This is an experiment with more open threads. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever.
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Test!
Test more.
Hopefully this’ll work.
Maybe now?
Test!
Yes! It worked!
The scale of these threads is really suggesting to me that SSC needs a permanent forum (it might be that Scott’s reservations about such a thing are misplaced). I’m having a hard time reading all the comments I would like to read, just keeping track of them. And LW forums aren’t much good compared to the community that’s been cultivated here.
Or innovate in web-design a bit and build a system that gives both forum- and comment-thread-views into the same set of data (with top-level threads being forum posts, and probably comment sections of different articles being maybe subforums or just threads of their own: maybe a forum thread can have child-threads instead?
Yes. Forum with categories by topic and no voting system. They worked incredibly well circa 2000~ and then people for some ungodly reptilian reason moved to social media and shitty platforms like reddit. SSC is a personal blog and this “community” (Some people say it doesn’t exist) is a very rare thing…
The question is, would trying to move that community somewhere else work? Would it really be a good idea?
On the thread I made on reddit, people said there was nothing in common between SSC readers beyond being SSC readers.
Some said they wanted an extended comment section for SSC and things “relevant to SSC” only and not a free forum. If we want a forum, do we want it focused on SSC or more like a permanent open thread that eventually is independent of SSC? Would this even wrok? (If you compare this to the already existing reddit and 8chan, you have no idea what a decent forum looks like)
“people said there was nothing in common between SSC readers beyond being SSC readers”
As best I can tell, most SSC readers are reasonably intelligent people who enjoy civil conversation. Presumably they are here, at least in part, because it is one of the relatively rare places online where such conversation routinely happens.
Can anyone hear me way down here?
There are 1,237 comments above this one. Is the presumption that I have read all of the above before posting?
I often am about to post something truly brilliant, but then I hesitate, what if one of the 1,237 above has posted exactly the same idea as mine?
Who will read this? Does anyone actually read all 1,237, and if so, may I borrow your time turner?
The thread will be fairly active until there’s a new post. You aren’t expected to have read the comments above. If you duplicate a post from above the worst that will happen is you’ll be ignored.
Unshaved lunaticsmentally stable and handsome young men on vacation will. Some ofusthem read all of the new comments to stave off boredom.If you do actually have something truly brilliant to say, I’d recommend posting it. Worst case scenario you can copy-paste it into a notepad document and re-deploy it on the next open thread.
I at least skim all of them. I skip entire subthreads I’m not interested in and concentrate on the juicy bits.
Yes. No, it’s only a wistful hope. Ctrl+F? Some of us. Not this time, but I’ve read some other threads (usually over several days, starting when the thread is new).
I don’t read all of them, but I at least glance at most. Sometimes the glance tells me that it’s on a subject I don’t feel interested in, so I don’t read it, don’t read the next few that appear to be responding to it, start reading again when the subject changes.
But I do spend a lot of time here.
If anyone is interested in the scientific research on how people actually behave in economic situations (often not rationally), I am reading a great book right now in behavioral economics.
Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463580737&sr=8-1&keywords=Predictably+irrational
Whether we’re talking about the wages of British Junior doctors, or the price of black pearls, sometimes prices are set, and other decisions are made, according to irrational influence, not rational ones. And it’s informative to know about this and to apply it to our own decisions and lives.
On being a good academic versus being a successful academic.
I find most of these apply to humanities too. Any thoughts on solutions?
Related, I wish there were a better way to do collaborative work and/or get frequent feedback in the humanities. Ironically, I can more easily get intelligent feedback on my unsubstantiated pet theories on why people are fat at SSC than I can on questions in my field I actually publish on. This is because once you’re done your PhD no one is paid to read your rough drafts and offer detailed criticism (and it can be hard to get that even before) except for peer reviewers who take an eternity and are often jerks (also you are heavily penalized for submitting anything less than perfect to get feedback at an early stage as the anonymous reviewers will lambaste it and your article gets rejected; this produces in some cases the ironic result for me where 2nd-most prestigious journal gets my heavily edited and polished article which has received a ton of useful critique from the reviewers of the 1st-most prestigious journal which rejected it).
I might start a blog about my academic interests at some point and solicit comments that way, but 1. I probably won’t attract a significant audience (few academic blogs in the humanities I’ve seen do, though I’m open to suggestions) and 2. there’s again the whole “getting scooped” fear.
(I wouldn’t mind 2 so much if the ideas were associated with me in some way, e. g. if I used my real name on my blog, which I probably might as well, since it’s a very small world, but that introduce the problem of fear of looking dumb by floating very tentative ideas. I don’t so much mind looking dumb on SSC, where I use a pseudonym to talk to other mostly pseudonymous people about things which aren’t my field of expertise; it’s significantly scarier if using real name to talk about own field to people who may decide e. g., whether you get tenure. But if presenting only polished ideas it kind of defeats the point).
Interesting. Sometimes people not in your field can give useful feedback too. Do you ever mention your questions of interest in your field here on SSC? Of course, feedback wouldn’t be as focused within your field or as detailed as you’d get from people in your field, but still it might be worthwhile.
Another thing that crosses my mind is that you might want to pay an editor, who edits intellectual books in various areas, for some feedback.
It sounds like it does work to some degree when the 2nd-most prestigious journal gets your heavily edited and polished article which has received a ton of useful critique from the reviewers of the 1st-most prestigious journal which rejected it. You could also try reversing that process. Why not submit to the 2nd-most prestigious journal first, at least on occasion, and thus shoot for ultimate publication in the 1st most prestigious journal?
One thing I would do– but I’m an extrovert and this may not be easy for some people– would be to go to academic conferences in my field and look for people who seem altruistic enough that they might be willing to give feedback to a colleague. Or else just cooperative enough that they may be willing to do a trade. And also sharp enough in their knowledge of the field that their feedback would be worthwhile. I’d get phone numbers and/or emails of such people. Then I’d see if I could trade a few things back and forth with them by email, giving each other feedback, and if it was useful. If you start a blog, you can email the web site of your blog out to those who are interested and whom you trust.
This sort of thing works for me for various purposes. I have a Ph.D. and am a writer and a personal growth aficionado. I’ve been trading personal growth exercises by phone for over a year now with someone with a similar degree of sophistication to me, in the areas of interest to me. It’s working out very well. But it took a while and a number of conferences to find such a person.
Of course, if you are concerned about getting scooped, you would want to step into such a relationship rather gradually and notice how they act and respond to you and others. You’d want to avoid people who have the characteristics described in the book Power Freaks, because these folks would rob anyone blind in a minute with no regrets.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Freaks-Dealing-Workplace-Anyplace/dp/1591020131/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463580222&sr=1-1&keywords=Power+Freaks
Also you may look on Twitter for people in your field. And on blogs that other people have. Some bloggers are brilliant and can be very helpful but are very lonely because no one knows about them yet. Maybe Scott even was that way when he first started blogging.
I have met some great people on line and had long email exchanges and conversations with them, and shared knowledge in various areas with them, as they did with me.
I don’t think there is a solution, really. We’ll probably forever get shitty results in humanities and social sciences so long as we have sufficient electronics, shipping and manufacturing, and medical technology progress to offset it. Those are big enough prosperity multipliers that we can live with an unhappy populace with no inner life. Whatever your field of study is, presumably you picked it because it interests you, not because anyone else cares about it.
Or let me tell you this. You think you have it bad because the academy rewards crappy intellectual practices? Up until I decided to abandon it a few years ago, I originally studied budgeting and financial management and then went to work for the Army. We violated every single best practice and principle of budgeting and accounting that has ever been devised in the name of expediency, convenience, and the need to accomplish a mission. It sucked. But what career field ever does not experience the discord between best practices and the realities of the market?
We’re overrun with programmers here, many of whom seem to insist nearly everyone who tries coding is terrible at it. I don’t buy it, personally. Software engineering isn’t easy but it’s no harder than any other kind of engineering and easier than many. But we’ve had decades of reality smacking us in the face that first to market products that capture network effects make billionaires even when the product sucks. Feature bloat sells new licenses even when the features don’t work. Just as we had pounded into our heads in the officer basic course that even though we’re being taught ideal tactics, an 80% solution delivered on time will always beat the perfect solution that never gets delivered at all, the reality of software is that code doesn’t suck because programmers suck. Code sucks because shitty code makes investors very rich and nobody gives a fuck that it’s not maintainable and is going to confuse the hell out of whatever poor sucker has to rewrite this shit with no documentation ten years down the road when the original designer is sipping Mai Tais on an island in spite of all the bugs and vulnerabilities he left in the code.
Now that I’ve been a reservist for a while, fuck, I’ve never seen it worse than here. We just had an exercise last month where they sent half the unit to Fort Sill for mandatory crew served weapons qualification and they qualified exactly zero crews. Higher headquarters was more pissed off than I’ve ever seen a higher headquarters outside of a real deployment. We completely wasted an entire drill weekend, all that fuel, and all that ammo, for nothing. Why? Our commander isn’t an idiot. He’s a smart guy and a quality officer, but leaders up and down the chain are yes men. They refuse to ever admit they can’t accomplish something with what they have because they need more time to do it correctly. Because 90% of the time, faking it works. You can just forge the training documents if you’re sufficiently dishonest and nobody cares because this is a construction unit tasked with domestic disaster response anyway and the chance they’re ever going to have to actually fire a truck-mounted machine gun in combat is virtually zero. They cut corners because almost all the time, it makes no difference.
This isn’t an academic problem. It’s an everywhere problem. Expediency wins in the real world. I remember my very first numerical analysis class having to learn about all these historical disasters that have arisen because of floating point errors. There’s the famous Intel example that probably cost them $50 million or some shit in an abstract economic analysis, but guess what? They’re still the world’s #1 chip manufacturer and whoever was CEO at the time might have suffered some embarrassment, but he’s still a multimillionaire. There’s the story of a missile-defense radar system that suffered timing errors and got an entire unit killed because they used 32-bit floating-point numbers in the time-to-impact estimator to save space. Is that because the engineers sucked? I doubt it. It’s because nobody cares because we didn’t need perfect software. We just needed to be better than the Iraqis and we overwhelmingly won that war in one of the most successful military campaigns ever and it was more important to get there in the first place than it was to have perfectly bug-free control software.
The feedback mechanism I’m familiar with is the workshop. You give a talk on your paper to a room filled with academics and academics in training (grad students), they comment.
My preferred version is the Chicago style, in which everyone in the audience is expected to have read the paper, the presenter talks about it for fifteen minutes or so, and it is then open season.
Airgap, your dadaist trolling has caused me to burst into genuine laughter several times in this comment section, without resorting to serious meanness or incivility. You are the best troll, and I sacrifice a chicken in your honor.
And here I was worried I had made too many constructive comments in this thread. Glad to know it hasn’t affected my more important contributions.
out of curiosity, what motivated your new rhetorical style?
There’s a man behind me with a gun to my head insisting on it.
Pics or it didn’t happen!
+
I think you people don’t know what you are asking for. Go to Reddit. It’s all “funny” comments. Airgap is exploiting the commons.
Additionally, in a space that ostensibly should be safe for the non-neurotypical, some of his comments are resulting in whole sub-threads responding as if he meant what he said.
I don’t think this is the space for this.
I don’t disagree about the commons, but this is a mostly-anonymous message board. If we have posters who are unable to discern trolls and don’t know how to interact with them (or not), then Airgap is providing a vital service to those posters, and should be encouraged and subsidized.
That being said, I am also reasonably sure that said service will not be long for this poor comments section, as soon as Scott finds a good combination of ways to kick him out.
I find that Airgap’s comments are mostly tiresome. There’s an occasional non-troll comment that I like, but Airgap’s a net loss from my point of view.
I suppose it’s educational for me that there are some posters who think Airgap is hilarious– I would have expected the favorable responses to top out at “mildly amusing”.
We already have a poster who makes funny trollish comments that also provide insight (and thus provides this service). Since getting insight + funny + trollish is hard, they post significantly less than Airgap, who just goes for funny and leaves a mark on every other subthread of some size.
One airgap post per OT is amusing, more are just noise – especially when he repeats the same style of edgy joke – and he didn’t stop at posting just one. And if we get more people aping him, oh boy.
Quality trolls are like the tannins that give a good wine its distinctive flavor. The master is of course suntzuanime, who understands that a little goes a long way, a lesson Airgap needs to learn. But then, I even enjoyed John Sidles, if only people would have learned to not engage him, but rather let him do his eccentric thing as a kind of performance art.
(In this analogy, purple anons are vinegar.)
Have a Slavic meat jello.
Hmm. Vinegar is used to make pickled horseradish — the traditional condiment for this type of dish.
My family eats that thing with bread and vinegar.
Being an asshole and saying “But I’m teaching people how to deal with assholes”, really just reduces to being an asshole.
@ HBC
Additionally, in a space that ostensibly should be safe for the non-neurotypical, some of his comments are resulting in whole sub-threads responding as if he meant what he said.
That might be kind of
a featureinstructive. For non-neurotypicals who can’t read body language, here’s a conversation where there’s no body language to worry about. So you-generic can learn to detect other signals of sincerity vs put-on (under no pressure, re-reading an exchange as often and slowly as needed, no need to respond but a kind landing if one does respond wrongly).I’ll just point up at what John Schilling said about “assholes”.
some of his comments are resulting in whole sub-threads responding as if he meant what he said
But are we responding as if he meant what he said, or only as we would if we thought he meant what he said? Layers upon layers here!
Agreed on Airgap exploiting the commons.
Totally second this. This is what trolling is supposed to be. Make the Internet funnier.
Airgap deserves a medal. When people talk about trolling being necessarily bad, his comments would be a prime counterexample.
Am I the only one getting weird side effects from melatonin? I took 1mg sublingually last night and it seemed not to have the promised effect — it did make me very tired, but in a way that kept me quite awake and aware of everything that was going on around me. Also, after I took it I got very twitchy and had this strange urge to twist and turn and clench my muscles all over. Sure enough, I did fall asleep eventually for about 8 more hours and now I feel like I’m having a bad hangover. It’s not the first time it worked less than ideally for me, but this grogginess (and the muscle twitching) seems to be a recent development. Gwern talked about melatonin like there was no good excuse not to take it. WTF is going on?
This might be a dosing thing. Try taking a third to a half of that.
(Also, even with correct dosing, I’ve noticed that if I don’t fall asleep within half an hour or so of taking it, I’m pretty much guaranteed to be up for a while.).
I’ll try, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of pill that’s easy to break into smaller pieces.
1mg? Do they even sell it in that dosage? At the pharmacy I see 3, 5, 10, and 10 time-release.
Here is 0.2mg, the smallest I have found. Supposedly 0.1mg is available in the Netherlands. Experiments show that 0.01mg is effective. Many people find that larger doses are less effective.
One market is not for going to sleep, but for sleeping through the night. This requires a larger dose (or time-release). But the main reason pharmacies sell ridiculous doses is because the customer believes that bigger is better.
I’ve been taking 10mg time-release, because my problem wasn’t so much trouble falling asleep (that had happened in the past, but had gotten better) – it was waking up at 3 or 4am and not being able to get back to sleep.
Stuff below 3mg isn’t even available where I am, as far as I can tell.
Have you tried any other doses? I would not be at all surprised if 3mg not time-released worked for you, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I would recommend that you experiment with smaller time-release doses. And report back to us!
Where are you? If you’re in America, pharmacies won’t sell you less than 3mg, but you can mail order lots of stuff from Amazon. If you’re in Britain, Amazon won’t sell you melatonin, but I believe that the brand I liked above will ship it directly. Here is 5mg time-release.
I know that I tried 5mg non-time release. It worked for getting to sleep, but I still had problems waking up in the night.
I’m kind of leery of changing what I’m doing, because my sleep is better than it’s been in years.
Also, I’m cheap, and loves me some store brand.
Being concerned about $14/year is way beyond “cheap.” Sleep is very important. You should be willing to spend a lot of money on it, including on experiments. Though the monetary cost of the experiment is trivial compared to the risk that it will disrupt your sleep.
Yes, it works for you now, but you are using 100x the recommended dose. I would worry about that in the long term.
That is a lot. I’ll check it out, thanks for the recommendation.
Edit: Amazon where I am can get me 1, 3, and 5mg time release. I think I’ll experiment with them. Thanks again.
Yes. I mostly saw higher doses too, but went for this one because it was the cheapest. I didn’t see any lower ones, though.
Anyway, I’m confused now — should I go higher or lower than 1mg?
It appears that slimmer comment threads are not helping in reducing the amount of comments.
Things to try:
– Ban about half the commenters. Fewer people, fewer posts.
– Post a new post every day. Few actually post in the non-latest thread, regardless of length.
The Whale Metaphor Blogging tag is underpopulated.
In a perfect world, it would contain every post.Why wasn’t marijuana more popular before the 20th century?
Not as widely known? I think it’s been popular in India for a long time?
So why wasn’t it widely known?
Because you could get better drugs legally then?
SSC SF Story of the Week #16
This week we are discussing “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin.
Next time we will discuss “Seventy-Two Letters” by Ted Chiang.
Predictable! Why don’t they staff EDS with misanthropists? Because that sounds like the prime qualification. If were staffing EDS, I would make sure that they would shoot the stowaway even if it were their own child.
Sounds like her education was woefully mismanaged!
It should damn well have also read, “ON PAIN OF DEATH” with a skull or three. The only thing that makes me feel any sympathy for the stowaway is that someone fucked up the warnings, and someone else fucked up educating space-traveling Earthlings about the rigors of space travel.
—
The story feels sort of like a shaggy dog story.
One thing I kept expecting to crop up in the story, but didn’t, was the pilot offering to shoot her before jettisoning. Might have been too cliche, though. Also, offering to go in her place, but that would have definitely been cliche.
Another thing that I kept wondering about – is there really nothing else that can be jettisoned out of the EDS? I’ll accept the canon statement that there isn’t, but 50kg is really not that much. I bet there would be some sort of non-critical equipment that could be chucked.
I also thought that it sounded like they had insanely small fuel reserves for anything unexpected, it sounded like a small ship but not minuscule. It implies fractions of a percent of fuel reserves.
Also yes, you’d have thought that dire warnings of automatic death penalties for stowing away and similar would be part of day 1 orientation for passengers and that signs would be at least this explicit:
http://www.safetysign.com/images/catlog/product/large/E3413BI.png
Of course, if you’re still willing to pay the fine… :
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/74/73/df/7473df046853707415cf9054232a2f58.jpg
On the one hand, criticizing some of the assumptions this story forces on me is really low-hanging fruit: Really, guys? No safety margin whatsoever? No “welcome to space flight” orientation for the Earthlings going to the colonies for the first time? Hell, he got the relevant safety information across to me in just a couple of paragraphs, no reason a brief “no seriously listen to this or you will die screaming in space” safety brief couldn’t do the same. No warnings beyond “Keep Out,” not even a locked door? No pre-flight safety check? No refusal to launch unless weight was just so? No non-critical equipment to jettison? Like I said, low-hanging fruit.
However, all of that’s obviously not the point of the story. We’re simply expected to accept it for the sake of the tale Godwin wants to tell, which is, well, about the Cold Equations. Sometimes people die, and it’s not because the universe is mean, gets a kick out of killing them, whatever. It’s just the math. I really did enjoy the message, despite the contrived set-up, but I’ve always been good at that willing suspense of disbelief thing.
1. Reminds me (and could have been inspired) Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat for its Realism.
2. Seems irrational from the operating company’s perspective to run such tight fuel margins. I know men who are 120 lbs, and some who are 290 lbs, The difference being the weight of the girl. So first off, you lose the ability to releive/replace a pilot. Now granted you could fuel = f(pilotWeight + cargoWeight), but clearly 1950’s people didn’t realize how variable those each of those components could be when you operate flights on a tight schedule everyday [“lost baggage / we’re getting you another flight crew”]. Finally, if fuel needs to be that tight, why aren’t ship pilots like Jockeys – known for their smallness, and paid to stay that way?
3. One reason to blame “the corporation” for negligence to plan for stow-aways is due to the hostility of space, the environment in which they operate. The life-and-death reality is what would gives a captain licence to play judge, jury, and executioner toward crew / passengers. Likewise, the social contract stipulates generous accommodations for civilians and their stupidity. Again if you’re willing to pay a fuel premium for pilots over 100lbs, you should pay a fuel premium to insure safety of a civilian.
4. The ultimate knock on the contrived scenario is that seems to offer justifications that social services are as a constrained as orbital mechanics, and the jettisoning extra weight is the only way for the civilization to survive. But in reality we live in a wealthy post-scarcity economy, and any jettisoning is as legitimate as ‘class punishment’ in marxian revolutions.
I can’t point to exactly which offhand, but I remember that being a plot point in a couple of stories I’ve heard of.
You understand that this wasn’t a routine commercial flight, right? The emergency shuttle was assembled on the spot for this one specific mission, knowing at the time of assembly who the pilot was going to be and what the payload was going to be. The guy doing the propellant budget had the actuals from the mass budget.
I don’t recall any discussion of the pilot’s stature, but military pilots in general do lean towards the small and wiry – though not to jockeying extremes.
What I like best about the story is how the editor (Campbell) sent the story back to the author three times because the author kept coming up with ways for the story to end “right”.
There is a long established pattern in (at least Western, and even more so in American) storytelling where the good guys win, morality is upheld, and A Solution is found. Failures have A Reason.
In reality, the tale is much more tangled, and, at minimum, there is at least a non-trivial number of times when the Bad Guys win, cheaters prosper, and despite trying very hard, things don’t work out.
The author of the WWII fictional novel A Thread of Grace Mary Dorian Russell gave her son a list of characters and a set of dice and told him to pick the ones who lived and the ones who died. People who have lived through extended combat say that it was like that – that there was a strong sense that God really was dicing with the universe.
I’ve had several discussions with fellow fans of The Walking Dead who objected to the lack of “a reason” for various deaths on the show – arguing that each character’s death should serve the theme of the show, or at least the plot. While I have several on-going issues with TWD (and remain a big fan) this is not one of them.
“The Cold Equations” draws out a moral lesson for the reader – it’s just not the one we tend to want to hear. And for that we-the-reader are often very angry.
Worm did this as well: during a fairly intense conflict, the author rolled dice to determine which characters lived and died, fully willing to kill the main character and change the viewpoint for the rest of the story if the dice came up that way.
I really want to read the other Worms that would have resulted from different rolls.
Out of curiosity, which conflict was this? There are so many candidates – Yrivnguna, gur Fynhtugreubhfr Avar, Rpuvqan, Orurzbgu, Fpvba – that I can’t narrow it down.
I also would like to know where you learned this, that I might also go and learn behind-the-scenes Worm facts.
This was Yrivnguna.
I believe I originally found out about this on /r/Parahumans: the author himself has mentioned it a few times I think, one such place is forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-worm-finished.12066/page-7#post-2729359
(the question this is a response to links back to his mention of rolling dice, and this directly references his willingness to let the main character die and his plans for after)
(couldn’t get the link to work for some reason)
Tangentially related – I recently watched Grave of the Fireflies and, despite being forewarned that it was the most depressing thing ever, I was struck by how hard the main character tries to make things work. He does everything he can to provide for his little sister and it isn’t enough.
Yes, Seita has a character flaw, he rejects his aunt’s help out of pride, but he didn’t deserve to die because of it. I got the same feeling you describe here – the feeling that it was just completely senseless. The feeling that the story shouldn’t have ended that way.
These kind of stories in Japanese animation bother me because the Japanese seem to treat World War II as bad because Japanese people suffered, but ignore that Japanese caused other people to suffer. Each individual instance of such animation can be justified, but cumulatively they give the impression that World War II either was caused by the West, or was a natural disaster. Comfort women? Nanking Massacre? What are those?
I think that’s pretty average.
Viet Thanh talks about his novel which centers the Viet Nam war on Vietnamese rather than (as is usual in American accounts) on Americans.
This being said, I think America does a better job of noticing damage on the other side than Japan does.
Anyone know how much Germany has given to the non-Holocaust victims of the Nazis?
I’ve had that exact feeling, of each individual instance being fine (great even) but the overall impression of seeing work-after-work as unsettling and with bad implications, from Japan many times. Topics like leadership, relationships, tactics, when to be honest vs when to decieve, self improvement, resolution of conflicts and so on all seem fine until you notice the weird, seemingly exceptionless pattern in how they’re portrayed.
American depictions of the Vietnam War center on Americans, but that’s different from never saying that Americans caused any suffering.
Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” is my standard example of a story where the bad outcome wins. I once taught an undergraduate course inspired by it.
Our natural instinct is to assume that if there are only two approaches to solving a problem and we have shown that one of them doesn’t work, we are done. But, of course, there is no reason to assume that there is a solution. The course looked at a bunch of problems, for each of which I offered arguments that neither solution worked.
@ keranih
What I like best about the story is how the editor (Campbell) sent the story back to the author three times because the author kept coming up with ways for the story to end “right”.
I won’t re-read the story, but I greatly admire that meta-story or legend — Campbell’s intention, and what the back and forth did to the resulting story (making it into as much of a patchwork of revisions and bandaids over plot holes, as the shuttle craft itself was*).
I see Campbell’s intention as creating a ‘conversation’ between the then-default trope stories and this one. Here’s a story that begins with the then-very-common situation of a tech puzzle to be figured out, light and sure to end well, and then … !! It wasn’t just a (to use the mid-century critical term) switcheroo. It may have collapsed the whole light techy lifeboat puzzle sub-genre. (Cf Agatha Christie’s classic convention-breaker where the murderer turns out to be the first-person narrator.)
Here is Campbell’s blurb for the story:
The Frontier is a strange place – and a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked “No admittance” – but it is always deadly dangerous. I’ve seen that expanded to a big contrast between frontier and civilized attitudes. For example, a high tech laboratory at the Jeffersonian Institute with guards and gardens all around, is ‘frontier’ if staff are working with unknown chemicals that have obscure dangers.
The frontier in CE is physical jury-rigging, few skilled people, little backup, contriving rickety fixes to urgent problems. They’re lucky they had any ‘no admittance’ signs to use at all, much less any more specific. ‘Frontiersmen’ don’t need a lot of detailed warnings; they know that everything is dangerous one way or another. The person before you didn’t do anything without a reason which zie doesn’t have time to explain; so if zie even taped something shut with masking tape that’s a Chesterton’s Fence.
Campbell’s conversation stopper could have been nihilistic, something meaningless goes wrong. But instead he made a good SFish point (frontier vs civilization) and made that the key to the girl’s character; and she’s just the right age for audience sympathy but also old/responsible enough to make her own decision when the pilot leaves it up to her.
* Almost literally. The shuttles and their regulations had not been designed top down for safety and PR etc. They were hasty answers to urgent (at the time) frontier problems. Each time some new glitch came up, a patch was added to the regulation.
The fundamental problem with “Cold Equations” is that if “no stowaways” was so crucial, they would have had enough security to ensure she never got on.
Lock all the doors and then do a pre-launch sweep to ensure it.
The fundamental problem with “Cold Equations” is that if “no stowaways” was so crucial, they would have had enough security to ensure she never got on.
Actually not. The conclusion is false because it presumes that if a thing is “crucial”, it can and will be achieved.
The premise is false because “no stowaways” is not crucial. Stowaways = death, but avoiding death is not crucial. On Earth we can at least pretend that it is; on the frontier there is no such pretense. The story was quite explicit about that.
People who are just finding “The Cold Equations” should also look at “The Cold Solution” by Don Sakers. (A discussion and link to further discussion of the story set here.)
(There was another story on the same sort of theme – the overloaded lifeboat – starring sign-language using chimps. Anyone know which one I’m thinking of?)
OK, first, I’m not rereading “Cold Equations”, not no way, not no how. I’ve done that too many times, and it doesn’t get easier. Second, as a guy who builds spaceships, if you ever want to be a passenger on one of mine, you are going to be reading CE, and if I hear a peep of “that’s not how it would really be”, you’re not going. That’s how it is. On to some details.
The story is sometimes criticized as to the technical implausibility of the shuttle flight. This is perhaps weakly true in that it is based on early 1950s assumptions of how space travel should work, but about twenty years ago I did the math in excruciating detail, or in less detail here. Given the scenario as described in the story, and 1950s assumptions about future spaceflight technology, the flight plan is plausible. And yes, we do really design space missions with propellant margins that tight when we have to. The Equations, for all their coldness, are at least precise.
There’s usually a suggestion or two that the story would work better if oxygen or life support generally were the limiting factor; it really doesn’t. First, because the necessary consumables are light enough that it is trivial to provide >100% margins. Second, over a timescale of hours, human oxygen consumption, CO2 production, CO2/anoxia tolerance, and so forth can vary by more than a factor of two . If the mission planners can be at all confident that the pilot will live to complete his mission alone, then the pilot and stowaway can both survive if they relax, maybe meditate or take a sedative, and catch a lucky break. Which breaks the story as written, and sets up a different story (though one potentially interesting in its own right – does the pilot have the right to risk six strangers’ lives on “if we catch a lucky break”?).
The story is also sometimes criticized on the basis of the Obvious Wrongness of the ship’s operators in allowing the known and abhorrent-to-any-civilized-society condition of stowaways being ejected into space to continue. Surely there would be safeguards to prevent this, or if not surely we are to take the story as one of the Obvious Villainy of the ship’s operators? Except, here in the real world, every civilized society on the planet allows almost exactly the same condition to persist. Substitute “airliner” for “emergency dispatch shuttle” and, well, every once in a while, maybe once in a pilot’s career (but several times a year for the industry as a whole) a desperate stowaway will sneak onto an airliner the only way they can, and if they aren’t caught before launch, there’s nothing to do but to push the button that isn’t actually labeled “Eject stowaway to certain death”, but might as well be. We know this happens, and we let it keep happening. We just don’t have long philosophical discussions with them beforehand.
We can put a man on the moon, but 100.00% effective safeguards against damn fools getting themselves killed in the machinery will be beyond us well into the future. So we let them, and when necessary we kill them.
Where the story does cheat, kind of, is waffling about the nature of the sympathetic victim. Taken literally, she’s an adult professional whose job requires travelling on a military spaceship but who apparently skipped all the safety briefings, ignored the warning signs, and went out of her way to sneak into a place she knew was off-limits. Gee, turns out you can get killed doing that? But that’s the only way to make the setup at all plausible, so that’s what Godwin does.
And then turns around to present her as basically a doe-eyed, innocently mischievous, utterly sympathetic child when it’s time to make the audience cry. Maybe some of that is a sort of infantilization of women that dates the story; the 1950s were well before my time, and I don’t have a good enough feel from period literature to be sure. But I think it’s a cheat. A damned effective one.
Finally: every time I see this story discussed, a disturbing number of commenters will disparage the ethical standards of the corporation that runs the whole system and is clearly responsible for the sympathetic woman-child’s death. I’ve read that story more times than I care to count, several of them specifically to address various criticisms, and I don’t recall any mention or any corporations. The star cruiser is clearly a government ship, either military or close enough as makes no difference. To modern audiences, apparently, a certain sort of villainy is Obviously Done by Evil Corporations, Don’t Bother Us With Facts. I am somewhat optimistic that we’ll see less of that here, and it will be interesting to find out.
Probably would have worked better to make the stowaway a few years younger… making them an adult detracts from things a little.
Your “in excruciating detail” link is broken.
Fixed – I think. It’s a google groups link, and those are notoriously erratic.
Your last point is quite interesting to me, John. I didn’t get that impression at all reading it – it seemed pretty obviously a government ship to me.
I think the only objection I have is that it was apparently remarkably easy for a damn fool to get herself killed in this machinery. Like, I appreciate the point that Campbell/Godwin wanted to make, and I think for the most part the story is effective at it. But this girl just wandered past an unassuming sign and got herself killed for it. It seems to me like there’s a low-cost improvement available there: add “on pain of death” or something to the sign. Put a lock on the door to which the pilot has a key. Neither of these things seem capable of ruining the delicate economy Godwin has created.
But, like I said in my comment above, this is mostly just petty quibbling over details and ignores the central thrust of the story. On the whole, I think it does a good job driving its point home.
I’ve never worked in a launch facility, or even a regular airport, but my guess from hanging around a few engine rooms and biochemistry labs is that most workplaces that aren’t open to customers are going to have a half-dozen or more unlabeled Things You Shouldn’t Touch If You Like Having Limbs.
That’s not (entirely) due to laziness on the part of management, it’s because there are potentially hundreds of ways for a determined person to hurt themselves in that kind of environment and being surrounded by blood red skull-emblazoned signs takes away from the effect of each individual one. We generally try to prevent unauthorized people from wandering in because they don’t necessarily even know how seriously to take warning signs they see. After all there are safety warnings on coffee and step-ladders too, to an extent people don’t even see them for the most part.
I’ve done launch facilities, civilian airports, and Air Force bases, and it’s pretty much the same thing. There’s a real emphasis on not letting anyone on the facility without checking who they are and making sure they’ve had the safety training. Paying attention during the safety training is mostly optional.
And the flip side of Chesterton’s Fence is, if you see a someone on the right side of the fence wearing any sort of badge and you don’t understand what she’s doing, you generally don’t interfere until you do understand. And sometimes you’re too busy to ask.
Maybe a warning sign like this one?
Nine hundred ninety nine times out of a thousand, it’s a quiet room full of idle, stowed hardware, the kind of place one might sneak into for a bit of privacy on pain of having the captain yell at them. “On pain of death” would be a lie, and a pretty obvious one, training people to ignore all such signs. Exactly as useful, or useless, as a simple “keep out” sign.
Fundamentally, it’s Chesterton’s Shuttle Bay Door: Either you’re the type of person who doesn’t understand why and so stays out, or you’re the type of person who doesn’t understand and so sneaks in, or you’re the type of person who insists on understanding and so read the safety guide in the pouch of the seat back in front of you. Whichever, the presence of the sign is what matters, the language is a matter of taste – and one in which tastes have changed over the past sixty years.
As for “wandered past”, it is explicit that she knew she was sneaking into a place she’d be thrown out of if anyone caught her. I don’t think the story needs to waste verbiage over the part where she hides behind a crate until she sees everyone busy working on the other side of the bay, or grabs a clipboard and acts like she’s working a preflight checklist or whatever. Any doors which were locked, had to be unlocked and opened to prep the shuttle, and any real operational procedures are going to be based on a general presumption of non-malice towards anyone who looks like they know what they are doing.
As you note, this is quibbling, the story isn’t fundamentally about the details of how to sneak into the shuttle bay of a military ship. And I’m glad you caught that it was a military (or at least quasi-military) ship; trust me, lots of people don’t.
I don’t think this is quibbling over details because it changes the nature of the story. Lack of adequate safety precautions is a human failing; it isn’t being victimized by the laws of nature. If she had just walked into an engine and burned up, the laws of nature dictate that people who walk into engines burn up, but we wouldn’t consider that the fault of nature.
There is no indication in the story that the safety precautions were inadequate.
There is among some of the audience a grossly unrealistic expectation of what “adequate” safety precautions can do. They can reduce the risk of accident, but are largely ineffectual against even low levels of malice. They can warn of dangers, but they do not divide the world into categories of “Safe”, “Forbidden due to danger”, and “Forbidden but just kidding you won’t get hurt”.
I think that’s another shift in culture since the 50’s.
Nowdays, if you have a building site surrounded by 12 foot high fences covered in razor wire and warning signs saying to stay out due to danger of heavy machinery then even when a moron climbs in with his own can of gasoline and manages to set himself on fire and maim himself while trying to conduct a little bit of arson (something that happened in my home town to a moronic student in my year) people will still um and aw and blame the “evil corporation” for the fate of the “poor little child” and go through any contortions to figure out how it must be the fault of whoever has the deepest pockets nearby.
Sometimes nature kills people. Sometimes people kill people…. and sometimes people ignore all warnings, warnings they know are there and then set about trying to blame everyone else for their fate.
When someone ignores all warnings and dedicates all their human ingenuity towards defeating any safety measures you have in place there’s nothing , absolutely nothing you can do to defend yourself from the hand-wringers who will claim that they have no responsibility for their actions.
Yes, but the story didn’t take that tack either.
If there aren’t warnings, and she walks into the engine and dies, that’s human failing–humans should have put up warnings and locked the engine door.
If there are warnings and she ignores the “you will die” and picks the lock and walks into the engine and dies, that’s her own stupidity killing her.
The story treats it as neither being killed because of lack of safety precautions nor being killed because of her own stupidity.
She was killed by her own ignorance, which she could easily have corrected. That’s not quite stupidity, but it’s within spitting distance from there.
John Schilling, there’s plenty of indication in the story that the safety precautions are inadequate.
A generally harmless person sneaking onto a rescue ship is so unusual that precautions couldn’t be expected.
Criminal stowaways are a known problem, and precautions against them– a lock on the ship or checking the closet before takeoff would have been sufficient.
Ok, the excruciating detail is quite impressive.
Now I wanna feed it into some modern orbit modeling software to watch it play out.
Interesting notes about the 50’s culture of often putting highly lethal hazards behind very mild and uninformative “you may not want to go here” style signs.
On a less serious note:
I know KSP sucks for anything with multiple stellar bodies but since only one is involved and it does apparently account for a 97kg mass for kerbals I wonder if it would be possible to whip this up almost exactly with a stowaway kerbal and some light modding…. hand people the scenario and let them try to find a solution where they can both survive landing and land reasonably close to the target zone.
The Kerbal Solution is “we take it in turns to get out and push”.
or “discover that one of the parts of the ship was a non-physics part and surf it from orbit to landing”
By “the only way you can,” I assume you mean in the wheel well?
Wow, modern airport security is even more useless than I previously thought. And modern terrorists are even more incompetent that I previously thought. It is apparently super easy to stowaway in an airliner’s wheel well, and yet not a single wannabe terrorist has ever thought of stowing away in an airliner’s wheel well while wearing an explosive vest?
It’s not a terribly effective place from which to make demands. Your chances of getting in there are slim,most terrorists are going to have poor information about the location vs the inside of the passenger cabin and there’s a good chance of your plans derailing when you start suffering from anoxia.
I think terrorists are pretty rational to avoid it as a tactic.
Never mind that they tend to be pretty conservative when it comes to tactics and often ignore far easier options.
A lot of modern terrorists don’t make demands, they just wreck things and kill people.
Modern airport security is almost exactly as useless as you previously thought. Because of that, the success rate of anyone who puts any serious thought into how to get a bomb onto an airliner is about 100%, and it’s way more comfortable to walk through a boarding gate than to cram one’s self into a wheel well.
There is the bit where people who think seriously about how to sneak bombs onto airliners have a significantly enhanced rate of drone-strike mortality, so it’s not like the problem is being completely ignored. We’d just rather not have people paying attention to the solutions that work. Look, over here, a bunch of stalwart TSA agents standing watch for your safety!
Is there honestly a non trivial number of people who work at airports who haven’t thought up a half dozen reasonably workable ways to get a bomb on a plane?
I mean even if you have no intention of ever actually doing such things you see the obvious options.
In case anyone’s distressing themselves over the agony of the pilot who has to lower the landing gear: as far as I know, there’s still no system in any commercial airliner that alerts the flight crew to the presence of a wheel-well stowaway (which is just as, uhh, well.) This case here in Boston is a good example: the flight crew found out about it when the rest of us did.
She’s eighteen and while that may be legally adult, your bones still aren’t set at that age. I’m old enough to still think you’re not an adult until you’re twenty-one 🙂
“Adult professional” is putting it very strong; she’s straight out of training school and going for her first real job and she’s lived all her life on Earth and only knows the “daring adventure” part of her older brother’s work in space (quite reasonably, he doesn’t tell his parents and little sister about the real dangers).
On top of that, the whole point of the story is that she’s from Earth; she’s never been off-world before, she knows nothing about the dangers of space, and she has the kinds of attitude that most people in the world have – how dangerous can this be, really? Sure there’s a big sign saying “No trespassing” but come on, just fine me and we’ll both be on our way! People on Earth don’t expect to be killed for trespassing or for stowing away on an aeroplane or boat, the closest analogy we have here. Lots of places have NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL signs up and people often ignore them, and she’s doing the same thing.
The cruiser is a mix of military – or rather government – and civilian; she’s a properly-booked civilian passenger who’s paid her ticket to get to her destination. Nobody expects her to be wandering around loose trying to stow away to see her brother; she didn’t plan on it until the last minute and for the sake of the mood of the story, she’s not the kind who is the usual stowaway (the story makes it plain that it’s criminals or hard-luck types who are bouncing from one planet to another who try it, not nice young girls on their way to their first grown-up job).
I’m not so sure the ship is military as such; it’s certainly government, at least in large part, but are the lifeboat services military (as distinct from the Coast Guard)? I think the ambiguity is deliberate; if it were very clearly and plainly “This Is Official Military Craft, Keep Out” I don’t think she would have tried stowing away. But she seems to think of the rescue ship as part of the civilian passenger service, or whatever it is exactly; I don’t see it stated anywhere that this is a purely government service or rather, an explicitly military one (government provides other services that are not military; maybe we should be thinking of the cruiser service like public train and bus transport?)
The weakest part is how she managed to stow away, but then again it’s semi-plausible; if she was talking with “the native girl” in that girl’s own language and was there with the cleaner, she might have been assumed to be an off-duty or just going on-duty member of the cleaning staff herself, and while everyone’s back was turned, she slipped in:
People on Earth don’t expect to be killed for trespassing or for stowing away on an aeroplane or boat
I wouldn’t expect to be shot, as such. I wouldn’t have a strong expectation of survival either; I wouldn’t expect people to risk their lives or even serious injury to save me, I certainly wouldn’t expect people to sacrifice themselves. I wouldn’t expect people to refrain from necessary actions that might kill me, like raising or lowering the landing gear. I do know that people die while attempting to stow away, and yet we continue having transport systems.
To a certain extent it’s a matter of how much the phrase “dead either way” means to you; I’m a big fan of the phrase but some people are likely to be less so. If you think there’s something especially super-bad about being shot then you might find the CE less defensible than others.
What bugged me was how the lack of precautions that would prevent a stowaway could easily go wrong in other, less dramatic but more likely ways.
“Hey, Josie, where’s my atomic floor-sweeper? I left it on the ship when I took a bathroom break.”
“Ship’s gone, man.”
“Oooooh fuck. Well, it’s only 50lb; should be safe as long as nothing else got left on bo–”
“Heya guys! Anyone seen my atomic lunch box? The wife made me, like, 10lb of Blarx-burgers today.”
You’d expect a strictly organized sweep of the ship before launch if the margins are that tight.
The shuttles were explicitly prefabricated and assembled on demand, so there’s nothing to sweep and no possibility of people storing their random junk in the lockers. But that just modifies the problem, merging the assembly instructions with the preflight checklist.
Preflight checklists, for airplanes or spacecraft, basically don’t cover stowaways, sabotage, or other malice. They basically can’t, first because those things are rare enough that real users will inevitably edit out those parts of the real list, second because no static list can compete with a dynamic mind on the scene and trying to subvert it.
Among other things, a list can only have one last item. If e.g.”Check the aft landing gear well” is the last item on the list, then “Check the forward supply cabinet can’t be. Leaving a window in which even an ignorant intruder can notice that she just watched the pilot check the forward supply cabinet, he’s now busy aft, and if she slips in the front she probably won’t be caught.
Really, anyplace where protecting valuable goods from theft or protecting the general public from their own stupidity aren’t core job functions, “I waited until nobody was looking and snuck past” is a perfectly plausible explanation. Not as a 100% effective strategy for defeating security measures, but enough for a single failure.
The point the story hits you over the head with seems fairly banal to me. The effect of trying to make it out to be profound strikes me as /im14andthisisdeep. Though another way to look at, especially because of the comically bad gender stereotyping, is macho chest beating. Either way:
C+
I think the number of people desperately demanding that there has to be a workable way out shows the merits of the story pretty well. Lots of people are utterly unwilling to accept the idea of a no-win scenario where the sack of kittens has to be thrown into the blender, no other options.
Perhaps, but first you need to back out the nerd-sniping aspect of trying to find a loophole.
I wanted to shake my fist at it for making it such a big deal just because it’s a woman being killed, but it’s pretty self-aware:
And nobody expected the pilot to off himself in her stead either!
she couldn’t land the ship.
It also made the point of her being young. (I think the story would have been better if they’d lowered it by a few years)
Campbell mentions that he had to send the story back twice to get the bad end, since Godwin kept coming up with ways to save the girl. I’m guessing that one of the deus ex machina endings was that the pilot sacrificed himself and the girl barely managed to land the ship with instructions from the cruiser over the communicator.
That’s too bad.
Should I post the next discussion on the new open thread, or should I wait?
I’m only halfway through the next story.
I think we ought to wait to see how deep Scott’s infinite open thread rabbit hole goes. If it looks like it’ll continue more than a few weeks, then yeah, let’s do the discussion there.
Otherwise let’s just wait for OT50.
I agree. The next story is a bit on the long side.
Alright, I’ll post the next discussion on the next Open Thread after OT49.75, whichever and whenever that is.
This is one of my favorite Sci-Fi shorts. It figures that I would be late to the party.
My one and only gripe is that if the emergency dispatch ship were really as “bare bones” as the author describes, stowing away in it should have been a lot harder. Not because of locked doors or anything but simply because there shouldn’t have been anywhere for an adult human to realistically hide. It’s like stowing away in an H-1 or your friend’s hatchback without being noticed.
That said, the rest of the story is excellent. Being that sort of nerd, I ran the math myself a while back and came to the same basic conclusions John did here. I have a deep appreciation for the fact that Godwin showed his work. After all, math geeks need to be entertained too. As an aside to those saying that the margins are too thin, it should be noted that Godwin’s margins are positively generous compared to those that actual astronauts were flying with at the time, and they still weren’t enough.
So, how many rude anon@gmail.com posts are we going to have to tolerate before Scott drives a stake into the email’s heart? I haven’t even gotten any anon hate yet and I still think it’s obnoxious.
I’ve seen polite ones too, so some people seem to be using it for good — no offense if anyone reading this happens to be one of them — but that isn’t where the overall incentives seem to be pointing.
So long as we have ten righteous commentators under that alias, I would be against nuking it.
I do not, however, expect the count to be so high as that.
Haha… just don’t look at the aftermath lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
What’s to stop us from using another email ?
The Anons’ well documented code of honor, obviously.
Admittedly, if a policy to avoid anonposting is in place, coordinating around a single e-mail becomes more bothersome, because you can’t do it in the comments’ section itself and expect it to last long. Still not an unsormountable obstacle by any means.
I expect it’s easier to ban accounts than it is for users to coordinate on them.
Before we adopted this convention I used to post with a garbage string, removing or adding a character every couple posts. Same level of anonymity, but the drawback is that posting in the same thread with different avatars is a form of sockpuppetry (this is why I only modified the string every couple posts even though deleting a character from it is trivial).
I don’t see what would stop the evil trolls from using the same method.
Well, nothing now. Thanks.
Garbage strings were a Schelling Point before anon@gmail.com became a Schelling Point. I have used them as well.
Is there a story behind that particular gmail on this site?
Yes. Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived in the tallest tower of a huge castle…
A while back, someone posted on an open thread saying to use anon@gmail.com for full anonymity or something. The email is linked to the gravatar that the anons in this thread are using. People noticed a lot of bad, rude, annoying comments from this gravatar, leading people to suggest that this uptick in thread pollution was caused by anon@gmail.com making it easier to be annoying. Of course, there might not be such an uptick and the rate is the same, it’s just that we notice it more because it’s all aggregated under one gravatar. Scott could probably figure this out by looking at report data from before and after anon@gmail.com rose to prominence.
In a thread before that, someone simply mentioned that they used anon@gmail.com when they wanted to be anonymous, and then someone else chimed in with “hey, me too!”. And so it spread to others.
Is that actually a bad thing?
For a little n=1 anecdata here, I have gravatar blocked by Ghostery and have noticed absolutely no change in average anonymous comment quality.
I never claimed it was a bad thing; I was proposing an alternate explanation for an observed phenomenon.
Is Gravatar particularly nasty with regards to privacy?
I don’t think so. Ghostery just blocks any cross-site tracking by default and I haven’t changed it because I don’t miss seeing avatars anyway.
I just heard a BBC program which quoted various researchers claiming very large positive effects from people being bilingual, including four to five years longer for the effects of Alzheimers to appear than with monolingual people. Do you know anything about this? My immediate response was skepticism–the effect sounds implausibly large and researchers have an incentive to produce newsworthy results. But if it’s right, and applies to people who learn a second language as adults, it would be a pretty good reason to do so.
It wasn’t clear how they controlled for obvious problems, such as the possibility that people who knew two languages were on average different, even before learning a second language, from people who only knew one.
I’d like to know how they defined “language.” Because if someone is mutually intelligible in Upper West Kingson Falls, VT, Acadaina, and Harlen County, KT, then I think that should could for *something*, even if it all is arguably American English.
Can’t be bothered to dig up a cite, but I seem to recall that the neurological correlates of language are very different in people that learned a second language as children and as adults. That’s probably important here.
At the intersection of globalization, culture, communication, appropriation, and literature – I was listening to the latest radio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (this is the one with Dormer, MacAvoy, Harewood, Cumberbatch and Head) and came to this bit: (rendered from Richard Mayhew’s pov)
Hunter: Have either of you crossed Knightsbridge before?
Anaesthesia: No.
Richard: Not down here [in London Below].
Hunter: Well, isn’t this going to be fun.
Richard: Is there anything, really, to be afraid of?
Hunter: Only the knight on the bridge.
Richard (laughing): You mean the kind in armor?
Hunter: The kind that comes when day is over.
Which is, of course, one of those homophones that peppers the English (and other) languages – and leads to criminal puns, and Tom Swifties, and tons of jokes and memes and plot twists. (“To Serve Man” is probably a version of this, but there are older versions – Tolkien, for one.)
I am aware of another example of this sort of overt reference to homophones in SFF, but this time the referenced language was Chinese. In one of the sequels to Barry Hughart’s wonderful Bridge of Birds, a word is defined along the various possible inflections – a large mouth, the empty set, zero, sometimes a small mouth.
What other uses of homophones in fiction are people aware of, and how often is this a device used in other languages? Given that this is one of those literary tools that is generally not able to be translated, would creating a work that used a number of these be seen as a deliberate choice against globalization/wide access for that particular work?
They show up a lot in Japanese media. The language is full of homophones — even more so than English, which is also pretty rich in them — and Japanese writers adore wordplay. It tends to go right over the heads of foreign readers, although occasionally by pure chance it happens to be close to an equivalent English pun.
I think the fact that wordplay doesn’t translate well is one of the things that makes anime and manga come off more serious in translation than it’s really supposed to be.
This is why every comic I’ve translated has a page at the end explaining all the original wordplay/references, which are way funnier than anything a translator could substitute.
“Localisers” are the worst. If someone doesn’t want to get a lesson in foreign culture, why don’t they just read stuff from their own?
Eh, I’ve seen localisations that better capture the spirit of the joke than the original text did.
As per Keranih’s original question, Pratchett is the most obvious author for whom wordplay is a key part of his writing’s appeal. As Discworld and the Neverwhere example show, such devices are primarily used for comedy. As such, miscommunication-based comedy may include an increased use of those techniques. Think Abbott and Costello, or Groucho and Chico zingers. Or Shakespeare.
Chinese comedy must be rife with wordplay. (Look up the Chinese “Shi poem.” Or the “Ma sentence,” along the lines of the Buffalo sentence.)
The Swifty itself has its roots in books.
For other media, the most obvious categories would be song lyrics and poetry. *shakes fist at Sondheim*
But the action one-liner is also one of the biggest sources of puns. There’s nothing like a terrible pun to comment on a specific means of inflicted violence. And then after the body’s had time to cool, here comes Horatio Caine and his sunglasses.
Second Nornagest’s point on Japanese media. Nisiosin. Just, Nisoisin. I know I’m missing a bunch of the wordplay still, but a respectable number of them translate well enough in the Monogatari anime, thanks to Shaft visually demonstrating them, as well. And speaking of Shaft, the entirety of Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei is basically their exploring various idioms in their literal forms, and then taking them to their logical extreme end.
“This is an experiment with slimmer, more frequent open threads.”
2 days, 872 comments. Depending on what you mean by slimmer, I don’t think the experiment is working.
Pedantically speaking, the longer the comment thread, the narrower it is compared to its width, so it’s getting slimmer and slimmer.
The sum total of human knowledge advances! I wonder – what is the intended, appropriate length of a comment section under a post?
It occurs to me that – in response to multiple suggestions – Scott is willing to perform low-cost-to-himself experiments to demonstrate what everyone else already suspects/knows.(*) However, I wonder how long he would be willing to go on putting up three threads a weeks with nothing more than “this is an open thread” in order to demonstrate that, no, his commentariant really can babble on for that long, before the various people making that suggestion accept it.
(*) As is correct – one does want to calibrate one’s priors, after all.
No hard data for this, but the more frequent threads, to my perception, are resulting in more conversations re-treading earlier ground. Perhaps it’s influx of some new commenters, but I’m seeing arguments being re-hashed from scratch, instead of linking to “here’s what we said on it before, let’s continue from that point.”
And sometimes it’s between the same commenters as the last time the topic came up, re-hashing from the same starting point instead of continuing from before.
Less frequent threads can force those conversations to take place on other platforms, for example one argument playing out once over a long period of time on Tumblr, because there’s no structural element like “a new post is up with a clear comment section” to wipe our brains of what happened last post.
Less frequent threads also give people the opportunity to stew over arguments, refine them, so that they have more to offer during the thread, when timeliness is a factor, (more substantial opening comments, more counterarguments already pondered) increasing discussion quality.
How likely is it that realistic, inexpensive, and nutritious fake meat could significantly reduce or eliminate real meat consumption in places where it’s available? That would make fake meat a pretty huge utility-booster.
Pretty low, because “realistic and inexpensive” are unlikely. A cow is a machine optimized for producing tasty beef, and beating it is likely to be extremely difficult. And cows are probably not the most efficient animal at producing meat by any means.
Why would fake meat boost utility at all anyway?
By eliminating a category of agents, called “cows”, that are perceived as experiencing a lot of negative utility.
This only works if you see cows as agents, of course, but it’s pretty common to sneak that assumption into EA discourse these days.
And only works if you believe their net utility is negative, that it is better for them not to exist.
I dare any vegan to come play with my lambs for ten minutes and tell me they shouldn’t be allowed to exist because they’re “suffering”.
I don’t care if they offer us “synthetic meat” or even reprocessed vegan activists as substitutes–we are not going to give up domestic animals.
@ Eggoeggo
I dare any vegan to come play with my lambs for ten minutes
Are you raising them just for wool, or do you eventually eat them? If the latter, then there’s an element of trust and betrayal.
(Disclaimer: I’m not even vegetarian at the moment.)
Which is pretty strange! Even a brief, torturous existence is better than nothing.
There’s no betrayal of trust. He regularly shows them the bolt gun and explains how it works. If they can’t put 2 and 2 together, that’s their lookout.
@Anonymous
Why? I’d say it’s beter than a long torturous existence, but I’d much prefer not being born to having any sort of torturous existence, or even just an unhappy one.
I suspect this is one of those differences in viewing the world that are just irreconcilable, like being able to visualize mentally or lacking the ability. It is obvious to me why being alive is superior to being non-alive, on an axiomatic level, but I’m not sure I am able to articulate why, much less to someone who would prefer non-existence to unhappiness.
It sounds like you’ve simply never felt the right sort of unhappiness, anon. Perhaps you’re constitutionally incapable of feeling it. But if not, and if you did end up feeling it (say, due to a change in circumstances), you’d understand soon enough.
“but I’d much prefer not being born ”
“Better not to be born. But who can be so lucky? Not one in a million.”
(From Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, by memory so probably not verbatim)
And I should take the very-obviously-not-thinking-clearly future-anon-who-is-suffering’s opinion on the matter? No, thanks. I’d rather precommit while sound of mind – for the same reason one writes a will before one has dementia, why being drunk invalidates consent, etc, etc.
What makes you think you’re sound of mind right now? 🙂 Being human, you are not immune to the usual optimistic biases, illusions or other cognitive distortions.
What makes you think that suffering will improve upon that?
‘Optimised’ is pretty strong. Selectively bred, but on the same basis a horse is optimised for swift transport, an ox for ploughing etc.
We the animal husbands, in order to form a more optimized cow…
IMO far more likely that we develop some sort of quasi-Vegemite protozoa-extruded pate type meat-ish product that (with different seasonings) replaces scrambled eggs, meat loaf and deli cuts.
That it boosts utility depends (as noted) how well that system replaces the other things we use cows and pigs for.
What if “sensitivity to environmental influence” is itself genetic?
I hope this is true, because it would be hilarious.
“Confounds abound” said Tom congenially.
See: Differential susceptibility hypothesis
Isn’t the “Orchid” gene, or something like that, supposed to be exactly that?
So, I’ve been reading Scott’s posts on Raikoth lately, and I’ve been wondering: Scott, do you have a feel for what crime rates are like in Raikoth? It’s certainly a fascinating thought experiment you’ve constructed, though I admit I’m perhaps too much of a pessimist to see a similar system ever working.
Worst practices
This was started as a discussion of how to sabotage a company. I think almost everything mentioned in the comments is actual business behavior.
My guess would be that the original OSS manual was based on dysfunction the writers had noticed within their own organizations. Thus Conquest’s Third Law: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
So in the course of reading through Scott’s older posts I found a link to givingwhatwecan.org, and I was surprised to learn that they only mention four charities that make it into their A list. Anyone have any insights into why this is? Are a lot of charities not very good? Is it hard to assess the value of a charity? I notice that they are all related in some way to diseases/parasites, so is it the case that this one particular issue causes such a vast amount of disutility that to attempt any other kind of charity in the current conditions is negligible by comparison? I’m interested!
In a way, it’s surprising there are as many as four.
“Negligible” is not quite the right word – if charity A gets a unit of bang for a buck, and B gets a unit of bang for two bucks, then B’s contribution is hardly neglible and it’s much better for people to be contributing to B than to not be contributing at all, but contributing to A is better.
Under the assumptions that A: charities are scoreable in terms of bang for buck, B: scores can be done to arbitrary precision, C: 5.00 +/- 1 is better than 4.99 +/- 1, D: the chances of two charities having exactly the same score are tiny and E: the aim is to do as much good as possible with the money available, then there must be a “best” charity.
Naively, it would seem a good idea to send all the money to the best charity, and thereby get the most bang-for-buck. However there are arguably multiple issues with this, some of which the EA movement takes into account. For example, there are issues of diminishing returns, and the ability of a charity to spend lots of money – “room for more funding” as GiveWell puts it. The short and sloppy version is that the bigger the EA movement gets, the more charities it can saturate with cash. (People who like complicated economic models can think about marginal utility per dollar, and equilibria where you give more and more money to the leading charity until the marginal utility per dollar equals that of the next-best charity, and then add lots of extra fussiness and spend forever making and defending economic models… “saturate with cash” is good enough. People who like paradox-like things might note that this destroys the circumstances in which assumption D holds, and compare it to other cases where acting on an economic theory destroys the assumptions it is founded on.)
I’m not a “full” EAer and find their lists useful but don’t stick strictly to EA principles in my own charity spend; I spend some money on things “closer to home”, and that comes out of my general charity budget, which I think is a no-no for strict EAs (they can spend on other charities from other budgets but not from money earmarked for EA purposes). For example I have mental health problems, and thus spend some money on mental health charities – it’s not exactly self interest but neither is it optimised for the greatest good, it’s… not selfish, not exactly groupish, more people-like-me-ish. There seems to be a weird idea in some places that the only good motives to follow are self-interest or the greatest good and, well, that doesn’t seem to match my sense of motivation.
I think there are also concerns about the longer-term future of charities; partly in terms of keeping useful but currently-not-maximally-mariginally-useful charities afloat, and of “rewarding” small growing charities who might grow into A-listers if properly nurtured.
I think that the lists of charities are going to have to grow as the EA movement grows. I think the EA movement tries to optimise for the good it can do in context in the world as it is, and that if there was a danger of everyone suddenly converting to EA principles overnight then the EA movement would have to rethink a lot of things pronto… but that’s not going to happen, so the movement has time to refine its principles over time.
(There’s a part of me that also says that the size of the EA movement is limited by the proportion of the population that properly gets the idea of marginal utility, that that’s a small proportion of the population, and it must look terribly strange and alien to people who don’t get it. But that sounds suspicously smug to me so maybe I’m missing something.)
The commenting section of this blog is out of control. At the moment of writing this, there are 686 responses to this thread. I would have to put aside half a day to read through all of them. On the other hand, if I happen to have a remarkably insightful comment but I don’t post it within an hour from the original post, it will get buried somewhere and no-one will ever find it.
Have you considered using some kind of rating system for comments so that good comments rise to the top? Or maybe a “Scott recommends” tag for posts that you like so that others can check them out too (assuming you read even 10% of all the comments here).
In a voting system your comment is even more likely to get buried.
It seems to me that what people asking for voting systems want is a system whereby someone else does work and finds interesting comments, and they get to read only those ones and everything else gets (and stays) buried.
Rather than a system that is conducive to dialogue. Which is what I want.
And you can always go to the subreddit if you really want a forum that allows voting.
What about, for open threads, sorting the top level comments in reverse order, so the newest is at the top and more likely to be read?
Would this mess up any of the tool ecosystem?
My strategy is to just collapse all the highest-level posts that don’t interest me, and after that just use the latest comments feature. Makes it harder to miss stuff, too. But the fact that I have a reading strategy for a comments section does suggest a problem.
Rating systems, however, bring in their own problems, and a system that would require Scott to read everything himself fully and make decisions as to what’s best is just making a problem for everyone into a bigger problem for one person.
Yeah, but it wouldn’t be a problem for us, which is the point.
Don’t read through all of them. Just check the latest replies and see if anything interests you. Although with a commentariat that probably has completionist / OCD tendencies, that might not be possible for everyone.
When there is a huge comment thread, I often close the page, and then come back the next day to see where discussion is active.
This also tends to select for drama-heavy threads, though. Which I probably need to cut down on.
There is the reddit subforum http://reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
much less activity there
That doesn’t help; it just adds another set of comments to read!
We could try being less friendly and welcoming, or less interesting to talk to.
Well that explains it. You can stop now, you’ve done more than your fair share. Let airgap take the load for a while.
Are you hitting on me?
A rating system is a messy socialized solution that can’t please everyone for reasons HeelBearCub mentioned. A better solution might be a tag system, whereby you have to add pre-set tags to describe your post in tl;dr/category terms, and then the individual can privately tailor reading the comment sections by omitting all of the posts in the categories they don’t want/only selecting the categories they do want. The comment section should also be reorganized so that comment trees are threads beginning with the OP.
I wonder if one could design a personalized voting system. I’m imagining a system where individuals upvote or downvote comments, the software keeps track of which other readers have views that correlate or anti-correlate with yours and provides you with ratings based on their votes.
One absolutely can, although you risk the usual problems with bubbles and circlejerks.
I see no reason why a forum or imageboard wouldn’t solve all the problems with the OTs.
Well, the fact is that there exists both a subreddit and an imageboard, and neither of them seem to have solved the “problem” (yet).
Imageboard? Where?
http://8ch.net/ratanon/index.html
Its pretty bad, the best would be having an old school forum with categories but with posibility of anonymous posts.
>8chan
Enough said.
Oldschool forum with anon may work, but if you want a constant turnover of discussion then an imageboard with forced “500 posts and no more bumps” forces content to be fresh. Depends on what you want.
I don’t understand the appeal of imageboards. Or, I understand the appeal for image-based discourse, like sharing pornography, but I don’t understand why they’re so popular for mostly-textual discussion. Why is the special sauce for a forum to require an unrelated image in every OP?
I can’t speak for all imageboards, but when I say (or said) imageboard I meant 4chan, or anonymous. Anonymity improves discussion for the same reason natural selection improves the fitness of a species (and with the same limitations and caveats). In general it requires posters to be actually interesting, and nixes the tumourous influence of comment upboating.
4chan at its worst is always when regular threads become dominated by name/tripfags. Then it’s no different to any other site.
Anonymity, lack of registration, image macros, and the ephemeral nature of its threads. Not for everyone (or even most), not for all purposes (or even most). But it has its place.
Question related to your professional skill set . . . when does hypersensitivity become a psychosis?
I went to a talk about Effective Animal Advocacy by Jacy Reese today. Some interesting points that came up:
Improving the standards of living for animals could drive down demand to reduce factory farming, because people will conclude ‘Eh, we’ve done enough.’ this seems like a frustrating problem to overcome in theory, but I can’t think of it happening anywhere in practice in the past. Am I just not thinking hard enough about past examples, or is there a flaw in this reasoning?
Some people want to focus on concrete gains- for example, ending the use of battery cages. Is this a sensible way of clawing in gains that won’t slide away, or inefficient focus on something symbolic?
And more generally, Jacy thought that people underestimate the power of their own close personal social networks. Actually, he said that EAs do this, but I’m wondering about whether there is a difference. I feel like people probably overestimate this, but maybe I’m the one who should recalibrate a bit. And if people do overestimate their own social influence, are EAs biased in the other direction?
One flaw is that improving living standards for animals makes them taste better. I don’t actually think this is a flaw at all, but I can see how you might.
this seems like a frustrating problem to overcome in theory, but I can’t think of it happening anywhere in practice in the past.
Some have argued that the (largely market-driven, partly democracy-feed-back driven) improvements in factory working conditions in the West have dulled the support for a true communist revolution that would have (in theory) made even greater strides in improving the lot of the common worker.
concrete gains- for example, ending the use of battery cages. Is this a sensible way of clawing in gains that won’t slide away, or inefficient focus on something symbolic?
I’m going with “inefficient focus on something symbolic” because the anti-modern ag movements don’t actually have concrete goals for improving the welfare and health of the animals involved – instead they’re focused on farming aesthetics and emotional reactions. An indepth look at the available data on various systems shows that there are health and welfare negatives to all types of farm production – including all the systems promoted by anti-modern ag groups.
people underestimate the power of their own close personal social networks
I’m not entirely following – do you mean that people can be more influential than they believe they are? Or that they think they can change things but really can’t?
Funny little intersection between “effective altruism”, signalling, and the “college is useless!” discussion.
My alma mater recently sent a begging letter complaining that alumni giving rates are way down (fallen by almost half in the last few years, percent-participation-wise, iirc). My immediate reaction was shock that they’d even consider headlining a fact like that, rather than ignoring it or only mentioning it carefully in phone solicitations–where people can actually be guilt-tripped.
It seems like the inevitable reactions are going to be A) there must be some rational reason nobody else is donating, and I should probably trust them. And B) oh good, now I don’t have to feel guilty–I’m in the majority!
Can anyone with experience in this area suggest why this might be a good strategy for them?
In the mean time, I’m donating them $0.00, to cover the paycheck of a student who lost his work-study job at the writing center for editing an alternative campus newspaper. And a little cover letter reminding them that we read the news, rather than the brochures 🙂
Scott brought up Calea Zacatechichi on tumblr as a herb that can increase dream recall and dream intensity. I’d love to hear more about it. Has anyone here tried it? Did it work? Any negative side effects? Is it safe?
Study concludes that the typical reasons people cite for the rise in obesity (“physical demands at work, restaurants, food prices, cigarette smoking, food stamps, and urban sprawl”) explain very little of the rise of obesity, at least when modeled as linear factors.
I’m a huge skeptic of the types of the claims that e.g. high fructose corn syrup or antibiotics or GMOs have had any major effect on obesity levels, but what the hell is going on here?
What the hell is going on here?
Dunno. But if you figure it out, there’s a Nobel Prize for you.
What’s going on here? High fructose corn syrup makes people obese, but for some reason you don’t want to believe that. What is your reason for your skepticism? Do you love foods containing high fructose corn syrup? Or are you an heir to a company that produces TV dinners and other high fructose corn syrup products? Or is there some rational reason for your skepticism?
A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
come onnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
You might want to read Scott’s article, “Beware the man of one study.”
I wouldn’t necessarily rule out HFCS as a culprit (or at least a contributing factor), but considering how few studies successfully replicate, I’d like to see more evidence. Nutrition seems to be almost as bad as economics or the social sciences in that you can find some peer-reviewed study, somewhere, to “prove” almost anything you want to.
Don’t start by assuming bad motives– there’s such a thing as honest disagreement.
As for what might be going on, there are a slew of theories– less sleep, gut biome, rebound from dieting, prescription drugs that cause weight gain, some specific infections….
@Jill:
We’ve discussed this a few times before so people might be tired of discussing it but: much of the conventional wisdom on diet is wrong and nearly every “scientists just found X!” study on the subject doesn’t turn out to solve much of the puzzle.
To me one of the most interesting factoids is that during the same period that humans in the developed world got fat the animals living around us did too. Our cats and dogs and even laboratory rats are all much more obese than they were in, say, the 1970s. That fact rules out a lot of the standard explanations. Dogs and cats and lab animals aren’t consuming lots of high fructose corn syrup. They’re not being convinced to eat more by television commercials or billboards. They’re not spending their workday surfing the net or playing video games. They’re not the victim of oversized restaurant portions, nor are they being pushed extra food with “super-size this?” or “would you like fries with that?” options. And so on.
If we knew why the animals are getting fatter, my suspicion is that it would go a long way to explaining why people are too.
Hormones in the water supply would be one possible factor here. Since animals are drinking the same water (potentially with even less filtering than for humans) they would be equally affected.
Need moar parasites?
What’s the source, based on what evidence, for animals getting fatter? If true it’s certainly interesting.
I think it’s this one: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.html
They did not actually measure obesity, just weight. It’s entirely possible that the animals simply got proportionally bigger, just as humans have gotten taller.
Maybe animals become more sinful first.
@Outis:
Yeah, that’s one of the relevant studies. To quote another account of it:
That one mentions one of my favorite off-the-wall theories – we’re fat because we got better at central heating and air conditioning:
Also: home and city lights (including computer monitors and LEDs everywhere) disrupt sleep. And there’s the hygiene hypothesis – that we’ve made the world too clean – mammals are adapted to get sick more and have more parasites than we do now. Or the “fat virus” aka infectobesity – there are viruses known to cause people-and-animals to get fat, and those viruses became more prevalent over time.
I’m not wedded to any of those, but they all seem more plausible culprits than HFCS.
Reading the piece Outis linked to, I noticed that the effect was significant if you combined all the animal populations but not for all of the individual populations. So it’s possible that the effect is driven by (say) pets, doesn’t exist for wild animals, or the other way around.
I could see how people who eat big portions, and don’t exercise, might also give their pets big portions, and not enable them to get enough exercise, but I don’t know how to explain the lab rats…
Maybe they also feed their lab rats more? Maybe the composition of lab rat chow has changed?
Perhaps I’m missing something, but it’s not clear to me that the lab rats data is being controlled for better housing (ie climate control & better/more hygenic bedding) and better diets (fewer contaminates, less spoilage and more nutritious) – all of which could have slowly been improving over decades.
Are their diets better?
I’m looking at manufacturer’s data on lab rat food (This site calls itself “The world leader in Laboratory Animal Nutrition”) and while it’s in a very different format from human nutrition labels, looking at the contents, I’m guessing by the fact that “Laboratory Rodent Diet 5001” contains both various grains and fat/meat from pigs (which would be fed on grains) the rats are probably getting a fair bit of Omega-9 fats.
Some people say that an Omega-9 to Omega-3 imbalance is a Bad Thing. Human intake has increased over the 20th century due to what we feed the animals we eat and the fats we use for cooking.
Possibly relevant?
@ dndnrsn –
Are their [domestic animals] diets better?
On the grounds of better balances of necessary nutrients for various life stages – absolutely. This has been a state of constant improvement and experimentation at multiple levels – universities, private feed companies, individual farmers – for decades. Better diets are a non-discardable portion of the improvements in animal health and productivity over the last century.
In terms of excluding toxins and preventing contamination and waste – also absolutely. Aflotoxins, f’zample, can have impacts on litter sizes and time to adulthood.
Human nutrition research is laughable in the face of the experimentation and improvement that has been done with feeding domestic animals. More specifically, we are pretty sure (*) that we’ve hit nearly all the low hanging fruit. What improvements that are left are aimed at the delivery of the prescribed ration (think about the difference between the grocery list in the frugal parenting magazine vs what your kid actually eats during the day) tweeking diets for specific life stages of different subpopulations, making the best use of available vs ideal ingredients, and incorporating marginal findings.
By all the data I’ve seen, omega acid balances are marginal findings. They may turn out to be a part of the whole cars/desk jobs/processed food/HFCS complex…but the data indicating that they are the orange soda itself is not there.
(Freaking comp ate my first reply. If I am confusing (or incorrect) please let me know.)
(*) often a bad sign, I know
No, that makes sense. I can imagine that animal nutrition is better studied – ethics committees probably wouldn’t allow locking children in cages.
They don’t allow for controlled diets of aduts, either, nor mandated periods of exercise for elders. But yeah, part of what I left out of this copy of the reply is “Human nutrition info is v. poor compared to animals and that’s not really a bad thing.”
(It’s not just ethics, though – the long lifespan and generations is also important.)
HFCS definitely isn’t good for you, but I doubt that it’s a major driver of American obesity on its own, i.e. that it would change much if you replaced it with older sweeteners. The saccharide ratio you get from it is very similar to honey, and not that different from what sucrose (i.e. table sugar) breaks down into — usually either 55% fructose (for soda) or 42% (for most packaged food), while sucrose gets cracked into fructose and glucose by your gut bacteria in a 50-50 ratio. That rules out most of the plausible mechanisms of action here. Absorption time, maybe, but sucrose breaks down pretty damn quick. Plus, countries like Mexico are getting fatter too, and HFCS isn’t a common sweetener there.
My own pet theory involves the rise of soda and other caloric beverages (fruit juice, Gatorade, energy drinks, Frappucinos) as staple water sources, however they happen to be sweetened, but I’ll readily admit that could be wrong or incomplete. It doesn’t explain fatter animals at all, but I’m a little leery of that claim.
Since we’re sharing pet theories. I suspect the primary instigator is carbs in general. A high-carb diet basically makes everyone pre-diabetic. It’s just that we don’t realize it, because we think a low glycemic index blunts the effect more than it actually does.
No, I don’t have any evidence for this. I just want it on the record. So that I might gain bragging rights, on the hilariously naive chance that I know what I’m talking about.
