OT54: Threadical Doctor

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Sorry for the low volume of blogging lately. My promotion to fourth-year resident has left me with less time and I’ve yet to find a way around that.

2. Thanks to everyone who donated to the Help Multiheaded Get Out Of Russia fund a couple of months ago. I’m happy to report that Multiheaded did in fact get out of Russia and is now in a European country. She can say more if she wants.

3. Latest person who needs help: Alison is originally from the Caribbean but has been in the US San Francisco Bay Area for a few months. She’s having immigration issues and for some reason being able to stay in the United Kingdom for a little while would help. If you are in the United Kingdom and willing to host somebody who many people in the rationalist community can vouch for being not an axe murderer, read more here.

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1,194 Responses to OT54: Threadical Doctor

  1. Lemminkainen says:

    Oh, my girlfriend is asking the same sort of question that I’m asking above. She’s about as smart as I am, I think. Both her undergrad degree and the PhD she’s currently pursuing are in early modern English literature. She’s previously worked in arts administration, serving the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where she did a lot of coordination and event-planning type work. She has a gift, unusual among academics, for writing really funny and vivacious prose. She has more experience editing than I do, and with teaching writing at the collegiate level (which involves editing a fuckton of student papers.) She can read Middle English, Medieval French, and Latin, and she’s also a domain expert in literature, the history of Renaissance England, medieval and Early Modern European medicine, witchcraft, opera, and horror film.

    It’s important for her to find a job that would provide her with health insurance, or at least pay her enough to be able to afford it, because she has an autoimmune disease which needs regular medication.

  2. neonwattagelimit says:

    Serious question: what percentage of Donald Trump’s fame – and here I’m talking going back decades – is attributable to the mere fact that he has an unusually catchy and memorable last name?

    I mean, if his name were, say, Donald Schmidt, would he have been plastering that all over everything? I have to think not. Schmidt Tower, or Schmidt Hotel & Casino, does not have quite the same ring to it. This, plus a talent for manipulating the media, is what initially made Trump famous. The guy has literally been capitalizing on his name for his whole life – both because his father’s connections got him his start in business, and because his actual, literal name was weirdly easy for everyone to remember after he starting shouting it from the rooftops.

    • Lumifer says:

      if his name were, say, Donald Schmidt, would he have been plastering that all over everything?

      Well, there is a large chain of Gaylord hotels and convention centers.

    • Nornagest says:

      The Wynn Casino (built by Steve Wynn) comes to mind.

      • neonwattagelimit says:

        Fair enough. He may have plastered his named on his buildings. But neither Steve Wynn nor whoever created the Gaylord chain (Gaylord?) is remotely as famous as Donald Trump. I think his last name definitely helped him out.

        • Lumifer says:

          So you think that a guy with a weird AND politically incorrect last name like, say, Schwarzenegger would have difficulties in achieving success?

    • Pku says:

      I’ve seen this asked about Kevin Bacon.

  3. Lemminkainen says:

    I suspect this may get buried, so I might need to post it again next week, but here goes:

    So, I’m an academic historian who’s doing pretty well, but I acknowledge that there’s still a pretty decent chance that when I reach the end of my PhD program, I won’t be able to get a decent-salary-and-benefits academic job, or be unable to get such a job that doesn’t make me miserable.

    When you pursue a high-risk career, you’ve got to come up with a good plan B, something else you can do if your ideal doesn’t work out. I would like your help with that.

    My qualifications/talents:

    I have a BA in both pure mathematics and history from a top-20 American university. In a few years, I’ll also have a PhD in history. I speak and read French and Spanish fluently, speak and read Arabic well enough to effectively do archival research in the Middle East (and am getting better at it all the time), and I am currently learning Turkish and German. My IQ is around 148. I have a remarkable associative memory, which has allowed me to acquire a nigh-encyclopaedic knowledge of history, literature, the arts, politics, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as a fairly strong layman’s grasp of the physical and life sciences. (I have expert-level knowledge in my actual domains of study.) I’m good at autonomously developing plans of action and following them through with minimal supervision (indeed, anybody who gets a PhD in my field has to have that skillset), and I’m fairly good at navigating unfamiliar environments. I would say that I’m also a fairly good writer, and I have a lot of experience editing others’ work (as both a peer and a teacher). I have fairly good social skills in small-group and one-on-one settings, and I’ve gotten praise from my students for communicating effectively on those scales. I used to be a fairly good programmer, but I haven’t written code in years.

    Problems/Constraints:
    I’ve never had a “real job.” I’ve just had a research internship at a pharmaceutical company in high school, REUs in college, and some TAships at my grad program (where I’m fully funded and earn a fairly generous stipend). My circadian rhythms are owlish, and I tend to function well below peak in the mornings (although a bit better if I get breakfast and coffee.) I also lose function much more quickly than most people do if I can’t get enough food (at the right times) and sleep. My alcohol tolerance is shockingly low for a tall man whose ancestors are northern Europeans. I’m still not great at speaking in front of large groups. (Although I expect I will get better at this with practice.)

    Things which could be either pros or cons:

    I’m bisexual, and tend to ping people’s gaydar. I have fairly strong, but unorthodox leftist political beliefs which probably wouldn’t be too hard for anybody to dig up. (I think that I’m somewhat better at not marking people as OUTGROUP ENEMY than most people are, which I guess is part of what makes me unorthodox.)

    Preferences:
    I like having autonomy, being treated with respect by bosses or clients, and having a flexible schedule or enough time off that I can have appropriate amounts of time for exercise, sex, and media consumption.

    So, what do you guys think would be good career options for me?

    • The original Mr. X says:

      You could try becoming a private tutor.

    • Lumifer says:

      Which end of the axis (work hard + make lots of money) vs (have a relaxed job + make little money) do you prefer?

      Also, are there spheres of work to which you have ideological objections — e.g. law, finance, etc?

      • Lemminkainen says:

        Probably the latter. I never plan to have children, and I live pretty comfortably and happily on about $24k/year now. I would like to have more money than that, certainly, but I’d be perfectly content with a less-than-six-figure salary.

        Possible exception: jobs that are really, really interesting or engaging.

        I dislike capitalism, but I also recognize that I can’t get rid of it by refusing to participate in it. There are probably some subfields of law, finance, government, etc. that I would find repugnant, but I wouldn’t put any of them off-limits globally.

        • Lumifer says:

          How about Foreign Service?

          If you don’t go for hard work, I wouldn’t recommend law or finance. High end there can be pretty good, but requires work (at least to start) and probably another degree for you. The low end isn’t great.

          • Lemminkainen says:

            I do seem to have most of the skills that the foreign service seeks.

            I guess that I should clarify that I’m not lazy, and I’m willing to work quite a bit, I just like having more flexibility and autonomy, and I don’t want to spend so much time working that I never get to enjoy my compensation. (So yes, the high finance and big law tracks would probably be bad for me. 100 hours a week at the office just sounds ghastly.)

          • Lumifer says:

            Yes, I wasn’t implying laziness but was talking about what’s often called “life-work balance”.

            It is quite possible to do high finance and not work 100-hour weeks but that usually happens on the quant side which I’m not sure is up your alley.

    • brad says:

      Do your political beliefs preclude work in the general sphere of the intelligence-military contractor world? Is there any reason you couldn’t get a security clearance?

      • dndnrsn says:

        That’s what I thought at first, but the preference for autonomy and a flexible schedule might clash with that.

      • Lemminkainen says:

        I’m pretty sure that at some point, I’ve publicly expressed a belief that the US government’s policy in the Middle East is both evil and ineffective. I’m not sure if that’s disqualifying. I don’t have any sort of criminal record.

        I have some ethical qualms about intelligence/defense type work, but they’re at least somewhat mitigated by the possibility of having at least some influence to make things less horrible. From a consequentialist perspective, it’s better for me to get my hands dirty than stand aside if, by getting my hands dirty, I can avert some bad outcomes that would have occurred if I hadn’t gotten involved at all.

        • brad says:

          RAND corp seems like it would be worth considering then.

        • James Picone says:

          I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but I know several people here in Australia who have been in marches protesting against the Iraq war and were still quite capable of getting security clearances. The Vietnam war too, for that matter. If the defence sciences side of things never hired any scientist with left-wing views they’d have a very small hiring pool.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Pretty much. Weren’t a decent chunk of the Manhattan Project scientists communists?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ dndnrsn

            …and how well did that work?

          • dndnrsn says:

            They performed well as scientists, but they weren’t so good at the “not funneling information to the Soviets”.

            It’s a tricky question – were there enough scientists of the right sort who didn’t have communist sympathies for the program to work?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ dndnrsn

            Isn’t America great? It got commies to build it the atomic bomb and it got Nazis to build it the rockets for ICBMs and space.

          • dndnrsn says:

            “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
            That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

          • James Picone says:

            Honestly most of the control over anything that isn’t seriously super-secret-squirrel is just 1) need to know 2) not hiring people who are actually members of revolutionary groups and make it obvious 3) giving extra scrutiny to people who’ve been to the Middle East in the last two decades (and probably Russia I guess, I dunno). Also that it’s mostly really boring. And not of any significant intelligence value.

    • dndnrsn says:

      How willing are you to live out of a suitcase or a backpack, living a minimalist, nomadic lifestyle?

      If you’re good with languages, good in unfamiliar circumstances, want freedom, but don’t care that much about money … you could always just bum around, travelling the world and cataloguing your exploits.

      • At a slight tangent, bumming around the world and writing travel guides might be an option.

        • Lumifer says:

          You think writing travel guides can bring in noticeable amounts of money? I thought the situation in that area is similar to travel photography — unless you’re really exceptional in some way there is no way to make a living there.

      • Lumifer says:

        That’s not a job/career, that’s a “bail out” choice :-/

      • Lemminkainen says:

        Although being a modern-day Richard Burton certainly sounds cool, I don’t think that I would actually enjoy it.

    • John Schilling says:

      You seem to be well-qualified to work as a spy; the question is, for which side?

      More generally, I’ll second the recommendation for the Foreign Service, with or without the spooky aspects. Being a leftist and thinking current US policy is evil are not going to disqualify you so long as you are willing to work with people on the other side. Civil service jobs are quite good for work/life balance, and I believe the Foreign Service is better than most on the autonomy side.

      How do you feel about travel and, given your language skills, travel to gay-unfriendly places?

      • Lemminkainen says:

        I like travel (although I have an opposite-sex partner who might not be happy with every location– she’s also trying to figure out what her alternatives to academia would be). I can deal with gay-unfriendly places, because it seems like gaydar is at least somewhat culturally contextual, and I don’t seem to ping it in the Middle East (or, to the extent that I do, people probably just write it off as me being a foreigner)

    • You could find some classic work in Arabic or Turkish that hasn’t been translated and should be and translate it. Here “should be” is a market measure not an academic measure–a work that, if translated well, would be likely to sell.

      If your Arabic is good enough, you could get a job as a translator. Someone I heard recently said she was offered quite good pay to do translation in (I think) the UAE.

      My daughter is building a career as an online freelance editor. Making a decent living at that, if possible, probably requires at least a year or two building up a reputation, but it sounds as though it fits your constraints pretty well.

      • Eric Rall says:

        I was going to suggest translation work as well.

        Another possibility, beyond David’s suggestion of literary translation and the upthread suggestions of intelligence and foreign-service work. is software UI localization. Most major software companies market their software worldwide in local-language versions. The way this usually works is for the programmers and UI designers to write up English-language versions of all the text in the software and sent it to translators who make French, Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, etc versions. I think the translators are usually independent contractors who get work through agencies and who work at home and get paid by the volume of work they take on, which would give you the independence and work-flexibility you’re looking for.

      • Anonanon says:

        Or if not something that will sell well on the mass market, something that’s likely to be interesting to the kind of people who might want to hire someone with his skill set.
        Which would tie in nicely to the suggestions given above about foreign office work.

      • Lemminkainen says:

        I imagine that I could also improve on the existing translation of some classic work.

        (I would probably have to be creative with this– you need to take a lot of liberties with Arabic poetry and literary prose just to give it a parseable syntax for English speakers, and probably even more to make it sound good.)

        • Abu Zayd is a literary genius/con man who swindles his way across the medieval Islamic landscape. I’m sure there is a translation, but perhaps a better translation would make a popular book.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      Oh, I’ve realized that the long list of languages is probably the most salient and attention-getting thing about what I wrote above, so I should mention that I was one of the three best students in my year at theoretical math. I didn’t abandon that path because I was bad at it, but because I burned out on the way that research in the field worked.

      I kick ass at linear algebra, and I have some formal training in statistics and game theory, although I’m not at an expert level in either of those fields.

      I’m not sure what exactly I would need to transition into the programming/data science/etc world, though.

      • Eric Rall says:

        If I’m reading your original post correctly, you’re currently in grad school. You should be able to sign up for Computer Science intro classes (the ones for undergraduate CS majors, not the “programming for …” that are offered as breadth courses for people majoring in non-computing STEM fields). These will give you enough of a grounding to self-teach some more specialized knowledge (buy textbooks for intermediate and advanced courses, or find online tutorials, or tell your CS professor what you’re doing and why and ask for advice). The specific math fields you mentioned probably carry over most directly to image processing, cryptography, and data mining.

        The best way to develop marketable credentials for an entry-level programming job (short of changing majors and getting a CS-related degree) is to develop a portfolio of personal projects: put highlights on your resume and have code samples and more detailed descriptions ready in case you’re asked about it. If you can make substantive contributions to well-known open source projects, or if you can get a project published as an academic paper, that adds quite a bit of heft to you resume above a private hobby project.

        If it isn’t too late to change your major from History, Econ might be worth exploring as an alternative to a programming career path. There’s enough overlap between Econ and History that you might be able to repurpose progress you’re already made towards your thesis, and your combination of Social Science and theoretical math backgrounds sounds perfect for an Econ program. From what I gather, Econ PhDs are in fairly high demand for think tank and public policy jobs, and it’s pretty common for big companies to hire economists as advisors to their finance departments.

        • Nornagest says:

          It won’t apply as directly to crypto; that’s mostly number theory, though statistics is useful around the edges. Machine learning and data mining are going to be some combination of linear algebra and statistics, though (IME ML more the former and data mining more the latter), and image processing is almost pure linear algebra.

      • Lumifer says:

        So you’re a smart generalist.

        Another suggestion for you, though an uncool : -/ one — go into business. No, not make a start-up, but become a manager in a large company and start climbing through the corporate ranks. In an appropriate company on an appropriate career trajectory you’ll be able to exercise both your math side and your humanities side. People who can do both are fairly rare.

        • Lemminkainen says:

          The most straightforward way to get into that would be management consulting, right? I got an interview with BCG back when I was an undergrad…

  4. name says:

    How many people here have a minimalist lifestyle? Can anyone give a decent intro? One prominent camp I’ve noticed is the ‘backpack’/’briefcase’ camp, where people try to fit their belongings into a briefcase. (Maybe reddit and a Mark Manson article isn’t the best representation, but whatever) Otherwise I don’t know much.

    • Anonymous says:

      Buy cheap food, non-processed raw materials are a good bet on being cheaper than the mostly-finished product; learn to cook.

      Don’t have expensive hobbies. Internet browsing and video game playing is cheap.

      Never rent anything bigger than a single room; in fact, prefer nepotistic arrangements with acquaintances over the open market.

      Don’t own a car, use a bike. Do you own repairs as much as you can.

      Overall, be a miser with regards to just about anything. Don’t buy anything you don’t need if you can help it.

      This book‘s a decent intro into personal finance for young men.

      • Zombielicious says:

        Adding to that, consider learning to live without heating and air conditioning. Can save thousands a year, and while it’s uncomfortable, anything above 45 F and under 90 F is fairly tolerable. Beyond that it’s doable (up to a point) but becomes a major distraction to pretty much any other activity.

        For cheap food it doesn’t get much better than beans, rice, and pasta (though any sauce besides straight tomato is relatively pricey). Just make sure you aren’t pushing the costs down the road into healthcare expenses from a poor diet and lifestyle.

        • Anonymous says:

          Adding to that, consider learning to live without heating and air conditioning. Can save thousands a year, and while it’s uncomfortable, anything above 45 F and under 90 F is fairly tolerable. Beyond that it’s doable (up to a point) but becomes a major distraction to pretty much any other activity.