Speaking of pet theories, when I’m being really cynical I start to suspect the entire notion of a balanced diet is a problem. Humans didn’t used to eat (or try to eat) anything resembling a “scientifically balanced” diet. What if our ability to put on fat (especially during childhood) used to be limited by the relative lack of various specific key nutrients or micronutrients? As we tried to optimize human nutrition to avoid any important shortages – putting iodine in our salt and vitamin D in our milk and vitamin A in our rice and making all our cereals fortified with essential vitamins and minerals and encouraging vitamin supplements and propagandizing the notion of “a complete breakfast” to parents and making sure schools served “balanced” lunches, maybe we accidentally improved the efficiently of fat storage during some stage of development.
Maybe an unbalanced diet is better for most people than a balanced one.
I totally agree this is a problem. I see people at the food court eating a whole fruit smoothie as a beverage to accompany their big pile of fried rice and general tso’s chicken. When one considers the fact that fried rice was originally a way of making a full meal out of a staple/accompaniment to main dish, these people, then, are eating three full meals. But then, they need to get their 10 servings of fruits and vegetables in, don’t they? Don’t you know smoothies are good for you?
This is why I’m super skeptical of vitamins, supplements, and almost every narrative of nutritional deficiency (other than vitamin D, but that’s really a hormone produced in our own skin and it’s highly plausible we’re low on that because we spend so much time indoors). People used to live on just like… potatoes. And you really think you’re deficient when you have access to Whole Foods year round?
I suspect a physiological system that evolved to deal with seasonal shortages of food coupled with increased activity during dry seasons (the savanna experience) transitioned pretty well to more temperate areas with seasonal severe cold, and (with different modifications) to sea-based diets (more dependable, but more work.) I suspect the shift to dealing with modern excess food year round isn’t going so hot so far.
IIRC nutritional-deficiencies during childhood lead to obesity down the road, because the body goes into “famine mode: store all the things (as fat)”.
I’m coming from the opposite direction. I think the diet isn’t balanced enough because macro-nutrients (and also “vitamins & minerals”) are optimized for at the expense of phytonutrients. Alas, who needs phytonutrients when we have incredible, edible potatoes? Foods other than potatoes are certainly available at the supermarket. But a diet of potatoes is also a lot cheaper than a diet of organic free-range hippy salads.
I do believe in such a thing as a balanced diet. But the USDA’s food pyramid (which puts nothing but starch and B12 at it base) isn’t it.
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As a silver lining, it appears the Lactose Tolerance Project is coming along swimmingly.
I could easily be abstracting way too much from personal experience, but this has to be related in some way specifically to what people eat. I don’t know if it’s carbs per se, or at least not all of them, but it’s something. Everyone here is speculating about lifestyle changes and being sedentary and having abundant food, but I’ve spent the last three years gradually seeing my physical condition deteriorate to the point that I can only get out of bed for an hour or two a day and yet I’m the same weight I’ve always been, outside of when I specifically tried to gain or lose weight for athletic purposes. This hasn’t taken any special effort. I don’t do anything ever so I’m not really hungry ever. The whole notion of a set point seems to work the other way, too. I’ve been somewhere between 172 and 178 for nearly 20 years, through being a state champion cross-country runner, a soldier, and now a bedridden cripple with five herniated discs and nerve compression issues. Huge variations in activity level have made no difference. It’s not willpower or intentional dieting. I’m just not as hungry as I was when I was really active, which seems to be the way appetite is supposed to work.
The fact that sedentary people can spend the entire day chomping down snacks and liquid calories that add up to enough excess to put them 50-60 pounds overweight is pointing to an issue with what they’re eating not creating the proper feedback signals. I don’t know if it’s liquid calories, energy dense sugars, whatever, but I challenge anyone to eat mostly lean meats and vegetables and still manage to overeat. It’s really hard.
What chemical pollutants, hormones, or additives are Americans exposed to that Europeans and Asians aren’t? That might be a good place to start.
Cars (instead of walking or cycling), outlet malls, Costco (instead of more frequent purchases of smaller quantities), big gulp…
But those are the usual behavioral/moralistic claims that the original link said were not a major factor (“never explain more than about 6.5% of the weight increases”). The study could be wrong, of course, but then you have to explain (as Glen Raphael pointed out) why domestic and lab animals are also getting fatter.
If we’re going to use moralistic explanations, let’s go whole hog: Obesity is a visitation for our sins. Offhand, I’d guess that the growth of secularism and permissive attitudes towards homosexuality are the major factors. One advantage of this theory is that it’s much easier to test. Which sounds harder: getting large groups of fat people to diet consistently and exercise regularly in perpetuity, or bringing back sodomy laws and getting a few supreme court rulings supporting a less expansive interpretation of the establishment clause? If the answer isn’t obvious, ask yourself which one has actually been done.
It would be irresponsible to test something like this on the whole country to begin with. We should obviously start by setting up a test group to live lives of virtue and a control group to live placebo lives.
“We should obviously start by setting up a test group”
That only works if God only punishes sinners for their sins. In some versions of the theory, everyone gets punished for the sins of some.
IIRC all you need to do to stave off collective punishment is gather ten virtuous people into a single city.
Obviously obesity is the punishment for rampant worship of Mammon.
@Airgap: this explanation seems hard to square with the List of Countries by BMI. The United Arab Emirates has more obesity than the U.S.; Sweden has less.
Because Islam is heresy.
Isn’t that why you have Mormons and Amish? How’s the rate of obesity among them?
It’s probably subject to scale, though. After all, God was bargained down to 10, so he’d probably demand more from larger cities.
I don’t know about the Amish, but the Mormons…
“Studies on Mormons have also weighed in on the question. A Deseret News article from 2006 reported that in 1996, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were found to be 5.7 pounds heavier on average and 34 percent more likely to be obese. By 2006 things had improved a little with LDS church members weighing only 4.6 pounds more than people in other religions.”
It’s not just Americans who are getting fatter; you’d also want to look at what pollutants/hormones/additives Mexicans and wealthy Gulf Arabs and Ukranians (along with the many, many other nations that are getting fatter every year) are getting.
The widespread nature of the obesity epidemic makes it especially difficult to pinpoint any specific chemical as the cause, though I do believe something environmental is causing it.
Also, note that it isn’t even confined to humans: wild animals are getting fatter too, as are lab animals and pets. The rise in pet obesity is easily explained as humans just feeding their pets too much, but the rise in lab and wild animal obesity is much more difficult to explain and no one really seems to know why it’s happening.
I don’t even know if it is happening. So far nobody has actually pointed at the source of the information, and it’s the sort of factoids that could easily spread with very little evidence to support it.
The obvious explanation for humans is increasing real income.
@David Friedman
The main study on this is titled “Canaries in the coal mine: a cross-species analysis of the plurality of obesity epidemics“:
There are also separate studies on various individual species. For instance, there’s an Association for Pet Obesity Prevention that regularly surveys vets, resulting in articles like this:
Horses follow a similar trend. In the US about 20% of horses are obese (and 30% are overweight); something called “Equine metabolic syndrome” is becoming a big problem.
What chemical pollutants, hormones, or additives are Americans exposed to that Europeans and Asians aren’t?
Does the use of high-fructose corn syrup as the primary sweetener in packaged foods have any impact?
EDITED TO ADD: there may be something else entirely at play.
What was the rate-of-expansion of the availability of cheap food?
Of jobs that can be accomplished sitting at a desk?
How does the usual method of travel in the U.S. and Europe affect average metabolism?
Here is my bullshit hypothesis…
The obesity epidemic has many causes and is complex, not a simple chemical thing or anything like that.
One problem is that people are not moving enough in their daily lives, and it begins in childhood. Staying fit is mostly a metabolic thing, you need to have your metabolism unatrophied for it to work, else people exercise and end up injuring themselves, eating muscle and losing no fat. Fixing this is complicated, there is no single solution or explanation like people are hoping. I have the suspicion that there is a more cognitive side to fitness, having to do with building and maintaining mechanisms in your brain that recognize, control and regulate your body. If we raised a kid paralyzed and unparalyzed him at age 10, he could gain muscle mass and so on but this cognitive side would be completely atrophied and would have to be built from scratch. It could be worse for real people with this problem but already overweight and accustomed to eating a lot.
I often find news like how kids don’t play in the streets anymore, or how cartwheels are ilegal in some schools. Sitting all day was never a good idea in the first place, and you can’t even stand up to stretch your legs without being disciplined. Exercise is isolated from daily life and this is done only by the few people who actually exercise, the rest mostly living a lifestyle that obviously leads to atrophy. Bed, Chair, Car, Chair, Car, Couch, Bed. Yeah, not a good idea.
Another problem is food, quality has “increased” in theory but decreased in practice, people go for the cheapest and most addictive food in general, many have no time or money to feed themselves well. Psychology also plays a role here, people in better conditions won’t eat on compulsion as some form of sensory escapism. People overfeeding kids is a huge problem too.
Yet another problem is non holistic approach to exercise, what little is done is very focused on specific things and pretty myopic.
More problems: The aesthetic standards are fucked up, particularly for women, that is, too many of them have an ideal physique that is unhealthy and unrealistic and are allergic to actual functioning physiques. Physicality is approached as “Be prettier”, “Be athletic”, “Lose weight!” and so on, instead of a reasonable and unproblematic holistic approach.
In addition to all this there could obviously be chemicals going around. Wild animals getting fat is interesting/terrifying.
I have a notion that car seats may be training (a lot of) children to be used to not moving.
I think weight gain and being extremely sedentary are different problems, though there’s overlap. As stated there are fat people in the active to athletic range and thin people who move as little as possible.
Body image issues are even more destructive than you say– aside from people who are afraid to be noticeable while fat (or “fat”), there’s also the fear of being bad at sports, dancing, etc. which causes people to not get started.
You mean those things that go above the car natural seats, with belts to immobilize the kid? Are people using those on non-babies?
Yes, you can stay thin or lose weight by doing nothing and eating the correct amount. You will still atrophy and encounter health problems though, and it won’t won’t work if you are already fat or your metabolism is not tuned for that.
Ineffective weight loss (From obesity) and being extremely sedentary are more related. Those thin but sedentary people are going to have problems too if they want to put weight, as they should.
The whole thing is really complicated, other people mentioned stuff I think plays a role too; Exposure to cold and germs. Cold in particular strikes me as very important to maintain a healthy metabolism. We are not, after all, cold blooded reptiles.
Yeah, I suggest people try and research a lot of stuff until they find something that looks fun for them. Something they want to learn and would do by themselves even after they are super fit, just to have fun.
Dancing, acrobatics, movement-mysticisms, classic gymnastics, climbing, martial arts, etc. (Something that makes you use your whole body and includes building up muscle, flexibility and complex technique at least) People are obviously going to suck at first as is proper for human beings learning something. Avoid military like trainers that force all students to do the same kind and number of exercises while using humilliation to motivate them, unless you are comfortable with that style (It can be great if you are but is horrible and harmful if you are not, or if the teacher likes that shit instead of using it reasonably)
I dunno about the rest of the world, but the state of Pennsylvania you have to keep your kid in some sort of car seat or booster seat up to age 8, and official recommendations encourage you to keep using the special seat past that age if the kid isn’t large enough to properly “fit” the car’s own seats.
I broadly agree with your entire comment, I personally have little doubt it’s extremely complex with respect to the specific biological causes. I don’t think it’s complex at all as to the ‘why as a society are we getting fatter’.
This concept is especially striking I think though. Lots of people love to blame the ‘food pyramid’ and various dietary guidelines/health organisations making recommendations on old research or incorrect research.
One of my favourite facebook pages is a nutrition researcher at an Australian University who commented on this phenomenon, making reference to this article: http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/most-australians-failing-to-meet-dietary-guidelines-new-research-shows-20160511-gosk59.html
No one follows the bloody dietary guidelines! And where we do come close to following them, it’s in the groups with high sugar/carb content and we eat the types of fruits and grains they specifically advise against.
As far as I can tell, dietary guidelines are put together by picking out which foods people derive the least enjoyment from and calling them “good”, while singling out the foods people like best and calling them “bad”. Is it any surprise they aren’t followed? They’re probably actively harmful, as whereas without them, people would just eat the “bad” foods, now they eat the “bad” foods, feel guilty, and try to “balance” them by eating some “good” foods as well.
This is why you track macronutrient intake and titrate to effect. This “good/bad foods” stuff is pretty much religious purity law. I have several very smart coworkers who appear to take the idea of “healthy foods” very seriously, even to the extent of using it in published quantitative research, which rustles my jimmies no end.
Has anyone done a study comparing a contemporary diet with what a peasant of the same ethnicity would have eaten a century ago? Because that would be *my* bullshit explanation of what is causing the obesity. After all, the nobility and the wealthy always tended to be much fatter than the poor, or even the middle class, and their diets seem not that far removed from a McDonald’s or KFC meal.
Yeah, if it were a problem with the water supply, etc. then why were Henry VIII and Louis XIV fat? Now we can all afford to eat like they did (not just expensive foods, but also rich, heavily processed foods with pleasingly emulsified fats and condensed sugars), ergo we’re all as fat as they were.
I feel the same way. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here.
The rich have never been universally fat, but they’ve always in the past been more fat on average than the poor. Because the poor were on the very effective “no money diet”.
Now, everyone is rich because of capitalism. And thus, everyone tends to get fatter, except that since fatness now purely signals “gluttony” and not “gluttony plus wealth”, (relatively) rich people have more time and incentive to work to combat their own obesity.
Of course, there are other people like myself who simply don’t have strong appetites. So we eat a lot less, but it’s not “work” and it doesn’t take mental effort to maintain. It takes time and mental effort to cook a meal or even to drive to McDonald’s, but I’d rather sit at home and not do that. Even when I was in college and had as many all-you-can-eat meals per week as I could want (10, the minimum plan), I went as little as possible.
On the other hand, maybe if I had unlimited funds to eat out at the finest restaurants every day, I would gain weight. (Though paradoxically, the fanciest restaurants tend to have more reasonable portions, so maybe not.)
The solution to the obesity problem seems straightforward though so far hard to implement: create effective appetite suppressants without bad side effects, in order to make the people who tend to become obese more like the people who don’t.
This implies that the American middle income cohorts only started being able to do much better than subsistence around 1970 or 80, which seems very suspect to me.
@ Nornagest:
That might not be too far from the truth, at least in some areas.
My mother (born 1964) grew up fairly poor in rural Alabama, and her family had a relatively hard time rising above the level of subsistence. For instance, they were not farmers, but they had to grow a substantial amount their own additional crops (and they would all get together to e.g. shuck corn or shell peas), and much of the meat they had was from fishing or hunting.
They certainly couldn’t afford to go to restaurants except as special occasions. They didn’t avoid going to McDonald’s because they were too sophisticated for it; they avoided it because they couldn’t afford it.
But sure, I may have oversimplified things. Yet I think it’s the same essential story: the major cause of obesity is wealth. Jobs being less physically demanding, requiring people to exert less effort, i.e. being more desirable, is just another aspect of that.
I’m willing to believe that 10th percentile income in 1970 or 80 was close to subsistence. I’m a lot less willing to believe that of 50th percentile income, especially in light of the relative flatness of real wages since then.
The rise in obesity is too large to be explained by changes below the poverty line.
I’m willing to believe that 10th percentile income in 1970 or 80 was close to subsistence. I’m a lot less willing to believe that of 50th percentile income
My grandmother was one of nine surviving kids in a rural tenant farmer family of East Texas Germans. (They were not sharecroppers. They owned their mules and harnesses, thank you, and only rented the land and plows.) She owned two dresses.
When she was a young wife, married to an enlisted military man post WWII, she would make supper for three from two meat balls, a quarter cup of flour and four slices of bread.
When I was growing up, we had typically had second helpings of *anything* only on Sunday evenings. We didn’t have desserts that often – maybe once a month, not counting fresh neighborhood fruit in season.
I don’t consider my lineage to be exceptionally poor – we always had *enough* – but it’s likely we were around the 40% mark by the time I went off to college, and had dipped quite a bit lower occasionally along the way.
Everyone I know except the really rich upper class people eats more and better than we did growing up. And I think the rich would eat more, but unicorn haunch is only really good in the spring, you know?
I was born in the 80s and I remember food being more expensive and less varied even then. I think the variety definitely makes a difference too. Imagine that most of what you have available in the fridge looks like this. But you can eat all you want! Personally I would eat this if I were really hungry, but not beyond that.
But my grandma was a great cook! You object. Okay, but she still can’t compete with the food court for sheer variety and calorie-per-dollar crammed into each spoonful.
Also, I think one underestimates how much cost, on the margins, affects your decision about how frequently to e. g. eat out or buy one more doughnut. Even if the 1970s middle class could afford to eat like the middle class today, if it meant using say (random figures) 40% of their income on food instead of 30% they might not have done it.
I’ve been seeing those aspic photos a lot lately.
In the case of Henry VIII – he had a severe jousting accident in 1536 – reportedly, prior to that, he was a fine physical specimen, after that, he couldn’t have the active lifestyle to go with his appetite so he got fat. Also reportedly his personality changed and he became a lot more cruel and tyrannical than before. Also also the shock of the accident caused Anne Boleyn to miscarry a male child… I don’t know about Louis XIV.
So I suppose an active lifestyle is an important part of the balance. The poor had hard physical work (and not too much food), the rich had hunting and jousting and all manner of exciting physical recreations.
It’s important to remember that for most of human history, an ability to pack on fat and not lose it easily would have been fairly advantageous.
While full-on obesity is a problem, just being overweight doesn’t actually seem to cause major health issues in the same way. And “normal” weight, going by BMI, still has plenty of extra fat on the body.
So is it not the case that people are consuming more calories while moving about less than they did in the past?
Urstoff, how far in the past do you have in mind?
My impression is that people generally moved a lot more in the twenties, but things haven’t changed a lot since the seventies.
The labor market’s changed a lot since the Seventies, with expansions in the professional and service sectors and contractions in manufacturing and most kinds of unskilled labor. I don’t have the data to say that this definitely means people moving less on average, but on first glance it does seem to point that way.
W.G Grace was a cricketer of high renown and in his day job a General Practitioner. He would regularly, (i.e every work day), walk in excess of 12 miles to get round to his patients. He died in 1915, (although in photographs of his old age he looks a bit of a porker).
As cars trickled down through the economy I imagine lessand less people would even consider such a thing.
It certainly is, but that’s just a restatement of the problem. The interesting question is: why? (which I’m about to post my pet theory upthread)
So we know the proximate cause, just not the distal/ultimate causes. Ok, just trying to clarify the state of our knowledge.
My pet theory, based on reading stuff and the personal experience of being a porker, is a combination of causes:
1) Rising economic insecurity in the last few decades
2) “Superstimulus” calorie-dense food
3) Something throwing off hormonal regulation (and there’s probably a genetic susceptibility factor to combine with that)
My anecdata: I can and have lost significant weight (never permanently; that’s approximately impossible for anyone), but only with iron-fisted calorie counting, which is the hardest diet to stick to.
“My anecdata: I can and have lost significant weight (never permanently; that’s approximately impossible for anyone),”
I don’t know your definition of “significant” or “permanent.” I pushed my weight down by about fifteen pounds several years ago and have kept it there. Not by calorie counting but by monitoring (either with a scale or how tight my belt was) and cutting down whenever it started going back up.
Everything’s very individualized with weight control – nothing works for everyone. My pattern is: nerd-skinny, weight unknown -> 275lb over ~10 years -> 225 over ~1.5 yr via calorie counting -> 315 over ~7 years.
If I can knock off 100 pounds or so I could go into a “maintenance mode” where I do just what you did – monitor & cut back to maintain some sort of equilibrium. I’m nearly there now, my rate of weight change, while positive, is fairly slow; I haven’t needed new pants for a few years.
But for me in particular, to actually lose weight it takes about the same amount of willpower it would take a fraternity to quit drinking. Some of this is idiosyncratic (e.g. I grew up poor, and my general willpower is probably on the light side), and I think some is more widely applicable.
My anecdata: I can and have lost significant weight (never permanently; that’s approximately impossible for anyone)
Seventy pounds, permanent for about ten years now, no calories ever counted, no tasty foods excised from diet. Less of certain foods, either in frequency or portion sizes. Half an hour of exercise every day, plus commuting in part by bicycle most days and hiking or diving once a month. And I set the thermostat at minimum in winter.
Calorie-counting is I think unsustainable, and diet without exercise ineffective, but those aren’t the only options.
Scott, here is a book for psychotherapists (I am one) that I find quite interesting, and that you may also. It’s a short book. Translated from Dutch.
http://www.amazon.com/Past-Reality-Integration-Mastering-Conscious/dp/1848505485/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463443590&sr=1-1&keywords=past+reality+integration
Ok. Does anyone here really love Monty Python? Specifically The Holy Grail? I absolutely love it and find it hilarious. Does anyone here really not find it funny at all?
I just re-watched it for the who-knows-what-time an hour ago and I still find it as funny as ever, but the reason I watched it was because I wanted to show it to a new friend I made recently. She didn’t find it very funny, she said she thought parts were funny, but she was clearly very bored because for the second half she just used her phone the whole time; when I said it was the final scene she exclaimed, “FINALLY!”
Beside the fact that she was using her phone during the movie, I just feel like I’ve lost some of my connection to her. I generally don’t have a problem with people not liking things I like, I don’t really care if the general public happened to not find Monty Python funny, but for some reason since she is a close friend who I share many common interests this is bugging me quite a bit.
I also feel like taste in humor is a bit different from taste in food or something else. At least to me, someone’s taste in humor says much more about their personality than their taste in food.
Opinions? Similar experiences? Agree/Disagree?
Take this with a grain of salt. I am not a person who gets a lot of humor that other people seem to enjoy a lot.
(Aside from that…anyone tend to enjoy being solitary because it frees one from perceived pressure to react to shows/sights/etc in the same way as many other people?)
I like many of the skits in Holy Grail, and Life of Brian, and other MP products. But a lot of humor is blunted for me if it is dependent on humiliating or mocking other people. For instance, the Black Knight is hysterical in part because the Knight is absolutely not afraid, not stopped, and is still a going concern. Likewise, even though the peasants are filthy mud diggers, they are not mockable – it is Arthur and his watery tart who are foolish. And Arthur is burdened with glorious purpose, so his ego is not really scuffable.
I don’t like the bits with Sir Robin, there is a lot of Life of Brian that turns me off, and I don’t like humor that depends on making people miserable.
(My personal morals are crap enough that I can see utility in making (specific) people miserable but that makes the process useful, not funny.)
A lot of conflicting tastes in music/film/books/etc I can take or leave – there is no accounting. But a difference that depends on something I find abhorrent is a lot harder to get past. It seemed to me that the situation with your friend was more in the line of differing tastes, rather than a deeper conflict.
It was funny when I was in high school. Now it’s very, very overplayed.
I feel this way about a lot of things that geek culture has adopted. It tends to develop this lamprey-like attachment to certain properties and refuse to let go of its host until long after there’s no life left to suck out.
Assuming this isn’t witty self-parody, this is a well known phenomenon that family guy summarizes quite well.
I’m english, and think that 99% of everything they made was cringeworthy and awful. Cleese’s scripted comedy was pretty good. How to Irritate People, Fawlty Towers, A Fish Called Wanda, and a bunch of his ads for compaq and business management were really funny.
Why cringeworthy and awful? I’m asking out of curiosity, not trying to be confrontational.
A lot of their sketches end by just falling apart awkwardly, and get “rescued” by a wacky non sequitur before transitioning to the next scene (like the “this is far too silly” policeman bit they did over and over).
Also americans who think everything english is the best are… well, imagine someone showing up to intro japanese class in a naruto headband talking about how kawaii stuff is. Desu.
American anglophiles elicit that level of cringe in me, and it’s tainted things like Python, Harry Potter, etc.
I don’t need to imagine it, I took Japanese in college. There weren’t any literal Naruto headbands, but I saw some stuff that was almost as cringeworthy. And I heard a lot of kawaii talk.
When I took Japanese, the class was basically split evenly into the anime half and the non-anime half. There was even a split in the classroom itself: one of the walls was plastered with anime posters, and the opposite wall was plastered with posters of traditional Japanese cultural stuff. I tended to hang out with the non-anime half, even though I am a detestable weeaboo, because I feel like a classroom is not the appropriate place for that nonsense.
So I don’t think the analogy quite works, since presumably the Americans are enjoying Monty Python et. al. on their own time, whereas the intro to Japanese weeaboos are harming others by disrupting their education.
The guy who wrote Gaijin Smash said that anime-japanese and normal japanese were so different that knowing a lot of the first won’t really help you with the second, or something along those lines. Does that sound right to you?
Well, as stated, I would say that the claim is hugely false; the Japanese used in anime has an awful lot in common with the Japanese taught in class and I have to assume with the Japanese spoken in Japan (I’ve never been). I think you should be careful not to be over-confident in what you’ve learned from anime, if you’re careless you could end up talking like a swaggering mecha pilot or a delicate flower of a schoolgirl. People are bad at understanding how little they know, in general. But I would say that watching anime was a definite benefit in terms of pronunciation, listening comprehension (being able to parse spoken Japanese), and to a certain extent vocabulary (although there were a few issues where I learned more melodramatic vocabulary than was usually appropriate).
Where anime was pretty fucking useless was in learning kanji. I could mostly breeze through the spoken language parts of the class, but memorizing kanji was a constant pain in my ass, and I’ve forgotten most of them.
I’ve probably misremembered the force with which he drew the distinction. He had JLPT level 1 and was an anime fan, so I doubt he got it wrong.
The thing about schoolgirls reminds me of another story I heard from a co-worker: White men in Japan tend to learn Japanese from their girlfriends. Because of the status-relative vocabulary in Japanese, they end up speaking as if they were young girls, much to the amusement of the locals.
Anime language is much different from regular language in that the way they talk and emote in most of them is the sort of over-the-top melodramatic or childish way, say, soap operas or cartoon shows might talk. It would be really out of place to talk like spongebob or the kardashians in an adult situation. Plus there are all the nonverbal cues and ticks which anime either exaggerates or doesn’t make obvious to foreigners, you just have to sort of live them to get build the neurological pathways for them.
Disclaimer: I have but one year as an exchange student that went to Japanese high school (I was able to talk conversationally at a middle school level, read like a 3rd grader, and write like a first grader). I know more language than I think I do, but intuitively rather than by rote memorization due to how I learned it.
Heh. Cultural appropriation, intra-Western edition.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s at all accurate to say that anime and manga Japanese won’t help you with “real” Japanese. It’s just that it’s a subset of Japanese that won’t help you to say, read a newspaper article about the economy (and of course reading introduces the issue of kanji), because that will use different vocab and grammar structures, and so on.
And yeah, if you actually talk like a person in an anime you run the risk of sounding rude, childish, weird, etc. If you talk like Doraemon you’d sound like a baby. If you talk like Inuyasha people will think you’re rude and strange and think you’re hot shit for some reason. If you talk like Naruto people will think you have some kind of weird verbal tick, etc.
Of course, I also don’t need to tell this crowd that anime is quite varied. Generally more “adult” anime with real world-ish/non-scifi/fantasy settings are going to depict a more realistic approximation of how Japanese adults talk day to day.
Part of the issue is Japanese changing more than English to reflect social hierarchy and levels of familiarity. Anime tends to depict people talking like teenagers shooting the shit with their buddies as opposed to the way you should talk to your boss. (Though, conversely, due to the presence of god emperors, etc. it also sometimes uses a level of extreme politeness very rarely used in daily life outside a customer service context; it would be very weird/come off as sarcastic to refer to someone as Name+sama in speech, for example).
I’m expecting that by now, Japanese people can tell who learned their Japanese from anime.
Love ’em. I do think their best work was in Flying Circus, though, not the movies. The Funniest Joke in the World is absolute perfection.
I agree about the show over the movies. Holy Grail is good, but I could never get into Life of Brian (except for the Biggus Dickus scene). The first two seasons of the show, on the other hand, I think are almost non-stop genius.
My dad hates Python. My mom and I love it.
I find people reciting Holy Grail to be super obnoxious, and not just because I’m ashamed that it’s something I used to do.
Lately I think some of the more obscure Flying Circus bits are my favorites. This is every sports interview ever.
A friend of mine often puts The Big Bang Theory on TV while I’m just hanging out at his place. I don’t find the sitcom very funny. But we watch it together anyways. (Sometimes, I even laugh!) There are certainly worse things in life than tolerating a bad sitcom.
Hypothesis: Perhaps the reason you’ve “lost the connection” isn’t just that she disliked it, but that she conspicuously disliked it. By playing with her phone during the film, she disrespected something you regarded highly and had attempted to bond over.
Pop Culture is not about aesthetics; it’s about camaraderie. Do my friends and I always share the same tastes in art and culture? Hardly. Would I ever play with my phone while my friend was trying to hook me on his or her favorite film? Never.
The Big Bang Theory is how non-nerds see nerds. (A show how nerds see nerds would be something more like Dilbert, or maybe with bits of HP:MoR.) This is why the show is usually not so funny for nerds; it’s merely repeating the cultural stereotypes about nerds being socially inept, and there is nothing smart to compensate for that. Someone is laughing at you, and you are supposed to not break the mood and laugh with them. Thanks, not interested.
TBBT isn’t all that mean-spirited, but it’s just… not quite right. Sheldon is too much like the actor playing him, so it comes off like a friendly parody of stereotypical STEM nerds performed by stereotypical acting geeks.
How nerds see themselves:
a) comedy
b) drama
Monty Python’s style of humor was similar through Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life, and the TV show Flying Circus.
There were even several not-quite-Python films which had a partial Monty Python cast, and similar humor. (Fish Called Wanda, possibly Time Bandits.)
I think Holy Grail wins because the target of the humor was less time-and-culture specific. Most people know enough about the “Arthur” mythos to enjoy the humor, even if they don’t know enough about English schools to get the English-School-related jokes from Life of Brian or Meaning of Life.
You may be correct: Monty Python humor is a taste. It’s a taste that I can enjoy in full occasionally, even if I can enjoy it in part much more often.
Which I think is part of what makes Python so quotable. The short quotes are funny, even to people who don’t like the full-length movie.
I watched a bit of Monty Python as a kid, enjoyed the sillier sides of ANFSCD but didn’t have the patience for the movies. About this time last year I rediscovered Python, and I was absolutely in love. I’d never see the TV show and it’s just sublime comedy, varied and profound and utterly bonkers. I haven’t felt that strong an inclination to watch the movies, but I did watch most of LoB and enjoyed it. It’s a gorgeous movie in addition to spot-on comedic execution.
Python almost strikes me as elemental comedy. Individuals who don’t like Python, don’t watch comedy for the funny bits. They are watching it for some sort of gratification, which can be very diverse (gooey romance/touching scenes, affirming social views, haha weed lmao and so on). Python is an acid test, matched by Eddie Izzard if I’m being honest.
Critical addendum: When I was 14 I quoted Python sketches I hadn’t seen and didn’t know purely to look intellectual and fit in. It happens, but it’s sad when adults do it, no matter the source material.
Has anyone had melatonin stop working?
I’m having trouble falling asleep at night. The good news is that I can demonstrate it’s all in my brain, because it only happens on nights when I have work in the morning. The bad news is that it happens on nights when I have work in the morning.
Not personally, but you can build a tolerance to most things.
If it’s in the brain it won’t be melatonin, which is predominantly in the eyes. If you worry about not being able to get to sleep when you have work in the morning, it could be one of those infuriating vicious cycles that minds sometimes get into.
It’s definitely become less effective over time (5mg sublingual nightly) for me. But my daily caffeine intake has been steadily increasing over that same period of time, so that’s probably it.
I was taking sublingual melatonin for a while, and having trouble with waking up in the night and not being able to get back to sleep. I switched to time-release melatonin, and that seemed to solve the problem: I used to have a very hard time getting to sleep and staying asleep. A combination of melatonin, weight loss, and magnesium seems to have helped: I get by on 7 hours of sleep minimum, whereas previously 8-10 hours wasn’t enough.
Oh god, I didn’t see your melatonin-related thread before I posted mine. Even more proof that the SSC comment section is a huge mess, I suppose…
Is it weird that there have been no MSM obits for Henry Harpending? Like, none. Or at least none that I can find on Google.
I’ve heard that the current theory is that memories are rewritten when they’re accessed (which I find plausible) and that there’s a pointer system for finding memories (matches my experience).
Why is making an effort to find a memory likely to be counterproductive, while ignoring the problem makes it likely to for the memory to just come to mind? I’ve find that sometimes deliberate relaxation can make a memory pop up.
Are memory pointers also subject to rewriting?
Hypothesis: “an effort to find a memory” means focusing on the same set of inputs/thoughts/senses/experiences that keep resulting in the wrong memories; only by using a different set of inputs/thoughts/senses/experiences can you access the memory you’re searching for. Relaxing yourself is one way to shift your experience so that you get different recall.
Memory pointers are subject to rewriting, but it’s more like you have a slightly wrong pointer and are just repeatedly accessing the data it points to. By relaxing, you start looking at the nearby pointers, which sometime hold the data you want.
Sometimes it’s definitely impossible to get to a memory because I’m fixated on a wrong pointer, but sometimes it seems as though I can’t find any pointer.
There’s probably another part of the system which checks on whether a hypothesized pointer is plausible.
Your pointers themselves are stored and indexed in your memory, this problem is recursive. You have to remember how to remember!
I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking memory advice from someone as dopey as you. [SHOTS FIRED]
Are you mocking the So Zetta Slowpoke, Chibi-san?
Anecdata: Sometimes I’m on a train of thought. Just to make something up, it might be like
0. reading SSC
1. reading about human memory
2. “I wonder how far HP has gotten on that memristor thing”
3. “magnets… how. do. they. work.”
4. “I should charge my phone”
Which prompts me to stand up and plug my phone into an outlet. Then when I sit back down, I try to remember my train of thought but I can’t. So after about 30 seconds, I’ll give up and go back to reading SSC. Which leads me back to the Human Recall post, which triggers the entire subsequent train of thought. This sort of thing happens often.
Hypothesis: my homunculus first checks its cache. But when I stood up to charge my phone, the cache had been reset to make room for “TASK: charge phone”. However — since my train of thought is often initiated by the immediate environment, and since my mind’s algorithm has such predictable thought patterns, starting a new train of thought (given the same environment) will follow an identical execution path. Kinda like how a pseudo-RNG will generate an identical sequence given the same seed.
In my experience the “on the tip of the tongue” memory doesn’t pop by itself, but is retrieved via indirect associations, after retrieving it by the most direct association (“how was the guy who wrote the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play called?”) failed. The relaxation part is extremely important to avoid accidentally rerouting those weaker associations via the failed one as they’re being activated, like, if you keep focusing on it.
Not sure if it’s been talked about on this site before (if it has, I must have missed it), but I came across this story and thought people here might find it interesting:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/oxfords-rhodes-must-fall-co-founder-in-restaurant-altercation-we-will-give-tip-when-you-return-the-land/
Tl;dr: a (black) law student at Oxford humiliates a (white) waitress and brings her to tears, then self-righteously boasts about it on Facebook ’cause colonialism.
Really, this sort of thing seems to me a good reductio ad absurdum of modern identity politics, although I’d be interested to hear what everyone else has to say about it.
Seems like the exact same mechanic at play when any high-status member of the priesthood feels like berating his lessers.
Vedic Brahmin and a Shudra. Pharisee and a slave. The one with the social power and privilege humiliating their inferior for the sheer joy of rubbing their noses in it.
Ironic that this soft-handed posh boy seems so eager to ‘take up arms’ though.
It’s a familiar dynamic from my university experience, but I’m still in awe to see it – how has the identity-politics left managed to seize every single institution of social and political power, and still hold on to it’s self image as the oppressed underdog? The mind boggles.
In my more conspiratorial moods I feel like this kind of thing arose in order to cement the current class system. We now have an intellectual movement where a Rhodes scholar genuinely believes he is oppressed by a minimum wage waitress. Where the perfumed scions of the upper class strike a blow for equality by scorning those terrible white-van driving, gravy and chips eating proles who can’t even remember to say “person of colour” instead of “black”.
Since money is the unit of caring… https://www.gofundme.com/tipashleigh
I think that people still have the oppressed mindset even though others don’t see it that way goes hand in hand with Scott’s last post, Skin in The Game. Things can look radically different depending on your vantage point, so much so that everyone disagrees on who is actually oppressed.
>We now have an intellectual movement where a Rhodes scholar genuinely believes he is oppressed by a minimum wage waitress. Where the perfumed scions of the upper class strike a blow for equality by scorning those terrible white-van driving, gravy and chips eating proles
That is beautiful and I’m going to quote it everywhere.
Seconded, and thank for you posting that so it caught my eye and lead me to read the original.
Did you see Freddie DeBoer’s comment on the Oberlin Dining Hall Cultural Appropriation kerfluffle?
I’m writing it off as misogyny– SJWs have a specific sort of nastiness about white women.
This being said, I don’t think he exactly believes he’s oppressed by the waitress, he believes he’s so oppressed by white people in general that he’s under no obligation to care about how he treats the waitress.
To be fair, the nastiness has mellowed a bit since Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka got old.
I personally think this is locational. In some locations, race has achieved Official Sanctioned Victim status, and in other areas, sex has.
Because Official Sanctioned Victim status is 100% about grabbing social status, this then entails forgetting that intersectionality is a thing.
Furthermore, this is kind of necessary for the alliance features of the social justice memeplex to work. I’ve long had a theory that the racist and sexist components of the SJW alliance are in direct tension, because so many of the metrics you can use to prove that black people are structurally oppressed also prove men are oppressed. (Arrests, violent interactions with the police, disproportionately low placement in college, etc.)
The Official Sanctioned Victim status, when it tilts the other way, instead gets you things like that Schrodinger’s Rapist article. But it’s all the same old thing; “You, the Outgroup, are responsible for these historic and vague sins, and thus bear the responsibility for what we accuse you of and do to you now.”
The “soft-handed posh boy” being eager to take up arms makes perfect sense, because he’s politically legitimising himself as a warrior in The Struggle.
The Apartheid Struggle narrative still has mythic implications in SA. Jacob Zuma – a genuine criminal, who reduces SA’s economic value every time he opens his idiot mouth – got into and has so far managed to stay in power power because he (literally) knows how to do the Struggle song and dance.
In case you’re wondering, he’s singing “bring me my machine gun”.
I bet he’s fun at parties though.
I am skeptical of the part where a waitress is reduced to tears by A: not getting a tip and/or B: getting a note with a pathetic excuse for not giving a tip. Seething barely-concealed rage, maybe, resignation more likely, but if that brings you to tears you’re not making it past your first week on the job. And we’ve only Qwabe’s testimony on that part.
Not leaving a tip, bragging about not leaving a tip, overestimating or exaggerating the impact of not leaving a tip, bragging about that – that’s just a jerk move, independent of politics.
Identity-dropping that you’re having lunch with a “radical non-binary trans black activist”, on account of those being the “ultimate blessors of this decolonial struggle”, is amusingly pathetic.
By any objective accounting, this person is privileged. So he feels guilty about it, because he’s supposed to be one of the suffering oppressed minorities on account of his racial origins, right? He’s the poster child for the causes he loves! He is the embodiment of what the progressive leftism is all about! Except he can’t be, because he’s a feckin’ law student on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, and genuinely struggling lower-class POC people wouldn’t look at the side of the street he’s on.
So he has to make himself relevant to the struggle, and fighting alongside radical thises and decolonial thats is the way to do it, and he can turn an act of all-too-familiar bullying by privileged university Hooray Henrys into political activism and a blow for the oppressed against the forces of [fill in the blanks]. The irony is that I’m quite sure, after boasting how he made a woman cry (if this ever happened, like John Schilling I doubt it), this specimen will probably attend ‘safe spaces’ on campus in support of protests against the patriarchy etc etc etc.
I think this guy is just a dick. I’ve met a few people like this. They are naturally toxic people who realize that social justice issues on college campuses are a socially acceptable outlet for a wide range of behaviors that would otherwise get a negative response.
This is what runs through my mind when I hear “Religion caused the Spanish Inquisition! Religion caused 9/11. Viva la Atheism!”
Some people just want to watch the world burn. And where there’s a will, there’s a socially-acceptable way.
Er, what? Atheism is watching the world burn?
No, presumably the sentences above are how people who ‘want to watch the world burn’, i.e. assholes, will act in atheist culture.
I mean, we have objective evidence for this; China and Russia and their respective megadeaths.
That’s not quite a controlled experiment I don’t think.
Solzhenitsyn said there was a definite connection in the USSR between official atheism and people being dicks to each other. This was probably a white lie he hoped would save our souls, the slimy fucker.
I’m not saying that atheism caused the Soviets – that’s all but unprovable – I’m saying that the fact that the top two worst regimes in history were avowedly atheist is pretty strong proof of the claim that atheists can be dicks too, contra the crusades-and-terrorists “evidence”.
(Which isn’t Bayesian evidence in any case, since all regimes in the area at the time were officially religious.)
“I’m saying that the fact that the top two worst regimes in history were avowedly atheist is pretty strong proof of the claim that atheists can be dicks too”
Nah, all you had to do is look at Atheism+ to see how much atheists can be dicks.
Besides, I’m pretty sure “worst regimes in history” is only due to technology; imagine if the Romans had nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and/or machine guns. The holy symbol of Christians probably wouldn’t be a crucifix…
It wasn’t technology; atheists didn’t achieve their body counts through nuclear weapons and the like. They used more mundane means, like engineering famines (both intentionally and unintentionally), and while their mass executions may have been accomplished with bullets, swords would have served just as well.
Are you saying that it was possible for Nero to engineer a famine across the entire Roman empire without 20th century means of communication?
Nah, fam. I’m saying that dicks will naturally accrete under “any banner which allows the expression of schadenfreude” (be it religion, atheism, etc) like moths to a flame.
E.g. had we lived in a world where Islam didn’t exist, I think Bin Laden would have been just as pissed at the West as he was in the actual world. He didn’t ram a plane because “it was the will of Allah”. Allah was just an convenient rationalization to do what he already wanted. So for atheists to claim that “religion is the root of all evil” is silly (not a strawman).
Not to pick on religion though. As others have pointed out, Atheism (etc) could have exemplified my point just as well. As another example, look no further than the other half of the War on Terror. George W had already planned to invade Iraq, but 9/11 gave him an incredibly convenient excuse.
[relevant memes]
People don’t become assholes solely because of religion, but that doesn’t mean that religion has no influence whatsoever.
Ken, true, but it does mean that you have to do more than merely cite some jerks to even show which direction the effect runs.
You could also take our host’s perspective:
The fact that a lot of horrible things are done in the name of things that are not religions is not proof that religion doesn’t cause horrible behaviour, but rather that we are defining religion too narrowly!
Beating out Adolf Hitler and Hong Xiuquan? I think your list needs work.
Bin Laden did us the favor of actually listing the problems he had with the US.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130826184301/http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
Bin Laden is in fact a Muslim. He believed the Muslim world was under attack by the United States and that it was his religious duty to fight the Americans using the only means he had available- terrorism. There is no evidence he was not sincere in any of this.
The problem with the Spanish Inquistion wasn’t “they were jerks”. They were in fact, not jerks. They went to people, corrected their doctrinal errors and had them do penance so they could go to heaven.
The issue is the whole “burning people alive for apostasy and heresy”. Which the Inquisition did (well, the secular authorities did the actual killing) because they needed to stop people from brining beliefs that would be damning.
Religion creates grounds for thought police to be the good guys. It turns out this is exactly as horrible as you’d expect. Fortunately Communists showed that the ancients were really inefficient in their methods and that modern bureaucratic states could really go the extra mile.
Mao probably killed more people than either of them, even if you held Hitler responsible for every death in the European and North African Theaters of World War II and Hong Xiuquan responsible for every death resulting from the Taiping Rebellion. Stalin’s ranking largely depends on which estimates you prefer.
Are you saying that it was possible for Nero to engineer a famine across the entire Roman empire without 20th century means of communication?
Probably not the entire Empire, although I reckon he could have starved a province or two if he’d been so minded.
“Probably not the entire Empire, although I reckon he could have starved a province or two if he’d been so minded.”
The life expectancy in Egyptian Oasis was higher than along the Nile because it was harder for the tax man to get there (source: Valley of the Golden Mummies)
I suspect the person in question was driven to tears because she was being blamed or held accountable for both something she didn’t do and had no way of providing restitution for. There’s a certain amount of frustration in not having control.
If the note had said something like “No tip because I hate white women”, he would have been considered an ass, but likely not as devastating, despite the outcomes being objectively the same.
Being blamed for something you don’t do, is pretty much a daily occurrence for waitresses. Customers who don’t like the food, don’t usually barge into the kitchen and track down the chef. Frustrating to deal with, yes, but moving a waitress to tears? That’s about as likely as a nurse who faints at the sight of blood.
And at this point, I think pretty much everyone in North America with vaguely white skin has developed some level of defense against being blamed for all the ills suffered by Black America. But waitresses, among others, get professional-grade defenses against that entire class of threat.
“And at this point, I think pretty much everyone in North America with vaguely white skin has developed some level of defense against being blamed for all the ills suffered by Black America.”
I think that whether you’ve built up those defenses depends a lot on where you hang out.
I don’t think a waitress would be likely to start crying in front of a customer– and the tip for two people isn’t going to be that much.
However, maybe her life was going extremely badly.
Maybe Ntokozo Qwabe is an unusually skilled bully. Or maybe he was lying about getting a waitress to cry.
In any case, I don’t have a problem with people sending money to her.
I’m about 90% on Qwabe being a liar, and 10% on the waitress having a really bad day for unrelated reasons.
100% sympathetic to anyone who wants to send money to the waitress, on the grounds that it makes them feel good and probably helps the waitress and maybe makes Qwabe look foolish, so what’s not to like?
I would never cast doubt upon Americans’ famously thick skin (and Canadians, and Mexicans, apparently), however, the incident happened in South Africa.
I thought Oxford, England with a South African student studying abroad playing the role of the villain.
I’ve known a few waitresses who would end up inches away from snapping and having a crying fit after bad shifts. It’s less “defense” than “capacity”.
While I’d love a chance to make fun of brits, the article (and relevant facebook post) seem to say it happened in South Africa.
You’re right, I misread that.
I am skeptical of the part where a waitress is reduced to tears by A: not getting a tip and/or B: getting a note with a pathetic excuse for not giving a tip. Seething barely-concealed rage, maybe, resignation more likely, but if that brings you to tears you’re not making it past your first week on the job. And we’ve only Qwabe’s testimony on that part.
My first reaction was similar. Apparently her mother was/is seriously ill, though, so she might have been close to tears anyway.
Regardless, I don’t think it makes much of a difference when assessing Mr. Qwabe’s character and the movement of which he is a part. The mental state of somebody who’d drive a waitress to tears and then brag about it on Facebook to make himself look cool is probably going to be similar to that of somebody who’d pretend to have driven a waitress to tears to make himself look cool.
Well I hope he enjoys any future public dining experience now he’s ensured all his food will have some kind of “special sauce” on it and the cutlery rubbed in the waitstaff’s bum etc.
Question for poly people:
Has anyone ever used polyamory to escape the necessity that a serenade be performed as a solo? It just seems that, say in the formation of a triad, 2 people could turn up outside someone’s window with guitars, maybe employing a call and response structure or something. With more complex networks, even more varied performing forces could be used.
I’m just imagining a barbershop quartet turning up in someone’s back garden.
O ye of little imagination. What’s the proper orchestral score for “we’d like to invite you to our orgy”?
While I’m imagining eight John Cusacks holding aloft a full complement of 7.1 surround speakers.
That’s not an orgy, that’s a gangbang.
(Please don’t ban me. I’m sorry.)
Article on activists shutting down a trans-focused mental health center for kids because they don’t like the philosophy of it seems like it’d be RTYI. Super interesting discussion of to what degree trans in young kids is innate and irreversible vs modifiable. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html
Maybe I’m too cynical, but the concern over the made-up bullshit nature of the report that was used to fire this guy seems misplaced. If your boss wants to fire you, your boss is gonna fire you. Of course it was a show trial, that’s how this stuff works. They weren’t looking for the truth with that report, they were looking for an excuse. You should focus your concern on how heads of big institutions kowtow to activist pressure rather than gaping in shock at how a report that was always intended to be bullshit turned out to be bullshit.
This article is utterly terrifying.
Reminds me of the kerfluffle over cochlear implants.
Transgenderism can be viewed, simplistically, as a mind trapped in the wrong sort of body, and if we make the body fit the mind, happiness ensues. Or we can take the POV that it is the mind that needs to be adjusted. Superficially, the dispute here seems to be between those two views, with Zucker taking the slightly nuanced version that, among very young children, it’s usually a bit of simple mental confusion but sometimes more than that.
I think the real dispute lies elsewhere.
Whichever model we chose, including the nuanced version, if transgenderism is reliably identified and effectively addressed in early childhood, then in a generation or two there isn’t a transgender community any more. There’s just healthy, well-adjusted men and women, some small fraction of whom may have notes in their medical files saying e.g. “The reason for Jane’s infertility is that she was born with a Y chromosome and a penis, but we mostly fixed that when she was three”.
And if you identify as a member (or even just defender) of the transgender community, that’s an existential threat. For there to be a transgender community, there have to be people who grow up or at least go through puberty as the “wrong” gender, people who are not seamlessly incorporated into the broader community as ordinary members of their preferred gender. Just like, for there to be a deaf community, there have to be people who grow up deaf and can’t hear.
Zucker’s therapeutic techniques, like cochlear implants, are at far too early a stage to constitute a perfect childhood cure for gender dysmorphia or deafness. But, to the extent that the writing is on the wall, it is perhaps terrifying to the cultures that see themselves threatened with extinction, and understandable that they want to destroy the agent of their extinction while it is still small and weak.
They will fail, and history will not remember them kindly. But they will cause real damage along the way.
A bit of a tangent to your post, sorry, but where did this language about being “trapped in the wrong body” come from in the first place?
Maybe this is just a holdover from my days as an obnoxious teen atheist, but doesn’t this kind of rhetoric strike anyone as superstitious? I mean, no-one is “in” their body. One is one’s body.
Wanting to change one’s body, change oneself, to approach an ideal can be laudable (depending on said ideal, of course). There’s no reason to drag in obsolete metaphysical concepts, or their dubious postmodern replacements, to deny the obvious physical reality of sex just because one wants to change it.
Since the rationalist sphere has a lot of both transhumanists and transgender people, does anyone know how common that viewpoint is compared to the gender identity / wrong body one?
Well, I’m not a materialist, and I don’t think you are your physical body or any part of it.
But even if you are a materialist, it would seem obvious that you are not identical to your entire body but rather to a very specific part of it: your brain. Or even, (and really, this is the dominant view among Yudkowsky-influenced people) to the “computer program” run by the hardware of your brain.
For instance, you don’t become a different person if someone cuts off your arm. You stay the same person, but you’ve just lost a possession, namely your arm.
What transgender people are saying, sensibly interpreted, is that they have a female-typical brain in a male-typical body. And the mind taking preference over the body (or in the materialist conception, the non-brain part of the body), they naturally want to change their bodies to conform to their brains, even if it were possible to do it the other way around (which, it seems, it isn’t).
No one is “denying the physical reality of sex”. That would be the case if they were literally delusional and e.g. believed they had a penis when they really have a vagina. But they have no such delusional beliefs. What they say is that their mental gender is the opposite of what would normally be associated with someone of their physical sex.
Now some people deny that there is any such thing as male mind or a female mind. But how would you test this? Well, it seems that you would take a woman and raise her as a man, and see whether she felt totally comfortable in the role of being a man, or whether she felt “gender dysphoria”. And that is just what trans people say they feel like. Indeed, they control for an additional variable of the experiment: you could argue that the woman raised as a man feels uncomfortable because her sex organs are wrong for her gender. But trans people have the “appropriate” sex organs for their assigned gender and still perceive that it is at odds with their mental gender.
They are saying more than that. They are also saying that nobody else is allowed to acknowledge their physical sex. Denying everybody else the right to go off of the physical evidence rounds out to denying the physical reality of sex.
Even in the realm of social sciences, we can come up with better tests than that. Male/female correlates to all kinds of stuff. Are transwomen underrepresented in STEM fields? Do they tend to cluster around the mean IQ, or have a wide standard deviation? Which group does their crime rate come closer to? Do they suffer more from commonly male mental illnesses or commonly female mental illnesses? There’s all kinds of ways we can dig deeper than self-report and blind faith, and as a bonus we can generalize the same techniques to otherkin.
@Jaskologist:
…no they aren’t?
Obviously, you’re trying to distort something that they are doing into some kind of straw man in order to make a point. But I can’t even tell for sure what it is you’re actually objecting to.
I’ve certainly never heard any transgender-equality supporter say that people ought to be prohibited from acknowledging their physical sex.
@ Jaskologist:
Sure, I’m not saying “self-report and blind faith” is the only thing to go by. Logically, it would follow from the position that gender identity is real that it is possible for someone to be mistaken about it.
For instance, a woman completely unaware of the existence of lesbians—but who found herself attracted to other women—might wonder if she were really a man, if she had only ever observed men to be attracted to women. She could potentially go through a long period of uncertainty and self-doubt about this—as trans people actually do in reality.
And of course it’s possible that there are people who do not fit neatly into a binary model of mental gender—just as there are “intersex” people who do not fit neatly into a binary model of physical sex.
The question with self-identification, insofar as it is political, is who is in the best position to judge one’s mental gender? That person, in consultation with his or her psychologist? Or random, unrelated third parties on the internet—armed with the latest insights from 12th-century theology?
It might seem obvious, but it’s incorrect.
For a simple and relevant example: sex hormones, which are for the most part produced outside of the CNS and have a large effect on its function and development. There are countless other systems in the body, from the facial muscles to the enteric nervous system, which have acknowledged roles in mental processes. A hypothetical brain-in-a-jar would likely have a greatly different personality and desires than the person it was harvested from.
Besides, why are we prioritizing so-called mental traits as the source of identity to begin with? It’s begging the question to say that all of a person’s actual identifying characteristics (voice, appearance, DNA, etc.) play no major role in identity whereas only those psychological traits formerly attributed to the soul do.
If God is Dead, then we can’t justify maintaining the fiction of mind-body dualism allowed by the concept of the soul. Dressing it up in Sci-Fi or Po-Mo jargon isn’t enough to keep the idea around when it blatantly contradicts the available evidence.
Bolding for emphasis.
That’s what I’m referring to. If my body is a male-typical body, my sex is male and I am a man. I might prefer to become a woman, and make changes to myself to the effect that I no longer have a male-typical body. But believing myself to have always been a woman, in some vaguely spiritual sense, is to deny the physical reality of who I was.
Maybe that’s hair splitting, I’ll accept that criticism. But that was the point I was making.
@ Dr Dealgood:
It’s materialism that’s blatantly contradicted by the available evidence…
And the fact that non-materialism have been advocated by religious people doesn’t make them wrong. No more than the failure of Marxism disproves atheism.
In any case, I’d really prefer not to tie this to the materialism-dualism debate, but there may be no alternative. If you’re going to say things like this:
Then the theory you are advocating is that there can be no such thing as mental gender because there is no such thing as the mind, only the body. But how can I debate with a self-proclaimed mindless individual?
In any case, let me respond to one of your points, which seems to be the root of it:
No one, materialists or not, is denying that the body influences the mind. That is obvious. Surely you don’t think that pain and existence of sensory perception represent the latest scientific observations disproving dualism?
Sex hormones may be produced outside the central nervous system, but they are irrelevant to people’s experiences and feelings except insofar as they affect the central nervous system. This is not an issue of materialism vs. dualism. This is merely an issue of naive, silly materialism vs. more plausible theories of it.
The whole fallacy of your argument is this; you’re saying:
1. Mental gender (“believing myself to have always been a woman, in some vaguely spiritual sense”) doesn’t make sense as a concept, apparently because the mind itself doesn’t exist.
2. Therefore, when trans women say they are women, they must be referring to physical sex.
3. Since it is obvious that they are not women in terms of physical sex, they must be lying or delusional.
But they’re not lying or delusional; they’re making a claim about their mental gender. And contra you, it’s not an obviously false claim. They’re not saying that they “want to become” women. Many of them, in fact, have no desire to have sex reassignment surgery and change their sex organs. Their desire is to be recognized as women, i.e. as people with the feminine mental gender. Their desire is not to deceive people about what sex organs they have or were born with, though they may indeed not wish to disclose this outside of intimate relationships, especially when the disclosure is intended to stigmatize them.
Can you link me to some of said evidence? If materialism is wrong I’d like to know.
And I’ll agree not to drag this any further into the physical / metaphysical debate.
You have correctly identified my objection, that mental gender is a nonsense concept because it relies on the existence of a transubstantiation-like metaphysical substance of sex which can contradict accidental physical sex. Although obviously I take issue with your phrasing.
@ Dr Dealgood:
The same evidence that should have refuted materialism the first time it was proposed: the existence of subjective mental experience.
It’s one thing to propose epiphenomenalism, or the idea that the mind is completely inefficacious, and that mental experience exists but is (in the words of one advocate of that theory) a useless byproduct of physical causes, like the steam exhaust from a train. I don’t agree with that, and it has its own serious problems (actually, I pretty much agree with Yudkowsky’s critique of it). But at least it’s intelligible.
The idea that mental experience is—not caused by—but is identical to physical objects, is just bizarre. As one critic put it, the normal way to show that a philosophical theory is wrong is by demonstrating that accepting it leads to an absurdity. But this kind of theory is an absurdity starting right off!
Or to phrase this more charitably, I’ve never seen anything like a halfway good explanation of how a mental experience can be the same thing as e.g. an electrical impulse in the brain. Given that they—apparently—have such different properties, and given that two things that differ in their properties cannot be identical. It’s like presenting me with the proposition that Henry VIII and Osama bin Laden were the same person: after all, have you ever seen them in the same room together?
The usual M.O. is just to sort of obstinately ignore the reality of mental experience. And when someone tries to point to it by a thought experiment like p-zombies or Mary’s room, to object to the experiments on irrelevant grounds.
There’s no positive argument for materialism, given the lack of an actually existing reductivist theory. There’s just this sort of argument: that first, man anthropomorphized everything in the cosmos, believing everything from fire to water to the harvest and death to be an agent like himself with a mind and purposes of its own. Then, man became more sophisticated and dismissed animism, but he still believed that the universe as a whole was controlled by a single omnipotent mind, though finally he overcame that delusion as well. One day—hopefully soon—man may stop anthropomorphizing himself, and individuals may stop believing that they themselves are agents with minds and purposes of their own.
The level of “concept stealing” there is mind-boggling.
I am under the impression that it is not just mental differences, which you seem to think is all metaphysical nonsense. There are also differences in brain structure which can be measured. Also, one analogy which I may be guilty of leaning on too much is that of hardware and software. Would you say that a Linux system running on a Macbook Pro is a Mac?
Vox Imperatoris:
While philosophy of mind isn’t my specialty, physicalists have to be aware that there is at least the appearance of mental experiences, and have some explanation for them that is compatible with physicalism. As for mental experiences being identical to physical phenomena, compare to the brushstrokes that make up a painting seem to have different properties from that of the painting itself, and yet we’re physicalists about paintings. To me, it seems plausible that a an electrical impulse in the brain is analogous to the brushstroke – perhaps by itself it’s not an experience/painting, but when arranged in a certain way with others of its kind, it is.
Mental experience is real, but I don’t see any compelling reason to believe in the impossibility of explaining it in physical terms.
@ blacktrance:
I think the problem is that people combine materialism with a weird kind of naive realism. Naive realism reifies abstractions as existing “intrinsically”, apart from their being grasped in anyone’s mind. Then materialism comes in and says “What do we need the ‘fundamental mental’ for? We have all these reified abstractions that don’t rely on the mind anyway.” But in denying the mind as distinct from the physical, you deny the basis for the abstractions!
To put things more concretely, let’s go with your example of a painting. The painting is an “emergent” phenomenon that exists when brush strokes are “arranged” a certain way. But “arranged” here means presented to a conscious mind! Apart from its perception in the mind, there is no identity of the painting. There’s only “brush strokes and void”. It’s the human mind that isolates the brush strokes from (what we consider) irrelevant factors, like the frame or the density of the air or the radioactivity of the compounds in the pigment.
Indeed, the identity of any large-scale material object is like this. The Ship of Theseus is the obvious example. You gradually take all the planks out and replace them with new planks; what makes it the same ship? Well, it depends upon the purposes of the human beings in question. If they care about some specific quality of the planks, it’s not the same ship. But if they care about the continuity of the ship’s function as a ship, then it is. But you take away human beings, you take away any question of the identity of the ship as a whole. It’s only in the mind that the ship exists as an entity and not simply as an agglomeration of the various fundamental physical particles that make it up.
Thomas Reid once responded to Hume’s denial of causality by saying that we most fundamentally observe causation in our minds as we choose our actions, then we (sometimes inappropriately) anthropomorphize and attribute a similar kind of causality to things in the external world. So when a billiard ball hits another, we say that it has some kind of causal power that it uses to make the other one move. Even though all we actually observe is “constant conjunction”.
My belief is that something similar is going on with identity. People directly observe their own identity as minds, as integrated agents. Then they generalize outward and assume that everything else is like this. So just as I have an intrinsic identity that remains the same through time, my ship also has the same kind of intrinsic identity. But there may be nothing that makes it really, intrinsically the same ship. It depends on what factors I choose to isolate from the rest of reality.
It’s commonly observed that “society” or “the US government” are not entities. They are composed of many different individuals, all with their own goals and purposes. That’s not to say they’re not very useful concepts for understanding the actions of individuals. We say that millions of people send checks every year to a certain address because they’re “ordered to by the US government to pay taxes”. But it’s only in people’s minds that the government is an entity or an agent with purposes of its own.
Part of the materialist project is to deny that anyone has ever existed, that there is any such entity as the individual human mind. They come up with a name like “the Cartesian homunculus” and say they don’t believe in any Cartesian homunculus. That they think the mind is no more a single entity or agent than is the US government; it’s made of all sorts of sub-units and processes working independently, and the idea that they form a coherent personal identity is an illusion.
The problem is: who’s having the illusion? It’s meaningless to talk about an illusion apart from the existence of a mind which is experiencing the illusion. If there were no minds, there couldn’t be any illusions.
That’s the nature of the stolen concept fallacy: you deny some fundamental premise upon which everything else stands, then you defend the derivative conclusions as if they didn’t rely upon it. It “works” because people are incapable of holding all of philosophy in their heads at once. From the upper levels of the castle, removing the first floor doesn’t appear to affect anything. Except that now you’ve converted your system into an enormous castle in the sky with no tie to reality.
Vox Imperatoris:
I agree that in the case of paintings it’s our minds abstracting them from brushstrokes. Perhaps computer programs would be a better example. We’re physicalists about them even though we can’t point to a particular stream of electrons and say “That’s Google Chrome”, and unlike the painting there really is a program out there in the world, not just an abstraction created by a conscious mind. To me, it seems that saying “Subjective experiences aren’t the same as electrical impulses” is analogous to “Electrons can’t browse the Internet”. It seems true if you look at too low of a level, but you have to look at the interaction of the different parts rather than any particular part. Our understanding of how it works will improve as neuroscience and philosophy of mind advance, but for now we can at least say that the mental processes of a particular mind are identical to the physical processes of the brain as a whole, in the same way that a computer program is identical to what is done by the physical components of the computer running it.
You keep saying this, but this particular position is called “eliminative physicalism”, and is far from the only type of physicalism. The SEP suggests “Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff any world which is a physical duplicate of w is a duplicate of w simpliciter” as a definition, which doesn’t exclude the existence of the human mind.
Scott has discussed this before.
The working hypothesis is that each brain has an internal map of the body. This map is probably responsible for proprioception. Males and females have different body parts [citation needed], and therefore are assigned different maps by their genes.
Sometimes, males get a map to a female’s anatomy (and vice versa). This causes weird sensations akin to Phantom Limb Syndrome. However — whereas PLS is often not fixed by surgery, Gender Dysphoria often is indeed fixed by surgery (and hormones).
Citation needed. The only studies I’ve seen which follow up sex-change surgery have been too small to really count, but have not found any improvement.
Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about gender politics. I was just parroting Scott. You’ll have to page him if you actually want citations. :/
As far as I can tell this is a pretty terrible summary of the dispute. Neither side seems to be disputing the realness of transgenderism, much less their well-adjustedness or health. Zucker seems to be arguing that it is a dubious idea to transition children before puberty because 1) gender identity changes a lot after puberty, 2) a transition is a difficult to reverse thing, and 3) a lot of young children don’t really have the conceptual understanding of the difference between being a girl as a gender and liking some things that are stereotypically female. Zucker isn’t proposing the possibility of changing the gender of patients (although his opponents seem to like to fling that accusation), he is saying that the possible instability of gender identity should be taken into account.
If anything, ZUcker would be the one that would be dissatisfied with a world where sex changes were routinely done, with no trace other than a note in someone’s medical file.
The opposition is to the idea that gender identity could be unstable. Zucker’s opponents think it is effectively fixed at birth.
3) a lot of young children don’t really have the conceptual understanding of the difference between being a girl as a gender and liking some things that are stereotypically female
How is “it’s usually a bit of simple mental confusion” a terrible summary of that?
I don’t think its fair to describe point 3 as “temporarily confused”, at least in the sense you could apply that to someone older. Instead its more “a 6 year old isn’t sophisticated enough to get what gender is”.
Yes, and “6 year old” is by definition a temporary condition.
And while we’re on the subject of terrible summaries, “This is a terrible summary” is a terrible summary of “Here are some more details that I think are important”. Is there a reason you are trying to make enemies here, or does it just happen by instinct with you?
It’s a noncentral example of temporary conditions.
I agree. It’s a really complicated issue because, on the one hand, allowing hormones to be administered before puberty would definitely allow people to transition much more successfully. I’m sure all trans people (especially trans women) wish retrospectively that they could have avoided going through puberty (especially male puberty, which is less reversible).
On the other hand, children are really, genuinely unqualified to decide for themselves on questions like this. You can’t treat them the same as responsible adults.
So the problem is that you’re trading more effective transitions off against some probability of mistaken, harmful transitions. How big is that probability? I don’t know. But I could easily believe it’s large enough to make the giving of hormones pre-puberty a generally bad idea.
I wonder if there is a middle ground solution; Do a procedure to keep them androgynous/stop the development of sexual stuff until they can figure it out. Probably harder figuring it out without the sexual stuff but who knows, maybe with enough fine tuning of the procedure…
There is no way that would not have long-term health consequences.
Yes, but at some point it might be worth it if something clever estimates 50% chance of the kid suffering a lot when adult because they made him a woman and 50% chance of the kid suffering a lot when adult because she can’t transition and has a fully developed male physique.
Personally, I think part of what makes me feel I’m supposed to be a man is the fact of having gone through male puberty.
Though this makes me think about a larger issue, which I in no way mean to be a sleight to anyone with genuine gender dysphoria:
It’s striking to me how many things which used to be just default and/or decided for you in life: where you will live, what you will do, whom you will marry, whether or not to have kids and how many, and so on and so on are now things we have to think about.
In many ways this is great: you’re not limited by where you were born to whom, etc. nor by rigid social expectations to nearly so great a degree.
On the other hand I think there’s a “you make the best with what you’ve got” phenomenon where part of the love for the person you marry comes because you chose to commit to them; not the other way around. Part of the pride in the career comes because you’ve chosen to dedicate yourself to it (and in the past maybe your father and father’s father had too). And yes, part of why I feel I’m supposed to be a man is because I was born with male genitals and went through male puberty, even though I didn’t chose to do those things in some sort of ideal, pre-life spirit space.
Are we really getting to the point where we’re going to tell every kid “well you were born with a penis, but I want you to think hard now before puberty about whether you want to be a man”? I feel like this may be too many choices for some people. Maybe for anyone.
FYI, this is apparently a sore point with a lot of transpeople, and if you ask about it be somewhat careful.
I’ve heard it claimed that the process used to determine the rate of desisters included the step of labelling every single child who left the program as having desisted whether or not this was actually the case, but have not actually read the paper(s) yet and cannot confirm whether this is true
Is there any research on the health effects of very long working hours on junior doctors and interns?
Yes: NHS administrators have found that if they’re under capacity and in danger of losing funding, they can just make their junior doctors work longer and longer hours until the problem goes away.
Not on junior doctors, but theres a huge array of research on the effecct of overwork, sleep deprivation, and extended periods at combat readiness on military personnel.
The nature of continuous at-sea deterrence (SSBN’s) requires the crew of the submarine to be on a combat footing at all times – 6 hours on, 6-hours off, for 6 months at a time. Anecdotally, this really fucks people up.
According to people I’ve talked to on Reddit, even the six hours off is mostly maintenance, and you end up getting less than the six hours of sleep. I don’t understand why people sign up for this stuff when they could be truckers or whatever, or why people agitate for the protection of Wal-Mart workers but not these guys.
Apply your inner Hanson. It’s not about military necessity.
Glow-worms tend to be a bit… Well, lets just say they make regular squids seem pretty normal.
Glow-worms who accept a boomer billet tend to make their shipmates look sober and reserved by comparison.
I never joined the Navy, but they did try to recruit me, and it’s not like the recruiter ever mentioned the specifics of how the shift system works. Although honestly, six-on, six-off beats the 23.5 on, 0.5 off we sometimes did in the Army.
Well, I would assume that it falls under the general patten of studys of long working hours for months at a time, namely that it is horribly crippling to some peoples mental and physical health and immune system capability.
Its probably a net sum loss to society, considering how the weakened immune systems of the junior docs working with already sick patients is..sketchy.
Or, the prospect of having some work for several years in a sleep deprived state and then wanting them to make critical split-second (or split minute) decisions is madness.
Does anyone have any geopolitical commentary on the winner of the recent Eurovision song contest?
Australia (yes, this year for reasons which nobody knows what they are, Australia was counted as part of Europe and had an entry) was the clear leader by the national juries vote.
However, when they went to the televoting and tallied the votes from the public, Ukraine zoomed past them and won.
Given the topic of the song – the singer has Crimean-Tatar heritage, it’s called 1944 and alludes to the 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, sample lyrics below:
and given that’s it seen as a reference to current events in the Ukraine, the irate reaction by Russia, and bearing in mind 2014 when the voting was pretty much the rest of Europe telling Russia – in the wake of the events in Ukraine – “Feck off, Putin” – does anyone think that we’re going to see things boiling over? Is this a straw in the wind?
Generally the joke goes “Eurovision is what we do in Europe instead of going to war with one another” but it has a sharper edge this year.
Given that Russia came 3rd with 8% less than Ukraine, it seems like Europe isn’t entirely of one mind. Still, maybe it’s a trick to lull Putin into a false sense of security. I’ve heard Europeans are pretty cunning.
If the result had been based on the televotes alone, Russia would have won and Ukraine would have been in second place. But the jury vote pushed Ukraine into first place. Which is probably part of the reason why the Russians are so annoyed.
By the way, does anybody have any idea why Poland did so well in the televote (3rd place), and so badly in the jury vote (near last place IIRC)? I’ve seen people attributing this to the Polish immigrants which exist in large numbers in many European countries, but I still find it hard to believe that their numbers are large enough and their tendency to vote for their home country is strong enough to produce that result. Maybe it was just a song that appealed to a lot of people? It didn’t stand out to me when I first watched it, but I listened to it again and I guess it is pretty good, as Eurovision songs go.
Some have said that the Polish singer did badly at the earlier performance the juries based their scores on. Still, I don’t get it, I thought that song was terribly bland.
Yes, someone has!
Calling the Sacred Band of Thebes “a little-known army of homosexuals” is rather too tongue-in-cheek for me.
On the other hand, I also liked the 2015 Georgian entry. And I was disappointed Belarus didn’t make it through to the final.
I don’t know about Russia winning it (I couldn’t make head nor tail of the new voting system) but you have to admit, for a while there, it looked like next year’s Eurovision would be hosted by Australia 🙂
I can’t say it would be funny, exactly, if the next European war was started because of Putin sulking over perceived insults from Eurovision, but it’s the kind of sideways glimpses of history that probably have a lot more to do with how things happen than the old Great Man Model: where the explanation goes “Due to the provocation by the Ministry of Country X, the parliament of Country Y retaliated by expelling all the chestnut-roasters, and thus the Ninety-Three Hours’ War began”.
I think a lot more things had roots in “somebody read a joke in a magazine that they did not find funny and their boyfriend/girlfriend snubbed the editor at a party and the editor’s cousin was a business partner with the brother of the minister for stapler procurement and when the party in power fell due to the postage stamp riots, the editor’s cousin lent money to the minister via the minister’s brother so he could invest in a munitions company – on the understanding that they would not supply the party supported by the boyfriend/girlfriend who did the snubbing of their cousin at the big gala – and that is why Side X had better weapons than Side Y when they went to war and Side X gained the victory”.
We’ve had a war fought over a scoring dispute in a football match (mumble preexisting ethnic and geopolitical tensions mumble), so why not a music contest?
The Eurovision sub on Reddit really geeked into this and there were several posts on the mechanics of the scoring system. In short: Australia won the jury vote, Russia won the televote, and Ukraine got second place in both. If the scoring system had been exactly the same as before rather than subtly different, Australia would have won.
There have been lots of discussion about the way the scores were presented, too. It makes me really curious about whether they’re going to keep this system for next year’s contest. If nothing else, the fact that the juries’ scores where much more “out in the open” than before suggests we might get clearer standards for how the juries are to be put together.
Germany’s entry came in dead last, despite (and probably because of) her embrace of Japanese/Korean fashion. Everybody hates a weeaboo. ;_;
I’m only interested when Lordi wins.
I’m only interested if I’m strapped into a Clockwork Orange Lodovico Technique chair and with the associated chemicals forcing it into my subconscious. Does that count as interested?
Asimov on different kinds of intelligence
It’s an interesting post, and it reminds me very strongly of the not-actually-Einstein quote about judging fish by their tree-climbing ability.
Still, I’m a bit skeptical about the outlook it seems to imply. I’ll accept that there are different types of intelligence – in particular, abstract reasoning seems disconnected from use of context cues and common sense (hence, dumb-but-practical and absentminded-professor as stereotypes). But Asimov’s claim about “80 on an IQ test” makes my eyebrows go up.
Good mechanics need not be geniuses, but if they’re doing more than following rote scripts they need to be capable of creativity, logic, and problem solving. Similarly, running backs tend to be much smarter than people assume when they hear “football player”, because they’re memorizing complex playbooks and then fitting them to real world situations in a way that can’t be done by intuition and muscle memory.
None of this seems to oppose the possibility of g; rather, it seems to suggest that our cultural assumptions about it aren’t excellent, and that good mechanics might be “high g, low education” rather than “low g”. It might also imply the existence of some other factor p (practicality) dealing with common sense and an obedience to real-world limitations.
I’ll leave the possibility open that the mechanic had a IQ of 80 because of being tested on a bad day or somesuch.
Depending what the questions were, a mechanic might do quite poorly on grammar and vocabulary because they weren’t interested in English at school, they were interested in learning what made engines run and how to fix them.
You can have poor handwriting and bad spelling yet not be stupid.
Nope, that is completely ruled out by the story. We are given no indication that he ever once in his life took an IQ test. We have Asimov’s estimate of his test-taking ability, not formed on a single, potentially bad day, but his impression over many meetings.
Here is the complete text, not much longer than the excerpt. And here is a scanned copy if one is worried about forgeries.
George Orwell said something along the lines of, an inability to work with one’s hands is a form of stupidity. (Paraphrased as don’t have the foggiest where I ran across it.)
Has anyone ever done an Escape The Room event? I did this past weekend with some friends and it was pretty fun. I wonder if a group of rationalists got together to do one whether they would escape in record time.
Or sit there arguing about the most rational method that should be used to solve the problem until they run out of time/pass out drunk if it’s a themed restaurant version.
Are “opt not to leave; drink instead” and “use a multitool on the door hinges, leave without solving the puzzles” considered viable answers? Most of the rationalists I know would be all about those solutions.
I don’t think rationalists would have a big advantage over people with similar intelligence and experience with puzzles.
I have; it was a good time.
I doubt an arbitrary group of rationalists would do much better than a similarly intelligent set of non-rationalists. Maybe worse, if they aren’t practiced at cooperating. But if you found or created a group of rationalists willing to e.g. shut up and obey reasonable instructions from someone who has arbitrarily started acting as leader, instead of arguing over leadership or details of those instructions, you could probably do pretty well.
The one I went to, we didn’t really have a leader, we naturally fragmented into groups because there were multiple puzzles we could be working on at once. We just made sure to keep talking about what we did, so that when someone says “I found a key marked #6!” the person who is looking at lock #6 can call them over.
It was more of an “Escape the field surrounded by concertina wire-topped fences and occasional guard towers” event, but yeah. It was pretty easy. I just hid in one of the delivery trucks before it left.
The main thing to remember is to be sure to wear an armband or other “Fixed, distinctive emblem, recognizable at a distance” or they don’t let you into the event. They just shoot you on the spot. It doesn’t seem fair, but rules are rules.
How did SSC end up with a dadist troll?
Do you want one, too?
Providence.
And I would have expected to emerge from the anonemail account but it didn’t.
literally worse than anon@gmail
We aim to please.
Hey, why do you have a different gravatar than the other Airgap?
Cosmic rays.
If (edit: when) you get the banhammer here, you’re welcome at ratanon anytime.
My plan is to emotionally blackmail Scott into unbanning me with threats of suicide, but thanks for the offer. Anyhow, it never hurts to have a backup plan or three.
I did one. I guess I am a rationalist. I was with at least one other person who is more of a rationalist and a couple of other people who weren’t. I didn’t find that any skill set I have learned through rationalism was helpful. The people who had done one previously were better at it. The puzzles struck me as contrived and boring.
I did one of these at the last CFAR reunion and it was pretty awesome. Duncan Sabien is a good GM.
They’re very fun. The one I went to (The Train Car in Chicago) was designed to always be a narrow escape, in a very clever way – one of the final puzzles was a ridiculously difficult dexterity and coordination challenge. Our group struggled with that for a while, got nowhere, and then, five minutes before time ran out, they offered us an alternate way to solve the puzzle (there was a screen in the room that let them pass us hints when we got stuck). We did that, and then we had a mad scramble to solve the final puzzle before the final five minutes were up, escaping with 3 seconds to spare.
So yeah, sometimes the game is designed to be hard even for a smart group.
My general impression is that like puzzle hunts, weffriddles, and similar, Escape the Room mostly rewards familiarity with puzzles and a certain type of constrained creativity.
It’s the sort of thing that operates according to unstated norms, where most of the gains available come from knowing which things to try first. Puzzle hunts are egregious with this (though still a lot of fun) because they expect that you’ll respond to random data with analysis techniques that were never implied (ROT13, number -> letter conversions, etc).
It’s less about rationality than about trying to replicate someone else’s thought process in an otherwise unbounded space of operations. Still, I find them a really good time. For anyone wanting to practice for free, check out Escape the Room flash games (be sure to find realistic ones, that don’t depend on magic or internal logic).
Are we not already – have we not always been – in the anarcho-capitalist’s utopia?
I’ve never felt like I’ve got a satisfactory answer to this question, from an anarcho-capitalist point of view. I find it very strange reading anarcho-capitalist arguments for how states won’t win out in a free-for-all of violence, when they clearly did. It seems like such a foundational question should be squarely addressed at the start, but it never seems to be, which I find puzzling. Some of the implicit arguments I’ve encountered are:
1. Sensitivity to starting conditions. Sure, states formed in the past, but if we were to abolish states now, they wouldn’t re-form, due to changed material conditions. This seems to be implicit in most an-cap writing I’ve read.
2. Moral progress. An altered version of (1), where the ethical beliefs of society, rather than the material conditions, are the relevant starting conditions. Huemer appears to believe some version of this.
Both (1) and (2) seem like special pleading. We don’t have special knowledge about how today’s starting conditions would play out in a complex iteration, and it is unclear why today’s starting conditions should be privileged over tomorrow’s, or yesterday’s. Besides, the material conditions and ethical beliefs prevailing at any given time are themselves the result of the interaction playing out. Such an argument can’t even assume that an-capland would be stable!
3. Multiple equilibria. This appears to be David Friedman’s argument. An-capland is stable, as is a state, and maybe other things too. It might be nicer to live in an-capland, so maybe we should try it. This is much more modest than the typical an-cap claim, but still seems too strong to me; it certainly looks like states “eat” their decentralized neighbours.
4. The eternal future. Sure, an-capland may not be stable today, but it’s coming, what with Bitcoin and such. This isn’t necessarily wish-fulfillment – Rees-Mogg and Davidson wrote a book predicting this as an undesirable, but inevitable, development. This claim may yet be true, but by its very nature it is impossible to evaluate.
Are there other viewpoints I should be aware of?
I can’t answer this for you, but I would like to second it as a source of movement-discrediting confusion with most ancap writing.
The vast majority of ancap arguments for why we won’t just get a slow-and-bloody return to statism seem completely vulnerable to proving too much. They’re eloquent and appealing, but they apply just as well to the pre-state era as to any hypothetical future, and we know that states did evolve the first time.
1) seems plausible, but I would want someone to explain exactly what those starting conditions are. I haven’t seen it, and the evidence I can think of seems to go against them – deadly-but-expensive weaponry just keeps getting better, and is well-tailored to state dominance.
2) seems like bunk. The moral values of society are so overwhelmingly dependent on the existing structure of society that I disregard any claim to “fundamental” progress.
3) doesn’t seem to have any strong existing evidence. Non-state survivors are divided into convenient free cities like Danzig or the Vatican (credibly an-cap, but only existing by the forbearance of states they’re convenient too), and undesirable quagmires (Somalia is effectively a non-state because there’s nothing worth conquering at the moment).
4) is believable, but centralizing forces seem at least as prevalent as decentralizing ones.
Possibly 5) active creation? Like, the idea that ancap civilization can come about by consciously creating examples and promoting them as a desirable alternative to statism. It’s sort of special pleading, but it’s a claim that we failed last time because we stumbled into statism without knowing our options. I don’t buy it, but its a claim.
“it certainly looks like states ‘eat’ their decentralized neighbours”
I think it can be difficult to look around, and look back at history, and know how confident to feel about such a generalization being the reflection of a stable principle. If you wanted to convince someone in 1650 that representative forms of government would come to dominate the world, but you had to avoid revealing that you knew this by being a time traveler, what arguments would you use?
I’d make the traditional argument about material military force (muskets and rifles) and population concentration (cities), both of which were trends in clear effect in 1650, although neither had come to fruition. Indeed, 1650 should give me an especially sympathetic audience, given that the Civil War and the Fronde were ongoing. Similar analysis makes me think the next couple of centuries will be a bad time for democracy.
But more generally, I agree with you that it is possible that changes, technological or otherwise, will occur in the future to make an-capland stable, or indeed to cause an-capland to eat all its neighbouring states. This is argument (4). However, this argument has an inherently speculative nature, and absent very concrete details, gives us little reason to privilege the hypothesis of an-capland over any other system.
1650 is two years after the Peace of Westphalia established nations, rather than kings, as the basis of sovereignty. At that point, while most every nation still had a king of some sort, the king was expected to serve the interests of the nation and the door was now open for asking whether there might be something better than a king to fill that role.
You’ll still have an uphill climb dealing with the obvious theoretical criticisms of democracy, mob rule, bread-and-circuses, eternal gridlock, voter ignorance, etc, without any recent examples of successful democracies to point to.
I think anarchism is an inherently shaky concept. Coercion springs eternal!
However, I think point 4 is interesting, and part of what drew me away from anarcho-capitalism. The main things holding back any sort of decentralization are 1: far too many of us are too weak and/or too stupid (not exempting myself!), 2: cost economies of scale and network effects lead to big business being efficient, leading to oligopolies and high exist costs, meaning that business of sufficient size takes on government like characteristics and thus needs the government to check it, and 3: labor binds people into extremely taxing relationships they would otherwise avoid, and from this springs the (hyperbolic but with a grain of truth) Marxist claim that the relationship between the bosses as a class and the workers as a class is one akin to free range slavery.
Therefore, in order to have any sort of decentralization in a way that is stable, we need to 1: have a strong self-sufficient populace (transhumanism?), 2: technology needs to come along and lower the cost economies of scale for most kinds of industry vital to subsistence (3d printers, indoor farming, etc?), and 3: labor needs to be highly automated (robotics and AI). Humans need to become more survivable, productive property needs to be more efficient at smaller scales of production, and the gathering of resources needs to be highly automated. The convergence of the three creates the possibility of decentralization.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses on the legitimacy of property claims vis a vis the NAP, and not the distribution of property (which relates exactly to whether we are already in the Ancap utopia). Of course, it would be a mistake to conclude that Marxists and left-anarchists do so, because their entire goal is the abolition of absentee title AKA private property, as contrasted with occupancy and use or various collective schemes of various coherence. The only political philosophy that focuses on the widest distribution of private property as its end goal is the third way philosophy of distributism, coming from the Catholic Church, and long marginalized and misunderstood.
Now, of course, distributism if taken to its extreme today would throw everyone into miserable toil in subsistence level agriculture, but the seed of the idea could grow into something really special if fertilized with technological improvement. If every person had property sufficient for their survival, wage labor could no longer be the primary mode of our economics. The fact that capitalism produces too few capitalists and not too many is exactly what leads to socialism in the first place. True individualism must be philosophically materialist and not idealist, because it’s clear that the material conditions for wide spread individualism and therefore decentralism do not exist.
The only way to change that is to try and make a bourgeois status as easy to achieve as possible. The end game here is that automation will drop the cost of production towards zero, as machines make machines and mine the raw material for the machines and run the power stations for the energy needed. Machines will be worker, capitalist, and capital in one. The stock of capital in future society will be so high that a basic income guarantee (government action being vital here to counter technological unemployment) would quickly lead to pretty much everyone owning versatile robots/other AI, making pretty much everyone a member of the bourgeoisie (or a slave owner depending on how you look at it), and perhaps, tentatively, thereby ending the relevance of that class distinction. This is inverse Marxism, predicated not on ending class through proletarianization, but through deproletarianization. If this sort of society becomes so, then people will not need so much big companies, and in turn the servile state can decline in prominence, setting the stage for decentralization. Anarchy here can only be something to asymptote towards, not a realizable condition in of itself.
Anarcho-capitalism rejects this kind of materialist class analysis and cannot account for why socialism exists or what would be needed to reduce the desire for it. It is capitalism that creates socialism. The class struggle is real, and if it is real it must be resolved.
To my mind it’s a widespread change in perception that would be needed to make ancapism relatively stable, not any particulars of military logistics.
Right now a big chunk of people, especially in the developed world, think anything short of universal adult suffrage and democratic representation is a horrible outrage (at least in the places they live). Even if Obama were able to abolish term limits and rig the system to, in effect, become a king, he couldn’t just abandon the pretense and proclaim himself king. Because people won’t accept it.
1000 years ago people would accept a new king, but if you told them you were going to have universal adult suffrage representative democracy they’d say you were crazy and it would never work. And so under those circumstances being a king works and democracy doesn’t work.
Doesn’t mean every conceivable system is equally good. Does mean that a big part of making any system work is having a critical mass of people both believing that it does work and that it is somehow right or natural. I think this would apply equally to anarchocapitalism and that if people believed in anarchocapitalism like they now believe in democracy it would be at least as stable as democracies are now.
This is a good point. Democracies outcompete kings, but in order to discover that you have to persuade an entire society to adopt democracy and then wait a hundred years.
You make a good argument that a change in perceptions would be necessary to make an-capland stable, and I agree. But you don’t even approach the question of why you think this would be sufficient.
Suppose a critical mass of people in Estonia believe that anarcho-capitalism can work, and is right and natural. Even if I were to grant, arguendo, that such a situation would be locally stable, what stops predatory neighbours invading? After all, we know as a historical matter that states have eaten their stateless neighbours.
Or are you arguing that you need the whole world to believe in anarcho-capitalism for it to be stable anywhere?
This seems like a very good point to me. Usually I have tried to argue this same point starting from an-cap worldwide (which, I think it is certainly arguable, is where we did start, anyway). But this may be a more effective way to make the argument.
I definitely don’t think the whole world needs to go ancap for it to work, though it would need to be a large enough area and enough people to garner international attention and respect (not just say, some Oregon ranchers or cultists in a compound).
Let’s say, for example, Scotland decides they not only want to be independent from the UK, but a great majority of Scots have decided and will overwhelmingly vote to the effect that they don’t want a government as traditionally understood at all, and, in fact, that forcing one on them is a tyranny.
Could the UK, especially with help from allies, defeat the fledgling Scottish ancap militia? Sure. But first of all, would they, considering all the nasty international press they’d get, and second of all, would they have the stomach to keep it up, assuming the Scots continued to believe in the ethical necessity of ancapism, which would cause them to continually protest and possibly even commit terrorism/guerrilla warfare?
To be analogous, lets say people in Scotland feel about government as most people in America now feel about Jim Crow and women being unable to vote. In other words, they find it a huge injustice. Even if you force them, for a while, to remain part of a government which has these features they find unjust, there are going to be constant protests, maybe even terrorist attacks. It will be much more trouble than it’s worth.
This is why the ideological change is key: in the past, regions with nothing we’d recognize as a true, territorial monopoly government have been swallowed up by territorial monopoly governments, yes. But the people inhabiting those areas didn’t have a strong, principled objection to government; they just didn’t really have one, and the new government was probably presented as some kind of continuation of whatever chieftain system they had prior. Plus, they didn’t have live footage of every brutally suppressed rebellion inciting outraged tweets across the world.
If the Scots continue to believe that territorial monopoly government is as unjust as we now believe women and blacks having no say in government is unjust, then there will be overwhelming pressure to eventually just leave them alone. (I pick Scotland both because of their recent secession attempt and because it strikes me as a large enough area to get international attention and respect, but not a super resource rich or strategically key area as would incentivize someone like Russia or China to just kick everyone out or something).
Eventually, the fact that, on my view, at least, the ancap country will become richer and more technologically advanced and therefore be able to afford better weapons, combined with the fact that fighting such a country will inherently require intense guerrilla warfare, will add a further layer of protection.
But in the initial stages I think the ideological change is both necessary and, if widely, deeply, consistently held on to, sufficient.
You appear to be saying that an ideologically an-cap society can compete in the global order because its neighbours won’t invade, and if they do, they won’t be able to occupy in the long term because the people will protest the occupation. Well, OK, but the words “an-cap” are doing no work at all there. You could put in any philosophy, religion or governmental system you like. Do you really believe this?
Now, I agree that rUK wouldn’t invade an independent, stateless Scotland, and that if it did, Scottish protests would eventually force rUK to withdraw. But this is only because people in rUK identify with, and respect the choices of, people in Scotland.
But there are plenty of ongoing occupations in the world, where the subjugated peoples’ wishes show no signs of getting their way, because the occupying power simply doesn’t care about said wishes. Sometimes the occupying power gives up anyway, because the subjugated are able to cause enough trouble, but this is dependent on available technology, geography, etc, and very frequently it goes entirely the other way; the subjugated peoples get marginalised or eliminated entirely. This is not exactly a rare process in human history.
My example was Estonia, not Scotland. How would it work out for them?
You don’t even engage with the mainstream idea that states came to be, at least in part, as part of a Darwinian logic of violent competition – an omission quite striking when supposedly the logic of anarcho-capitalism is all about that .
@ onyomi:
Yes, I think ultimately the question here is whether ideology matters. I think it does.
But many people subscribe to an essentially “dialectical materialist” view of history, on which the dominant ideology is purely a function of the underlying mode of production / military technology / whatever. I think that certainly has an influence, but I don’t think it explains everything.
For instance, I don’t think the rise of the welfare-regulatory state over the course of the 20th century was inevitable. It’s not truly the case that the special interests and “unproductive classes” have gotten together and hijacked the system to support themselves at the expense of the productive minority. The vast majority of spending at all levels of government is allocated toward programs that are genuinely thought by most people to be in the general interest.
There’s an incentive problem, but it’s not a coordination problem. The issue isn’t that everyone is rationally maximizing his own interest at the expense of the public good; the issue is that people don’t know what the public good is—and they have little incentive to learn. If people were rationally self-interest utility maximizers, they could arrange Pareto-optimal deals to abolish inefficient government programs that benefit the concentrated few at greater cost to the diffuse many. For instance, by aggregating all the various subsidies and privileges into one up-or-down vote, in which case what one loses from eliminating one’s own special privileges, one more than gains in eliminating everyone else’s.
But as I say, the problem is just that people’s ideas about public policy are mistaken. And no one is capable of thinking for himself from first principles about every issue—they take their opinions directly or indirectly from the intellectual classes. In the earlier 20th century, these were dominated by socialism, and today they are still dominated by interventionism. I don’t think this is in any way inevitable; I think they could be dominated by different ideas, to the extent that they can be convinced those ideas are true.
In other words, anarcho-capitalism could not work in the current environment because almost no one is in favor of it. And almost no one is in favor of it because almost everyone believes there are severe and intrinsic problems with it. And almost everyone believes that not because he thought about it himself, but because he’s taking his cue from the journalists and popular political writers, who take their cue from the political philosophers and economists.
I myself am not a full partisan of anarcho-capitalism because I’m not sure it would work. But I think that if a sizable number of the economists and political philosophers were convinced that it would work, it would eventually become an idea with popular support and would be tried.
@onyomi/@salem:
And what happens when a splinter IRA group buys property in “An-Scotland” ships in arms and militants and starts (a) “buying” more property, and (b) eventually engaging in cross-border raids.
What happens when every high level criminal in the UK moves to An-Scotland and runs their criminal empire from there?
Whose going to stop them? How long before rUK feels compelled to act?
@ Salem:
It’s not that the neighbors won’t invade / won’t be able to occupy in the long term under any conceivable global order. It’s that they won’t be able to, in a global order based on liberalism.
It’s not so much that they “identify with” the people of Scotland. It’s that the people of the UK are under the sway of broadly liberal ideas. If they were under the sway of totalitarian communism then, sure, the humanitarian concerns wouldn’t stop them.
onyomi pretty clearly states that he thinks it wouldn’t go so well for Estonia. (Though that may not necessarily be the case, if e.g. NATO should decide to extend protection to the stateless area of Estonia anyway.)
But this is pretty irrelevant. No one is arguing that an anarcho-capitalist territory can resist aggression by any potential state under any potential circumstances. And moreover, there is no form of government imaginable under which Estonia could stand up to Russian invasion, without American protection. It’s not like the Estonian government provides any meaningful contribution to the US in return.
I’ve never seen an anarcho-capitalist theorist stress that’s it founded on a logic “violent competition”. It’s supposed to be founded on the opposite: a logic of non-violent competition being better for all parties, even the victors. A major problem being that states engage in violent conflict even when it’s not in their rational interests to do so. Putin’s Russia being an obvious example.
So necessarily, a big part of anarcho-capitalism would be convincing the “thought leaders” that war and violence are not in the interests of their people. Just as economists have—with considerable success, actually—tried to convince people that mercantilism and protectionism are not in the interest of any country.
@ HeelBearCub:
You are begging the question by assuming a point that any anarcho-capitalist theorist is obviously going to dispute: that any such territory would be a lawless, chaotic place where any criminal or terrorist could hide out with impunity.
Surely what someone like David Friedman would say is that, in such a situation where IRA members are operating openly and notoriously, representatives of the British government would press charges against the IRA members in a private court, obtain a conviction, and hire private police to arrest them and extradite them to the UK.
@HeelBearClub: In other words, “How did England come to rule Ireland?”
But according to onyomi, this can’t have happened, because the Catholic Irish didn’t wish to be ruled from London and the Pale, and wishes are horses.
“but the words “an-cap” are doing no work at all there. You could put in any philosophy, religion or governmental system you like. Do you really believe this?”
The words ancap are doing work insofar as one believes that ancap could result in a reasonably prosperous, functioning society. I do believe that any strongly held philosophy, religion, or governmental system can be stable so long as it is possible, under that system, to achieve a semi-reasonable level of peace, order, and prosperity. Hell, even systems that objectively produce poverty and misery manage to last a long time so long as people believe in them, or, at least, continue to pay lip service to them (DPRK).
If the answer to the empirical question of whether or not an ancap society can achieve a reasonable level of peace and prosperity is “no, any ancap society always descends into a war of all against all until some neighboring state steps in” then, of course, ancap cannot work even if people do believe in it. But I don’t think that is the empirical answer. And remember, we don’t need to pass a super high peace and prosperity bar if people believe in it. People are willing to put up with shockingly bad material conditions so long as they believe in the virtue of the system (though really bad conditions tend to erode faith in a system over time, of course).
One other place where “ancap” is doing “work” here: ancap is, by definition, decentralized. Therefore, you can never just defeat “the army” or occupy “the capital” and declare total victory, since the people living there don’t recognize that kind of victory as entitling you to rule.
As for Estonia vs. Scotland. I didn’t say anywhere in the world right now could declare itself ancap and be a success. There are places where, even if the local population had strongly held beliefs, it is likely that say, China would just shut them down if they happened to be, say, Tibet. But that’s because China is invested enough in holding on to Tibet to commit a lot of atrocities.
If the belief were strongly held enough then probably even a less-worried-about-human-rights-and-more-worried-about-propaganda-victory-and-strategic-resource/territory-claims government like the PRC would give up eventually, but it would be harder. Factors I think would make it easier to succeed, in the initial stages, as an ancap region: being already developed/having cultural ties to liberal democracies who care about not brutally suppressing “rebellions,” not being located in a place of great military strategic importance or natural resources.
@VoxImperatoris:
You appear to stress this notion of a “liberal global order” as the key. In other words, we are safe not because we can defend ourselves against our neighbours, but because our neighbours don’t even want to invade us. So an an-cap society has nothing to fear from its neighbours, because no society does.
This isn’t entirely wrong (is Canada afraid of US invasion?) but it isn’t entirely right (is Ukraine safe from Russian invasion?). NATO, and more specifically the US military, is the underpinning of our global order. It’s certainly possible to free-ride on that, but free-riding doesn’t scale.
Estonia isn’t strategically key nor resource-rich. I think we can agree Russia would eat it anyway. Sure, the Estonian military budget isn’t a key part of NATO, but if they become stateless they won’t be able to make treaties. Yeah, NATO might defend it anyway, but they didn’t with Ukraine. Becoming stateless doesn’t look like a winning move.
How can stateless societies, individually or collectively, provide for national defence? Historically, we know they haven’t been able to in sufficient terms to deal with their neighbours. You can say “persuade people that war is not a good idea” but it only takes a few defectors. Invading Estonia doesn’t even need to be in the interest of the Russian people, only the Russian state. If the US became anarcho-capitalist, even supposing that system “worked” domestically, it would be a disaster for human freedom, because the world would lose its policeman, and the “liberal global order” you rely on would unravel.
But anarcho-capitalism is supposed to take place in the shadow of violence, in much the same way that arbitration takes place in the shadow of law. That’s why it posits private protection agencies, who can go around arresting people, not just everyone being perfect. And your private protection agency needs to have enough guns to make it worthwhile for the rival protection agency to respect them, rather than just arrest them too. And so on. People don’t actually resort to violence, because that would be bad for business, but the logic of the violent competition is still there – in much the same way that IRL nukes don’t need to be used to be effective.
EDIT:
@onyomi:
The Vikings didn’t invade 9th century England despite the fact that it was peaceful, orderly and prosperous. That’s why they invaded – that, and it wasn’t attending enough to its own defence. Successfully defending against them necessitated military centralisation and dedicating far more resources than could be voluntarily co-ordinated – because national defence is a public good and so gets under-provided. This is the origin of the English state.
And this keeps happening, over and over… Ghengis Khan, Timurlane, Wallenstein, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler, and hundreds of less famous examples too. Societies that can’t match their neighbours’ defence spending get eaten. Even societies that do spend a lot on defence sometimes get eaten – there’s no guarantee – but they have a better chance. The idea that any country is fine as long as its domestically stable is just ludicrous.
DPRK exists because they have Chinese military backing. That’s all.
@Vox:
Under what theory of ancap law is a private security agency to prevent the IRA from amassing their own private territory with their own private security force? In my example (a) comes before (b), and (a) is a process that amasses territory and military might, first via strict economic exchange and then via the discomfort that comes from being adjacent to a well-armed theoretical belligerent.
Meta-comment:
Debating the feasibility of an ancap system with someone invested in statism, especially of a “social contract”-type variety is usually fruitless because they come at it from the perspective of “must I believe this could work” rather than “could this work?”
Because if they were to admit it might work then they’d have to face the fact that it’s morally preferable to the status quo and should therefore be given a chance. If advocates of liberal democracy had had to thoroughly satisfy all possible qualms about how it might go wrong before it were ever tried, well, then, I think we can safely say it would never have been tried in the first place.
Re. the idea that historically Genghis Khan et al invade precisely because a place is peaceful and prosperous, a few points:
One, again, the residents of those places didn’t have a principled objection to being ruled per se, they were generally just paying taxes to the Khan instead of some king whom they also didn’t know. Their incentive to throw off Tatar rule to replace it by Tsar rule was not great nor principled.
Second, the transferability of technological and economic power into military power grows greater the more advanced warfare becomes. In the past, your peaceful farmers couldn’t fend off the raiders on horseback just because they were technically richer in material goods. Nowadays, the rich, tiny country with nukes and drones can fend off an essentially unlimited number of less-advanced marauders (keeping in mind also that it’s much easier to keep foreign invaders out than to win on their soil: see, e. g. Vietnam).
Also, if you recall, Hitler was defeated by a coalition of nations which seemed to object to him just gobbling up his neighbors for their resources. I don’t see why that would have been any different if one of the neighbors he had gobbled up had been the fledgling region of Ancapohungary.
@HeelBearCub:
In the example, you say they’re part of the IRA. People in the IRA are terrorists or engaged in a conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks.
If they’re not doing those things, there’s nothing to charge them with or arrest them for. But then, in the current system, there’s nothing stopping people from forming an association of “people who don’t like British rule of Northern Ireland” and buying up property even in London itself. They’re called Sinn Fein. And when it could be proved that they gave money to the IRA in a specific case, they were arrested and sent to prison. But often they did so surreptitiously.
Actually, some of the biggest funders of the IRA existed as Irish-Americans in the United States. Where they were prosecuted whenever it was proven that they gave money to terrorist groups, but often they were able to hide this by going through intermediaries.
Nothing about this situation changes in the environment of anarcho-capitalism.
They don’t say “We are the IRA and we are coming to wage a war of terror!”
They say “We are the Northern Irish Refugee Alliance” and we just want a place where we can live out our lives practicing our religion in peace. Now get the fuck off our land.” and then pretty soon “their” land is a separate Irish state inside of An-Scotland with enough military might to make the various competing security organizations say “You do not get our protection if you venture inside their privately owned “town”.”
Absent a shooting war, you will not stop this without betraying AnCap philosophy.
@onyomi:
1. It’s extremely rude to call me a statist. That whole post is basically Bulverism.
2. I agree that a society with a shared ideology is better at resisting invasion than a society with no shared ideology, but an anarcho-capitalist ideology seems no better (and likely worse) as a unifying factor than religion, nationalism, dynastic loyalty, etc etc.
3. A shared ideology only gets you so far – military factors are far more important. The 9th century English, for example, strongly objected to being ruled by Pagan foreigners, and as your thinking predicts, that helped – Alfred would certainly have lost without it. But it didn’t do any good for those north of Watling Street.
4. What matters is not the wealth of the participants, but the balance between offence and defence, the price, and the level of training involved. Muskets were pretty cheap and needed little training, so they made the world more democratic. Modern militaries are incredibly capital intensive, and this argues that states will become even more powerful as time goes on (to be clear I think this is an undesirable trend) unless further technological advance decentralises power projection. A free market is never going to fund aircraft carriers and nuclear subs, because the benefit we get from them is too remote.
5. You are right that Hitler got stopped (although note that most of the places he gobbled up didn’t get their freedom back – they were simply given to a different gobbler). Not every gobbler gets stopped. It is courting disaster to make yourself the weakest, most tempting target, then free-ride on others’ willingness to protect you.
@onyomi:
Nations whose taxpaying members had no right to opt out, thereby preventing free riders.
Also, if you recall, Hitler was defeated by a coalition of nations which seemed to object to him just gobbling up his neighbors for their resources.
Austria wasn’t a neighbor of Germany? Czechoslovakia? Or are we using a very broad and shallow definition of “object to”?
And nobody much objected to Italy gobbling up e.g. Ethiopia, which wasn’t even a neighbor. But was populated by, hmm, what’s the term for those things that kind of look like people but which obviously aren’t, and those not-really-people things can’t form Real Nations, can they?
The principle of not allowing nations to invade and conquer other nations may not be so broad as you suggest. In the 1930s, it may have been limited to nation-states with a century or more of sovereignty under their belt and populated mostly by white people. Now, the rules are a bit broader. But I’m going to guess that for some time to come, any An-Cap territory would likely be perceived, by Real Nations, as Not A Real Nation. And that military intervention, hiding behind the right code words, would be seen not as a threat to the proper order of nations but as a restoration of that proper order.
And, as with e.g. the Libyan intervention, would be conducted on the basis of exaggerated claims of the horrors and atrocities of AnCapLand which would never be questioned or verified because, really, everybody knows how those AnCaps are.
Yeah, it’s Bulverism, but I decided this was a rude thread after “But according to onyomi, this can’t have happened, because the Catholic Irish didn’t wish to be ruled from London and the Pale, and wishes are horses.”
“Nations whose taxpaying members had no right to opt out, thereby preventing free riders.”
Now we’re moving the goalposts to whether a stateless world can remain stateless, as opposed to whether Scotland or Estonia could remain stateless surrounded by other states. But if it’s a stateless or mostly stateless world then all the arguments about advantages states have over non-states become moot.
Unless the point is just that ancap regions would inevitably free ride on the militaries of regions with states, and that that, while do-able, is somehow immoral. But how is it immoral to let yourself be protected from the tax-funded marauders by other tax-funded, or god-forbid, conscripted marauders?
Then you provide yet another example of the other remarkable feature of anarchy-capitalists, in that you condemn those who would happily be your allies in shrinking the state as statists, and ascribe to us positions we’ve never held – who knew I believed in a social contract!
That anarcho-capitalists respond to my polite inquiries to better understand their doctrine by lashing out in such a manner does nothing to increase my belief that there are good arguments at the heart of it.
@ Salem:
Does this sound polite to you? If so, you should adjust your idea of what you consider polite. It’s very rude.
Moreover, it certainly wasn’t clear to me that onyomi was calling you a “statist” or alleging that you believe in the social contract. He was responding to at least four or five different people in the broader subthread.
This sounds like a misunderstanding or miscommunication.
“who knew I believed in a social contract”
Who said I was talking about you?
@onyomi:
First off, slight apologies as I think I pulled a left turn when you were going right. I was speaking to the idea that AnCap security organizations could successfully fend off Hitler inside the AnCap, which I realize is orthogonal to your point.
As to whether nation-states will unite to stop the absorption of one AnCap region, Hitler is a very bad example, as John Schilling ably pointed out.
@Salem:
You seem like an able commentor, and I have noted that we seem to have broad agreement on a number of issues lately.
I think that snark is mostly deleterious to productive discussion. I criticize it here fairly frequently. I’d prefer to see less of it at SSC, generally speaking. Of course it ain’t my blog and some people here seem to think I am scold.
@onyomi:
That said, I’d love to see snarky comments met with “that was a snarky comment” rather than answering snark, etc.
Re. WWII, while I can certainly conceive of nations not intervening to help ancapistan for reasons John Schilling states, I do think WWII provides a different interesting example, which is Switzerland. Not ancapistan, but arguably the most libertarian country in Europe where everyone owns a gun and they’re really into financial privacy.
Of course, part of it is the geography, but part of it is their longtime attitude (perhaps cultivated because of the geography) of “we’re not strong enough nor interested in fucking with you, but if you fuck with us we’re going to make it really not worth the effort.”
I do think the porcupine is an excellent libertarian mascot, as I think that is precisely the type of defense an ancapish region would tend to cultivate: the “we don’t have a big standing army useful for invasions, but boy would we make you miserable if you tried to occupy us” kind of strength, as, indeed, we still tend to find in some quasi-stateless tribal crossroads areas like Afghanistan.
And speaking of geography, while I still think the ideology is the key point (that is, it only needs to be held longer and more insistently if geography and other factors are unfavorable), I do think it is interesting to consider how, a la, the “resource curse” thing, we can kind of guess how libertarianish a place will tend to be behind a veil of ignorance, and it is kind of inversely correlated, I guess unsurprisingly, to how bad states will tend to want the territory.
Like Saudi Arabia, for example: super strategic place in the middle of everything and full of a certain valued natural resource, though also not a nice climate. And of course, brutal monarchy. The fact that the things which make your land desirable to states can be described as “curses” for the people living on that land tells you something about states… (if they really worked for the people they claim to represent we’d expect these places with a lot of “competition” for rulership to be the best run).
This would be the Switzerland that imported 20% of its food and 40% of its fuel from Germany, paid for by exporting several billion dollars worth of arms, ammunition, and other war materiel to the Nazis?
Aside from industries that Hitler & co could already tap, the only thing of great value in Switzerland is the legitimacy of its banks and institutions, and those would be compromised by any invasion. So there’s plenty of reasons to put Switzerland on the list of nations to be conquered last in any attempt to conquer the world. But, completely surrounded and filled with people who will starve or freeze if long besieged, it will eventually yield.
If the defense of your proposed system is “They’ll conquer us last, because we sell them the weapons they’ll use to conquer everyone else first”, then A: that’s a pretty weak defense both materially and morally and B: it pretty much guarantees nobody will help you if someone decides to conquer you first after all.
I actually think ancapistan would be like that in the sense that they’s probably sell to whoever’s buying since they wouldn’t be able to coordinate a boycott on selling to anyone. But Switzerland seems to have come out pretty well in the end. And I think they would have been saved by the Allies just like the rest of Europe had they been invaded. And if you are dealing with an enemy destined to conquer the world, well, then, better to be the person making money off them and conquered last, rather than the people conquered first?
This reminds me: Braavos is clearly the most libertarianish place in GoT and also the most awesome.
On the other hand, Jackson’s Whole is full on ancap and it’s an awful hellhole.
Let’s not even get into trading fictional evidence. We all know that you can make a plausible utopia or a plausible dystopia based on any political theory you want, if you’re minimally creative.
And I think they would have been saved by the Allies just like the rest of Europe had they been invaded
Switzerland was saved by the Allies even though it wasn’t invaded.
But I’ll bite: Why do you think that the Allies would have intervened to save Switzerland from invasion, when they didn’t intervene to save Austria? Or Czechoslovakia, or Finland, or Rumania, or Korea, or Manchuria…
If the answer involves Switzerland being an established sovereign nation of unquestioned legitimacy, that won’t apply to Ancapistan any time in its first century.
If the answer involves the perception that anyone who would invade Switzerland will eventually e.g. France so might as well deal with it now, that won’t apply to Ancapistan ever – any attacker with a remotely competent PR department will be able to sell “We would never invade a Real Nation; we are invading Ancapistan because it isn’t a Real Nation”, and Real Nations will be eager to buy.
If the answer involves Ancapistan being peaceful and inoffensive, then HeelBearCub is right that Ancapistan will be particularly appealing to terrorists, pirates, and other troublemakers looking for a secure base and not well-suited to removing them.
That may not even be that much broader today. For example, pretty much nobody outside of North Africa objected to Morocco invading and annexing Western Sahara less than 40 years ago.
There are other examples that I could bring up too, but I decided that they would draw too much controversy to be worth it.
“That may not even be that much broader today. For example, pretty much nobody outside of North Africa objected to Morocco invading and annexing Western Sahara less than 40 years ago.”
Western liberal democracies only care when other Western liberal democracies get invaded.
@onyomi:
Which Ancapistan would not be…
Well, I was being a little glib. But that’s why I earlier said that it would be advantageous to be neighbors with and ideally have cultural ties with Western liberal democracies. Hence the Scotland example, again. I think that the rest of the people in the UK feel enough kinship and connection to what goes on in Scotland that even if Scotland decided to try some weird new system they wouldn’t stand idly by if, I don’t know… Russia just decided to try to take over. If nothing else, they’d rather not have Russia controlling Scotland.
This relates somewhat to my predictions about what would happen if, for example, Texas were to secede from the United States today (but not necessarily to be ancap, maybe just to be a new country). I’ve had debates on here before with people who think this would still be labeled treason and stopped with overwhelming military force even today.
Personally, I think values have changed a lot in the past 150 years and presumably they also won’t be seceding over something as ethically charged as slavery. Assuming the Texas secession was overwhelmingly endorsed by the people of Texas (not just some weird cult in a little part of Texas or something else easily written off as not really representing the wishes of the people of Texas), I don’t the American people would have the stomach for that today. It would just be seen as… wrong. Even if people didn’t approve of what Texas was doing.
Similarly, if the people of Scotland voted overwhelmingly that they wanted to dissolve their traditional government in an orderly fashion move toward an ancap system, I don’t see the UK or other neighbors having the will or desire to use overwhelming military force to stop them, nor tolerating Russia or whoever just stepping in and grabbing the territory.
@onyomi:
I think if Texas tried to secede today, it would go to SCOTUS and Texas would lose at at least the appellate court and SCOTUS level. Provided Texas said they had seceded and didn’t actually try and use force of arms against any federal facilities, the Feds wouldn’t use force of arms either. But the US wouldn’t just let Texas secede unilaterally and do so by force of arms. Texas would be forced to take the first military move, and then be promptly de-headed.
It might be possible for Texas to negotiate a secession, but that would be different.
And there would be no way it would be overwhelmingly approved of when the Feds stopped sending social security checks and block grant money to the state, which would be a move the Feds would make at some point.
Don’t fight the hypothetical.
The hypothetical is Texans vote overwhelmingly to unilaterally secede and don’t care about losing their social security checks, etc.
@onyomi:
Don’t ignore the bulk of my comment, which addressed the totality of your point.
Why would they be forced to take the first military move?
I’m not sure this can get anywhere, though, as it involves deeply different intuitions about how mainstream American culture would react to “what if” scenarios with no way to test them.
I think the correct question to ask is how did previous regime changes work to avoid getting eaten by their neighbors. We should not just look at state to stateless but every drastic regime change from king to republic, theocrat to democracy, elective monarchy to king, holy roman empire prince to principality, etc. Many leadership changes failed and many other succeeded, mostly due to combinations of defensive alliances, mercenaries, blood ties, friendly relations, trade,etc. If it was just a matter of the bigger country eating their smaller neighbors with weaker (or non-existant) governments, we should be ruled by some combination of Persia, the Romans, Mongolians, Timurids, Byzantines, Turks, Mughals, Ming, Austrians, Bohemians, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Spanish, French, German, or Russians by now.
Your big neighbor may want to eat you, but rest assured your other big neighbor doesn’t want the first big neighbor to gain territory/power either (historically this has a mixed success rate).
Most of the historically succesful regime changes resulted in new regimes which could more efficiently raise large armies than the old ones. You might want to consider looking specifically for cases where that didn’t hold.
“Even if I were to grant, arguendo, that such a situation would be locally stable, what stops predatory neighbours invading? After all, we know as a historical matter that states have eaten their stateless neighbours.”
States sometimes eat adjacent states as well. How vulnerable an A-C society would be depends both on whether it has powerful, aggressive neighbors and how well it solves the problem of private production of defense against states (some thoughts on the latter).
The Comanche provide an example of a stateless society (although not a very attractive one) that punched well above its weight. For quite a long time, the problem was protecting their neighbors from them. They eventually lost out to a state with enormously larger resources of population and technology–but it took quite a while.
I’m not sure that would work well. The problem is that ‘amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics’, and you’re doing away with the professionals. What separates a modern army from a bunch of guys with guns are the systems in place to ensure that everyone has enough beans and bullets, and knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and those are the boring parts of the job. Nobody is going to join the volunteer militia as a water tech, and while there are water techs in civilian life, you’d have to get them after the crisis began. And you’d have to stop them from deciding they’d rather be on the front lines instead. And you’d have to stop the militia units from deciding that what they want to do is more fun than what they’re told to do, and being really ineffective.
This is a good blueprint for creating guerrilla groups, but that’s not a good foundation for actual security.
They can probably stop the bad guys from occupying your country. Eventually. But they’re terrible at providing actual security, which needs the ability to actually deter potential enemies from causing trouble. Sure, it may be way too expensive to invade your entire stateless place, but they can still bomb it with impunity, and put troops somewhere occasionally if they need to.
Or to put it another way, your suggestion puts some limits on the ability of other states to meddle, but not enough to raise it to what I would call ‘security’ if you have powerful enemies.
Many, maybe most, real-world political philosophies are vectors rather than points. If ancaps are saying “we should go this way and see what we find”, in the same way socialists generally are, the problem becomes less clear.
Maybe it will get stuck somewhere around minarchy, maybe external security will be much less of a problem than the lack of bread and circuses, maybe a worldwide movement of the Overton window in the same vague direction will make implementation easier, and maybe there’s a point at which people will have sufficient freedom and sufficiently little government interference that they won’t care so much. To predict the future is very difficult.
If we have something we’d like to contribute to the discussion on a particular post, but a week or so has already passed and few people (especially Scott with what I imagine is limited time for reading the immense threads his posts generate) are likely to see new comments, where should we put it? Waiting for the next Open Thread could work. Perhaps a better option would be posting on the SSC subreddit, but I’m afraid that the day I finally open a reddit account will be the day my borderline-addiction to writing long posts on the internet via my cell phone will blossom into a total life-sucking black hole of lost time.
(I ask largely because I posted something fairly long in the Albion thread that I don’t think many people saw (though one person did in fact respond, which was gratifying), and even since then a few new comments have sprung up after mine.)
Didn’t we have someone who was involved with this posting here when it came up in a links thread?
I don’t know, but thanks for the link, the Schadenfreude was delicious.
I once read an article arguing that the fictional Galts Gulch could not work, because it inhabitants have no reason to trust each ocher…they don’t genuinely know each other, and they have no legal structure to enforce honesty …apart from the law provided by wider, statist society….
Being libertarians, many of GGC’s investors were against the use of government courts to correct the injustices and receive the property they paid for. But what they found was that there simply was no other way to regain their stolen property without doing so
(Semi-related to the conversation on superheroes vs the government above)
If we were to make a technological
evil killer terminator robotsuperhero how extreme would the laws of physics allow their powers to be?MIND:
How smart? The law of physics limit is computronium, but other practical limits for replacing a human brain in that volume without egregious power usage are going to be way way way^50 lower, and we really have no idea of what the trade-offs are yet in total when you move from the way computers work to the way the brain works. AI or enhancement is the ultimate superpower.
We can already say that really quick reaction times for relatively complex actions don’t seem to have big trade offs. As you can see from the robot designed to cheat at rock, paper, scissors. It has reaction times of 1ms and then forms a counter movement in 20ms. The ceiling for human reaction times is only 100ms. It’s possible to conceive of robot cops in 30 years that can tell someone is pulling the trigger before capping them.
First version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY
Second version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVNnoOcohaU
Third version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb5UIPeFClM
Telepathy? Cyborgs and robots can interface through the internet obviously, but scanning a human brain at a distance might even be possible. I don’t know.
DEFENSE:
We already have bullet resistant body armor, but someone or something stronger would be able to carry more of it, and so stop higher caliber ammunition. If all the magical fairy promises of graphene come true, then bullet proof armor should become… a lot better? …a little better? It all depends on whether graphene really has over one hundred times the tensile strength of steels when you scale it up.
SPEED:
Just get on a motorbike. If you wanted to run really fast like speedsters in Marvel and DC, then you reach hard limits really fast without special wanky magic stuff. The coefficient of traction between the supers shoes and the tarmac might be greater than 1, but not much greater (dragsters might be able to get around 4, but that’s between really sticky heated up slicks running on melted rubber), so the maximum acceleration you could achieve would be around the gravitational acceleration, and then your top speed is going to be around terminal velocity in a free fall, because you wouldn’t be able to apply any more force and keep traction. It might be a little higher than this because you are going to have a vertical component to the force you are applying that is only limited by the mass you can push away from you, but the horizontal component is going to be limited close to the normal force. Running at high speed is just plain inefficient and would use loads and loads of energy up.
So just get on a motorbike, a really cool futuristic motorbike.
STRENGTH:
Carbon nanotube based artificial muscle fibers seem to be really really strong:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/artificial-muscle-stronger-121115.htm
200 times the force seems high, so I’ll believe it when it scales and its efficient. They can also contract and then lengthen in 25 milliseconds.
Then there’s these ones made from just fishing line and sewing thread (I want to have a go):
http://www.livescience.com/43536-yarn-muscles-100x-stronger-human-muscles.html
“The polymer-muscles generate about 3 horsepower per lb. (7.1 hp/kilogram), or the equivalent of a jet engine.”
STAMINA:
I guess this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte
“Respirocytes also have the potential to allow an adult human to sprint at top speed for at least 15 minutes without taking a breath.”
I can’t evaluate the viability of that.
>I can’t evaluate the viability of that
I can.
Assuming ideal conditions (ie 100% energy efficiency in the glucose motor, no excess heat produced by rotors etc), and going off the design specifications here (http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Respirocytes2.html#Sec31) and here for the sorting rotors (http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/3.4.2.htm) in order to transport the volume of oxygen consumed by the average human (I’m just using the lowest value I could find of 198 mL per minute) would require approximately 0.486 KW of power. Since these devices run on glucose I used the total exothermic energy of glucose oxidation of 2870 KJ per mole to obtain a glucose consumption rate of 0.0316 grams per second or 6 POUNDS OF GLUCOSE PER DAY!!! And this value only takes into account transporting the same amount of oxygen the average human does already. So computation, communication, and sensors are not taken into account. So in order to do what the article claims using realistic assumptions instead of ideal would probably require at least one hundred pounds of glucose to be consumed per day.
So make of that what you will.
Refined sugar wholesales for about 32 cents a pound. So, if the robot consumes 6 pounds of glucose each day, that’s a per diem of less than two bucks. Most Americans spend more than that on food.
I doubt it would take 100 pounds a day – after all, the robot presumably isn’t running all its servos at full power all the time, any more than you run your car at full throttle 24/7. But what if it did? We’re talking about $32 a day in food/fuel costs. If you’re using the robot as a cop, firefighter, or soldier, that’s almost certainly much cheaper than the human alternative – at least in most First World jurisdictions.
(Though I admit the idea of Robocop or the Terminator driving around in a squad car jam-packed with massive bags of sugar is rather funny.)
If you’re a robot, you can run on more efficient power sources than sugar, like gasoline. It’s only the squishy meat bits that need to run on food. Our hero already has his brain replaced with computronium and his muscles replaced with nanotubes, there’s no reason we can’t stick a generator in his chest to power all that.
(And why stick to just gasoline? This whole exercise is about theoretical limits, so why not stick a few grams of antimatter in his chest? Now that’s energy density!)
Why bother “capping them” at all? One of the advantages of using a robot as a police officer is that we don’t have to care if it gets shot at. It could just tank the bullet, take the gun from the perpetrator, and arrest them. Deadly force should only be necessary if third parties are in danger (e.g. hostage situations).
@JDG1980
Hostage situations?
Aside from that, a security robot is probably a significant capital investment – thats state money that’s not going into hospitals, education, primary research.
Bullets are cheap.
Criminals almost by definition have a negative value to society.
Just on cost-benefit grounds I’d say it’s immoral for the robot to be programmed to risk any damage to itself in order to preserve the wellbeing of the criminal.
Obviously this argument doesn’t work if you posit some kind of inherent value to life.
First off, if your robot is bulletproof (which is why JDG1980 says “tank the bullet”), there’s no reason to shoot them at all. If the criminal could actually hurt the robot, you might have an argument, but there’s no way the criminal’s life is less valuable than the price of banging some dents out of the robot’s armor.
And legally, we do put an inherent value on life – you are allowed to kill in self defense, but not in defense of your property. Even the police cannot use deadly force unless they believe the suspect is an imminent threat to themselves or others. You might have a reason to kill them if there are bystanders at risk, but not if it’s just the criminal and Robocop in a dark alley.
Lastly, you’re missing the whole point of capturing criminals in the first place! The reason we put them in jail for a set time (rather than removing them permanently) is because we believe that, while they are currently net negatives, they could be set straight with an appropriate punishment. Unless you think that all criminals should be just straight-up executed rather than jailed, this isn’t a useful argument.
I was playing devils advocate mainly. Tongue firmly in cheek
I do think ricochets and unforeseen scenarios mean that your robocops need to carry weapons – its an analogous situation to the “power armoured infantry conquer north korea” story that was SF-of-the-week a while back
Disposable robot bodies seem better than armour for defence, albeit a slightly fishy definition of “defence”.
Telepathy is definitely possible. Current state of the art uses bulky helmets and implants to pull out words or blurry images. There’s no reason this can’t be made smaller. Range is trickier; it’s probably possible, but you’d do better to just use nanobots.
Speaking of nanobots, just scan and simulate the entire planet, that’ll give you superpowers.
Works for ants. (Meaning actual ants, not any other kinds.) In reality, we should think of the queen as the only “real” ant, or perhaps the colony as the organism, rather than each autonomous worker.
You’re forgetting about reproductively viable worker ants (actual RVWAs, not other kinds)!
There’s also the business of worker policing which is on a similar theme.
There was also some fascinating stuff in The Selfish Gene which compared the interests of worker ants with queens, and found that for complicated reasons involving haplodiploidy, there was some conflict over male-to-reproductive-female ratios, with queens “preferring” to produce a 1:1 ratio, and their worker daughters “preferring” a 3:1 ratio (i.e. sisters are better than brothers). Except I remember reading somewhere that a lot of the stuff to do with haplodiploidy doesn’t actually check out, so maybe that’s wrong.
Anyway, ants: more intra-colony tension than you might naively expect.
Worker policing seems simply like the idea that you want your robot defense agents to be smart, self-aware and self-preserving, but not too self preserving.
Telepathy is just speech on a different frequency anyway.
I think I may have solved, or have given one of quite a few plausible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Or at least, I have a unique enough solution to it.
Basically, I argue that there is such a thing as the conservation of utilty principle. More or less, quite a few emotions that exist we simply don’t have access to even when created in our own body. We don’t have access to the counter-emotions that exist when they are being produced. I argue that *can* be the case due to there being some psychological *other* that exists to process stimuli thresholds when we are asleep.
So, the conservation of Utility, and the possibility of advanced civilizations discovering that principle could lead to a withering of psychological impetus to go out of the solar system.
Its one of many…many plausible solutions, but this one is a bit damning. Thoughts?
Presumably I’m misunderstanding you, but it soun
Argh! A similar thing happened on the unsong site – I hit post (there intentionally, here accidentally), then was taken to a “you have already submitted that comment” page. When I came back, my comment hadn’t gone through. I assumed an error and added more content, and when *that* comment went through, I saw the first one (and only one).
(I also don’t have an edit button on the above for some reason, although I should by timestamps)
Presumably I’m misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you’re proposing a weird dream eating ghost that kills desire for exploration.
A substantially simpler explanation: light speed limits make it difficult at best to organize a manned interstellar journey which must almost certainly be a generation ship if it hopes to get anywhere worth writing home about, so species generally remain focused on their star system. We don’t hear them because as technology improves, targeted messaging becomes clearly superior to blasting signals in all directions and hoping someone is there to pick it up.
Not a weird dream eating ghost. I am proposing that –positive and negative emotion are *conserved*. Or, the properties that accompany the electric force, namely that it is conserved, applies to emotion.
Say there is an electrical signal propatating a corresponding emotion. And its a good one! It may be the case that there is also a negative emotional signal generated that goes *somewhere*, or perhaps even stays at its original location, however it certainly exists.
In that case, in accordance with Utilitarian Theory, it would more or less nullify the meaning of accomplishment. Pleasure or Pain, there would be no real difference in the emotions. Requited or Un-requited love would be ultimately emotionally idencital.
That’s what I mean by the conservation of utility.
If you’re using the term “Solution to the Fermi Paradox” to mean “Non sequitor” (which is how I use it), then definitely.
Well, not quite.
Most solutions given are why under the laws of physics, its not possible for this to happen, with a few exotic solutions (nanobot space particles are already past light speed, going into another dimension, etc)
This is a solution as to why an advanced civilization might utterly not *care* to advance any further, if only not hoping to find a way to disprove the conservation of utility. If its shown that its impossible for life to get any better, why progress?
Ah! Yes, well, I am in some sense a physicist, so I can answer this one pretty easily:
You are wrong. Very wrong. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong. You are weird-dream-eating-ghost wrong.
Utility is rooted in agents, which are fundamentally computational entities. They obey the laws of logic/mathematics, as those laws are embedded in reality*. Agents can be (and are) instantiated on physical substrates, and those substrates obey all the usual physical laws with their conservation and such, but the agent is not in principle bounded in terms of purely agenty things, like assigning utility values to stuff. It is bounded in terms of how it can affect the world based on the pure-agent things it does (there are only so many molecules of hormone whatever available at any one time; only so many calories in the system; only so many sectors of hard disk to fill with data…). But the agent can do whatever it wants with the physical signals it gets, subject to the mathematical limits of its nature.
Furthermore, for “emotion” to exist physically, you would need some kind of experimental way of detecting and classifying emotions, independent of the humans that produce/experience them. You have to work out how the effect happens independent of your detector causing it.
Even furthermore than that, would you believe, “conserved” things like momentum and energy and charge don’t just produce magical bookkeeping negative versions of themselves to account for the loss – what happens is that the system fundamentally doesn’t change, even though the parts of it are rearranged. A two body system continues to move in the same direction, at the same rate, even though before body1 was going faster in that direction than body2, and now body2 is going even faster than that and body1 is going backwards. In order for there to be some kind of “conservation of utility” like what you’re proposing, you’d need there to be some meaningful global system of utility, which has one canonical measurement. You don’t have that, at least not in the way you’re talking about. It’s not even clear what you’re talking about.
Nextly, you need and do not have a formal notion of what an emotion is. Once you get that, what the hell is a “negative emotion”? Where do you get requited love = -1 * unrequited love? Or pain = -1 * pleasure? What even is pleasure? How much pain is offset by a pleasant afternoon I spend relaxing on a comfortable couch, versus an afternoon playing videogames with friends? If Jane orgasms, Tom gets the job he always wanted, and Ann gets the last slice of apple pie, how many extra minutes does Biff have to sit in traffic over the course of the next week?
And finally: you’re just talking about zero-sum games, and assuming that the laws of physics somehow bind agents instantiated in them to zero sum games on any measure of value, despite the existence of trivial proofs to the contrary. (I define a game where each player, on their turn, recieves 8 quatloos. There are 50 turns of play. Now I write a computer program that maximizes quatloos and have it play that game against itself ten times. Bang! 4000 quatloos, totally free, no nega-quatloos generated anywhere.)
*Thermodynamics: yet another Turing complete system!
You’re going to need to elaborate a lot more. What are these “counter-emotions”? What makes you think we have them? Is there any plausible experiment that could prove these emotions? And why does the possible existence of counter emotions imply a lack of desire to explore other solar systems?
Well, this is pretty similar to that of panpsychism. It tends to deny that emotion is an emergent property of complex intelligent beings, and that emotion is thus a property of the bits and waves of matter. It argues that current materialism does a fairly poor job of explaining emotion.
The simplest way i know to argue for this is the simple “Where do you put an end to where emotion ceases to exist in creatures”. A monkey and a dog clearly have emotions and can feel pleasure and pain. A gerbil can. A worm reacts to stimuli, and thus has pleasure and pain. Where to stop? Well, I believe that it dosen’t stop. There is no clear way to start saying that emotions don’t exist in cells an mitochondria. We can’t really ask them, as they lack the necessary intelligence to respond, but that dosen’t mean emotion dosen’t exist in that small level.
We like saying that a dead animal with simple nervous system twitching the emotion no longer in pain. But I argue that the pain in the animal still exists. Or a muscle electrical spasm an hour after official death, a twitch of the arm.
Once that “Where do you stop” question is asked, its a simply question. What about simple properties of electricity? Well, I belive its plausible.
So, how to perhaps show that there is a conservation of utility?
Namely, if there can be shown to be a near one to one correspondence with certain physical measures of emotion and declared intensity, and the typical counter signals can be seen to occur, then there may well be a conservation of utility. Like how the nervous system propogates signals and constantly depletes and refills positive and negative ion channels. (Its been awhile since I took bio, so I am a bit very rusty on the details).
This dosen’t have to be electricity itself, though. But the main point is there.
Is my point clear enough?
You’re … suggesting that we experience disutility equal to the utility produced during the day when we dream? And that this makes everything pointless, so societies that discover it don’t bother researching space exploration?
That seems really unlikely, to the point where I seriously think you should see a psychiatrist.
NO…where did that dream thing come up anyways?
I argue that the roots of what emotion are and what sensation is…is not very well explained currently.
As emotions must come from physical processes, they are of course linked and tied to atoms. I argue that each bit of matter has some corresponding emotion to it, and our sensory organs move them around in such a way as to feel some of it. I also argue that the same principals that give a conservation of electric charge may also be applied to that of emotions, both positive and negative (felt intuitively)
With that, I argue that even if we don’t feel the corresponding opposite emotion in synapse, it doesn’t mean it does not ultimately exist. I say that emotions and sensation can exist in the body without us being consciously and intelligently aware of it by what happens during sleep. What is commonly thought of as the “Other”, or subconscious processes, still process the sensations and stimuli during sleep, our conscious brain simply does not remember it when we wake up. That’s how I argue emotion and sensation exist without your conscious brain being aware of it
I suppose its difficult to think of proving right now, but its also impossible to prove anyone *but* you is not simply a simulation hologram.
“I argue X” isn’t itself an argument, it’s just an introduction to an argument, it’s like a preview. It doesn’t have any force unless you later give actual reasons to suspect X might be true.
In this case, I argue that the conservation of utility principle is pretty definitely false. Utility is just a fake thing that we made up to describe problems in decision theory. It’s just a theoretical construct, and we can easily invent utility functions that do not always sum to zero. It’s like saying there’s conservation of dollars – no, dollars are just fake and we can print more whenever we want.
I think you should take more care to have reasons behind your conjectures before you call them damning.
I mean, for this to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox would require that most aliens be a) hedonistic utilitarians and b) concerned about the abstract “emotions” of unconscious, unreflective processes.
Also, even if that were true it seems so unlikely as to be impossible for utility to balance out exactly like that, which would then lead to the aliens attempting to modify the universe to have either more or less “activity” generally depending on which way the balance goes.
Edit: Actually, this seems like a way for a poorly made hedonistic AI to go unfriendly, now that I think about it, though I don’t really know much about AI theory.
It might be that way.
A hypothesis that I find interesting enough is that utility, just like electric charge and the matter to anti-matter ratio might be lopsided, but more or less unchangable.
If so, it would give credence to the idea of “Why bother”.
Its a thought.
Utility: not a property of elementary particles.
“The issue of emergence of mind(or emotion) is important because it is the mutually exclusive counterpart to panpsychism: either you are a panpsychist, or you are an emergentist”
You don’t know that. I simply take that view as I believe its a natural one. Where can we say that a person other then ourselves, and then a smaller animal, then a microscopic animal..and all the way down to a cell and smaller. Where does emotion and feelings cease to exist? I can’t quite put a place where I would say it no longer exists in some form, so I don’t.
I mean, we don’t know that elementary particles don’t contain the properties of utility, and I can’t quite find a spot in the chain of life where I would pinpoint where it suddenly becomes an emergent property.
All I can say is that some organisms seem more familiar to typical human behavior and emotions than others.
I mean, utility is subjective. Whether an atom or elementary particle can have utility or not depends on who’s utility. Its certainly a rather… bizarre… utility function but it can exist.
(though I am confused, at that scale there may be plenty of “response to stimuli”, but how do you even distinguish which responses are negative and positive if you are trying to tie it in with pleasure/pain?)
But… the vast majority of aliens are not going to think this way, so its not a solution to the Fermi paradox. And if you want to talk about atomic interactions in a way somehow tied to pleasure/pain responses (which ties you to specific utility functions) then they are not going to balance out exactly like this, there is no reason to expect such a thing and its not going to be exact by chance.
I have a long commute that’s mostly train + bus. I’ve been playing card games with AIs on my smartphone, which makes me feel like I am a mouse pressing the “feed me”/”pleasure” button over and over. But I am frequently tired and stressed out and doing anything more intellectually taxing is difficult. Does anyone have either tips for this or a really fun novel they could recommend that is out in paperback? I like literary fantasy and science fiction.
Play card games on your smartphone against other people? That takes the level of engagement up a notch, but it’s still a relaxing activity you can do when tired.
I really enjoy Star realms, for instance, its default mode of play is “postal” matches where players have 48 hours to make their move, so it’s a nice in-between activity that I can play for as long as I want by having several simultaneous matches going, but can put away at a moment’s notice even though there are other humans involved.
People still do PBEM? That’s awesome to hear!
I assume you mean play by email? Well, not technically, it all happens within the official app, but in spirit it’s exactly that.
I’ve played a bunch of games like that over the years, be it over a webpage, in a private chat, or an android app.
Look around you. My favourite thing to do on a long commute is to stare at people (well, not insistently and awkwardly). I like to draw and 3D model and have a fascination for facial/physical traits, so it has served me well. It’s not cognitively demanding and you learn a lot of things about how people look like, dress, behave in public etc., which may seem very basic, but there’s a deeper level of observation that not everybody reaches without practice. And in any case it’s less alienating than staring at your phone screen.
On the train you can shoot out the window at road signs, since a train probably isn’t a “motor vehicle” for the purposes of California Code 26100 and similar laws in other states. On the bus, try out some of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels like “Scoop” or “Vile Bodies.”
Eh, probably counts as negligent discharge under 246.3 in CA and falls under discharging a firearm in a public place in other jurisdictions. Wouldn’t be worth the hassle of lugging a decent rifle along.
Alternatively, if you bring enough books you can use them as improvised sandbags while returning fire at anyone trying to enforce 246.3. Wodehouse wrote a lot, and if you like Waugh, you’ll probably like him too.
For exchanging fire from entrenched positions I would probably have started with Kipling.
Not Remarque?
The other guys can have Remarque. Maybe they’ll decide it’s not worth it and bugger off.
Doorways in the Sand is cheerful science fiction.
For Zelazny I would recommend This Immortal (aka Call My Conrad) and Lord of Light.
Second on Call Me Conrad. LoL I never got that deep into – and I read four or five of the Amber novels, but bounced right off LoL.
The Amber novels are fluff. Very good fluff—he’s a brilliant writer. Lord of Light is pretty nearly the only novel of his with a really satisfactory plot, but Call me Conrad has a wonderful feel to it.
What? I just re-read the first five this year, thirty years after first reading them, and noticed a whole bunch of depth there that younger me was unequipped to see. There’s an awful lot of philosophy woven into them, along with the usual quasi-existentialist ethical themes. And the symbolism is non-trivial.
(As an aside, do they qualify as Urban Fantasy? If so, are there any earlier examples?)
Are they as spectacularly good as “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”? No, but novel cycles tend not to be concentrated goodness the way (successful) short stories are.
Speaking of short stories, his stitch-up Dilvish the Damned is worth reading.
I’ll suggest The Dresden Files.
They’re emphatically not literary, but I enjoy them for the same reasons I enjoy literary fantasy. They’re so massively self-aware and trope-aware that playing “spot the motif” and “spot the trope-breaker” engages the ‘literary’ muscle, even though the basic stories are super easy reading. It was my go-to “tired, stressed, and traveling” read until I finished the whole series.
I’ll second that recommendation and suggest the excellent audio versions, which are narrated by James Marsters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Discworld is light and fun, though not especially literary.
I like literary fantasy and science fiction
“Literary”, means different things to different people.
For well-written character-driven science fiction, Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga would be my first choice, and most of the two dozen or so books should be available in paperback. Anything before Memory can be read as a standalone, but the usual entry points are Cordelia’s Honor and The Warrior’s Apprentice. The former is a love story involving military officers on opposite sides of an ugly war, that becomes rather less ugly for their involvement. The latter, a coming-of-age story about a young man whose dreams of martial glory are shattered, with several of his bones, by a crippling deformity. He adapts.
Or, per Shaw, he unreasonably forces half a dozen worlds to adapt themselves to him. The earliest books have a bit of new-author weakness, but only in the sense that Bujold didn’t start winning the field’s top awards until her fourth novel.
I read the Vorkosigan series based on a recommendation on here a few months ago–probably yours. More space opera than my usual fare, but very enjoyable reading. If it was you, thanks.
I’d recommend internal chronological order except for Falling Free, which should come before Diplomatic Immunity. You can find a list online or in the back of any of the books. The first one is Shards of Honor which can be had as a stand alone book or as part of the aforementioned Cordelia’s Honor multi-novel book. If you are buying, the omnibus versions are cheaper.
Any thoughts on Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen? I decided not to read it after I happened to see an amazon review that claimed it was one of those sequels that ruins what came before it.
GJ&RQ was…different. This was…this was what happens when the heroes win the war, and peace descends across the land, and old enemies make truce, and the crops are good, and people spend their whole lives in one place, listening at evening to the dogs barking in the next village, and yet ever having a reason to visit that other town.(*)
GJ&RQ was about a country for old men. If one really wanted the thrills and risk and heartbreak of failing and making victory out of defeat of the earlier works series, I could completely see how it would not work for that reader.
I wasn’t entirely thrilled with GJ&RQ, because of how 1) the foundation premise was told, not shown to grow, which left me feeling rather cheated, and 2) the whole foundation premise completely fucking invalidated what I felt was one of the best lines of one of the earliest works in the series.
And then I went back and re-read Borders of Infinity, and everything was okay again. *shrugs* I’ll always have BoI, and Memory, and the fate of Cockroach Central, and that horrible dinner and that unforgettable marriage proposal – two of them, actually – and your mother’s dog and “Shopping!”
For me, it is enough.
(*)Taoist reference
>Any thoughts on Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen?
It was offensively bad and frankly felt like a deliberate slap in the reader’s face. I’m a lifelong fan of the Vorkosigan saga, have read every book in the universe and enjoyed it, and I returned this one.
GJ&RQ was epilogue. A otherwise well-written story where nothing happens. A lot of people hate it for this reason; I’m afraid I can’t even dredge up that much emotion for it.
The character of Jolie is a bit of a trick on the reader (and on Miles), but I actually found that to be one of the better parts. It’s not like she hadn’t been setting it up for 25 years; nothing since _Barrayar_ has been told from a perspective where you would have seen him, and we learned quite a lot about Aral in _Shards of Honor_ that was never explored.
Bujold’s suggested reading order
Now I’m really confused about whether I should read Gentleman Jole…
I am disappointed by the lack of pun in the title. It could have at least been called something like Open Thread 49.5: Open Trial.
I sometimes have trouble using a person’s preferred pronoun when that pronoun is “they”, because it feels grammatically incorrect.* However, I frequently use it as a singular pronoun, in certain contexts. After some recent introspection, I realized that this is because I use it as an indefinite pronoun, and I use he/she as definite pronouns. By that I mean, loosely, that I use “they” in place of an unknown name**, while I use he/she in place of a known name***. There are some subtleties (a specific person whose name I don’t happen to know gets a definite pronoun, for example), but that basically captures it. This also maps well onto my gut reactions to various other gender-neutral/genderless first person singular pronouns: “ze” is great, assuming we can agree on the spelling, since it is clearly distinct from but parallel to the gendered definite pronouns; “ey” is awful because it’s just another indefinite singular pronoun and dammit we already have one of those.
Has anyone else had a similar experience? Any nonbinary folks feel like weighing in? How about linguists?
*I sometimes have trouble using other preferred pronouns because I forget (about) them, but that’s a different problem (which is, of course, strictly my own).
** eg, “If the door would close as the person behind you reaches it, you should hold it open for them.”
*** eg, “Scott Alexander is an interesting person, he writes about psychiatry, reason, and whale cancer.”
I really think that English needs a non-gender specific pronoun that fulfills the same role as “he” and “she”. To use “they” brings on alienating connotations and it feels too impersonal. That’s the nature of an indefinite pronoun.
If only we could be like the Swedes (IN THAT ONE WAY SPECIFICALLY AND NO OTHER WAY), where they have the neat trifecta of: han, hen, and hon, for male, neutral/third, and female, respectively.
Something is going to come along to fulfill that role at some point, I would think, because having everyone make up their own pronouns just isn’t stable going forwards. If a new civil rights movement for non-binary people picked up speed, there would need to be some all encompassing pronoun that allowed them to mesh easily with everyone else, otherwise misgendering would happen constantly, being that 500 different pronouns are too hard to remember. That’s pretty much why it’s not a mainstream movement yet and has no real momentum. People are just about grappling with trans rights in which the pronouns are simply flipped. Going to the next level requires a large degree of coordination.
On the other hand, I can’t think about what the new all encompassing pronoun should be. “They” clearly doesn’t work well, but things like “zey” just sound ridiculous to me. Someone should form the Non-Binary Association of America and let them vote on it. Once non-binary people agree on that, then the rest of us can start trying to agree on it, because then we’ll actually know what we are supposed to agree with.
That’s why I like ze or zhe (pronounced like the letter). It fits phonetically in a way that most of the other proposals don’t, at least to my ear.
Also, do the Swedes avoid the “it problem” where using the existent neutral pronoun winds up sounding like you’re talking about a lamp or a mosquito, rather than a person?
“Hen” doesn’t mean “it” at all, it refers to a person just as clearly as “han” and “hon” does.
TD does exaggerate a bit when they say that we “have a neat trifecta”, since “hen” is new, far from well established and used very self-consciously. Use of it unfortunately acts a bit like a political marker and many are annoyed by it – on the accasion that I use it myself I tend to use it in a tone of voice that implies quote marks since using it as if it were standard feels like handing political capital to parts of SJ ideology I’m not comfortable with. That’s unfortunate, since a word like it is truly needed.
In that way I much prefer English where “they” feels much more neutral since its use go back far in history. Imagine if there was, say, “xie” or nothing. You’d have to “pick sides” far more blatantly.
Not Really. Swedish has four pronouns, han, hon, den and det. Den and det both have the same problem as it when referring to a person, though I think that den used to be ok because there are some fixed expressions where ‘den’ refers to a person.
Hen is the Finnish personal pronoun, and I believe that they don’t have the it problem because they don’t have gendered pronouns (perhaps not grammatical gender at all).
Some people are trying to introduce hen in Swedish for about the same reason as some people are trying to make they singular in English. And with about as much success thus far. People here would not recognize hen if you used it in a sentence, but would either be confused or think that you mispronounced han.
I support this. I want people to know when I misgender them that it’s not because of the poverty of our language.
This is basically why my efforts at gender-neutral language have been limited to “respect people’s active requests for pronouns, vary example-person-pronouns between he/she, use ‘they’ for indefinite when not grammatically horrifying”. Anything more active than that feels like work for essentially no gain, because it will at best violate n-1 standards instead of all n standards.
In particular, I’ve run into (in person) the requests “don’t neutral gender me” and “gender me based on presentation, without inquiring about my pronouns”. This raises gendering to the level of incompleteness theorems – no process I use can possibly stop me from misgendering everyone.
The trouble is that even though some people apparently present as non-pronoun-inquiring, they actually identify as pronoun-inquiring because they’re at an early stage of pronoun-identity transition.
Yeah, it frustrates me when people claim that “singular they” has been in the language for hundreds of years, so it’s not a big deal if people want to use it as their pronoun. Well, yes, there has been a singular “they” for a long time, but not the kind you’re talking about. Probably there should be nongendered definite pronouns, and it’s even possible that “they/them/their” is the best option, but don’t pretend like it’s nothing new.
“Ze” is my preferred option, but I’m not sure it’ll get off the ground.
A hack: “that person” works surprisingly well in some limited contexts, avoiding as it does the plural ambiguity of “they” and the object-instead-of-a-person ambiguity of “it”.
I dunno … “that person” seems like a long-winded version of the indefinite singular “they”; plural ambiguity is usually resolved by context alone. The problem is the lack of a proper definite singular pronoun.
Now that I think of it, by the way, I think “he or she” is another kludgy, needless indefinite singular pronoun; this one has the benefit of sounding less formal/legalistic than “that person”.
Interesting. This is very similar to my policy (unless I’m asked to use a specific pronoun set, in which case the only reason I might not do it is because muscle-memory or my crappy memory interferes):
I use ‘they’ when I’m talking about a generic someone, and ‘ve/ver’ when I’m talking about someone known whose gender is non-binary.
That leaves a grey-zone of specific people whose gender I don’t know – here I tend to do the awful thing and just guess based on what I know about a person. 🙂 Sometimes I can bring myself to use ‘they’ for someone specific if I don’t know their gender, but usually I just wing it based on the dominant demographic of the group, or use ‘he/she’ if I really must, or just ask. I’m super inconsistent in this slice of life.
Long time luker, first comment. I want to know what do you think about this:
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/12/11666116/70000-okcupid-users-data-release
A group of researchers has released a data set on nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid. The data dump breaks the cardinal rule of social science research ethics: It took identifiable personal data without permission.