          That’s a good one. Personally, I find it easy to tolerate barely-above-freezing inside temperatures, while finding it hard – but not impossible – to tolerate anything much above 25 C. Still possible.

          For cheap food it doesn’t get much better than beans, rice, and pasta (though any sauce besides straight tomato is relatively pricey). Just make sure you aren’t pushing the costs down the road into healthcare expenses from a poor diet and lifestyle.

          See a doctor sometimes, have him do you some tests to see if you need any nutrients. Overall, eating lots of fruit and vegetables (which are generally cheap) takes care of most of that. Eggs are very good for saving, too – cheap, nutritious, filling.

  5. JDG1980 says:

    So, the latest political tempest-in-a-teapot is about Melania Trump (Donald’s wife) giving a speech that had portions of two sentences which were identical to those in Michelle Obama’s speech in 2008. She’s being accused of “plagiarism”. And that might indeed be the case – if this were an academic paper and not a political speech full of banal generalities. These accusations bother me because they are part of a larger trend that might be called “academic imperialism” – trying to force everyone in the country to follow the norms and culture of the college-educated academic elite.

    There are good reasons why academia has strict norms against plagiarism. Academics need to be able to trace the chain of transmission of ideas, and they don’t want other people taking credit for their work. But applying these norms to political stump speeches (and by a candidate’s wife) is absurd.

    • herbert herbertson says:

      If that had been the approach Trump had taken, this would have been nothing more than a quick chuckle for snarky liberals on Facebook yesterday morning. Ditto if they had just said, whoops, sorry, but NBD right? It’s the weird, reality-denying reaction that gave this one its legs.

      • Corey says:

        John Rogers pointed out the Trump campaign seemed to have no idea how to throw people under buses (or just didn’t want to, for inexplicable reasons). But they seem to be learning.

        • herbert herbertson says:

          You’d think they’d at least be prepared to go with “sure, but who cares, it doesn’t matter.” No busses required for that one.

    • Emily says:

      Yeah, I saw some comment from a college administrator on facebook about how this would be grounds for immediate firing if she had been a faculty member. I find this both doubtful and irrelevant.

      • Jaskologist says:

        No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

        • gbdub says:

          At this point, what difference does it make?

          • Martin Luther King is an interesting case.

            He plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis. If he had not been both famous and dead at the point it was discovered, I expect the university would have removed his PhD.

            A bit of his most famous speech was lifted from a speech someone else had made. I don’t think that was a serious offense against oratorical norms and am not sure it was an offense at all.

            Melania’s plagiarism makes her look silly, but that’s all it does.

          • Agronomous says:

            I expect the university would have removed his PhD.

            Really? I expect a university would not actually care enough to do anything—and that’s if it were Joe Schmoe. For MLK, I think they’d offer a full-throated defense, and maybe pressure the original author to admit to plagiarism instead.

            [Edit: I thought it was an Ed.D, but I was mistaken.]

            The whole thing did nothing to lower my opinion of King, and a bit to lower my opinion of schools of Education. I frankly wish we could have somebody on today’s political scene with half his integrity.

      • Corey says:

        Facebook really needs an “eyeroll” button amongst its reactions.

        • Nornagest says:

          Facebook will never offer a reaction option that unambiguously implies disagreement. They’re in the business of making echo chambers, not fostering debate.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          That sounds like a slightly better idea than resurrecting Hitler and a genderbended Stalin and then having them mate.

          • Lumifer says:

            Why did you decide to have a trans-Stalin instead of a trans-Hitler?

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Stalin was more handsome than Hitler, so he’d probably make for a better waifu.

          • Lumifer says:

            So I googled “waifu Stalin” and my faith in the powers of teh internets was reaffirmed 8-/

          • Nornagest says:

            No, fifty genderbent Stalins!

          • Anonymous says:

            When I google “waifu stalin” I get more images of waifu hitler than waifu stalin.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Anonymous, Google must think you’re more interested in Hitler than Stalin, based on its vast records on you. I definitely get more Stalins than Hitlers (though I do get a few Hitlers. Also some Putins).

          • Anonymous says:

            To be clear, I get mainly unmodified Stalins. But of the results that are waifu, mainly they are Hitler. Sometimes accompanied by normal Stalin, sometimes alone.

            I clear my cookies religiously. The only search I did before this had to do with cargo cult flower arrangement.

      • Certainly not in a speech. As undergraduate lectures almost never come with citations, professors copy without attribution all the time in their oral lectures.

    • Anonymous says:

      Those damn elitists!

    • a n o n says:

      According to wikipedia, Plagiarism is “the “wrongful appropriation” and “stealing and publication” of another author’s “language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions” and the representation of them as one’s own original work.” The word doesn’t seem limited to academia, nor to a legally punishable act, and seems to fit here.

    • smocc says:

      Personally, I don’t think of it as a great crime, and I’m not outraged at the plagiarism.

      But I do think it’s hilarious. It would be one thing to rip off an old Nancy Reagan speech; it’s a much higher level of comedy to rip off a speech of the wife of the opposite party incumbent your husband has spent the last eight years attacking.

      I’m also disappointed how little focus is being given to the fact that it seems like she Rickrolled the entire convention.

      • gbdub says:

        The comedic aspect, including the Rickrolling, kind of makes me think it was a setup. I mean, the lines stolen were complete banalities. Even if you were plagiarizing, it would be very easy to obscure it a bit more with a little paraphrasing. Maybe an act of rebellion by a NeverTrumper in the writing staff?

        Anyway, isn’t Biden the speech plagiarizer extraordinaire? And wasn’t Obama accused of a similar speech-lift in 2008?

        This campaign cycle has not increased my faith in the media. Or my social media for that matter – apparently this is a far greater crime than mishandling classified email and then lying about it.

        • tcd says:

          Definitely a setup. They were looking for another disproportionate response and they got it.

      • John Schilling says:

        it’s a much higher level of comedy to rip off a speech of the wife of the opposite party incumbent your husband has spent the last eight years attacking

        “I think he’s doing a really good job…he’s totally a champion”
        – Donald Trump on Barack Obama, less than eight years ago

      • Corey says:

        Could be that she non-ironically thinks “Never Gonna Give You Up” is a good song – it’s the most romantic song I know, after all.

    • onyomi says:

      The things that bother me about this particular “scandal” are

      1. it’s the sort of thing nobody cares about even a little when it’s their guy who does it. If Michelle Obama’s convention speech had had a few bits lifted from a speech by Laura Bush, no one currently claiming to care about this (and, in fairness, I think even most liberals treat it as mostly a joke) would care even a little (though maybe in that case some conservative outlets would be trying to make a big deal out of it).

      2. people trying to blame Melania for something she obviously just read off a teleprompter. If there was plagiarism, it wasn’t her who did it, but her speech writer. Why they don’t fire the speech writer (Trump’s “never apologize; never admit fault” philosophy?) who couldn’t come up with a few new platitudes, I don’t know.

      3. what we should all really care about here is not “Melania Trump is a plagiarist,” but political speeches are mostly vapid and interchangeable. This has been an interesting season because of the way it has sort of pulled back the hood on politics to reveal just how fake most people already kind of knew it was.

      The other prominent example was Marco Rubio’s robotic talking point broken record, but even there, the real takeaway shouldn’t have been “Marco Rubio can’t think on his feet,” but, rather, almost all the candidates are reciting canned talking points all the time because that’s what works. Going off script is dangerous. Hammering home your same few points is effective. To some extent this is okay, I think, because not everyone who has good ideas can express them on the fly in front of cameras with eloquence without practice. But it also reveals how difficult it is in our politics to have a real conversation about anything (the British seem much better at this with “question time” and the like, though that can also descend into a different kind of point-scoring-over-substance).

      • Randy M says:

        Is there a politician who has a “apologize occasionally” philosophy? Bush didn’t; Obama only apologized for Bush and for not explaining his successes well enough.
        A politician who admits fault is likely a doomed one.

        As for the Banality of speeches, I really doubt “Hope and Change” started the trend, but it sure hung a lampshade one it.

        • Nornagest says:

          Campaign slogans have always been banal.

          (I think my favorite on this list is Woodrow Wilson, 1916, “He Kept Us Out Of War”.)

          • LHN says:

            I appreciate the unusual policy specificity of Polk’s.

          • Nornagest says:

            It’s fun how you can tell just from looking at the slogans that 1884 and 1964 were unusually combative elections.

          • Mercer says:

            1844 Henry Clay really should have gone with “Who the F*#@ is James K Polk?”

            Some of these are amazing…”Keep Cool With Coolidge”….why god why…

          • The original Mr. X says:

            To be fair, I don’t think “He kept us out of the war” is a banal slogan, even if it turned out to be somewhat ironic in hindsight.

          • Zombielicious says:

            These are all good, but how has no one mentioned the genius of James Blaine: Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa, Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            Blaine was also the “beneficiary” of the most disastrously non-banal campaign slogan ever: Rum, Romanism, and rebellion.

      • James Picone says:

        Australia has a question-time setup, not sure if it’s similar to the british one. It mostly works like this:

        – A member of the government asks the prime minister a question like this: “My question is for the honourable member of Safeseat, Govtown. Have you noticed how this cherry-picked economic indicator has gone up recently? Why are you so good at your job?”

        – The prime minister stands up and says “I’d like to thank the member for Dingo Woop Woop for their question. Our party is the party of economic responsibility and is much better at that than the other people, as your cherry-picked economic indicator shows. Indeed, your cherry-picked economic indicator will always be lower under us than under the other people.”

        – A member of the opposition stands up and says something like “My question is for the honourable member for Prettysafeseat, Ministertown. So have you heard about this week’s thing we’re trying to make a big deal and talking to all the news channels about? You know, the way the department you’re minister for mislabelled and then misplaced three paperclips? I think you should all resign!”

        – Everybody yells a lot; “he’s supposed to ask a question that statement at the end isn’t allowed!”, “Go fuck yourself Pyne!” etc. etc..

        – The speaker says “Order! Order! The honourable member for Safeseat, Oppositiontown will retract that statement”

        – Oppposition member retracts the statement.

        – Minister for whatever ministry it is stands up and is all “I thank the member for the question. Have you heard that cherry-picked economic indicator is up? I think that indicates that nobody should care about whatever the latest controversy is.”

        – Yelling, “He didn’t answer the question!” “Go fuck yourself Pyne!” “Order Order!” etc. etc.

        – Repeat.

        I don’t think anything of consequence ever occurs during Question Time.

  6. Ruprect says:

    I really hate cars.
    Has there actually been any advantage to having cars? I suspect that it might be one of the worst “advances”, in terms of its impact on individuals, that we’ve ever had. It’s probably not quite up there with the introduction of agriculture for screwing up the individuals exposed to it (not quite), but, at the same time the motorised society doesn’t have the same degree of molochian advantage over train using societies that agriculturists have over the hunter-gatherers, or industrialised societies have over agricultural ones. It wasn’t a technological advance driven by some inexorable social force – it was just a really rubbish thing that we chose to do.

    Cars = smoking?

    When I was at school they used to show us pictures of the first cars, where they had to hire a man to walk in front carrying a red flag, and it was like “ha ha ha, silly people in the past”. Why the hell did they get rid of that rule? That was a brilliant rule. I’ve got so many friends and family who’ve been killed or injured by cars – but motor use is such an established institution, there is a tendency to just shrug your shoulders and treat it as an act of God.

    So. If I was the lawgiver, my first suggestion would be, “let’s have a sizeable area of our country where there are no cars” Everything important that is achieved by cars could be achieved by trains, and people walking.

    Is this just me? Am I missing some vital thing that cars do?

    • Artificirius says:

      Not without a staggering number of trains, or the acceptance of far more inefficiency. It might have worked if that had started before cars took off, but I really doubt many people would be willing to not switch when they hear that folks down the line don’t have to travel for a couple hours to get to the hospital.

      • Ruprect says:

        You could have an emergency rickshaw station in every neighbourhood that would rush you to the nearest train station. Hospitals and the like would have to be near the main hubs, I suppose.
        It’s definitely doable though.

        • Artificirius says:

          And you would have standby trains for emergencies? How do you coordinate that? Do you just accept that people will have to wait on train schedule, subject to the foibles thereof?

          Do we spread out medical staff? How does that work when the concentration of medical staff and equipment is a significant enabler of our better care, certainly where more than general health care is concerned. I don’t see great trauma centers being parcelled out every hundred miles or so.

    • Nornagest says:

      I’m guessing you’ve never lived outside a major city.

    • Skivverus says:

      Main things that come to mind are rails versus roads, and scheduling based on population density.
      In the first case, roads are cheaper up-front, especially dirt ones that you might have already been using horse-drawn carriages for.
      In the second, which is at least partially due to the first, if you don’t get enough passengers to justify the train going to/past destination X every ten minutes, you might increase the interval between trains to every fifteen minutes… or every hour… or maybe once a day… or maybe just never, because your passengers have all gotten impatient and hired a taxi (gas-powered or otherwise) to get to X and back in less than that day. Or, y’know, just bought one of whatever the taxi driver was using, because “how hard could it be?”.

    • Sandy says:

      My family lives in a suburb near Princeton. It’s impossible to get anywhere without a car. All the malls, supermarkets, cinemas, and townships are at least a 30 minute drive away. Walking is out of the question, and you’d need a lot more train lines.

      • Urstoff says:

        The interesting counterfactual, though, is what would cities and their surrounding areas look like had cars never been invented or come into widespread use.

        • Lumifer says:

          In this counterfactual first you don’t have very big cities (the bandwidth of carless transportation is insufficient to supply everything a very big city needs), and second everything will be covered in horse manure.

          • John Schilling says:

            Cars, also, are insufficient transportation to supply everything a very big city needs, and there are some potentially interesting edge cases where cars do not exist but trucks do. But the more central issue is that it is certainly possible to build very large cities using rail or river/canal transportation. Those cities will be very interesting, in part because they will necessarily not be monoliths with a single urban culture but segmented into districts defined, perhaps by design, by ease of rail transit.

    • onyomi says:

      Someone on SSC, I forget who, pointed me to the work of this guy, who has a lot of bad things to say about the design of…just about every city designed in the last 200 years. Basically, making roads big enough for everyone to drive results in everyone needing a car which makes a dearth of fun places to walk, results in everyone having to drive farther…

      As an American, I enjoy the freedom to go basically anywhere on the continent whenever I want which owning a car provides. Within urban areas, however, I do strongly prefer the “traditional” city design, where things are more tightly packed together and walkable. It encourages all kinds of good things, like beautiful architecture, window gardens, courtyards, street food…

      • John Schilling says:

        Basically, making roads big enough for everyone to drive results in everyone needing a car which makes a dearth of fun places to walk, results in everyone having to drive farther…

        Not making roads big enough for everyone to drive results in not being able to drive delivery trucks to peoples’ homes or places of business. Or to the sites where homes and places of business are even going to be built in the first place, so how do you get the construction materials there?

        I suppose if you are absolutely certain your first round of construction will be the last you ever need you could overbuild the roads at the end, but that would still leave a tricky problem in delivering goods.

        • onyomi says:

          They make it work in the old parts of traditional Chinese cities, though, admittedly, there’s not usually a lot of new construction going on there, except when they’re torn down. You’d be surprised how much you can get on the back of a motor scooter…

          Also, the little honeycomb hutongs even in olden days would be separated at intervals by larger boulevards.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’ve spent an afternoon in a Hutong, and that’s enough thank you. Anyone whose criticism of modern western cities is that they are insufficiently Hutong-like, is I think not going to be convincing to many western urbanites.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I don’t think you need to go quite as far as a hutong to make your point. The streets of, e.g., Rome are often quite narrow and windy, and people seem to manage alright when moving something from A to B.

    • Pku says:

      I’m vaguely optimistic that with the advance of self-driving cars, we might someday manage to reduce the number of cars on the road by an order of magnitude or two (and, hopefully, eliminate most parking lots). The invention of cars does seem kinda molochian, but given where we are, our best hope is probably to try and power through it.

      • gbdub says:

        In many cities the parking is a bigger pain in the arse than the driving. Eliminate the need to park close with self driving personal cars or cabs that can be summoned on command, and you free up extra space for traffic (no street parking) and can build denser (no downtown parking garages – and no traffic-clogging lines to get into them).