I very much like the following book on Bronze age collapse
http://www.amazon.com/End-Bronze-Age-Robert-Drews/dp/0691025916
He goes through a list of theories including earthquakes, fires, sea peoples, internal conflict, economic collapse, drought, etc. He ends with his own theory involving the sudden collapse of effectiviness of tradional states deriving their power from Chariot Archer corps. Strongly recommended.
P.S. Sorry I clicked on the wrong button and reported your comment. Scott this was a mistake! I’m sorry!
P.P.S. Apparently I also replied to the wrong person.
The researchers probably broke the T&Cs of the site by using a scraper, but isn’t this just an instance of people being made aware in a visceral, scary way that their data has been public all along? The users probably agreed to T&Cs stating that their data is publicly accessible, it’s a dating site after all.
Genuine question: What’s so different about this situation and taking other public databases containing sensitive personal information (maybe debtor’s registries or something) and publishing a study about that? would this also be considered unethical without getting explicit consent from each person appearing in said registry?
Nothing’s different from the database side, but a little more effort would probably be put into anonymizing the data, for (minimal) example by discarding both name and username. Also Kirkegaard seems like kind of a dick, irrespective of ethics.
I thought for a moment there you were talking about Søren Kierkegaard, and was about to agree.
Anonymization is a lot harder than most think. It’s probably something nobody should try on their own, because of that and because of the consequences of de-anonymizing some of this data. That said, I don’t know that there’s anyone you can go to and pay to properly anonymize data for you.
Once upon a time a student completed a project for his psychology class: design an experiment and perform it on fellow students; and then realized that he had not received IRB approval. Indeed, the teacher had not mentioned IRB approval and it is probably too slow a process to accommodate exercises for class, anyhow.
It made me wonder, how much do people really believe in IRBs? It makes sense not to train undergrads to submit to IRBs because they don’t do much research in their free time. But an exercise for a class is under the auspices of a psychology professor who does know about IRBs.
IRBs have leverage over psychology professors because journals demand IRB approval and professors really care about publications. In theory the IRB can directly sanction the professor, but this is pretty rare. But this leads to conflicting situations, like where an IRB invades a new department and, eg, demands that a historian destroy materials. The history journal doesn’t care, so the only leverage the IRB has is direct.
As someone who’s taken time to take medical ethics training and get IRB approval for real (though low-impact) medical research:
IRBs exist because people who are enthusiastically curious about questions sometimes fail to take into account the impact on others their experiments could have. See: Nazi freezing survival experiments, Tuskegee syphilis experiments. At the extreme edge, I think they can be useful.
For low impact things, the overhead seems somewhat ridiculous. Fortunately, for most trivial cases, they are eligible for expedited review, which can be done by a single delegated member of the IRB in short order. In the case mentioned, it’s possible that the professor could have stacked all of the experiments together and had them rubber stamped.
If this was a class on methodology, however, I suspect that most of the experiments weren’t going to be controversial (like the Milgram experiments). Given that the goal of the IRB is to ensure that informed consent really does exist, having the fellow students in such a class participate probably mitigates the risk as they are informed of the goals, methodologies and so on ahead of time. Likewise if the questions are unremarkable (eg. evaluating how much people like chicken soup vs. the mean seasonal temperature of where they grew up), there isn’t much risk of harm in the question itself.
I find medical IRBs a lot more defensible than psychology IRBs and apparently everyone else does, too, because they always defend psychology IRBs by citing medical experiments. Indeed, it appears to me that the main reason psychology IRBs exist is to mimic medicine. The other reason is that Zimbardo was personally afraid of people replicating his work.
Yes, it is possible that the professor got IRB approval for a very vague program and checked that all proposals fell under it, but didn’t tell the students. Or even submitted them individually to an expedited process.
But less us move away from boutique IRBs, to general practices, to which I am much more sympathetic. One goal is informed consent. The researcher is supposed to inform the subjects and have that information on record. And the researcher is supposed to collect signatures, demonstrating explicit consent. If I recall correctly, my friend did not do this and the teacher could not do it secretly for him.
So I should have said: how much do people really believe in informed consent and standard methods of documenting it? But, in fact, I think that an adversarial relationship with IRBs degrades people’s allegiance to the basics.
The Milgram experiment was in psychology. They are generally viewed as having been unethical. Many of the participants claimed to have been traumatized.
Personally, I find it hard to find somebody realizing that they can be a dick under stress unethical. And, I doubt that most student experiments conducted on their classmates under teacher supervision would rise to any level approaching that level of stress.
Googling a little bit, I found e.g. this document, which says
(The federal definition of research is apparently this one.)
I guess this rule makes some sense. The IRB is supposed to protect test subjects from the researcher. A research methods class is done for the benefit of the students rather than the teacher. If the data can not be published, then there is not much for the researcher to gain, so there should less temptation to be unethical.
So, what do people think of this the-Luwians-caused-the-bronze-age-collapse theory that seems to be new? I don’t have the expertise to analyze it myself.
I’m not a historian and know very little about ancient Anatolia, but quickly glancing at the page, this bit struck me as kind of weird:
It’s totally out of sync with (my understanding of) consensus views on Troy. If the city of Troy hasn’t been found yet, what do they claim Hisarlık is? Is that what they mean by “the citadel of Ilion”? As to the second paragraph, do they think the consensus view is that Troy was fictional (which I’m pretty sure isn’t true)? If not, why put that in in the first place?
I’m probably being unfair, but it did raise my eyebrows a bit.
Maybe they’re asserting that Hisarlik is just a citadel – an acropolis/palace/fortress, while the main population center was spread out in the valley below. I seem to recall that Hisarlik itself is tiny, much smaller than you would expect from a full-blown city-state (even in the Bronze Age), so that sounds at least plausible.
I’d certainly love to hear that they’d found that Troy was a metropolis – perhaps along with Helen’s actual jewels, or the remains of colossal funerary pyres.
jeorgun points seem valid to me. The lack of peer-revieved claims in the formal literature also raises a few red flags for me, especially since they seem to lack any institutional affiliation with a mainstream university or research institute. There is also an extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence issue here. What they are saying conflicts quite a bit of mainstream history, but their evidence seems circumstantial at best. I have no direct evidence against their claims, but their whole operation trips a lot of my pseudo-science alarm bells.
I tried to read Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C: The Year Civilization Collapsed, but it turned out to be extraordinarily dull. I think there’s a market failure in the popular non-fiction market somewhere. The process isn’t selecting for engaging writing, just interesting sounding topics.
Agreed, but it persuasively made the case that there was a whole lot of interesting stuff that came together about that time, all of which has been extensively researched, and none of which amounts to a smoking gun for the Bronze Age Collapse. So my position on anyone saying “look, we just found the smoking gun for the Bronze Age Collapse!” is one of extreme skepticism and you’ve got no more than a thirty-second elevator pitch to convince me you know what you are talking about and are worth paying attention to.
The Luwains people don’t pass that bar, and I am disinclined to look into their claims further.
There’s a video game called Hearthstone with a play mode called arena. You choose a class (like mage or warrior), draft a deck, and then play with that deck against opponents until you accumulate 3 losses or 12 wins; this is called a run. People often like to keep track of their average number of wins per run. There are eras due to releases of new cards which change things up a bit, and each player will see a slight change in their performance.
There’s this google spreadsheet where this guy tracks the results of every run of a bunch of streamers (people who stream video and audio of their gameplay). A new era just started, and I’d love to take a Bayesian approach on modeling the streamers to better predict their long term performance in the face of low sample sizes.
For instance, the question “what wins-per-run average would streamer X had if he played all 9 classes evenly?” comes up often. The simplest approach would be to average the win-averages for each class, but unfortunately, there will be classes where there are very few runs. Sounds like we need to mix in some reasonable priors. One very crude method would be to insert some quantity of fake runs to moderate the volatility of low sample sizes, but I’d like something more rigorous.
Also, let’s say streamer X has played 20 runs in this new era and has an average of 10 wins; streamer Y has played 40 runs in the new era and averaged 9 wins. Which feat is a better indicator of skill (as in, predict which streamer will have the higher win average when they both have more runs).
Everything above is to set the context for what I’m asking you guys: what are the best books and online resources to read up on Bayesian modeling/analysis to do those various things described above? I’ve had statistics and probability as a light interest for a while, but I’ve never done any serious Bayesian stuff.
I’m not sure what to recommend you, because this is a pretty classically seat-of-the-pants modelling problem. You build a model that has free parameters, and try to estimate the parameters, and don’t really need to worry about model uncertainty.
So what you need is a textbook that just makes you do some exercise in estimating continous parameters, and showcases how to build some models of systems. Like, you can make a model by assuming all games are the same difficulty, so each record of wins will let you update, by Bayes’ rule, the effective difficulty for each streamer / class combination. What prior you use is also part of your model, and in this case you should probably use the average win rate of that class, weighted by streamer.
Now that I put it like that, I’m clearly using a causal model, so you could look up a book like Pearl, or Koller and Friedman, but those might just be more than you need.
Thanks for your response.
Right, I think what I want is pretty basic, and I already have in mind roughly what parameters my model would have (like general skill parameter, and class-and-era-specific skill offsets). I just want to know the standard and rigorous Bayesian way to do parameter estimation without reinventing any conceptual wheels or tools (a long and error-prone process). I’d hate to incorrectly handcraft something in a spreadsheet or python when I all I needed to do was “use Metropolis-Hastings, which is in scipy and R”, for example.
If you’re referring to Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems or Causality, I’ve read parts of those and my memory/impression is that they won’t be very helpful for my application. I’m not familiar with Koller and Friedman, but assuming that you’re referring to books like Probabilistic Graphical Models, that seems similar to the Pearl books. I’m not trying to build a causal model/graph.
Two books that look promising to me:
Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition by Andrew Gelman et al
Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, Second Edition: A Tutorial with R, JAGS, and Stan by John Kruschke
Hopefully they are well written and accessible introductions that are applicable to what I want to do. If there are some free online resources that are also recognized as applicable and high quality, that would be great. I’d rather not spend a lot of time trying out a bunch of incomplete or low quality web tutorials.
I was going to say “this sounds like a question for su3su2su1”. But it seems he deleted his tumblr. I wonder what happened.
Some kind of drama involving a threat of doxxing. I don’t remember the details.
Someone in the greater rationalist sphere doxxed him, found out he had used sockpuppets in the past, and passed around a dossier with proof to various rationalist worthies including our illustrious host. Said worthies generally said: we are all against doxxing but what can you do when someone attacks rationalism and isn’t 100% scrupulous. Just as well he deleted his online presence. Again, not that we support doxxing or blackmail — heavens to Betsy.
su3su2su1 is definitely not above using anonymous sockpuppets to lie and present su3su2su1 in a better light.
That’s too bad. Not that I followed him much, but it was nice having someone around who pushed back on The Big Yud.
su3su2su1 was discovered to be sockpuppeting and lying about su3su2su1’s qualifications in order to win arguments, and su3su2su1 fled in shame.
the “doxxing” people are talking about was the evidence that su3su2su1 was doing this, which was not made public in order to avoid doxxing su3su2su1.
That’s still doxing. “Admit that you did X or I show these private documents that show that you did X” provides no more real choice than just showing the documents unconditionally.
Eh… except that it leaves you the option to admit you did X without being dox’d? Doxing is not merely offering private evidence someone did something.
The point is not to offer su3su2su1 the choice of not having su3su2su1’s malfeasance revealed. That’s, like, the opposite of the point. su3su2su1’s malfeasance should be revealed. The point is to avoid revealing su3su2su1’s personal information in the process of revealing su3su2su1’s malfeasance.
By that reasoning, saying “publish your home address or I release these documents containing your home address” isn’t doxing either.
If the only way to get the information without cooperation is by invading privacy, that’s doxing, for the same reason that “if you don’t give me all your money, I’ll hit you over the head and take it” is stealing. You can’t use the excuse “he gave me the money voluntarily”, since if he didn’t give it voluntarily, you would have taken it by force. Likewise, “he released the private information voluntarily” under the threat of having it released anyway is not an excuse.
… no, that’s doxxing, because it reveals your home address. Are you saying the bare fact that su3su2su1 was using sockpuppets and lying about su3su2su1’s credentials to win arguments is personal information that su3su2su1 had a right to keep private?
Doxing is a valid, morally acceptable act in some circumstances. When a person is abusing pseudonyms to lie to people, exposing those pseudonyms is morally acceptable, despite being doxing. When a person lies about their identity to support their arguments, exposing their identity to demonstrate their lie is also morally acceptable, despite being doxing.
The problem with doxing is not that it is intrinsically wrong, but that it is used to cause harm to people completely orthogonal to any useful information. Publishing someone’s phone number so random assholes on the internet can spam their voicemail is not a moral use of doxing, just like death threats are not a moral use of free speech.
I think even in the case where a person is abusing pseudonyms to lie to people, it is worth trying to resolve the issue without exposing that person’s personal information. As was done in this case! And people are complaining about it! It boggles my mind.
People are complaining because you people drove away an interesting and insightful poster because he dared to say that the emperor has no clothes (i.e. that Yud doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to physics and that MIRI isn’t doing much useful or interesting).
I’d much rather lose a shitposter-in-chief that always posts on his own name than someone like su3su2su1 even if he did occasionally sockpuppet or exaggerate his background.
I think it may have had more to do with the malfeasance, actually. Rationalists love interesting and insightful posters who say the emperor has no clothes, that is their favorite thing in the world.
@suntzuanime
Some people view that exposing the shared identity of pseudonyms (i.e. that they belong to the same person) is itself doxing, and I somewhat agree. What happened to su3su2u1 was a non-central example of doxing, where care was taken to minimize fallout. It was, by all accounts, a fair response.
@Anonymous
No, we “people” drove away an interesting and insightful poster because he was also a liar who fabricated evidence to sabotage an in-group organization. It’s more than possible to criticize (or even outright insult) Yudkowsky/MIRI without lying or fabricating evidence.
I am not too bothered by the loss, because dealing with the stress of double-checking a known liar’s claims is more trouble than I’m willing to put up with.
“fabricated” and “sabotage” — you guys are so histrionic.
I guess that comes with being critical to the most important struggle that’s ever happened or ever will happen!!!1!
well yeah it’s probably not going to save the world, but you have to fight for something
At least you’re not trying to deny that it is doxing.
But “X is acceptable, as long as it is done to people who I think are guilty (but where I need to do X to get the evidence)” is indistinguishable from “X is always acceptable”.
We don’t say that the police can conduct warrantless searches as long as they only do it to guilty people. The whole purpose of doing the search is to collect evidence that the person is guilty.
@ Anonymous
su3su2u1 literally created a sockpuppet account that lied about attending an EA convention in order to slander MIRI and EA, in order to dissuade people from donating to MIRI.
@Ken Arromdee
Except I don’t advocate “X is acceptable, as long as it is done to people who I think are guilty”. I advocate “revealing private information is acceptable if it is necessary to expose immoral behavior”. And I further advocate that the smallest amount of private information necessary to expose said behavior should be released, to minimize fallout.
I dunno that I agree with that general principle stated so broadly. I would say that immoral behavior unrelated to the community falls within personal information that you have a right to keep private.
I think the general principle that applies here is that a community has a right, or even a duty, to protect its discourse from sockpuppeteers and liars. And I don’t see any more respectful towards privacy way of doing so in this case than what was actually done.
(Also on the scale of doxxing, tying two pseudonyms together is on the incredibly minimal end of it. By those standards, Scott has doxxed me.)
I concur.
“Drove him away”? He could have just kept writing as before. I don’t know why he didn’t, and instead deleted his tumblr, and I don’t think he has said anywhere. (My guess is he was feeling embarrassed.)
In the analogy, that would be “It’s okay to use the evidence from a warrantless search in court, as long as the person is guilty”. That really isn’t much better.
If it is necessary to expose immoral behavior? How exactly did you discover they were performing immoral behavior in the first place? You didn’t have evidence for it–that’s why you invaded their privacy. The fact that invading their privacy then discovers evidence can’t retroactively justify it.
It’s true that there’s a greater invasion of privacy in releasing the information than in just finding it out. But if you weren’t supposed to cause the first piece of harm, you can’t justify the second piece of harm by saying that now that you’ve found out something by causing the first piece of harm it frees you to do the second. If you’re not supposed to be invading someone’s privacy, you’re also not supposed to be using anything you got from invading someone’s privacy to justify further invasions.
@Ken Arromdee
The individuals in question are neither police, nor are they taking rights-violating action like entering into someone’s house without their permission (the equivalent here would be hacking someone’s email). We hold the police to a higher standard of behavior because we allow them more power. I reject the validity of your analogy.
A better analogy would be a private investigator following someone around in public and taking photos of their meetings in public and semi-public (i.e. restaurants) venues. This is, to my knowledge (not a lawyer), both legal, and court-admissable.
In this case, it’s not even that, because there are no photos. The private synthesis of publicly available information to infer other information is, as far as privacy violations go, inconsequential. The public reveal of said synthesized information is more harmful, but I posit that the harm caused by letting liars undermine discussion exceeds the harm caused by this kind of doxing. Especially when steps are taken to minimize the harm caused by the reveal.
If you’re complaining about being overdramatic, I sure hope you’re not the one who made this post, anon-kun.
Doxxing is a weird sort of privacy violation, because the violation comes from making publicly available info, which is not itself a privacy violation, more visible and prominent to people who may use that info to do harm. If you don’t actually make the info more visible or prominent, there hasn’t actually been a violation.
The harm caused by this kind of doxing isn’t just the harm to the immediate victim. It includes the harm caused by changing the standards so that now everyone feels free to dox liars according to their own personal definition of “liars”.
Or in other words, you can’t dox people who use sockpuppets without encouraging other people to dox closeted right-wing gays (you know, the right hates gays, so being a closeted gay on the right is sort of like lying) or Ants (those Ants are all harassers and that’s as bad as lying).
Ken: I think the Ants example you suggest is a bad generalization. The norm under discussion isn’t “dox liars because lying is bad”, but rather (at worst) “expose lies (and doxing is a legitimate means for this)”.
I’ll grant you the right-wing gays case, that one is more worrisome.
@Ken Arromdee
No. This is no more true than people feeling free to reveal private information because, according to their personal definition of “doxing”, that isn’t in fact “doxing”. If you’re going to let the enemy weasel out of being responsible by redefining words, you have already lost.
Implying that allowing this means allowing people to break into my house and rifle through my positions because it fits their personal definition of “deduction” is utter nonsense.
No, and no. This is not “eye for an eye” shit, this is “censoring threats is moral despite being censorship” shit. “Hurting the bads” is not an excuse, you have to be specifically exposing deception. No, not “sort of like lying”, the information reveal has to pertinent to the deception itself. No, not “as bad as lying”, actually lying. We don’t allow people to deploy violent force as self defence in situations that are “as bad imminent physical danger”, you have to actually be in imminent physical danger.
Whatever tools you would deploy to dissuade doxing, you instead deploy against doxing that isn’t about exposing deception or that uses methods that are too extreme. And you clearly communicate why you’re deploying said tools (i.e. doxing not for an acceptable reason, doxing not using an acceptable method).
Saying that it doesn’t count unles it’s actually lying is just a matter of semantics. A closeted right-wing gay is making false statements about his sexual orientation. That’s actually lying. Someone who says “I’m in it because of ethics in gaming” when in fact he’s in it to harass women is telling untruths about his motivations. That’s actually lying too.
You can try to reject the second example by saying “well, that doesn’t count because it’s much harder to determine that someone is lying about his motivations and because harassment is a fuzzy concept.” But Schelling points can’t be made for arbitrary categories. You can’t make a Schelling point of “dox him if it exposes easy to determine and unambiguous lying”; you can only make one of “dox him if it exposes lying”.
And even that won’t save the closeted gay example.
Ken:
I don’t know what they did in this particular case. Do you? If, say, Alyssa looks at the IP addresses of the comments on a particular blog post and finds that they are all the same, is that illegitimate?
Allowing your opponents to stomp on you with impunity because your rules say you can’t expose them is a losing game. It probably means there’s something wrong with your rules. If you’ve got a meta-rule that says your rules cannot be nuanced because your opponents will take any exceptions as permission to break the rule, and you have no other way to require opponents follow your rules, you might as well sign off.
Thus with doxing. Sure, I agree; I shouldn’t reveal personal information about people even if I happen to know it. But if someone is using false personal experience to bolster their claims, I sure will reveal that the personal experience is false. You can call it an exception to the rule or you can call it a reprisal. Similarly if I know someone is using multiple pseudonyms to create a false appearance of support, I’ll reveal that those pseudonyms are the same. Again, you can call it an exception or you can call it reprisal.
If that makes my opponents feel free to reveal something completely irrelevant, such as my address or my employer… well, they’re wrong.
Exposing a closeted gay person would be doxing. And it would be wrong… unless the person is using their identity as a heterosexual to gain advantage. In this case I’d probably hesitate to expose them, because the consequences are greater than the other cases, but again, I don’t think it would be wrong to do so.
By this reasoning we can go back to the warrantless search example. In fact, let’s generalize it a bit. We should have no reason to ever exclude evidence at a trial just because the evidence was gained in an abusive manner. After all, if the evidence is necessary to convict the person, and your rules don’t let you use it, you’re fighting a losing game in which you can’t expose criminals.
That moves the Schelling point from “you can dox someone to expose a lie” to “you can dox someone to expose a lie that leads them to gain an unearned advantage”. That doesn’t work; you can’t build Schelling points on arbitrary statements. Everyone can and will say their enemies are gaining an unearned advantage from the lie, while their own side’s lies are innocuous.
@Ken Arromdee
Everything is semantics because semantics is meaning.
A closeted right-wing gay who never mentions their sexual orientation isn’t lying. Being right-wing is not synonymous with gay-bashing, and furthermore self-hating gays are a thing that exist. Responding to “as a straight man, I know what men want from women” with “but you’re gay” is substantially different from outing a closeted gay because you don’t like their position on abortion.
Similarly, responding to “I’m in it because of ethics in gaming” by revealing a chat log wherein the subject says “I’m in it to hurt wimminz” is substantially different from releasing someone’s phone number because they criticized Kotaku.
Schelling points are made for arbitrary categories all the time! We allow people to use violent force in self defence, but arbitrarily limit “violent force” (i.e. low collateral, no grenades) and arbitrarily limit “self defence” (i.e. imminent physical danger, not emotional nor past/far-future). We allow censorship, but on arbitrary targets (i.e. death threats, not insults) and through arbitrary means (i.e. the police and courts, not vigilante action). Shooting people is one method of censorship, but allowing people to respond to death threats by involving the police does not mean allowing people to respond to insults about their hair cuts with knife assaults.
I challenge you to henceforth replace all uses of “doxxing” and its conjugations with a description of the act you think I’m justifying, the context that justifies it, and why the act is bad. “Privacy violation” is inadequate because it elides “know things” with “breach security measures”; I remain unconvinced that googling public forums is an immoral act.
“Not made for arbitrary categories” in this context means “not guaranteed to be able to be made for every arbitrary category”.
Furthermore, the categories you describe only work because of the existence of processes to determine whether the category was met, that don’t just depend on the say so of the person involved.
Remember that most of the time you’re not the one who gets to decide what is substantially different. People’s enemies get to decide it. Leaving too much leeway in the rule makes it open to abuse. I guarantee you that even if you don’t consider a closeted gay man to be lying, there are those out there who will.
“Direct contradictory evidence to claims” is not “too much leeway”. Anyone willing to claim that someone being right-wing and gay without declaring their sexual orientation at all times is lying isn’t going to give two shits about whether their behavior is doxing.
If you don’t have an enforcement mechanism, then you have no way to make your enemies follow your rules regardless of what your rules are. Your only hope is to make a persuasive argument, and “you must allow liars to run rampant in your communities because exposing their lies would violate their privacy” is significantly less persuasive than “minimize the harm and collateral damage done when fighting liars”.
@Ken Arromdee
The law is extremely nuanced and full of exceptions; if we had a rule that said evidence obtained without a warrant wasn’t admissible full stop, criminals would have a field day; they’d leave evidence in front of cop’s noses so as to make it inadmissible.
Furthermore, the law is not a case of similarly-situated people; the government claims a monopoly on making and enforcing the rules, whereas between two people in an unmoderated or lightly-moderated forum the “rules” are more custom than rule, and have no formal enforcement mechanism.
The set of rules “doxing is not acceptable”, “sockpuppetry is not acceptable” and “exposing sockpuppetry is doxing” is not a good set of rules, because it means sockpuppeteers can act with impunity, provided most people don’t figure them out independently.
Is there some reason we’re all misspelling it as “su3su2su1”? Like, we’re putting in the third “s” to make it harder to google the controversy or something? Or we’re just trying to annoy physicists? It doesn’t seem to be on the Big List of Forbidden Words.
In this past week’s episode of “Real Time”, Bill Maher had a segment mocking the notion that the prevalence of leftist PC culture has contributed to the rise of Donald Trump. I think he’s totally wrong on that, but putting my opinion aside, here’s the kicker: He himself said as much a few weeks ago in an interview. He’s totally contradicting himself. His own words:
Another place he expounded on this view was in a discussion with Seth McFarlane months back (jump to 6:50). His exact words there:
I hope this is Ok, bringing in politics here. Thought it might be relevant to the readership here because it touches on a topic that’s been mentioned in the past by our esteemed blog host.
Bill Maher is quite far from a pillar of intellectual best-practices. How much PC is to blame for Trump is an interesting topic, but I don’t think we need to talk about Maher’s hypocrisy in this case. It’s par for the course with him, as is the way he strawmans the Vox piece he discusses in that segment.
I think there is a big extent to which political extremism feeds on itself. Moderates get forced out of the debate as extremists on both sides target them. And extremists on the left give extreme voices on the right justification for their fears. So, it is entirely possible to me that PC or what ever you want to call it could have fed Trump’s rise.
Maher is being inconsistent, but I don’t think a backlash against PC is responsible for the majority of Trump’s support. There’s a particular kind of support you can see on the internet where segments of non-conservatives are considering Trump for that reason, but it’s a really small percentage of people supporting Trump. It’s just like how if you tried to gauge politics based on twitter, you’d assume that Trump supporters were mainly 16-30 year old dakimakura clutching NEETs and neo-nazis, but then when you look at Trump rallies they are packed with the same fat old people every Republican candidate attracts. Of course, even that is just the segment who will go to rallies.
Trump is largely pulling from the Republican mainstream, because he’s finally talking about things the base cares about, rather than what the leadership cares about, but it’s not like he’s getting huge numbers of disaffected liberals burned by social justice to defect (most of those are going to be voting Hillary while sobbing).
I agree it’s probably not the majority, but it’s some percentage. And of course we’re not talking about disaffected liberals burned by social justice, but we are talking about everyday people who haven’t even heard of the term SJW but know that they are being silenced by PC culture.
Everyday people aren’t being silenced. Everyday people stay faaaaaaaaaar away from college campuses and angry teenagers on tumblr because they have better things to do, like raising kids and having jobs. Backlash against PC culture is greatest among the population that frequents this blog – youngish men in intellectual circles who have some experience with the extreme sides of Social Justice being nasty, but the majority of people anywhere at all aren’t affected by this.
I know some hippies whose son cut off all contact with them after they refused to accept their weird eastern religion thing was cultural appropriation. Interdisciplinary Studies is a hell of a drug.
This crap is affecting the general population now.
Hippies are part of the general populace now? They don’t seem like the sorts of people who’d ever vote for Trump to me.
I’m working on them 😀
It was just really funny to see this elderly hippie woman murmur darkly about how this newfangled stuff seems a lot like fascism. Because now she gets to be The Man who’s responsible for all the world’s evil.
Certainly most people aren’t being silenced, but they are at least aware of it; the last season of South Park had an arc about PC, or so I hear. Of course, I might just be overestimating the cultural prominence of South Park.
Does Jack Kerouac seem like the kind of guy who would vote for Trump? I know he’s technically pre-hippy, but still.
Most people who work in a reasonably-sized company are going to have some exposure to it through their HR department forcing them into sensitivity training or having diversity goals or whatever. They don’t have it as bad as people on a college campus, but nobody has it as bad as people on a college campus.
South Park’s creators like to poke fun at silly things anywhere. Them having an episode about something doesn’t mean it’s a big societal issue, it means they wanted to make an episode about that topic.
The company thing.. Well, it should be easy to measure. Find out which companies do/don’t care about sensitivity trainings or somesuch, find out how many Americans are made to attend those, extrapolate from there. I really, really have my doubts over that number of people being very significant, and even then a portion of such people are going to agree because yayyy, diversity.
It wasn’t just an episode, it was an entire season of South Park. Diversity and sexual harassment “training” is common at corporations large enough to have an HR department. While most Trump voters may not be on college campuses, a lot of them probably have kids who are. And there’s been a constant drumbeat from “the mainstream media” about how conservatives are stupid and evil people whose ideas need not be considered. Obama’s remarks about clinging to guns and religion were only unusual in as much as they were impolitic for a candidate to say; the attitude is common among liberal intelligentsia.
So, yeah, I think everyday people are affected by PC culture and, more widely, liberal “smugness” (e.g. the remark “reality has a liberal bias”).
There is a big gap between company diversity polices and being “silenced by PC culture.”
Back when I worked at a giant corporation, the diversity requirements were 2/3 wastes of time (e.g. watch this video on the website and take an online quiz on the contents), and 1/3 stuff that considered quite valuable (“here are things to be aware of when you’re working with people overseas,” “here are guidelines for managing a pregnant employee,” “here are some best practices for conducting interviews,” etc.) Total commitment was a couple hours per year, and I had considerable choice in which diversity courses to take.
If most Trump voters have kids at college he is going to have a tough time winning the election. Just how many parents of kids at college do you think there are?
Hey, now, moving the goalposts isn’t necessary here. It’s a very far cry from ‘PC people are trying to institute quotas for everything and think everything is misogynist’ to ‘liberals are those smug assholes who keep railing against everyone else’. I object to the first being a reason many people vote for Trump, as I doubt there’s really that many people affected by the more extreme social justice movement. The second reason is probably much closer to the truth, if only because the reverse seems to be true as well; the way many right of wing organisations treat and talk about their own outgroups will turn off many people, too.
>you’d assume that Trump supporters were mainly 16-30 year old dakimakura clutching NEETs and neo-nazis, but then when you look at Trump rallies they are packed with the same fat old people every Republican candidate attracts.
Holy **** I’m glad I wasn’t drinking cuz i’d spit it out laughing.
I read that as Daimakaimura.
There are a lot of things you could mean by “PC culture leading people to vote for Trump”. For example, I am a lifelong liberal who is leaning towards voting Trump. Why? Well, the one political belief I’ve been most confident about is an opposition to intolerant religious fundamentalism, and I always thought that that put me squarely on the side of the Democrats. Turns out I was wrong.
We’re now looking at a world where Islamic fundamentalism is arguably the single biggest issue in global politics. I happen to think that it is, and I think that it should be addressed as such. However, PC has caused some short circuit in peoples’ brains whereby it’s extremely difficult for Democrats to criticize Islam — it turns out that somewhere along the way the “opposition to religious fundamentalism” thing got an “…unless the religious fundamentalists have brown skin” attached to it.
Effectively, I see PC as having made it impossible for Democrats to seriously address the biggest issue in global politics. That’s a problem, and it strikes me as a problem that could possibly do more harm than anything Donald Trump might do.
I have similar feelings about illegal immigration, which is a lesser issue but does probably have more day-to-day relevance for most Americans. PC culture seems to have led to a point where “it is good to have restrictions on immigration, but it is immoral to actually enforce these restrictions” has become the dominant opinion. That’s a position that’s self-evidently nonsensical when presented the way I put it, but it survives because of PC culture.
So, that’s one way that PC may have led to the rise of Trump — I see PC culture as a mind virus that’s actively hampering our ability to deal with important issues. I definitely have my concerns about Trump, and I would love to vote for a safer candidate who also deviates from PC orthodoxy on these issues, but that safer candidate doesn’t exist. And I think PC is the reason for that, too — the only candidates who are willing to publicly take positions like this are people who are willing to let PC culture see them as monsters, and unfortunately that rules out people who are inclined to be sensitive and conscientious and who care about being seen as “good”. PC culture created an environment where the only people who could take non-PC positions are people like Donald Trump.
It’s more nonsensical than you think. The record for Most Deportations by a President of the USG is currently held by Barack Obama.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he also held the record for most killings of Islamic fundamentalists. I don’t exactly see Hillary slowing down that trend, either. I guess they just have a PR problem if apparently people think the democratic candidate for president is tumblr. Of course Trump is good at nothing if he’s not good at PR.
That’s damning with faint praise because the record is being compared to other presidents who weren’t very good at deportations either.
Yes, Barack Obama has talked up the PC line on immigration while in practice has not actually followed it.
Good find. Maybe Maher has turned-about, but this seems duplicitous. Underlines the useful RoT never to take a talking head too seriously.
Anyone want to help a sci-fi novice begin exploring the genre? I plowed through The Three-Body Problem this week and it only encouraged my prior belief that I’ll probably really like science fiction, even though I’ve only read maybe a half dozen books from the genre. I’ve picked up a few of the recent Hugo winners and plan to get to them soon (probably after I finish Three-Body’s sequel), but does anyone have any advice beyond just doing that?
Hyperion, Blindsight
Thanks. Why those in particular?
I really like both and they are very different. Should be a great introduction to the genre. Hyperion is soft sci-fi with incredible imagery, stories and so on. Blindsight is hard sci-fi built around interesting ideas.
Cool, I’m going to check them out. Thanks again.
Actually good novels.
Don’t put too much stock into Hugo awards. Sometimes they go to good stuff but often it’s a clique/mass appeal thing.
For example, how the pretty stupid ‘Hominids’ von over Scar and any other SF/F book that came out in 2003. Or Harry Potter triumphing over G.R.R.Martin. Right! Or Ender’s Game over Blood Music.
Right, that’s my sense of awards generally. But I don’t know of a better way to get a sense of the best of contemporary sci-fi if not using them, unless I get help from knowledgeable people. So people giving me recommendations here, especially if they can explain why it’s a good choice (and, frankly, thereby show me that their recommendation is worth taking), is super valuable to me.
I found Hyperion incredibly boring, as the whole series at least. Also, the author has never peed from a great height, this is simply inexcusable.
Fall of Hyperion is easily in my top 5 books. I actually read it before Hyperion which I think may have enhanced the experience for me. Don’t read past Fall of Hyperion; the Endymion books were merely okay, and threw away most of the interesting world-building.
Anything by Tim Powers is great, but Anubis Gates is greatest of all. I imagine they’re even better if you know about the time period he’s set a given book in; I always find myself wishing for some kind of director’s commentary to read alongside it.
Tentatively offered, since I didn’t like The Three Body Problem, but Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep is big-idea sf.
Thanks, saw that suggested when I tried to google around for this kind of thing prior to commenting here and therefore already downloaded it. Also saw that people weren’t as keen on Three-Body as I, which made me a little sad but so it goes. Some of the criticism was about lack of scientific plausibility, which wasn’t a problem for me due to my own scientific ignorance, and some of it was about the translator, which I just don’t agree with. To each their own and all that.
I enjoy Alistair Reynolds and Ian M Banks, especially House of Suns by the former and Player of Games by the latter. Both are transhumanist; Banks very explicitly and Reynolds in an understated way that appeals to me quite a bit. Neal Stephenson is also excellent; Seveneves has quite possibly the best opening sentence I’ve ever read.
Someone has mentioned Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns, Revelation Space series), Iain Banks (Culture series, don’t be discouraged if you don’t like Consider Phlebas as they get much better after that one, particularly The Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward and Surface Detail) and Neil Stephenson (Anathem, Snow Crash, Reamde and Seveneves would be my favourites) – all very very good.
Reynolds can get annoying in Revelation Space, particularly with respect to some badly written characters and massive jumps between time periods for no real reason I can discern. But the themes are similar to three body and he has some really cool ideas that are more on the hard sci-fi end. Banks and Stephenson are both better writers IMO, Reynold’s work is perhaps more fatalist and ‘gritty’ but all 3 are definitely worth it.
I would also check out The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (pen name for Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham). More pop-sci than the aforementioned authors but a really really good story. TV series is decent but not near the level of the books (one season in too, so only 2/3 through the first book).
Hannu Rajaniemi has a trilogy called the Jean le Flambeur series. Also extremely good transhumanist stuff. These books are a head-fuck but worth plowing through (you may have to re-read to get it all, I did). Ditto Firefall by Peter Watts. That one is a actually a collection of two related books, Blindsight and Echopraxia. Watts is interesting in that he has a pretty extensive reference list that he tacks on the end to try and provide scientific basis for his ideas, particularly on consciouness. I think he jumps the shark a little but the ideas are woven into the story really well – it’s quite a dark series. Rajeniemi’s stuff is more crazy out-there extrapolations of quantum physics concepts.
Dune is of course a classic, and I would definitely reccomend that you read it, but then stop after reading Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. Don’t subject yourself to the warhammer-level writings of Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson (some may like it, but not me).
Those are probably my favourites (I really liked Three-Body and Dark Forest). I’d tentatively reccomend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (can meander a lot and tends to be more politically focused), John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (tending towards more B-grade level sci-fi writing) and the Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card (it’s decent if not on the level of the Stephensons, Banks and co)
Agreed on Robinson; Red Mars and its sequels are pretty good, as is The Years of Rice and Salt, but please don’t subject yourself to his books about global warming.
I third the Alastair Reynolds recommendation. His Revelation Space series is great, although the first book can be a bit of a slog, as his characterization and pacing is kind of weak in that one. The second book in the main trilogy, Redemption Ark, is much better (I think it’s the best of the three). There’s also some auxiliary books set in the same universe that are really good, especially The Prefect, which is a prequel to the main series.
Outside of the Revelation Space universe, his best book (imo) is Pushing Ice, though I also enjoyed House of Suns. Both of those are standalones that can be read independently.
Don’t forget Chasm City, my favorite Reynolds book.
I was actually about to recommend Pushing Ice and changed it to House of Suns at the last second. I happen to have a slight preference for the second, but both are excellent.
Meta-suggestion: don’t limit yourself to Western sf. Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are classics of world sf; don’t miss their work.
Object-level suggestions (tailored for the novice):
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky brothers), The Cyberiad and Fiasco (Lem — and these two of his works are very different!), I, Robot and Foundation (Isaac Asimov), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein), The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester), The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. LeGuin)
That should be a decent sampler of the genre’s breadth.
Seconding Roadside Picnic. If you don’t mind short stories, Hinterlands by William Gibson is probably the best sci-fi story I’ve ever read.
There are a lot of good answers here here already, but I’ll add A Canticle for Leibowitz – it’s a justly acclaimed classic, fantastically written, dealing with some pretty heavy themes. It’s about a Catholic order in the post-apocalyptic Utah desert, and their attempts to win canonization for their patron non-yet-a-saint as civilization reemerges.
I’d also second Blindsight, since it’s an incredibly skillful hard-SF story.
I’d also imagine that Dune appeals to a lot of this blog’s readership, due to its philosophical/religious/sociological themes, and it, too, is a very skillful piece of writing.
The Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun series’ by Gene Wolfe. Very, Very different to anything else. Very conceptually dense. They expect you to figure things out on your own, and much of the science fiction elements come about in an understated way, since the narrators are generally at a lower tech level than a 21st century human, but are surrounded by hard sci-fi elements.
The only science fiction I’ve ever read which managed to marry hard sci-fi to “literary” themes, and some of the best-drawn characters I’ve ever seen in any work of fiction. Wolfe is a master craftsman when it comes to prose and characterisation.
I second Blindsight, and also Echopraxia and the Rifters series by Peter Watts, but they’re very different in tone and content. They do however have the advantage of being available for free on his website, if you’re averse to torrenting.
I will never not second Solar Cycle recommendations. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is good, too — a similar setup, with colonial-era sensibilities married to an SF setting.
Depends on what you mean by literary– I think of the Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin as the best combination of big idea sf and literary character-based fiction I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know if I’d call it hard sci fi, but the entire Solar Cycle has my vote for best science fiction franchise. Maybe not the greatest place for people who aren’t familiar with the genre to start, but there’s always a chance it’ll be someone’s Book of Gold.
Blindsight is fantastic. The Rifters series is also very good, but should come with a cognitohazard warning. The first book is merely depressing, the second and third verge on monstrous. Extremely well-written, packed full of interesting ideas, but I think I’d be happier if I’d never read them.
I thought The Three-body Problem was pretty poor. For a better currently popular sf novel, try The Martian.
But my inclination would be to start with old classics, not new popular works. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Double Star, and Stranger in a Strange Land are among the better Heinlein novels. Asimov’s Foundation series. Poul Anderson short stories, especially the Nicholas Van Rijn ones. Lots of other good stuff out there.
@ David Friedman
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Double Star, and Stranger in a Strange Land are among the better Heinlein novels. Asimov’s Foundation series.
For people of my taste, these would all be rather dry and off-putting. Of comparable vintage, in order of increasing hard-SF-ness, I might suggest The Butterfly Kid, Out of the Silent Planet, Babel_17, Ringworld or Dream Park, or, harder yet, Dragon’s Egg.
I read Starship Troopers at the same time as The Forever War and found them surprisingly complimentary – so much so that I decided to do the same with Homage To Catalonia and Storm Of Steel.
I loved Three-body Problem and cannot stand The Martian – Andy Weir’s prose is just intolerable to me.
Eric S Raymond (ESR) wrote a list a couple of years ago. I’ll update this comment if I can find it.
A few not yet mentioned:
CJ Cherryh’s older novels, esp The Pride of Chanur and Downbelow Station. If you like a dense slog through socio-science, try Cyteen and its sequels. If you like adventure, try Rider at the Gate and Serpent’s Reach. If you like both at once, Finity’s End and 40,000 in Gehenna.
Sherri S Teppler’s Grass is also a thinky adventure book.
Tanya Huff has been writing for donkey’s years, but she has recently published an excellent Mil-SF(*) series that starts with Valor’s Choice, which is yet another retelling of Rorke’s Drift, but she makes it work. The rest of the series is also good.
Also consider Micheal Crichton. If all you know of Jurassic Park is the movie, try the book. It is excellent SF in a completely different way than the movie.
Other works to consider: Molly Glass (Dazzle of Day) Mary Dorian Russell (The Sparrow – which is linguistics and first contact).
(*) note appropriate abbreviation!!!
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Bujold, who is one of the best currently writing. For fantasy, The Curse of Chalion.
Cherryh’s Paladin is a little hard to classify, but very good. It’s the reason she was one of the people my first novel was dedicated to.
I think of Paladin as a fanfic of Bridge of Birds – you know, one of the fics where the fic writer picked up a couple of barely named spear carriers and built a plot around them.
Bujold got mentioned further down, otherwise I would have talked about her here. Having said that – despite the brilliance that is Curse of Chalion, I almost prefer Sharing Knife because of the mood and the setting.
I personally really like Downbelow Station, but I tend to push Merchanter’s Luck as an intro to the Union-Alliance series because it’s not as dense. (And I think one or the other makes Cyteen better by giving the outside impression of Union first.)
I also just reread (well, listened to the audiobook of) The Pride of Chanur, which probably means I’ll run the series again.
I have a friend who swears by Cherryh’s Foreigner series. I bounced off at the beginning, and really miss her writing– well, anything else, really. But I should probably give that one another try, given that it’s up to umpteen volumes by this point.
Pride of Chanur and its sequels are good. The one with the protagonist’s husband is my standard example of how to do a currently fashionable topic in fiction without making it feel as though you just stuck it in to appeal to modern sensibilities. The status of male Hanni grows naturally out of both the lion pattern already described and other features of the world building.
Downbelow Station is hard–realistically complicated. I had to read it twice before I had a reasonable picture of what was going on.
Probably my favorite science fiction story ever is C. J. Cherryh’s “Voyager in Night”, one of the stories in her “Alternate Realities” book. But… so far, I haven’t met anyone else who liked it. Just thought I’d throw that out there.
Other people have already recommended a lot of good books. I would second Hyperion, Blindsight, Echopraxia, Dune, The Quantum Thief trilogy, Gene Wolfe, Vernor Vinge, and Neal Stephenson. I will give short pitches for any of them if you are interested.
But no one else has mentioned Michael Swanwick! I highly recommend Stations of the Tide.
And another Micheal – Michael Resnick. His short stories are better than his long fiction, imo. I recommend the collection Bones of Old Earth and all the Kirinyaga stories.
Since nobody’s mentioned it so far, I’ll suggest Rendezvous with Rama (but stay well away from the sequels). I guess that’s a Hugo winner, but not a recent one.
Someone in this thread mentioned that Asimov might be too dry – I love Asimov, but it’s true that his best work was done when he was cowriting with Robert Silverberg, who actually knows how to write believable people. Of those, my favorite is Nightfall. I haven’t been able to find much that Silverberg wrote solo, but the few short stories I’ve run across were also excellent.
Another great short story writer is Terry Bisson. (Read “They’re Made Out of Meat” online if you haven’t yet: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html ), I really enjoy the collection “Bears Discover Fire”.
Oh, and anything by Ursula Le Guin, especially the Hainish Cycle. Probably start with The Left Hand of Darkness
Silverberg wrote a tremendous amount and almost all of it solo.
Where have you been looking?
Why read when you can watch?
Books by John Barnes
Books by Cory Doctorow
Sci-fi books by Diane Duane (Although her most famous series is sci-fantasy, she’s also written some excellent pure scifi, as well as Star Trek and Doctor Who novels.)
And then go on their social media to see which authors they like.
Highly second the Canticle for Leibowitz recommendation.
So, I went to see a psychiatrist to ask about modafinil or something else non-amphetamine to help with concentration, and I mentioned how I get very loud heartbeat, loads of irritability and feeling like I can’t breathe after not masturbating for cca 48 hours. (this has not happened to me, ever, in any other context)
She looked at me and said that’s normal for a young man. (Except I’m over 30 and back in my teens I didn’t have any issues if I was too busy to jerk off for the entire work-week. Sure, compared to her well-preserved age of fifty I’m young, but otherwise I’m not.
Was she pulling my leg or what? What might cause symptoms like that?
She was clearly coming on to you. Etiology of that is being a cougar and hearing a hunky young 30-year-old man talk about his penis. The ADHD and drug-seeking give you that bad boy charm she can’t resist.
Exactly the sort of helpful comment I was looking for.
Anyone who alleges this quality of SSC comments is declining needs to look at this post and realize how very wrong they are.
Right. Before, they might have thought it was declining. After reading that reply they’d realize it is in fact collapsing catastrophically.
Anyone who alleges the quality of SSC comments is declining needs to be shot at dawn.
You’re saying she wants to pull his third leg?
What? This is ridiculous. Literally no one would think this.
IANAP. Internet, grain salts, etc.
Doesn’t sound like concentration problems to me. Masturbation is relaxing, have you considered that you may be self-medicating against anxiety?
Don’t go to a psychiatrist thinking you already know exactly what you need. Good mental health professionals are more than drug vending machines. However, what you describe doesn’t sound normal to me, so either get your psychiatrist to grok exactly what bothers you and why, or find someone else who does.
Tried that, they gave me some tests to do then they told me they can’t help me with my attention and impulsivity problems since I don’t have the exact kind of attention deficit disorder they’re familiar with.
This one prescribed me Strattera, which so far hasn’t made much difference but then it takes weeks. Nice side effects though.
I’m gonna agree you probably just have high levels of anxiety, which can also make it hard to concentrate. Not everyone with trouble concentrating needs amphetamines.
I am of this type. When my anxiety levels get high I have trouble concentrating, but under such circumstances a stimulant would just make it worse. What I need is meditating, long walks, sleep, etc.
https://mises.org/blog/government%E2%80%99s-war-affordable-housing
People who meant well made a lot of poor people worse off.
Interesting article. I’ve wondered why there weren’t more dormitory-style housing offered to non-students, considering some of the economies of scale involved with shared amenities. I didn’t realize that it was literally illegal to offer that type of housing.
It is possible that you are hampered by gender here – it is still illegal in some few states to board more than X unrelated females in the same house, so as to keep brothels out of the neighborhood. A lot of college towns still run into this.
Relevant to Scott’s Who By Very Slow Decay, this recent New York Times article about bodies buried by the NYC government in a mass grave, often after use as medical cadavers.
Hey SSC, I’ve been working on a tabletop adaptation of UNSONG and I think I have it in a state where I’m comfortable sharing the first draft.
Here are the core rules
And the first pass at a list of Names
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, feel free to drop into the Roll20 playtest group and await further bulletins
Thanks to Scott and the other users in this thread
I think this is a great idea, but do have some constructive criticism.
Consider using an off-the-shelf system for your mechanics, rather than creating your own. A hack of Fate, Apocalypse World, GUMSHOE or Savage Worlds will be far easier for people to learn, since many players will have already played them if they are into RPGs (especially players into the sort you download off the Internet). For people who are new to RPGs and want to play for the novelty of UNSONG, there will be more beginner-friendly resources to learn whatever system you choose, unless your writing is supremely well-edited. They have core mechanics that have been extensively play-tested, so you know exactly what to expect, and they have a community of fellow hackers that would be willing to give you advice on ways to change the system.
I recommend making the system more narrative. Having rules for traveling by foot makes sense for D&D (more of a gamist game, rather than narrativist, see GNS Theory), but not so much for UNSONG unless your players get lost a lot. Similarly, you have rules for movement speed in a round of combat, the damage rating of various weapons, and grappling, but UNSONG is not about that kind of fine-grained tactical stuff.
I had originally written that having to micromanage which names you know and can remember doesn’t fit the spirit of the text, given that Scott has a bunch of them that he’s planning to sprinkle through the text, but now I’m not so sure. On the one hand, it seems like everyone in UNSONG knows all the names they need to know, and we know there are thousands of them. On the other hand, one of the so far key elements of the book is having names that were foreshadowed as being important come up in narratively fitting ways, and I suspect we’ll see them used in surprising and fun ways, particularly the ones we know. So maybe micromanaging that one aspect is good, but maybe not.
Personally, I would run UNSONG in Fate Accelerated. Figure out how to deal with the magic system in a way that replicates the heart and feel of UNSONG, bolt it on to Fate Accelerated, and get to playing in 1/10th the time.
If you want to make it a hack for another game all you really have to do is cut out the paragraph or two about Names and stick into another rulebook. You probably don’t even need to do that if you’re playing something like GURPS, which already has splats for casting magic spells Ra style (The downside is that you have to learn GURPS, if you haven’t already).
D&D is a narrativist system, especially its OSR derivatives. Later editions may have bloated the rulebook with mechanics for everything under the sun, but the early game was fairly slim and most of what happened at the table was down to improvisation and negotiation on the part of the GM and the players. Strip away some of the more boneheaded design decisions like descending armor class and certain ability scores being ‘prime requisites’ for bonus XP and the whole thing was actually fairly rules light too. The reason I picked the OSR genre as a foundation is that at its core it’s about solving puzzles, exploring, running away from things and fighting only as a last resort, especially since most of the spells you know will probably be useless in direct combat.
I personally can’t stomach Fate. Having to describe things as aspects and manage an economy of points for mechanical bonuses is too much overhead for me in a game that’s supposed to be about narrative control and getting the mechanics out of the way. The whole self-compelling system is a particularly egregious offender since it introduces an element of system-mastery in a game that clearly isn’t supposed to have any.
E: should have added, thanks for reading!
Also should have mentioned: the reason it’s not houserules for another system is that, in addition to designing games being fun, it’s important that the end result be a standalone product. Having to learn an entire other system and flip back and forth between two books to play a game is a drag.
I apologize if my last post seemed patronizing, it sounds like you are already fully informed on some of the tradeoffs you are making. I had thought that it was made by someone who only knew D&D, rather than by someone steeped in RPG knowledge and actively choosing a system in that general template.
When you create a hack you can definitely package it up into a complete text, if you are using something that is OGL or CC licensed. You can even sell it.
I agree that Fate Accelerated requires more system mastery than is implied by its promoters and reputation. For the purposes of a game which you are intending to have played by people you don’t know who are specifically new to RPGs, I’d probably publish in another system. That’s just what I would run the game in for myself.
I apologize if my reply came off as too hostile. I really do appreciate people carefully reading and commenting on individual sections and I didn’t mean to bite your head off.
One thing you’re absolutely right about is tactical movement in combat being the wrong choice. Movement speed is in there because every time I try to run an action sequence without some kind of visual indicator of relative positioning my players get confused and ask for something to clear it up. One possibility is to eliminate Agility as a primary statistic entirely, since aside from dodge chance and movement speed (which is mostly useful when running away) it doesn’t really do much, and parcel out its functions between Strength (which I’d just rename ‘Body’ or something) and Wits.
Backcountry movement speed is in there because if I remember correctly, large sections of the US interior are canonically given over to warlordism and other phenomena which make overland travel rare and difficult.
I haven’t read the system doc yet, but I’m dubious that a D&D-lite game is the way to go here; Unsong would, at the very least, require very different stats, and D20 games set in the modern world have never really taken off … except for Shadowrun, I guess, which is set in the modern world at this point.
When I imagined an Unsong game, my first thought was something inspired by the World of Darkness games – very harsh combat and firearms rules, several “mental” and “social” stats, some kind of morality/psychology system.
That said, Names definitely lend themselves to the old-school “let’s munchkin the hell out of this stupid utility spell designed for peeling grapes” feeling D&D provides.
You’re right in that D20 Modern is generally regarded as pretty bad, but I don’t think Shadowrun uses 20 sided dice. I’ve never played it but my understanding is that it’s a D6 dice pool system, sort of similar to the D10 dice pool used in the storyteller system which powers the World of Darkness games. Then again, Shadowrun seems like the kind of game I imagine a lot of people would run in an UNSONG setting (murderhobos vs magic megacorporations).
My only real exposure to the World of Darkness franchise is a copy of one of the older V:tM editions I picked up at a used bookstore. Guns have the highest damage output of anything in the game, and I’ve been debating whether to reduce the base player health pool, which would make them even more powerful. The downside to this would be that hyperlethal combat isn’t much fun when even trying to avoid or run away from your opponents gets you gunned down. There are a million different directions I could take with the morality system, the classic law/chaos axis seems entirely workable (UNSONG on one side, BOOJUM on the other, Singers perhaps somewhere in the middle), as does something like the motivation system from Eclipse Phase. Alternative ideas are more than welcome.
I’m seriously hoping the Names I came up with in addition to the canonical ones are useful to this effect.
Given that Hannity, Limbaugh, Fox News et al are a thing, and have been for years, why are so many Republicans surprised and outraged when it comes to Trump? Aren’t Republicans just reaping what was sowed?
Eh. I don’t think Hannity and Limbaugh have anything to do with Trump. Trump is the pushback against the republican party selling out their base.
My surprise is only limited to how far he has gotten. Historically, outside candidates like this haven’t gotten quite this far (I’m using Perot and Forbes as examples).
>Hannity and Limbaugh have anything to do with Trump.
As in they espouse the same sorts of anger at the “establishment”, racism and misogyny he does.
I have paid scant little attention to the race so far, so take this with a grain of salt:
My impression so far is not that Trump’s success has little to do with racism (xenophobia? perhaps), misogyny, or anti-establishmentarism. Trump is tapping into the sector of the population that is sick and tired of having changes forced down their throat by their ‘betters’. The part of the population that wants to generally live their lives free of interference and care not for the endless virtue signalling and ‘who’s the biggest victim?’ games.
Maybe this is their self impression, but if so they are lying to themselves. They expect all kinds of things from every level of government, including–indeed perhaps especially, the federal government. As well as from society writ large generally.
There are actual rugged individualists and virtually autonomous communities out there, but they are tiny in number and politically insignificant. The vast majority of people with that self image are either lying or delusional. Either way we shouldn’t indulge them.
Saw a meme recently; “Stopping Trump is only the first step. The real battle is fixing the education system so it doesn’t produce the kind of morons that will vote for a Trump”
When you think it’s imperative that c.40% of your population be sent for reeducation, you certainly deserve to lose an election.
@Stan le Knave
I think you’re playing it a bit fast and loose with ‘reeducation’ there. The meme is implying that the people voting for Trump are uneducated, not with the wrong political views (which what ‘reeducation’ usually refers to).
Of course, the funny part to the original meme is that the education system all those Trump voters went through is the same lefty-idea-dominated education system that most Americans went through.
@ The Nybbler
I thought the meme was implying that they had the wrong political views because they were uneducated. That’s a position that always gets my hackles up. No matter who you are there are certainly more intelligent, better educated people who disagree with you.
I’m sure there were communists in the USSR who genuinely believed that proletarians opposed to communism genuinely just needed educating, and then they would realise why they really should be communists!
Names like “Gentry” and “Labor” are too bland to describe the class system that exists in some people’s heads. In this guy’s case I’d suggest “pukka sahibs” and “bloody ‘eathens”.
Isn’t this literally anti-establishmentarism? And given that the changes being “forced down their throat” tend to be (at least believed to be by progressives) anti-bigotry, is it so strange to imagine that being anti-establishment and being bigoted are, at least in this instance, kind of hard to tease apart?
You can oppose bigotry and also oppose specific proposed remedies for it.
@Stan: Let’s be fair. The party opposing Trump is also the party of the educational establishment. Why *wouldn’t* they propose mass re-education? If the re-educated still support Trump, the party’s long since cashed the check and have new reasons to hit us up for more. They should see if mass re-education will make people taller. I’m pretty sure there’s a correlation, so it’s worth a shot. I mean, it couldn’t possibly make them shorter, so where’s the downside?
Probably a better interpretation of Trump supporters is that they think American government should serve the interests of the American majority, not constantly search for ever-smaller and more marginal minorities to champion while the mainstream working and middle classes get worse and worse off.
Relevant
https://nithgrim.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/ca-ira-ca-ira-ca-ira/
I see one huge weakness in that piece. Graduating from college doesn’t make you a minor aristocrat. Graduating from *Harvard* (or a similarly prestigious school) does.
This.
And telling them they are stupid because they care about their own interest is not going to help.
(I don’t think Trump will actually help them, but the thing is that at this moment they don’t believe anyone else would.)
People have a desire to feel that their leaders care about them. Many professional politicians feel that it would be low-status for them to care about the plebs. Then, unsurprisingly, the plebs hate them, and will rebel when the opportunity comes.
The politicians need to start pretending that they are not lizards. Hillary is not really good at this. Trump is more talented.
If the Trump supporters were willing to openly affiliate as a special interest group seeking government largess for their group they’d have no problem being accommodated within the current system.
The thing that’s keeping them from openly advocating for their own interests isn’t some sneering journalists or professors, it’s their own hangups regarding self sufficiency, work, and value.
We could easily pay them off and move on, but the demand that we reshape the world so that they and everyone else is fooled into believing that they aren’t taking payoffs and are really really important people, heroes really, is an all but impossible demand.
So they follow the guy who promises to fulfill their impossible demand. I wonder how they’ll go.
It’s hard to pay off the majority, especially if you continue paying off the minorities as well. You run out of privileged people to rob pretty quick.
It’s easy to pay off the majority, they have cheap wants. It’s also easy to pay off the very rich, there aren’t very many of them.
It’s hard to pay off the upper middle and lower upper classes. There are a relatively large number and they have large appetites.
“If the Trump supporters were willing to openly affiliate as a special interest group seeking government largess for their group they’d have no problem being accommodated within the current system.”
The money to pay off one group comes from another. If you pay off group A with money from group B and pay off group B with money from group A, in both cases with costs due to both administration and incentives, at least one of the groups ends up worse off. Possibly both.
^^^
This post isn’t at all responsive to what you quoted. Go peddle your abolish the state stuff to someone that’s interested.
Granted, but that still leaves the question of; If you’re paying off the minorities and the majority, the rich and the poor, where is all that “pay” coming from?
Edit:
And while I find all that “abolish the state stuff” naïve you’re wrong about it not being responsive.
If you really are going to rob Peter to pay Paul and Paul to pay Peter why don’t you just save everyone the hassle by leaving them alone.
Remember Romney’s 47 percent? The group in question — white working class, which may not actually be a majority, already gets subsidized in many ways large and small. If we consolidated and quit beating around the bush about what we were doing efficiency gains would allow those transfers to be a little larger. And I think we could get a little more money out of the system without the whole thing collapsing.
That’s my whole point. If the government “working for them” means sending a little more money their way, that’s an achievable goal. It would be a goal that would be easier to achieve if they openly advocated for it though.
I have less than zero interest in debating the question of whether a class of systems that currently exists in large swaths of the world is actually impossible because these axioms claim it should be. I refute it thus.
You never explained what you mean by “subsidized”?
The white working class can either be your “crypto-welfare queens”, or they can be your folks who pay in to support everyone else’s pay outs, but they can’t be both.
Unless working class extends way higher on the income scale than how the term is generally used they are the former. Income taxes were covered by Mitt and people on the lower half of the income scale tend to come out ahead on SS and Medicare. That leaves sales and maybe property taxes balanced against all the government services. Maybe if you are off the grid in northern Idaho or something but then you probably aren’t paying much in taxes to begin with.
I know truck drivers, construction workers, nurses and the like think they are the folks that pay for everyone else, but that’s the upper middle class and above. Disproportionately the very rich. And some of those jobs that they feel oppressed having to pay taxes on are government created make-work jobs to begin with (either directly or indirectly via eg trade barriers).
The operative word in working class is “working”. Generally speaking, the folks collecting SS and Medicare are not. I also find the claim that those paying in now will “come out ahead” in the years hence suspect.
Those truck drivers, construction workers, nurses and the like are the “47%” along with all those low-to-mid tier office workers and above. I made about $25 an hour working in the ER and I make about the same now as an junior engineer. The main difference being better hours and the fact that I haven’t been vomited or shat upon this week. I’ll owe money again come April regardless.
Even if they weren’t that wouldn’t make them “crypto-welfare queens” because non-white non-working class people also collect SS and Medicare, so you’ll need a bit more than that.
“That leaves sales and maybe property taxes balanced against all the government services”
You are ignoring costs not in the form of taxes. The farm program and the biofuels program drive up the cost of food, which is a regressive tax, since poorer people spend a larger fraction of their income on food. Tariffs drive up the cost of imported goods. Professional licensing reduces the opportunities for people to get jobs. etc.
Those are all ways in which the government benefits some people at the cost of others.
“tend to come out ahead on SS”
Wow, they don’t get negative returns from a savings program? They must be disgusting moochers!
The operative word in working class is “working”. Generally speaking, the folks collecting SS and Medicare are not.
Class definitions are not based on current employment or income. To the extent they are based on employment and income at all, they are based on (expected) lifetime averages. A typical college student, college professor, and retired college professor are all “middle class”, even though only the active professor has a job and the student may be living below the poverty line in pure dollar terms.
Likewise, a factory worker and a retired factory worker are both “working class”. The guy who got laid off when the factory closed three years ago is also “working class”, and will be so long as he has any reasonable hope of landing another factory job in the future, so long as he is accepted as One Of Us by the people who still have factory jobs.
And all three will vote for the guy they think best represents the collective interests of their working-class tribe, with a strong emphasis on making sure there are lots of good factory jobs to be had.
@David Friedman
I made that point in the very next paragraph:
The whole “good job” thing is supposed to give people pride in hard work, paying their own way, contributing to society, yada, yada, yada.
But mostly these “created” or “saved” good jobs aren’t actually creating any value, they are destroying it. It’s just hidden welfare. Get rid of them and switch to straight up welfare I say. I know you’d rather get rid of the “and …” but it seems like at least you’d be happy with the efficiency increase of the honest solution.
John Schilling says: Class definitions are not based on current employment or income.
I am aware of how the term “class” is typically used but the strategic equivocation between “people who work” and “people of a particular cultural background” is not helpful.
If you’re seriously going to define the middle & upper classes so broadly and the “working class” so narrowly that truck drivers, construction workers, nurses and factory workers fall into the former rather than the later I feel that I have every right to call you out on your shenanigans.
Anonymous says: Get rid of them and switch to straight up welfare I say.
…and how does that work when the tax revenue to fund that welfare is being drawn from the same jobs you just got rid of?
Romney’s 47% can either be the folks you tax to support everyone else’s payouts, or they can be your crypto-welfare queens, but they can’t be both because the axioms are mutually exclusive.
Likewise, Eggo may be acerbic but they make a fair point, SS and Medicare are (in theory at least) being paid off by the worker’s own contributions. Classifying them as a subsidy is pretty clearly dishonest on your part.
Nurses seem like an odd fit in that last. That at least can be a respectable middle-class job, although it can be a respectable working-class one too. (Heuristic: would your middle-class grandmother turn her nose up if you showed up to dinner with someone who had that job?)
I’d say cultural context is a much better way of understanding class than income, though, even if you throw out students and retirees and other zero-income specimens. Take journalism for example: very high-status job, pays far worse than what most plumbers get.
The white working class aren’t the people you tax to support everyone else’s payouts. That’s the upper middle class and the especially the very rich. I’ve already said this and it shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
Even if society comes out ahead on a taxpayer with $50,000 in gross income, which is a doubtful proposition that depends on a myriad of details not the least of which is whether the income comes from a BS make work job such as those that only exist because of trade barriers, it still doesn’t sum up to very much. For the BS jobs in particular, it doesn’t matter if the income is $50k or $400k, they are still value destroying and make the country poorer not richer. You can’t magically make the numbers come out ahead by taxing the BS income that comes from the BS jobs. That’s a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
As for Medicare and Social Security they aren’t in either theory or practice savings programs. There’s no separate accounting for anyone’s tax payments under them to form a corpus from which the benefit payments are made. They are social spending programs funded in part by a dedicated tax. It is in no way dishonest to look at the net distributional consequences. If you want to blame someone for dishonesty, dig up FDR and hang him in effigy.
@hlynkacg: When did I ever define “middle class” to encompass “truck drivers, construction workers, nurses and factory workers”? Those are all solidly working-class professions; the people who do those things, who reasonably aspire to do those things, and the people who have retired from or been laid off from doing those things, are at the heart of the working class. I don’t think I have ever said otherwise, and I can’t find anything that could be confused as such in this thread.
Are you sure you’re not mistaking me for someone else?
@ John Schilling, You were defending anon@gmail’s definition so I assumed you agreed with it.
@ Nornagest, the equivocation between social class and economic class is pretty much what I’m objecting to.
@ anon, You seem to be operating on the assumption that “working class” means 0 income or close enough to it that they’ll end the year with no tax liability. The vast majority of truck drivers, construction workers, nurses, etc… do not fall into that category. In fact, population wise, they comprise the vast bulk of “the 47%” which is why your assertion that we could “We could easily pay them off and move on” is nonsense.
In regards to FDR, that’s the difference between theory and practice.
You understand that there’s two sides to the ledger, right?
@Hlynkacg: I think you’re misreading purple anon:
“I know truck drivers, construction workers, nurses and the like think they are the folks that pay for everyone else, but that’s the upper middle class and above”
Translates, I think, to:
“I understand [Blue-collar folk] think that [Blue-collar folk] are the folks that pay for everyone else, but [folks that pay] is the upper middle class and above”.
The only class distinction there is that [blue-collar folk] are not [upper middle class]. Whether purple anon counts them as “middle class”, “working class”, both, or neither, is undefined.
I don’t think economics is productively analyzed in class terms, with the possible exception of extreme poverty. People generally don’t act in the interests of people sharing their income level, but they act in the interests of people sharing their cultural context all the time. Which makes sense, since we filter almost all our information through our peers and cultural institutions and none of it through our income.
@John Schilling & Nornagest,
I don’t think I’ve misread.
Anon is arguing that that “[Blue-collar folk] aren’t the people you tax to support everyone else’s payouts. you tax [income bracket].” My point is that a lot of [Blue-collar folk] who have jobs are in [income bracket] making the assertion that “[Blue-collar folk] aren’t the people you tax” false.
You realize that we tax based on property and income rather than social background right?
Purple anon may have been objectively wrong about the income level of blue-collar workers. Purple anon made no claim regarding the class of blue-collar workers, except that they are not “upper middle class”. You are misreading purple anon, and me and others, when you read any statement (true or false) regarding the income of blue-collar workers, as a claim about the class of blue-collar workers.
I am middle class. I was middle class when I was a poor college student, and I expect to be middle class when I retire. There are truck drivers that make more money (and pay more taxes) than me. There are high school students who expect to become truck drivers who make more money than me, and people who have retired from driving trucks for more money than me. They are all working class.
@John Schilling, Purple anon made no claim regarding the class of blue-collar workers, what purple anon has been doing is using social class and income interchangeably.
If you’re going to claim that “Romney’s 47%” are footing the bill, you need to concede that the truck driver in your own post is going to be a member of that class.
Hannity and Limbaugh are angry at racism and misoggyknee?
Depending on how you define it, Trump anywhere from border(lol)line to hardcore Alt-Right. The talking heads listed are pretty much, if not very centrally, establishment. Herein lies the vital dichotomy.
I don’t think Trump is right wing at all. He had to talk a right wing line to get the nomination, but he hasn’t even been consistently a Republican, let alone a conservative.
It’s arguable for a certain definition of Right-wing. Minimalist goverment, capitalism, protectionism, meritocracy, social tribal signals – depending on which of these one assigns to the Right-wing label (and more or less centrally), Trump can ricochet from “more right than the establishment in decades” to “Left-wing” or “Return of Monarchy”.
Related superhero question: Do a superpowerful superhero have an obligation to take out tyrannical regimes like North Korea? Yes, it’s easy to say how that could lead to a slippery slope but it’s North Korea! Are we going to let millions of people suffer for a regime that cannot possibly be justified and risk nuclear warfare just because it might possibly lead to a bad consequence somewhere down the line?
The bad consequence isn’t “somewhere down the line”, the bad consequence is that all the governments of the world immediately have to worry about the possibility that at least one of the thousands of superheroes out there thinks that they’re as evil as North Korea.
“Don’t overthrow any country your own country isn’t at war with” is a much better Schelling point than “don’t overthrow any country your own country isn’t at war with, unless they’re really evil”.
Well… we never officially signed an armistice with North Korea, and still have soldiers stationed all along the DMZ. Subject level, sure, just dropping bodies doesn’t improve the governments or economies of these countries. Object level, though – “at war with” has been a hazy fucking boundary since the middle of the twentieth century.
“Take out” how? Iraq post-Saddam might be instructive here. Just killing or removing a leader or leadership hardly solves the issue.
Normally, I would agree but again(and this can’t be stressed enough), this is North Korea. They are already at rock bottom.
Not quite. It was worse in the 90s.
Wait, somebody finally nuked them? When was this? I have to start reading the news more.
I’ve heard people say this about geopolitics a bunch in the last decade. And they haven’t been right yet.
In particular, events in non-Western countries typically only break in to the Western news cycle if the news is exceedingly bad. If it bleeds, it leads. This results in most people having a view of any particular country or region that is excessively weighted by the worst things that have happened there in the past generation or so.
I strongly suspect that much of the enthusiasm for the Libyan intervention was driven by half-remembered stories of Gaddafi’s assorted misbehavior in the ’80s and ’90s, and not at all by an appreciation of his post-2001 moves toward reform. And in North Korea, mass starvation was a real thing in the late ’90s, early ’00s, not so much today. And of course there’s no civil war going on, much less a nuclear one.
It can pretty much always get worse. On the Korean peninsula, it can get lots worse.
Things can always get worse.
Most superheroes are very good at one on one combat. Just about any hero can probably take Kim and his immediate guards out without any issues. But what happens then? Kim isn’t the sum total of North Korea. A hero can reasonably take an unpowered leader and a small unit of normal soldiers. However, until you hit reality warper power levels, you can’t instantly pacify an entire country. You now have the entire North Korean military to deal with, and further, they likely aren’t going to all line up to waste time going after the hero, but follow their orders for what to do in case of an attack and strike against South Korea, most likely hitting Seoul with massed artillery including WMDs. North Korea is leaderless, with its military lashing out in anger, ripe for either anarchy or another warlord. South Korea is economically hurt at minimum, and the northern part is likely devastated. Things have gotten worse, so saying you were at rock bottom is not quite accurate.
On the moral dimension, assuming you could pull off a guaranteed instant win against a tyrannical leader, things get more dicey. Imagine a character like Mystique, a shapeshifter able to pull a perfect kill-and-replace, so you could replace Kim with your hero and be guaranteed not to be detected. The goal is to fix the system. Fixing it isn’t going to be easy… the faster the hero tries to fix things, the more the people suffering under the current system benefit, but the more likely it is that the system collapses: for example, an army general that runs the prison camp system launches a coup before his power base can be dismantled. If you take it slow, people die in camps waiting for the system to change. And the hero is going to have to spend a lot of time making the change; meanwhile other villains and tyrants are out there doing evil things which could be stopped.
Yes.
Care to elaborate?
No.
What if elaborating is the only way to topple Kim Jong Un?
Are we going to let millions of people suffer for a regime that cannot possibly be justified and risk nuclear warfare…
…when we can make it worse and guarantee nuclear warfare?
I’m not sure what it is you expect a superhero to do here. If the plan is for Superman or whomever to fly in, grab Kim Jong Un and his cronies, and deliver them to the ICC, that plan doesn’t end with the North Korean people dancing peacefully in the streets, pulling down statues, and living happily ever after. That plan ends with civil war. You got a plan for superheroes to end a civil war, with bonus nuclear weapons?
Besides, we’ve already discussed the Iron Man version of the story already, and it was a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy the first time.
“…when we can make it worse and guarantee nuclear warfare?”
Is this “they can’t steal all the nukes” or a “we have to give North Korea afterwards to China” sort of an issue?
A little of both. Mostly, the North Korean nuclear arsenal is sufficiently hidden and hardened that the combined capabilities of the USA and ROK cannot reliably defeat or destroy it before some cities go boom, and if superheroes bring any new capabilities to the table I expect the regime would adapt its plans accordingly. And while we don’t know as much as we’d like about the command structure, it’s almost certainly in the hands of hard-line regime loyalists who will go down fighting rather than march quietly off to their cells in the Hague.
But, as you suggest, the People’s Republic of China is not going to allow a nuclear-armed US ally with a few divisions of US troops on its border. The Republic of Korea is not going to allow anyone but Koreans to rule any part of Korea if they can help it. This makes for an ugly problem in the event of any regime collapse, with a multi-party race to secure North Korea’s arsenal and so forth; I don’t think we have anywhere near the advance planning in place that this would call for.
It’s not the nuclear weapons, which may or may not work and are reliant on a delivery system which may or may not work. Its North Korea’s chemical and biological arsenal that’s the real worry.
Last week I made a half-serious argument that the intervention in Libya should have been on the side of Gaddafi.
Care must be taken when determining whether a regime should be toppled: are you overthrowing a famine-ridden hellhole that’s so bad that extremely unordered anarchy would be an improvement, or are you overthrowing the most prosperous state in Africa? And does it matter if a regime tortures a few dozen journalists and students a year, if it keeps the power and water on and doesn’t let millions of children starve to death?
We should just split the difference and intervene on both sides.
That’s not too far off from what we’re doing in Syria right now.
And to think Trump has the nerve to say he’ll make America great again.
That’s not a fair article.
We’re not fighting a proxy war with ourselves. We’re fighting a proxy war with Turkey, while at the same time trying to restrain our proxy to make Turkey happy. And Turkey’s proxies used to be our proxies, but we dropped them (after waiting way too long to do so – the northern rebels are either salafi-jihadist fanatics or people who will easily be frozen out by said fanatics the moment they no longer need them) and started supporting another faction.
Only half-serious?
The Russian intervention on the side of the Syrian government has done far more for the Syrian people than the US/UK’s strategy of pretending to bomb ISIS
Half-serious in the sense that nobody in the west was ever going to support bombing the plucky rebels over bombing the troops of a man who architected the Lockerbie bombing and sent RPGs to the IRA, even if it was the ethical thing to do and even if it contributed to the current refugee crisis. Non-intervention was the best that could have been hoped for.
The Houthis still are the “plucky rebels” in Yemen, though they have never pretended to be pro-American.
I was very puzzled why the Libyan intervention wasn’t on the side of Gaddafi and spent quite a bit of thinking trying to figure it out. Surely Gaddafi wasn’t that much worse than the military dictatorship of South Vietnam or the Emir of Kuwait.
@ E. Harding
Initially, Gaddafi was threatening genocide to some of his own people. By the time the intervention actually got off the ground, some things may have changed.
Sure, there were massacres, but why would Obama care? He didn’t care much about the Sinjar Massacre nor about stuff happening in present-day Benghazi; why would he care at all about stuff happening in 2011 Benghazi? And American-backed military organizations throughout the world have never lacked in human rights abuses.
It wasn’t that Obama cared about Libya, Europe (specifically, France) cared about Libya, and Obama followed along.
And he did order the execution a thousand people after a failed coup, so I don’t think that was an empty threat. And even if he didn’t, I don’t think the situation would have been much better : economically, the country would still be in crisis like other oil dependent country, and ethnic tension would still be there.
As for why Gaddafi wasn’t helped :
* he was a pariah. Nobody liked him, and he was a first class trouble maker in the region.
* we are no longer in a Cold War, so the foe of my foe is my friend no longer apply: dictator are at best tolerated.
* 20/30 years ago, France was in the habit of protecting the statu quo, but that fell out of fashion due to poor result(a protected dictator will wrong more than one who fear civil war).
Because Gaddafi was the villain in Back to the Future.
OK, that’s flippant, but I think we shouldn’t underestimate how much foreign policy decisions can be driven by irrational emotional considerations. US policy towards Cuba over the past half-century is very hard to justify on any kind of a rational basis. Once the American public has made a particular foreign despot into a pop-culture hate-figure, that makes it far more difficult to deal with them in a sensible manner.
I don’t believe there was anything irrational in McCain and Obama’s backstabbing. I think it was all -except maybe the Benghazi attack- deliberate, including the planting of ISIS in Libya. I don’t believe our rulers are stupid, though some of their close lackeys might well be intensely deluded.
U.S. policy towards Cuba makes sense if American farmers don’t want to see the country flooded with Cuban agricultural goods. Before WWII, the U.S. deliberately kept Puerto Rico’s cash crop sector underdeveloped through sugar import quotas. Cuban Communism has kept Cuba in a state of being reliant on agricultural exports (as well as medical services and other such stuff) for foreign currency. The U.S. medical establishment is also not a fan of foreign competition.
@ E. Harding
Gaddafi wasn’t that much worse than the military dictatorship of South Vietnam or the Emir of Kuwait.
They didn’t spend decades engaged in media conflict with the west, the and Lockerbie counts for quite a lot, still. (And the Emir presides over one of the top three functional Arab representational governments, with actual policy debates and other crazy stuff.)
U.S. policy towards Cuba makes sense if American farmers don’t want to see the country flooded with Cuban agricultural goods.
I think you might be overstating Cuba’s ability to impact the general supply of food and ag products in the USA.
Before WWII, the U.S. deliberately kept Puerto Rico’s cash crop sector underdeveloped through sugar import quotas.
I think a more accurate reading was that US import policy supported domestic sugar production at the expense of PR’s cash crop, not that the PR’s ag sector was deliberately targeted. And I will agree that this was bad, and probably should not have been done.
Why assume the intervention should be military. The best way for Iron Man to intervene in North Korea would be to sit down with some defectors privately and have them put together some media. Then drop several million MREs, bundles of dollars, household goods, etc with propaganda over the whole country. This can’t really make the situation worse given the aid that foreign governments give to North Korea, and might work.
1) That’s something that existing governments could physically do (and they have so many more resources than Iron Man that doing anything that Iron Man could do would be a rounding error for them). The fact that they don’t is because there are indeed consequences to doing so.
2) It’s still something that would make other governments fear similar intervention. You don’t *want* foreigners invading your land and dropping food on your enemies.
3) It doesn’t work. Sending food + propaganda to an enemy regime’s population may or may not result in their being better fed; it does not result in their overthrowing the regime.
4) The bit about “aid that foreign governments give to North Korea” is about a decade out of date. In 2001, foreign governments gave over 1.5 million metric tons of food to North Korea. By 2010, that was down to less than 100,000 metric tons; I don’t have any data past 2012, but I believe it is pretty much insignificant.
If giving a million tonnes of food to the North Korean people when they were literally starving, didn’t result in the downfall of the Kim Dynasty, I strongly doubt that it will have any effect now that North Korea can feed its own people without such assistance. Consumer goods even less so; nobody goes to war over a new blender.
In a universe where Iron Man suits were a thing Kim Jong Un would have already had a poor quality one knocked together and crashed it into the sea.
I’d read that fanfic.
In the second movie the US was attempting to develop their own suit but couldn’t. Iron Man’s superpower is that he is a genius even among other geniuses.
1. The aid that is sent to North Korea now is sent through their government. If you asked the average North Korean where the food came from, the answer wouldn’t be from the US.
This is generally because the US and North Korea went through diplomatic channels to establish the aid. My guess is that North Korea wouldn’t accept food if it came with strings, and the US wasn’t going to risk an incident. With Iron Man, the US government could say “Yeah, but he’s a little crazy. We can’t really stop him.
2. It actually does have a very clear line. Open societies are not at risk, as they have a marketplace of ideas and free speech. So they are already dealing with their enemies propaganda. As for internal enemies, I’d be clear that North Korea doesn’t have internal established insurgents. It would be a different thing if it was supplying a rebel force.
3. I’m not sure of that. A lot of regimes have liberalized right after improvements in standards of living. It’s almost as if people who aren’t living on the edge of starvation aren’t slavishly loyal to the only ones supplying them with food. The money and goods are actually important because NK has a bit of a black market. Black marketeering isn’t sexy, but almost everyone does it if given the chance, and it is subversive. As for propaganda, the best message is that there are better standards of living in almost any other country.
1. The aid that is sent to North Korea now is sent through their government.
By “now”, do you mean “2015/2016” or “I vaguely remember something about this from 2001 and I assume nothing has changed”?
If now means now, I’m curious as to what aid you think is being sent, how much, and by whom. Because I’m pretty sure nobody is sending enough food to North Korea to matter, just token amounts to say “look, virtue here!”, and not even that from the governments of the United States or any other western nation.
Nobody rational goes to war over a new blender.
The problem in North Korea is that the people with the guns are better fed and treated than the peasants, so there is nobody with the capability to start a revolution that won’t be crushed by the already-armed regime loyalists.
I’ve seen a few science fiction stories where the good guys airdrop (or spacedrop) super-3d-printers to the poor oppressed masses so they can print weapons for a rebellion. Even then I don’t think that would work with getting a North Korean revolution off the ground…
Back to “Nobody rational goes to war over a new blender.”, while dropping stuff to the North Korean masses isn’t likely to lead to a peasant revolution war, the North Koreans have threatened war with South Korea over radio broadcasts and minor drops of supplies from South Korea, so if the supply drops do anything, it’s cause North Korea to attack South Korea, which isn’t what you want. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_propaganda_campaigns_in_Korea)
In “Nothing to Envy,” Barbara Demick stated that the regime would happily pass out sacks of food from the US and the World Food Programme that had the logos stamped right on the front. The DPRK would tell the populace that it was tribute that the Great Leader had extracted from the American bastards.
This may be of interest to some.
http://lawandthemultiverse.com/
Hi. I have a problem, and the mental health lines aren’t working.
I’ve been trying to get my parents to stop interfering in my life. I thought that getting a job in which I pay my own way plus the fact I’m renting my own flat would be enough, but it isn’t. Last time I lost my credit card (which had only $20 on it), I wanted to go to the bank and fix the problem myself. But Mum and Dad ganged up on me on the matter and said I couldn’t do that, insisted on searching my flat for it on their own, and wouldn’t even trust me with my own passport (Mum made a Freudian Slip about me ‘borrowing’ my passport) for fear I’d lose. It’s mine, and I want to take that risk, but Mum and Dad seem to insist on never giving me the chance to fail no matter how much I need it to grow.
I’m 24 now, and I said I want to be a full adult by 25 which isn’t unreasonable no matter how autistic I am. But Mum and Dad keep insisting it’s not possible.
People I phone on mental health lines keep telling me to negotiate with my parents, but I just can’t do it. It’s a struggle just to achieve one thing- converting from atheism etc. Then another one comes up, my parents seem to have ignored the lesson that I can handle it myself from last time, and the same thing happens all over again.
This is particularly frustrating because my lack of self-confidence keeps me from getting a girlfriend. My parents chide me over it, but I ask how I’m supposed to be self-confident when I know I can’t stand up to them over dropping of university, they made me do it half time, forbade me from dating for years etc. This makes it very, very hard to keep my cool around them.
Addressing something like this isn’t going to be easy. I am going to start with the assumption that this is simply a case of possible over protectiveness.
Do you have a cell phone? If not, can you get one?
If so, the tack I would try would be to tell them (essentially):
‘Mom, Dad, I love you and know that you want to protect me, but you aren’t going to be around forever. I need to learn how to function on my own and your constantly trying to solve every problem for me robs me of that. I need to learn how to manage on my own, both for your sake and mine. I promise to ask for help if I think I need it and you are welcome to offer advice, but I need you to not interfere unless I request it.’
Now, a word of warning: Some people are of the sort that they may flip hard when told something like this. I don’t know enough about your parents to make a judgement call as to their behavior.
If you have tried this, or they continue to interfere, it may be that you just have to not tell them about any problems unless you want them to interfere.
I’ve tried this, and it does sound like good general advice. The problem is that Mum and Dad’s counter-strategy is that Yes I very well should be an adult but I’m just not ready yet but I will be before I’m thirty they’re sure of it.
Some more information would be helpful. How did you end up in this situation? When you say “autistic”, do you mean you have actual autism or Internet autism? Apart from your passport, what direct control do your parents have over your practical life?
Back when the diagnosis was Aspergers Syndrome I was formally diagnosed with that. And I think when I was young my parents got used to the idea I needed to be protected and looked after. At 18 I assumed I was going to be an adult, but they claimed I misunderstood how life worked and that as an Aspie they were going to look after me.
My parents don’t have direct control, but I have reason to be afraid of them. Mum and Dad think they have the right to stop me from using prostitutes and last time that was brought up Mum threatened to hit me. I don’t have much in the way of technical skills to fix my own things should they break so I need Dad for it. They also have an irrational drive to make me go to university (and I don’t understand why people at uni who know my parents are basically forcing me to go don’t have a problem with it).
Yes I know it’s a bit pathetic, but for years not only did my parents and everyone around me told me this was normal (even the professional psychologist I went to said I had to negotiate with my parents for freedom, and didn’t see a problem with them ordering me as if I were a child to go to university part-time). Thus, I lack a lot of the life skills I need and I never learned to stand up to them well enough.
(And yes I considered suing him, but Richard Eisenmeier is very prestigious in matters of Aspergers so I fear it won’t work)
(EDIT: Finally, it really didn’t help that for years every time I tried to achieve something on my own for independence my parents would at the bare minimum strongly discourage it. It’s hard enough to learn new skills on my own without that kind of pressure)
Can you go no-contact, or move to a different city? Maybe see if you can go on exchange somewhere for a semester?
I get that this would be difficult to do, but given the pattern of consistently ignoring your boundaries I have a hard time believing mere words will be enough to change their behaviour.
Right now I’d love to go no-contact, so I thought about that. The problem is that right now I don’t even have the skills to arrange an airport trip or accommodation.
I’ll try to get past that hurdle on my own, then maybe I’ll try it.
1) I can tell from your accent that you are from Australia, and I understand that prostitution is not illegal there. However, it is not something you discuss with your own mother. You should not go with prostitutes until you understand and internalize why that is.
By the way, if you do have sex with a prostitute, it will not give you self-confidence or get you over “that obstacle”. The obstacle is you. And sex does not actually feel all that good (although I guess it’s possible that drugs fucked me up). The main thing is to feel like you are desirable as a man, and obviously prostitution won’t help with that.
2) If you break your things, there are professionals that can fix them for you. Or maybe a friend or coworker.
3) What are you going to university for? What are you working as? Why don’t you want to go to university?
4) Try and make steady progress in improving your life skills. Prioritize them by how fucked you would be if your parents stopped helping you with it. Protip: getting a girlfriend is not even close to the head of that queue. Yes, I know Maslow put sex at the base of his pyramid, together with food and drink – that’s because he was a quack.
1: I need to discuss it with her. I know this isn’t that normal, but I’ve internalize a fear response regarding doing things my parents don’t like. If I don’t confront them and say openly what I’m doing, I’ll never get over my fear.
2: I don’t have any friends with good enough technical skills- I don’t get out much socially. I could try to look, I suppose.
3: Originally, I did want to go university. My father is a high ranking politician, and most of the people I know are very high flyers (famous lawyer, VCAT judge, prestigious doctor etc). For a while I was in denial about my own capacities, thought I could equal Dad in life, then eventually discovered I couldn’t. I was doing an Arts degree, with intent to get into law.
When I realized I couldn’t, I wanted to drop out of university and do something else. This is where Mum, Dad, and my psychologist came in and started telling me that them forcing me to go to university was normal.
4: The question is how to speed up the process. My parents have fucked me up a lot (not letting me use the trams for a long time, not letting me date etc). I want to get back on track so by the time I’m 25 I can start living a normal life.
But consider making an exception for this activity. “Getting over your fear” is only a means to an end, right? If you can find other ways of doing those things then that’s just as good, right? So consider doing this one in secret and, if necessary, using some other of the things your parents don’t want you to do to get over that fear.
I think most parents would probably have a (pretty strong) aversive reaction to the idea of their child seeing a prostitute, for reasons that are complicated. A reaction strong enough (and for reasons so complicated) that it’s probably best just to avoid the whole hornet’s nest by keeping it from them. (Outis’ other point about why it still might not be as good as you hope also stands, though.)
This is a worthwhile project and you should work on it as much and as fast as you can, but having a fixed deadline – “by the time I’m 25” might not be the most helpful thing here for you, primarily because “living a normal life” is something you’re likely to asymptotically approach, rather than clearly and definitely arrive at.
@Carinthium
I can’t help on any of the boundary issues, but I want to echo James on not setting a fixed timeline.
IIRC, you’ve said you’re 24. Expecting to solve all these issues in less than a year is extremely unrealistic. Not only are you likely to disappoint yourself, trying to force it that hard is probably going to make the situation worse.
It took the rest of us a lot of time to grow up. It sucks that your parents took that time from you, but you won’t do yourself any good by going too fast in the other direction.
What Catcube and James said. Take your time.
I don’t know about you, but I distinctly remember one summer when I was 8-10, and was watching adults deal with a crisis in a pretty competent manner, and thinking to myself I can not WAIT until I am grown up and know all the answers and what to do when things go wrong.
It took me most of another decade to realize that no, actually, adults don’t know all the answers either. Decades later, and I’m still faking the hell out of it with everyone else.
A slightly different take – I used to get into screaming fights with my mother because she would deliberately not tell me about things (usually family health things, like my grandmother going into open heart surgery) “because I thought you’d get too upset and I didn’t want to tell you until it was over.”
It took some pretty severe head butting for us to get to a compromise – when she told me something *even a little bit early* I would take a deep breath and say “thank you for telling me about this. Please keep me updated” and then go off and have my freakout elsewhere. Eventually we’ve gotten to the point where now I have to remind her she’s already told me about Cousin Bob’s car accident four times now.
So my suggestion is to try for a compromise with your parents – you will tell them about issues (like the lost card) but on the strict condition that you get at least one free try to fix it without their interference. Even if they think it will cost you money or not work. On your side, you have to tell them, and you will have to own up if your attempt to fix doesn’t work, and go back to them for help.
I hope this helps. Good luck.
Carinthium: your father is a high ranking politician?! Then why are you even thinking of going with a prostitute? Do you want a scandal?
That’d show him for interfering, right?
I, too, was diagnosed with Asperger’s. The difference is that this happened as late as last year, when I was twenty-one, so for better or for worse my parents never quite managed to develop much of a controlling streak.
That said..
Your posts reads as if you’re saying ‘doing this thing I want to do is hard, can it be easy.’
It just can’t, and I feel like somebody should be telling you that.
If I’m not reading into the situation in a terribly wrong way, your parents simply view you as incapable of functioning independently and aren’t going to be swayed from that view very easily. What do you expect to do about that? To have a dramatic scene as if this were a movie, three people crying and resolving their differences? If there were an easy path to sway their minds, I’m sure you’d be smart enough to have taken it by now. The only option beyond asking/manipulating things into going well is making things go your way.
If your parents can’t respect your boundaries about your apartment, stop allowing them in/take away their keys. If they can’t let you take decisions on your own, stop consulting them, and break off any conversation where they might want to try to do so anyway. It isn’t easy, but it is necessary. If you want to prove somehow you can be independent, you need to act like it.
My own mother has on occasion tried the same sorts of manipulative tactics on me, if thankfully to less extreme degrees, and there has to be a point where you need to stand your ground and refuse to play ball. For me, it was when I was twenty and she’d decided that after a number of years where I’d on occasion cook our family dinners I had become incapable of cooking rice(not hyperbole). You seem to have gone past that point. It is in some way the reverse situation of a parent taking away their kid’s phone and games and sending them up to their room until they stop misbehaving, in a twisted, upside down sorts of way, but it’s the one thing I’ve personally seen work.
Take this with all the grains of salt you otherwise would from an internet commenter, of course.
What Stefan said. If they can’t behave, don’t let them in.
They will pitch a fit and try to force you. You may feel very distressed in the process–most people want to be on good terms with their parents, after all. But there’s a good chance your parents can learn, eventually.
Do you have any close friends (preferably IRL) you can bounce ideas off of/go to for help/advice? Such a friend can be invaluable for those moments when you’re not sure, “hey, is this thing they’re saying totally unreasonable, or is it just me?”
Good luck.
I’ve tried to do this before. The problem is that I just don’t have the willpower. People say you can just do these things, but willpower is finite. I have nobody whatsoever to support me in person, whilst my parents have large numbers of friends and neighbors to back them up (and tell me I have to go to university). Even many of the help lines I call try to tell me to negotiate, even when I discuss the time my mother threatened to hit me. I can’t do this alone.
At first, all my sources of information were telling me that it was normal to live at home and not be independent and go to university because I had to when I desperately wanted to move out. After years of being told that, it’s hard to get past it.
Mum and Dad consistently say they will respect my boundaries, then next time a conflict comes up proceed to ignore them and forget what they said. They state reasons why what I’m doing is hard to intimidate me, and I can’t stand up to them and try to press through genuinely hard difficulties simultaneously.
Well, have you considered going to the police? If I understand correctly, you are legally an adult. Your mother can’t withhold your passport, it belongs to you. That’s theft, maybe even coercion and blackmail. A serious crime is being committed against you. Internalize those words.
Once you manage to get police involved, all the emotional manipulation in the world won’t make them go away. The cold hard facts are on your side. The tricky bit is getting them to take you seriously. Don’t tell them that your mother won’t give you your passport. Tell them that it was stolen, and when they ask for details, fill them in, vaguely but truthfully. Provide details only when asked. That way, the police are already involved before any kind of prejudice about your autism or about it “just” being a family squabble has a chance to make them not take you seriously. Maybe wait for an opportunity where the situation is very blatant and clear cut before you act.
If it comes down to a he said, she said scenario, it’s hard for the police to prove anything and take action, but at least you can get new documents issued, and lock them away. If all of this seems too daunting, if possible hire a lawyer to help you take the right steps and say the right things. A lawyer is literally paid to be on your side. And again remember: there is a crime being committed here, no matter what pretty words are used to justify it, so getting a lawyer involved is in no way overblown or dramatic. It’s the thing reasonable people do when others infringe on their rights.
Same basic idea with your apartment keys. Ask nicely for your keys back. If your parents won’t comply, change your locks, report it as theft, do whatever it takes to bar them from entering your place against your will.
Once you have those two things taken care of, it should be much easier to gradually distance yourself from them, to make your own choices without asking for permission or approval.
I’ll try that r.e. passport. I’m a little nervous about it so I’ll give Mum and Dad one last chance- knowing I can do that means I can insist more easily on the matter of taking it home to my place so that in the future it’s mine to deal with.
Good Luck!
I’m not sure whether it counts as good or bad news as a confrontation might have been nice, but my parents backed off on the passport matter.
I called Dad, and once I mentioned “legal right”, his natural respect for the law won out over everything else. I was warned about potential consequences, but I got my way. Mum can’t object to “legal right” once Dad has backed down, so I have won a small victory.
Nice work.
Have you considered using violence? Try demanding your passport at gunpoint. I find this works very well. I now have 23 passports from 7 different countries!
A bit flippant.
Can you suggest some ways in which I could be more flippant?
Banned for being consistently annoying on this thread
Mistake, I think.
At least, I mostly found his flippancy entertaining. I gather some others did not.
Someone actually having problems in their life may not appreciate you being flippant in response. That said, a brief ban as a reminder to only have fun in appropriate places seems like a better approach than an indefinite ban. Fun people are more likely to accidentally overstep the bounds of moderation than tedious people, so there’s a dangerous ratchet effect here.
“Adulthood isn’t an award they’ll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I’m sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that’s hard.’
Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
I see what you’re saying. The problem is (a) I’m an Aspie, and naturally big on objective standards. It is very, very hard for me to think differently about myself without changing the facts. The trouble is every time I do change the facts people disrespect me anyway, making it harder. (b) I tend to naturally feel ashamed when I can see people aren’t acknowledging me as an adult. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s feels like there’s something wrong with me.
I wasn’t sure about whether that quote was too blunt and didn’t give a process, but it was such a cool quote….
For what it’s worth, you’ve been doing the work of getting an independent point of view, even if you haven’t found effective ways of completely putting it into action yet.
I don’t know whether this will help, but that feeling of shame you’ve got isn’t just an Aspie thing. Neither is having a very hard time dealing with controlling parents.
I know that. But waiting until I’m 24 in order to handle my own problems is something to be ashamed of. I try to tell myself I thought it was normal thanks to my psychologist, but honestly that excuse can only go so far.
Your credit card story sounds terrible. I assume that 20$ is not a huge amount of money that will wreck your personal finances. You had them gainsaying your decision and searching your apartment over something minor. This is unacceptable.
I see two changes that must happen. You must be able to try to handle low stakes problems on your own. You must have some privacy from your parents.
I want to give advice, but have some questions. The answers determine what advice I’ll give.
1. How did your parents find out about the missing card before you went to the bank? Were you unable to pay for something with them present? Did you tell them, and if so did you ask for help or approval of your plan?
2. How did they end up searching your flat? Did you invite them in to search? Did they have a key and just walk in? Did you object to their search? Did they search everywhere or did they respect some boundaries in searching? Were you searching with them, and if so did they search the same areas you had already searched?
3. You say they ganged up on you. Were they insulting you? Did they try to convince you with arguments? Did they act like you had no choice?
1: I wanted to handle the problem on my own, but I knew I needed my passport. I tried to get it, saying it was hypothetical, but Mum insisted that there was too much of a risk I’d lose it. I then tried telling the truth in the hopes my parents would let me handle it on my own. Big mistake.
2: Mum insisted and made me feel I have no choice. They searched everywhere I might have lost it. I logically should have, but I get very demoralised when these things happen so I was wincing and trying not to look.
3: The last one. I tried to protest, but Mum said that it was impossible because . She even admitted that she was wrong afterwards, but based on past experience that changes nothing.
I wasn’t insulted directly, although the veyr idea itself is an insult.
Then I have two pieces of advice for you.
When you want to handle a minor problem for yourself, don’t ask them for permission. If the worst reasonable outcome is something you can handle easily, then it’s minor. Try handling it yourself without telling them until after your attempt. The worst that could have happened in the credit card situation was losing 20$. What happened to you was worse than losing 20$. This will let you work towards independence.
Set some boundaries around your flat. It’s yours. Your parents do not have the right to visit at any time. They do not have the right to go through your things. The rules might be that they come over for dinner on Thursdays and stay away the rest of the week unless you invite them. When they are there, they can’t just go anywhere and look at anything (ex. my bedroom is private). They may give you some pushback on this, but it is very important. I predict this will help with your confidence in with women. By having space and times that you are free from your parents, you can use some of that to date. Without that, when and where will you?
As for the passport, that’s something I’m confused by. In the US, we only need a passport if we are traveling out of the country. Your parents are probably more worried that you will get into trouble in another country than about you losing it.
As the OP does not (to my knowledge) drive, nor have a driver’s license, I assumed the passport was to prove identity at the bank.
keranih
Here in the US most people without drivers licenses have state IDs. It’s basically the same thing, and you get it through the DMV. The only difference is that it doesn’t let you drive. It’s much more convenient than a passport. It fits in your wallet so it’s harder to lose and it’s easier to replace if lost. I’d advise him to get the Aussie equivalent.
I thought one of these posts said that he wanted the passport so he could go to a whorehouse. And he told his mother that’s why he wanted it.
No, I wanted it so I can replace my credit card from the bank. I do use prostitutes, but a passport isn’t necessary for that.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. Who’s paying the piper?
Make a list of all the things you rely on your parents for, e.g. rent, cooking, cleaning, social opportunities, looking after pets, not getting fined by the AEC, emotional support (panic attacks? someone to talk to after a hard day?), anything else you can think of, big or small. In order to gain independence, you need to reduce the size of that list.
Only you know your situation, but I’d imagine that there are things which you don’t do because they are hard, and things that you don’t do because your parents won’t let you, as was the case for me and most others. Take control of the hard stuff, and you’ll have achieved three things: firstly, you’ll have a better bargaining position; secondly, you’ll have proven to your parents that you’re capable; thirdly, you’ll have made it easier to walk out if negotiating fails.
I urge you not to do anything sudden until you’ve reached the limit of what you can do gradually. Going to the police or cutting all contact, while they may be necessary, are drastic moves that will have a very large impact on your life. You shouldn’t burn your bridges unless you’ve done a careful analysis of the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives. If you rely on your parents for lots of things, then you NEED to know what you will do when they cut you off. You NEED to have put in place some kind of contingency plan for how you will earn an income, where you will sleep, and who you will rely on. You CANNOT just bluff, because they WILL call you on it, particularly if they get a call from two very serious policewomen at 7AM on Saturday morning about the reported theft of a passport.
Carinthium, if I were you, I would join a church or other social group of some kind and make some friends who are healthy stable people who do not know your parents. Then I would seek help from some of these people. You need people who have gotten to know you face to face, people who can see from experience with you what you are capable of or not capable of.
We are sort of flying blind here. There are numerous things about a person that cannot be discerned without face to face experience and contact.
People on the help lines do not have face to face experience with you either, and so are flying blind too, although I expect they do the best they can for you.
If you are an atheist, be aware that you can still be an atheist if you are a Unitarian, although you do not have to be.
I have been trying to look for a social group lately (although I was thinking more a Dungeons and Dragons group since, like a large number of Aspies, I don’t get much socialization). Thanks for the advice- I’ll look into it.
Unitarian: Someone who believes there is at most one god.
I’m pretty sure you could get away with Trinitarianism as a Unitarian Universalist, since you can get away with everything else.
You can get away with trinitaratianism among Unitarians, but I’ve talked with Christians who didn’t feel comfortable among Unitarians, and mentioned an organization (I’ve forgotten the name) which is Christian-friendly Unitarianism.
OK, so you have a job, and you’re living in a flat you’re currently renting yourself?
You mention below that you’re viscerally afraid of doing things without your parents’ permission and approval, even things your parents wouldn’t normally be involved in (such as sex.) My guess would be that this is your problem – your parents’ overprotectiveness isn’t helping, but there’s nothing physically stopping you from doing things without their permission and not discussing it with them. You could have gone to the bank without mentioning the issue to them, for instance.
I’d suggest focusing on this as the problem, not arguing with your parents more effectively. If you can, deliberately do things you think you’re capable of doing without consulting your parents. Maybe talk to a psychologist (or a mental health line) about this fear.
Your parents shouldn’t have a key from your flat, if they don’t respect your privacy. If they already have a copy of the key, perhaps ask your landlord (for a permission) to change it.
Let’s talk honestly about your risk of losing things (such as the passport). Are you really losing things, or is it completely made up? Because if the problem is real, the proper way is to solve it. This is separate from the fact that your parents should respect your privacy anyway. Yes, they should. But imagine that they would give you the passport and you would lose it the next day: you would have a problem, and they would have a very annoying argument against you in the future.
I say this because I was often misplacing things as a teenager. The solution was to specify a very small set of places where the important items are allowed to be, and never put them in a different place. If you can follow the rule, it is quite easy to find them. In my system, the important items are either small (ID card, passport, credit card, etc., phones) or big (legal-size paper documents). The small items are only allowed to be in my bag, on the corner of my working table, in a special box on a specific shelf, or temporarily in my pocket when I am outside without my bag (but when I get home, they are immediately moved on the table). The large items are either in a specific box, or later sorted in a binder. As long as I follow this system (and no one messes with my stuff), I can always find the important things. At the beginning it required some discipline, now I do it automatically without thinking.
A few people here mentioned that you should make a list of all skills you need to learn to become truly independent, and to gradually obtain them. I only add that you should start small, and progress in small increments. I say this because some people start heroically, then fail, then get depressed; and it’s probably an unconscious mechanism of self-sabotage. It feels better to make small steps and succeed often, than to make large steps and fail; and feeling better will motivate you to continue. If you are below-average in something, you should aim to become average first. Asking for advice about specific skills will probably provide more actionable answers than complaining in general.
Getting a girlfriend is difficult for most guys for the first time. Don’t put it first in your TODO list. If you keep progressing in other things, time will work in your favor, because more skills will make you more confident, and male peak attractivity is around 30. (I’d recommend to try some dancing classes, and only focus on the dance, don’t try to pick up anyone, until you are good. Then you will have a social excuse to talk to girls and a skill to impress them immediately. To get comfortable with body contact, I’d recommend massage classes. When you are good at dancing and massage, sex is not really much different from that.)
With technical skills, 50% of the skill is using the right tools. Have some basic tools at home, so you can use them when the opportunity comes. (A set of screwdrivers, french keys, hex keys. You can probably get all this together under 100 dollars.) Then buy something cheap from IKEA and build it yourself.
School sucks, but it’s an opportunity to socialize (read: meet people your parents don’t know). You could also ask people to help you with some specific skills.
Learn to relax. It’s good for your (mental and physical) health, and relaxed people seem more confident and attractive.
Absent a transition, I thought really thought you were moving into “how to take a female’s locked bedroom door off its hinges instead of attempting courtship”.
In the long run, mastering courtship will save you a lot on tools.
Hi Carinthium. I’m not an Aspie, but I do have somewhat serious ADHD, which can cause very similar emotional and practical difficulties in day-to-day functioning. Your story is quite different from mine, but I see enough commonality here that you might benefit from a lesson I had to learn on my own about adulting, one that I rarely, if ever, see brought up in advice specifically about being an adult:
It isn’t just you, or Aspies more broadly. Practically nobody can do it all on their own.
The reason you can’t stand up to your parents is because they are all you have, and they know that. To get outside support, you call mental health lines, or you talk to your psychiatrist, but these people aren’t in your corner, they’re supposed to be neutral. This is probably going to sound like an unrealistic ask right now, but you really have to develop independent friendships and a social network with people who have nothing to do with your parents, preferably a wide one, with people who are sympathetic, understand you, and are capable of offering you practical help and advice. (Incidentally, the rationalist and EA communities are pretty great places to do this!) This will do two things:
A) Make you feel more confident, which will in turn make you more capable of doing things independently;
B) Be a safety net for when disaster inevitably strikes.
On B specifically: lots of people don’t fully realize the function their social circle plays in their lives, because most people haven’t been isolated for very long periods of their life. I have, though. I’m naturally very strongly introverted with somewhat minimal social needs and have difficulty relating to people, so for long periods of time I would have only one or two people, outside my family, that I considered more than just a friendly acquaintance, if that.
Everyone inevitably has set-backs and runs into trouble in their lives, often frequently, but most people are able to deal with it anyway. So why can’t you? Well, any sort of executive dysfunction (which all ADHD folks, and most Aspies, have) will tend to magnify problems and make you somewhat likelier to mishandle them, compared to most people. But this isn’t as much of a problem if you’ve got people around that you can rely on, who know about practical things, who can give you advice or contacts or even do something for you, if you really need it. Dependency is not relying on other people, because everyone relies on other people. Dependency is relying on too few people, few enough to give those people disproportionate power over your life. This is what has happened with your parents, and this is also why you shouldn’t enter a romantic relationship right now, even if given the chance, because that is how codependent (and often abusive) relationships form.
Your predicament is relevant to me in large part because I’ve just recently made a major life transition from a very bad situation that I felt stuck in because I was heavily dependent on someone, to a much better and brighter path where I’m mostly independent, and it’s mostly due to the efforts and advice of a few very good friends I reached out to.
I think the best thing you could be doing right now is to focus on making (and sustaining) friendships with people who share your values and get along with you well. Another valuable use of your time would be learning more about executive dysfunction, which is what causes many of the practical problems people with neurodevelopmental disorders face. This has swallowed up a large (but interesting!) portion of my time, and if you want some pointers for good resources on that, or any more advice on the social stuff, feel free to email me at throwaway49411@gmail.com.
Quote of the day. Upvoted.
Stellaris is bad. It’s got potential, but at the moment it’s buggy, unbalanced, illegible, and doesn’t deliver on its promise.
When I say it’s illegible, I mostly mean the combat system. Other Paradox Studio games were much better in this regard, Stellaris has fancy 3d models on the map and ties what’s happening in the combat to actual stuff you can see, but most of the particulars of how these onscreen movements and choices are made are mysterious and unexplained. How does the game choose what ship to put at the front of the inexplicable triangle formation? I’d like to be able to choose that, but in the absence of that knowing the rules would be nice. How exactly do the AI modules attached to the ship affect behavior in the locked in battle mode? Why do my corvettes occasionally just sit around doing space donuts as they get fired upon by enemies outside their range? Is it because of the longer range destroyers I mixed in with them, are they sticking in the formation with them out of some sense of misguided loyalty? In the hours I’ve played, I found the behavior of the battle AI so frustrating that I coordinate my fleets to warp right in on top of the enemy at the edge of the gravity well, creating an immediate mosh-pit of flashing lasers and exploding ships with no opportunity for the computer to dick around. In EU4, the system was very simple (rows of squares with symbols on them, lined up to mash against each other in two recurring phases of combat!), but it was completely legible what was happening. You could see what was fighting what, squares changed in shade as the armies they represented depleted, you could see the dice rolls for each round of combat. Infantry out front, cavalry towards the sides, artillery at the back when there’s enough infantry for the front line, and so on. In Stellaris, who even knows! I’ve built a fleet and had my missile blocker corvettes out front, where I want them to be, at the very back, being useless as torpedoes hammer into my front ranks, and in the middle. I’ve seen gifs people upload of swarms of ships seemingly stuck like Burridan’s ass in the middle of two different fixed enemy stations,vibrating into a huddle as they are hit by missiles from outside of their own range. The different weapons and ship types are unbalanced at the moment, but those are just minor scripting changes, a change to a value here and there, the battle AI is a serious problem which infringes directly on fun.
The user interface is a nightmare of mixed messages, missing functionality and clutter. They can do better, and have with their other games in the past, the only explanation is a complete rush job and lack of development time. The mission system “Situation log” is filled with tens of identical “collect debris” research projects after every war, you have to flit through menus in un-intuitive processes to access necessary game functions, ship designs are unsegregated and unsorted in a long linear list!
Weirdly enough I’m still planning on playing more of it though. I’m having fun with the buggy and broken aspects of the current system, trying to figure out how to abuse its inadequacies before it’s fixed, and while a lot of material has yet to be implemented the pop system they put in place is a good backbone for a game of this sort, though more ways to influence Ethos values and whatnot would be appreciated. Thoughts from other people would be nice.
I haven’t played it yet (my computer is very bad), but how is it compared to, like, release EU4 or release HOI3 or pre-HOD Vicky 2? Because the complaints that I hear from people sound valid but they also sound like recurrent problems for Paradox games generally, especially before they’ve had time to refine their models and experiences. I’m not saying people shouldn’t complain but like, at a certain point, it’s really not novel for Paradox to need time to refine things like AI and automation, and the fact that they’ve apparently built really solid basic systems into the game seems positive to me.
I mean, like, Vicky 2 is probably my favorite Paradox game, and I would say it STILL has problems with message spam, opaque subsystems, and it not always being clear what the player’s motivation should be, even after 2 DLCs. Of course that’s kind of a generation old at this point but still.
The problem with Stellaris is that it doesn’t have the real-world history flavor to fall back on to paper over the issues.
The issue is that while some things seem math balancing (and resolvable) like the combat system, others don’t.
For example, the closest I’ve seen to an inherent flaw would have to be planet management/sectors.
On planets, you assign pops to tasks. Sectors let you/(are required after you control a certain number of planets) automate things with the AI. If the AI can do a good job (aka it is a solvable task) why is there even a planet screen? If the AI can’t, playing will be a constant struggle of microing to make up for the feature designed to reduce micro.
That’s… not good.
Ethos are weird; while individualist/collectivist makes sense and just needs a bit more bug fixing/balance, pacifist/militarist is really policy and shouldn’t be an ethos, xenophobe/xenophilie is straight up good/evil and materialist/spiritualist is… odd. It doesn’t make sense in universe (since this is one where mental powers exist so the test for the new pope presumably includes making the Papal Throne hover) and it has the issue of balancing research versus any other input. That is a really hard to balance especially since the research rate is set by bonuses due to the increasing tech cost from population.
I’d personally throw out all but individualist/collectivist and replace them with
xeno-nationalist – xeno-assimilationist
continuous – discrete
concrete – virtual
xeno-nationalist versus xeno-assimilationist would be about how to integrate aliens. Do you go the multicultural route, going as far as to set up a millet system so that each alien species has its own law system and leadership underneath your government? Or do you attempt to make everyone an equal citizen of your state, insuring all have a common background and interact and mix with others no matter their species.
The former would make it easier for pops to migrate in and out of your worlds as well as insulate your pops from the ideologies of alien populations; the latter would have the opposite effect. Xenoassimilationist would also be in favor of spreading their ideologies to other empires and spreading their genetic traits to others while xenonationalists would prefer having aliens live on planets they are adapted to.
continuous versus discrete deals with change; do they like radical measures or go slow and steady? I’d have it deal with the probability of getting certain techs as well the way happiness works (getting a bonus for each percent or for passing certain levels)
Concrete versus Virtual deals with transhumanist specification, wireheading and other major modifications.
Of course to make these work (in the sense the flavor matches their effects), you’d have to add in new mechanics. I doubt they change the game in any way to be like these.
Watching sector AI crap itself in the release streams was the dealbreaker for me, yeah. The best were the robot-populated tomb-worlds whose governors insisted on putting them all to work farming the lifeless hellscape.
Couldn’t stop imagining some poor robot standing with an apple like Eve Tempted, going “what the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?!”
Either let us optimize planetary economies ourselves, or abstract it to some “labour, land, capital” level where it’s not essential to carefully place individual buildings and staff them with exactly the right species of slave in order to have a productive planet.
The best part is that we had Victoria 2 moders laying out ideas of what they would do if the ever made a future space version of the economic engine. I’m puzzled by why they didn’t go with that and instead went with a totally generic economy.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/thinking-about-programming-my-own-game-a-victoria-2-like-space-empire-game.653367/
@ Samuel Skinner
I mean… I love Vicky 2, but the Vicky 2 economic system was insanely complex, very obtuse, and also often had weird issues (see for instance Capitalist AI decision-making). Also, I’m fairly sure that no one currently working at Paradox actually understands how the underlying code works. So I’d imagine the reason they didn’t go with a Vicky 2-style economic system is because it would have been really, really hard to make, and take a huge amount of work, and probably not worked that well, and made the game much more complicated.
It does sound like the sector AI is a problem in terms of striking the balance between automation and player control/optimization. It reminds me of some of the similar issues people had with automation in HOI3, but at least less central to the game than in that case, and hopefully Paradox will get it sorted out. It does seem like the kind of thing that would be naturally ripe for DLC.
Yep, I’ve played it a lot now and Stellaris very much seems to follow the Paradox tradition of “Is it done yet? – No but we’ll fix it after release.”
At least it doesn’t crash to desktop every half an hour like HoI3 did, but so so many systems everywhere in the game are clearly unrefined, unbalanced or just plain broken. The midgame lacks the flavor of the early and late game, and they have outright admitted to shipping without the entire system that was supposed to fix that (colony events) just because it wasn’t done yet. Right now, if you are not among the biggest hardcore fans of Paradox (in which case you probably already have it…), avoid.
That being said, there is a lot in Stellaris that shows real promise. The flavor and writing of a lot of the game is brilliant, like Alpha Centauri level brilliant. At it’s core, the gameplay is fun. It really feels like you inhabit a living universe. Consider this game again after a few patches and expansions.
I would agree with this comment. If you’re not so into the genre that you’ve already determined to pick it up, wait half a year for a sale. By that time, it’ll have at least two patches and possibly a mini-expansion and it should be a pretty great game.
Things the game does well-
– Exploring is satisfying
– Ship design is pretty easy and meaningful
– The choice between hyperdrive and wormhole gates is interesting and meaningful
– Game events and event chains are intuitive, surprising and well-written
– Species/ethos design is natural and complex
– Uplifting primitive species is well-done, challenging to do but extremely useful once mastered
Things the game sucks at-
– All diplomacy
– Borders are, by default, magical force-fields
– Fallen Empires really terrible at their jobs
– Keeping fleet updated is a huge PITA, and the auto-update seems to prioritize making your ships really expensive over making them any good
– Corvette spam is the alpha and the omega
– Sectors are a cool idea, too bad they suck
– No matter how advanced you get, the coolest Fallen Empire stuff (ringworlds, sealed planets, etc) lieth forever beyond your power to build
– You can scrupulously avoid using dangerous technology if you like, but there’s no way to tell if some idiot empire on the other side of the galaxy is gaily creating superhuman AI and then enslaving it while going ‘Whatcha gonna do, wipe out all organic life? You won’t.’
– Warp drives are terrible
– No matter how advanced you get, your options for actually interacting with all the systems you had such fun exploring remains limited.
– The non-empire alien factions are boring.
But my biggest complaint is a constructive one- Stellaris had the chance to do something which no empire-building or 4X game has done since Alpha Centauri. In AC, being science-focused was fun, and not just because of the benefits that it brought you. In AC, discovering the true nature of the Planet and choosing how much to adapt to it vs. adapting it to you was a storyline- when you did a lot of research, it told you a complex tale of how your technology changed you. It was like a subgame, an RPG contained within one of the strategy elements, and playing through it rewarded the player with cool options and a unique end-game goal.
For a while, I really thought Stellaris was going to do that. It tricked me several times; discovering the precursor’s trails, researching the enigmatic nature of the Void Clouds, finding the Tree of Life, finding a shattered ringworld… each time I thought that this was going to be the first part of an epic journey of discovery, researching phenomena scattered across the galaxy to learn a hidden story. But instead each of them petered out after a few events, dumping a handful of resources into my lap and then vanishing.
And that’s what disappoints me most. That disappointment is probably why I’ve only been able to bring myself to play for about six hours each day.
What is the hypothesis you’re testing with your experiment, Scott?
(I only ask because I would like to be a data point that helps prove true a hypothesis like “more frequent open threads would be a good thing for SSC and SSC readers, especially those who refuse to
go back on heroinget a Reddit account.”)Eh, I can’t think of anything in particular that would make me not want to keep doing this, but I want to see if something comes up.
Airgap (above) could successfully discover a technique for stabbing people via TCP/IP.
Do you know where to submit draft RFCs for review?
You should be able to clean up http://www.marz.ca/2013/09/30/a-standard-for-the-delivery-of-face-stabbing-via-ip-datagrams/ and submit it to the IETF.
I’d be surprised if this could actually be implemented. I always assumed you would need the TCP window (in order to break and generate sharp fragments).
hardware option
After reading the “Skin in the Game” post it got me thinking about a topic that has been annoying me for years. How do you balance between some people a lot who are far away with you with helping someone close by a smaller amount.
When I was volunteering at a charity book store there were two events which highlighted this issue. The first was I had a manager, who was a proper geezer (this is England by the way), he was a very nice guy and I enjoyed working with him. However he was not the best at his job, he wasn’t bad, just not the literal best. Eventually the organisation made him reapply for his own job and he didn’t get it. I got the feeling that this job was a large part of his life and he seemed devastated at having lost it. The next manager managed to increase profits in the shop and was also nice, but I couldn’t help but feel like the organisation had failed to help this person near. But obviously by increasing profits they were helping some of most vulnerable people on the planet, so it seems weird to complain about this one person they didn’t help.
The second example was we had a old guy who used to come into the shop. He was a very intelligent man (spoke fluent french and had a great knowledge on a surprising number of topics). However he seemed to have some sort of neurological problem and he was prone to out bursts and in general acting strangely. He wandered the streets all day, no matter the weather and so when he came into the store we gave him a cup of tea and allowed him to sit in a chair for a couple of hours. However after the change in management he was more or less told that he could no longer come and in sit in the store, since his outbursts were scaring off customers. Once again I felt uneasy, even though it was only a single guy compared with helping some of the worst off in the world.
There were even little things like how we could use expenses to buy snacks and tea, surely we should have forgone those since the money we spent could easily save someone’s life. It seems so hard to balance between these two issues and I can’t really say I have an intuitive response one way or another, I would love to hear other people’s input.
These are great examples. The first one seems very grey. It would be a tough decision to make either way. How detrimental to the organization is he? What agreements do members of the charity tacitly have with each other and management? It’s possible that he had to go… have outcomes been that much better since he left?
I feel a similar disease with the guy getting laid-off as you do. An organization has responsibility to treat its employees well, yet it does not seem he was actually mistreated. However, maximizing profits and the organization’s output should not come at the expense of those who sacrifice for the organization. If you are working in a charitable organization, as it seems we both do, there are often people “out there” who could fulfill the same role better, and some current peers could achieve financially better outcomes for themselves by going elsewhere. Yet, there is an ethos of solidarity; a certain amount of self-sacrifice gets made and opportunity gets lost on behalf of the charity, either for the nobility of the cause or the fulfillment of the individual. Those continued acts of solidarity should play a large part in the calculus of who is told to go. Too often we overlook the bonds of trust and cooperation which make our battle for the Good Side a battle worth fighting.
In your second example, of course, it would depend upon how disruptive the guy was, how regularly. Nonetheless, those with mental disorders need to be treated compassionately insofar as is possible by the organization. Some people are not perfectly developed and peak physical/mental condition. So what? That’s a fact of life, we should learn to deal with patiently so long as we can’t cure it. It sounds to me like the guy wasn’t a terrible menace. If he truly was, then perhaps asking him not to come around makes sense.
We have a special needs guy who is not intelligent at all. He comes around every two weeks or so, asks really loud questions, sometimes soils our bathroom, and takes a worker away from his/her task for a few minutes. It’s not the end of the world. We treat him kindly and respectfully and help him on his way. He is not a blight upon humanity, nor such a detriment to our operations that clients have a right or reason to be afraid.
Not everyone gets to be a rationalist, but everyone (who is not working day and night for Dark Side) should receive compassion and be extended patience, even if they are in the wrong job position or a store they shouldn’t be in.
Maybe that’s a non-answer. But that’s how I see it.
@ CrashSite
On Munchkin fora, often there’s a hypothetical about a Paladin captured by an Evil Whosis who threatens evil to some hostage, unless the Paladin breaks his vows. Imo the real* Paladin thing is, don’t waste time or energy wrestling with conscience; concentrate on finding a clever, practical way to rescue the hostage.
* Silent movie Lawful Good cowboys, first generation Superman, etc.
That’s the focus I’d recommend. Trying to persuade the cold hearted Managers in your comment (who are right on logical grounds anyway) very likely won’t work (or shouldn’t). Instead try to help the geezers in some direct practical way, like connecting them with some Senior Center etc.
Maybe we’re missing externalities. Biscuits and tea might help retain volunteers, helping a mentally ill man might generate social trust or in-group cohesion, etc.
I’ve always thought of raffle tickets and door to door chocolate sales as ritualised tests of loyalty combined with bonding exercises, where junior members of an organisation are tasked with going out and earning money by representing the group well.
I’ve been think a lot about this lately, too. I feel recently in America we’ve moved toward a culture of economic efficiency (what I’d probably call “neoliberalism” if I were a different kind of academic) which says you always fire the not-super-efficient-but-this-job-really-means-a-lot-to-him guy. The idea that this will hurt morale or whatever doesn’t usually enter into the picture, much less that you should just give preference to people who are already invested and whom you already know over theoretically better strangers.
I encountered something that made me think of this in academia recently. An older colleague, hearing I was looking for a book publisher, offered to recommend my manuscript to his prestigious book publisher. I was like “sure, that sounds great!” Not much later he apologetically told me that book publishers no longer welcome recommendations. They want everyone to do it sort of on their own merits. This is no doubt a result of intense competition and a desire to avoid appearance of partiality (plus, if you can get a recommendation, before long everyone will have one and it will be useless).
This relates also to the memes making fun of older generation people saying things like “why don’t you ask your friend so-and-so if they can get you a job at their company.” This kind of personal connection thing just doesn’t work, at least in the US, like it used to (it is still very much a thing in China, and probably a lot of other places, based on my experience, and it can definitely sometimes be infuriating and inefficient to have to cultivate personal relationships for every business deal and for people with connections to get ahead of the more talented).
Yet I also think there’s something psychically extremely beneficial about not trying to totally divorce business from personal life. It might even make up for itself in some cases through increase morale and devotion to the company (loyalty to companies and organizations today seems almost nil, and deservedly so, in my experience). But I’m not sure where the balance lies. I feel right now we’ve gone too far in the “fire the nice, slightly inefficient guy to whom this job means a lot” direction.
I think it’s turtles all the way down. I read a post or op-ed or something once about why flying is such an unpleasant experience. The basic answer was: look in the mirror. When vacationers book a flight, the first thing they do is go to expedia or kayak or whatever put in their pair of cities and dates and sort by price. They don’t have a favorite airline, they don’t run down the configuration of the plane, they just sort by price. If you are going to do that then companies are going to fight each other to get that cheapest spot. Scott’s moloch article discusses something similar.
It’s interesting to see it in the non-profit sector and think about how that aligns with effective altruism. It seems like the EA answer is for the non-profits to act like the most aggressive, rapacious, profit hungry capitalists so that they can maximize the money going to the most effective use per dollar. Something like compassionate leave could only ever be justified by hard data. There seems something off about that to me, but then I’m not an EA.
About that hard data–morale and devotion point seems like something we might wish were true, but that only means we should be more skeptical about data tending to show its true.
My problem with this is that from the consumer’s perspective, there is no noticeable relationship between the amount paid and the service obtained.
The TSA makes the non-flying part horrible (which is why I no longer fly).
Next, I did a quick search on Priceline for flights between Pittsburgh (closest airport to me) and Las Vegas (a popular destination). For the dates selected, more than a month out, including Saturday-night stay:
* There were 40 different options.
* The cheapest, fastest, shortest fare was a direct flight.
* All other options cost anywhere from ~1.5x as much to ~4x as much. There was no way to evaluate seat pitch or width, or other costs other than baggage fees and taxes.
* The cost differences didn’t seem to relate to any obvious pattern of flight times, etc.
* There isn’t any way to pay extra for just what you want. Eg. I’ll pay extra for more seat width, and up to 2″ of extra legroom. I’m willing to make extra stops or vary my flight times if I save money as long as I get in by 10pm.
I did a quick search on Priceline for flights between Pittsburgh and Las Vegas…
Well there’s your problem right there. You do a quick search on a service named Priceline, and you were expecting to get anything but the cheapest possible price for a service that can be legally advertised as an airline flight from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas?
There absolutely are ways to evaluate seat pitch and the like. Priceline isn’t one of them. There are ways to purchase a few extra inches of width and legroom, often even on the same flight. Priceline won’t tell you about them. Because 95% of the flying public doesn’t care, or more precisely doesn’t care enough to spend even $30 extra for it.
If you’re looking for a simple one-stop aggregator that ranks seating and amenities as well as price, TripAdvisor.com might be a place to start.
Garrett:
* The cheapest, fastest, shortest fare was a direct flight.
Well, yes. The last two are tautologically obvious, and the first is pretty much to be expected. These days, airlines are under intense pressure to fly their planes as full as possible. Indirect routing takes two flights instead of one, so there’s not much incentive to do it unless they have less capacity on the direct route than on both of the legs of the indirect one. That’s pretty rare to a major hub like Vegas.
* All other options cost anywhere from ~1.5x as much to ~4x as much. There was no way to evaluate seat pitch or width, or other costs other than baggage fees and taxes.
Pitch and width are to be found online, as are things like airline food cost. The fact that they aren’t all bundled together just raises the research bar slightly.
* The cost differences didn’t seem to relate to any obvious pattern of flight times, etc.
I find the opposite. When I’m shopping for tickets, it’s usually cheaper to take the first flight of the day or get in late at night.
* There isn’t any way to pay extra for just what you want. Eg. I’ll pay extra for more seat width, and up to 2″ of extra legroom.
As John says, they call it ‘Premium Economy’ and usually offer it as an upgrade when purchasing the ticket, instead of putting it on priceline. I’m sure the marketing people have a good reason for that.
I’m willing to make extra stops or vary my flight times if I save money as long as I get in by 10pm.
Extra stops often don’t make economic sense for the airline. Varying schedule is called ‘standby’, and doesn’t guarantee you a seat. The airline can only pass so many people a day over a given route, and varying schedule is a logistical nightmare. Often, the plane is going to be full anyway.
John:
There are ways to purchase a few extra inches of width and legroom, often even on the same flight. Priceline won’t tell you about them. Because 95% of the flying public doesn’t care, or more precisely doesn’t care enough to spend even $30 extra for it.
I don’t think that’s the reason. I think that the marketing people have discovered that a significant number of people, when given a choice between $150 and 29-inch pitch and $180 and 32-inch pitch, go for the 29-inch pitch, but when told during seat selection ‘and for only $30 more, you can get an extra 3 inches’ go for the extra legroom. The last few flight-comparison websites I’ve used have generally listed three categories for each flight: economy, refundable, and first. So they’re clearly catering at least somewhat to niche customers.
That’s actually why Southwest doesn’t list on aggregator websites. They want people flying with them to be doing so because they like them, not because it was the cheapest. (Although if you’re flying with lots of luggage, they are almost always the cheapest.) But to a large extent, you’re getting what you pay for. A lot of airlines will sell you all the perks you want. You must not fly much if you don’t know about the conventional carrier’s ‘premium economy’ seats. Airplane configuration is (on most domestic routes) not really a variable. You get either a Bombardier/Embraer or a 737/A320, and put people in it in one to three classes. Which you get is determined by route and capacity.
An A320 can be set up like spirit airlines does or like Jet Blue does. Same plane very different experience.
Premium economy makes it even more complicated to comparison shop. How much lower does the base fare need to be in order to make spirit airline’s “Big Front” seat a better deal than a standard jet blue seat? If instead of doing this kind of comparison shopping the vacationer picks the cheapest fare and then springs for the economy premium during checkout that only increases the incentive to have the absolute cheapest seats available. Got to keep that funnel filled.
An A320 can be set up like spirit airlines does or like Jet Blue does. Same plane very different experience.
I misread you there. I was thinking of ‘favorite airplane’ as opposed to looking at the seating layout. I agree that the seating layout the airline selects has a lot more to do with the experience than the airplane itself.
Premium economy makes it even more complicated to comparison shop.
I believe that’s called ‘marketing’. Sure, JetBlue may be cheaper than United’s Economy Plus (and the seats are almost exactly the same), but the customer doesn’t realize that when they upgrade on United.
How much lower does the base fare need to be in order to make spirit airline’s “Big Front” seat a better deal than a standard jet blue seat?
People aren’t that good at doing explicit utility calculations. And those that understand the air travel game aren’t really priceline’s targets.
I do think there’s a definite “tyranny of the consumer” at work, as well (which is why it surprised me in the last thread that Heelbearcub assumed I wouldn’t blame the consumer for making shitty choices). I think it’s kind of a defect-defect vicious cycle which can get created when companies and customers start treating each other antagonistically. This seems especially severe with intellectual property lately, though in that case I side almost wholly with the consumer.
I am probably somewhat guilty of seeing another nail for my libertarian hammer here, but I personally think having a ton of regulations for “consumer protection” and the like ironically encourages a situation where both buyer and seller take the maximum advantage within their legal rights. Because so much is illegal, what isn’t illegal must be okay.
Re. airlines, point taken, though I don’t think it’s a great example. For one thing, there isn’t much difference among carriers in the US, and the difference between the least expensive flight and the second-least expensive flight is often hundreds of dollars for no apparent reason. If some of the companies were actually consistently a lot better than others I might feel some loyalty, but mostly I find they all have their good days and bad days and average out to a consistent mediocre.
Like, if there were two companies both flying where I wanted to go and one was $50 more expensive but I knew they had nicer planes, better foods, and arrived on time more often, I’d definitely pay the extra. Maybe even more. But the choice you are usually faced with is “you can buy the cheap, direct flight on crummy airline A, or, for an additional $300 you can buy a flight that does a bunch of weird layovers on slightly less crummy airline B.”
I think there are large differences in international flights. I flew to Asia on Singapore airlines a while back, and it was impressively good.
And, on the whole, I find Southwestern at least a little better than other airlines, although that’s more features such as free checked baggage and no penalty for changing your flight than in flight amenities.
Some airline pricing seems downright illogical, like when a flight from A to B, booked separately, is actually more expensive than a flight from A to B and then B to C booked together, where you wind up on the exact same flight as the person who booked the first option. People actually find it desirable to book flights with extra legs that they don’t end up using because of this, leading to increased problems of seats not being full as the airlines would want.
“large differences in international flights”
Oh yeah, definitely. I usually choose a non-American-based carrier whenever I can. They are usually (though not always) much nicer in terms of service.
The fact that non-US-based carriers are not allowed to operate within the US, btw, seems like a huge sop to our crummy airline industry, and is arguably an example where trade barriers are making the great majority of Americans worse off to protect one non-competitive local industry.
I think there are large differences in international flights. I flew to Asia on Singapore airlines a while back, and it was impressively good.
Singapore is commonly rated among the world’s top three airlines.
Oh yeah, definitely. I usually choose a non-American-based carrier whenever I can. They are usually (though not always) much nicer in terms of service.
International flights are a rather different thing from domestic flights. Emirates, for example, has a good reputation for international work, but a rather poor one for its (small) domestic operations.
The fact that non-US-based carriers are not allowed to operate within the US, btw, seems like a huge sop to our crummy airline industry, and is arguably an example where trade barriers are making the great majority of Americans worse off to protect one non-competitive local industry.
It’s actually an international law thing. Air traffic rights are regulated by international treaty, and called freedoms of the air. That said, there’s already a lot of competition in the domestic market, and if you’re comparing international services by non-US carriers to domestic services by US-flag carriers, you’re not really looking at the same thing. To the best of my knowledge, flights inside the European air travel block are not that dissimilar to those in the US. The big difference is the presence of RyanAir and EasyJet, which take packing customers aboard to extremes. Spirit is doing the same thing here, but hasn’t achieved the same penetration of the market.
“already a lot of competition in the domestic market”
I disagree. The strong tendency has been for mergers and for each airline to focus on a couple of hubs. So while there are a fair number of airlines out there, most of the smaller ones are subsidiaries of the few big ones, and on any given trip, there are usually only 1 or 2 reasonable choices.
I disagree. The strong tendency has been for mergers and for each airline to focus on a couple of hubs. So while there are a fair number of airlines out there, most of the smaller ones are subsidiaries of the few big ones, and on any given trip, there are usually only 1 or 2 reasonable choices.
This depends a lot on where you live. For reasons I don’t understand, some markets are poorly-served relative to their size, and thus are a lot more expensive and have fewer options than others. But I’m not sure that the US market could support that many more carriers. Big carriers can run lots of routes, and trying to route through little carriers would be a logistical nightmare. And there are significant economies of scale in operations. Airplanes take a lot of work to keep flying.
So it’s less that we need more airline-to-airline competition, and that we need more competition from high-speed rail?
The number of routes on which high-speed rail could effectively compete with air travel is very limited (particularly in the US, where our two biggest metropolitan areas are 2,800 miles apart).
@ onyomi
Yet I also think there’s something psychically extremely beneficial about not trying to totally divorce business from personal life. It might even make up for itself in some cases through increase morale and devotion to the company (loyalty to companies and organizations today seems almost nil, and deservedly so, in my experience). But I’m not sure where the balance lies. I feel right now we’ve gone too far in the “fire the nice, slightly inefficient guy to whom this job means a lot” direction.
Obvious distinction: The nice, slightly inefficient guy doesn’t freak out the customers like the wierdos off the street do. The nice inefficient guy may please some customers, as being easier to talk to, as well as just plain nice.
So I’d get rid of the wierdos (as nicely as possible) but spend as much time and thought as necessary with the inefficient guy to make the job a better fit for him. Or just appreciate him as he is!
To transform Newtonian ethics to utilitarian ethics, simply multiply your intuitive cimpulsion to help with a factor r, which is the physical distance between yourself and the person you want to help. Then renormalize.
Maybe you have moral anisotropy though, in which case you need to use vectors and multiply with an appropriate anisotropy tensor as well.
Assuming there is no deity responsible for the universe, what was the probability this blog would exist? If there were a deity and rational design is valid, then would the probability increase or decline?
1. Roughly 0, unless a multiverse exists
2. Increase depends on whether a multiverse exists
Your favored theory should be whichever of “multiverse, god” you consider simpler given our world.
I’m curious what your justification for this claim is. Is this a fine-tuning problem type of argument?
See http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=book/chapter_2
Mostly fine tuning, yes.
An assertion like this is in desperate need of an adjustment for the anthropic principle. This blog’s long odds of existing are not evidence for multiverse or god, because this discussion is predicated on the existence of sentient, blog-commenting-on entities.
Arbitrarily rare outcomes are only suspicious if you are capable of observing less rare outcomes.
I adopted this position after reading http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=book/chapter_2, fwiw.
The tl;dr is that the anthropic principle only works if the other, far likelier outcomes actually happen somewhere.
1. 100% (or close)
2. No.
The existence of SSC is proof of God’s existence. Checkmate, atheists.
1. Almost by definition, we have no way to tell whether the universe could have been created in a different way than it was (the universe is everything we can observe, so there’s no way to get outside it and look at multiple universes). And we certainly have no way of knowing if that different way would lead to this blog existing or not. So we can’t really say. But we’ve observed one universe that exists, and it contains SSC, so… 100%?
2. Even if the universe was intelligently designed, we have no idea what that design is. We have no idea whether SSC’s existence furthers God’s plan or not, so again, we can’t say. But again, we’ve observed that our universe contains SSC, so if we assume God created the universe, this blog must be part of the divine plan.
1. Miniscule, though non-zero (for any given universe).
2. Increase to a decent probability – well under 1%, but not in the “treat as zero” realm of probabilities.
But this persuades me of nothing because we’re reinventing the anthropic principle. We don’t get to claim cosmological constants as evidence for anything, since we’re actively limited to observing samples in which the constants are similar to what we do in fact observe. That pushes our observation point into the last 10,000 years to start making observer-dependent claims.
The version of 1) that’s comparable to 2) is something more like “given that no deity is responsible for the universe, and that universe supports life and human-like sapience, what was the probability that this blog would exist?”
And the answer to that is about the same as the answer to 2): namely, “Low, but not astronomical. It’s one of many plausible blogs which could exist.”
I get the sense that SSC has attracted a fairly substantial cohort of people who think that college is useless, merely a “subsidized tulip”.
My question is, how deep does this go? How many people wouldn’t advocate teaching children anything at all? (I assume no one?) How many would teach their children to read and nothing more? (I assume very few, if any?)
So, at what point does education cross-over from useful to useless?
It’s not that education is bad on its own. It’s that you have to mortgage your life for it. There’s nothing wrong with teaching kids, but the current system of making them get a credential that has little to do with the job they’re likely to have and going massively into debt for it is a problem.
So, law, medicine, engineering, etc., aren’t a problem. Those programs are valuable for teaching you to do the job you intend. Getting a degree in liberal arts so you can work in HR is actively destroying value.
Perhaps I need to also loop in the many recitations of the idea that IQ is largely determinative of outcomes and not affected by education to give a fuller picture of what I mean.
Can I get you to expand on what you mean by “destroying value”?
Spending a lot of money for something that doesn’t help you do the actual job, and is only a piece of paper to make the person screening your resume put you into the “good” pile.
I loved going to school, and could see myself doing it for the rest of my life. I got my degree in engineering, joined the Army as an officer, eventually got into a position to use my degree, found that I love it as much as when I was taking classes and decided to get out to keep doing it. College was *great* for me, especially because I have no debt. However, there are a lot of people, probably most people, that find being stuck in a classroom while someone yammers at them to be soul-sucking. Requiring those people to get a degree just to get a degree is what I mean by “destroying value”. They’re taking on a huge pile of debt to learn something they don’t much care for to get a job that doesn’t really use the information they suffered through classwork to get.
This seems related to Fundamental Attribution Error. Most people who go to college seem to really like college. You like college because you found it stimulating intellectually and it led you to a satisfying career. But other people must have only liked college because parties or something, they must have found the classes were soul-sucking and useless.
This seems very flawed to me.
I don’t understand why there isn’t a way to have the “college experience” without college. Shouldn’t it be simple to get a bunch of 18-24 year olds together in one place and have them be involved in clubs while having parties on the weekends?
@Wrong Species:
Flexible schedule, small geographic footprint, created tribal affiliation, young. Hard to get all of that outside of college. Even the military only has two of them, or maybe three (but the small geographic footprint tends not to last).
Shouldn’t it be simple to get a bunch of 18-24 year olds together in one place and have them be involved in clubs while having parties on the weekends?
One critical ingredient of the “college experience” is that one’s living expenses, and a whole lot of party-related infrastructure and organization, is paid for by parents, the government, or by subsidized and guaranteed loans. In exchange, one has to not actually flunk classes, but as the product that colleges and universities are selling is “students who didn’t flunk”, that’s not a terribly high bar.
If you have to work a job where your actual economic productivity covers the costs of living in a college-equivalent environment, with the experience and discipline of a self-taught 20-year-old, you may not have much time left over for partying.
*shrug* Could be. I guess my question is do they like college for the classwork/learning opportunities, or the social life? As David Friedman has pointed out before, his daughter went to school with a bunch of people who were happy when class got cancelled. Depending on the class, of course, I felt the same way getting my bachelor’s. After being in the Army for 7 years, when I was working on my masters I felt differently. When you think about it, it is pretty messed up to be happy a class you’re paying thousands of dollars to attend has been cancelled.
I’ve had more than a few friends who were at college with no major, or general studies, because they didn’t know what they wanted to do. At the time, I was like “Hey, at least you’re in college.” Now, I realize that’s pretty screwed up. The default should be you don’t go to college if you don’t know why you’re there, but we’re in this prisoner’s dilemma where middle-class people feel like they have to attend even with no clue what they want to do, while they ring up debt that gets skimmed off by academia (whether faculty or administration) to build their own empires.
@HeelBearCub:
Datapoint: I was in the students-aiming-for-job-ticket-with-vaccum-attached-to-soul category. It’s a real thing, though college wasn’t nearly as bad as grade school in that respect.
(also I never actually got the job ticket, though I’ve done okay anyway)
@CatCube: Just on the “paying for classes you don’t attend” thing –
Sometimes you’re paying for lecture. More often, in my experience (engineering/hard science), you’re paying for a reading list, a set of practice problems, a designated place to ask questions, and finally some proof that you did the reading/practice. Some people don’t notice the first two and use the third to just ask directly for the fourth. These people are idiots in every sense of the word. The people who do take the first two seriously, and for whom the last is relatively trivial, are the people who benefit from college.
(I’d generally include lectures and lecture notes mostly with reading, and somewhat with the “question zone”, but I’ve generally found that the associated text is more important/useful. That might just be me, though.)
@HeelBearCub:
American campus universities are quite a strange place from a (continental) European perspective. Of course, students also party and do all the other “college experience” stuff but the university does not do much to provide them any special environment to do that. It is usually not expected that all students find a student dormitory, I don’t know the exact numbers but I would say that probably the majority lives in regular apartments, usually with other students. What the Unis in Europe do provide and what is arguably something unnecessary, are sports facilities. Other than that though, it is just the stuff actually related to studying (and subsidized mensa food but do not expect any culinary marvels, the purpose of the mensa is to have a place where people can fill their stomach between morning and afternoon lectures without having to go to far from their lecture rooms).
I’ve never been to the US, so maybe I have a distorted picture, but from what I read and hear, the US campuses are much more like a strange hybrid between a kibbutz and a hotel. It also seems much more expensive to run it. European universities are usually run by the state and either fully or mostly paid by taxes but they still seem to be able to provide their services cheaper – possibly because they do not provide as many luxuries to the students.
Still, I would go much further and rebuild higher education in the language certificate fashion. You can have a research centre which also provides certification. So when you’re ready to take an exam in whatever you want to learn, you come there, pay for the exam and only for the exam and wait for the results. Each centre structure its exams into programmes so that if you finish the list (and possibly do a more intensive project which would correspond to the current bachelor/master theses and for which you would find someone to guide you in that centre – and obviously pay them for the consultation hours), they give you a Bachelor or a Master Diploma. You can decide who gets to have the right to issue these diplomas in two ways – either the state certifies the research centres, or you could have it in a decentralized way by rating agencies, similar to how it is done with many things today. You trust the agency because it has a good reputation, if it starts cheating (accepting bribes) it will soon lose the reputation which is unlikely to be worth it, reputation is really hard to earn and even harder to regain.
In either case, how you actually obtain the knowledge needed to pass the exams is up to you. And you can then simultaneously have people who go to traditional universities (and pay the traditional price) which include all of the “college experience” in their package. Or you can learn online/with books and perhaps pay for a consultation every now and then when you don’t understand something (there are many online courses which are actually done very well and they’re generally for free). Or you can do something in between. The point is decoupling the “college experience” and the actual learning, so that you can have the same amount of learning (hopefully, we agree that that is the primary thing) for a much lower price.
I think that when people criticize college, they generally criticize its inefficiency and wastefulness rather than the concept itself. In the same way, people criticize lower education – I am not a fan of standard schooling at all and in this case I think that even the concept is wrong (since everyone is supposed to learn the same thing and at the same time in a very unnatural environment).
The difference with regards to dormitories between US and European colleges probably has a lot to do with the fact that the US is a lot larger than any European country except Russia, meaning that a lot more students will be going to colleges far away from their hometown. From what I gather, living in dormitories is less common at US colleges that mostly only attract local students. For example, at the University of New Orleans, which mostly educates New Orleans residents who are willing and able to go to college but are either unwilling or unable to leave the city, 90% of students live off campus.
The US “college experience” is essentially being sheltered from Moloch for a few years so you can do fun and interesting things (and for many people it’s the only time they get to do anything interesting in their whole lives). Sheltering people from Moloch isn’t cheap, but by latching on to certain signalling arms races (credentialism and the idea that learning certain things is inherently virtuous and high-status) the universities have gotten other parts of society to mostly pick up the bill. Attempting to decouple credentials and learning from the rest of the college experience would expose students to Moloch; governments and parents would become less willing to pay for the full college experience, and employers less willing to tolerate as long a period of goofing off on resumes. Is the brief period of freedom between childhood and employment not worth defending from Moloch by whatever rationalisations and fences are available?
No, it isn’t.
Maybe this is sour grapes, because I spent my time in college actually preparing for my career, but having a four year bacchanalia with other people’s money is pretty much the precise opposite of what young adults should be doing.
Even assuming an 100% consequence-free environment, how exactly is drinking until you puke three nights a week supposed to be a worthy enough endeavor to justify the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs? There’s no reason you couldn’t take one hundredth of what you would have spent getting a degree in critical flower arranging theory and backpack across Europe with it. If anything you’d come out way ahead, since you’d have in all likelihood a more interesting experience while incurring less debt and wouldn’t be over-credentialed for the work you’ll actually end up doing.
The stripped down,non residential approach has been implemted successfully in the form of the Open University.
“The difference with regards to dormitories between US and European colleges probably has a lot to do with the fact that the US is a lot larger than any European country except Russia, meaning that a lot more students will be going to colleges far away from their hometown.”
In the Nordic countries it’s a matter of cultural pride for young people to move away from their parents and often to a wholly different town as early as possible, so while I don’t have the statistics, I’m not sure the rates of people living away from their hometown (their parents, really – that’s what’s being discussed here, no?) are any different.
@Anon256: I see two problems – this is more or less poor people subsidizing rich people’s kids, so that they can have a few years off, while the kids of the same age who do not go to college actually have to work. This is especially the case in continental Europe where higher education is either fully or mostly paid by taxes, less so in the US where it is mostly covered by the parents (but the system still makes it more difficult for poor people to get the higher education because of unnecessary costs which have nothing to do with actual education).
The second problem is that it is simply inefficient. If we want people to have a year or two during their late teens or early twenties to “find themselves” or whatever, then let them do that without the distraction of courses etc. It might even come off cheaper.