    • Lumifer says:

      Yes, it’s just you : -P

      Look at what people in the countries transitioning to middle-class levels (Japan in 50s, Korea in the 70s, Russia in the 00s, etc.) buy. They buy cars. These vehicles are expensive, often badly made, need maintenance — but people still buy a great number of them. Why, do you think?

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        Well, obviously it’s because the evil automobile companies bought up the streetcar systems in all those countries and shut them down.

    • Tekhno says:

      My only problem is that I’m too poor (read: stingy) to buy a car.

      What’s great about cars is that they allow choice. Public transport can get you places fast, but not always to the place you want to go, and not always when you want to go. Cars allow a freedom that I think offsets their dangers, and their effects on the structure of cities (the suburbs being too large is mostly an American problem anyway, not a European one).

      Without widescale mass transport, I’m not sure we could have the modern economy we have. You can’t just build trains everywhere, and there would be far too much horse crap everywhere (I seem to remember that before the car, some people feared that an exploding population would end up burying us in horse crap). Horses are scarier than cars anyway.

  7. I plan to be in New York City and vicinity for several days, spanning this coming weekend. If any NYC-area folks are interested in meeting up for coffee or lunch, let me know. My gmail address is my surname.

  8. name says:

    Gymrats of SSC, what’s your observations about what makes a good gym?

    Also, what makes a good beginner weightlifting program for an early 20s male?

    • Mercer says:

      The more squat and power racks, the better. Theyre popular and a single person can use one for a long time. I also like my gym to have deadlifting platforms and if it allows chalk thats even better, but its not a dealbreaker.

      Upper/Lower splits are a good place to start out. 2 upper body days and 2 lower body days a week (can also do 2 upper/1 lower or 2 lower/1 upper if 4 days a week is too much). Focus each day around a big compound movement like the squat or bench press.

    • Anonymous says:

      Gymrats of SSC, what’s your observations about what makes a good gym?

      Good ventilation. Weights/machines for every muscle.

      Also, what makes a good beginner weightlifting program for an early 20s male?

      What are you trying to accomplish?

    • Psmith says:

      what’s your observations about what makes a good gym?

      Most of the clientele being stronger than me. (or better-built, I suppose, if my goals were more physique-related).

      This will account for a good deal of the equipment selection and rules and so on as well, and I don’t think the residual matters very much.

      Also, what makes a good beginner weightlifting program for an early 20s male?

      In the absence of specific information about your goals (and the multiple other comments that I assumed would be giving this same recommendation), reading Starting Strength and Practical Programming is a good place to start. They’re not right about everything, but they’ll get you to a point where you have enough experience to figure out the relevant individual variation for yourself and adjust your training accordingly.

    • Emily says:

      I was a gym rat for long time (pre-baby).

      If you have enormous self-control or really thrive on being part of some kind of community, this may not be the case, but otherwise a major attribute of a good gym is convenience. Lower the barriers to going to the gym. Obviously there also needs to be equipment you can work with, but if you’re lifting, that’s not a lot of stuff. Definitely check it out before joining, but most normal gyms are going to have a squat rack, someplace you can bench, and a bar for pull-ups. If you want to do deadlifts, there’s some specialized equipment that it’s definitely nice to have (and maybe necessary to have if you are lifting at normal-guy amounts, I don’t know) and that not everyone is going to have, like bumper plates.

      I’d say something similar about what makes a good beginning weightlifting program: it’s something you’re going to stick to. Going from not-lifting to lifting as a young man, you’re going to get stronger so long as you are regularly lifting at an intensity that is difficult and not injuring yourself. When that stalls, if you still want to make gains, figuring that out will be a bigger deal. There are two major programs that get recommended a lot for beginners, stronglifts and starting strength. I’d say they’re pretty similar, but I’m sure you can find a lot of stuff on the internet about how they’re totally different. I would also say as a note: there’s a lot of variation in terms of how easily people learn form. Some people can watch some videos on the internet and then do a motion correctly. Some people need a lot more coaching. You may have a sense of where you fall on this already from your experiences with gym class/sports. Unless you’re really great, I’d suggest initially getting some feedback on your form. You can get a trainer or friend or take videos and post them to r/fitness.

      Also, while there are some advantages to doing a barbell-based program, you really don’t have to. There are body weight programs. There are also machine weights. If you really struggle with form or you just hate barbells, you will make a lot more progress just switching programs then stopping entirely.

    • name says:

      Thanks to everyone who replied! My goal is to figure out if it’s even for me. I’m looking for a simple program, and I got to this (http://ironstrong.org/topic/1157-the-average-fn-program-a-simple-and-efficient-training-template/) from reddit.

      My only problem is that there’s a bunch of conflicting ideologies on the net, and that as a beginner, it feels like jumping into a bottomless pool. It seems kind of reckless but sometimes I wonder if maybe I should just do things instead of thinking about them too much.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Important question: are you skinny, or fat?

        Beyond basic considerations like that, people like to argue about programming or number of sets or whatever but you are right that just doing things is the major issue – provided the program isn’t terrible or inappropriate, of course. When I fiddle with my programs and try to put in some cool thing I just read and so on, I don’t do as well as when I just lift the weights. That program looks fine.

        • name says:

          Male, 5’4, weight fluctuates between 57-59kg (125-130lbs).

          My main issue is that at a very low level, which is my level, it kind of feels that it’s glorified grocery bag carrying. You probably won’t wrap a grocery bag with a watermelon to your neck, and hell even if you did that’s still something you can easily solve. It seems like it’s just much better to sign up to a gym, try whatever workout you believe in, make sure your form is correct, and just repeat. Despite all the good people trying to help others, with so many conflicting things, it just leads to more confusion and probably more inaction.

          It just feels that a lot of bodybuilding advice misses the forest for trees. In the end, the only thing I’ve noticed were a bunch of recurring topics which were compound exercises, form stability, and progressive increase of load. If I missed something feel free to add (nutrition excluded)

          Or maybe it’s just my own issue – has anyone else tried to study something and just felt more confused rather than more informed?

          • dndnrsn says:

            So, you’re normal weight – always been that way? Basically, there’s a decent argument to be made that someone who wants to lose fat should be doing higher reps with lower rest periods relative to someone who is focusing on strength, maybe even relative to someone aiming for mass. Someone who used to be fat is probably going to have to be extra careful putting weight on, as well.

            And yeah, there’s a lot of information out there and it conflicts. I kind of enjoy it, but I spent too much time in university reading scholarly arguments, so two guys arguing over whether High Intensity Training works or not amuses me.

            Add to that list keeping your movements balanced: pushing should be accompanied by a roughly equal amount of pulling in the opposite direction (eg you shouldn’t be benching twice a week but only rowing once), if you’re doing something that overwhelmingly hits the quads (like front squats) you might want to do something for the hamstrings (like Romanian or stiff-legged deadlifts), etc.

            One thing that I’ve learned that some people are really dogmatic about is that you can totally substitute exercises, within reason. Only powerlifters need to do the straight bar deadlift, regular squat, and barbell bench.

          • name says:

            Actually I was about 10kg more with the same fluctuations and after age 19 which is probably when puberty ended I dropped to my current weight. I’m not sure if my eating habits changed as I never really regulated them. I did some running at age 16-17 but got bored after a year. At that time my weight was the same as my current weight. My unscientific conclusion is that I store less fat after puberty.

            Now my problem about the ‘resting period’: from a consequential point of view the body did x amount of effort. What physiological benefits does lower resting periods give that you recommend them? AFAIK the whole point of lifting while losing fat is to upkeep your muscle so that after you lost the fat (not weight) you won’t look like an A4 paper. In the long term, it looks like a diminishing return to me, and probably nothing you can’t fix by throwing and extra 5kg on the bar later on (in case you do lose some more muscle).

          • dndnrsn says:

            It’s sorta bro science, but people training for mass or for fat loss often recommend shorter rest periods. It’s supposed to result in greater post-workout calorie expenditure, and greater growth hormone release. The bro-est of the bros just say that if you rest too long between sets you lose your pump.

            The bigger worry from a practical point is letting yourself rest too long: you’ll see people who aren’t doing low-rep maximum strength work rest as though they are. If nothing else, it means you take too long in the gym.

          • gbdub says:

            One thing my trainer had me doing that seemed to help from the calorie burn / fat loss standpoint was to have active supplemental exercises between sets of the big exercise.

            So I’d do a set of squats, then immediately do some unweighted jumps and side lunges, grab a swig of water, and go back for the next set of squats. Get the tempo right and the muscles you’re working will be exhausted on the last big set and you’ll be getting winded. This is hard but seems to get your cardio fitness up quick.

          • Pku says:

            Something that’s really helped me avoid long rests is training with other people. It can be hard to find a group to exercise with and there are inconveniences if you do, but it’s worth trying out if you can.

          • dndnrsn says:

            You can also do “compound sets” where you do a set of one thing, then a set of an “opposite” exercise, with little to no rest in between (I generally only rest long enough to jot down sets in my book and get a drink). For instance, front squats hit the quads hardest and require isometric work from the abdominals, and Romanian deadlifts hit the hamstrings hardest and require isometric work from the lower back. Or, bench presses and rows are basically the exact opposite movements.

            It basically means you can pack x sets of one and x sets of the other into a little more time than it would take you to do x sets of one.

          • Psmith says:

            What physiological benefits does lower resting periods give

            None that you can’t get better from conditioning on the rowing machine, the fan bike, or pushing/pulling a sled.

            Don’t rest so long that you get cold. Apart from that, take as long as you need. It takes about 8 minutes to replenish ATP stores in skeletal muscle, and the weight, not the rest time, is the stimulus to which we want to adapt. (Otherwise, erg/bike/sled.).

          • dndnrsn says:

            If you’re doing submaximal loads, though, how important is it to fully replenish ATP? Plus, if someone is just lifting weights for general purposes, pure strength isn’t the only desirable adaptation.

          • Psmith says:

            If you’re doing submaximal loads, though, how important is it to fully replenish ATP?

            Not as, but still somewhat. I didn’t mention it as an absolute minimum rest period for anything anyone will ever do. More by way of a benchmark, since so many people seem to think of two minutes or so as a really long rest period.

            (and, of course, a set of 10 at 8.5 RPE is going to need a longer rest period than a single at 9.5. There are other variables.).

            Plus, if someone is just lifting weights for general purposes, pure strength isn’t the only desirable adaptation.

            Yes, that’s why I mentioned conditioning (which I think is important for nearly everyone, actually, titrated to appropriate volume and intensity.). I suppose we could construct a hypothetical under which we should maximize total weekly volume over ~75% 1RM by limiting rest periods–advanced trainee (requiring specificity), limited training time, in part of a training cycle where they don’t need to worry about exposure to weights closer to 1RM than minimally necessary for hypertrophy. But I submit that anyone in that position will be able to figure it out for themselves. Meanwhile, I have talked to quite a few otherwise healthy young men who have been squatting 2 plates and benching a plate and a half for the last three months and can’t figure out why, who upon further investigation turn out to be taking 3 minutes between their work sets. Hell, I don’t have the relevant training logs at hand, but I’m pretty sure I was one of those guys myself at one point. So I think telling people to think about keeping their rest periods short probably does more harm than good.

          • dndnrsn says:

            A caveat I should have thought of: I lift weights for a few reasons, but one is as an adjunct to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, where pure strength is less important than muscular endurance, work capacity, and being able to recover quickly.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Good maintenance of good quality equipment. Weigh the Olympic bars: they should be 45 pounds. I remember one gym where they must have blown all their money on machines of various sorts, and the Olympic bars were of low enough quality to be off by several pounds.

      EDIT: Also, further indicators there may be enough interest for a regular exercise thread.

      • Anonymous says:

        The transformation will be complete when SSC becomes a bodybuilding forum.

      • Eric Rall says:

        Pedantic nitpick: you’re looking for 20 kg, not 45 lbs. The equipment standards were defined in metric, and those of us who use pounds and inches round 20 kg = 44.1 lbs up to 45 lbs by convention in order to make the math easy.

        A good black-iron gym might also stock 15 kg and 10 kg Olympic bars (conventionally rounded up to 35 and 25 lbs respectively). 15 kg bars are the competition standard for Women’s Olympic events (they’re also slightly smaller in grip diameter, making them easier to grip for people with smaller hands), and 10 kg bars are there for weaker novices who aren’t yet strong enough to lift a competition bar.

    • Pku says:

      Related question: It seems like whenever I go to the pool, most of the people there are out of shape and/or overweight. I always hear swimming’s supposed to be good exercise, and I haven’t seen this problem with runners or weight people. Does anyone have an explanation?

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Swimming is (relatively) easy, so a lot of the people who sort of want but will never actually lose weight gravitate to it. It’s also the choice of people coming back from injury and old people, skewing it further.

        Also, what kind of pools?

        • Pku says:

          Usually college gym pools. I also tend not to go super early, which I think is when the really serious people go.
          Also, if swimming is relatively easy, is an hour of swimming comparable in benefits to an hour of running or weightlifting?

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Also, if swimming is relatively easy, is an hour of swimming comparable in benefits to an hour of running or weightlifting?

            Depends on the swimming, the lifting and the running.

            What I mean when I say it’s “easy” is that you can swim at a very leisurely pace and still be considered to be swimming, if you’re just walking in the park, you won’t be considered to be running, and if you’re doing 20 knee push ups every other day, you’re not grouped in with lifters.

    • Urstoff says:

      Get the Starting Strength app on your phone and do what it tells you. There are only 4 different exercises it asks you to do: squat, deadlift, bench press, and standing barbell press. Aside from the bench press, these are all exercises that use tons of stabilizer muscles.

      • Nornagest says:

        Five; it starts asking you to do power cleans after you can deadlift your own weight (which is not very hard).

        SS is weak on upper-body pull and anything to do with arms, but that’s relatively easy to deal with. Most straightforward way is probably to add pull-ups (pronated or neutral, for preference) and maybe dips as accessories. Barbell row would also be a decent option.

        • Urstoff says:

          Right, but at the start, it’s just four. And I’d worry about trying to learn the form of the power clean without personal training (you can learn the others pretty well by watching various videos).

        • dndnrsn says:

          Pretty sure the latest edition of SS includes chinups.

          As for power cleans, beyond learning them, there’s the issue that they require specialized equipment: either a floor you can drop weights on, or bumper plates. Or both.

          • Eric Rall says:

            It does. The novice progression starts out with Squat, Bench, Press, and Deadlift, then adds power cleans a couple weeks in, then adds chins a bit after that.

            I do power cleans at home without specialized equipment. You just lower the bar quickly to the hang position (expend just enough energy to control the bar; don’t try to do a reverse curl with it), then lower it to the floor like the second half of a deadlift. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of — I’ve never come close to dropping the bar, although I’ve gotten bruises on my thighs a few times. The main downside, apart from the occasional bruise, is that you’re doing a little more work so you can’t train the power clean quite as aggressively as if you have bumper plates.

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      The presence of racquetball courts. 😛

  9. LaochCailiuil says:

    I’m not sure how your readership feel about Aubrey de Grey, I think he’s one of the more down to earth famous Transhumanists. In any case he’s doing an AMA
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4t65ay/aubrey_de_grey_ama_ask_about_the_quest_to_cure/

  10. Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

    I’m fairly new here, and was reading through some old posts. And I found one about it I just had to say something. The Untitled post, it seemed that so many in the comments reacted wrong to the story about younger Aaronson asking the doctor for chemical castration. They were horrified that he asked, but the horrifying thing was that the doctor refused. Going with how Aaronson described his situation then, asking for the chemical castration was very much the right thing to do. We are a society trying to end harrasment sexually of women, no?

    • Outis says:

      Low-effort troll.

    • Anonymous says:

      They were horrified that he asked, but the horrifying thing was that the doctor refused.

      Suppose you, yourself, feel uncontrollably lustful. Do you think self-sterilization is the right thing to do?

      Going with how Aaronson described his situation then, asking for the chemical castration was very much the right thing to do.

      I don’t see why. Especially given that his feelings were not abnormal, and definitely were not despicable, criminal or worthy of elimination from the genepool.

      We are a society trying to end harrasment sexually of women, no?

      Not really.

      • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

        But it is not about being “uncontrollably lustful”, or “elimination from the genepool”, it is about the sexual harrasment. Mr. Aaronson was right to seek to stop harrasing his female peers with his desire, and the doctor wrong to make him keep harrassing.

        • Lumifer says:

          Still a low-effort troll…

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            I don’t see why you call me a “troll”. And for “low effort”, do you mean I need to say more, explain it to people in more detail.

            To quote Mr. Aaronson,
            “I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.”

            He was wrong on the expelled or jailed part (unfortunately, this society does far too little to punish and prevent sexual harassment), but the rest was right and proper. If he was at all correct in his assesment of his unattractiveness, then letting any of his female classmates learn, in any way, of his desire for her would make him “a creep and a weirdo” and ” an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.”

            The commenters here skew male and to, shall we say, sexually unusual (and to the right wing on non-economic matters), so you may not understand normal women. But if a man is sufficiently unattractive, then simply knowing that he is attracted to us sexually, however we learn of it, directly or indirectly, gives us a physical disgust. It is why words like “creepy” are used, the mere knowledge of his desire makes us uncomfortable. And anything that makes a woman uncomfortable sexually is harassment.

            So if Mr. Aaronson was as unattractive as he said, then any failure to completely conceal his desires from the targets of those desires, or from anyone who might inform those targets, would constitute sexual harassment of those young women. And I think men underestimate how many signals of interest they put out. So I’m sure he did not, in fact, fully hide his desires from his female classmates, and so remains an unpunished sexual harasser. And since such attraction generally cannot be perfectly hidden, the only way for such an unattractive man as the young Mr. Aaronson to cease harassing young women with his disgusting sexual interest is to make that interest go away. And so, castration was the proper route to seek.

          • Pku says:

            It means you’re clearly just looking for position based on being offensive rather than philosophical or moral defensibility. Please go away.

          • Lumifer says:

            That’s a bit more effort, but still insufficient. You must work harder at being a good troll. LEAN IN!

          • Nornagest says:

            Effort or no, that doesn’t pass the Turing test for me. The content’s dumb but plausibly falls within Poe’s Law, but the framing is all manosphere.

            I’ll give you this one for free, Anita: next time you feel like doing something like this, find the right jargon first. Or at least be more euphemistic.

          • So if Mr. Aaronson was as unattractive as he said, then any failure to completely conceal his desires from the targets of those desires, or from anyone who might inform those targets, would constitute sexual harassment of those young women. And I think men underestimate how many signals of interest they put out. So I’m sure he did not, in fact, fully hide his desires from his female classmates, and so remains an unpunished sexual harasser. And since such attraction generally cannot be perfectly hidden, the only way for such an unattractive man as the young Mr. Aaronson to cease harassing young women with his disgusting sexual interest is to make that interest go away. And so, castration was the proper route to seek.

            This text is a caricature of what a terrified and embittered young man might imagine a feminist woman believes about him. Nothing can be hidden, because women will read your mind in search of things to be disgusted by. Castration is advised as treatment for thought crimes. It is so over-the-top that it is hardly even interesting.

            They were horrified that he asked, but the horrifying thing was that the doctor refused.

            At first, I thought this was the actual question being raised. Yes, like most, I am horrified that he asked, but what are the doctor’s obligations under these circumstances? What is the appropriate boundary between individual autonomy, and protecting the patient from himself?

          • Sky says:

            Anita you need to work harder. You are coming across as a Red Piller who is writing what he believes women think, not as a women writing what she actually thinks.

            >If he was at all correct in his assesment of his unattractiveness, then letting any of his female classmates learn, in any way, of his desire for her would make him “a creep and a weirdo” and ”
            >And anything that makes a woman uncomfortable sexually is harassment.
            >But if a man is sufficiently unattractive, then simply knowing that he is attracted to us sexually, however we learn of it, directly or indirectly, gives us a physical disgust

            These are all straw-men of what feminists/women believe. I’ve never actually seen a feminist/woman claim to believe this, I’ve only seen red pillers and the like say that this what is actually going on in a woman’s head.

          • Pku says:

            I’ve seen both. I’ve also seen liberals who act exactly like republican strawmen of liberals and vice versa. They’re uncommon, but Poe’s law exists for a reason.

          • Anonymous says:

            And anything that makes a woman uncomfortable sexually is harassment.

            No. It isn’t.

            At first, I thought this was the actual question being raised. Yes, like most, I am horrified that he asked, but what are the doctor’s obligations under these circumstances? What is the appropriate boundary between individual autonomy, and protecting the patient from himself?

            I think it’s pretty clear – the doctor presumably swore to do no harm. If he, in good faith, believes that the patient is asking for something that is harmful to himself, he is obligated to refuse.

          • Jaskologist says:

            I’m pretty sure the reason Poe’s Law exists is so that when we are taken in by a troll, we can use that as further evidence of how crazy the other side is, rather than look inward.

          • Jiro says:

            I think it’s pretty clear – the doctor presumably swore to do no harm. If he, in good faith, believes that the patient is asking for something that is harmful to himself, he is obligated to refuse.

            The question arises because we’ve abandoned that principle in the first place. What if the doctor thinks in good faith that contraceptives are harmful? What if the doctor thinks gender reassignment surgery is harmful?

          • BBA says:

            This reminds me – Roe v. Wade was originally decided on grounds of abortion bans infringing the doctor’s autonomy to decide the best course of action. The notion of a woman’s right to choose never entered the court’s decision.

          • Pku says:

            Can doctors not decide that? my impression was that they’re considering (or have passed) laws forcing insurers to cover these things, not forcing doctors to perform/prescribe them.

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @Anonymous

            And anything that makes a woman uncomfortable sexually is harassment.

            No. It isn’t.

            Bullying: The Ultimate Teen Guide says,

            “Anything sexual in nature that makes you uncomfortable is considered sexual harassment. If, on the other hand, someone you are interested in is flirting with you and you enjoy it, then this is not considered sexual harassment. The key is how it makes you feel.”

            gurl.com says,

            “Well, let’s set the record straight. Any kind of unwanted behavior that’s sexual and makes you feel uncomfortable is sexual harassment.”

            The Ohio Department of Health says,

            “Sexual harassment can take many forms. Anything sexual that makes one feel uncomfortable – whether it is a look, touch or a story – is considered sexual harassment. Most importantly, teens should remember:
            If it makes you uncomfortable, it is not OK!

            Ask A Manager says,

            “You can’t really report a vague creepy feeling. But you do have that vague creepy feeling, and you should trust it.”

          • Anonymous says:

            Props for the citations. (I still disagree, because that definition is ocean-wide and insane.)

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @Anonymous

            I still disagree, because that definition is ocean-wide and insane.

            You’re perfectly free to be wrong. And how is that definition “insane”? And is it “ocean-wide”, or are other (wrong) definitions too narrow, not wide enough to cover all the wrong done to women in this area?

          • Artificirius says:

            Because the transgression is question is not predefined. Unless you are implicitly assuming that this is behaviour occurring after being asked to stop.

          • Anonymous says:

            You’re perfectly free to be wrong. And how is that definition “insane”? And is it “ocean-wide”, or are other (wrong) definitions too narrow, not wide enough to cover all the wrong done to women in this area?

            “Sexual harassment” is a legally actionable event. You get arrested, tried, fined, imprisoned, etc for doing this. Therefore, the definition needs to be not solely based on one person’s say so – otherwise you run the risk of ruining lives of innocent people on a single instance of perjury. This good justice does not make.

            Further, if your goal is to reduce the amount of harassment, rather than arbitrarily terrifying men of contact with women, it needs to be something that they can look at and apply consistently. “Do not cause women to feel uncomfortable” is not a clear instruction, since women are not all clones, and the workings of other peoples minds are occluded. Unless you think men are telepaths, such a formulation will be useless to them when determining whether to do any particular action; it will tend to create two types of men – those who play it safe and avoid any relations with women, and those risk-takers who don’t give a fuck about your silly rules and do what they please anyway. Are you secretly some kind of misogynist, who wants to increase the amount of sexual harassment by eugenically making sure that only the rule-breakers reproduce?

            If I were to make a rough draft for a definition of sexual harassment, it’d be something like:
            “Actions towards another person that are, a) intimate in nature, whether somatic (such inappropriate touching) or verbal (such as lewd suggestions), and b) directed towards a party who is either an inappropriate target for them (such as a married person, or coming from a married person to someone not their spouse), or has explicitly rejected the notion of romantic involvement (preferably in front of witnesses).”

            Notice how persistent, but polite, attempts at courtship are not harassment here – and neither is touching your wife’s butt.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anonymous –

            Please stop feeding the troll.

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @Anonymous (pink)

            “Do not cause women to feel uncomfortable” is not a clear instruction, since women are not all clones, and the workings of other peoples minds are occluded. Unless you think men are telepaths, such a formulation will be useless to them when determining whether to do any particular action;

            How is this not simply the common complaint of men that we women are somehow expecting men toread our minds“?

            When, of course, we’re just asking you to read the basic emotional signals. It’s not hard if you just pay a little attention; we do it all the time without even thinking about it, so if you are not picking up the obvious signals, then you must just not be paying attention.

            it will tend to create two types of men – those who play it safe and avoid any relations with women, and those risk-takers who don’t give a fuck about your silly rules and do what they please anyway. Are you secretly some kind of misogynist, who wants to increase the amount of sexual harassment by eugenically making sure that only the rule-breakers reproduce?

            The first, let me repeat myself. Eugenics is a discredited pseudoscience. And the second, only the “rule-breakers” reproducing would only matter if you are a genetic determinist who thinks that behavior like the “rule-breaking” is genetic (rather than, like pretty much all behavior, being cultural and social in origin), and this is Nazi thinking.

            And for your proposed definition, note that the University of Michigan Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center includes “sexual or “dirty” jokes”, and WomensLaw.com, this law firm sexual harassment Q&A and another law firm discussing the Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. ruling also all include the telling of “dirty jokes” as included under sexual harassment. Where does this fit in your definition? And for the “explicitly rejected” part of your proposed (b), to quote the definition given not only in Lina Gonsalves’s “Women and Human Rights“, but many other places,
            “The courts have generally concluded that a victim need not say or do a particular thing to indicate unwelcomeness.”

            Thus, your proposed definition is even narrower than the insufficient legal and common use in place today. I still maintain, with many others, that “anything sexual that makes a woman uncomfortable” is the one and only correct definition.

          • Anonymous says:

            How is this not simply the common complaint of men that we women are somehow expecting men to “read our minds“?

            No, just a subset of women does this. Including you, apparently.

            When, of course, we’re just asking you to read the basic emotional signals. It’s not hard if you just pay a little attention; we do it all the time without even thinking about it, so if you are not picking up the obvious signals, then you must just not be paying attention.

            Or are incapable of it. This is equivalent to mind-reading to many people (mostly men), doubly so those on the autism spectrum (of which men make up the bulk). Detecting subtle cues and accurately inferring what they mean is not easy, and is far from reliable. And definitely should not be required legally.

            Eugenics is a discredited pseudoscience.

            No, it isn’t. It’s just taboo to apply it to humans explicitly. It is in continuous productive use for domesticated animals, and has been for the whole history of our association with them.

            And the second, only the “rule-breakers” reproducing would only matter if you are a genetic determinist who thinks that behavior like the “rule-breaking” is genetic (rather than, like pretty much all behavior, being cultural and social in origin), and this is Nazi thinking.

            All behavioural traits are heritable.

            And for your proposed definition, note that the University of Michigan Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center includes “sexual or “dirty” jokes”, and WomensLaw.com, this law firm sexual harassment Q&A and another law firm discussing the Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. ruling also all include the telling of “dirty jokes” as included under sexual harassment. Where does this fit in your definition?

            Nowhere, because it isn’t. It may be inappropriate, but it’s not harassment.

            And for the “explicitly rejected” part of your proposed (b), to quote the definition given not only in Lina Gonsalves’s “Women and Human Rights“, but many other places,
            “The courts have generally concluded that a victim need not say or do a particular thing to indicate unwelcomeness.”

            That’s what the first clause of that point is. If she isn’t known to by married or otherwise off-limits, then she is fair game until notified otherwise.

            Thus, your proposed definition is even narrower than the insufficient legal and common use in place today. I still maintain, with many others, that “anything sexual that makes a woman uncomfortable” is the one and only correct definition.

            The current-day use could use a narrowing.

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @Anonymous

            Or are incapable of it. This is equivalent to mind-reading to many people (mostly men), doubly so those on the autism spectrum (of which men make up the bulk). Detecting subtle cues and accurately inferring what they mean is not easy

            This is nonsense excuse-making. We all have pretty much the same basic brain, “psychic unity of mankind” an all; if it’s easy for one group (and it’s easy for me and by girlfriends), then it’s easy for everyone without a real mental deficit, and “autism” is massively over-diagnosed (as it’s become the new excuse for male misbehavior). Claims of “incapacity” are simply “selective blindness” employed by men as an excuse to ignore women’s obvious discomfort. And any real differences between men’s and women’s ability in this area is purely the product of sexist cultural forces that should be fought (any and all claims of “innate” mental differences between men and women are “straight-up” sexist). But even if I accepted your sexist claim that men are collectively “inferior” at this basic human ability, why then should women be the ones to suffer for this male defect? This is the “logic” of the burka, where men’s issues are framed as the “fault” of women, and women made to suffer for it.

            Eugenics is a discredited pseudoscience.

            No, it isn’t.

            The state House of Virginia has officially called it “the now-discredited pseudo-science of eugenics”, and plenty of people agree.

            All behavioural traits are heritable.

            Yes, people inheret traits from their parents… culturally and socially via their upbringing; genetics and is irrelevant for differences in human behavior (read some Stephen J Gould). Genetic determinism, like in that awful link, remans racist, sexist nonsense.

            If she isn’t known to by married or otherwise off-limits, then she is fair game until notified otherwise.

            The idea that a women who doesn’t “belong” to some other man is therefore “fair game” to male predatory and harassing behavior is stupendously sexist.

            The current-day use could use a narrowing.

            Anyone with the slightest concern for women can see it needs widened; only a blatant misogynist could believe what you said.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Stop feeding. This is the troll designed to push all the buttons.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Anita
            if [reading non-verbal signals is] easy for one group (and it’s easy for me and by girlfriends), then it’s easy for everyone without a real mental deficit[….] Claims of “incapacity” are simply “selective blindness” employed by men as an excuse to ignore women’s obvious discomfort. [….] But even if I accepted your sexist claim that men are collectively “inferior” at this basic human ability, why then should women be the ones to suffer for this male defect?

            1970s feminist here. If the guy ignores a non-verbal signal, give him a verbal one.

            Slip out the back, Jack
            Make a new plan, Stan
            Hop on the bus, Gus
            Just drop off the key, Lee

            If you don’t like those, there should be another 46 around somewhere.

          • Anonymous says:

            We all have pretty much the same basic brain, “psychic unity of mankind” an all; if it’s easy for one group (and it’s easy for me and by girlfriends), then it’s easy for everyone without a real mental deficit, and “autism” is massively over-diagnosed (as it’s become the new excuse for male misbehavior).

            No, men and women have considerably different mindsets. This is obvious from their different behaviour.

            Claims of “incapacity” are simply “selective blindness” employed by men as an excuse to ignore women’s obvious discomfort.

            Which doesn’t begin to address situations where the discomfort isn’t obvious. Or when a woman isn’t uncomfortable before you start with the courtship – but by then, by your standard, the sexual harassment has already occurred.

            And any real differences between men’s and women’s ability in this area is purely the product of sexist cultural forces that should be fought (any and all claims of “innate” mental differences between men and women are “straight-up” sexist).

            Reality is sexist and the differences are biological in nature.

            But even if I accepted your sexist claim that men are collectively “inferior” at this basic human ability, why then should women be the ones to suffer for this male defect? This is the “logic” of the burka, where men’s issues are framed as the “fault” of women, and women made to suffer for it.

            Mere discomfort is not ‘suffering’. And notice how I do think there are limits on what is acceptable to do. Just not by the barking mad standard you propose.

            The state House of Virginia has officially called it “the now-discredited pseudo-science of eugenics”, and plenty of people agree.

            Hitler officially blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s problems. Plenty of people agree.