And of course – as long as there is a way to get the same kind of education (or rather a certificate which is equally valued) without the luxuries then by all means, keep this kind of a system as well, have the rich kids enjoy the comfort of the campus if their parents are willing to pay for it.
@Tatu: I was talking not so much about leaving town, but about not living in a campus. Campus-style universities are quite uncommon in continental Europe as far as I know (also, I think that in most European countries, kids do not want to go too far from their hometown, although they usually do not want to live with their parents – although I read an article about Italians the other day according to which it is quite normal in Italy for 30year old men to live with their parents…mamma cooks and looks after the boy, so why should he move out? :)) ).
@Tibor: It’s unfortunate that poor people are currently less likely to have the opportunity to spend a few years sheltered from Moloch, but this doesn’t seem like a reason to tear the system down, any more than the poverty of third world countries is a reason to tear down Western welfare states. Work to expand access to more people, not fewer.
“have the rich kids enjoy the comfort of the campus if their parents are willing to pay for it” The trouble is their parents won’t be willing to pay for it if there are socially-acceptable alternatives. Indeed parents would soon find they had little choice but to take the cheaper alternatives in order to afford to compete in positional-goods bidding wars with other parents who had done the same.
While it’s possible to imagine a better system than the status quo, we can’t just decree new social norms and have them stick. The current system co-opts a status arms race to subsidise youth freedom and basic research (without much impact on the Laffer curve). Collapsing this system is unlikely to lead to youth freedom and basic research being subsidised in more efficient ways; the money/resources will likely go to other positional goods instead.
@Mark Atwood: What would you consider “social need”? Society is a tool which exists to increase freedom and fun, and college is where it does this most successfully. Mocking people who spend time on fun and self-reflection reminds me of the rats from the Moloch post who would mock those who spent time on art and leisure rather than devoting themselves single-mindedly to maximising reproduction.
“I must study Politics and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, Natural History, Naval Architecture, Navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelain. My grandchildren ought to study these things in order to give their children the liberty to find themselves while getting drunk three nights a week.”
@Anon256: I generally don’t see subsidizing someone else’s luxuries as a desirable thing. I generally do not like the welfare state because I think its flaws outweigh the benefits but I can at least imagine a scenario where I would support some kind of welfare (something along the lines of a negative income tax). But I don’t see why I should subsidize someone’s leisure, especially if he’s rich, but even if he’s not. Sure, leisure and hobbies (even if those sometimes at least partly overlap with work) are essentially the ultimate goals of everyone so we should not frown upon someone who likes to enjoy them, we all do. But even if you like subsidizing things, you cannot subsidize everything and there are hundreds of things that are worth subsidizing more than hotels for moderately to highly intelligent people in their twenties. Also, I don’t think they really need much of a subsidy. The university can consist of the lecture rooms, everything that is necessary for the research (of course that does not concern bachelor students much, but if you want researchers there, you need it) and that’s it. That would be a lot cheaper. Of course, then you cannot have the Uni in the middle of nowhere, you have to have it in at least a medium size town (100k people let’s say). But all the leisure stuff the students like, they can still do, they just pay for each thing separately instead of a package deal like in an all-inclusive hotel on the French Riviera. They can even live together with other students, it is very common at least in German or Czech cities for students to share a big flat between 5-6 people. There are student dormitories too, but it would work without them as well (the prices in the dormitories are slightly subsidized, but the price difference between a place in the dormitory and a corresponding flat/room in a regular house is usually not more than 20-30%…sometimes you can actually get a better deal outside of the dormitory, although then it is usually a really small room in a shared flat).
@Tibor: I don’t mean to argue that it should be subsidised by taxes/government; my claim is more that the US social norm where middle-class adults buy their children (or past selves via debt) these expensive “packages” is better than the likely alternative. (Dorms vs grouphouses is an implementation detail that I don’t think matters much for this.)
I hope you’re not including CS in “engineering”. It’s notoriously hard to teach people to code (let alone to engineer software or to administer systems!), which means that frequently self-taught people do as well as the formally-educated.
Honestly, it looks from here like everything short of traditional apprenticeships is just a kind of pale shadow thereof. Like, we know how to do education one-on-one, and apart from that it’s kind of a crapshoot. (It seems like too much of a coincidence that the field that has yet to be professionalized is the one where you can do a good job learning on your own.)
Studying CS at university, especially in postgrad, teaches you things you would be unlikely to pick up on your own, but it does not teach you how to code. In terms of utility as a software engineer, it goes like this:
Self-taught coder + formal CS education
Self-taught coder
Formal CS education
“Hacker school” grad
Vagrant
Some of the PhDs I end up having to interview
“Vagrant” should be above “Formal CS education,” but otherwise reasonable.
I agree with your list, BUT the problem with self taught coder + formal CS education is that they don’t know that they still suck.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I’ve been coding professionally for 8 years!” from a 22 year old. Daddy’s friend paid you $20 to make a website for him when you were 14, you want a cookie? Combine that arrogance with the “did I mention I went to STANFORD” and the resulting insufferably density risks forming a black hole. No we aren’t letting you rewrite the core product in Scala or Haskall or Clojure. Now shut the fuck up and fix some bugs.
The only way to become an excellent software engineer is to be a software engineer for a good period of time.
Teal, I’ve interviewed candidates who’ve been employed in the industry for ten years who can’t do FizzBuzz. (The struggle is real!)
For me, it helped to occasionally touch code that I couldn’t understand, e.g., the Linux kernel, and remember that I might be the most competent engineer in the room, but it was a very small room. (I eventually moved to a bigger firm, where I’m a much smaller fish, and I’m quite happy here.)
@Teal:
Time in most jobs makes you far better at the job (with diminishing returns plus a “burn out” factor taking away from that). Even for already experienced workers.
However, the question is why employers/other employees should spend their time making you more productive. Usually its because they have been satisfied you are worth the effort. You only really, really know once someone has been in the job a while, but, given that starting employees are colossally expensive to bring up to speed, one wants to maximize the likelihood that the will actually do so.
>College
>Children
Boy, the infantilisation of college students got internalized fast.
College is just the tail end of the mindset I am referencing. I’ve seen plenty of extension of this to HS, and there is also plenty of references to IQ determining outcome irrespective of education.
I feel pretty comfortable labeling college (at least in many cases) an inefficient potlach.
As the discussion starts moving back towards elementary education, I am not as confident being a skeptic. That said, it does seem like formal education might be a complete waste of time for natural autodidacts… which might explain why the ‘anti-education’ idea finds so many believers here.
I think it just looks that way because US primary and secondary education is so bad. Only the most autodidactical of autodidacts won’t benefit from some direction on what to learn and where to go looking for it, at the very least.
“Only the most autodidactical of autodidacts won’t benefit from some direction on what to learn and where to go looking for it, at the very least.”
Yes. But that direction doesn’t require sitting in a classroom for many hours a day. It can be provided by conversations with people who know stuff, most obviously one’s parents.
Well. If your parent is Milton Friedman, definitely.
I saw “Free to Choose.” David: Do you think it’s too late to change your dad to Tom Sowell? He seems much cooler.
@Air:
I don’t think I look the role. And he’s only fourteen years older than I am, which makes it unlikely although not impossible.
You’ve clearly never seen “Trick Baby.”
Intelligent autodidacts are the people most in need of something like college. At least if they aspire to produce something other than outsider art.
I don’t think sitting in a room for an hour or two with other people and learning things from a wiser person at the front of the room, perhaps based on material by an even wiser person, is an inherently bad idea. I do that every time I attend a conference, for example.
But if that’s all college was, then it’d be harder to say college is (mostly) useless. The problem is, college is mostly NOT that.
Wiser seems to be doing a great deal of lifting there. Or maybe not.
What do you see college as then, exactly?
Disclaimer: I am probably not a typical SSC reader. I’m not into the EA thing, I believe in God, I’m socially conservative, etc.
When we say “college” I’m assuming we’re mostly talking about undergrad, and some amalgam of the educational experience of both STEM and non-STEM majors. Dorm life and campus activities are included too. The typical interaction with college sports (attending a few games, purchasing branded merchandise, sharing class with student athletes) might be considered on top of that. And we’re also talking about college as it’s situated in our society: as a thing that costs a lot of money and usually puts you into a mountain of debt, takes 4 or more years of your life to complete, and spits you out at the end with a piece of paper that a lot of places won’t hire you without but which doesn’t mean a whole lot in terms of your knowledge or preparedness for the practical challenges of everyday work.
Sitting in a room with other people and learning things from a wiser person at the front of the room is a very small part of all that, and sometimes that wiser person is teaching things that are useless or worse than useless.
The biggest problems with college are really part of the problem of how we treat education more generally.
BTW, this isn’t to say that I think people only need to learn by going to the library and reading books (as at least one other commenter seems to be saying). I’m a big fan of the apprenticeship model, though it has its shortcomings too. I’m also not so sure there is a less worse model when I consider what mass immigration and automation has done to a lot of the jobs that would otherwise be done by the huge proportion of people who simply will never be smart enough to earn meaningful college degrees (or in many cases, high school diplomas).
@Good Tea Nice House
In high school I think it is an inherently bad idea.
For the typical SSC reader, lectures are a waste of time because one could learn the same material faster and better by just reading a good book on the subject. If you look for a good book you can find one written by one of the best book-writers in the country, not even limited to currently-living ones and that book has been edited so it’s not full of ums and ahs and mistakes and unplanned digressions.
The fact that in finding a teacher we’re stuck looking among the pool of people who live in your town in easy commute distance of your school and are otherwise unoccupied and we get the best lecture they’re capable of that day, whereas in finding a book we can cast a national or even global net and get a product that took years to refine means the average book is orders of magnitude better (compared to other books) at accomplishing its instructional goals than the average lecture is (compared to other lectures). (And heck, if the lecture WERE better you could transcribe it, edit to tighten it up a bit and…put it in a book!)
So SSC readers would rather just read the book and ignore the lecture.
Another problem is that lectures can only efficiently convey information when people are really interested and motivated to learn it. If a third of the class is behind and lost, a third is ahead and bored, and the remainder that might conceivably benefit isn’t terribly interested in the material and thus isn’t paying much attention, that teacher is lecturing mostly for their own benefit. Schools then become a jobs program for teachers and a daycare program for kids with conveying information nearly an accidental byproduct.
When you go to a conference, your group is highly selected for being interested in that particular material taught that particular way and the conference company has market feedback that gives them an incentive to get rid of boring bad instructors and instruction methods. Schools don’t have such feedback or such highly qualified and pre-selected students, so what works in conferences might not work as well in schools.
Lectures were invented in a time when books were so expensive it made sense to have one guy stand up and read from a single book to the class. Now that books are cheap, I’m not sure the value proposition is still there.
Books have been cheap for almost 600 years. That is plenty of time for the market to adjust to the new “value proposition,” yet lectures in particular, and in-person tuition in general, are very far from dying out.
My local library is full of fascinating textbooks on every academic subject under the sun. Why bother going to university, when you can just go to the library? If you spent 40 hours a week reading those books in the library and working through the examples, I’m sure you’d learn much more than if you spent the equivalent time going to lectures and tutorials, but I’m also sure that that section of the library is deserted. Lots of people are checking out the James Patterson and Danielle Steel novels, though.
If you think a book is a near substitute for a lecture, could it be that you are missing an important part of what a lecture provides? I know that I don’t consider them near substitutes, and I am far less certain than you on the views of the mythical “typical SSC reader.”
Perhaps a closer substitute for a lecture is a youtube video of a lecture. That scales well, can be rehearsed and edited, and consumed at a time convenient for the customer – all the things you consider so important. This kind of thinking is behind MOOCs, etc. We will see how it goes, but I predict mostly failure. A youtube video of a lecture seems to me too much like a book, and too little like a lecture, to be successful.
I ditched a lot of lectures during my bachelor and mostly learned the stuff from books. I studied “general mathematics” (which included the basics of mathematical analysis, algebra, probability theory, statistics and numerics as well as a bit of computer science) in my Bachelor, probability theory during my Master (there the lectures were more specialized and a bit less basic, so also more local…but even then I probably only came to like 75% of the lectures). The main reason to come to the lecture for me was to make myself actually go through the material before the exam period. But if I had more willpower, I could probably ditch two thirds or even more of the lectures and read everything from books plus an occasional consultation with the lecturer (I usually read and tried to understand all of the lecture material then I wrote a list of questions and arranged for a consultation with the lecturer where I asked about those comments).
I think that the main reason we have the same kind of lectures people have had for hundreds of years is that somehow it is perceived as “less serious study” to just read books, even though usually the opposite is true.
There are some obvious exceptions – if you have to work in a lab in your field, then you are back in the scenario where study material is expensive (or impossible to get legally as a private person – certain chemicals or dead bodies are obvious examples) and so it makes sense for people to meet in a room with a lecturer. Also, one-on-one studying is undoubtedly superior to just reading books, but this only happens during the PhD, undegrad lectures cannot really be tailored to specific individuals.
Aren’t we pretty sure the answer is ‘signalling’? Reading books and getting an education doesn’t get you a credential, and that’s what the education system is.
Teachers pretend to teach; students pretend to learn; employers pretend that it really matters that you have a well-rounded liberal arts education. A closed-loop Human Centipede of lies and fakery. It’s common for educators to complain about it.
I heartily agree that credentialism is part of the answer. One of the things that the lecture series provides is a credential at the end.
It’s not the whole thing, though. One of the big things they’re selling is motivation. Even Tibor writes:
Unfortunately he can’t take that thought any further, and falls back on “oh, we go to lectures because that’s how it’s always done.”
I personally much prefer lectures. I *can* learn from a book, but it goes much more easily when I have an expert walk me through examples, and can fill in gaps in response to my questions.
I don’t even like webcast lectures; I much prefer in-person.
I heartily agree with @Salem here.
One of the things that bug me about the SSC zeitgeist around education is that it assumes that we can ramp up “autodidact” to a whole population, with, as near as I can tell, zero evidence.
Scott links me to a post where the best study on unschooling he can find is N=12, and never mentions selection effect at all. If this were a post citing a study on the latest research on teaching “grit”, I think we know what Scott would say.
I find that for learning concepts rather than facts, a one-to-one chat is many, many times more useful than reading a book, to the extent that a five minute chat with a lecturer has brought me to understanding when hours of reading the material was insufficient.
“If you think a book is a near substitute for a lecture, could it be that you are missing an important part of what a lecture provides?”
Yes. But after thinking about the question for several decades I have not yet figured out what it is.
My view of the subject amounts to Glenn’s argument plus the puzzle you raise–why the mass lecture survived the invention of the printing press. Small classes make some sense because of interaction, but a lecture with three hundred students in the room seems in all important ways inferior to a book. Yet they are still given.
Surely the point of lectures, as opposed to books, is to help people overcome akrasia. If you have a book in your possession, you can start reading it any time you like, and once you’ve started you can stop reading any time you like. The scheduling of your study sessions is entirely up to you. But if you’re going to lectures, you have to keep to the lecturer’s schedule. Even if there are no penalties for you if you miss a lecture, the lecturer’s schedule is a Schelling point.
I’m a university student. If I had been learning from books alone instead of lectures, I think it’s possible I might still be about as knowledgeable as I am now about the subject I’m learning, but I think my knowledge would be more focused on the particular areas of the subject I’m interested in, and more patchy in generality. That might be a worthwhile trade-off; I don’t know. But I’m probably an unusually conscientious student. I think most people probably end up learning more via lectures than they would if they just read books.
I just wanted to chime in that I always got a lot more out of college lectures than the books. Even when I actually read the books, which I often didn’t because the assigned sections are often too long to reasonably do in combination with everything else, kind of boring, and not very helpful for getting an A on the exam.
For instance, I think I got a much better understanding of Aristotle’s or Immanuel Kant’s philosophies from listening to a professor talk about them than from trying to read that stuff. This has some relation to the fact that what’s usually assigned for the readings are primary sources, which I tend to think are of…dubious value, especially as introductory material.
But I’ve always considered myself more of an “auditory learner”, as much as that distinction is valid. I tend to remember what I’ve heard significantly better than what I’ve read, and I definitely find it much easier to focus on auditory material. That said, I can’t stand watching videos on the internet explaining how to do something because the people are too long-winded and talk too slow.
In any case, I always hated every kind of “participatory” or “hands-on” project in school. My favorite type of education has always been the “sit quietly while you’re being lectured to” model. With questions allowed, but not when it turns into the students talking more than the teacher.
I don’t see why you kids are trying to explain mass lectures and other educational artifacts rationally when the real explanation is path dependence. Big lecture halls are what we’ve always done. If there was a better way, and if the system were subject to pressure (e.g. market forces) to find the best way to impart knowledge, we would change. We haven’t. Determining which of the above conjuncts is false is left as exercise for the reader. Anyhow, that’s all for today. See you next class. Don’t forget to study for the midterm next tuesday!
By “typical SSC reader” I mainly meant “person with >130 IQ who enjoys reading”.
So…consider a typical math class in front of 30 kids. The teacher is not as smart as the brightest kids in the class to begin with and that teacher is presenting a lecture which has to cover the material slowly enough that the class doesn’t get lost and confused, which means repetition and overlap. You start each year with a week or more of review that assumes kids don’t remember anything they learned the prior year (which is not true for some) and move on from there at a pace such that the kids in the bottom third of the class can keep up. This means kids in the top third are bored out of their skulls. I survived most classes by ignoring the lectures as I sat in the back and read books hidden under the desk, occasionally glancing up at the board to see if I’m missing anything. At the time I thought I was getting away with something but looking back I’m sure my teachers knew and didn’t mind as long as I wasn’t disruptive and at least occasionally pretended to be paying attention.
In math class, the teacher discussed the same material that was in the book only less efficiently; the best use of my time was to either read the book *or* pay attention to lectures, not both.
I feel like I learned much more despite than due to my classes – I could have learned more and faster without them.
But this argument applies much more strongly to grade school and high school than college. And it doesn’t apply at all to classes teaching things you can’t learn directly from a book, like pottery or drawing, or to classes where the teacher is for some reason unusually gifted. But it applies to the typical class at the typical high school.
It applies the most strongly to situation where the teacher sees their job as spelling things out – elaborating on how to apply what’s in the book – before students who don’t need that service because they read the book and understood it.
Regarding ‘motivation”: one reason it’s hard to motivate kids to learn is that you’re teaching them something they don’t yet need to learn. If they wait and learn it later when it’s relevant to something they need to do, it’ll be easier then.
The good news is indeed that online universities are likely to disrupt this. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
“But this argument applies much more strongly to grade school and high school than college. ”
Your example was math. For the most advanced math classes I took (nominally grad students only), there was no book. I took notes from the blackboard, made no attempt to keep up or follow in any detail what the professor was teaching, learned the course in the week or so before the final from my notes. It would have been a little easier from a book.
@David:
Clearly you take better notes than I do! 🙂
One reasons I thought my argument applies somewhat less to college is that fewer college students are legally required to be present in the room. If everyone who really doesn’t want to be there either doesn’t sign up for the class or doesn’t bother to attend, the teacher can teach faster. Another is that college professors might somewhat more plausibly have unique insight into the material or be teaching something for which the definitive book hasn’t yet been written.
“Another is that college professors might somewhat more plausibly have unique insight into the material or be teaching something for which the definitive book hasn’t yet been written.”
It doesn’t seem likely. Most fields don’t change that rapidly, and only a small fraction of college professors are actually original thinkers with unique insight.
The one clear advantage of a class is interaction, but that doesn’t apply to large lecture classes, which are the ones whose survival I find puzzling.
I asked questions in all, or at least most, of the large lecture classes I had. I have to think I wasn’t the only one who got benefit out of that, if for no other reason than they made lectures less predictable.
My father used interactive feedback devices to make his large lecture Econ classes interactive. He regularly used that method to do things like market simulation.
Large lectures can most certainly be interactive, to some extent.
@Salem: I think you could set up better mechanism than going to the lecture though and so the motivation really is not the main reason lectures are held. A typical lecture lasts 90 minutes. In those 90 minutes I would usually mostly copy the blackboard into my notes (and I would not even do that when there were good lecture notes provided by the lecturer, which was sometimes the case). Maybe some people are better at concentrating but to me this means paying less attention to what the lecturer is actually saying then if I just listened. This hardly seems like the optimal way to motivate people to study. If nothing else, especially in the big bachelor level lectures, the presence of the lecturer is almost unnecessary. For example you could arrange for scheduled meetings of the students where they read the provided lecture notes together (they could then also meet in much smaller groups). Then some questions could be answered by other students and for the remaining ones you could have a consultation lecture every few weeks where the lecturer would answer these. When there were good lecture notes provided, this was often more or less what I did (except that I usually read it alone or maybe with one other student) and I would come to the lecture from time to time mostly to show up because I thought the lecturer would not like a student who never comes to the lecture and then only shows up for the exam. And even though I did go to some lectures in order to study at a more steady pace (as opposed to learning everything during the exam period), I still had to do most of the work at home, being at the lecture gave me a rough idea about what the lecture was about but I still had to go through the notes afterwards. 90 minutes at the lecture saved me on average something like 45 minutes of reading on my own.
Exercise classes were very different, not just because attendance was often required but also because it was actually useful to be there. I could also usually get a more clear understanding of the concepts from the lecture there. 90 minutes at the exercise class could save me as much as twice the time studying at home.
In my master and in the few lectures I took during my PhD there were usually not more than 5 people attending the class, on two occasions there were only two of us attending the class. In these quantities, one can really do things a book cannot, you can also stop and explain something every time someone does not understand it.
I also have another problem with lectures – I am usually able to follow the line of argument but to put everything together into a bigger picture, I have to go back and reread the whole thing. It happened to me quite often that we were proving a really complicated and technical theorem and at the end of the proof I forgot what we were actually trying to prove and would have to backtrack a bit. Other times, something was explained in more detail than I though was necessary, because the argument was (to me) obvious. This happens even at small lectures, but there you can usually actually stop the lecturer and ask. If everyone did it at a lecture with 200 students, it would take twice as much time and half of the people would get bored quickly.
At the end of the day, like my PhD advisor says – you don’t really understand anything before you start doing it. Unless you actually start applying what you learn yourself (at least in the form of a bachelor/master thesis), your understanding will be very superficial at best (more likely, you’ll forget a lot). Of course, in maths you get to apply a lot of the basic stuff while learning the more advanced things, so this is less an issue with calculus or linear algebra but more with more advanced (and specialized) material. I think this might be even more true in other fields where things are less built on top of each other than in maths.
@Tibor:
In regards to note talking, I believe there is good research that, for many/most people, hearing something and then writing it down leads to far better memory retention than just listening. The same is also true for reading, but I seem to recall it not being as effective.
Take that with a grain of salt, because I certainly didn’t read any primary papers on the effect.
@HeelBearCub: I think that’s is true, it definitely works with me, although I suspect that the writing bit is the most important. I can still recall one time in the grammar school where I was either ill or on a vacation with my parents for a week or two and then I borrowed my classmate’s physics notes to copy them (I think we did not have a scanner at home back then). I wanted to be examined afterwards so I planned to copy the notes and then to learn it. But to my surprise I had already learned it while rewriting it from my classmate’s notes.
I also used to write theorems and proofs during my bachelor and master while studying for the exam instead of just reading them, or rather I would first read it and then try to recreate the theorem and the proof on paper (eventually, I would write the main ideas of the proofs only since I was confident I could work that out if needed, but especially in the bachelor when I was a complete beginner, I would usually write the whole thing while studying).
Even today, when I read a paper for example, I like to make “paper notes” if the paper is technical and complicated.
I also find colloquium talks or conference talks useful. Well, some of them…especially other PhD students often have quite horrible talks full of formulas and technical details which one simply cannot follow in the 30 or so minutes a typical conference talks has. But there are amazing talks sometimes when after 30 minutes I feel like I understand all the ideas perfectly and all that is left are boring technicalities (these are usually talks of much more experienced people). But lectures are different. There you actually do all the boring technicalities and I have a horrible attention spam (I can sort of pay attention for one hour, after that I keep zooming out without noticing, sometimes it happens even sooner), so often I would realize I missed the last 5 minutes while thinking about something completely unrelated (without even realizing it) and could not keep up with the last argument because of that.
If lecture talks were structured more like good conference talks – omitting the details, giving the main ideas and the big picture and assuming that the rest would be filled in by the students themselves, perhaps using the provided lecture notes (where it would be written in detail), then they would be a lot more useful. But this is very rarely how things are done in practice.
Lectures are, I think, still useful for the same reason newbies in online games ask their questions in chat rather than consulting the manual – substitute “textbooks” for “manual” and “academic subjects” for “online games”.
A textbook will (probably) contain the information you’ll need for your specific inquiry, but it also contains a lot of other, less-immediately-relevant information, and however trivial a skill “checking the table of contents and index” is, very few people master it to a degree where it’s faster than just asking the expert in residence. Plus, some people just learn better with their ears than their eyes.
I’m wary of generalising these observations for three reasons: (i) I’m from Ireland, which features heavily subsidised university education and isn’t the poison debt pit of the US, (ii) I studied undergraduate law, which is as much a craft as it is an academic subject and (iii) I think a lot of these arguments are being made in the context of the US, specifically undergraduate liberal arts courses of dubious utility. That said, here are some generalised observations.
In the first place, I think it’s a bad position to start from the assumption that many or most people who receive a university education are similar to the aloof latterday philosopher kings that populate the SSC comments section. I would’ve been heavily in favour of the approach whereby people simply read books to learn as opposed to having those books effectively read out to them, but having subsequently met a large number of people who would describe that process of self-learning as a literal(figurative) hell, I’m sympathetic to the idea that lectures work and work well for a lot of people.
Going to lectures and following them through demands a degree of rigour and thoroughness that I don’t think I would’ve supplied myself had I been allowed to study at my fancy. When I didn’t attend lectures I produced some very good stuff on esoteric and interesting topics but would find myself struggling to remember precisely the basic ingredients for negligence in tort. I felt very unmoored from the boring but important workaday elements of the law.
Being lectured by somebody who has good practical experience in a subject was invaluable. It provided a context and savvy professional awareness of the law that simply couldn’t have been replicated by the experience of sitting in a room reading the law reports cover to cover.
Lectures don’t work particularly well for people who are going to work at the top of their field or in an academic position producing new scholarship in that field. But I don’t think that’s their ambition. They’re designed to force large numbers of students to remember and engage with large volumes of boring but necessary information while providing some minimal level of personal interaction and reassurance as well as the ability to ask for in-person clarification of particular problems that the student might be experiencing. Combined with tutorials, they’re quite good at doing that.
“Being lectured by somebody who has good practical experience in a subject was invaluable. It provided a context and savvy professional awareness of the law that simply couldn’t have been replicated by the experience of sitting in a room reading the law reports cover to cover.”
How about sitting in a room reading a book written by someone with good practical experience–whatever person among those with such experience who does the best job of writing such a book? What is it the lecturer can give you in a lecture that he can’t give you in a book, and how does it make up for the fact that you get to be much more selective in books than in lecturers?
Have you really never heard of the typical mind fallacy?
This is like Rafael Nadal going around and tennis forum and incessantly asking people why they can’t just hit the ball 120 MPH. It’s easy!
You can’t ask a book questions. and books generally don’t tailor their output to the audience.
“How about sitting in a room reading a book written by someone with good practical experience–whatever person among those with such experience who does the best job of writing such a book? What is it the lecturer can give you in a lecture that he can’t give you in a book, and how does it make up for the fact that you get to be much more selective in books than in lecturers?”
As the guy below said, I think you might be generalising from your own experience as a very smart, autodidactic person.
Keep in mind that you’re dealing with undergraduates, who for the most part have little to no purchase on the academic intricacies of the subject that they’re studying. So while you might be able to sort good scholarship from bad, relevant from irrelevant, contemporary from outdated, most people entering into a subject haven’t the faintest idea where to start. Without the guidance that some form of knowledge curation (like lectures) provides, it can be a very disheartening experience to plunge into a new field of knowledge.
One might say that these goods could be provided by a Youtube series, and I’m very sympathetic to that argument; I’m sure there’s many other factors at play, but considering that the core good sold by a university is brainy people talking in a room full of people and brainy people thinking silently in a room alone it seems ridiculous that it should cost so much.
At the same time, I think it underestimates the importance of in-person interaction with a lecturer and sense of shared competition/suffering/enlightenment of going through lectures with a peer group.
I suppose the classic example in law would be a professor saying: “The law is X, though in my years of practice I have found that it applies with corollary Y, or is only relevant where Z is pleaded.” Perhaps they give you a broader context within which a regulatory scheme applies. Or they give you an anecdote from practice which provides insight into the life of a corporate lawyer. You can imagine. Surely as a lawyer you’ve come across legislation or a legal anomaly which seems ridiculous on its face but made sense once someone contextualised it for you?
“Surely as a lawyer”
I’m not a lawyer. I’m an academic economist who teaches in a law school.
So far as your general point, a good book, like a good lecture, points the reader at the things he needs to learn, so I don’t see the advantage of the latter. I’m not suggesting that people replace a lecture with a research program, which is what you seem to be describing. And I still don’t see why the sorts of information you describe in a hypothetical law school lecture couldn’t be provided just as well in a book.
@David Friedman
Do you have some examples of the good books you’re talking about? My impression is that you’ve gained basic competency in several fields through self-study. Each time you did that did you use a single book, or multiple? Did you have to try bad books before finding a good book? How did you know which books were the good ones?
I ask partly because I’m not sure I have ever learned an entirely new skill from a single book. I learned more from Taylor’s Classical Mechanics than from my lectures, but that came after several years of studying physics and math, and I learned group representation theory from a book, but only after two very good lecture courses on math foundations and abstract algebra. Honestly I’m having a hard time imagining the sort of good book you’re talking about.
@David Friedman:
Perhaps you have put me on mute, but I would still like you address the idea of whether you can confidently assert that lectures and books are perfect substitutions for each other.
Paring knives and butter knives are far more similar to each other than books and lectures, yet each is very much unsuited to the task done by the other.
@smocc:
I learned the new skill of counting cards at blackjack from a single book, Million Dollar Blackjack by Ken Uston. It’s not a great book but it was the first one on the subject I randomly came across. I had learned that skill once I read that one book, spent a bunch of hours practicing, then spent some hours playing in a casino.
(Since then I’ve read a dozen other blackjack books – my favorite of the later set was Blackbelt In Blackjack by Arnold Snyder – and subscribed to newsletters and forums and revised my strategies many times, but that first book got me started.)
Heck, even when I joined a blackjack team which required learning a new system and mastering new rules about money management and checkouts and such, that stuff all got written down. The info I needed was provided in a text file and emails, not a classroom lecture.
Or as a second example: for both libertarian-ish political theory and economics, my gateway book was Free To Choose by Milton Friedman. (sometime after that I went through a phase of reading economics textbooks for fun, but FtC instilled the economic way of thinking and gave me the idea there was something worth knowing in there.)
I don’t think I’ve ever read just one book on a subject I’m interested in, but I’ve often had the experience that the first book changes the way I think about that subject, primes me to want to read more, and provides pointers to other relevant books or related topics.
I could list lots of other specific books that worked like that for me but honestly if you just go to any bookstore or library, wander through the section related to the topic you’re interested in, pick up and skim texts at random until you find one that looks kind of interesting and seems to be written well…that’s the one you want. Read it all the way through (it helps to be a completionist) and you’re on your way to understanding that subject better than you did before. Now find and read ten more and you’ll start to have a sense of the field.
(this method has served me especially well in bookstores near a college campus or in a subject-specific university library, but it probably generalizes to wherever you are.)
@HeelBearCub
Didn’t David directly answer that question here? He said there might be some advantage to lectures but (after much thought) he doesn’t know what it is.
As for me, I can think of a few conceivable advantages to lectures. For instance:
(1) There is a theory that some people are auditory learners – they learn better from hearing than from reading. Maybe they get something out of vocal tone or body language that helps retain info better, or maybe they’re poor readers or have especially good hearing or especially poor eyesight or need glasses. Those people should attend lectures or perhaps read books-on-tape.
(2) There is a theory that teachers aren’t really there to convey knowledge at all. You teach who you are is the phrase. The teacher is there to be a positive role model, to provide the students with an example of a functioning adult person who they can emulate as they themselves try to become functioning adult persons. The material is only an excuse to bring students and teacher together. From this perspective when the teacher digresses from the topic to discuss say, where they went on vacation or what they had for lunch, you might be learning more of what really matters than if they stick to the material!
(3) there are (very very rarely) some subjects in which scholarship is changing so quickly that a good book on the subject doesn’t exist yet.
(4) There are some subjects in which the lecture is inherently hard to write down, perhaps because there are physical demonstrations involved (eg, physics experiments).
(5) Some lecturers are really entertaining speakers or are really famous, such that students have fun or like to be able to say they met or learned from that person in person, regardless of whether they learned much. Or students might hope to glean additional nuance on a topic they already know really well. (It’s kind of like the difference between a live concert and listening to the album.)
I am sure #1 is true for some people, though it didn’t apply to me when I was in school. I have been motivated by #5 and #2 a few times.
Upshot: it’s easier to explain the persistence of lectures if one drops the premise that the sole point of a lecture is to impart knowledge. Because in the main, books do that better.
@Glen Raphael:
Thanks for pointing me at that comment. I had read it, and it predates my question to him. It’s a little unclear to me, but it seems to me he is only engaging in epistemic humility, allowing that he might be wrong about lectures and books being substitutes. He does not seem to be saying he thinks there might be advantages to lectures.
And my question is, again, why would we think that two things that are so very different from each other would not have comparative strengths and weaknesses? Most college classes use both.
As to your points, that seems like a good list, but I think you are really underselling #1. Universal US literacy (let alone world literacy) is, what, less than 50 years old? Whereas homo sapiens verbal communication is at least 100,000 years old? And primate language of some sort is probably much older?
I know which one my money is on for being more prevalent in terms of learning styles.
I also think that missing from your list is the concept of reinforcement. Most learning requires repetition. Ideally, you read an assignment before the lecture, you hear the lecture, you write down the lecture in the form of notes and you discuss the lecture in study groups or sections. Not only are repeating the information, you are doing it in different ways, and I believe research supports that doing it in different ways is better. If you could smell the information, it would be even better. 😀
Good books:
My standard example is _The Selfish Gene_, which teaches evolutionary biology and makes it fun. I thought of that as in part a model for my _Hidden Order_, which tries to do the same thing for price theory.
I learned quite a lot from Marshall’s _Principles_, the book that really put modern economics together a little over a century ago.
If I hadn’t studied physics in class, Feynman would probably have been a good way of learning it.
Poetry, one of my interests, I learned almost entirely by reading poems, not either by taking classes or reading books about poetry.
_The Elements of Style_ is a pretty good book for learning to write better. But I think most of my training in writing was doing it. For some years I was the token libertarian columnist for a conservative student magazine. I had a word limit, I think 800 words, and fitting what I had to say into it was very good training.
Law I have learned in part reading articles, in part teaching courses, which sometimes involved reading the textbook.
But a lot of what I learned was from talking with people and teaching courses. When I came to VPI as an assistant professor of economics, I got assigned, I suspect deliberately by Jim Buchanan, to teach a large part of the syllabus. Teaching things is a good way of learning them.
More generally, I think my learning was more something that happened in my head, although books helped. When I started writing my price theory text, if you had asked me how many pages it would take to explain the subject I would probably have guessed fifty or so. Actually doing it forced me to think through the ideas underneath the ideas, and the book ended up at something like ten times that length–teaching me quite a lot.
So I’m not that good an example for my argument. I sometimes say that you never really understand an idea until you have invented it yourself.
@HeelBearCub:
I don’t think I’ve put anyone on mute–I’m not even sure how to do it. If I find comments uninteresting I just skip over them.
Books and lectures are not perfect substitutes. My argument is that the book is a superior substitute for the mass lecture, not always for the class small enough so that most students have substantial interaction with the teacher.
And I recognize that the continued use of mass lectures is evidence against my argument. That’s a puzzle to which I have not found an adequate solution.
@David Friedman:
Thank you for clarifying. My brief thought on why the mass lecture continues in higher education is simply that it is a gate preventing those who have not been exposed to the introduction concepts from taking higher level courses. Gates of course don’t only prevent entrance, they also mark the entrance, so one can think of mass lectures as marketing for the field of study.
It’s not clear to me, however, what this has to do with college writ large, as mass lectures are significantly in the minority of courses taken.
@HeelBearCub:
Wait, they are? How are you measuring that?
My undergraduate degree was at UC Berkeley (which had 30,000 students at the time); nearly every class I took was a mass lecture. (As an undergrad at Berkeley if you want fewer than 50 people in the room, that’s what discussion sections or office hours are for.)
That may be a feature of Berkeley specifically; I went to a large state school, but the huge lecture halls were mostly just for introductory classes. After the first couple years all my classes were in reasonably-sized classrooms, maybe thirty students at most. I’m really struggling to see how you would hope to teach upper-level undergrad stuff in a mass lecture.
@Glen Raphael:
73% of Berkley’s undergraduate classes are fewer than 30 students in size.
Perhaps this was a function of your particular major? When did you graduate and with what degree, if you don’t mind me asking?
If you experience of a college was entirely 400 student lectures, well, you didn’t have anything like the typical experience.
HeelBearCub:
Graduated UCB in 1990. I competed a major in Computer Science and most of a minor in Philosophy. So the big classes were in CS, Philosophy, music, various electives and core requirements.
At the time, CS was “an impacted major” (meaning more students than they could reasonably handle wanted to get in). It still is today. Intro to CS is the largest class at Berkeley, serving ~1100 students in a lecture hall with 750 seats.
There is a fantastic video illustration using pills to show class sizes at the bottom of this article.
The claim “73% of classes are <30 people" has an obvious implication which is false due to selection effects – it doesn’t mean an average student experiences mostly small classes.
UPDATE: hang on, let’s do some math on that. Suppose we divide Berkeley classes into two types we call “popular” and “unpopular”.
An “unpopular” class is one taught by an unpopular professor on an unpopular subject, connected to an unpopular major. To make the math easy, let’s say the average class size is 10.
A “popular” class is one that serves an especially popular subject or major or is a basic intro to something important, or it is a class taught by a superstar professor (say, a philosophy class taught by John “Chinese Room” Searle). These classes overflow the room, have students standing in aisles and turned away due to overcrowding. Let’s say the average class size is 500.
73 “unpopular” classes of 10 = 730 students.
27 “popular” classes of 500 = 13,500 students
Given that math, at any given time 5.4% of students are in the small classes and 94.6% of the students are in the big classes.
Students who spend extra time, effort, and creativity studying the ratings and strategizing out how to get into especially good classes would be expected to spend even more time in large classes. Students who pick really popular majors would also be in a large fraction of big classes – I did both those things. On the other hand, students who pick an especially obscure major might get to spend nearly all their time in small classes, seeing the same few people all the time in them.
I’ve exaggerated the case a bit for dramatic effect, but not all that much. Possibly the best thing I learned from Berkeley was the value of persistence. When you really want to crash a 600-student class which you didn’t get because it’s “full”, if you just keep showing up eventually the other dozen or two people trying to add will give up and leave. A week or two later you’ll have no trouble adding the class, the Prof will just sigh and say “are you still here? Sure, I’ll sign the add form.”
I completed a Math Degree (which was really a Comp. Sci. degree) from UNC in ’91.
My experience was absolutely nothing like that. Large lecture classes were reserved for intro to Psych, Econ, Geography and maybe a few others. Comp. Sci course topped out at about 50 (maybe 100 in Intro to Comp. Sci?) and got smaller the more advanced they were. Math classes were around 30. Physics was around 50. I took a variety of general college courses in a variety of other departments, all (or almost all) of them 30 students or less. I recall that all my large lecture classes also had sections which met weekly as well, which were maybe 20 or 30 people.
Our required course of study didn’t let us take mostly large, 100+ lecture classes. The required course work routed you through mostly smaller classes.
My daughter is currently at a school of 800 where most of the classes are 15 or 20 people. I don’t think they even have a large lecture hall.
Edit:
And that article seems particularly linked to programming being more and more linked into every other field of study, leading to lower level courses being swamped with demand. That’s not an example of what a typical bio, history, poli. sci., psychology, etc. major would experience.
Yeah, that sounds like a problem relatively unique to Berkeley. I remember when I was shopping around for colleges I visited Berkeley and thought the place seemed dingy and poorly maintained. Maybe they just don’t have the funding to do a proper job teaching their students? I wouldn’t generalize to the average undergrad experience based on that.
Note that adult second-language classes (particular for immigrants) are subject to few of the distortions present in other forms of education (the people paying are generally the ones benefiting, they can mostly tell whether they’re learning what they should, government involvement is minimal, the focus is on useful skills not credentials or abstract virtue). But these also often take the form of small lectures.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic is useful. Algebra is sometimes useful in daily life. Geometry is rarely useful in daily life (at least, for me). Everybody forgets their science classes, but everyone should know some basic science stuff (you leave more sweat on your shirt in human air, man evolved from apes, enzymes are proteins, stuff like that).
I don’t know if I can decide where education crosses over from useful to useless. Theology is definitely useless, electrical engineering is definitely useful.
Is electrical engineering useful to the guy who doesn’t want to be an electrical engineer? Sure, they might be better positioned to do something in the event of an outage but we don’t give mandatory plumbing classes.
I meant as in utility to society in general. True, not everyone needs to be an electrical engineer.
Apparently it’s very useful if you want to run a venture capital firm in silicon valley, for some reason.
Presumably someone thinks theology is worthwhile.
The problem isn’t education per se, but that the education we teach tends to be low value. Most of formal schooling is little more than an information cram, which isn’t very helpful for most people. It is like this because it is easy to write and test your memorization of data. The important lessons are (almost) never formally taught. Instead we are expected to acquire them along the way.
Perhaps I am wrong, but how many people that went through the school system learned (in class):
1: How to manage your finances.
2: How to complete basic repairs/maintenance.
3: How to negotiate.
4: How to identify manipulation and lies.
5: How to interact with the government (police, social services, etc).
6: How to choose a life partner.
7: How to become employed.
8: How to choose a profession.
These seem to be absolutely essential things for any person to learn to make the best out of their life, but I wager not 1 in 20 people covered more than 2 of these things in ‘school’.
1. Do not spend more than you make. From a Dickens book where a character says that, for a man with an income of 20 pounds, spending 19 pounds and 19 schillings is happiness, but spending 20 pounds and one schilling is ruin. Or something to that effect.
Also basic economics and accounting, in high school.
2. No, and I haven’t felt the need for it.
3. No, although you could argue that there are enough examples in history.
4. Not explicitly, but yes.
5. Basic civics, yes.
6. Not as such, but I read enough writers’ opinions.
7. Yes.
8. Sort of.
But I don’t think these things necessarily need to be taught in school, especially at their the most basic level, which seems to be what you have in mind. School is not meant to take in feral children and spit out functioning members of society. There is a (fully reasonable) expectation that parenting and other out-of-school learning is going to happen.
“School is not meant to take in feral children and spit out functioning members of society.”
Excepting ‘feral’, this seems to be largely what it is sold as and what a lot people expect from it.
I agree that it isn’t what it actually does, nor was it the original design purpose.
Micawber, in David Copperfield, Chapter 12: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
(I could have sworn it was a Chesterton quote, to the point where I was surprised David Friedman hadn’t corrected you yet 🙂 ).
@Jason K.:
Paul Graham talks about how you can tell the real purpose of an institution by looking at what it makes easy and what it makes hard. He notes that it was easy to go all day without learning anything at his high school, but next to impossible to leave campus without being caught.
Paul Graham is too much in love with a pithy quote and too little in love with the truth. It’s easy to avoid getting a driver’s license at the DMV and hard to convince the pretty clerk to sleep with me, but one should not conclude that the DMV exists to keep me sexually frustrated.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/
Where is the evidence that, at a population level, unschooling can actually work? N=12 has to be bound by selection effect to a ludicrously high degree.
You might want to look at the literature on Sudbury Valley School. N is considerably greater than twelve.
Whether it works for most people is hard to tell, since unschooling is pretty rare at present.
So, I see Sudbury costs $8700 per year to attend, which is really close to the $10,700 average cost per pupil of public school in the U.S.
Pretty much blows most of Scott’s post out of the water.
Now, I was a Montessori kid early on, as were my kids, and my mom is a Montessori pre-school teacher, so I am actually a big fan of self-directed learning. But it does require resources and guidance. And it doesn’t necessarily work for every kid.
I watched my oldest kid just stop working when she hit fourth grade, because akrasia is a mother.
@HeelBearCub
I know I’d like a 20% cut in my property taxes, perhaps it’s worth a look?
The original Sudbury School has a fabulous physical location and some prestige value; tuition is $8700 for the first child per family, $7400 for the second, $6000 for each additional child. (You can find much cheaper Sudbury-type schools in other locations.)
Er…the per-pupil cost of public school in that district (Sudbury, MA, typical for that state) is 14,246 (source).
So even the first kid per family saves 40%. Presumably if that schooling model became more popular there’s room for economies of scale beyond that, but it seems like a good start, no?
Scott’s whole post is premised on the idea that the entire cost of public schooling and college can be recouped as GBI, which it doesn’t seem unschooling actually allows you to do.
The cost of Sudbury also doesn’t deal with selection effect, so it’s not clear to me whether one can actual even do it at the price if you try and role it out to the whole country. Perhaps economies of scale would take effect, perhaps things would be more expensive when you start trying to unschool everyone. And that assumes that unschooling is actually effective for families who don’t “opt in” to it.
I also am unsure if Sudbury has any sort of non-tuition based funding. For instance, do they have an endowment of any kind?
In any case, unschooling may be less “expensive” than current public schools, but what is blown out of the water is the idea that unschooling is free.
True unschooling is illegal or nearly-so in many (most?) metropolitan areas due to truancy laws. The Sudbury Valley School is first and foremost a school so they have to pay the cost of dedicated staffing and real estate. If you want to send your kids to “a school” that practices unschooling and meets all the state regulatory criteria for fitting the description of a school, there aren’t a lot of options for that and the few institutions doing it face a fair number of inherent costs.
If unschooling were more socially acceptable then people could do the exact same thing at home (or in a random neighbor’s backyard or garage or at the park…) without all the parents involved being at risk of their kids being taken away from them. That’s where we could get the other 50% savings from.
“selection effect” could go either way – one reason parents pick private schools is that their particular kids do badly in public schools. Also, a lot of “problem kids” in the public schools aren’t a problem under Sudbury-type methods. Public school social pathologies often have to do with the weird learning environment – segregating kids by age, giving them no control over what they learn or when, expecting them to sit still and be quiet and stay in a particular place on cue, expecting them to learn at a particular pace and order. The Sudbury method plausibly scales across a wider variety of learning styles.
@Glen Raphael:
So now you want everyone from pre-K through college to be completely without any dedicated adult or teacher support for 8 to 10 hours per day? Because that is what your suggestion seems to actually boil down to.
Heck no! I just want something vaguely resembling that option to be legally allowed. I wouldn’t inflict it on everyone. Right now it’s almost completely illegal, and I think there are probably stages in between “X is illegal” and “let’s force everyone to do X”.
“I seek the staid, moderate middle ground between prohibition and compulsion.”
Remember, a lot of people here – or perhaps their parents – grew up in a time when it was socially allowable to hire a local teenager to babysit your kids and it was socially allowable for kids to play in the backyard or the front yard or even the street without a grownup present and it was socially allowable for relatively little kids to ride their bikes long distances. Or get on a plane by themselves, to be met at the other end. Or ride a bus on their own. Or arrive home before their parents do and look after themselves for a couple hours (aka “latchkey kids”).
If you relax the constraints that enforce the current model of schooling, that doesn’t mean we end up that everyone at every age is completely without any dedicated adult or teacher support. Rather, it seems likely to me the median result is that some kids get some unstructured and unmonitored or less-monitored time to play or read a book or learn on their own.
Maybe you have a dedicated adult or teacher part-time, like you see them only on certain days or at certain hours of the day instead of them being there all the time. Or maybe you have older kids responsible for younger kids. Or maybe kids work with their parents or take a side job or volunteer or apprentice somewhere to learn stuff that way.
(I still get the feeling you’re not grokking how self-directed learning works, but I’m not sure where the disconnect is.)
Self-directed learning? I’m fairly familiar with it, as my mother is a Montessori pre-school teacher and I and my kids both attended Montessori through at least some of grade school. I have zero problem with self-directed learning, and I think it would be good for it to be more widely available.
And I completely agree that we need our kids to have more freedom in their day generally, especially when we consider the WHOLE day, not just the school day.
But Montessori isn’t any cheaper than bog standard US public schooling. And I’m not sure unschooling is either. For instance, do you think home unschooling would work if one parent wasn’t stay-at-home?
In any case merely cheaper is quite a bit different than what Scott is asserting in his post. He claims that all of the cost of public schooling can be captured to be used for GBI with no resulting loss of society wide function. I find this claim extremely dubious, to put it mildly. His address told a putative entire graduating class that they gained nothing from schooling, and in fact laughed mercilessly at anyone who thought that education had helped them learn “how to think”.
You can say he is merely asking people to “look at the tradeoffs” but his thumb is solidly on the scales. We know what Scott thinks about the proposition.
@HeelBearCub:
It seems like you enjoy strenuously asserting things that nobody has disagreed with.
I do think that, yes. I’m not at all convinced you need a parent nearby in order to learn – I learned just fine reading books at the library – but even if you did (for what?) why would it need it to be your parent. Couldn’t any other parent in the neighborhood work just as well?
It seems like your model of unschooling might be “parent intensively homeschools their own kid, but allows some amount of autonomy in choosing subjects.” No, figuring out what you want to learn and how you want to learn it is the whole deal. If a parent has to be home all the time to do it, that’s probably just homeschooling, not unschooling. (Not that you really need parents home all the time for that either – lots of homeschooling uses self-paced workbooks – but that’s another topic.)
Scott does not claim this. You might want to work on your steelmanning skills; there’s some straw peeking through. Scott didn’t say with no resulting loss so if you want to assume he did, why not assume he threw a qualifier in there somewhere at the time?
If you only think there would be SOME “resulting loss of society-wide function”, you haven’t yet disagreed with Scott. If you think there would be some and that loss would be substantial enough so as to endanger his thesis then you should (a) state that point clearly, (b) defend it.
He really didn’t. He said they gained a whole year compared to a Sudbury-type approach. That’s not nothing. It’s just not enough of a something to be worth what we’re giving up.
Okay, yes, he did do that. And if you have an argument to the contrary, maybe you want to…present it? Or at least give us a hint?
@Glen Raphael:
David Friedman is asserting that self directed reading is as good as lectures. That’s who I am disagreeing with in that quote.
The reason I brought up a parent being home is that it represents, in opportunity cost, the implicit expense of home unschooling, regardless of how much or little instruction they do. Assuming one parent stays home out of 10 per 15 average families, and you are at standard teacher to pupil ratios.
Going back to the original post I made in this OT, I’m fighting the contention that college (and perhaps all schooling) is useless. As I noted early on, this is related to both frequent comments I see about school or college here, and also the repeated assertions made about IQ being unmalleable and determinative.
If you do not think instructor aided education is useless for most (or all) people, then I don’t think we are in disagreement?
If you are saying that for some children instructor led, or even more strongly even just instructor aided, is unnecessary, I don’t disagree with that! If the contention was “Well, school was useless for me, but maybe not for you” my stance would be quite different.
But that isn’t the claim I see being made, nor is it the hypothetical I originally posited. As to your point about me giving a hint as to how college (or schooling in general) helps people learn how to think, you actually pulled a quote from a post where I did exactly that.
I contend that the practicing of collecting, condensing, assessing, analyzing and summarizing information is learning how to think. It might not be enough to optimize your thinking, but that would be a different contention.
@HeelBearCub
I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much official formal schooling we could profitably get rid of, only that it’s quite a lot. The optimum level of that thing is so much less than what we have now that movement in the direction of less seems like a good idea, no?
When Scott claims the education system we’ve got now isn’t collectively worth what it costs that doesn’t mean it has no worth at all. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people in some specific ways. All it means is that the costs outweigh those benefits. You can’t defeat a cost-benefit argument by saying “but there are some benefits; it’s not useless“! Given the mindbogglingly large amounts of time and money we spend on schooling it’d be astounding if you couldn’t point to anything that in isolation looked like a benefit, but what matters is the net benefit, the benefit in excess of the costs. I didn’t see costs even mentioned in what you’ve been saying so far.
Revisiting this quote:
It’s true as far as it goes, but you’re stacking the deck if you think it’s relevant to the current argument. One problem is the false dichotomy. There’s nothing that prevents individual study from employing reading, writing, testing and, heck, even lectures. My own self-directed study efforts have included all those things! There’s also nothing stopping individual study from including other-motivated elements, or finding and making use of an existing curriculum.
The difference is that the self-learner *chose* what lectures and curricula they wanted to follow rather than having this inflicted upon them by outside agents. And in doing so – in figuring out what resources to use to meet their goals, the self-learner is likely to learn how to learn at a deeper level than someone who has to wait and be told by others what their learning plan is.
So if you tell the self-studier they can’t use an existing curriculum or tests or writing or…whatever seems useful to achieve their goals, you’re asking them to learn with a hand tied behind their back.
Another small problem with your quote is that phrase “learn better” which prompts the question “learn what better, and what do we mean by better?” There’s no argument that if you already know exactly what specific thing you want to learn it could be useful to have somebody come along and tell you how to learn that and hold your hand while you do. You might learn that specific thing faster. But as you did, you wouldn’t be practicing the skill of learning how to learn as much as if you figured out how to learn it yourself. And you might not be learning the right thing!
Figuring out what’s worth learning and figuring out how to learn things on your own can be frustrating and slow. It might be easier to just have a bunch of assorted info spoon-fed to you. But frustrating and slow and difficult things are worth doing too. Like exercising a muscle.
In California, home schooling is effectively unregulated, so you can unschool your own kids pretty easily.
So far as selection effects, my impression in the very small Sudbury model school that our kids went to for a while was that a fair number of the kids were ones who had problems in, and were probably problems for, the public school.
For instance, do you think home unschooling would work if one parent wasn’t stay-at-home?
I do think that, yes. I’m not at all convinced you need a parent nearby in order to learn […] but even if you did (for what?) why would it need it to be your parent. Couldn’t any other parent in the neighborhood work just as well?
Most children are highly motivated to not disappoint their own parents, and if possible to gain their express or at least tacit approval. Random adults from the neighborhood, not so much.
I’d wager this would substantially affect the way an unschooled child choses to spend their time, and it would be an interesting experiment to conduct. Preferably for someone with more free time and accessible test subjects than me.
@Glen Raphael:
If you took anything I said to mean that I was disparaging your education, or the education of any individual who went to Sudbury or did some other form of unschooling , I apologize. This was not my intent. I am only attempting to speak to population level effects. I’m in favor of a variety of schooling methods, matched to the children, “Follow the child.”
I will note that this argument works the other way, as I found my traditional schooling to be quite valuable, and observed the same in my children.
I am asking for evidence of this at a population level. You seem to be asserting this without evidence. I have, via the cost of Sudbury and the opportunity costs of parents, shown why it is naive to assume that unschooling is free or near free or even a great deal less expensive than traditional schooling. Perhaps one can prove that there is a great deal of savings, but you are the one asserting this, so it is on you to prove.
The question is, if you take people in the middle of the bell curve of “traditional schooling is a good match for them” and force them into unschooling, how effective will that be? Right now, selection effect should predispose us to think that people in unschooling are dominated by those on the tail end of that bell curve. Would we get good educational outcomes if we populated an entire cohort of people from the middle of the bell curve into unschooling? Not one or two among a cohort of those not suited to traditional school, but a cohort dominated by those who are of average suitability for traditional school.
As to comments about “straw peeking through” and the like, I don’t think that improves the discourse.
I tentatively believe that education is better regarded as something that happens naturally while doing useful or fun things, than as a big chunk of life during which you can’t do anything else. I’d be happy to teach children to read, but as an instrumental value for getting information and enjoyment from books. I’d happily subject 8 year olds to lessons on trigonometry and programming for the purposes of making a game, or drive them to sports if they wanted to play them, or anything else that’s both productive and something they actually want to do.
Most of my childhood was spent sitting at a desk surreptitiously trying to read interesting books while the teacher pretended I was doing actual work, interspersed with a series of increasingly violent and increasingly fun games of football at lunch and recess, bracketed on both ends by daycare. I was one of the smartest kids in my class, so I had the luxury of stolen time, and I had parents with interesting hobbies who encouraged me in mine, so school didn’t totally ruin my education, but for most others the joy of learning was completely killed by the process of formal education. I would imagine many SSC readers would have had a very similar experience, and might have drawn similar conclusions to me. Studies previously posted here and elsewhere bolster this view.
Kids aren’t much more stupid than adults. Why, when you learn something as an adult, is the process so different from learning as a child or a university student?
Because it allows the adults to feel superior and/or in control?
Its not that education is bad. Its that there are good and bad reasons to get a college degree.
Reason 1, the education provides a skill set that is useful to you in the future
Reason 2, the education provides a way to signal to the world that you are the type of person who has a college degree
Reason 1 improves human capital and is generally good (as long as the value provided by the knowledge exceeds the cost of the education). Reason 2 gets society a $50,000 white elephant.
I really find the idea of unschooling appealing. Ideally, we’d let children learn stuff as and when it becomes interesting to them rather than inflicting a particular planned curriculum upon them. And sure, if a few kids happen to do especially well with traditional guided sit-at-a-desk-and-be-talked-at style instruction we can keep some of that around, but I wouldn’t be inclined to make that the default.
If we could somehow separate school and state completely – get a real free market in education – I’d expect to see lots of different approaches to teaching. Good ideas could become standardized, turn into franchises. Like McDonalds, you might see a branded local branch of a national chain providing a cheap standardized education product. That’d be another way to go.
What does the private school sell? To whom are they selling? It seems unlikely that businesses will pay schools for their graduates, which means that the schools will almost certainly be paid by the parents of the students. This, then, means that schools will sell “these employers will hire our graduates”. This will be the same as “our graduates are the best possible employees” only in so far as it is cheaper to actually train people than to provide something that looks like training, eg, a degree in “general studies” or some such thing.
Education that works is a hard problem because consequences are largely decoupled from payment. Payment happens first and outcomes are uncertain to a degree that is so hard to measure that it isn’t worthwhile for any particular potential buyer, and in any case the outcome is very far removed in time from the actual payment. Education is therefore paid for by people other than the eventual direct beneficiary, regardless of the surrounding structures.
Apprenticeships are the exception, but apprenticeships are largely incompatible with unschooling because of the necessary commitment on the part of the apprentice.
So, at what point does education cross-over from useful to useless?
At the point where the information and patterns established in the student by the process become counter-productive to the student and/or their society.
To judge that point, we have to establish what patterns are actually being learnt, and which of these are nonproductive. On top of that, we need to decide if bad-for-society-but-good-for-the-student are okay, perhaps +/- public funding. We are also going to run into the problem where student a and student b go through the same education process and one turns out a decent citizen and one becomes a crook.
And then we need to take action to remove the student from the “bad” education process. All of which takes a lot of work, deep knowledge of the specific student, and imperial power over the student.
If only there were one or two independent adults we could trust to monitor the development of every student, really getting to know that individual, and watching how they respond to different stimuli, and making changes in the education process when the student starts to go astray…
I’m part of the cohort I guess, so here goes:
Higher education is useful pretty much to the extent that it is an apprenticeship. So the only useful part of undergraduate school is in setting up internships, as well as meeting the requirements for graduate and professional schools which are much more useful. Presumably trade schools and the like would also be useful.
Foundational knowledge is important but, frankly, if you’re the kind of person who can learn from a college or highschool lecture you’re also the kind of person who could have picked it up on your own time. Teach everyone the three R’s by the time they hit puberty, then let the kids work as unpaid labor in their chosen field for a decade before you ask for a thesis or masterpiece.
you’re the kind of person who can learn from a college or highschool lecture you’re also the kind of person who could have picked it up on your own time
I strongly disagree with this, and see it as a sort of autodidactic snobbery.
Some people will, given access to a library, acquire a college-level education on their own time. Other people won’t. I would guess that about two-thirds of the people who are capable of acquiring this level of education, will require more than just time and books (or the internet) to do so.
Some people are wired to learn by hearing or doing, far better than they can by seeing or reading.
Some people need the formal structure of lectures TTh at 10:30 and homework every week, to avoid endless distraction and procrastination.
Some people need the social support of a peer group that is going through the same thing, even if only passively but even better if they study (or just gripe) together after.
Some people will get hung up on, frustrated, and eventually give up over some small stumbling block that could be resolved in a minute or two with a bit of Q&A with an expert.
And some other people can dismiss all of these people as “not the kind of person who can learn from a college lecture”. Except, if you put them in college lectures, they learn.
So far as the “make sure you do it” element of lectures, one could have a course taught from a book with a quiz every week or so which would accomplish the same thing.
When Betty (now my wife) went to Oberlin, she took a calculus class that met at eight in the morning but had unit tests which you could take at any time. She stayed two weeks ahead of the class, verified by the tests, with the incentive of not having to get up early to go to class.
This seems very much like “one size fits all” which is supposedly what you are fighting against.
I’m not arguing that unschooling is best for all kids, only for some.
Certainly some number n of students benefit from unschooling.
But the argument I see being made either explicitly or implicitly is that n is close to the size of the student population, which is a quite different proposition.
@HeelBearCub
An alternative, more charitable take on that: “n is certainly smaller than the size of the population, but it’s also significantly larger than [American] society currently gives it credit/money for.”
I don’t think we can afford bespoke, artisanal, hand crafted educations for all 70 some odd million children in the US. At least not until
the moshiach comesGutterdämmerungThe Singularityautomation makes work obsolete. Unless the N is big enough and/or clustered enough the current homeschooling exceptions will have to be a sufficient safety valve.Frankly I don’t see the problem. David Friedman doesn’t see the need for lectures or classes and claims he can learn everything he needs to learn out of books. Looking at his CV it appears he was able to secure professorial appointments without ever formally studying the subjects he teaches and writes about. So the system worked, no?
@Skivverus:
“College and HS are worthless warehousing of young people” is very different than “perhaps more self direction in all education would be a good thing and 20% of people might be able to school almost completely self-directed”.
If people were making the second argument, I would find no fault in it, except that I would want to know why they thought 20% was the number.
“I don’t think we can afford bespoke, artisanal, hand crafted educations for all 70 some odd million children in the US.”
Unschooling takes less teacher time than the conventional method, not more. The hand crafting is being done by the student. All the teacher (parent) is doing is pointing the student at resources for exploring what he is interested in–and a lot of that is done by the student or other students.
“So the system worked, no?”
The system wasted about a thousand hours a year of my time for ten years, sitting in a classroom being bored. Not my definition of working. It didn’t prevent me from getting an education, but it only occasionally helped the process.
Somewhat less true of college and graduate school.
“College and HS are worthless warehousing of young people”
The argument for that claim is the evidence that a large fraction of those who go to college don’t know significantly more coming out than going in. That doesn’t tell us whether an alternative approach would work better.
The arguments for unschooling, at least mine, are:
1. Arguments about what is wrong with the present K-12 system–that it selects from the universe of knowledge a largely arbitrary subset about large enough to fill K-12 and insists on everyone at least pretending to learn that subset, and that it teaches in a way which has serious problems.
2. The claim that for at least some kids, there is a much better alternative.
Unschooling takes less than 65 typical teacher/parent hours a year? Color me skeptical.
65 ~= 180 * 6 / 16.6
I guess I’ll speak up and say that I, at least, found my undergraduate to be tremendously useful (I did a degree in physics, and I’m doing a PhD in physics right now). I learned a lot from my degree, and not just in physics – I came out of it a much better problem solver and a much better thinker. I think there’s a “trial by fire” component to a rigorous STEM degree that’s hard to replicate through self-teaching. It’s one thing to try to figure something out because you want to; it’s something else to have to figure it out, because you have an assignment due in five hours that needs to be done (and then three more assignments due the next day after that).
I’m guessing people who are negative on universities would say that I’m an exception, and that most people don’t have that kind of experience with their undergrad degrees – that most degrees don’t teach much of anything, that they only exist for signalling purposes, that they’re completely useless. And fair enough, maybe they are. But even if I’m an outlier, I do exist, and so do a bunch of people who actually got something from their degree.
(You could also say that I got something from my degree, but that it wasn’t anything useful – that I learned only esoteric skills and knowledge that are great for an ivory tower but of little use in the real world. Why should the government subsidize me learning about quantum fields and lorentz transformations and all that just to satisfy my weird curiosity? But I don’t think this is true, though – I really did come out of my degree a better thinker, and post-degree me would be immensely more useful to an employer than pre-degree me)
I second this comment. I also did physics and math, and I think a lot of the value came from putting me together with other hard-working, intelligent people, and forcing us to do more work than was comfortable. (I slept so little my second year…)
Ok, but that could be done without lectures. And when my lectures were worthless, I didn’t go! I made notes from my textbook, handed in homework and showed up for tests. But other lecturers really were excellent, and added a lot of their thought processes and personal insight.
In addition, I definitely think it made me a better thinker. When I think back to the type of problems I had difficulty with my first and second year in undergrad, it appalls me that I could have ever found them difficult. I don’t think this is just domain knowledge; the methods of reasoning became far more familiar.
I suspect many people who study theoretical math have a similar experience where it ‘clicks’, and from that point onwards, proofs just make sense (this happened to me early in my third year). The mathematical style of reasoning has been incorporated into your own reasoning. As I grade undergrads, as a TA, I have to remind myself that the mathematical style of reasoning does not really come naturally, and has to be built.
“But other lecturers really were excellent, and added a lot of their thought processes and personal insight. ”
Why couldn’t a book do the same thing? You have the option of using the best book on the subject ever written. You don’t have the option of a lecture by the best lecturer in the world.
But face-to-face communication is a much more information-dense form of communication. And a relationship with the person you are communicating with allows them to tailor the delivery of information to you.
In trivial terms, you can’t ask a book a question.
I may be biased as I studied a very niche subject with a lot of small class size lectures.
@David Friedman:
Honestly, why would you expect them to do the same thing?
Have you ever tried to butter bread with a paring knife? Have you tried to peel an appe with a butter knife?
When it is something very simple, people seem to intrinsically understand that small differences in characteristics can make for really big differences in outcomes. But when we start talking about education, all of a sudden things as widely divergent as books and lectures are considered perfect substitutions.
A few small points: because people think about things differently/learn differently, there is no ‘best’ book in the world on a subject. There will be a collection of highly regarded books with different perspectives and levels of sophistication. Analogously to that, there is no best lecturer in the world; so I could be reading a high quality textbook with one perspective, and hearing a high quality lecture with a different perspective. In addition, writing a book takes a lot of time, so there may very well be plenty of lecturers, who are very good, and have a unique perspective, who haven’t bothered to write a book yet.
But more generally… I’m not sure why, but its just not the same. A good lecture generally helps you ‘get it’ faster. The two types of learning really aren’t equivalent.
A quick note: all of this is relating to subjects where the concepts are difficult to grasp. This may just be my arrogance showing through, but there very well may be no point to some Biology lectures. If a subject, at least at a certain level, is purely memorization of facts and structures, then lectures are probably equivalent or worse than a good textbook.
“But face-to-face communication is a much more information-dense form of communication.”
As I think I have already said, my puzzle isn’t the survival of small classes with lots of interaction but the survival of large lecture classes with almost no interaction–a few students out of hundreds asking questions that get responded to. From the standpoint of all the students who don’t ask a question, a book that included responses to the questions the author had found students ask would provide the same level of interaction.
“so I could be reading a high quality textbook with one perspective, and hearing a high quality lecture with a different perspective.”
Or you could read two books with different perspectives.
What you are ignoring is that a high quality lecturer means, at best, the best lecturer in your university–say one of the thousand best in the world if you are lucky. A high quality book can mean the best book on the subject that has ever been written.
In addition, the lecture has to go at a rate that almost everyone in the audience can follow. With a book, you can skim rapidly over things you already understand, read things you find difficult three times over. In effect, the book reading is tailored to the individual student, the lecture is not.
I wonder if we are having a slight problem of talking about different things.
Does “traditional lecture” mean a professor with a huge audience and a totally prepared presentation? Or does it mean a professor with <30 students who stops and takes questions.
My college experience (physics major / math minor, early 2010s) makes me think that the former format has not survived. The only classes I took with very large lectures were general ed overview or introductory courses. That means that large lecture courses were significantly less than a quarter of my college education. Admittedly, I remember almost nothing from most of them.
The other non-lab classes I took (the great majority!) were either discussion or lecture based with smaller classes where you could stop and ask questions or argue with the teacher / your colleagues. I found this very helpful, and not something that could be replaced by a book.
My physics department was especially zealous in trying different formats and techniques, e.g. electronic clicker participation stuff and “flipped” classrooms.
I did go out of my way to avoid large lecture courses when fulfilling my non-major requirements and someone who didn’t take as much care as me might have ended up in more lectures. But I it’s important to make a distinction between the large lecture format and classroom education in general. They can be very different.
My college experience makes me think that the former format [a professor with a huge audience and a totally prepared presentation] has not survived.
From a first professional degree in the 2000’s, and then a masters in the last five years – the format is still alive and thriving.
It is true that most of the courses taught with this method (and I was one of those who would interrupt with stupid questions and ask the instructor to back up and repeat when I didn’t get it, for which I was thanked repeatedly by students who were more shy/less resigned to being thought an idiot) were basic intro courses, and yes, I cut a lot of them.
But I wish I hadn’t. There was information to be learned there and I just refused to accept the pain that was required in order to get the trade off. In later, smaller, more-hands on courses (and exams, and practical work) the skimming of earlier courses has come back to bite me.
In a more ideal world, the book/lecture learning would have been melded with practical work to the extent that I (I-me, not I-any student) would have willingly dug into the lecture prep so as to be able to master the cool practical stuff faster. This would, however, have required instructors who were able to handle multiple students at varying levels of basic knowledge, each progressing at different rates, and all with the patience of Job.
The only classes I took with very large lectures were general ed overview or introductory courses. That means that large lecture courses were significantly less than a quarter of my college education. Admittedly, I remember almost nothing from most of them.
I think that for the time/money trade offs mass lectures serve enough students well enough that we are stuck with them. (Like, say, having people on assembly lines in order to have lots of cheap autos.) But lordy do they ever suck.
At least some of the large lecture classes I took also included much smaller TA lead sessions of about 20 to 30 students. Does that not happen anymore?
@David Friedman:
I wish you would respond to my point above about the fact that lectures and books cannot be considered substitutions of each other.
“Does “traditional lecture” mean a professor with a huge audience and a totally prepared presentation?”
My puzzle is why that sort of lecture continues to be given. But I include the case where the presentation is prepared but the lecturer takes an occasional question from the audience.
@Keranih
Agreed. Unless or until MOOCs take over, though I personally hope they don’t.
I increasingly suspect that the answer to David Friedman’s implied question – what explains the continued presence of mass lectures today – is that the obvious replacements, books written by the foremost experts of the respective fields, do not in fact exist yet, for a great many of the mass lecturing topics.
If true, this implies that book writing is harder than first assumed, or that the need for them and ease of providing them has not yet reached critical public awareness. Pursuant to the latter, I notice that the WWW is only about 20 years old, and the first purely educational websites aimed at a general audience are necessarily younger. Meanwhile, high speed internet access in the US is only about 75%.
“books written by the foremost experts of the respective fields”
I don’t think the author has to be one of the foremost experts, any more than a lecturer has to be. It has to be someone who understands the subject and is a good writer.
There seem to be two problems with university (when I say university, I mean 3/4 year undergraduate stuff and up) and two with high schools.
Universities, first, face the problem that most programs (honestly, most stuff that isn’t applied sciences) prepare you either for further studies (I know a history bachelor’s isn’t going to prepare you to go be a historian, the same is true for the social sciences, and I imagine it’s true for many sciences besides comp sci and engineering – and weren’t the original universities basically vocational training for priests?) or are a way for the affluent to become more interesting and make connections. But now universities have become, in large part, a way to establish that a person is basically literate and competent enough to handle white-collar work of some variety or another. There’s also this idea that they’re a means of social mobility: “the well-off have university degrees, therefore, someone who gets a university degree will become well off” is fallacious – but might have been true for a while, before a quarter or whatever it is of the population went to university. But now you’ve got people taking on heavy debts for something that isn’t very useful.
Second, as a result of the above, a lot of people who for one reason or another aren’t suited to university. Maybe they’re just not bright enough, and the result is a growth of less-demanding programs and a lowering of standards in those programs. Maybe they just don’t have the right temperament, but have been thrust into university because it’s expected that everyone of a certain level of intelligence, certain social class, whatever, has to go to university, otherwise they bring shame upon their family. Both kinds of people benefit less from university, would probably be better off doing something else, and are probably paying a decent sum for the experience.
With regards to high schools, the first problem is that having the same standards across the board for everyone doesn’t really seem to work. Some people are better at some things than others, and some people are smarter than others. Trying to ignore this leads to wackiness like trying to legislate that all children be above average. If a kid is just not that smart overall, or is just not good at a certain subject, it’s inhumane and unfair to blame and punish them/their parents/their teachers/their school administrators/their neighbourhood for their failure to pass grade 11 math or whatever. And I say this as someone who took the easier of two options for grade 11 math.
Second, as people have noted, there are a lot of important life skills that high schools don’t teach. Everyone should know how to cook a meal and deal with their finances.
“But now you’ve got people taking on heavy debts for something that isn’t very useful.”
Find me some non-fringe examples of companies exploiting this to make a profit. By which I mean, if university is not useful or only a very little bit useful, companies should be able to hire HS graduates at a significant discount over their college graduate peers.
We should see companies competing with colleges for the HS graduates who have the least to gain from going to college. Outside of the military, is their anyone who does this in any appreciable numbers?
This is a good point. Thoughts:
A. Perhaps the employers haven’t caught on yet. For the longest time, a university degree really did prove someone was probably smarter and more competent than someone without.
B. Perhaps there’s an advantage in perception: it looks better to clients if all your desk jockeys have BAs. Again, the market hasn’t caught on yet, in one way or another.
C. People with heavy student loans are desperate enough to work for not much more than a HS grad would get for the same job.
A. Does not comport at all with university being worthless for very many people at all.
B. The vast bulk of people employed, especially college grads, have no direct contact with the public. Even when they do, can you quantify how many contacts with external company employees you have encountered where you knew whether they even attended college, let along graduated? This seems to require a great deal of work to prove, and doesn’t seem to meet the available evidence.