            Yes, people inheret traits from their parents… culturally and socially via their upbringing; genetics and is irrelevant for differences in human behavior (read some Stephen J Gould). Genetic determinism, like in that awful link, remans racist, sexist nonsense.

            No, upbringing has next to no influence. It’s mostly genes and random factors. Which you would know if you cared to understand what Jayman wrote there.

            The idea that a women who doesn’t “belong” to some other man is therefore “fair game” to male predatory and harassing behavior is stupendously sexist.

            I am stupendously sexist by your standard. Somehow, this does not make me feel bad.

            Anyone with the slightest concern for women can see it needs widened; only a blatant misogynist could believe what you said.

            Anyone with the slightest concern for humans can see it needs to be narrowed; only a blatant misanthropist could believe what you said.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HouseBoatOnStyx – “If you don’t like those, there should be another 46 around somewhere.”

            Some better than others.

      • Brad (The Other One) says:

        >Suppose you, yourself, feel uncontrollably lustful. Do you think self-sterilization is the right thing to do?

        Under certain contexts, sure, uh, why not? Everyone is acting like this is bizarre conclusion to come to but I don’t see why, particularly since it’s voluntary in this case.

        >I don’t see why. Especially given that his feelings were not abnormal, and definitely were not despicable, criminal or worthy of elimination from the genepool.

        What if an individual wanted to be chemically castrated not because some weird self-loathing, but just because of some idiosyncratic (but otherwise harmless) personal preference, like a person who shaves their eyebrows or someone who insists on tattooing large parts of their visible upper body? Would you support such a person’s choice to self-chemically castrate in that case?

        • Anonymous says:

          Under certain contexts, sure, uh, why not? Everyone is acting like this is bizarre conclusion to come to but I don’t see why, particularly since it’s voluntary in this case.

          Not everything you want is good for you. Especially not if you’re very far from thinking clearly (which itself is not an especially good standard for making good decisions, given the human condition).

          What if an individual wanted to be chemically castrated not because some weird self-loathing, but just because of some idiosyncratic (but otherwise harmless) personal preference, like a person who shaves their eyebrows or someone who insists on tattooing large parts of their visible upper body? Would you support such a person’s choice to self-chemically castrate in that case?

          That’s even worse. Scott Aaronson at least had a logical reason to want to do so – misguided, but a direct product of the axioms he assumed. In this case, the doctor should refuse and have such a requester tested for severe mental illness.

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            Your responses bother me. I would think you would prioritize the autonomy of a person to their own body. I realize this is controversial, but we respect the wishes of people with body dysmorphic disorder in requesting hormone therapy, albeit with barriers and oversight to so that they only get it if they’re really, really certain about their condition and their decision.

            Let us say our person requesting chemical castration is tested for major mental illness and they are found to be of sound mind. Unless there are major side-effects from chemical castration, or the drugs are controlled substances/dangerous/illegal, etc. why should he not be allowed to have such treatment? (Particularly since, to my knowledge, chemical castration is reversible.)

          • Anonymous says:

            but we respect the wishes of people with body dysmorphic disorder in requesting hormone therapy

            Who is “we”, comrade?

            Let us say our person requesting chemical castration is tested for major mental illness and they are found to be of sound mind. Unless there are major side-effects from chemical castration, or the drugs are controlled substances/dangerous/illegal, etc. why should he not be allowed to have such treatment?

            Provided he pays for it himself, I find little *civil* reason to deny it. But on the other hand, why should be allowed? Where’s the benefit of permitting this?

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            @Anonymous

            >Who is “we”, comrade?

            Allow me to explain that I speak as a devil’s advocate: I have my own feelings on body dysmorphic disorder, but I am aware – or at least believe (and perhaps this belief is incorrect) – support for the gender reassignment procedures exists on this forum. But it struck me as strange that, for a board where I might expect support for gender reassignment to be the norm, (such reassignment being requested voluntarily by individuals, and involving hormone treatments) that there would offense at a person voluntarily requesting hormones to suppress their sex drive. Surely if one is permissible, the other would also be permissible. But it seems that many people here (the “we” in question) find one permissible and the other impermissible. Perhaps I am not being charitable and the community here has a broader range of views than I initially assumed, and the person who find CC impermissible would also find Sex reassignment impermissible (and vice-versa). However my confusion was that I assumed that support for Sex reassignment was commonplace here, and so opposition to CC seemed strange to me.

            >But on the other hand, why should be allowed? Where’s the benefit of permitting this?

            The ostensible benefit of chemical castration would be akin to the ostensible benefit of sex reassignment: the well-being and peace-of-mind for the individual voluntarily choosing it. This is the logic I believed would be in play, not that this reflects my personal views.

          • Anonymous says:

            However my confusion was that I assumed that support for Sex reassignment was commonplace here, and so opposition to CC seemed strange to me.

            This place is pretty diverse. Personally, I object to SRS because it amounts to plastic surgery with bonus castration. I will be much more willing to support it were it actually able to turn a fully functional individual of one sex into a fully functional individual of the other sex.

    • Ruprect says:

      I think this is a good point – obviously testosterone is involved in violence, but I always wonder how many of the awful things we see are a result of sexual desire gone wrong. If you could keep the testosterone but somehow reduce the sex drive, would that change the crime rate?
      Even if that isn’t possible, is our testosterone worth all of the terrible antics that young men get up to anyway? We might be better off as eunuchs.

      And finally, why should a sex drive be a good thing? I can enjoy eating without getting hungry. Wouldn’t the same thing be desirable for sex?

      • Anonymous says:

        Without hunger, you would likely starve in short order. (Just as without pain, chances are poor that you’d be able to survive infancy without stabbing yourself in the eyeballs repeatedly for shits and giggles.) The sex drive is there to make you reproduce, which is a good thing.

        • Brad (The Other One) says:

          >The sex drive is there to make you reproduce, which is a good thing.

          A good thing in what capacity? To whom?

          What are your feelings on birth control? What about procedures like tubal ligation or vasectomies?

          Surely if the latter, with their complications and difficult-to-reverse nature are permissible, why should chemical castration be treated differently?

          • Artificirius says:

            It is a good thing in that is the mechanism by which we exist as a people.

            It is also not a wrong thing to possess, even though the specific need to have people reproduce is not as strong as it once was, if it really exists as a need now.

            Women don’t possess a right to non-attraction of themselves. Neither do men, though this is not a commonly held principle either.

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            @Artificirius: I am not saying, if I understand your response correctly, that reproductive capacity or libido is bad thing to possess. I am asking: Why is it wrong for someone to use drugs to dull or stop their libido, if they choose to do so of their own free will (and they are not mentally ill, and the drugs do not have outstanding harmful side-effects)?

            >Women don’t possess a right to non-attraction of themselves. Neither do men, though this is not a commonly held principle either.

            I don’t know what this means or how it pertains to a discussion of individuals choosing to use chemical castration. I’m parsing it as: “individuals can’t keep people from being attracted to them”. If this is mistaken, please correct me, and clarify in a more general sense, if you’re inclined. I also believe you’re bringing this point up because you think I’m the same person who brought this topic up originally, which I am not.

            Regardless, I’m not talking about interpersonal relations between strangers who may or may not be attracted to each other. I am asking why it would be wrong someone to seek chemical castration aside from A: dangerous side-effects (I’m not aware of beyond issues with bone density and higher lifetime risk for things like heart disease) B: liability(s) for a doctor who gives such a prescription, which I am not aware of, beyond the above listed side effects.

          • Jiro says:

            Why is it wrong for someone to use drugs to dull or stop their libido, if they choose to do so of their own free will (and they are not mentally ill, and the drugs do not have outstanding harmful side-effects)?

            There is a big gray area between “mentally ill” and “mentally competent” where someone may be competent to decide some things but not others. If we are only permitted to decide that someone is or isn’t mentally ill, that’s a binary decision that doesn’t take those nuances into account.

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            @Jiro

            And what if the person is someone categorized as a “mentally competent”, in addition to the other exclusionary criteria previously mentioned, for someone voluntarily undergoing such a chemical castration procedure? That is, of sound mind, mentally competent to understand the implications and take full responsibility of the risks (which I presume are sufficiently understood by this individual), there are no legal complications, etc?

            Is there any further criteria we can throw up to explain why this willing, ready, able, non-crazy, not-stupid person cannot get what they desire in this case; that is, chemical castration?

          • Jiro says:

            For someone to be mentally competent to decide on chemical castration and to actually want it is unlikely. Asking what I’d do if it happened is like asking what I’d do if a mentally competent person said he wanted his own (healthy) hand cut off and eaten.

            In reality, the mere fact that someone states such a desire is strong Bayseian evidence that he is incompetent to consent to it. The hypothetical in which he actually is competent anyway is logically possible, but pretty much never applies to real human beings, because of the nature of human beings.

          • @Jiro, aren’t you pretty much assuming your conclusion? I don’t see why chemical castration (assuming it is temporary and has no serious side-effects) should be inherently undesirable. If someone’s sex drive is causing them to suffer, under circumstances in which no other reasonable option exists, why would wanting the suffering to end be a sign of mental incompetence?

          • Anonymous says:

            A good thing in what capacity? To whom?

            I, for one, think that it’s a good thing that the human species exists. I may be biased, being human. In many ways, it is also beneficial to the individual in question. (Do you actually want me to justify that reproduction is preferable to extinction?)

            What are your feelings on birth control? What about procedures like tubal ligation or vasectomies?

            Against and against.

            Surely if the latter, with their complications and difficult-to-reverse nature are permissible, why should chemical castration be treated differently?

            If.

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            @Anonymous

            Oh, okay. I kind of assumed you were more left-than-right leaning on these matters, and knowing that generally people who lean left support similar procedures in other contexts, I thought there was some contradiction at work. But your stance seems to be consistent all the way through.

          • Artificirius says:

            Why is it wrong for someone to use drugs to dull or stop their libido, if they choose to do so of their own free will (and they are not mentally ill, and the drugs do not have outstanding harmful side-effects)?

            The example was someone terrified of people reacting poorly to the mere existence of said person’s desires. This does not fit the category of reasoned/lucid/sane.

            In general, it’s pretty easy to say if person X is reasoned/lucid/sane, anything they ask for is therefore reasoned/lucid/sane, when the reality is you should look at what they’re asking for, and more generally extrapolate from that as to their mental state.

            A woman in the states has a firm belief that she should be a parapalegic. She wants a doctor to sever the nerves at the base of her spine to attain this desire. By accounts, she is quite calm, perhaps reasoned/lucid/sane.

            My gut intuition is that barring a medical need, performing medical procedures is not a great idea.

    • Anon. says:

      People. Trolling is like the tango. It takes two. If you don’t reply, if you don’t react, it simply doesn’t work and disappears.

      Stop feeding them.

  11. Alliteration says:

    One of the disadvantages of open borders is that the policy could cause irreversible change to a nation. (Assuming that the nation unwilling to do something nasty like mass forced emigration) Even if we think that open borders will have a net positive effect, social polities often have unexpected effects. Thus, it could be useful to test open borders on a limited scale.

    Thus, this proposal. The nation would choose a coastal city and allow an unlimited number of immigrants into that town. However, the immigrants would not get full citizenship, and their visas would only allow them to live in the coastal town. If open borders fails horribly, the nation will have only destroyed a single city. If open borders is a great success, the special zone can be expanded to a larger area.

    The primary difficulty of this proposal is keeping the immigrants in the special zone. If the nation sets up boarder controls, that will isolated the city economically and make life difficult for the natives. Without boarder controls, it seems likely that the immigrants would sneak into the rest of the nation, defeating the point of the special zone. Other disadvantages include not getting the full benefit of the immigrants working in the agricultural sector (because the immigrants are stuck in the city), and bad press from forcing the immigrants to live in a slum if the experiment fails.

    • Sandy says:

      Doesn’t seem fair to the natives to turn their city into a testing ground for potentially disastrous social experiments.

      • Agronomous says:

        My understanding is that a bunch of cities, San Francisco among them, have essentially volunteered.

        • Sandy says:

          San Francisco may have volunteered but it’s not as deeply invested in the experiment as other cities. SF’s population is still largely white and Asian. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is nearly 50% Hispanic, with a huge illegal population, and it has seen a corresponding decline in many indicators of urban prosperity.

    • “Thus, it could be useful to test open borders on a limited scale.”

      The first hundred and forty years of U.S. history don’t count?

      Not quite open borders because of restrictions on Chinese immigration toward the end of that period, but close enough. The French even gave us a handsome statue to celebrate the success of the experiment.

      • Anonymous says:

        I think you are confused about the statue.

        • Anonymous says:

          Which statue? The one in New York Harbor: the Statue of Immigration? The one that has the preamble to the Constitution (written by Emma Lazarus, natch) engraved on the pedestal?

      • Jiro says:

        The first hundred and forty years of U.S. history don’t count?

        Only if you’re testing open borders without giving the immigrants social services.

        • My impression is that that’s what most supporters of open borders, at least among libertarians, would prefer. It’s what I proposed in the relevant chapter of my first book.

          • Bassist Pig says:

            What are some of the main reasons immigrants would come here at all, if they knew they would not receive social services? Here’s my answer:

            The safety and opportunities afforded by our culture, institutions, and infrastructure–or at least by proximity to them–would be available to immigrants even if we didn’t give them welfare.

            So, are these things unlimited, maintenance-free resources? If not, should we still make them available to immigrants? If not, how can we do that except by not letting people immigrate in the first place?

      • Alliteration says:

        Society had different norms back then. Our more tolerant society may assimilate immigrants slower. Also, there is no frontier to be settled. More immigrant might come because of improved communications and transport technology. The immigrants might be more different because they would be coming from all over the world instead of just Europe. There is now a welfare state; people are unwilling to have slums locally were it is easy to notice them. A cultural distaste for inequality. Just because it worked historically does not insure that it will still work now.

      • Randy M says:

        Open borders has a different meaning at every point along the world population graph.

  12. TomA says:

    Is it reasonable to presume that a future AI may be able to provide efficacious psychotherapy in the same manner as an app?

  13. Agronomous says:

    Hi, Scott. Just your regular reminder that you banned D3is34ch 34 days ago, and a gentle suggestion that a month is plenty.

    Soooo….. ?

    • Montfort says:

      Can you give it a rest? There’s no need to have another big D*****ch thread with its attendant old drama.
      If you honestly think Scott may have forgotten, you can just send him an email.

      • Agronomous says:

        I gave it a two-week rest; my previous comment on the topic was on July 4. You make it sound like I bring up D.’s ban every day.

        As for whether Scott’s actually forgotten, or he’s procrastinating because he doesn’t know quite how to handle lifting the ban, or he’s the victim of an Ugh Field, or this is a weird variation on [Awkward Silence]: I have theories, but they don’t actually matter. D.’s ban, and in particular the indefinite term of it, affect the commenting community; that’s a reason to bring it up in the comments.

        If you think this is courting excessive drama, (a) avoid Twitter like the plague and (b) click the Hide link.

    • Seth says:

      This is just speculation, but given the initial “I’m going to get myself banned for sure this time!”, I don’t think she’ll be unbanned without an apology and a promise not to do it again. And, further speculating, I doubt either will be forthcoming.

      I’ve been thinking about that ban as a case study of the issues regarding some contentious theories about social norms. But maybe that whole hornet’s nest is better left unstirred.

  14. Bassist Pig says:

    Is there a term for when someone “softly” cuts off contact with another person by agreeing to respond to communication but never originating it? E.g. will sometimes answer emails (often with reluctance and a long delay) but will never write to you out of the blue. And I’m specifically talking about the case where there are bad feelings behind it, not just that the person is absent-minded.

    Maybe the Germans have such a term?

    • Acedia says:

      I’ve seen “the slow fade” used in several places to describe ending a relationship by gradual and deliberate neglect.

    • Outis says:

      I call that “friendship”, because it’s the closest thing I have to it.

  15. Tsnom Eroc says:

    Also, from a man whose blog I should read more

    https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/it-ought-to-be-common-knowledge-that-donald-trump-is-not-fit-for-the-presidency-of-the-united-states-of-america/

    Terry Tao, current leading man in the “Smartest person in the world” contest and absolute winner of “Best mathematician of today” , his article on why Trump should not be president.

    Also, from the Quantum Computer guy the blogosphere knows and enjoys, Scott Aaronson

    “I think people support Trump for the same reason why second-graders support the class clown who calls the teacher a fart-brain to her face. It’s not that the class literally agrees that the teacher’s cranium is filled with intestinal gases, or considers that an important question to raise.”

    • Anonymous says:

      IQ is everything. Except when it is totally irrelevant. Tough to figure which is which.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      We chewed this over a couple of open threads ago. I’d put it to you that a mathematician is going to know any more about politics than any other random shmoe ranting from a barstool.

    • Loquat says:

      I believe that was discussed on a previous thread some time earlier, and the general opinion was that Tao has made a fundamental error: Trump’s unfitness is not a common knowledge problem because (a) lots of people do in fact believe that he is fit to be president, and (b) lots of people who believe he’s unfit have been saying so loudly for quite some time, on the right as well as on the left.

    • Civilis says:

      There’s also the matter that for most people fitness isn’t a binary value. I suspect that most Republicans don’t think Trump’s fitness for office is particularly high when compared to, say, Romney or McCain, it’s just that it’s higher than Hillary’s fitness for office.

      For many people, it’s also a combination of ‘fitness’ and ‘electability’. I certainly know people that think Johnson is more fit for office than Trump, but consider his ‘fitness x electability’ too low, and I’m sure there are people that consider Jill Stein more fit for office than Hillary, but likewise think Stein’s electability is too low to risk voting for her over Hillary.

    • Pku says:

      There’s an interesting point to make here. Unlike, say, Bill O’reilly or Stephen Colbert, who bravely just say things their viewers already think, Tao is actually trying to think one level deeper – he knows his followers already dislike Trump, and he’s trying to do something with it rather than just resaying “Trump is bad”.

    • Agronomous says:

      I think Other Scott A. is a little closer to the truth than TT is. Looking at first-order things like Actual Policies can’t explain Trump’s success. Even looking at second-order things like Likely Actual Effects of Nominating/Electing him can’t explain it. This is some iterative second-least-worst punishment strategy or something: I think Trump supporters aren’t even that interested in who he is and what he’ll do; they’re happy enough just to keep the usual suspects out of power, and figure (rightly, I think) that at least the Republicans will pay more attention to their concerns after four years of Trump.

      A couple months ago, I said voting for Trump was how white working-class people riot. I seem to have gotten the demographics wrong, but I’m still pretty sure it’s a riot: i.e. something that’s somewhat self-damaging to the rioters in the short-term, in an effort to intimidate and motivate more-powerful groups to change their behavior.

      • Tsnom Eroc says:

        I think people keep forgetting what Trump did almost 6 years ago, and how that effects him now. He kept calling for Obama to release his birth certificate, loudly, and as a popular media figure (and a billionaire businessman) that made his voice heard loudly as a “credible” figure amongs’t the around 30%+ of republicans who believe Obama was a muslim from kenya. No other republican was so loud on that, and linking himself to Obama releasing his birth certificate really rolled in the votes.

        That in itself could make someone win the current voting system, while losing in a perhaps more rational system of voting

  16. Mercer says:

    Gavin Long, in his last video before his actions in Baton Rouge, says “Don’t affiliate me with nothing”. This after he had earlier claimed the Dallas police shootings were “Justice”

    From an article on the daily caller: “Law enforcement officials said Sunday that the shooting does not appear to have been race-related. At least one of the officers killed in the attack was black.”

    Isn’t this a bit surreal? A man commits a heinous crime, knowing full well we’re going to associate him with a racial movement. He protests this inevitability. Soon afterward, we get a statement from officials that the crimes aren’t race-related. What is the standard for “relatedness”, that this doesn’t pass muster? Am I supposed to pretend BLM rhetoric has NOTHING to do with Baton Rouge?

    If you were to argue Gavin Long was not representative of BLM, just as Micah Johnson was not representative, I’d be inclined to agree. But not related?

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Am I supposed to pretend BLM rhetoric has NOTHING to do with Baton Rouge?

      Yes, you are supposed to pretend that.

    • Zombielicious says:

      What is the standard for “relatedness”, that this doesn’t pass muster?

      I think the standard is that he was killing cops, without regard to their skin color (i.e. one of them was black), as opposed to killing white cops specifically. It was anti-cop, not anti-[some race] (afaik – will retract if further evidence comes out).

      People are then motivated to politicize it in order to blame it on whatever they’re opposed to. Depending on which of your enemy ideologies you want to target, you could stretch it farther and blame it on atheism, liberals, libertarians, gun culture, the military… really pretty much anything. And of course pundits gladly will. Some of those are bigger stretches than others, but when white cops and black cops get shot and killed by the same guy and you claim it was racially motivated then you’re already stretching.

      • Mercer says:

        A black man can kill another black man out of racial motivation. He may believe a black man who decides to be a cop is a race traitor. I would rate it likelier than not that this is what Gavin Long believed, based on the type of rhetoric he embraced

        Perhaps Gavin Long was anti-cop and but not explicitly anti-white. But that feels like it requires much more stretching to believe than the converse.

        • Zombielicious says:

          He can, but when he’s killing black and white cops together, it requires adding in a lot of other additional assumptions to make it race-related. He’s clearly targeting them because they’re cops, not targeting white people because they’re white and also coincidentally black people who he considers “race traitors” – and not even “race traitors” for being cops, but specifically because they’re supporting white stuff, otherwise you’re just back to “it’s because they’re cops.”

          Now if he had killed white civilians and black cops at the same time, or just white-anyone while avoiding black-anything, you’d have a better case for it being a primarily racial attack.

          The main thing though is that if you’re going to blame otherwise non-violent groups, movements, ideologies, whatever, for all the unstable crazy people they might inspire, literally no one will be left. At least if you consistently apply that principle across groups. If you don’t, then you’re just another person selectively politicizing current events to attack opposing groups and ideologies (e.g. this kind of thing). So it doesn’t seem reasonable that all the non-violent people trying to achieve goals in specifically non-violent ways should be held accountable for the randoms that might go nuts in the name of their cause, despite having actively discouraged that kind of extremist behavior.

          • Mercer says:

            He is clearly targeting them primarily because they are cops. Absolutely correct. Why is he upset with cops? Because cops are perceived as racist, and this perception is a major part of current pro-black rhetoric. I believe I have to make one assumption in order to demonstrate “relatedness”, which is that anti-cop rhetoric and pro-black rhetoric are bound up together in our current discourse. I don’t even know that this qualifies as an “assumption” anymore?

            “Primarily a racial attack”….well, if its primarily an attack on cops, can it not also be secondarily an attack on white power? And perhaps thirdly an expression of black solidarity? Is that not enough for “relatedness”?

            Blaming non-violent groups for unstable crazies they inspire is how I think BLM would like to characterize criticism of them in the wake of these attacks. I, for one, am not blaming them, specifically. The blame is Gavin Longs. But I am criticizing them. And I am certainly “affiliating”.

            Consider the case of Anders Breivik and the far right. He wrote a manifesto that was explicitly rightist, then went on a killing spree. Of course, the far right wanted no part of being “affiliated” with Anders Breivik. He’s just a lone crazy. Of course he’s a lone crazy in one sense, but in another he’s also clearly a part of something we’d call “the far right”, no matter how much anyone in the far right would protest against that.

            Its difficult to listen to Gavin Long’s youtube videos without thinking of BLM. You are free to disagree with that assessment. You speak of groups that are “otherwise non-violent” that go on in “specifically non-violent ways”. If you’ll indulge me even further, consider the difference between MLK and Malcolm X. The former is explicitly non-violent, so much so that nonviolence is almost as definitive of him as anything else. The latter stands for by any means necessary. Whose descendent is BLM? When you pay homage to Assata Shakur, isn’t your rhetoric starting to blur the lines a bit on being “specifically non-violent”? Not to either condemn or praise Assata Shakur; she was many things, but nonviolent was not one. If BLM stood for nonviolence, they could be a good bit more explicit about that. As it stands, it looks like to me nonviolence is just the bailey to the “by any means necessary” motte

          • Zombielicious says:

            Re: the “one assumption,” it seems like a long chain of specious reasoning (no particular offense intended). He’s targeting them because they’re cops, because cops are perceived as racist, because of anti-cop rhetoric, which is tied up with pro-black rhetoric. To take that where it’s obviously going, therefore “pro-black rhetoric” is bad because it incites black men to shoot cops.

            This might be easier to debate if conclusions were stated more directly. If this is true, what should BLM people do about it? Not exist? Make stronger denunciations against violent or extremist behavior? Blame their problems on themselves or the black community instead of systemic stuff?

            Like I said in the previous OT, I was at one of the protests a few weeks ago, and it was all openly and blatantly non-violent. They had a large team of volunteers in orange vests that they told people to contact if they saw anyone trying to agitate the crowd or otherwise cause problems. They specifically warned people about trying to provoke the crowd or cops. When some random bystanders would try and agitate people (e.g. shouting “blue lives matter” at the protesters) they would get between the groups and keep it from escalating. Nothing that was said by any of the speakers with megaphones was even remotely encouraging of more aggressive tactics. The closest thing I saw to violent tendency was two random guys who got into an argument (out of a crowd of thousands of people) and were threatening to fight before people separated them. There was absolutely no sign of encouraging “by any means necessary” tactics in undertones while pretending to superficially promote non-violence.

            The thing seems to be organized at the local level in each city, so I can’t say what the situation is in other places, and you do see more aggressive groups sometimes getting involved (e.g. Black Panthers in Baton Rouge marching with open carry shotguns). You also see neo-Nazi biker gangs trying to provoke the crowd, and cops arresting people for giving interviews or pointing rifles at unarmed civilians.

            So if a bunch of bikers decide to also march “in support of law enforcement,” and some of their group is joined by skinheads with Confederate flags, and Confederate flags have been associated with white supremacy and slavery, and maybe the founder of one of the gangs was also friends with an old KKK member, does this then mean that “supporting law enforcement” means supporting slavery and lynchings? Because this is basically the same level of argument you’re making. Is it not possible that while some people might be actual racists who really do think blacks should be slaves, that most people who think positively of police at some level are tacitly using a motte and bailey for their real support of slavery and violence towards blacks? Or that while some people who join a protest group like BLM are actual Black Panthers supporting black power and such, most people aren’t actually supporting violence and just want less racism, less cops shooting people, and less impoverished communities of minorities (among other things I may be forgetting)?

            Given the recent spate of police shootings though I am really expecting to see the organizers of the local groups try to distance themselves from, and put more effort into discouraging, the extremist stuff. They already seem to be doing that, e.g. the previous one I mentioned was only a few days after the Dallas stuff and they were obviously focused on discouraging people from trying to provoke or escalate things. Unfortunately all it takes is someone pulling a gun or throwing rocks at cops and you can quickly end up with a chaotic situation which then reflects badly on everyone else, and then the added toxoplasma effect where the peaceful protests get largely ignored but the Black Panthers and Confederate bikers are all over the news.

          • Mercer says:

            It is difficult for me to envision Gavin Long as anything but racially motivated. If you can do so, then we have nothing more to discuss on that point, unless you feel like offering me insight into how you do it. Watch his videos, if you haven’t.

            What is more compelling is the question of what is to be done. “Not exist? Make stronger denunciations against violent or extremist behavior? Blame their problems on themselves or the black community instead of systemic stuff?” Well, no organization is going to pick option A. They could do try option C, but if your position is that “systemic stuff” is a bigger problem that issues internal to the black community, then why would you? I think the opposite, but what I think is not important, so lets grant that “systemic stuff” is worth protesting. That leaves us with Option B.

            My take on this, and it applies to all movements left and right, is that if you’re not explicitly nonviolent, you are inviting violence to ride under your flag even if you yourself detest it. What I mean by explicitly nonviolent is that your movement espouses nonviolence as a core philosophical principle. This is a binary choice.

            There’s a contingent of BLM that is trying to do this. “The movement began as a call to end violence. That call remains.” Well, a claim is one thing, but you need to enforce. There’s also a contingent that chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like Bacon”. It’s no use assigning blame to the better elements in BLM. But my criticism is that they need to oppose the other element, consistently. Ditch the bailey, completely. Calling Long and Johnson lone crazies doesn’t do this. They did not fall out of the sky. They are not the only ones to think as they did; they are so far just the only ones to act.

            Pro-black rhetoric (I regret this particular phrasing, give me an appropriate replacement) and anti-cop rhetoric do not have to be connected. One need not imply the other. That they currently ARE connected is not my invention. In the battle to improve the condition of blacks in society, BLM has chosen as its fortress the racism of cops. I disagree with their position, and if you like, I can argue the case that the racism of cops is overstated. But regardless, my opinion on the matter is hardly definitive and cops shouldn’t be immune from criticism or protest.

            So, can you criticize cops without inciting? Only, I think, if you preach nonviolence as forcefully as you can, and exile anyone who strays from the position of absolute nonviolence. The first part is not that difficult to do, but it can be difficult to be heard over competing voices. It has to be loud. Even so, I’ll acknowledge toxoplasma is a bitch. The second part is very very difficult, I think. It involves casting out past icons like Assata. And it involves treating the “Pigs in a Blanket” folk not as unfortunate allies but as enemies, exactly as racist cops are enemies.

          • Sandy says:

            The sad thing is I can imagine someone affiliated with BLM or who sympathizes with their larger cause arguing that ostracizing the “Pigs in a blanket” people would amount to “respectability politics”.

          • gbdub says:

            Zombielicious, I suppose you were not at the protest where “pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon” was an organized chant? Or the freeway protest that devolved into hucking concrete and fireworks at police? Certainly, there are many, many nonviolent protests, but its also clear that provocation and violence at these rallies is something that ought to be considered an expected outcome. The level of enforcement of nonconfrontation you saw at your rally seems to not be universal.

            It’s kind of absurd to argue that BLM is not a racial organization. It’s called “Black Lives Matter”, not “End Police Violence” (or “End Violence in our Communities” which would save more black lives). They are explicitly anti-cop, and they explicitly assume that any death of a black person at the hands of the police is caused by racism.

            Their tactics are, even if non violent, generally confrontational rather than cooperative (not to say this is universal, certainly there have been cases of them peacefully engaging with authorities). Protest rallies, interrupting speeches, etc. That’s what they get known for. In our previous discussion on the topic you argued that disruption is necessary to get your point across. And that may be true, but the more disruption you encourage, the more likely that some subset of your supporters are going to take that as a call to violence.

            That doesn’t make them “responsible” for nutjobs being inspired by their rhetoric. But they should still be cognizant of this, and I think at some point if you organize an intentionally disruptive protest and don’t take the sort of precautions you described, there’s a level of negligence there (I would apply the same standard to neo-Nazi bikers). “I didn’t intend to start a wildfire” is not a complete defense to playing with road flares in a dry forest.

          • Immortal Lurker says:

            @Mercer

            I have a nitpick. I am not certain that nonviolence as a core principal is always necessary to prevent violence from entering the movement. I don’t recall the tea party or occupy wall street being violent[1].

            But I think we all agree that the interesting question here is how to implement option B. And I think that the answer depends entirely on the ratio of protests like the one Zombielicious described to protests like gbdub described.

            I have no idea how to get that number. Blindly Googling it would probably devolve into a game of “which pundit is more trustworthy?”, in which case you can just declare your tribal affiliations beforehand and save yourself the trouble. Is there any method we can agree upon for capturing how violent a movement is?

            At the moment my probability distribution for how violent the BLM movement is looks a lot like total ignorance.

            [1]Shooting from the hip here. If am wrong, I’ll need to rethink this bit.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Groups/movements/ideologies that have no centralized authority mean that basically everything is a No True Scotsman.

            You can find BLM and related groups that are outright nonthreatening (I categorize stuff like people surrounding an individual, getting in their personal space, yelling in their face, etc as threatening) and are admirable in their commitment to this – this is what Zombielicious describes.

            You can find BLM groups whose tactics are quite threatening. I can’t think of any examples of outright violence (physical violence – I don’t buy the definition creep that’s happened with the word “violence”), but there definitely have been cases of either promoting violence (“pigs in a blanket” etc is not just some thing that some right-wing author somewhere made up) or using nudge-nudge-hint-hint language (stuff about “revolution”, for instance).