C. This also does not comport with college providing no value. You would have to think that the market price for a college grad was equal to or below that of a HS grad, due to their desperation. But then the HS grad should happily accept the job at the college grad wage and not take on the debt. Again, the market competition should exist.
The only way you get around this is if we say the minimum wage is interfering, but then still the HS grad should happily take the job at the same minimum wage, but fewer benefits.
All of this is confounded by the fact that their are many professions where 4 year college is not the route to employment. Certified Medical Assistant requires only one year of post-secondary education, as just one example.
Honestly, you might be right, and I’ll have to update my opinions on the value of a university education accordingly.
If a university education is still worth it, though, why all the fuss about student debt, and so forth? Anecdotally, I know a lot of people with degrees from good universities who have a hard time finding a decent job.
Is it just a lack of decent jobs, in general, then?
It’s a form of B: ass-covering. If a guy hires a high school graduate and then something goes to hell with that guy, that currently gives management a hook to blame him for the hire. If instead he hires a BA in gender studies and this person shockingly turns out to be a mental invalid, the hirer “did everything right” and isn’t to blame — even though in practical fact the outcome was much more predictable in the second case. Therefore people in charge of hiring default to sorting out people without a degree because it’s a “risk”.
(There’s probably also more than a little class bias in this, where middle class people cement their status position by preventing those who couldn’t afford the entry ticket from obtaining well-paying and/or prestigious jobs, but the ass-covering explanation is sufficient, and HBC seems to be arguing from a perspective of not believing in economic irrationality for the purposes of this discussion)
My understanding is that Once Upon A Time prospective employers would have applicants go through their own testing process (frequently an IQ test). This was fast and cheap. It also had racial disparate results. This may-or-may-not have been the goal. The result is that using that type of testing was struck down by the Courts, unless it can be shown to be directly related to the job at-hand. Eg. someone applying for a computer programming job may be given a programming skills test because the test is evaluating skills or requirements specific for the job. It’s nearly impossible to show that you can only be effective at a job if you IQ is 110, but not 109.
However, it is still legal to reject applicants who don’t have a degree. So having a degree is being used as a proxy for intelligence, which is being used as a proxy for likely-to-not-be-a-complete-waste-of-my-time.
@dndnrsn:
This is the highest honor possible to bestow in the comments of SSC. I am humbled.
Two hypotheses spring immediately to mind:
1. Expected return on investment vs. actual return on investment. Especially in regards to the phenomena wherein losing something you “have” is more painful than not getting something you don’t have.
2. Trend lines. College debt, if it continues on current trend lines, will stop being worth it. Wage stagnation, even real wage loss, if it continues on present trend lines will reduce us to [insert some perceived bad state]. Trend lines of course rarely do continue, but it feels like they will.
And your point about the job market is certainly true as well. This is mostly occurring post-2008, which was, we should not forget, was really, really bad, economically speaking. The worst in 80 years. So, the amount of general economic angst should be expected to be pretty high, especially among all those current college grads who are now competing with all of the PhD grads who wouldn’t be PhDs except for 2008.
@ HeelBearCub:
For what it’s worth, I just wanted to chime in that I agree with you as well. It would contradict everything in economics for everyone to be scrambling toward college education without its being a good deal for those who get it.
@Garrett:
I can still list my HS, my GPA, even my SAT scores on my resume, all of which I am assured or also good indicators of IQ.
@Vox:
Well, that isn’t really my point here. It is the from the opposite side. It would contradict what we know about economics for employers to fail to compete for HS grads if they were as skilled as college grads.
I mean, I think it could be shown they are intrinsically related too each other, but different sides of the same coin. But, for example, in the the event of any pointless, credentialist regulatory capture, one could easily see the training to be “worth it” but not imparting much, if any, true skill.
A thought: even if the value of a university degree is based on irrational decisions (in status-seeking, ass-covering, or due to a prohibition on better ways of choosing employees), that’s still value.
Additionally, I know a lot of people (yeah, more anecdotal evidence) who instead of seeking a job out of undergrad pursue further degrees in the hope of being more employable and/or in the hope that the job market will get better.
However, it is still legal to reject applicants who don’t have a degree
Only because no one has brought it to court. Read the text of Griggs:
We need someone to push the issue in court, at which point SCOTUS precedent is clear.
The universities might have enough affirmative action to make requiring a degree okay.
Looking at the example of the military may give some insight into why this isn’t a common model. First, the military has done a lot of research into who is successful in the military. (It’s definitely not HS graduates who have the least to gain from going to college. They are recruiting mostly mid-tier high school graduates.) They’re good at it. For other organizations which may be less good at it, it may make more sense to just use education to sort candidates. Second, the military trains the heck out of their recruits both to acclimate them to the service and to their particular career field. I’d imagine that beginning extended, intensive training programs for new employees would be daunting. Third, the military is willing to invest in training candidates in part because those candidates sign contracts that make it difficult for them to leave for some number of years. That’s not a common employment model. I don’t think candidates for other types of jobs would be as willing to sign those kinds of contracts, and I’m not sure you would be able to make them as legally binding.
All of which matches the idea that attending college does indeed improve the skillset of those who attend.
The military spends massive amounts on education. What does that suggest?
The military spends enormous amounts of money on training. Four-year college degrees consist largely of job training for a few majors (engineering, pre-med, journalism for the tiny fraction that manage to land an job in the field), but it is not the norm. And even within those majors, there are usually breadth requirements or elective classes that take up a lot of the student’s time.
Associate degrees are almost entirely job training, but they’re not what most people are thinking of when they say college education.
You say “training” I say “education”, either, either, neither, neither, let’s call the whole thing off.
Employers clearly value whatever it is that colleges and universities impart and aren’t willing to spend the time to impart that themselves. The military is a good example of what it looks like to employ people directly out of HS. Learning various trades might also qualify.
So, given that employers aren’t employing people straight out of HS in lieu of college grads, what is college imparting?
A college degree certifies that the applicant was rigorously screened by the college application process and successfully sat through 4+ years of being directed towards information and producing reports/assignments on that information to the specifications given by various instructors.
All this for *free* to the company doing the hiring, in a labor law environment with a hard floor on how much a non-college student’s value can be discounted.
(You need a pickup truck. Your options are either a Peterbilt semi or a bicycle. In many situations, the bike could be free and you still couldn’t make the math work to take it.)
For what it’s worth, I just had a medical test done and chatted with the technician. She had not gone to a regular college, had taken a four year course in her specialty. Obviously she was employed.
So that’s one alternative that apparently does work in some fields–replace the liberal arts degree with some sort of professional qualification reflecting the fact that you have been trained for a particular profession.
The whole point of the signaling model is that it doesn’t need to be imparting anything as long as it correlates well with traits the employer finds valuable: probably some combination of intelligence, conscientiousness, ability to follow directions, and middle or high SES and attendant cultural markers.
You could probably design a hiring system that extracted the same information from a high school graduate’s public data (transcript, SAT scores, etc). I bet you could even do it without running afoul of the disparate-impact laws that right-wingers like to complain about. But that would take more work, and employers have no reason not to just hire college grads.
“producing reports/assignments on that information to the specifications given by various instructors.”
There’s a good bit of cheating in college, though I don’t have a feeling for what proportion of college students cheated so much that their degree is meaningless.
@Nornagest: (whoops misidentification)
You appear to be ignoring cost of good as a factor in micro-economic decisions.
The reason to go through the additional work of screening HS grads is that their cost of good was much, much less. They will happily be employed for much less.
Either we are only talking about the lowest rung employees, whose wage and benefits are set by things like minimum wage laws, which does not describe most college graduating hires, or the idea that it is not “worth it” for employers to hire HS grads in lieu of them going to college needs far more support than you are giving it.
Is that actually true, though? Can you get full-time, permanent work from high school graduates as smart and conscientious as you can get college grads, in this labor market, by paying them less? And can you get enough of it to make it worth the trouble of setting up a new, totally untested hiring process? There’s internships, but they’re rarely full-time or permanent, and I don’t know how much the kinds of work that interns are assigned actually contribute to the bottom line.
(Well, I know how much they do in tech, which is “not very much”: it’s more a form of charity that sometimes makes coffee and might be hired to do useful work someday. I don’t know how it works in other industries.)
To make working right out of high school attractive to college-bound high school graduates, here and now, you need to make it competitive with the college path — and probably not just to the students themselves, but to their parents, who at this point in life usually have a great deal of influence over their kids’ decisions even if they’re formally adults. It seems to me that this implies salaries within spitting distance of conventional entry level, even if not quite as high; at the margins, you might be able to wedge off a few with less, but at the margins you get marginal people.
Remember also that salary is only a fraction of total cost of employment.
@Nornagest:
That is my whole point, restated.
The fact that we don’t see these hires mean that college actually has a substantial effect, not merely in status, but on the skill set of the graduates. College bound HS graduates are not being recruited in lieu of college graduates, meaning that college has had a positive effect on these students.
As to your point about career path, 4 years of experience plus four years of salary plus no college debt should look pretty attractive to everyone if, in fact, college is not doing anything for these students.
It seems to me there is also some defect-defect PD going on here too. College-bound students could shirk the college degree program to get the salary + training instead of debt to roughly balance things out, but would lose out to other students that did go the college route because that is what employers will currently hire. Employers could go hire college-bound students with that attractive offer on net, but they’ll defect to hire college grads instead because they are better.
(Note, I think this still holds even if college degrees turn out to be worthless or even negative in real knowledge/skills, so long as both sides think they have value. This just changes what the offer for would-be-college-bound hires should be).
No, it doesn’t. College doesn’t need to be adding any relevant skills whatsoever for everything in my last post to be true. It does need to be a good proxy for certain desirable attributes (smart and conscientious are not skills), but that isn’t the same thing.
I don’t think you can get equally good workers at scale by hiring high school grads cheaply. But that isn’t because there are no competent high school grads, it’s because the social norm for competent high school students (that don’t want to enter the trades or a family business) is to go to college. If you’re asking for long-term, professional work from those students in lieu of college, you’re asking them to buck the norm, which means you need to get their attention — probably by offering near what their starting salary would be afterwards, if not more.
There has to be some middle ground here. I didn’t find college useless, at least not all of it. Spending a great deal of time putting together and presenting detailed arguments and research reports, formulating problems in abstract, mathematical terms and then finding ways to solve them using familiar algorithms and design patterns, even learning how to use specific toolsets to implement assignment requirements, are all things I’ve had to do professionally as well. Maybe the modal student really does just spend three years drinking and going to frat parties, but I didn’t and neither did any of my friends.
On the other hand, it was a pretty wasteful and cost-ineffective way to do this, I definitely could have taught myself much of what I learned, and I could have done without things like the mandatory by law poli sci 101 class that the professor bragged only existed because he and his friends knew how to lobby the state. I also can’t see a good reason we needed to be providing a free farm league to professional sports associations.
For whatever reason, people badly overplay the ‘haha queer studies card,’ though. The DOE tracks this stuff. Overwhelmingly the most popular degree paths are business and healthcare services. The majority of students are a lot more practical than they get credit for.
Adam, “business” is first but second is “social sciences and history”, although to some extent this depends on how you break it down and different sources (from the same agency, even) break it down differently.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37
Which degrees are “practical” is hard to figure out. I don’t think either a bachelor’s level psychology degree (the “default” degree for women, for some reason) or bachelor’s level business degree (most popular for men and popular for women) is actually all that useful other than signalling “ready for white collar work”.
That’s actually the source I came from, but somehow I overlooked that social sciences and history were 10,000 ahead of health, though that changes drastically if they include associates and certificate programs instead of just four-year degrees. I honestly have no idea what an undergrad business curriculum even teaches, but it at least seems that the intent of most students is obviously something along the lines of “I want to be employable, but I’m not good enough at math to do engineering.” That isn’t everybody, but it’s hundreds of times more people than ever take an ethnic studies or art history class, to pick out what seem like the two most popular bugaboos of people who think college is completely pointless.
@Nornagest:
Hold on, somewhere between $50K and $100K less in debt or remaining savings, plus 4 years of full time salary (even at a reduced rate) and benefits, plus four years work experience is NOT extremely attractive?
Someone, many someones, should be hiring people into jobs with that kind of package. They should have a “Junior Associate” position which automatically promotes to Associate (the level at which they hire their college grads) after four years.
Not when you’ve had it preached at you for the last N years that going to college is cruise control for money and status, and when you lack the context to interpret most of those numbers. It might be attractive to your parents, but your parents probably suspect shenanigans (because, again, this is an antinormative move). You might, too: since you’re a teenager in this scenario you probably have poor temporal discounting, but you’re probably also inclined to distrust strong, unusual adult claims.
Now, as college becomes more ubiquitous, its signaling value erodes and that sort of preaching becomes less credible. I don’t expect that to continue indefinitely. But I’m not talking about some hypothetical equilibrium state. I’m talking about a lone company trying to do this now, since that’s what matters on the margin.
@Nornagest:
But that is a really attractive economic package right? Are you saying if companies like Hertz, Ernst and Young, Walmart, or Bank of America, all of whom are among the top employers of college grads today offered that kind of program that they wouldn’t be able to get 1000 or 2000 HS students to accept offers?
At least some of those would probably work, but it couldn’t be just any company: it has to be one with the reach to get the word out, the money to ensure it isn’t going to evaporate and leave its employees high and dry, and the prestige for prospective hires to take them at their word. And companies that well established also tend to be highly risk-averse.
You couldn’t get the same effects on a smaller scale.
Hertz and Ernst and Young already list their minimum requirement as an Associates rather than a Bachelors for some positions. Perhaps they could hire high school students for slightly cheaper, but would the cost of the additional screening or training they’d have to do exceed the difference in pay?
Bank of America actually doesn’t require a degree for some of their positions, so they’re already doing it.
They shouldn’t require any extra training at all, unless my statements about college actually imparting value (past mere signalling) are actually correct. Again, I am fighting the contention that college is “useless”, as I have seen asserted frequently on these boards. Not useless to some particular individuals, but useless full stop.
If almost all of the white-collar employers in your community insist on offering jobs only to people with Genuine Masonic Signet Rings, which the Masons will sell to anyone on their eighteenth birthday for $100,000 but which thereafter can only be purchased on the black market for $200,000, almost all intelligent people who plausibly aspire to white-collar careers will buy such a ring on their 18th birthday. Probably with their parent’s money, freely given, but if not bankers will be lining up to offer them loans on reasonable terms.
People who aren’t qualified for white-collar jobs will be much less motivated to purchase rings because, even if they want such jobs and the ring lets them get one, they’ll probably be fired before they can recover the cost. Bankers and parents will have an opinion here, as well.
This economy is in almost every way inferior to the one without the silly obsession about Masonry. But in that economy, the set of people without signet rings is going to be heavily dominated by people who shouldn’t be trusted with white-collar jobs. There will be exceptions, but you’ll probably go broke trying to find them even if you can hire them on the cheap.
If there were nobody but qualified white-collar workers with rings and qualified white-collar workers without rings, the market equilibrium might be for the wage premium of ringbearers to exactly match the NPV of the ring. When you add in the cost and risk posed by the large pool of unqualified applicants masquerading as the ringless qualified – the search costs time and money and and some of the false positives will have decidedly negative value – that no longer holds.
@John Schilling:
“If almost all of the white-collar employers in your community insist on offering jobs only to people with Genuine Masonic Signet Rings”
The question is why does not one of the while collar employers hire people who can demonstrate the ability to get a loan for a masonic ring at a lower salary.
People (an-cap libertarians, even!) seem to me to be ignoring everything they think about markets in other situations because they have decided, absent good evidence, that schooling is useless.
I don’t think schooling is useless — well, okay, I think high school is useless, but college has value. I just think that, for many majors, most of that value consists of being an honest signal of intelligence, conscientiousness, and cultural competence, and has relatively little to do with what’s actually taught.
At this point I’m starting to wonder if you’re even interested in engaging with this line of thinking. I haven’t seen anything that looks like a challenge to it, only a lot of assertions that of course college must be imparting value, because markets or something. Only markets can accommodate this kind of equilibrium just fine in the short term, especially when they have culture and policy leaning on them.
@Nornagest:
I have engaged with it elsewhere, but this sub-thread was about the economic argument, which is where it has stuck. For instance, I maintain that (in-person) lectures and individual reading are not perfect substitutions for each other, and that they are, in fact, markedly different. Also, no one asked.
I think that there any number of (perhaps most) people who learn better through a combination of lectures, reading, writing and testing, than through self-motivated individual study with no provided curriculum. I think many workplace training curriculums, backed by research on how to get people to effectively retain information, will show this to be true.
Much of the work of white-collar employees is the collection, condensing, assessing and analyzing of a variety of information. The end product of this process is frequently some written document, which is then used to make decisions. Those decisions then need to be executed and the results tracked.
Many of those same skills are also used to complete a college curriculum. In addition, the white-collar workplace is not static but dynamic, therefore being able to do this in brand new areas of information is paramount. This is why a well rounded education is quite helpful. It forces you to perform the same types of tasks, but in many areas which with one is not already familiar. The typical liberal arts education seems very well suited to build skills that are of use in the white collar world.
The evidence is that many of us went to college and didn’t learn very much that we actually use.
@HeelBearCub: The question is why does not one of the while collar employers hire people who can demonstrate the ability to get a loan for a masonic ring at a lower salary.
Because the person who has the ability to get a loan for a masonic ring doesn’t want a lower salary, and he doesn’t have to accept it. He can just take out the loan and buy the ring instead. The best he can realistically expect is to break even or slightly better, with the NPV of the decreased career salary approximately equal to the NPV of the loan payments on the ring. If there are too many negative-value employees hiding with him in the pool of “Look, I don’t have a ring but trust me I could totally get one if I had to” applicants, he can’t even break even once the employer discounts for his expected costs.
The equilibrium where everybody who can get a ring does get a ring, and the pool of ringless job-seekers is dominated by the useless and worse-than-useless, is stable. In that stable equilibrium, it is not rational to hire from the pool of mostly-worthless-and-worse-than-worthless applicants just because they work cheap.
@Psmith:
The fact that there exist some autodidacts that do not gain useful skills or information from attending college isn’t the question though, is it? I’m talking about population size (or industry work force size) effects. You can always find examples of things on the tails of distributions.
Second, do you engage in collection, condensing, assessing and analyzing of a variety of information? Do you write documents or otherwise communicate summaries of this information? Do you encounter a variety of new problem spaces in your work? Do you dispute that these are skills which are exercised by a traditional college education?
That doesn’t follow, or I am not following your argument.
Obviously, the employer needs to offer more than the expected salary of someone who does not have a ring for this to be enticing to the prospective employee, but less than the expected salary of a ring holder. The expected salary difference should be roughly equal to the NPV of the ring loan. If the difference was much higher, than loans would be increasingly easy to get (much as home loans are cheaper when housing prices are rising).
You also seemed to have smuggled in an assumption that Masonic ring purchasing imparts skills, rather than being simply a measure of the net worth of families, as you have somehow concluded that those without Masonic rings are bad at doing jobs. I don’t know where you are getting that from. Perhaps you mean that if I already know I can’t do the job, I will not invest in a ring? That seems to imply a discontinuity in the skill curve, one that is easily detected by job seekers themselves.
The point is that this is a common experience. Do you not know lots of people who use very little of what they learned in college?
I’m an academic economist. Modus ponens/modus tollens, I suppose.
I won’t say that I use absolutely nothing I learned in undergrad. I probably use about two classes’ worth, out of the 52-54 classes I took. Everything else I learned on the job or taught myself.
I enjoyed many of the other 50-52. But I don’t use what I learned in them, they didn’t make me appreciably better at anything except the specific topics they covered, and they weren’t worth the price I paid in time and money. On the other hand, being able to credibly signal to employers that I’m worth hiring is worth the price. So I signalled. In my experience, this is quite common, except that most people I know who aren’t in academia use less of what they learned in school and more of what they learned on the job or taught themselves than I do.
[merging threads]
Take whatever road leads you to satori, I guess. But I’m not trying to do anything by posting here but while away an idle hour–certainly not to fix all the social ills associated with the US educational-governmental complex.
(And the IRL equivalent of the discontinuity shows up in less-prestigious schools, two-year programs, etc.).
@Psmith:
So, assuming that people in the market to purchase Masonic rings can easily detect whether they should or not, what makes this signal hard to detect for the prospective employers?
In other words, if the difference is easy to detect, why do we need the employee to spend an absurd amount of money to assert their own intrinsic competence? Why can’t we negotiate the middle man out of the picture and capture the wasted value?
You also seemed to have smuggled in an assumption that Masonic ring purchasing imparts skills
No, only that it signals skills. And only in the same way that a peacock’s tail signifies fitness – if you haven’t got the skills to back it up, you’ll go broke trying to afford the signal. There’s no requirement for the Masons to test for skill, though it strengthens the argument if they do.
The $100k for the ring is a pure deadweight loss, leaving a $100k surplus to be divided between any competent-but-ringless employee and any employer willing to hire them. But the premise is that such employers are very rare. So:
1. If competent-but-ringless employees also very rare, the occasional surplus an employer gets when hiring them will be outweighed by more frequent losses when they hire an incompetent faker. Being the employer who hires the ringless is a sucker bet.
2. If competent-but-ringless employees are common, essentially all of the negotiating power goes to the employer willing to hire them, meaning they will claim essentially all of the surplus.
3. Second-order effects, like the sunk cost of starting a ringless job-hunt, the employer’s continued risk of hiring an incompetent faker, and the cost penalty for trying to rejoin the ringbearers after trying the competent-but-ringless route, further increase the employer’s bargaining power and will drive the wages below breakeven.
4. This makes pursuing a white-collar career while ringless a sucker bet, so almost nobody will do it, pushing us back to 1. Enter the cycle wherever you like.
The stable equilibrium is for everyone competent white-collar worker to borrow money to buy a ring, and for everyone who needs a competent white-collar worker to hire a ringbearer. Also, peacocks still have massively impressive plumage.
@John Schilling:
We are talking about an inherently unstable job market though, because old people are leaving the market and young people are entering it. Ringless entry level employees are very common, because they are ALL ringless, but they are not without leverage, because we have already stipulated that they are able to buy a ring.
So, assuming that people in the market to purchase Masonic rings can easily detect whether they should or not, what makes this signal hard to detect for the prospective employers
That would be the part where people lie.
And sometimes they lie to themselves, so it’s never going to be a perfect signal. But if there’s $100K on the line when it comes to whether I can e.g. code C++ or do organic synthesis or whatnot, I can do a pretty good self-assessment. And if there’s $100K on the line when it comes to whether I can convince you that I can do those things, I can tell a pretty good lie.
It will always be easier for me to know what I am capable of, then for you to know what I am capable of.
@John Schilling:
Now you are claiming that it is very easy for me to know whether I can do “masonic ring work” (which I have never done), but very hard for my employer, and, well, how exactly is that going to work?
@Psmith:
Do you teach freshmen econ 101 courses? How about senior level degree seekers? Do you advise PhD candidates?
Think of the PhD candidates you advise and compare them to the freshmen. Do you think the freshmen you will go on to seek a PhD would be capable of working on their thesis on day 1 of their freshmen class? If not, why not? If so, … well, I actually don’t see you answering this in the affirmative, but … if so, why don’t they?
I’m just a reg monkey, not a professor. No Ph.D., and I sure as hell don’t advise anybody. (I may have exaggerated for effect by not mentioning this above. My bad. On the other hand, I don’t see the actual tenured and tenure-track research professors using much of what they learned in undergrad, either.). Still, just going by what I see around me…
Yeah, pretty much. To the extent that they aren’t, as far as I can tell, it comes down to some combination of
1) reading a bunch of papers and books on their own,
2) one-on-one conversations with economists,
3) a stats/econometrics class, preferably one that teaches enough R or Stata that they can teach themselves from there (this was one of the two or so classes that taught me something useful, and it might well be superfluous for someone smarter or more driven than I am), and
4) deciding that they want to be economists and not business majors or doctors or whatever.
Maybe the math-heavy guys need more formal math education, but it sure looks to me like the ones I know can pretty much teach themselves what they need to know, and that the ones who aren’t sufficiently hot shit to teach themselves sort into other fields.
I worked minimum wage in a big residential kitchen for several years while I was in school. I got more out of that than I did out of most of my classes in terms of everything–pay, health, socialization, character-building and work ethic, organization, practical skills, even enjoyment compared to all but the most fun quartile or so of classes–except the metaphorical Masonic ring.
(Of course, “is someone capable of performing the tasks of the job without going to college?” is a very different question than “will we, the professional gatekeepers, allow them into the profession if they haven’t gone to college?” Which is exactly my point. There are reasons that people continue to go to college and employers continue to hire college graduates, but it’s not because going to college causes people to be more able.).
@Psmith:
Well that is at least a consistent answer with your previous stance.
I find the contention that the average freshman who will eventually seek a PhD is capable of starting work on their thesis on day 1 of freshmen year bizarre, though. I realize I am asserting that without offering evidence.
Anecdata, I am a programmer employed in industry. In college I missed the switch to object oriented languages by a few years. I still, 20 years later, wish that I had experience with OO back then, as I tend to approach things procedurally. The piecemeal way that you pick up new techniques once you start working is just different than 4 years of of dedicated focus on developing skillset and knowledge.
I’m a better programmer than most, but I can tell the difference.
It’s not that they don’t get anything at all out of college–it’s that they don’t get anything that they wouldn’t get from steps 1-4 and working a minimum-wage kitchen job. And partly I think it’s just a matter of getting older, too.
Fair enough. I’m a little surprised–it seems like the most vocal autodidacts (or informal apprentices, etc.) are programmers.
@Psmith:
Both of my parents, and several of my aunts, uncles and cousins are teachers. My father, a university economist, spent a good chunk of his professional life working on more effective means of teaching economics. I’ve also done a fair amount of development and delivery of training as part of whole-life cycle development of large custom applications (single company user bases in the 1000s). I have done a fair amount of sales engineering/support as well as first line and second line tech support for products I have developed, especially when working in a small startup with single-digit employees.
So I have bias. I am exposed to teachers who I have respect for and my sense is that it is a true and necessary profession. But I also have experience with trying to get the average computer user to understand how to use what they have been given. Trying to convey that in writing without them being able to ask questions is much less efficient and effective than simply delivering a presentation and/or a demonstration.
I think part of the problem with this discussion is not distinguishing among different sorts of students.
Most of the students in an introductory freshman economics course are not actually interested in learning what you are teaching and most of them don’t–they memorize enough to get past the final. My guess is that for many of them the same is true of their other classes. They are in college for some combination of getting a credential and having an enjoyable four years socializing with their age peers. I wouldn’t expect them to graduate knowing much more about what they have had classes in than when they arrived.
A minority of the students in the class are actually interested and likely to learn something. The PhD candidates are drawn from a subset of that minority.
And it isn’t clear to me that the members of that minority learn more from the lecture class than they would from being assigned to read a good book on the subject, with some sort of feedback–perhaps quizzes and discussion sections.
The employment puzzle is why the degree significantly increases the income of the pupils who were not interested and didn’t learn.
@David Friedman:
1) You are posing a binary measure of interest with a discontinuity of distribution. I’d posit that the more likely distribution is a bell curve over a less/more interested axis. You can call the center of that distribution “not interested” but I think you are almost certainly wrong.
2) You further posit that the distribution of preferred/optimal learning styles is concurrent with with the distribution on the less/more interested axis. I believe that research into optimal learning styles fairly well debunks that notion. There are substantial number of people who are audio/visual learners. Given that universal literacy is very young, and audio/visual learning has existed as long as humans (or longer) this should not be surprising at all.
Anecdotally, as someone who would have been on the far right side of the “more interested” axis, I needed the structure of class sessions and lectures. I rarely was able to make myself crack the textbook before a lecture, and mostly learned in college through lecture and note taking. The textbook was a reference for me, but rarely was it the source of my knowledge. And I learned a heck of a lot in college.
The available evidence is not, I think, in favor of your theory. Some people simply read the book and teach themselves, but not most.
“There are substantial number of people who are audio/visual learners.”
If that is the explanation of my puzzle, videos, in class or online, ought to be a cheap substitute for lecturers. But the mass lecture survived that technology too.
@David Friedman:
Production costs on high quality audio/video are high compared to the cost of the individual lecture. How many large lectures is a university going to replace before needing to redo the media? You could posit some cross university program, but that runs into substantial other issues.
And given that you won’t be eliminating very many of the classes offered at the college, what have you gained? And at the loss of having Jr. faculty practicing lecture skills, the loss of the structure that class schedules bring, etc. anecdotally, I wouldn’t have watched the required video before my section, either. The loss in value provided by the structure would have been very high for me.
Not to mention that people actually do ask questions and interact with the professor, even in large lectures.
The students themselves have a strong incentive not to go with such a company. Because if they do, they might get paid well for a year or two, but then what? They are now “off the path” and somewhat damaged goods if they want to get back on it. Aside from anything else that means they aren’t in a good bargaining position with their employer.
The military is somewhat of an exception because it is big and prominent enough that people all across society recognize it as a special case.
If I work for two years at a job that normally requires a college degree, that will count as “relevant experience” in lieu of a degree. However, if I find this to be a stumbling block, I can still go to college afterwards.
I’m not even asking why everyone isn’t doing it. I’m asking why no one is doing it.
Given the amount of money lying there, we should be seeing someone take advantage of it.
Going to college after working a few years is a bad signal compared to going to college right after high school.
@Ken Arromdee:
Gap years are currently gaining in popularity, which would seem to argue against this. Graduate from college is a graduate from college, and it’s not at all clear to me how “Graduate from State Uni in ’16” looks worse than “Graduate from same State Uni in ’18, but with two years of intern experience under their belt”
People ARE doing it. In tech, for instance, there are people with no degree at all in software engineering jobs. But it’s generally a bad bargain because not having a degree remains a stumbling block even after the first job, which means depressed lifetime earnings. This means that to tempt a rational college-bound student to skip college and go right to work, you can’t pay as much less as you’d think. Usually the incentive is a shot at the “startup lottery”.
Among what segments of the population are gap years gaining in popularity?
I wish the gap year were a good signal. I wish that everyone took a year after high school to work in the real world and realize if they want to go to school for 4 more years.
But right now I suspect the gap year is a negative signal, unless you are an Obama.
I don’t think a gap year is much of a signal either way. It’s just a minor variant of the usual thing.
It’s when you are 30, have eight years work experience, and a fresh bachelors degree that employers have to figure out how to think about you.
And that is only if the work experience you have is markedly different than work experience I would expect you to have if you are applying for a position. So if I have 8 years of accounts receivable experience, and the job is in accounts receivable, the fact that my BA is newly minted won’t matter. Actually it may even look like a plus.
Think about investment banking. The standard paths are :
bachelors degree -> analyst -> associate -> VP -> MD
or
bachelors degree -> ??? -> MBA -> associate -> VP -> MD
Where ??? can be analyst but doesn’t particularly need to be.
If you had 2 years as an analyst and then got a bachelors degree should you be applying for an associate positions or an analyst positions when you graduate?
It works as a type of signalling. Signalling is useful to an individual in the sense that an individual who fails to signal or who fails to look at signals is comparatively worse off. However, it is useless in the sense that the population as a whole is not better off if they all signal/use signals compared to if none of them do so.
Pointing out that employers don’t make money by hiring non-graduates shows that it is useful in the first sense, but not in the second sense.
Right. And there are two important things to remember in connection with that:
1. Education is a very reliable signal, not just of intelligence, but also of things like conscientiousness and conformity. Any employer who wants to make bank by hiring people who didn’t go to college still needs some way to avoid hiring schmucks. Wonderlic tests will get you pretty far for intelligence, but the other two are pretty much by definition difficult to credibly signal in a short, cheap, easy-to-administer test.
2. Education signals (at least in large part) a positional quality. The point of hiring college graduates is not to hire people who meet some Platonic threshold of “good enough”; it’s to hire people who are better than the competition. So anybody who wants to hire people who didn’t go to college but still wants to make sure they’re on the right sides of the relevant bell curves is going to have to come up with some kind of criterion that, to a plausible first approximation, weeds out about as many people as getting a college degree does.
To put it another way, I think the problem is not that there are lots of people who would have great jobs if they only went to college; the problem is more that the people who are going to get good jobs have to burn several years and a pile of money first. So any employer trying to pull off this proposed arbitrage is going to have to find a way to distinguish the people who would have gone to college and successfully completed a degree, thereby signalling their underlying ability, from the people who wouldn’t have made it in college and are attracted to the job for this reason.
“Any employer who wants to make bank by hiring people who didn’t go to college still needs some way to avoid hiring schmucks. ”
Less of a problem if it’s easy to fire people who turn out to be schmucks.
There are 1 and two year study programs already in existence if all that is required is to signal that you can be conscientious. $100k or $200k per student is a lot of money sitting there waiting to be claimed.
If all that is going on is nothing in those four years, someone is really going to come along and claim that reward if you believe in markets that operate with a modicum of efficiency.
Walmart, GE, some really big company should be able to completely revamp corporate HQ. Small startups should be able to run circles around big companies that haven’t gotten with the program. Someone should be able to take advantage of the massive inefficiency that is being posited.
These do not signal employability as strongly as a four year degree for much the same reason that a 6:00 mile does not signal running ability as strongly as a 4:30 mile. Unless they’re very difficult–and in those cases I think you see exactly the dynamic you claim. (The guy who completes his bachelor’s in two years is in fact going to get hired before the guy who completes the same degree plus a little bit of extra coursework in four.).
“6:00 mile does not signal running ability as strongly as a 4:30 mile.”
You have to actually do the work to be able to go from 6:00 to 4:30. This example largely proves my point, rather than fights it.
But, let’s do something different. Let’s say it is all signalling. Jobs need people who can run marathons in 3:00 hours, so they recruit from people who actually run marathons in 3:00 hours. That means it will take at least 3 hours to conduct their job screen.
What you are saying is that the businesses need people who prove that they can do 4 years of undergraduate work, which takes 4 years of undergraduate work. Even then (which I am only granting for sake of argument) college isn’t useless. It shows that the job screen is super-expensive to run.
Basically, yeah.
Multiple senses of “useless” here. I think college is useless in that it imparts mighty few useful skills for the time and money. This has been my own experience and seems to be somewhat widely shared. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to college. It is absolutely individually rational to go to college (if you want a high-paying white-collar job), which is why people keep going.
Exactly, and that’s the problem. Figuring out a way to make it cheaper would save a lot of time and money.
If we were forming a team of people to investigate whether ancient peoples really did run large herbivores to exhaustion, and you wanted to be on the team, and they were looking at people who had a documented time in one of hundreds, nay thousands of marathons organized around the country, would we say “running a marathon to prove your a candidate for the team is useless. It imparts nothing and has no relationship to what you will do once you are on the team. It is useless status seeking.”
Mm, no, but we’d probably say
1) If you want to prepare to be on the team, rolling out of bed and trying to run a marathon as fast as you can is probably not very useful. Instead, you should do some shorter work at various paces and perhaps a long run at an easy pace once a week. Going out and running the marathon will do very little to develop the abilities you’ll need to be part of the team. (I haven’t followed the state of the art in running for several years, but this was more or less the orthodoxy back when I was paying attention.).
2) Usefulness has to be balanced against cost. If running a marathon cost a few hundred thousand dollars and four years, we’d probably want to use some combination of VO2 max testing, a Wingate test, blood draws to determine lactate metabolism, etc., instead. (I claim that there is essentially no analogous battery of testing that would substitute for college, that anybody trying to implement such a battery faces adverse selection issues, and that the existing policy environment militates against the development of any such substitute.).
I am not saying that the problem of higher education (namely, that we spend too much time and money on it) is an easy problem to solve. If it were, we would have solved it already. In the status quo, it is individually rational for businesses to limit their search to college graduates and it is individually rational for prospective employees to attend college. That’s why it’s a difficult problem to solve. But I contend that it is, nevertheless, a problem.
@Psmith:
Given the framework I set up, here is how I would describe your contention: After Spending four years working at “running marathons”, you are no more prepared to run down a large herbivore than you were before you started.
Given that we have many companies who engage in the business practice of running down large herbivores, and they hire almost exclusively from those who have done the 4 years of training and competing, I think it’s reasonable to ask you to come up with evidence that these companies can succeed in running down large herbivores by hiring people who have only been training for and running 5Ks?
Sure. Like I say, this is a problem for a reason. If it were easy to solve, we’d have solved it already. So a big part of our agenda (insofar as there is an “us” and insofar as we even have an agenda, ~passivism will win~) is coming up with institutions that will do what college does, but better and cheaper. In the absence of some suitable alternative mechanism, like I said, it makes sense for most people (who want high-paying white-collar jobs, anyhow) to go to college, and it makes sense for most employers (who want high-paid white-collar employees) to hire college graduates. I don’t intend to march up and down outside Stanford with a sign saying “Dissolve the Monasteries Now.” But I think, for example, that “people who go to college are richer, therefore everyone should go to college” is false, and the falsehood of that statement ought to inform policy.
Something that does “it” better and cheaper is always nice, if you can get it.
I guess the big issue I have is that you usually don’t get there by asserting that “it” doesn’t exist and you can get “it” for free (whatever the “it” is).
Stating flatly that college is useless isn’t a very good way to figure out what it’s actually doing, how to do it better or how to reduce the cost.
Bryan Caplan is finishing a book on this subject soon to be released. His answer:
I see that others have already hit this point.
I’ve had a vision of the future in which after publishing the book, Caplan is falsely accused of sexually assaulting one of his students who’s unhappy with the ideas he’s promulgating, has his tenure revoked, and loses the down payment on the new house he was going to buy for his family. He’s also begun to resemble William H. Macy for some reason.
An under-appreciated (as far as I know) aspect of the “college experience” I’ve been thinking of (as a mid-forties college grad with an 18-year-old nephew facing the choice of whether and how to do college): the soft start on adulthood.
You get some subsidized time to get used to living on your own (usually with roommates), managing parts of your own finances, etc. without the immediate pressure of “overspend or screw up and you’re homeless.”
I think it would be fair to say that the journey from preschool to college is replete with exactly these sorts of increasing rights/responsibilities.
In my experience, I think that this aspect of college may have done more harm than good for me. In particular, having a meal plan and living in a dorm room about 2 blocks from a school cafeteria was definitely not a good preparation for living on my own and having to prepare my own food most days.
As someone who dropped out of college and would probably conform to most’s idea of a “tulip subsidizer”, and also as a primarily child educator, I gotta say those are two unconnected things.
A thought: is this discussion leaving out the social opportunities in university?
There are a lot of professional career paths where, beyond the “guild membership” aspect of it, your time in university is a great time to build connections. Even if a state or province or whatever let people sit the exam to become a lawyer, those who went to law school would still benefit from connections – perhaps enough to make the price tag worth it. The same is true of many other professions and career paths.
Beyond that, there’s the personal aspect: university is where a lot of people make their closest friends, meet partners, etc. These things improve quality of life.
When I was a kid, I read a lot more Serious Books for Curiosity and Fun than I do now (as in educational, books that Scott has reviewed is a good proxy for what I mean). (I’m 20 now).
I notice that Serious People that I respect (Scott, Eliezer, people I know personally) tend to read lots of such Serious Books, which makes me feel bad for not reading as many (also the reviews make them sound fun, I guess). It’s not like I don’t have the time, it just gets spent on internet or other reading. I’ll go hunt down a rabbit hole of legal sources or whatnot, and it’s just as intellectually satisfying, but looking back it doesn’t feel the same like having read long educational books.
Is there some simple technique I can use that will help me read more, or optimize better for what I really want (which I’m not actually sure)?
Apologies if this isn’t terribly clear, I’m hoping someone recognizes my description in themselves or an earlier version and can help without further explanation. I don’t particularly understand what’s behind my dilemma beyond my description, except that there’s definitely a there there.
I’ve had problems with this, and it seems like standard akrasia/time-discounting/intellectual-preference-revealed-preference-difference. The easiest way is just to do it. Get the book, read the book. It’s not hard to do, but it’s easy not to, especially if you spend a lot of time, e.g., reading online, or generally in flow states that don’t have room for reflection. Anyway, here’s my suggestion for how to do it more easily:
Go to the library often. Take a reading list of Serious Books you might like to read. While you’re there, you might as well get something–why not something from your list? And since you have to return the book when it’s due, you’ll feel pressure to finish it by then. Don’t be afraid to quit without finishing if you don’t like a particular book; sure, it feels like you’re giving up on your goal, but the whole reason you have that goal is because you enjoy reading Serious Books.
This is probably stating the obvious, but getting physical distance between me and my distractions is very helpful for me. The best version of this is going to a cafe without your phone or laptop, but even just putting your internet-capable devices in another room partially removes them as an alternative that my brain might decide is preferable to reading.
I also become better at doing the things I’m supposed to do for the remainder of the day after I exercise. (I’m aware I’m doubling down on trite advice.)
You think Eliezer is a serious person? Have you met him? I’m betting not.
Serious as in intellectually serious, which I notice by the number of references contained in their writing.
Put aside a specific amount of time every day for reading. Not the time right before you sleep. Get away from electronic devices. Drop boring books instead of trying to finish them. Always have the next book ready.
Depending on your budget (and/or technical know-how and disregard for intellectual property laws), I recommend getting a Kindle. When you are carrying around a library of Serious Books in your pocket at all times, it’s really easy to sneak in 15 minutes of reading here and there when you’re in line. In addition, the activation energy to move onto the next Serious Book is very low; you can pre-load dozens, or easily purchase a new book just from the Kindle interface, and be reading it in minutes.
I’d personally recommend a Kindle Paperwhite; the first-gen Kindles are flimsy, and the Paperwhites are fairly cheap now.
(This reviewer was provided with nothing for his fair and unbiased review.)
This was part of the problem. I got a kindle and now have more books on it than I can ever finish, so each book feels smaller.
One thing I found that helped to concentrate the mind, rather like Johnson’s prospect of being hanged, was to roughly calculate time per book against estimated days of life remaining. Once I had an approximate upper limit number, time spent on frivolous reads felt more wasteful.
Thus if you manage one a week for 60 remaining years your upper boundary is only 3120. Of course due to reading speed and free time your mileage may vary.
Hopeful transhumanists can disregardthis method.
Posted this (very late) last time, but sadly didn’t get a response. Hopefully second time’s a charm:
I have a quick research request inspired by a conversation on the subreddit and browsing some trans-rationalist tumblr blogs.
Can anyone link a male to female transsexual who posts/blogs/talks about masculinity and masculine men in a positive way? Specifically indicating attraction to them. One would do, but more would of course be better; you can never have too many hot-guy photoblogs in your bookmarks.
I have a hypothesis, and this seems like an easy falsification test. The only problem is that I’ve got none of the contacts or cultural knowledge I’d need to find the info myself.
Someone else on the reddit said they were also interested in this for other reasons, so it sounds like it’s at least a vaguely useful line of inquiry.
What hypothesis? You should have said the first time.
Well, you have to test your sample against the population before you can do any responsible theorizing.
Right now I’m sitting here with a big pile of red and green M&Ms. Before I go analysing them, I should at least check if there’s actually such a thing as blue M&Ms, and that I didn’t accidentally pick up a special edition “christmas colours” bag with a misrepresentative sample.
There is Blaire White who is is a male-to-female transgender MRA/anti-SJW. I don’t know if she speaks about being attracted to masculinity (I just watched a couple of her videos) but at least she seems sympathetic towards it.
I suppose she is not a redpiller though, if that’s what you were looking for.
I’m just a simple country chicken, but isn’t there more than a little daylight between “posts/blogs/talks about masculinity and masculine men in a positive way, including considering them worthy of attraction” and “redpiller”?
Seriously? Isn’t there? I honestly don’t know who’s defining terms for whom any more.
Everyone’s talking about “men’s issues” and “redpills”, and I was just hoping for a link like “my-sexy-firemen.tumblr.com”, or maybe info on a transsexual bara artist.
Considering men attractive can’t be considered some radical fringe position… can it?
I’ve seen online discussion of the extent to which heterosexual men *never* get told they’re attractive– I think it’s part of the system which requires them to make the first move.
Right, but… there’s porn of men out there. Gay dudes can’t be the only ones reblogging and talking about it, can we?
I know a bunch of mtf transsexuals who make and reblog porn of women, and one who writes (really hard) erotic fiction about women.
Surely there must be some “straight” ones who make porn of men?
I just figured people were going to post like twenty ero-tumblrs run by mtf transsexuals, and I’d have to reevaluate my biased sample and have a heartwarming revelation, etc. etc.
There are much easier ways to find porn on the internet than asking for help on SSC.
Wouldn’t you expect transgender women to exhibit female sexuality? So read & write sexually explicit fanfic rather than drool over crotch shots?
Considering men attractive can’t be considered some radical fringe position… can it?
I shouldn’t have thought so but then again, seeing the amount of grimacing about “cis hets”, who knows?
And then yet again, attraction is a very individual and subjective thing. The guys I find attractive might do nothing for you, and vice versa. JUST REALISED NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: Sorry, I’m not trans or (apparently) sufficiently queer (being aro/ace doesn’t count, it would seem) to be able to help you in your quest, I’m one of the horrid cis hets with all that unexamined and unearned privilege 🙂
You’d be surprised.
I hate to use chans as an example, but there’s a persistent meme in places like /fit/ that gainz (+fit) are an escalator toward non-heterosexuality, and it’s largely because while the other guys in there might appreciate your body, the ladies seem to only appreciate from the distance of a tv screen or magazine.
Candidate theories:
1. It’s possible to spend so much of your life on the internet that you avoid discovering that women like physically fit men.
2. *chan boards produce a signal through your monitor which causes brain damage, like in Videodrome.
3. /fit/ posters are mostly closet homosexuals to begin with.
Obviously the next step is to seek an NSF grant to determine which (if any) are false. I welcome help from anyone familiar with the application process.
/fit/ posters are largely non-closeted homosexuals to start with, or at least pretending very convincingly for the sake of humour.
@Leit
4. Gay men have no idea what women find attractive because they don’t care.
@Deiseach
Remember that the unexamined privilege isn’t worth having.
OMG, Blaire sounds awesome. Mostly seems to discuss serious issues/memes, but I’ll see if there’s any relationship talk in the longer ones. Thanks!
Sorry for not finding anyone… I got distracted.
Wow. I can actually hear the hackles rising from across the Interwebs.
It’s too late to edit the original post, but could you explain a bit? It sounds like I poked a sore spot? Someone told me to look up Alice Dreger last night, and hoooo boy…
Aaaaand I found out why
http://physicshead.blogspot.com/2016/02/alice-dreger-bailey-case.html
I’m not touching this subject with a ten foot pole any longer. My curiosity and tolerance are both fresh out.
Myra Breckinridge is a novel by Gore Vidal which is essentially all this, that is, you can get through all the satire and megalomania. It quickly became a go-to book for queer theorists back when it was published.
Except that Gore Vidal is gay man, not an MTF transsexual, and everyone already agrees that they’re into masculinity.
As an aside: I didn’t anticipate the plot twist in Myra Breckinridge when I read it because I was so distracted by how much Myra reminded me of an ex-girlfriend of mine. The ex claimed to have been pregnant before, but on reflection, I can’t be sure this is true.
The complaints I’d heard from trans circles is that the character of Myra Breckinridge is… a cis gay man’s idea of something, essentially a device for exploring ideas of gender and sexuality, but not in any way an attempt to explore what trans-as-it-occurs-in-the-real-world is like.
It does not surprise me at all to hear that queer theorists were all over it; literary theory has a tenuous relationship to the real world at the best of times; at it’s best, it’s not so much about what the world is like as what writers and readers think it’s like when writing and reading. (Also I have a low opinion of literary theory in general and queer theory in particular, so it doesn’t surprise me to hear of a whole bunch of them having been dead keen on a problematic text. There’s a certain… not quite Schadenfreude, but similar, to it.)
I don’t talk about *attraction* to men, but I do sometimes attempt to talk about men’s issues from a sympathetic and personal perspective on my tumblr blog. (I have a tag for it, a lot in it is just reblogs from others tho.)
You should try asking on 4chan’s /lgbt/ board. It seems like the perfect place for your question.
I don’t know any specific blogs or anything, but trans women are at least as often straight (i.e. attracted to men) as gay (i.e. attracted to women). The belief, in fact, for a very long time was that the only “real” trans women were attracted to men, and that those attracted to women were suffering from “autogynephilia”, or an attraction to a sexual fantasy of themselves as a woman, and not truly transgender at all (and therefore, shouldn’t be given hormones or sex reassignment surgery). As a result, this is a sensitive subject.
You could read the memoirs and interviews of famous transgender women. For instance, material about Christine Jorgensen, the first American to have sex reassignment surgery.
I just attempted to post something and got filtered, but if you look for porn instead of activist bloggers, I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.
I can’t give any specific suggestions, but I think you’d have better chances by searching fandoms in which men are the objects of desire (Supernatural, MCU, One Direction, Free!, etc.), and then looking for the MtFs in those fandoms. Browse through the social media of the more prolific fanfiction authors, since they tend to spill a little more about their personal lives, or have a good number of fans in theirs Tumblr asks/replies saying “I’m [of this demographic] and was inspired by your fic!” and such.
Alternatively, find trans geek spaces, and then narrow down within those spaces to fandoms in which men are the objects of desire.
My favorite part of the sequences has always been 37 ways words can be wrong. What are people’s thoughts about this?
I ask because I’m taking a class next semester on semantics from the linguistics department at my school, and I’ve been wondering if this area of the sequences has been less criticized because it’s right, or whether it’s just been overlooked. (Or perhaps I’ve never seen the criticism but it is out there.)
It’s right. It’s also basically just Wittgenstein, but there are worse things to be. Note that Scott has written on a similar topic at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I’ve heard the “Less Wrong is Analytic Philosophy lite” thing a few times in different ways. Suggested entry point for Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein in particular?
I recommend reading Wittgenstein in the original German, as this will help prevent you from falsely assuming you understand what he means. If you can read German, try to find his works translated into, say, French.
“If a philosopher could talk, we would not understand him.”
I would suggest Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein if you want to follow Ludwig into Analytic Philosophy. The chiding comments about Wittgenstein being incomprehensible are cleared up very well by Ray Monk. That book was my gateway into AP.
http://www.amazon.com/Ludwig-Wittgenstein-Genius-Ray-Monk/dp/0140159959
Less Wrong is kind of like AN AP lite, but Less Wrong has a cultural outlook which makes for some very good public discussion. A professional philosopher could often look over at Less Wrong and find quaint people puzzling over questions that have been discussed by ‘professionals’ for 50 years, but the same philosopher has no community of AP philosophy equivalent to Less Wrong. I think Less Wrong peeps are an awesome experiment in philosophy without input from the Tower.
For example, I think “37 ways” is an extremely misleading article and needs amendment. My Tower education allowed me to read a lot more on the topic than most people ever will, so I’m predisposed to find most explanations about words to be woefully incomplete, and thus misleading in some ‘crucial’ way.
Wittgenstein is a kind of odd figure in Analytic philosophy – everyone agrees he was brilliant but nobody is really sure what he was saying. This is common in the continental tradition but rare in analytic philosophy, where tremendous value is placed on clarity and people don’t like to bother much with interpretation. So I think looking at Wittgenstein as your introduction to analytic philosophy would give you a misleading picture of the discipline. That said, I think his Philosophical Investigations is a work of great beauty as long as you recognize that it’s not representative.
I think a better entry point into analytic philosophy would be to pick an area that interests you (ethics, epistemology, etc.) and read a textbook or compilation, or some plato.stanford.edu articles. Or, if you need some names, Bertrand Russell, David Lewis, Robert Nozick are all much clearer and more representative writers in the analytic tradition.
Offhand, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and Reality and Mark Colyvan’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics are good textbooks on philosophy of science and math, respectively. Here is a decent introduction to formal epistemology and confirmation theory.
Less Wrong is not Analytic Philosophy lite; Analytic Philosophy is Less Wrong lite.
Well, the later Wittgenstein, Rosch, Lakoff and successors, and picking certain bits from the later Wittgenstein rather than trying to swallow the whole thing whole (a difficult task – as Airgap says, no-one can agree on what it all means).
An uncharitable person would say, “it’s the sort of thing you get if you think that ‘cognitive’ is a magical search term that means ‘the good stuff’ and then trying some searches to try to find some good linguistics”.
Probably the best thing to do with Wittgenstein is to decide in advance what you want to argue, and then skim the Investigations for quotes that appear to support it. Whether your position has anything to do with Wittgenstein’s is immaterial. I understand Saul Kripke’s doing pretty well for himself.
You have a distinctively Positivist view of citation practices. You should instead think of them in terms of citations games, or forms of citation life. I recommend that, whenever you find yourself saying something which you think is smart enough for Wittgenstein to have agreed with, you add a footnote as follows:
1. Cf. Wittgenstein CR 107.3.
It makes absolutely no difference if the acronym or the numbers represent anything, as it is hopelessly passe to understand language in terms of representation.
Not sure why the “smart enough for Wittgenstein to have agreed with” condition is necessary, but otherwise solid [1].
[1] n.b. Feferman 1979, pp -7 to pi.
Doesn’t this article basically resolve the sand-heap Sorites Paradox? How is this not the resolution? IE, that categories are constructed rather than inherent, and therefore whatever we define as a heap or pile is what a heap or pile is.
That, in itself, does not solve the problem.
We don’t just arbitrarily choose to call some things a heap and other things not a heap. We call them heaps because of what they’re objectively like, independently of what we call them. Otherwise, calling them heaps would be meaningless because you could call anything a heap. Yet the term is not meaningless, since in order for there to be a heap of something, there has to be a good-sized amount.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a terrible, insoluble problem, either. Ayn Rand’s answer (in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) to this kind of boundary-drawing problem was what she called the “objective theory of concepts” (in contradistinction to the “subjective” and “intrinsic” theories). Concepts are created by human beings, yes, but there are are some instances where the classification according to a particular concept is mandatory (for the goal of achieving both “unit economy” and an accurate picture of reality), some where it is impermissible, and some where it is optional.
There’s some point, e.g. one or two grains of sand, where the concept of a “heap” is completely inapplicable. There some other point, e.g. two tons of sand, where it would be absurd to call it anything other than a heap. And there’s some point where, depending on your purposes, you may want to call it a heap and you may not.
It’s the same question with red and orange. There’s some point at which a shade is unquestionably red and not orange at all, some point where it’s orange and not red. But there’s some point in the middle where you can call it either orange or red, make a new concept to delineate that particular shade (e.g. “coquelicot“), or just describe it by a circumlocution like “reddish orange”.
I’m not sure of this. Concepts like “heap” exist to simplify expression, at the expense of precision. Ie. instead of saying “there is greater than 1kg of sand in the sandbox” you can say “there is a heap of sand in the sandbox”. There is no reason you would expect such a concept to have an objectively delineated and exactly precise definition. The definition of such a concept is therefore going to be imprecise and context-dependent.
@ Theo Jones:
As I tried to express in my post, I’m not saying that a “heap” has to have an “exactly precise definition”. Any theory of concepts upon which it would has a serious problem.
But neither is the term “heap” completely imprecise, so as to be meaningless! If there’s one grain of sand lying on the ground, it’s not a heap. No matter whether you say it is or not. You can redefine the term “heap” of course, but the point is that it does have a generally accepted meaning that applies to some things and not others. There are some things that are unquestionably heaps, some things that are unquestionably not heaps, and many things in the middle.
That’s different from saying a heap is just whatever any particular individual chooses to call a heap. The term is able to communicate information because the things people call heaps have certain features in common.
I think the answer is that “heap” brings an image or a shape to mind, a roughly pyramid-shaped … it’s hard to describe this without calling it a “heap”. Like a mound? A bunch of instances of the thing lying on top of each other.
I don’t think it’s related to number at all.
I agree:
Fifty sandbags is enough to make a heap.
Fifty sand grains is not.
I don’t think I like ’37 Ways That Words can Be Wrong” very much because I’ve been introduced to the ideas therein slowly and thus been inoculated.
“The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories” is interesting to me, because I think it accidentally (seems to everyone as though it) argues against the beliefs that Scott actually holds, which were detailed on his tumblr recently (I link you to this, reader, under the implicit agreement that you will not make it go viral, because that may make Scott sad). This would not be overly surprising, people change opinions and whatnot, but Scott cites his “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories” in that same tumblr post as supposedly the same position. Is this just me?
And now, a slightly related quote from 37 Ways That Words can Be Wrong:
I don’t think “humans are mortal” is supposed to be so by definition.
I prefer the little sci-fi stories.
This is amusing. It doesn’t follow from the fact that Tom is a bachelor that Tom is a man, because, were we to define a bachelor as a one-eyed raven, we could then infer that Tom is a one-eyed raven, which Tom is not? Uh, okay.
Let’s suppose (falsely) that, necessarily, Bob is a human only if Bob is mortal. Why on earth would that generate an obligation to observe Bob being mortal (…how?) before calling Bob a human? Surely I can call Neptune a planet without violating any norms of assertion even if I’ve never observed Neptune doing anything planetary.
Suppose that I see an animal at the zoo with gray skin, large, floppy ears, tusks, and a trunk. I use the conventional name for this creature, “elephant,” and infer from past experience with elephants that, if it is female, it in all likelihood gives birth to live young. Isn’t this how inductive reasoning is supposed to work? How is this different from the blegg story?
We had better not use any terms whose referents we can’t point to, then! Wait, scratch that, that’s a terrible idea.
There are, of course, substantive issues which hinge on the meanings of words. Suppose that we wish to know if a certain politician perjured himself– knowingly told a falsehood under oath– when he claimed never to have had sexual intercourse with a certain intern. To show perjury, we must first show falsehood, and whether his statement was a falsehood or not depends on what the words “sexual intercourse” actually mean.
Hinduism is just so obviously a religion, is it? Take two Hindus, say, a village Brahmin c. 2000 BC sacrificing a goat to Indra to ensure a good crop, and an illiterate, vegetarian Vaishnava from Bangalore whose faith consists in a brief prayer over a lotus flower every morning. Would they recognize one another as fellow-practitioners of the same religion?
Between the repetition, the truisms, the errors, and the inconsistencies, that's about all I can stomach for tonight.
The first one is perfectly sensible, it’s making the same point as section 2 of Two Dogmas.
It’s true there’s a lot of repetition on the list, and many of the points seem rather trivial. However, I would like to offer some responses, as your criticisms seem to miss the mark:
2: The argument “Tom is a bachelor and therefore, by definition, a man” is in fact invalid – if the arguer’s actual information about Tom is only “Tom is a ‘bachelor'”, the fact that one definition of ‘bachelor’ is an unmarried man is not helpful. The information the arguer needs is what definition of ‘bachelor’ was used to classify Tom. If the arguer themselves classified Tom, what “Tom is a bachelor, and therefore a man” really means is “I am led to believe Tom is an unmarried man, the combination of which features I call ‘bachelor’,” but obviously that’s a bit of a mouthful.
4: The objection is that the hypothetical arguer is equivocating between definitions. Clearly mortality isn’t that important for the definition of human if the arguer already knows Bob’s human without determining his mortality. If one knows that Neptune is a planet, the definition of planet being used does not require or necessarily imply qualities that one doesn’t know about Neptune.
5: Of course the arguer can make that inference. But pretending that it’s not an inference is a way to be wrong. In other words, “It must be heavy, it’s an elephant!” is an easy way to make the speaker and listeners forget that the creature may not be an elephant, but instead an animatronic elephant-like robot made from balsa wood and helium.
Granted, in most real-life cases, people recognize “X, as an elephant, …”and “X is an elephant, so…” as challengeable claims, but it’s more relevant when the classification made is using one of several substantially different definitions, or one unnatural to the speaker or listeners.
(other 5, I think you mean 6): You agree that here point is not meant exclusively literally, right? I find it hard to imagine having a useful word that can’t possibly be given an ostensive definition, but perhaps one exists (maybe particles or articles?). I’d be intrigued to hear a counterexample.
17: In that case you’re not arguing over what sexual intercourse means, you’re arguing about what the respondent understood by it – an empirical question, albeit extremely difficult to prove. In fact, once you understand what the respondent was trying to say, you’ve solved the issue (as a matter of law, perjury in the US requires the alleged perjurer not to believe the statement in question, and to affirm it’s true, among other things). In the more general class of things that depend on the meaning of a word, I believe most are actually about what the speaker/writer meant by the word. There are also arguments about what most people would understand by a word (e.g.marketing, PR, etc), but those aren’t about what the word means, rather what the audience thinks it means.
Arguments about what a term means to Bob, or to the IEEE standards committee are explicitly deemed ok, Eliezer just thinks it’s wrong to argue that there is one true definition of a word everyone has to line up behind in all contexts. Not very profound, I grant you.
27. We understand Christianity to be a religion as well, even if many practices among different sects are quite distinct, and commonly include sects which don’t regard each other as true Christians. Further, taking a practitioner from 4000 years ago as an example is, I think, rather in bad faith; the example is that Hinduism is “obviously a religion” not that it has always been so, nor that is has always been the same religion unchanged. Finally, and most importantly, I don’t think your objection really strikes to the meat of the point – whether or not Hinduism is a single religion seems rather irrelevant to the question of whether the non-central fallacy is actually wrong.
I acknowledge there are commenters here who don’t agree that the non-central fallacy is a fallacy, and consider it a valid argument, but you’re not making that argument, you’re just picking a fight over a non-critical example.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. If you’re saying the inference from Tom being a bachelor to Tom being a man is not logically valid, i.e. true in virtue of logical form, of course it isn’t. If you’re saying that there are other, marginal uses of the word “bachelor,” of course there are, but we’re not talking about those (if you like, substitute some word which has a unique meaning for “bachelor”). Yudkowsky seems to be claiming that, even if A’s being an F entails that A is a G, we are not allowed to infer from A’s being an F that it’s a G because, were we to define “F” differently, this would allow us to infer a falsehood. This is ridiculous.
This doesn’t follow at all (ignoring the poorly chosen example). Suppose that having property X is a sufficient condition for being an F, and that having property Y is a necessary condition for being an F. You might determine that A is an F by way of its having property X, and glean from this the important fact that A also has property Y. For instance, if someone tells you that you have an enclosed figure whose edge is at all points equidistant from its center, you can draw the useful and novel inference that its area is pi times the square of its radius. Or do you think that the relationship between the radius and area of a circle isn’t an important feature of circles?
None of this has anything to do with observation, of course, which is the problem in the original claim.
I agree that one should not believe that one is not drawing an inference when one is, in fact, drawing an inference. Note, though, that this is a truism and has nothing do with misuses of language.
Good lord. “Hadron.” “Twelve.” “The Big Bang.” “Natural Selection.” This is restricting ourselves to nouns, once other parts of speech are brought in there’s not even a glimmer of hope that we might systematically define them by jabbing our fingers around. Put a little thought into this, please.
This is wrong– perjury requires that the statement be actually false, which depends on the actual meanings of the terms involved, as noted. A man who believes he is testifying falsely but, in fact, is not does not commit perjury.
Oh, sure, whatever. I was just pointing out that we can add Hinduism to the list of things the author doesn’t know anything about.
The point is that just because you defined all Fs as being Gs doesn’t mean that’s what is actually happening in reality.
Here is what you seem to be saying:
–If A is an F yet lacks property X, our definition of F-hood should not include property X.
This is true, but not at all illuminating. It amounts to the requirement that definitions be accurate.
As best I can reconstruct, Yudkowsky was trying to make a slightly different claim:
–If A is an F and has property X, but possibly A could be an F while lacking property X, our definition of F-hood should not include property X.
This is a more sophisticated truism– it amounts to requiring that definitions be true in all possible worlds. In any case, Yudkowsky apparently didn’t have the conceptual vocabulary to express himself properly, and wound up saying something ludicrous instead.
On a list of “ways words can be wrong” it seems appropriate to include “using a word this way is logically invalid.” I believe your second interpretation (from your most recent post) is close to my understanding of it, though emphasized differently.
If X is a sufficient condition for being an F, observing X logically entails observing Y and, what’s more, knowing that X is sufficient and Y necessary requires us to already know X entails Y (so we also know we have observed Y).
The original claim, quoted here: “You unconsciously slap the conventional label on something, without actually using the verbal definition you just gave,” is actually just “equivocating on definitions is bad.” If we introduce an atypical definition of human, clearly we ought to actually use that definition; if we don’t know if Bob fulfills the necessary conditions, we can’t (in this context) honestly claim Bob is an example of a human. This is sort of like point 5.
Is “jabbing our fingers around” intended for rhetorical effect, or meant to be taken literally? I agree many meaningful concepts exist that cannot be physically pointed at.
I think we must understand different things by the phrase “ostensive definition.” With enough examples of twelve varied objects labeled “twelve” and examples of groups not numbering twelve labeled “not twelve,” we could arrive at an ostensive definition of twelve. We can, similarly, give actual examples of natural selection, both real and fictional. Adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and prepositions can be demonstrated.
As a single event, we can do better than ostensive for “The Big Bang” and move up to a proper extensive definition. Hadron we can also define extensively, barring major discoveries in physics.
Behold:
perhaps it is different in other countries. In any case, establishing the actual falsehood of the statement would involve proving that what the respondent meant was false, not recourse to an “actual” definition. I can see where someone might want an “intentionally mislead” clause, too, to include cases where the respondent uses bizarre meanings for their words, but then the argument would be not about an “actual” meaning, but what the questioner might reasonably be expected to infer from the answer given.
I suspect you may be in too far over your head for this to be a productive conversation. I have no idea what you think it would mean to use a word in a way that is logically invalid. Logical (in)validity is a feature of arguments or inferences, not words. I get that you feel compelled to defend Yudkowsky’s honor or whatever, but you’re not doing him any favors by piling a new set of confusions on top of his.
Let me stop you there. This is obviously false. Suppose I observe of a polyhedron:
X: It has exactly six faces, all of them square.
I infer from this that the polyhedron is a cube, and, therefore:
Y: Its volume is the cube of the length of any edge.
My observing X certainly does not entail my observing Y.
Earlier you said:
“I find it hard to imagine having a useful word that can’t possibly be given an ostensive definition”
So can you point to the big bang or a hadron, or can’t you? I’m not interested in listening to you hem and haw and introduce new terms you don’t understand. Just answer the question.
Actually, it is as I said it was in the US. Here is US v Gorman:
“To support a conviction of perjury beyond a reasonable doubt, the government had the burden of proving that (1) the defendant, while under oath, testified falsely before the grand jury; (2) his testimony related to some material matter; and (3) he knew that testimony was false. 18 U.S.C. § 1623.”
And here is the statute:
“Whoever under oath […] in any proceeding before or ancillary to any court or grand jury of the United States knowingly makes any false material declaration or makes or uses any other information, including any book, paper, document, record, recording, or other material, knowing the same to contain any false material declaration, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
@Earthy Knight:
You appear to have misread your own quote:
“Whoever under oath […] in any proceeding before or ancillary to any court or grand jury of the United States knowingly makes any false material declaration or makes or uses any other information, including any book, paper, document, record, recording, or other material, knowing the same to contain any false material declaration, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
This expressly states that you must know your claim is false for it to be perjury.
Yes– I glossed it in my initial comment as “knowingly t[elling] a falsehood under oath.” tern disputes that falsity is required: he claims, apparently in error, that making a statement you believe to be false while under oath suffices for perjury.
Is that your invitation to commence the traditional sniping and hostile reading back-and-forth now? I can’t say I’m very interested in that, sorry.
I thought the meaning was fairly clear – the arguer is using the word to make a logically invalid inference, and not in the trivial sense of “there are words in that inference.” The invalid inference escapes notice because the word is implying facts not observed or justified.
Perhaps you prefer the phrasing “using a word this way encourages logically invalid arguments,”
Yes, you could say that you haven’t directly observed Y in such a way, I suppose. But you will have observed a fact that necessarily implies Y, and when you observe X you know it necessarily implies Y. There’s no mystery as to whether Y is true. One could say you’ve observed the truth of Y, instead, if you like, or incontrovertible evidence of Y. I don’t know what significance you attach to this – are you taking issue with the use of the word “observe” rather than “verify with certainty”? If so, then this is again a criticism which doesn’t seem to engage with the concept that the item is trying to communicate (“don’t equivocate”). I mean, it’s fine to criticize the given examples, I just thought you were disagreeing with the substance of the point.
One cannot physically point in a meaningful way at a hadron or the big bang, if that’s what you mean. Considering that I’ve repeatedly questioned the relevance of literal pointing and received no answer, I assume you either a) don’t mean that but don’t wish to explain what you mean or b) use ostensive in a different way from me that implies this question is relevant.
I was taught to use the word “ostensive” to refer to definitions provided by example and counterexample only, whether the examples were accessible to direct observation or not. Looking up definitions available online, that may not be what you understood by the word.
If we take “ostensive” to exclusively apply to definitions in terms of the kinds of things one can directly observe and/or physically point at (apparently fairly common usage), then I freely admit there are many things one cannot define ostensively.
I further admit, after having gone back to re-read the linked article and try to figure out what exactly Yudkowsky meant, I find this particular item (6) in the list to be distressingly unclear in intended application, and only tangentially related to the article it links to. I’m not sure I agree with your interpretation, but I’m not confident in my initial reading of it, either.
I see. So depending on whether a grand jury or court is involved, we must sometimes prove (knowing) falsehood and sometimes not (though I’m not a lawyer, so there might be precedent establishing that requirement for 1621, too, I guess). If you look within the court case you cite, you’ll see that the determination of falsehood was not dependent on an “actual” definition, but rather based on what the defendant understood:
In other words, once the jury understands what Jamarkus meant when he denied “having” the car, there’s no further argument about the definition of “have”, just whether he “had” it or not in the way he denied.
What? He’s callin’ you out, bro. Don’t be a pussy.
@Airgap:
I think this trolling persona you are using is fairly annoying. It’s also an exploitation of the commons, in that if everyone did this, the comment section would be completely unreadable.
For what it’s worth, I find Airgap entertaining.
Stop using words you don’t understand. Yudkowsky’s claim, I take it, entails that you could not infer from Tom’s being a bachelor that Tom is a man, because, were you to define a bachelor as a one-eyed raven, you would then be able to infer that Tom is a one-eyed raven, which he is not. Do you endorse this principle, and agree that you cannot infer from Tom’s being a bachelor that Tom is a man?
So you’re on board that, even if property Y is a necessary condition for F-hood, you need not, in general, observe A exhibiting Y before dubbing it an F?
So you now agree, contra Yudkowsky, that it is sometimes acceptable to “try to define a word […] without being able to point to an example”?
No, the statement still has to be false on at least one of its actual meanings to be a candidate for perjury. Suppose Tom robbed a gas station but never a bank, mistakenly believes that a gas station is a type of bank, and testifies, under the misapprehension that he is lying, “I never robbed a bank”. Tom does not perjure himself under the statute I cited, because his statement is true regardless of whether he takes it to be.
This sort of Kantian thinking would greatly impoverish the comments section.
This is not Yudkowsky’s claim. He’d certainly agree that we could infer that “Tom is a raven”, had someone defined “bachelor” to mean “raven”.
The problem is when people debate definitions because they think the conclusion of their debate-over-definitions will causally exert an empirically-measurable impact on reality, rather than redraw their opponent’s model of reality.
A better example EY uses is when atheists argue that religion is the root of all evil, and theists counter “but atheism is a religion too”. If the atheists take the bait, they’ll get sucked into a futile dispute over whether “atheism is as much a religion as traditional religions”.
This is merely a definitional dispute. Whether we define Atheism as a religion distracts from the original empirical question of whether religions like Christianity or Hinduism beget {net disutility, excessive warfare, insert your own metric}. The original question is potentially useful insofar as it will help us decide whether to encourage or discourage theism in posterity.
It’s kinda like the Is-Ought Divide. But between inductive and deductive.
I don’t think that’s the claim, but probably not. I’m not sure, in this instance, if by “Tom is a bachelor” you mean “Let Tom be a bachelor, whatever that is,” “Tom is an unmarried man,” or something else. If it’s the second, then definitely not, that’s a reasonable inference.
The claim, I believe, is that the label one uses for a concept (e.g. the literal string “bachelor”) should not be confused with the actual properties of the concept. Tom is not a man because he’s labeled a bachelor, but because of his relevant characteristics. When they do get confused, you get trouble as in FMR’s example.
If Y is a necessary condition for F-hood, your certainty of the truth of F-hood can only ever be as good as your certainty of Y, and not better. So whatever degree of certainty you need before you officially dub A an F, you need it for Y – if that requires direct observation for some reason, then you’d need to directly observe it, but I don’t see why that would be the case in general.
Without being able to literally point a finger at it, yes. As I said, I have no earthly idea whether Yudkowsky meant the statement to specify literal finger-pointing, though his example does use it.
Of course it does, but from my quote of the case you cited, it seems that one of the “actual” meanings the jury considers is what they judge the defendant to have meant. Quoting more concisely,
Gorman earlier cited Bronston, which held that “literally true” but misleading statements are not grounds for perjury. But here we see in the Gorman decision the court says that it’s not enough for a “literally true” interpretation to exist; if the jury decides the defendant was not operating under that interpretation, it’s still perjury.
In your example, Tom understands the question to mean “did you rob a bank or gas station” – if the jury believes to the required standard of evidence that that’s what he understood, and that he robbed a gas station, it’s sufficient to make his testimony knowingly false, according to that passage.
It’s clear from what Yudkowsky says that he is objecting to the following argument schema:
–A is an F, Fs are, by definition, Gs, therefore, A is a G.
He objects to this schema because, were F to be defined as ~G, it would yield a falsehood. But “Tom is a bachelor, bachelors are, by definition, men, therefore, Tom is a man” is an instance of this schema. If you accept that we can infer from Tom’s being a bachelor that Tom is a man, you reject Yudkowsky’s claim.
Good. So if you believed that mortality were a necessary condition for manhood, that would not given rise to any obligation to observe someone being mortal before judging him to be a man?
So we are agreed that a witness perjures himself only if his statement is actually false, and whether it is actually false depends in part on the meaning of the words involved, and not exclusively on the witness’s mental states?
I do not see where you are getting this from. The opinion is saying that if a word has (say) six candidate meanings, and on some of those meanings the alleged perjurer’s statement is true and on others it is false, the jury may attempt to reconstruct from context which one of the senses the alleged perjurer intended. But there is no sense of the word “bank” on which it includes gas stations, consequently, a man who has only ever robbed a gas station and testifies that he has never robbed a bank does not perjure himself, no matter what he thinks the word “bank” means.