            There isn’t necessarily a connection between rhetoric and violence – I’m somewhere where there’s been no violence and next to no threatening behaviour by the local BLM group, no non-BLM mobs (see below), and no attacks on police officers, but one of the main BLM organizers has a history of poorly thought out social media use.

            I will wager that BLM is far less violent than the disorganized mob violence that can happen: eg, a black guy gets shot by the cops, and riots/looting break out. It probably acts as a safety valve.

            But you can’t really say “BLM is xyz” because there isn’t a central office with a membership test, is there? It’s more “BLM are”.

          • Jaskologist says:

            I really like the “BLM is” vs “BLM are” formulation, and will try to use it in the future about other things.

          • Mercer says:

            Given that we’re dealing with a “BLM are” and not a “BLM is”, I have to reconsider some things. I take for granted in my analysis the existence of a central leadership which on second thought is probably hard to justify

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Jaskologist:

            Thanks. I find that using the English-style “are” for things that are grammatically singular, but not in reality singular, is very useful for discussing ideological issues where there’s a low bar to entry for a particular position. Plenty of obvious examples. Really helps defeat the “No True Scotsman” that pops up in these situations.

          • Lumifer says:

            Central leadership is an interesting thing.

            For a certain kind of groups/movements it is highly advantageous to have a core which is more or less centrally controlled and listens to orders, plus a large fringe of allies, co-travelers, sympathizers, etc. who are allowed to use the branding of the core but who are quite deniable if need be.

            The fringe often includes violent elements who can be (indirectly) pointed at enemies, and who can be publicly disavowed but privately encouraged. Think about the Sinn Fein – IRA relationship, for example.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Lumifer:

            I think that in the case of BLM and Occupy the refusal to have a central authority is as much a political choice as it is a practical one. They’re not the first left-wing groups to behave this way, either.

            This, of course, doesn’t always turn out well:

            Because of their commitment to radical egalitarianism, most early radical feminist groups operated initially without any formal internal structure. When informal leadership developed, it was often resented. Many groups ended up expending more effort debating their own internal operations than dealing with external matters, seeking to “perfect a perfect society in microcosm” rather than focus on the larger world. Resentment of leadership was compounded by the view that all “class striving” was “male-identified”. In the extreme, exemplified by The Feminists, the upshot, according to Ellen Willis, was “unworkable, mechanistic demands for an absolutely random division of labor, taking no account of differences in skill, experience, or even inclination”. “The result,” writes Willis, “was not democracy but paralysis.” When The Feminists began to select randomly who could talk to the press, Ti-Grace Atkinson quit the organization she had founded.

          • Zombielicious says:

            I’d like to have responded earlier but can’t be around the computer all the time, so since this OT is nearing an end I’ll try to just address the main point about whether BLM is net-good/bad because of potential violence…

            It seems weird to blame the cop shootings on the BLM protests or particular signs held at them (edit: mistake, gbdub was referring to a chant, not a sign, which implies more people involved) when the elephant in the room is the repeated videos going viral of cops shooting unarmed black people. Whatever contribution BLM protests, or the things advocated at some of them, might have contributed, I can’t imagine it doesn’t pale in comparison to the videos of police brutality themselves. The Castile video is particularly messed up. Gavin Long specifically cited it as a reason for his shooting (edit: “cited” might be technically incorrect – I didn’t actually watch his videos from after it happened).

            Now the videos and the protests are certainly tied up, but what are people really expecting from them? If you really want to prevent these kinds of attacks on cops, you’re only real options seem to be getting cops to kill less unarmed, innocent people, or trying to suppress the videos themselves when they do, or telling people that they shouldn’t protest it when police kill an unarmed person. Sure, the protests should absolutely discourage violence, if only because the violent extremist stuff tends to delegitimize them. But just having semi-weekly viral videos of cops murdering people + protests against them bringing public attention to it is going to attract that kind of thing.

            At that point, when some unstable person decides to kill a cop over it all, blaming the BLM protests for not having “incorporated nonviolence as a fundamental part of the movement” seems like a huge distraction meant to delegitimize the protests. Since there will likely still be people shooting cops as long as the videos are going viral and there’s a huge public discussion about it, and embracing some philosophical principle within the core group of organizers (whoever they are) isn’t likely to stop it much, it basically makes for a neverending attack on BLM protests by blaming them for things beyond their control and demanding changes that they’re basically powerless to enforce. They might manage to discourage one or two people, but most likely crazy shooters gonna shoot, and they’ll just add into their youtube rants how BLM isn’t effective because of it’s nonviolence and pacifism. Micah Johnson is a good example since he seemed to think exactly that (Long did too, apparently), and was even blacklisted by the black power groups that do believe in armed attacks on whites.

            As an anecdote, I’ve had some really shitty experiences with cops myself – from having guns pointed at me over trivial stuff (imo), or blatantly just to scare me, to a guy I went to high school with who was killed by the cops after they tasered him 17 times while already having him handcuffed with six cops sitting on him, to protecting some people while they kicked down the door to my house and robbed me (and then lying about it on the police report), to beating the shit out of my friends when arresting them for smoking weed or blaming another woman I knew for her own kidnapping and defending the guy who had done it. This is not an exhaustive list, and all this from a middle-class white person. I have trouble being overly sympathetic, to put it mildly, to the cops when something like one of these shootings happens, and I imagine a ton of the protesters asking for non-violence feel the same way deep down inside. But there’s a big difference between genuinely hating the cops and encouraging people to kill them. Most people at these protests probably view the cops as an occupying enemy army, most have probably had similar experiences to the ones I described, not to mention having grown up hearing stories from parents and grandparents who lived through segregation, Jim Crow, and were themselves the children of slaves (edit: former slaves, rather – lived into at least the mid-20th century) . It’s hard to get overly worked up about any kind of sign that someone thinks might be “indirectly promoting violence” when just driving by a cop on the street makes you wonder if you only have minutes to live (and most people I know feel this way to some degree or another, though I think I get harassed a lot less now due to increasing age, skin color, and the type of car I drive).

            Again, the protests should discourage violence, but after you’ve done that, chasing the marginal returns of it by spending all your time policing the language of your supporters, rather than the people who are actually out killing you, just to placate the people least sympathetic to your cause anyway, becomes some self-defeating diversionary tactic. The comments about non-violence (separate from non-disruption) as a core principle and distancing themselves from fringe elements seem like good advice, and I don’t disagree, but people should consider the potential bias of the criticism compared to the major influences on cop shootings (viral videos coupled with people’s negative experiences with cops, way more than signs and protests), and when you’re telling them to be far more concerned with the potential safety of the cops killing unarmed innocents than the people regularly getting abused or killed by them.

          • gbdub says:

            Why are you billing “promote nonviolence” and “protest about our grievances” as if they are a mutually exclusive choice? Do both! Nonviolence is a tactic for protest, not a renunciation of protest.

            “you’re telling them to be far more concerned with the potential safety of the cops killing unarmed innocents than the people regularly getting abused or killed by them.”

            Another false dichotomy. Killing cops is bad. Cops shooting people who shouldn’t be shot is bad. It is possible to be concerned about both. To the extent that BLM supports this dichotomy (your own comment does – you’re basically saying “you’re not allowed to complain about cops dying until cops stop killing black people”), this is bad.

            “Most people at these protests probably view the cops as an occupying enemy army”

            Do you believe that encouraging this view is likely to make things safer or less safe for black Americans?

            “It seems weird to blame the cop shootings on the BLM protests or particular signs held at them (edit: mistake, gbdub was referring to a chant, not a sign, which implies more people involved) when the elephant in the room is the repeated videos going viral of cops shooting unarmed black people.”

            Why is it justified to treat “the cops” as a unified block, each one of them equally responsible for the actions of the others, but unjustified to do the same for BLM and their various fellow travelers and inspired nutjobs? This is especially relevant given that at least some of the cops getting killed are exactly the sort of cops that we want to work with (Jackson definitely if his Facebook post is representative, and the Dallas PD has apparently put in a lot of effort to reduce violence and racial disparities in policing). You’re stereotyping your opposition, and No True Scotsmanning your own side.

            And yeah, videos are going to piss people off. They probably should. But it would be helpful to have an organization on the generally-sympathetic-to-BLM side willing to tap the brakes a bit rather than throw a riot as soon as a video comes out. Certainly, rational investigation into the Michael Brown case changed the narrative a lot, and honestly the BLM supporters came out looking unreasonable to a lot more people because of that.

            A quibble – neither Castile nor Sterling were “unarmed”. That does not mean they were posing a threat worthy of deadly force at the time they were shot (as you say, Castile’s shooting looks especially messed up, as does today’s video of a guy taking one in the leg while trying to help an autistic patient). But being “unarmed” doesn’t mean you aren’t a threat. That’s part of my issue with BLM, they seem to go from “unarmed” black man shot -> racism is ONLY explanation -> let’s throw a riot without a lot of thought in between, and that’s going to lead to a lot of actions that look unjustified in retrospect. It’s certainly stoking rather than soothing general tensions between the cops and black people – and yeah, you need to do that to protest a real issue, but my point all along has been that if you’re going to stoke the tension, you do bear some responsibility for keeping it appropriately directed.

          • Mercer says:

            Unsure if its any good putting another long post in an old OT, but whatever. I’m confident this topic will come back around, so on the one hand these ideas can wait, but since you went through the trouble of posting a lengthy response Zomb I’ll reciprocate in kind.

            Your experiences with the cops sound horrible. Though I personally haven’t had any poor experiences with police officers (I’m white…surprise?), I’m not so thick as to believe that police corruption and abuse of power aren’t serious issues. Even if we pretend 99% of cops are good, 1% of cops is a heck of a lot of cops to be afraid of. And of course I’ve just pulled 99% as a figure out of thin air. If it were closer to 75%/25% it would be a complete disaster. There are occasionally reddit threads asking “good cops” to tell stories about corruption they’d seen, and its always pretty brutal.

            So maybe it IS a complete disaster. I don’t have the real percentage or know where to get it. But regardless, policing is necessary, and it is by its nature a profession that demands a certain level of ugliness. Though we could have a better police corps than the one we have now, I’m neither smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to figure out what policies we should enact to create one, and frankly I’m dubious of anyone who claims to have the answer. Go too far in one direction, and you have a draconian monstrosity, too far in the other, and you have weak and ineffectual policing. You say cops feel like an invading army. What is authority supposed to feel like? Is the only acceptable number of people killed by the police accidentally zero? If Philando Castille was murdered (I’d say yes), was Alton Sterling (I’d say no)? Would it be fine, if they just wouldn’t be racist? If only

            Herein lies the crux of the matter. Your whiteness didn’t stop you from being abused by the cops. And Dylan Nobles didn’t stop him from getting shot. Is the elephant in the room the videos of police killings? Or is the elephant that police killings are, statistically, not racially biased, but actually are proportional to the number of violent criminals of that race? From no less than this blog :

             As you can see, a person shot at by a police officer is more than twice as likely to be black as the average member of the general population. But, crucially, they are less likely to be black than the average violent shooter or the average person who shoots at the police. 

            This is referring to stats from New York in 2011, I believe, but if you google them you’ll find corroborations of the same for other places and timespans. This does not mean that cops themselves are not sometimes racists. But there is seemingly no racial bias in who they kill. If every cop in America woke up tomorrow cleansed of their racist feelings, would that solve our police problem? Would they be better, worse, or about the same at combatting criminals? Does Black Lives Matter move on to the next issue confronting Black America? Do they disband? I imagine our answers may not be the same.

            I wasn’t bringinng this up because I want to work from the assumption that BLM’s complaints about cops are legitimate, and if they are legitimate, how do they go about making them in a way that doesnt feed into violence. That I actually doubt the claims, at least somewhat, shouldn’t be a factor.

            Your position is that Gavin Long and Micah X. Johnson are responding directly to the videos capturing the actions of the police, and are therefore best understood as being parallel to Black Lives Matter, which, while also responding to said videos, do so in a completely different way.

            Another thought experiment. Pretend we’re in a world where Black Lives Matter received a tenth of the attention they currently get. Or better yet, if you can manage it, imagine they don’t exist at all. Cop behaviour doesn’t change, but people judge them in the context of different ethnicities having different levels of criminality, so they don’t attribute wrongful deaths caused by cops to racism. In this world, two videos get released on back to back days showing cops killing young black males in controversial circumstances. Is it less likely, more likely, or exactly as likely that a Gavin Long or a Micah X. Johnson will respond to these videos by attacking police officers?

            My answer is: less likely. Black Lives Matter, disband immediately! Well, no, this is just our Option A from before, and we ruled it out as being unfair to people who wanted to express grievances with police. Not to mention its basically impossible.

            Yet another hypothetical, because why not beat a rhetorical device into the ground? Imagine a world where Black Lives Matter are exactly as prominent as it is now, but are reported as being adamantly opposed  to violence in all forms, and a sizeable portion if not a central authority regularly denounced people perceived as being « on its side » when they stray from total nonviolence. Lets go even farther, and say this version of Black Lives Matter not only says it cared about black on black crimes (which it currently does say) but also devoted as much of its energy and time to the issue of black criminality as it did police violence. By the standards of “oppose the people who are actually killing you”, certainly you can’t exempt criminals, who end far more black lives than cops. Once again, two videos come out on back to back days with similarly appalling content. Is retribution now less likely, more likely, or exactly as likely? And second question, will the fringe of such a BLM movement be less populated by believers in violence, more populated, or exactly as populated?

            To the first question, I again answer less likely…probably. This is related to my answer to the second question, which is a resounding I’m not sure. Its possible that by disowning violence, the BLM movement would push so many believers in violence into the fringe that they’d then form an alternative « group », parallel to BLM in its opposition to cops but embracing methods which exclude it from our more aggressively nonviolent BLM. This is what someone who places Gavin Long and Micah Johnson outside the BLM-sphere proper might say is already happening, I think. In which case, our hypothetical BLM has changed its behaviour for no reason. Crazy gunna cray. But there is a second possibility, which is that by being aggressively nonviolent BLM might effect a change in the discourse that helps starve violent rhetoric and shame people who embrace it. This would shrink the total population of people who see violence as legitimate, which shrinks the population of people who might entertain violent retribution. And it doesnt have to be more than the one or two people who get discouraged; Long and Johnson are just two people.

            To put it another way, if you think the number of violent actors out there is more or less a constant, then BLM policing itself (themselves?) would have no real impact except to make said crazies more isolated and potentially even more dangerous. “Crazy shooters gonna shoot”. If you think that the number of violent actors shrinks and grows depending on the character of the discourse high-media profile groups engage in, then maybe you’re more optimistic about the potential for BLM to minimize future retributive attacks. Which all sounds kind of obvious and makes me wonder why I had to type so much to get to this point.

            I admit, I had not thought this out anywhere near as much when I made my initial post. So thanks for sticking this out this far, Zomb. I wasn’t really expecting your last reply and it helped in my reflection.

          • Zombielicious says:

            So I agree with Mercer that it’s probably best to wrap this up, but to clarify a few perceived misunderstandings (particularly with what gbdub replied)…

            There’s a few things that I didn’t mean to say or imply. In particular:

            1) That discouraging violence and protesting are mutually exclusive.
            2) That “you’re not allowed to complain about cops dying until cops stop killing black people.”
            3) That “it’s justified to treat ‘the cops’ as a unified block” (at least in regards to all being murderers/racists/etc – you could still make arguments about even good cops helping perpetuate a bad system).
            4) That “racism is the only explanation” for every police shooting. (Some people may actually claim this, but I’m not one of them.)

            These are simplistic, black-and-white statements and a pretty uncharitable interpretation of what I thought I said. My point was about the marginal returns of trying harder and harder to discourage violence, versus the rhetorical tactic of opponents using the (technically epistemologically true) position of “BLM could do more to discourage violence” as cover for the instrumental goal of “BLM protests and criticism need to stop.”

            (A good parallel for this is the similar statement “when will moderate Muslims stand up and denounce the violence done in the name of their religion?” Of course it’s technically a valid argument that non-violent Muslims could always be doing more to discourage violence, but when said in the context of the same people asking that question also wanting to ban all Muslims from entering the country, it’s pretty transparently a way of masking the actual implication “all Muslims secretly promote terrorism even if they publicly claim not to.”)