Again, I don’t agree that’s precisely the claim. It doesn’t follow from the fact that the label “F” is applied to A that A is a G, it follows from the relevant properties of A (here, G-ness). The detour through “is an F, and Fs are by definition G” serves only as a place where someone could equivocate. Instead, they ought to just say “these qualities of F’s indicate G-ness.” In other words, If Tom is sitting next to you and a stranger asks “Are you sure that thing beside you is a man and not a raven?”, It would be unhelpful to say “he’s a bachelor, and therefore by definition a man,” instead of just “I asked him and he said he’s a man,” “I have sworn testimony from four zookeepers he’s no raven,” or simply “yes”.
Such an obligation would exist under the colloquial definition of observe, which many people use to mean “to come to realize or know,” “to notice,” “to be or become aware of” etc.
In a stricter sense like “perceive by an unaided physical sense,” no. It’s obvious you took it in this sense, and what Yudkowsky meant is, again, beyond me, but even if he did mean it in the informal sense above, there are other, better words that would not risk such confusion.
No, because even under section 1623 the defendant’s mental state at the time of the alleged offense counts as a relevant meaning of the word. Really, the relevant meaning because a statement made that the speaker believes true can’t be perjury, and (as I contend below) a statement that the speaker believes to be false, provided he’s not mistaken about the facts of the situation, is perjury. In my interpretation, once they’ve proven what the speaker meant, there’s no more question about what the word means.
My understanding is this: if there is inherent ambiguity, or someone claims there to be ambiguity (and gives enough evidence to support it), the defendant can be found guilty if all meanings provided are false – crucially, one of those meanings can be Tom’s, if the court believes it. If some of those meanings are true, the jury can attempt to conclude what Tom meant, and if that’s false they can convict. Obviously the second step is superfluous if they’ve already been convinced of Tom’s strange definition.
Consider the case where Tom’s quirk is well known – literally everyone in the court has always known that Tom thinks gas stations are banks, and thinks that the phrase “gas station” refers to fuel depots for spacecraft, and doesn’t understand that other people don’t use his definitions. But still, no one else uses the words that way, and the definition doesn’t appear in dictionaries, urban or otherwise. Do you really think Tom gets to answer “no” without it being considered a false statement under 1623?
Suppose you are in a bar, you overhear a stranger mentioning that he is going to Jaime’s bachelor party tomorrow, and infer from the stranger’s utterance in conjunction with the definition of bachelorhood that Jaime is a man. Don’t you thereby learn a new and important piece of information about Jaime, solely based on facts about meaning?
You seem to be reading your wacky semantic views into the opinion. Here’s the complete passage from US v. SCOP:
“An answer relating to a term susceptible of various meanings can be found perjurious so long as the jury can adequately assess from the testimony the defendant’s understanding of the term and thus the falsity of his or her statements with respect to that term.
The possibility that a question or an answer may have a number of interpretations does not invalidate either an indictment or a conviction which requires the jury to determine that the question as the defendant understood it was falsely answered in order to convict.”
When the court talks about “meanings” they’re talking about actual meanings of the sort you might find in a dictionary, not idiolectic meanings that only exist inside the defendant’s head. This passage wouldn’t make any sense, otherwise: all terms have various meanings and all questions and answers have a number of interpretations if “meaning” and “interpretation” are understood psychologistically.
@HeelBearCub
If everyone else did it, I wouldn’t have to.
As a heads up, unless your linguistics department works differently from what I’m used to in U.S. universities, a semantics class is unlikely to address any of the topics you link to.
What semantics does is construct models that are meant to explain certain facts about meaning, such as entailment relations and the productivity of language (the fact that language users are capable of understanding indefinitely many sentences despite having finite minds). In the model theoretic tradition, this requires doing three things:
1) Specifying tree structures for sentences illustrating syntactic relations.
2) Assigning each word a meaning, which is generally a function–written in lambda calculus notation–that takes the meanings of other expressions as arguments.
3) Specifying a set of rules for combining the meanings of various expressions given their context within the tree structure.
Together these things allow you to calculate the “meaning” of the whole sentence, which will be a truth value in extensional cases or a set of possible worlds in intensional ones (rather, the characteristic function of that set). And by “calculate”, I mean calculate; a computer can do it. It has the feel of a logic or math class more than anything else.
The worries on the LW page are either stipulated not to be present for simplicity, shoved off toward the discipline of pragmatics, or unaddressed.
I have some background in computational linguistics, so my knowledge of “real” linguistics classes is limited, but:
The model-theoretic thing is certainly a thing, and I’ve worked with projects involving large collections of computer code to do exactly that. There’s a distinction between lexical semantics (step 2) and compositional semantics (step 3), and different ambiguities involved in each step. One example sentence with a compositional ambiguity: “every smoker is the nephew of a dragon” – do you mean that every smoker is a nephew of the same dragon, or that each smoker has his own draconic uncle? In half-remembered symbolic notation, the first reading is ∃(x)dragon(x)&∀(y) (smoker(y) => nephew(x,y))) and the second is ∀(y)(smoker(y)=>(∃(x)dragon(x) & nephew(x,y))). I’m sure I’ve mangled this – the point is that you can do all of this and all sorts of exciting logic without, for example, knowing that “nephew” means “sibling (or sibling-in-law’s) son”.
The lexical semantics in step 2 often seem to boil down to selecting the correct sense from a smallish inventory of word senses, turning “bank” into “bank(sub)financial(/sub)” and “bank(sub)river(/sub)” – there’s no consideration of the niceties of which sorts of financial institutions count as banks (or which institutions are financial enough to count).
The thing that mucks things up is that I and various others have become skeptical of neat little word sense inventories – they tend to be either so small and coarse-grained as to be missing important senses or so large and fine-grained as to make it too hard to tell which sense a word is in. A lot of word sense ambiguity is due to regular polysemy (example: animal-food polysemy, i.e. “fish” and “chicken” and “lamb” and many other words can refer to live animals or meat derived from those animals), there’s a lot of confusion over where things like metaphor stop and word senses start, and so on.
My overall impression was of people building a complicated brittle thing which was kind of amazing in its own way, but which seemed to be missing some key insight.
Being the sort of nerd who buys textbooks and other dry academic books for fun: I’d recommend Cognitive Linguistics (Croft and Cruse, 2004) for a not-too-out-of-date summary of some of the relevant bits of linguistics, and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (George Lakoff, 1987) is a big seminal work with lots of important ideas. With the latter… Lakoff’s linguistics IMO are better than his philosophy (or for that matter his political commentary, but that’s not relevant), and apparently there have been some discoveries about the Australian aboriginal language which he uses as his big example that kind of undermine some of his case, but still it’s an important work and gets cited loads.
So if you want something reputable (and more clearly written than Wittgenstein), then have a look at those. I read the LW lingustics stuff a bit after I’d read lots from those sources, and lots of the LW stuff checks out, at least as far as an amateur like me can say. That said… linguists are a notoriously fractious bunch and I’m sure you can find people in different camps who would complain as much about the texts I’ve recommended as about LW.
I need help thinking through a problem. There is an elderly 80+ lady whom I have casually known for decades, and whom I sometimes help with small tasks, such as letters or translations (she doesn’t speak English.) She lives in a different state. She has worked physically all her life, the last 30 years as a cleaning lady in a small clinic. The job is all the social interaction she has. All of her old neighbors moved out, and new immigrants, speaking a different language, moved in. So, recently, her boss of 30+ years retired, and shortly thereafter she was laid off. I suspect it was that boss who kept her around for so long, because he knew how important the job was to her. She is now asking me to call her HR department and plead with them to take her back part time. The problem is that I’m a very introverted person who is terrible at talking to people or at any sort of persuasion. And I want to give it my best shot. I really want to help this lady. Any suggestions as to what would be the most effective way of talking to her HR department for me to even stand a chance of convincing them to help? Additionally, my understanding is that the lady and the HR head dislike each other. Thanks for reading =)
That… almost sounds like effort would be better spent finding her new avenues for social interaction, especially if that was the most important part of the job for her.
How is her income, do you think? Is she religious? Volunteering for church functions is an excellent way to get in touch with people, especially if you may need community assistance down the line.
Thank you for responding. I think she’s fine financially. She’s very frugal and will be receiving social security payments. Great idea about volunteering at church. I will ask her if she’s considered it.
Still, I’d feel guilty if I at least didn’t give her HR department a call. I wish there were negotiators for hire that I could use… Are there? Anyone’s ever used one? (I’m going to be googling this.)
Lawyers are a kind of negotiator for hire, but only for certain types of negotiations. Same for sports and entertainment agents (who are sometimes, but not always lawyers). I don’t think there’s any such thing as at large negotiator for all circumstances, walk-ins welcome.
Calling HR is going way above and beyond, and probably won’t be effective (especially with the dislike between the HR head and this person).
As she no longer has any connections to the area she is in now, my first suggestion to her would be to move to a location where she can make connections. Perhaps find some nearby ethnic enclaves for her?
In fairness, she has been here 30 years and still doesn’t speak the language? That sounds like almost willful helplessness. Be careful. People that are willfully helpless can become massive energy drains. Sure, you will feel good for a while helping them, but it can easily create an unhealthy dependency based relationship and the demands for your help can easily spiral out of control. My second piece of advice for her would be directions to a local ESL class.
Thank you, Jason. It’s a good idea to look around for some ethnic enclaves or at least organizations (maybe a church) that she could use for social support.
Isn’t she a bit too old to work as a cleaning lady? Even if she can do it now, would she be able to do it in a couple years? If she slips, trips and breaks her hip on the job, wouldn’t her employer get into trouble with the insurance lawyers and/or government regulators?
It looks like she’d better consider herself retired and look for some other forms of social interaction.
It wouldn’t surprise me if her employer were concerned about the very same thing. Thanks for your comment!
I think I agree with everything other people already said about calling HR being likely to fail and maybe even not such a good idea.
But, assuming we still want to give it a try, here is what I would do: Pick a friend who you think has good people skills, explain the situation to them, and ask them to do this as a favor for you.
I really like this suggestion. Thank you!
Find a more extroverted friend and convince them to plead the old lady’s case for you. To convince the friend, you can use a combination of emotional blackmail, bribery (e.g. offer sexual favors), and outright threats (it’s pretty easy to obtain a rifle in most of the US, and they’re much easier to aim than pistols). Good luck!
Hahaha. I appreciate the sense of humor. =)
Does she understand she has the right work below the minimum wage?
The employer may be receptive to such acts of liberty.
Name checks out.
If you do end up making the call, try the Door-In-The-Face technique: After explaining how important the job is to the old lady, ask them to take her back full time, and if they say no, ask for part-time.
The anchoring effect combined with people’s aversion to saying ‘no’ two times in a row will work in your favor.
Any other history students read SSC?
I got an undergrad history degree if that counts. I’m a software developer now though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I still enjoy reading and learning about history as a hobby. In my experience it isn’t the most popular topic, unless you include the WWII buffs.
History minor. Fell totally out of touch with the field once I lost access to journals. You take it for granted at university 🙁
Journals are evil. Use sci-hub.cc
This is v sad
Well, I’ll be starting a history degree next year. Why?
Well, sometimes Scott writes about history or history related stuff. And I think he has interesting things to say. Certainly he has very different priors than the people who get published in American Historical Review. I asked mostly because I wanted to see what other history people think about his history related writing.
I follow a few early American history blogs, and I wonder how race and gender studies came to dominate that are of history (does it now dominate every area of history?). Is it simply that the political / economic / etc. areas of history have been completely mined? Is it shared political biases or interests? Or is it just a historical / institutional accident that those areas are now dominating?
I ask because I like to read books on the founding fathers, and those books tend to be derived as “founders chic” by lots of historians (whether the books themselves are written by historians or not). It just seems odd to be bothered by what captures the public imagination. As a philosopher, I’m not really bothered by what philosophy books are publicly popular; I don’t expect hardcore analytic philosophy to every be popular with the public, and I’m ok with that.
I’m reading a pretty good biography of Robert E. Lee. Does that count?
I got a 5 on the APUSH and AP World exams, and am currently writing a long blogpost on how the parties switched geographical positions. Does that count?
No longer a student (well, at least not a formal one, reading never ends) but do have an undergrad degree in the subject.
Took graduate classes before I decided academia wasn’t worth all the bs to get to a good job (plus the decreasing likelihood of ever making it even if I did stick with it). Got an area of specialization/a preferred historical methodology? I tend to prefer structural histories myself (I’m still not reconciled with the idea that post-structuralism was a real advance in the field).
Area: modern Europe (mostly France, but I’m trying to branch out)
Methodology: I just discovered microhistory and Carlo Ginzburg which I’m very excited about. In general I mostly study social history with occasional forays into intellectual history and (very rarely) military history.
Post-structuralism is hard to like. Derrida was worthless for sure. Foucault is I think worth reading but not taking too seriously. I’ve never really heard of structuralist history, except for one book about Nazi Germany by Ian Kershaw that mentioned something called that. But it sounds like you mean French structuralism and not whatever Kershaw was talking about. Did you just apply like Lévi-Strauss and Althusser to history?
I don’t have any degrees in history, although a few of my publications deal with historical issues such as the doctrine of the just price. But I am interested in history and do historical recreation, including cooking from cookbooks back to the tenth century.
The tenth century? I am intrigued, and am going to want to see that now.
The tenth century cookbook.
My and my wife’s self-published cookbook, which includes some recipes from that one.
Ahh, that does make sense. A tenth-century European cookbook would have surprised me a lot more. It does look neat.
There’s a late Roman cookbook (Anthimus) but I haven’t worked from it. And there is a sixth century letter from a Byzantine physician to Theoderic, king of the Franks, that you can squeeze a few more or less recipes from that I have used. But al-Warraq is the earliest real cookbook I’ve worked from.
The earliest post-Roman western European cookbooks we have are 14th century or perhaps late 13th c., but there is one 13th c. cookbook that hasn’t survived but has left daughter manuscripts, one of which is the source of one of our favorite recipes.
I don’t think there is any reason that there couldn’t be a 10th c. western European cookbook, but so far as I know there isn’t.
There’s a number of Roman cookbooks and recipes in general, yes. Back in high school I’d turned in a number of assignments past their deadline, and my teacher found it funny to give me extra homework consisting of a text from Apuleius to translate, which was a recipe of his for the preparation of pig vulva.
As for tenth century Western Europe.. It’s probably a case of all the wrong people being literate enough to write such a thing. The thirteenth and fourteenth century are after the commercial revolution in northern Europe had started off, as well as the cities in Italy hitting their stride; merchants with clerks are very well able to produce such literature. (Pre) feudal kings generally aren’t.
What field do you work in?
Assuming that’s directed at me, I’m an academic economist, currently specializing in the economic analysis of law. For more details, see the relevant part of my web page.
I have a Master’s degree, and a minor in Classics.
I teach history at the high school level.
I generally enjoy Scott’s writing on history, since he does have a fresh perspective, even if it is sometimes adorably naive, like his credulousness towards Albion’s Seed.
Could you expand on that? His review left me a bit suspicious of the book, but I haven’t read it.
Overall, Fisher’s work is really strong – there’s a reason his book is still a text in graduate-level American history courses, which is where I first encountered it. His research is top-notch and his history of folkways (he breaks them down into all manner of things like wealth ways, marriage ways, learning ways, child-rearing ways, etc.) is lots of fun to read, as Scott showed with his “interesting facts” sections. And as a history of the cultural development of the early American colonial regions, it can’t be beat.
Fisher’s main weakness, though (and this was brought up in the comments of Scott’s review, which is why I felt no need to comment) is that he wants to stretch his thesis too far. You can’t explain modern America using his 4 British folkways, as SSC commenters quickly discovered when they started trying to sort each other into the various cultures and found that it was more complicated than it seemed. Fisher almost totally ignores, for example, the effect of race on American culture, of immigrant traditions beyond the English (many commenters recommended City at the Center of the World as a useful antidote to this particular failing), of subsequent waves of immigration to the United States, and of the environment upon culture.
Oh, he makes token acknowledgements of these things – saying of course material conditions can affect culture, of course cultures grow and change – but usually forgets about them as soon as he moves on to the next interesting fact. As a result, the book has a mess of contradictions. Culture is ever changing, but the 4 founder cultures are immutable. Culture is a “human instrument,” often a tool of the elite to control the masses, but it’s also apparently genetic (Patton). Culture is at the mercy of its environment, but even though the influence of the South’s wide, slow rivers and pleasant climate on Southern agriculture and its peculiar institution has been noticed for decades, Fischer never develops the idea at all, preferring instead to concentrate solely on the Cavalier culture.
As a result, the way that cultures can change over time are totally ignored, since Fischer prefers to play around exploring the colonial founder cultures (with good reason, as they are indeed fascinating!). Hence you get his cursory treatment of topics like the interplay between race, climate, and culture in the South – he even says “race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies, that culture created slavery.”
Finally, Fischer’s exhaustive research lets him play around a bit with the evidence. At times he can cherry-pick examples to support his point, while ignoring counter-examples. Thus, he offers isolated examples like Wethersfeld, Connecticut to prove a New England culture of nuclear villages but ignores the several hundred plats presented by Joseph S. Wood (author of a cultural history of the New England village) to prove the opposite point. Fisher is not being deliberately dishonest – his evidence is copious throughout the book, and not solely based on anecdotes – but he’s not giving the full story, even in 900+ pages.
Basically, American culture is a complicated story and Fisher provides a good tool for starting to grapple with it, but he can be (and is) often oversimplified.
Probably replying too late, but I did my B.A. in history and then finished a master’s in social science with a history concentration about a year ago. I wrote a comment at one point about how refreshing Scott’s take is because he actually reads and evaluates historical arguments in the way scientists read and evaluate findings. He seems to recognize that history is about actual facts, and that some facts may actually be interesting and have discernible implications that follow logically from them. This is as opposed to treating history as just a perpetually fraught hermeneutical exercise where you can never make a statement that’s more right than any other, and your objective is never to determine facts anymore, since we already know what happened.
Anybody else reading the Interfaces thing?
I love it, reminds me of Unsong some times, but way darker. Touches on some things that might be of interest to this community.
Here are some favorites: 1 2 3 4
(They are all short)
It seems that they are parts of a continuing story. Maybe it would be best to click the user’s name and read them from the beginning? I’m not that interested. More background
The first link in my comment goes to a collection of all parts, in order of chronological posting. The provided examples are non-spoilers.
The author posts daily in relevant reddit threads, pretty good strategy to make commentary and generally disturb people in a good way.
I second this recommendation – this is fantastic.
> We must find and enter the narrow gate, but it will not be easy. It order to find it, we must sort through the many possible pasts to find the few possible futures which result in a humanity free to live and die as humans, and not as an unholy agglomeration of mindless flesh. Unfortunately, as we fight against the forces of slavery and death, it will be precisely our instincts towards the preservation of freedom and life that will lead us to destruction. In short, we live in precarious times.
It does sound like he’s talking about something like Moloch.
Exactly what I thought. “What if Moloch were a real outer god, rather than just a metaphorical one?” Which also drags in the Unsong parallel, I guess. “What if the sky cracked and the metaphors that returned to being real were the weird and horrifying ones, rather than the merely very scary good-and-evil ones.” Well, I suppose we’ll have to see where Unsong goes.
Also strong elements of SCP, of course. Off the top of my head 093 and 3125 are broadly similar, but there’s no lack of random body-horror stuff on there. Maybe worth noting Frictional Games as another purveyor of high-quality SAN damage in the same general vein.
Yeah this is a great recommendation, thanks Anon.
There’s been an article going around about how Acetaminophen may reduce empathy (From Painkiller to Empathy Killer: Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) Reduces Empathy for Pain).
While not an extremely surprising result, has anyone with background in the field gone through the article and determined whether this was a well done study?
This is one drug I have experience with, and I’d be mightily surprised if the empathy-reducing effect of paracetamol weren’t more than offset by the empathy-increasing effect of being in less pain oneself.
Why did Pangloss say that noses exist to hold up spectacles? He should have said that gravity exists to keep spectacles on noses.
then why do noses exist?
To hold up spectacles!
Spectacles exist to keep down noses.
What about noserings?
Warning plumage for high chance of relationship drama.
I take it you’ve dated many bulls?
Must be a hot wife.
“My belt holds my pants up, but my pants have little loops that hold my belt up. Who is the real hero here?”
Because he was a strawman, and he had to say that noses exist to hold out spectacles to set up the rebuttal that, in the best possible world, you would not need spectacles to see well in the first place.
And the real problem with that is that some people who don’t need glasses still wear them for aesthetic reasons. Which points us to the reason why not everybody has perfect sight: to justify the invention of a fashion accessory.
So the newest Captain America movie came out and one of the questions is about how the governments of the world should react to the existence of superheroes. Should they try to rein them in or would that psssibly lead to tyranny?
I haven’t seen the new movie yet, but it’s an interesting problem. One issue is the relative power of the superheroes. Can governments rein them in using their own resources, or do they have to depend on the aid of other sumpathetic superheroes? The could also be beyond the rein of other superheroes, like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, and there is nothing anyone can do but try to influence his mind.
If, on the other hand, a collection of superheroes working together is powerful enough to keep any other one at bay, they could form their own organization together that presumably would be stronger than any government on earth. Maybe it works for good, but maybe it becomes tyrannical too with no accountability besides the consensus of beings with no other accountability.
Maybe the best idea would be to treat them as a valuable natural resource whenever they pop up and keeping them accountable to governments. They can be kept in line by a combination of military resources and the countries other superheroes. The governments of the countries with superheroes are kept in line by the presence of countries with other powerful superheroes, so now you have a weak concept of Mutually assured to destruction and hopefully everything works out.
There is always the question of the government using superheroes for bad things anyway, but this is always an issue with governments and anything that’s powerful like nuclear weapons, torture, biological weapons, secret police, espionage. I bet superheroes would be in a better position to stand by their ethics and go against their government, since they could hopefully use their powers to disobey and escape the situation. Using their clout as a superhero, they could then go on to explain their objections to the public, who would hopefully in turn keep the government accountable.
Those are my preliminary thoughts, and I’m interested in seeing the movie.
In most comics, you’re fundamentally relying on the motives of the heroes involved. They’re too powerful to get around that fact. Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart takes a look at what happens when all the people with powers are interested in taking over and oppressing the fuck out of everyone else. And many people here are probably familiar with Worm, which involves a constant struggle between governments with powers and criminals with powers, as well as between different governments with powers.
In most comics, the most powerful characters are basically good, even if they face ethical dilemmas or disagree on the best way to do things, they mostly have good intentions. In Steelheart, they’re evil. Worm is complicated, though the most powerful handful of capes are nominally good and most have good-ish intentions (probably the most powerful evil cape is the Siberian).
Another key difference is to what extent normals can keep up with powered individuals. It’s completely futile in comic books, but they can be of use in Steelheart (key plot point) and Worm (particularly with cape support, such as PRT units with Dragon’s gear).
It can also be interesting to contrast similar universes. DC also addressed the issue of “what happens superheroes have too much power?” and the answer is similar (Batman, like Tony, is nominally a regular human with above-average smarts and technology) but also different (Tony involves the government, Batman doesn’t).
Really? If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. About half of superheroes and supervillians don’t have any specific super powers, and are ‘just’ insanely skilled inventors and/or martial artists.
In comics, just about anyone who really wants power badly enough eventually gets it, one way or another.
No. In comics, everyone who wants power and has a story written about them can get it. With trained-normal or inventor type superheroes there’s a tension between “anyone can do this” and “this guy can do what nobody else can do”–they’re just normals, but on the other hand, they always do better than the police and catch the robbers, and the police and robbers are also normals. If everyone could do it, police forces would be made up of hundreds of Green Arrow types, which they’re not. They’re normals, but they’re better than other normals, somehow.
(More modern comics sometimes introduce elite forces of police or government agents who do indeed have comic book levels of training or advanced technology. There still aren’t hundreds of them, but at least you stop wondering why the police can’t ever take advantage of this stuff that “normals” can do.)
>Worm is complicated, though the most powerful handful of capes are nominally good and most have good-ish intentions (probably the most powerful evil cape is the Siberian).
Even ignoring Scion and the Endbringers as edge cases, Glastig Uaine is the most powerful human alive. Bonesaw and Wnpx Fynfu are also immensely powerful, and can basically wander around killing people left and right.
And there was String Theory, I guess. And the Thanda, although I guess you could argue the Thanda weren’t totally evil.
Scion || Endbringers != Capes
Including scion and endbringers would be like including galactus as supervillain.
Glaistig Uaine heel face turns by the end. Bonesaw was basically a persona created in service of Wnpx Fynfu. Excluding Wnpx Fynfu, most “evil people” in worm are basically either self-interested individuals who have a lot to gain through breaking the law, people with power exacerbated mental issues, or cosmic horrors.
Rot13 is cipher used for charcter names
http://www.rot13.com/
Wnpx Fynfu also isn’t particularly powerful. He happens to be extremely charismatic, and he uses that to control people substantially more powerful than him, but it isn’t part of his powerset. His powers that he gets sebz uvf funeq basically just consist of a long range cutting ability plus n yvzvgrq nagv-bgure-cbjre novyvgl that he doesn’t even notice.
Gur punevfzn vf cneg bs uvf cbjre. VVEP uvf funeq jnf hfrq sbe pbzzhavpngvba orgjrra gur jbezf. Urapr jul ur’f va ab guerng va gur pbzcnal bs vafnar oheafpne naq pna vasyhrapr fpvba jvgu n fragrapr. Vg’f gur fnzr guvat nf Gnlybe trggvat nznmvat zhygvgnfxvat.
Wnpx Fynfu’f cbjre vf oebnqpnfgvat. Ur oebnqpnfgf gur rqtr bs uvf jrncbaf va beqre gb phg guvatf ng n qvfgnapr, ohg nyfb uvf gubhtugf gb vasyhrapr gubfr nebhaq uvz. Uvf oynqrf pnhfr phgf orlbaq gurve rqtrf, uvf gubhtugf pnhfr npgvbaf orlbaq uvf frys.
(source)
Civil War was loosely based on a comics storyline. In the comics storyline, unfortunately, the writers couldn’t agree on exactly what superhero registration meant, to the point where it made hash of the story (it actually matters if superheroes are being drafted by the government into combat).
Unrelatedly, one aspect of many comic book superheroes is that they inevitably break the law in some ways–roughing up suspects, breaking in to buildings, etc. The whole concept of the superhero is that the superhero has to work outside the law, and because of plot reasons the superhero actually can be trusted in doing this. Having the government control superheroes would mean either that superheroes are officially violating laws (bad, and it’s a lot less plausible that a government would only violate the rights of bad guys than Batman would), or that the government keeps the superheroes from violating laws (eliminating the point of the superhero).
Why? Or is that part of the definition of Batman?
It’s easier to imagine one guy with supernaturally good judgment and motivation, than to imagine a couple of hundred guys with it, which is what it would require for the government.
Also, one guy has a finite appetite for, well, anything, and if that appetite leans significantly in the direction of abuse we call him a (super)villain. A government is the sum of millions of appetites united in mutual back-scratching – do the math.
Being superhumanly right (and nigh-incorruptible) is one of the things that the superhero fantasy rests on. That’s why they can be admirable despite being unaccountable wielders of extreme violence. The guy Batman holds over a ledge or punches repeatedly in the face is never an ordinary person in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Let alone someone Batman is unjustly suspicious of for socioeconomic reasons.)
Occasional errors in judgment (followed by appropriately over-the-top guilt) may be allowable. But if they’re as brutal as a Batman-like figure (let alone a Punisher-like figure) and aren’t right nearly all the time, then you’re probably looking at a deconstruction of the genre.
(Which while occasionally done well, is kind of shooting fish in a barrel. Yes, costumed freelancers punching people to further their perception of justice with no one to answer to would tend to go south in a hurry without the support of genre convention. Relatedly, if you try to express strong emotion by engaging in an elaborate song-and-dance number, people will stare at you. And it’s unlikely you can support yourself and a small staff in Manhattan brownstone by solving murders for walk-in clients on a regular basis.)
If the government doesn’t allow normal people to form vigilante/paramilitary/guerrilla groups that act outside the boundaries of the law, why should it allow people with “superpowers” to do so?
The government may make an exception for god-like superheroes like Superman or Dr. Manhattan who are just to powerful to control, any attempt to do so could provoke their hostility with catastrophic consequences, so it may be better to just try to keep them happy and hope that they will always remain benevolent. The real world example would be the government of some small country accepting the US interference in its internal business, because if you are a small country you can’t really do anything to oppose it and it’s better not to provoke the US hostility.
Because
1. You can’t stop them if you want to, so what you “allow” is moot
2. If you do stop them, you have nothing to stop the supervillains with.
This is an interesting essay on the topic:
http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-superpowered-people-would-change.html
In my case it’s severe drug addiction, but you may be right on average.
Well, the important part is you’ve found a way to feel superior to the political analysts here.
It’s not like we’re particularly homogeneous anyway. Is that Jill?
Jill has better grammar, and usually isn’t openly aggressive.
“it’s the heavy diet of anime, comic books, video games, and science fiction combined with utter certainty that one is correct and a deep need to blame and castigate, fruitlessly bitching to no end, with no sense of shame are human sympathy”
May 16, 2016 at 7:51 am
I think I’m beginning to understand what’s gone wrong with the political analysis here.
YES. To you. The person with the symbol but no name. Is this board so scary to you that you feel a need to be nameless? That would actually be understandable to me.
Some folks want to be the arrogant superhero who knows all and condescends to everyone else, playing dominance/submission games constantly.
That was the point of the vox.com article about Norm Ornstein that I posted on a previous thread. The guy is Right Wing– works at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s not talking about ideology. He’s talking about the level of political discourse. He sees this as having gone downhill big time since Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
And he sees it as having gone downhill big time in those particular ways mentioned in that quote.
If you build it, they will come. If you bash it, with personal and destructive criticism and arrogance, then everyone will just feel badly and nothing constructive will be accomplished. People might become very disheartened and lose all hope of constructive problem solving.
Speaking on behalf of all people who use a symbol rather than a name, I think there’s nothing weird about it. Stop culturally appropriating me.
Ah yes, people liking things wrong. That’s the cause of our woes! How dare they!
I can believe that different political tribes have different tastes in fiction. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Further, saying that there’s probably some feedback loop going on that grows specific divergent memeplexes also seems plausible, though I’d bet on underlying biological factors first. But really? “Them $NERD_INTERESTS make you all robotically unsympathetic and convinced of your own righteousness”?
If you want to see why this is wrong, consider the symmetric “Your $ELITE_INTERESTS make you out-of-touch and convinced of your own righteousness” position*. If there’s any reason for dismissing it that can’t also apply to the original position, I’d be very interested to hear it.
On the other hand, if you keep posting under that name, we’d have our own Mistake Not…, which would be cool.
* – it’s the heavy diet of theater, free verse, indie films and postmodernist novels about middle-aged people having affairs combined with utter certainty that one is correct and a deep need to blame and castigate, smugly condescending without end, with no sense of fun or moral integrity.
@Dirdle:
As a exercise, try to figure out why my riposte was so much more effective than yours. The nasty man with the long username will tell you it was if he comes back.
Is that a glyph for the symbol-latterly-known-as-Prince? I wonder what else is hiding out in the bowels of Unicode.
re: the essay
An important missing piece is that even a superman-tier fellow can’t PROTECT everything he desires. Sure, the military can’t harm him, but lets say he forms a nation where he runs things as he wants – the military can just nuke it, or have some kind of dead man’s switch system should certain politicians get a bit too eyebeamed, etc etc. It would likely be more cold war-ish than a strict “supes does what he wants”. Then again, this assumes the superperson desires a structure more nuanced than “I control everything”. I’m assuming they would, because running a planet seems like a lame job for someone with superpowers.
“An important missing piece is that even a superman-tier fellow can’t PROTECT everything he desires.”
He also can’t actually make you do anything.
Witness that in both antebellum South and imperial Rome, a slave owner could punish a slave fatally without legal consequence — yet in both times, owners were known to pay slaves to work.
Slacking off can’t be fixed by the knowledge that the person can be crushed for it. As witness the USSR.
Not in the south. Look it up.
@Mary
An important distinction that new officers need to learn: You can’t make anybody do anything. You can only make them wish they had done it.
It’s interesting that you suggest mutually assured destruction. My thoughts were the exact opposite. Give all the superheroes their own nation and if they try to do anything terrible, team up and stop them. The problem with your suggestion is that the superheroes could secretly conspire with each other and manage to control the nations of the world without a fight. The problem with my idea is that humans may not be a match for all of them and without other superheroes as a check and balance, it may be impossible to stop them from imposing their will on the world.
Yeah, I definitely think all the supers together is too tough for the rest of the world to deal with, so I can’t really see that system working well. Your last sentence was what I was trying to get at.
When they are in their own countries, they are with their own countrymen in an national defense organization with a common goal of defending their countries from other threats from outside. I think it’s very reasonable that they start to identify more with their countrymen and their friends they work with and that connection than the superpower one. Hopefully this loyalty halts conspiracies, but even if they don’t and those conspiracies succeed doesn’t that just naturally lead to the second outcome anyway?
I like how the comments in this thread more or less recapitulate one of the subplots in Worm.
a) Trying to mete out vigilante justice can already get you sent to prison in the US. You may be well within your rights to shoot someone who’s threatening your own person or property, but if you go out looking for criminals to beat up you’re going to wind up on the wrong end of the law. A whole lot of what comic book superheroes do is just completely independent vigilante justice on a larger scale, and I can’t see any self-respecting government tolerating that for long. If they want to fight bad guys, they’re going to get integrated into the police and/or military.
b) Basically all international stuff seems likely to be either banned or subjected to the same rules international military intervention is subject to now. Pretty much no sovereign nation is going to agree to a legal system under which foreign citizens can come conduct paramilitary operations in their country, endangering their citizens, without needing to get official permission first.
It helps if you can pin down exactly what a “superhero” is.
For most of comic-book history, a defining characteristic of superheroes is that they did not kill people, even in self-defense or in the defense of innocent bystanders. Meaning anything they do can in principle be undone if society disapproves. Also part of the definition is that a superhero doesn’t seek profit or political power, at least not by way of his superness. That takes out most of the motives for wrongdoing. And they turn their defeated foes over to the secular authorities for punishment, which means that while they may be defying the government w/re tactics, they are at least implicitly letting the government call the shots at the strategic level.
The category for anyone who doesn’t obey that code is “supervillain”. Even if, as has occasionally been the case for people like Lex Luthor or Victor von Doom, they are presented as zealously championing the welfare of humanity or some subset thereof. They kill people in the process, become rich and powerful, and place themselves above the law, so they are villains in the black-and-while morality of the comic books.
And as others have noted, since the late 1980s actual superhero comics have started taking a more nuanced take on this, but movie superheroes still pretty much have the “no killing, no profit, submit to secular authority in the end” code. Which doesn’t really make for interesting stories, though the cinematic “Watchmen” captured at least some of the interesting bits of its dead-tree predecessor.
If you’ve got a community of people powerful enough that the tools of mundane law enforcement are next to useless against them, well, I think Scott once noted that the defining characteristic of the Middle Ages was that one armored knight could defeat any number of peasants. Which is an exaggeration, but not enough of one to matter – for a while knights could and would, out of tribal self-interest, organize to preemptively break up any attempt at organizing peasants to overpower knights. So will superheroes, if it comes to that.
Note that realistic human motives include, “I’d rather people see me as the Good Guy, so long as it doesn’t involve submitting to infuriating petty rules made by people who don’t understand what it’s like in the field…”. And also, “I’d rather find an excuse to see those really really powerful people as Good Guys than try to fight them with nothing but a pitchfork”.
So, secular law is basically written by the knights. And there is a separate spiritual law based on shaming the knights (and everyone else) by categorically withholding their Certified Good Guy status if they go too far astray. Possibly something similar would emerge
Ooh, relevant! “Finally, I have seen the day…”. The kind-of-nichey Grendel comics from the 1980s address this! It started off as a sort of Batman pastiche with more stabbing, then turned into this sci-fi mashup, far-future-seen-from-the-1980s, zaibatsus, flying cars, shoulder pads and superweapons.
This takes its toll on the genre conformity, of course; there’s a secondary protagonist who does dress up in costume and stab people, but he’s mad and doesn’t really drive the plot, apart from thematically.
You can’t really have plausible superheroes, if only because history doesn’t generally work on the Great Man Punches Things model. They’re symbols, and if you mistake an analogy for an isomorphism, you’ll end up asking pretty silly questions.
Thanks for that link. I’ve bookmarked it to read in the morning.
I also may end up rereading my Grendel collection. And trying once again to track down a copy of issue #29 (I think that’s the one I’m missing).
Aren’t most of the really interesting super-villain plots based around stripping the heroes of the public support that legitimizes them?
IIRC (and this is from when I was like 7), the old live-action superman TV show had a plot where Luthor had everyone convinced that Superman’s powers were causing environmental damage: heat waves, earthquakes, etc.
That seems more interesting than “punching each other in the sky for 20 minutes like Neo and Smith in that one movie we just pretend didn’t happen”.
Depends how “really interesting” looks to you, I guess, but I can’t think of too many famous or influential plots that use that hook, except for one of the threads of Watchmen.
A lot of superheroes have trouble securing reliable public support in the first place, or don’t seek it at all. It’s probably most obvious in the X-Men line and its imitators (where the powers are a transparent stand-in for membership in one marginalized group or another, depending on the writer), but even Spider-Man, a fairly traditional good guy in most respects, has to deal with his civilian boss trying to smear his costumed identity.
Hmm. “Hero is framed” is a relative common plot in my experience. And others where he looks bad. Notable for the gullibility of the crowds.
(A good version is The Cloak Society, Villains Rising, and Fall of Heroes by Jeramey Kraatz.)
You’re probably thinking of “The Man of Steel Bars“, an episode of the 1990s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman TV series.
November 21, 1993, so I was even younger than seven. That explains the really poor memory.
Thanks for the ref!
I understand the concept of the passage of time, and I recognize that Lois and Clark is now old enough that, for example, someone who was a small child when watching it for the first time can now be an adult.
I nonetheless feel great pain at the idea that “the old live-action superman TV show” now references something that didn’t star George Reeves.
I know the feeling mate.
Something else I’ve found obvious but which a lot of people seem not to: Traditional superheroes only handle cases where a successful outcome would be morally unambiguous. A superhero will commit a crime to stop the Joker from killing. Pretty much everyone except the Joker thinks we’d be better off with the Joker not killing. A superhero will not commit a crime to prevent a particular politician from being elected, even if electing the politician would save 100 lives and catching the Joker only saves 10, because whether a politician is bad is not something everyone agrees on.
Modern superhero writers have a tendency to use superheroes as author mouthpieces and end up violating this traditional superhero rule. This has the side effect of making superhero activities a lot more questionable.
This at least goes back to Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man in the late 1980s. Wow, does he ever have non-subtle politics. But writers have slipped their politics into comic heroes for a long time, even before the Vertigo invasion.
It goes back to Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, who spent a lot of his first year physically threatening politicians and captains of industry, or knocking down a slum (with just enough warning for the residents to grab what they could carry) to force the government to build public housing. At about the same time, Captain America was violating the Neutrality Act right and left in a way that looks fine to most of us, but presumably didn’t fly well with members of America First.
But the genre was still coming into focus then. For most of the next few decades, superheroes were studiedly apolitical (within the Overton Window of the US, of course). When they started having political opinions again starting in the 70s, they were still mostly careful to only go after actual illegal activity. (Green Arrow might talk left-wing politics, but he was never going to engage in direct action against someone who wasn’t a clearcut criminal by any standard.)
Siegel and Shuster had a story where Superman beats up foreign athletes for expressing anti-American views. They turned out to be spies (their country Dukalia was apparently meant to be pseudo-Nazi-Germany), but he didn’t know that when he was beating them up. It shows exactly what is wrong with using superheroes politically–the creators of Superman, with perfectly good intentions and relatively liberal beliefs for the time, still managed to unintentionally have Superman be a fascist oppressor when he meddled in politics.
Captain America Comics #2 likewise has Cap punching a random fellow airline passenger because Bucky says “he looks like a fifth columnist”. (He is, but not based on any evidence available to Bucky or Cap.)
As a rule of thumb, it’s best to wait until someone makes a mistake before you criticize the basis of their decisions. How do you know Bucky doesn’t have a solid visual model of a fifth-columnist?
@Jiro
“It shows exactly what is wrong with using superheroes politically-”
I don’t know. I find those early stories way more interesting than whatever Superman is doing now. There’s one story where he engages in social engineering by smashing up cars and assembly lines to send a message about road violence. How do you top that?
The “Superman is a reluctant messiah” thing they keep milking is way less amusing. A fascist oppressor is more fun.
Captain America Comics #2: “The Ageless Orientals That Wouldn’t Die!”
Now that’s good comic writing. Team Fortress comics teased us with hippie punching for several issues, but I don’t think they ever delivered.
What I wouldn’t give for a return to the Rainwater-&-Pure-Grain-Alcohol Age of anti-communist comics.
The problem is the combination of “superheroes never make mistakes, so it’s okay for them to break the law” and “superheroes meddle in politics”. If Superman is stopping Lex Luthor from making California fall into the ocean, I can easily believe that he has little chance of making a mistake. If Superman is beating up people for exercising free speech, it is much harder to believe that he’ll never make a mistake–especially when the justification he uses in the story is to our eyes a mistake.
“movie superheroes still pretty much have the “no killing, no profit, submit to secular authority in the end” code.”
This isn’t really true.
The current DC movie heroes kill (and are widely criticized for it), but all the Marvel heroes kill people as well and openly oppose the government (and Iron Man makes money off it, too), and the X-Men are on-and-off at war with the United States and stab people to death a bunch.
Also, Batman has killed people in every one of his film incarnations except maybe the Adam West one, and they’ve made Watchmen and Kick-Ass films. Also, if we count films without comic counterparts, then there’s Chronicle and Hancock.
In fact, the only movie superhero who doesn’t kill people is Superman, and he threw Zod down a chasm.
Tell that to Zod’s snapped neck.
My question is why was Captain America the one who refused to submit to government authority. Isn’t he a soldier? And Tony Stark is an entrepreneur. It seems completely backwards.
It makes more sense if you’ve seen the previous movies. In the last Avengers movie, Tony Stark created an AI that went rogue, killing many. So he wants to atone for what he has done. In the last Captain America, it was revealed that one of the top spy agencies in the US was infiltrated by a Nazi like organization. So of course he’s concerned about what could happen when the government(or the UN in this case) tells him what he can and can’t do.
For a summer blockbuster, the movie is actually fairly nuanced. Each side has good reasons for what they do and there is a never a clear indication of who’s right. You have to decide for yourself. Considering that they manage to introduce two new characters and a good villain while giving everyone some screen time and it’s quite an impressive undertaking.
This movie also did the “versus” story better than I’ve seen in a while. The formula is usually: two heroes are lured into fighting each other by a manipulative villian, only to discover that they are both on the same side, and then take on the villian in the climax together. Even in Spider-Man comics in the 70s this was understood to be largely played out.
So… when the story introduced five new winter soldiers in the second act with a flashback, I rolled my eyes and expected a 3v5 to cap off the story. The way it wound up playing out, with Zemo killing all the soldiers with the rationale being he didn’t want the avengers united against a common foe, was instead the capstone to the last wind of an extended fight between Cap and Iron Man that had been going on the whole movie. Not only did it makes sense for Zemo to want to continue their fight with each other after they had gone to face him, it also worked much better by keeping the conflict congruent throughout the whole film, instead of having a last minute villian. And to complete this Black Panther prevented Zemo’s suicide, ending the cycle of revenge that was started by Captain America himself.
Alright, I’ll stop now, I’m gushing.
Hey, do you guys do “phrasing”.
We could start.
It’s a bit odd that the movie itself didn’t directly address these obvious motivations (to my memory). It didn’t even seem like it was supposed to be some unspoken fact, it’s like they just forgot to put those lines in. A nod to Scarlet Witch’s family being “collateral damage” but still not trusting Stark (for that same reason) seems like an obvious unused angle for her being on the fence, too. Weird writing.
I do like that I’ve heard people say “they only made one side even plausibly believable!” about both sides, though.
Isn’t he a soldier?
Captain America is, as the title implies, an officer.
“I, Steve Rogers, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
There’s nothing in there about obeying orders or doing what the government sys. Those can be pretty strongly implied in some contexts, but not universally so. There is something very explicit in there about defending the United States Constitution against its domestic enemies. And Rogers comes freeze-dried from an era when the Constitution wasn’t quite so liberally reinterpreted as today. The comics, at least, have pretty consistently portrayed Captain America as the sort of old-school patriot who doesn’t blindly trust or obey the government.
Iron Man isn’t a terribly good fit for law and order, but the entire superhero genre basically creates characters that don’t fit that role and, when the story demanded a whole bunch of loyalists, he was the least-bad fit in the Marvel stable. Tony Stark, Crony Capitalist?
Aside: Given that he leads the Howling Commandos, movie Cap is presumably an officer (and maybe even a captain). But I think comics Steve Rogers (who had a secret identity, unlike the movie version) spent the entire war as a PFC; I’m not sure if his Captain America identity had official military status or if people just went along with him because of course you would.
Every reference I can easily find says that “PFC Rogers” was a cover story, but none of them specify a rank. Pretty sure he commanded soldiers more than once, so I’m going to go with the blatantly obvious.
It may have been a cover story eventually. (Or that may be a post-revival retcon.) But I read the first couple of issues earlier this week (thanks, Marvel Unlimited!), and there’s no sign that he’s reporting to anyone. Meanwhile PFC Steve Rogers is peeling potatoes– and getting upbraided by his superiors for how long he’s taking, thanks to his unexplained absences.
Which at one point include traveling across the Atlantic and crossing France into Germany. (Steve dresses as an old lady. Bucky simultaneously kicks both Hitler and Goering.[1]) That absence is long enough that Steve gets put into the guardhouse for a week. Which seems pretty lenient, given how long he must have been AWOL.
[1] http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2016/05/11/i-love-ya-but-youre-strange-that-time-captain-america-had-to-dress-like-an-old-lady-to-stop-the-nazis/
So at least at the beginning, Captain America was much more of a freelance superhero guise than a military position, and one which inconvenienced PFC Rogers’ career rather more than Superman’s activities did Clark Kent’s.
Wrong Species, John Schilling: Thanks, that explains it to my satisfaction.
Tony Stark is a *defense contractor,* he’s definitely got to stay on the good side of the government if he wants his business to continue operating. And having essentially worked to strengthen the US government his whole life, it makes sense that he would be convinced that that’s the right thing to do.
Even if he was some other sort of businessman, it would be easy for the government to shut down his whole corporation.
(Note: haven’t seen Civil War yet)
Tony Stark *was* a defense contractor, but realigned his company after seeing the results firsthand. The guilt is strong in that one, which drives his actions both in Avengers 2 (which should have been an Iron Man movie, but I digress…) and Cap 3.
It doesn’t really make sense.
Tony Stark has literally spent every film doing his own thing and flipping off the government, and has rejected suggestions like this onscreen twice before; and Steve Rogers literally spent the majority of his life dreaming about being a soldier. (Other characters don’t really make sense either – Black Widow is a Snowden-style whistleblower and implied war criminal, Hawkeye has a vulnerable family, etc.)
In the film’s defence, however, Stark has been acting increasingly unstable and hostile to the idea of “superheroing” in his films – building robots to do it for him, suffering panic attacks, temporarily retiring twice – while Cap appears to operate entirely on the principle of “is this person a Nazi?” and has already opposed the US Government in his films (they turned out to be Nazis.)
In the film’s offence, none of the legal details made any sense either and the superpowers were weird and inconsistent. Also, it has the same plot as Batman v Superman.
I like how all the superpowers are pretty much exactly balanced. No matter the nature or source of their powers, any two superheroes end up pretty much evenly matched.
I don’t think we saw, e.g., Clint and Vision be matched. Heck, I think we explicitly disproved that thesis in Natasha v. Hulk in the first Avengers movie.
What the teams had was a counter for each hero, and a bunch of other heroes who could act as force-multipliers. But it was clear that none of the heroes whose powers were based on Actual Physics could have stopped Vision for long.
Don’t forget that both sides were pulling their punches to avoid lethal harm, so when a heavy hitter fights a softy, they use way less force.
Not to mention – Hawkeye got the drop on Vision when he attacked the compound and set up very specific countermeasures and he still lost.
This wasn’t government authority, it was rule by the freakin’ UN. Of course Captain America didn’t go for that crap.
Captain America has never been one to blindly follow orders. And in the movies they’ve shown him increasingly at odds with modern bureaucracy. Refusing to follow an order he disagrees with is consistent with his character. If you watched his previous movies, in the first one he only became Captain America after leading an unsanctioned rescue operation. And in the second one he found himself in the midst of a massive government conspiracy.
Iron Man is pretty much on the government’s side due to personal guilt. He created an AI that almost destroyed the world and it continues to haunt him. He’s starting to believe that he has come too close to causing catastrophe and needs to be supervised, and he also projects that belief onto the other heroes, even though none of them have been as reckless as he has.
You might find the Wearing the Cape series by Marion G. Harmon interesting.
One of the oldest definitions of the state (going back at least to Weber) is that the state has a monopoly on violence on its territory.
That means the the state may not be directly opposed to superheroes, but it would be to their heroics.
In practice, most states takes preventive actions against any possible challenge on their monopoly by controlling guns and militias, so I presume they will go after superheroes even if they are law abiding.
States don’t have a monopoly on violence in their territory–if they did there would be no private murders, robbery, etc. I think the usual claim is something like “a monopoly on legitimate violence,” which rapidly becomes circular if “legitimate” means “legal” means “approved of by the state.”
My definition avoids that by treating “legitimized” not as a moral or legal category but as a description of how people react to its acts.
I still think all the drug murders in the ghetto are secretly committed by agents of the Office of Management and Budget.
I think there are a few ways things could go. Either the powered individuals become the heads of state (like Black Panther is in Wakanda) as people willing throw governing power at them and they decide they can do more good with more power OR they form independent groups that now supercede governments in power and become the new ruling bodies of the world.
When I watched Civil War I mainly saw it as the governments of the world trying to do a massive power grab of convincing the Avengers that the population of the world should have control over powered individuals rather than the other way around. If the entire group decided to say “No” to the UN, then the UN would have no recourse and no real ability to do anything back.
The Avengers being the new world rulers is prevented as a possible future due to Tony Stark still being very regretful of his own actions and no longer trusting himself after almost single-handedly killing all life on earth with Ultron. The Avengers directly accepting democracy and governments as the best method for directing safety policies for the world is prevented as a possible future because Captain America saw how easily SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra (and could easily be infiltrated by someone like Loki as well) and knows the Avengers will almost instantly become helpless puppets to government leaders with selfish personal agendas. Adherence to a path of strong violence is also prevented by Vision being largely a pacifist and possibly being the strongest person there.
They should be registered, for one simple reason: So that when Fireball Man robs a bank, the government can look in their database of supers who throw fireballs and see what comes up.
I wouldn’t support anything beyond registration though, because trying to turn people into an underclass when those people can kill you with their brain is a stupid idea. Admittedly, a lot of people in the Marvel-verse are just racist against mutants, so you can’t expect rational responses. But I would still suggest that they not pursue policies that make mutants sign up with Magneto.
I’d also probably support some incentives to keep supers out of trouble and stop them from turning to villainy to support themselves. Yes, this means you’re essentially paying people for being born, but I bet it pays for itself by not having supervillains tear up your cities.
I would not be horribly afraid of government tyranny because the supers have a monopoly on force – if the Avengers don’t want to be evil, there’s no power on Earth than can force them to. Of course, by the same token, that means that there’s a risk of superhero-driven tyranny. But that’s sort of baked into the superhero setting – the only thing that can stop a supervillain is a superhero – which means that a government-backed super-team is probably the best option we can hope for. At least SHIELD has some sort of oversight.
The film doesn’t center around registration, for what it’s worth. According to the SHIELD series, supers are already kept track of (which makes sense.)
Fireball Man could easily have only just triggered, though, or kept his powers a secret, especially in a world where supers are rapidly brought to justice.
I saw the movie yesterday. It started out on the theme of government control, vigilantism, and power. But then it embarked on a plot in which the anti-government control faction was trying to prevent a villain’s plot, while the pro-government control faction just mistakenly thought one of the other faction was the villain. Both sides end up recruiting other heroes seemingly without ideological interest, from Antman who seems like he’s just happy to be included, to Spiderman, a mercenary who takes a new suit as payment for his services to Tony Stark. The theme is government control is not addressed further, and not resolved.
It would make sense for governments to generally be ok with certain acts of heroism, like runaway trains, preventing bomb threats, stopping bank robbers, or saving kittens from burning buildings. But if anything goes wrong in these scenarios, like the train derails into an affluent neighborhood, the bomb goes off anyway because the superhero doesn’t know anything about how bombs work, a robber’s bullet bounces off the hero’s armor and into a civilian, or the burning building collapses and kills a lot of people due to the hero punching through walls, then the government will jump on getting involved. They can’t touch heroism as long as people support the outcomes. See the beginning of the movie “The Incredibles”.
Or heroes are tolerated because they protect against threats so large that the government has to rely upon them. But this only applies to characters like Superman and Dr. Manhattan.
In the “real world” though, with sufficient numbers of people with superpowers and with a large enough power scale, lack of government control of supers would lead to a kind of superhero warlord game of risk, while government control of supers would lead to, probably, tyranny.
One proposition I’ve seen proposed in Worm and possibly other things that seems plausible is that a world with superpowers will naturally tend towards feudalism. Feudalism arose from an environment (and in fact independently in more than one environment) where a small number of well trained, well equipped knights are a more significant military force than basically any number of peasant levies. Gunpowder weapons allowed any recruit to be trained and armed relatively cheaply into a valuable asset, tilting the balance in favor of democracy.
But if you have people with superpowers who can’t be effectively fought except by other supers, that looks a lot like knights who can’t be effectively fought except by other knights. If the mass of the population has no appreciable military power, pretty soon Moloch will take away their political power too.
The gun is democracy, yes.
Only there’s probably some lag involved. Citizen’s militias are no longer considered militarily effective (outside of militia fantasies), and haven’t for over a hundred years, so something like feudalism could potentially come back around in our real world. One thing that stops it is that even though the military is vastly superior to citizens in any combat situation, the sympathies of the military are with the citizens given that those are who their friends and family are.
Automated armies will take that away, and back to feudalism we go! Actually no, because feudalism requires that peasants are economically useful, so something new will happen. If everything is automated except high level tech jobs, then no one else has any useful role in society. Looked at materialistically, this might imply that the great extermination is around the corner. In all previous eras, no true state supervillainy could exist on this scale. Even genocidal states could only go so far, as elites needed their people for the economy and they needed the military to back up their power. When human beings stop being useful, all bets are off.
Artificial intelligence is a superpower wielded by a superbeing, so groups like MIRI want it to be “friendly”, but to achieve this goal a high degree of centralization is required, which is to say that as computers become more powerful, and algorithms more versatile, anything that could potentially blossom into AGI anywhere must be contained. However, the consequence of that is that no one can defend themselves from being exterminated by those who control automation. Essentially, we need to solve the friendly human problem first.
This is why I think we are fucked either way. The human era will be over soon.
An armored knight requires more than a knight being stronger than a bunch of peasants. To arm and train a knight is very expensive and time-consuming, which meant that anyone trying to start a rebellion against such types would get their revolt stamped down before it could go anywhere. Guns, on the other hand, are much more cheap and easy to use; you can take a generally average person and train them to be effective in combat much more easily today than you could when knights were still militarily relevant.
“Guns, on the other hand, are much more cheap and easy to use; you can take a generally average person and train them to be effective in combat much more easily today than you could when knights were still militarily relevant.”
True of crossbows too, however.
Crossbows have an extremely limited range
Early guns had a limited range too.
I guessed that guns had worse range than crossbows until rifling. I’m seeing figures of ~400 yards for medieval crossbows, 175 yards for the Brown Bess.
I think you’re comparing the literal maximum range of crossbows with the effective range of muskets. I don’t have data on musket balls, but the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute indicates that the lethal range of a 12-gauge shotgun slug is about 1000 yards.
You can’t expect to hit a specific target at that distance, but you weren’t hitting specific targets with a crossbow at 400 yards. And really, you weren’t shooting the crossbow at all until the target was within half that distance.
Actual european warfare evolution was fairly interesting. Heavy cavalry charges (what plausibly is the domain of “the knight”) were decisive for a very long time, well into Napoleonic warfare, when cannon was also important, infantry had guns, and cavalry was not armored anymore.
Siege of Vienna in 1683 was lifted partly by a celebrated Polish cavalry charge. Firearms were well into being a thing by then.
Earlier, men at arms (some noble, some not) had a retinue of 3 to 10, called a “lance” (sort of like the old school “squad”) from which armies were made. This retinue had archers and such.
No. Effective range of the Brown Bess is even lower.
Seems to be working out for the Taliban.
Citizen’s militias are definitely more effective when you coke-fueled whoremongers in the US Congress airmailing you RPGs. I know my local neighborhood watch misses the hell out of Charlie Wilson. The last time we caught a prowler we actually had to wait for him to bleed out from the gut shot. Goddamn waste of time if you ask me.
Have you talked to a neurologist lately? I was looking over old posts a couple of days ago, and I don’t remember you being insane. You should probably get that checked out.
Your memory of reading sane posts by me is almost certainly iatrogenic. Try suing your therapist, or if you don’t have one, Scott.
Citizens’ militias can’t effectively project power, but you don’t need power projection to make life unpleasant for occupying troops that are already there. Those tactics don’t lend themselves to conventional victory — very few insurgencies have ever just straight-up kicked their opponents out, and the ones that have, have usually enjoyed conventional military support from foreign powers — but in most cases you don’t need victory, you just need to make the war unprofitable.
Tell that to the citizen’s militia with a grand total of 2 members, neither of whom had any combat experience or training whatsoever, who shut down the 6th largest metropolitan area in the most powerful country in the world for 2 days using fireworks and kitchen appliances.
I am, of course, referring to the Tsarnaev brothers.
Not too long ago, a somewhat larger and better equipped citizen’s militia wreaked so much havoc in a single night that they brought the 7th most militarily powerful country in the world into a state of martial law for 6 months and counting. You might have heard about it.
Or just go to the airport, take a look at a security line, and reflect on how having to take off your shoes and undergo a virtual strip search before getting on an airplane would have seemed like something out of a cartoonish dystopia story 20 years ago. Then reflect on how even these cartoonishly dystopian security measures still aren’t effective at protecting air travelers.
And that’s in the developed world; in the developing world… Just open up Google News and type in any of the following search terms: “Syria,” “Iraq,” “Libya,” “Afghanistan,” “Sinai insurgency,” “Boko Haram,” “Donbass,” and “Mexican Drug War.” You’ll quickly see why the statement that “citizen’s militias are no longer considered militarily effective” is laughable.
I read that as “preventing air travelers”. I think I like my version better.
To be fair, I’ve seen it mooted that successful asymmetric warfare depends on the militarily stronger side being unwilling to go full Colonel Kurtz, which strikes me as more plausible than the standard “lol but drones tho” line of argument.
That may be true, but even when going full Colonel Kurtz works, it tends to take a long time and leave the territory under dispute in a very bad state. For example, the Russians pretty much ignored the Geneva Conventions during the Second Chechen War, and after 10 years and more than 7,000 military deaths they “won” in the sense that in the last 6 years, the conflict in the North Caucasus has only killed about as many people as the Northern Irish Troubles killed in 30 years. Similarly, Bashir Al-Assad has paid little attention to humanitarian concerns during the Syrian Civil War, and he may eventually win, but even if he does there won’t be much left for him to rule over.
successful asymmetric warfare depends on the militarily stronger side being unwilling to go full Colonel Kurtz
More to the point, it depends on the militarily stronger side restricting legit violence to their military and preventing the sort of vicious ugliness of Bleeding Kansas, Bosnia, and the like that happens when civilian populations go to war on each other.
So long as the military side retains the capability and will to engage in “a whiff of grape” at strategic points, insurrections can spend decades not getting anywhere, while political processes may go on elsewhere. When they do not, and both of the civilian populations become engaged, we get traditional (ie, non-American) civil war.
The forbearance of the stronger military does not promise success to the insurgents, of course – the Shining Path and the Palestinians are long running insurgencies that still have not won. But it’s the combination of restraint and control of the violence that creates an environment in which the insurgency does not die quickly.
When I expressed this position (elsewhere) someone pointed me to Jacobin’s Four Futures story, where they lay out some alternatives to this (which they label “exterminism”). Being Jacobins, they’re coming at it from an explicitly socialist perspective, but there are other possible endpoints once labor is no longer scarce: automated communism, ordinary socialism (say, robots + UBI), or rentism (everyone’s employed in intellectual property industries, so they can pay licensing fees on their replicators).
Disclosure: I do still think exterminism is likely, because people are assholes, but it’s hardly inevitable.
In comic-book universes, technology can make up for the lack of superpowers. This technology usually ends up being restricted to the hands of a handful of superheroes, supervillians, and government agencies, but that seems like a result of the narrative requirement to keep the background setting at something approximating modern-day America, rather than a logical end point of the plot.
I have seen the previous movies – and followed some of Cap and IM in the decades previous – and for me, the movie is going to have to do a metric $#!+ton of work in the first act to make me believe that Steve Rogers is on the anti-registration side against Tony Stark, the man who privatized world peace.
I might be over-conflating Rogers with other similar heroes (Bigwig, f’instance) and with actual military men of that generation, but to me, Tony Stark is still the man who doesn’t trust any system he didn’t build himself – and in Age of Ultron ran smack into a brick wall of his own limitations.
Having said that – in a system that had superheroes, those powerful individuals would have to be taken into account when governments attempted to order interactions between people. IMO, we’d much less likely see “government” trying to deal with supers than we would see supers concerning themselves with right government. The founding fathers, the Roosevelt and the Kennedys, Napoleon, the ambitious landed warlords of the Kyoto courts – these were all “superhuman” – possessing of skills above those of ordinary mortals. (We see this reflected in the existence of Batman – Bruce Wayne’s superskill might be sheer will, but he is what he is because of being gifted not only with grit, but also enormous wealth.)
Superman is, imo, separate only in degree, not kind.
That’s why he’s pro-registration, though: either he works with the system and has some input into the outcome, or he fights it and watches the government send death squads after all his friends. He has personal experience with how governments deal with things they perceive as threats (he used to help them with that), he very much wants to make it clear that he and his people are not threats.
Rogers was always a loose cannon, he was just lucky enough to have a a good target to chase so he avoided pissing off the powers that were. That his judgement is at least 2 standard deviations better than any government oversight is irrelevant, because the assorted political forces of the world demand accountability, and “it was the right call” ain’t gonna cut it (even if it was!).
“It was the right call” will usually work, if it is in fact the right call. It’s not uncommon for somebody to get away with violating regulations if it works out.
If you make a habit of violating regulations, you’ll usually end up getting thrown against a wall eventually, because in real life nobody is right all the time.
What I mean by “the right call” is not “successfully predict the future” but “choose the course of action, given the information available to you at the time, that is most likely to achieve good outcomes”. Because the future is uncertain, even intelligent decisions will fail. Sometimes you do everything right and still lose. And the public gives zero shits that you did everything right: you lost. Regulations are the excuse for losing, so you follow them even if it means you lose more often.
He was literally against registration in the previous movie.
@keranih I came in wondering about that, but the movie did a good job of sketching out the sides based on each hero’s previous MCU experience.
Spoilers for attitude and previous movies, but not for specific incidents in Civil War:
Cap’s experience with legitimate authority running things includes the World Council and SHIELD. The former decided to nuke New York while he was there. (Arguably a defensible call, but not one he’d have agreed with.) Both turned out to have been infiltrated and taken over by HYDRA. Nick Fury himself wasn’t corrupt, but defended the merits of compartmentalization, need-to-know, and necessary ruthlessness to Cap only to be completely blindsided by his own organization. Steve isn’t a loose cannon, but he’s never going to willingly outsource his conscience to an organization like the UN after that.
Ever since Afghanistan, Tony has been desperately pursuing safety, and failing to achieve it. He got PTSD courtesy of the Chitauri, and his attempts to act on his own to improve the world keep backfiring more spectacularly (from Ironmonger in the first movie to Ultron, which he conceived as “a suit of armor around the Earth”), hurting other people more than himself. He doesn’t trust himself (or, by extension, the other Avengers, because of course he’s the one he trusts the most) not to hurt people unnecessarily while thinking they’re doing the right thing. By subordinating his judgment to the world’s, he’s trying to take his proven fallible judgment out of the equation, once again trying to make things safe. (Or at least to not make it his fault that they’re not.)
There are other, personal issues driving the conflict as well, which contribute to the escalation from talking to punching. But at least within the context of the MCU, they’re both shown to have a point, and events are pushing them further towards their respective poles than they’d probably really feel comfortable with in a calmer place.
While there are fridge logic issues with the plot, I thought the themes were really well handled.
>the World Council and SHIELD … Both turned out to have been infiltrated and taken over by HYDRA.
When was the World Council infiltrated? They were just shadowy faces on some screens.
Spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Marvel’s Agents of Shield (and sort of for the first Avengers movie):
In the first Avengers, the main Council guy Nick Fury argues with over things like the effectiveness of the Avengers and nuking New York is played by Powers Boothe. In Agents of SHIELD, Boothe plays Gideon Malick, part of a multigenerational HYDRA family who holds high rank. (Arguably their leader, but there seem to be rival splinter groups.) The show eventually established that Malick was in fact the Council member in the movie.
Since the show takes input from the movies, but not vice versa, that’s still potentially ambiguous taking a film-only view. But we also have:
In the Winter Soldier, Nick Fury’s close friend Alexander Pierce (whose life Fury saved once) is an ex-SHIELD operative, now probably a US Cabinet official (he’s called “Secretary”) currently appears to be taking a leading role on the Council. (He also at some point declined a Nobel Peace Prize.)
We learn he’s been a HYDRA operative since his SHIELD days. From his seat on the Council, he’s in charge of the entire mole operation that’s hollowed SHIELD out from within, tried to kill both Fury and Cap, and put HYDRA within hours of destroying twenty million enemies using the helicarriers SHIELD (ostensibly) built for the Council.
Winter Soldier also establishes that HYDRA established itself in SHIELD right under the nose of Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, and that Nick Fury had zero clue up to the point they almost took him out. That’s pretty much everyone Steve might have trusted to have a clue. Now he’s going to place his activities at the disposal of the UN, which he presumably knows much less well?
Thanks! That’s very convincing.
What outcomes would lead you to think that this experiment with more open threads was a success or failure?
Success: Increased income, health, education level, and decreased rates of criminality and teen pregnancy amongst commenters.
Failure: Increased rate of joke comments.
Except Tom Swifties. I think they’re considered successful comments.
Not by me.
“Not by me,” Tom said distantly.
That leads to perverse incentives. We could just be mean to poor, sick, uneducated criminals until they all leave.
You think you can get rid of me that easily? Think again.
Should we not have been doing that already?
No, because we weren’t coordinating it yet.
Success: Increased income, health, education level, and decreased rates of criminality and teen pregnancy amongst commenters.
Plainly this policy works retrospectively as I did not get pregnant during my teenage years 🙂
You say that, but my time machine is almost finished.
Dear Airgap, if you can successfully assail the fortress of my chastity retrospectively, you deserve not alone whatever awards due to you for inventing a working time machine but a medal of valour and a triumphal procession.
The disincentive in this case would be you very well might end up having to marry me, and that, dear sir/madam/other, is a fate you would rather jump into a volcano to avoid 🙂
You’re telling me you wouldn’t go for a guy with a time machine? Ha.
Oh, you won’t catch this person napping! I’ve read Wells! Sure, you come on all “Come with me to see the wonders of the 55th Century” and then I end up as the centrepiece of a Morlock banquet! 🙂
Ah, but had you read Wells when you were 15?
I understand the first items in Success, but how does one measure how many commenters are pregnant teens or criminals?
Convenience sampling.
Yes, but what about the pregnant criminals, teen criminals, and pregnant teen criminals? Are they all to be counted separately from “pregnant teen (non-criminal)” and “criminal (non-teenage, non-pregnant)”?
Use a proxy. Compare rates in us states with high internet use versus those instates with low internet access.
lmao
thanks
Look for there user name elsewhere on the Internet and link them back to their real name, then check their facebook account. Assume people you can do this on are a representative sample of the population. Publish.
I want to know why vegans are better people than vegetarians http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27161448?dopt=Abstract
Not sure if you’re taking the piss (nothing personal, just that people often are when they talk about vegans), but is this actually surprising? Veganism is harder than vegetarianism, so of the people who are vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons, the vegans will tend to have stronger moral motives and/or better self control, so it’s not surprising that they are “more universalistic, empathic, and ethically oriented”. I’m sure there are some class-related explanations too, but the obvious explanation can go a long way.
I’m a vegan and no it’s not surprising 😛
Just spitballing her and didn’t read the whole report, but wouldn’t a big contributing factor be that more conscientious people are “better”? I’m a vegetarian who’s tried to go vegan before and failed because I struggle to hold principle above base desires for pleasure and convenience. More conscientious people qho examine there morals and come to the conclusion that meat eating shouldn’t be supported as a culture skip the half-measure of being merely vegetarian an keep themselves on a commitment to avoid all animal products.
That’s a tempting narrative. But the study looked at the ‘conscientiousness’ and found that this did not vary between their veggie and vegan populations (16.4 to 16.5, ns). Vegans seemed maybe a little more open, but these were not big differences.
I wouldn’t count too much on that survey being accurate. Study on moral offsetting behavior. While the study is about the environment, the concept applies elsewhere. What people say they do and what they actually do tends to diverge.
Possibly because there are more vegetarian cultures than vegan cultures. Suppose half of the vegetarians are making an ethical choice and half are Hindus following their parent’s cue on food choice. I wouldn’t expect the second group to be much better than the average person. They aren’t making an ethical choice in diet, just garden variety cultural conformity. So any correlation between making an ethical choice in diet and empathy to be diluted.
The Dalai Lama is an omnivore. Yasser Arafat, at least toward the end of his life, ate only boiled vegetables. Just sayin’.
And then there is the issue that different people are, and feel, healthier on different diets. I wonder if people’s morality correlates to some extent with their health.
E.g. if poor health makes you more empathic toward other sick people, or others in general, or the environment, then those people who are vegan but not getting enough protein or whatever to have good health, would be more empathic. But it could be, in this case, perhaps because of their poor health, not because of their being vegan.
I believe it’s a principle of Tibetan buddhism to be an omnivore rather than a vegetarian. Something to do with the animals you are eating being the reincarnations of your former teachers.
I cant find any reference to this in 5 minutes of perfunctory googling, but the Buddha himself did continue to eat meat all his life apparently.
It’s forbidden for the majority and possibly all? Buddhist monks, at least, to be vegetarian, since they’re meant to beg for food scraps for their sustenance and therefore cannot refuse food, since that would create an imposition or guilt in the givers. They’re not allowed to eat anything prepared especially for them, however, especially not an animal slaughtered expressly. The underlying principle is that they shouldn’t create additional suffering in order to feed themselves, so any accomodation is abhorrent. Moreover, it was immediately recognized that letting regular devotees produce food expressly for the monks would lead to a wasteful arms race of ostentatious piety, with the rich competing to feed the monks the rarest and most expensive foods and so on, thus ruining everything for everyone and sending them to Buddhist Hell.
Plus, many Buddhists don’t believe it’s worse to kill an animal than a plant as such, which makes vegetarianism philosophically nonsensical from their perspective.
I don’t know about manifestations in other countries, but in China, Shaolin monks are the exception rather than the rule among Buddhist monks in being allowed to eat meat. They also do have food prepared for them at their monastery, and I suspect that they are not exceptional in this, since it’s probably not practical for larger monasteries to feed their entire population of monks through alms, at least if the monastery isn’t located in a large population center, which some are not.
There is a Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox that was announced on the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit here. This is purely experimental at the moment, but an open thread seems like a good time to test it. Clicking my name should lead to installation instructions.
This must be different from the one that was announced a week or two ago that just let you hide annoying users. That one didn’t have upvote arrows.
Yes, it is. (The Chrome extension in question, and as a userscript for Firefox.)
That one only let you collapse certain users by default, was not crowdsourced, and did not provide voting, in part because I don’t think voting is likely to be good for the community.
It appears to work with Tampermonkey on Chrome
I know what SSC stands for, but what do SSCES and SSCEC stand for?
SSCES is just the name, but it was inspired by RES, the Reddit Enhancement Suite which originally started as a Greasemonkey plugin.
And SSCEC?
I don’t see that anywhere except in your comments. Maybe it was a typo that later got corrected.
Is a government agency charged with investigating securities fraud among commenters.
SSCEC is the reddit username at the first link in this thread.
Maybe it was a typo and he forgot his username, rather than his password?
Ah yes, apparently that was a typo. The correct name is SSCES. It also has a much better pronunciation.
I don’t know why we’re all upvoting this, nobody who hasn’t already gotten the script can see it 😉
EDIT: bug report: this re-orders everything after the browser has already jumped to a submitted comment, meaning you’re dropped at a random location on the page whenever you submit comments.
I wish there was an extension to hide all except top-level comments, like Reddit Enhancement Suite does.
Still no race or gender?
Use your judgment. And if your judgment is wrong, I’ll permaban you.
OK.
I actually like this policy. It’s honest and straightforward.
Very formalist tbh.
t.Nrctnry
It sounds like there was a big change in the comment policy I missed. Does anyone have a link to that one?
From what I can piece together…
I can’t remember when Scott said he was first trying out a reign of terror. I noticed that the Comments Page now has the simple policy “If any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation, we shall punish him severely.”, hyperlinked to a review of Albion’s Seed. Relevant quotes from interesting Puritan facts:
I think that a lot of it came under Scott’s judgment anyway – there were lots of attempts by lots of people (including myself) to lawyer the old Sufi Buddhist policy and no-one seemed to be able to agree how to interpret it. The new Puritan policy is at least more-or-less explicit in its vagueness and unlawyerability.
Everyone agreed how to interpret it: their comments were all necessary, no one else’s comments were necessary.
Only if you’re also discussing NeoR****ion. This is called “Shooting the moon.”
What is this question about?
It used to be standard for Scott to include a proscription against starting OT threads about race or gender, as they led to a nasty downward spiral in the following comments.
[inserts tongue into cheek]
Obviously starting a discussion of the athletics of racing, and the possibility of a person of ambiguous or mis-identified gender participating in such a sport, is a subject not to be discussed.
[removes tongue from cheek…how the heck did I talk with my tongue in that position?]
ventriloquism
Brainstorm more. Obviously the ban covered discussions of grammatical gender.