            That’s the problem with calling No True Scotsman in a discussion like this; it’s kind of meaningless since it can be thrown around any direction. E.g. some people who criticize BLM as promoting violence, or not doing enough to discourage it, just use it as an attack on black communities or anti-police-brutality activism in general – and if anyone claims that’s not the real argument being made, just call No True Scotsman on them. (Can make parallel arguments against HBD supporters, by the way.) Of course the validity of an argument shouldn’t depend on the motives for making it, but there are instrumental differences in which arguments we choose to act on, and the argument “BLM could do more to discourage violence” isn’t much different (imo) from “BLM critics could do more to eliminate racism and police brutality.”

            This is why I was trying to find some common ground (which also seemed a way to keep the discussion from going on forever) by saying essentially “BLM should definitely do whatever it can, within reason, to promote itself as a non-violent movement, but also people encouraging them to do that should ensure that their criticisms don’t obstruct progress being made towards eliminating police brutality, racial inequality, etc.”

            “Most people at these protests probably view the cops as an occupying enemy army”

            Do you believe that encouraging this view is likely to make things safer or less safe for black Americans?

            It’s kind of irrelevant to the question of what extent the view is true or not. But that’d be another long debate we probably don’t have time left for, unfortunately.

            @Mercer:

            Thanks for the discussion, my only comment would be that, re: the thought experiments, a lot of it changes depending on how much you consider minorities to be affected by various forms of systemic racism. E.g. it’s possible that minorities have different levels of criminality, and that arrests and shootings still result from racism, if you consider it systemic racism rather than the racism of individuals. Discussing that would be another long debate, but the argument would generally involve stuff about poverty, laws differentially targeting minorities (e.g. crack vs cocaine sentencing discrepancy), social differences leftover from historical systemic racism, etc. (I’d recommend the documentary The House I Live In if someone wants to see a well-made version of that narrative.) Essentially “black people may commit more crimes, but that’s mainly because white society has been systematically impoverishing us for centuries, and either continues to or only mostly stopped really, really recently.” Since a lot of the people in BLM would probably agree with that type of assessment, it explains why they’d think the “racial injustice” component of the movement would be as important as the “police brutality” component. Even though police brutality obviously effects far more than just black people and minorities.

            I did say previously (maybe the last OT) that my main criticism of BLM was it’s focus on racism as the cause of police brutality at the exclusion of other factors, such as being young and male. My guess is a 19 year old white male is probably at higher risk of being shot by a cop than a 50 year old black woman, though maybe not for other forms of police abuse. Nor do I particularly blame the shootings on racism so much as other reasons (in particular, lack of convictions or punishment for cops who kill innocent people, general preference for the safety of cops over the safety of the public). But the attitude that the police force/society in general is racist, higher crime rates among black people (as judged by “has been arrested or convicted before”), and historical treatment of black people in the U.S. (especially by police departments), is closely related to why it’s “Black Lives Matter” and not just “Stop Police Brutality.”

            Fwiw, I’m fine with letting this go now, unless anyone else has anything to add. At least if I don’t reply again it’s because of feeling a need to drop it more than not having plenty left to say on the subject.

      • Anonymous says:

        I think the standard is that he was killing cops, without regard to their skin color (i.e. one of them was black), as opposed to killing white cops specifically. It was anti-cop, not anti-[some race]

        That would be all well and good if BLM was anti-white. But that’s not what they say.

    • Jaskologist says:

      For surreal, check out the newspaper that apologized for accurately saying that the Dallas gunman targeted whites.

      • Mercer says:

        I would like to steelman the editors decision here but im having trouble coming up with anything coherent

    • Pku says:

      I’m pretty sure poor black communities have strong anti-cop sentiment that precedes BLM. This is definitely from the same source as BLM, but that doesn’t mean it’s caused by it.

  17. Tsnom Eroc says:

    Who else is worried about the ages of the leading presidential canidates?

    Hillary would be 68 at election, trump 70. Trump would be older than Reagan, and Hilary about the same age, a few months difference.

    Theres a bunch of weird stories about a blood clot in Hillarys brain, and Trump is already the angry old man yelling about everything and seemingly forgetting what he said just a day ago(how else to explain the daily flip-flops…kidding, hopefully).

    http://www.brainhealthhacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/fluid-and-crystalized-intelligence3.png

    The graphs are a lot worse for age then the text.

    http://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-peaks-at-different-ages-0306

    The research is fairly consistent. Your brain peeks at age 19-25, in terms of raw learning ability and speed. At age 60, you start declining quickly. At age 70, you are much much slower mentally, with a much lower IQ then at age 20 when you first impressed people. You also start getting at much higher risk of well, absolutely serious processing and memory disorders.

    The optimal age for a president, the blend of intelligence and life information, is probably in the 40’s.

    • Lumifer says:

      Not with these two. You have two of the most hated people in the US as your only choice for a President and you care about age?

    • Zombielicious says:

      Another issue is that people in that age range have around a 5-10% chance of death during an 8 year term, so it’s basically guaranteed to happen eventually if you keep electing them, and even assuming it isn’t during some kind of major crisis, you then end up with whatever awful VP was picked just to “balance out the ticket” (e.g. imagine a Sarah Palin presidency if McCain had been elected and died in office). The actual risk of death from old age might be higher/lower due to the ridiculous stress of the job or having access to probably best the health care on the planet.

      And aside from lower fluid intelligence, you also have the problem of the head of state being someone whose opinions and worldview may be out of touch by several generations (you’d think voting would help with that, but I’m not so sure). Most people working at that level of government have been there for decades – e.g. Clinton as first lady in the 90s and Cheney and Rumsfeld working in the Nixon and Ford administrations. The continuity between administrations, even over three or four decades, just contributes to inertia and groupthink in the various branches of government.

      • Pku says:

        The actual risk of death from old age might be higher/lower due to the ridiculous stress of the job or having access to probably best the health care on the planet.

        Presidents tend to die significantly younger than average for their demographic (can’t find the citation now), probably because of the job stress.

        • Salem says:

          Or perhaps because four of them have been assassinated.

        • Corey says:

          An interesting study I can’t be arsed to Google up right now compared Presidents who died of natural causes with the people they defeated in their respective elections (so similar demographics, etc), finding a significant effect (died a few years earlier IIRC). N is small of course, can’t really help that.

    • SJ says:

      I think that the age profile of the nation was a little younger in 1980 than it is today.

      Does that change the comparison with Reagan?

      Another question: what has been the typical age of Presidents in recent history?

      Since 1944, Presidents have been:

      FDR (First elected in 1932 at age 50. Aged 62 at time of election in 1944.)
      Truman (age of 61 when he became President in 1945. Age of 64 when he won in election of 1948.)
      Eisenhower (Age of 62 when elected in 1952.)
      Kennedy (age of 43 when elected in 1960)
      LBJ (age of 55 when he became President, aged 56 when he won in election of 1964)
      Nixon (age of 55 when he won in 1968)
      Ford (age of 61 when he became President, aged 63 when he lost to Carter)
      Carter (age of 52 when he won in 1976)
      Reagan (age of 69 when he won in 1980)
      GHW Bush (age of 64 when he won in 1988)
      Clinton (age of 46 when he won in 1992)
      GW Bush (age of 54 when he won in 2000)
      Obama (age of 47 when he won in 2008)

      I didn’t look carefully at the age of both big candidates in that time span. But I get the impression that the younger candidate usually won.

      I can’t think of a Presidential election in that time-span in which both parties fielded candidates older than 65.

    • Pku says:

      Reagan’s age was apparently a major problem with his presidency, especially towards the end. He’d be useless if he didn’t get enough sleep, and by the last year or two he was going pretty senile. This is probably going to be a problem.

      • Tsnom Eroc says:

        That is exactly my fear and worry.

        Does this count as a stroke?
        Its said it isn’t, but at the least it counts as damage. There are 8 possible more years of this type of damage…

        • Pku says:

          Let’s say four – eight assumes reelection, which, between their ages and their general unpopularity, I don’t think either of the current candidates can count on.

          On health grounds, I’d give the advantage to Hillary – she’s a few years younger, women generally live longer, and she can probably pick a better VP than Pence in case she gets another stroke. More generally, we should probably worry more about the VP choice in this election than we usually would.

  18. walpolo says:

    Two studies I’ve recently seen shared on the topic of police brutality against black people:

    http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0141854

    “It is sometimes suggested that in urban areas with more black residents and higher levels of inequality, individuals may be more likely to commit violent crime, and thus the racial bias in police shooting may be explainable as a proximate response by police to areas of high violence and crime (community violence theory [14, 15, 23, 35]). In other words, if the environment is such that race and crime covary, police shooting ratios may show signs of racial bias, even if it is crime, not race, that is the causal driver of police shootings. In the models fit in this study, however, there is no evidence of an association between black-specific crime rates (neither in assault-related arrests nor in weapons-related arrests) and racial bias in police shootings, irrespective of whether or not other controls were included in the model. As such, the results of this study provide no empirical support for the idea that racial bias in police shootings (in the time period, 2011–2014, described in this study) is driven by race-specific crime rates (at least as measured by the proxies of assault- and weapons-related arrest rates in 2012).”

    http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

    “This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.”

    Thoughts and/or criticisms about either study?

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      No useful comments, other than to suggest that you add those to the (currently semi-dead) SSCience discussion thread above.

      Ctrl+F “~ S S C i e n c e ~” without spaces or quotes.

      EDIT: Forgot one of my own rules. I don’t think it’s possible to have an apolitical discussion of these studies unfortunately, although I wish that we could.

      My useless comment is below:

      We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

      I spent way too much time on LW it seems, because I’m now grinning ear to ear thinking about Officer Clippy. We need way to mathematically prove that police cadets will be Friendly once they self-modify into cops, dammit!

    • Aido says:

      My social circle passed the same two studies around and I remember at first thinking they were contradictory. I changed my mind after a closer read. Please offer corrections if I run off course, but here’s my attempt at a summary:

      Study 1 compares across race total numbers of police killings, and finds that Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police. This is in contrast to Study 2, which examines single encounter outcomes, and instead looks at the metrics of nonlethal force and shootings. Study 2 finds that Black Americans have it worse on an encounter-by-encounter basis for nonlethal force, but when it comes to shootings they find Black Americans are shot at an equal or lesser rate. One would tend to think that shootings lead to killings, so how is this possible?

      Two potential explanations (I think both are probably true):
      1. Police begin encounters with Black Americans more frequently, even after accounting for racial differences in crime-rate.
      2. Police use higher levels of force with Black Americans: when they engage nonlethally, they do so with more force; when they shoot, they shoot more.

  19. Ian says:

    I have a psychiatry question. My wife and I had our second child last week, and my wife is suffering from some postpartum depression. She went to her OB/GYN today who diagnosed her with the condition and prescribed Sertraline. My question is: is there anything else I or we can do to help her feel better? Thanks!

    • Randy M says:

      IANAP, but I’ll remind you of the usual things that might help–get sleep, eat healthier, get whatever exercise her current condition allows, get some sunshine, social interaction, etc.

      • Julie K says:

        Help with the housework (hire help if necessary). As a new mother I found it incredibly depressing to have a messy house and be too tired/busy to do anything about it.

        Oh, and congratulations!

    • Tek Tek says:

      Yeah, get her off of Sertraline.

      Shes getting on a med where most of the positive effects during short-term studies are seen with placebo, down-regulation mostly nulls any initial positive SSRI effect, and ends up eventually giving permanent sexual side effects, and if you have another child and she is on that SSRI, say hello to a horrific at-birth withdrawal effect.

      Seriously. People who feel horrible on drugs like this with diarrhea and sexual dysfunction who drop out of studies are not even counted as against the drug itself. Its a horrible statistical trick for a drug that markets itself as an antidepressant.

      You really are better off with MDMA, when taken intelligently. You know to take it sparingly, every other week or so for a great experience. Shame research on the drug had to be banned.

      • James Picone says:

        Counterpoint: I have taken Sertraline for depression and definitely benefited from it.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I’ve also taken Sertraline for depression. It’s difficult to tell how much I benefited from it, because several other things in my life changed at about the same time as I started taking it, but I haven’t noticed any side-effects from the drug.

  20. jseliger says:

    Did you read Jacques Delacroix’s 2015 article “Religious Bric-à-Brac and Tolerance of Violent Jihad?” It reads like something you might write, if you were a retired American professor living in France and then trying to explain French Islam (and many other topics) to a wider audience. I don’t mean that purely in content terms; I also mean it in the sense that Delacroix ranges widely but intelligently and writes in a way that is hard to excerpt well, because the parts are so well integrated into the whole.

  21. Friday says:

    Deliberate food waste before the point of consumption doesn’t account for a very high proportion of losses of edible food, even in developed countries. (Source.)

    Yeah, it’s probably a good thing if a supermarket coughs up a couple bucks so that their substandard produce goes to the local homeless shelter instead of the garbage, but it seems like activists exaggerate the impact of deliberate food waste.

  22. NN says:

    Now that the 3 day moratorium on politicizing a tragedy has passed…

    Isn’t it weird how quickly the Nice attack vanished from the public consciousness? The second worst terrorist attack/mass killing (similar to Orlando, this looks to be a mix of Radical Islam and personal mental health issues which makes it a bit hard to properly categorize) in Europe in the last 10 years has garnered surprisingly little attention outside the city and country where it happened, and certainly much less attention than, say, the Orlando shooting, the Istanbul airport attack, or the Brussels bombing, all of which had a significantly lower death toll.

    A major factor is surely that the attempted coup in Turkey happened immediately afterwards and drew the world’s attention away, but even taking that into account there still seems to be something very strange about how quickly the story vanished from the headlines. If the Turkey coup had happened right after the Paris attacks last year, I highly doubt that people would have immediately forgotten the latter events.

    I think that one of the major reasons may well be that the attacker’s primary weapon was a truck, and cars and trucks simply aren’t scary for most people in the same way that guns and bombs are, even though they are empirically capable of wreaking similar amounts of havoc. Most people just accept it as a fact of life that cars and trucks kill thousands of people every year (in France in particular, there are more than 3000 road fatalities every year), and their reactions don’t seem to change much when some of those deaths are intentional rather than accidental.

    In short, what if this was a terrorist attack that failed to effectively terrorize people because it looked too much like part of the plan?

    • Bassist Pig says:

      On one hand, I think a lot of mass killings, whether fundamentally caused by Islam or by mental illness or whatever else, are to a large degree inspired by the publicity afforded previous mass killings. So, when the media shuts up about them a bit, it helps clamp down on copycats and the like.

      On the other hand, I am suspicious of the degree to which journalists are hoping that if they don’t give attention to these kinds of incidents, glaring holes in their soothing narratives about mass immigration will be overlooked or forgotten.

      There could of course be other reasons I’m not thinking of.

      • Outis says:

        I think that’s an often-overlooked aspect. A big reason why America has so many mass shootings is that it’s just a cultural meme over there.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      The coup in Turkey, the slayings of police officers in Baton Rouge, and the upcoming Republican convention probably all served to crowd out coverage of the Nice attack. But there are still new articles about Nice on the home pages of the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN, and in the World section of the Washington Post, so it is false that “the Nice attack [has] vanished from the public consciousness”. I suggest you should be more diffident about your ability to make sweeping, impressionistic judgments of how much news coverage an event is receiving– this seems like an open invitation to let confirmation bias or apophenia run the show.

    • Civilis says:

      It’s hard to take a look at coverage of a single news event in isolation from what else is happening around it, to include previous stories of a similar nature. There is surprisingly a lot going on (Nice, Turkish Coup, British PM, US Police Shootings, Donald Trump Republican VP Pick (a two-fer)). For me, I was startled to see the Pence as VP story relegated to a small bottom corner of the Washington Post front page.

      As for me, in the Washington DC media market the Nice terrorist attack hasn’t completely dropped off the radar yet, in part because of some of the sob-stories about the US victims. I don’t know where you are, but from what I saw both the Washington Post and the Wall St. Journal paid more attention to Nice than to Istanbul. Likely the same for Brussels, but that’s not as fresh in my mind.

      • Civilis says:

        As a follow-up, the Washington Post this morning had a full page, with three separate articles, dedicated to Nice.

    • Urstoff says:

      Has it been established as a terror attack, or was it, like Orlando seemed to be, just a mentally unhinged guy who wasn’t a true believer but just used ISIS as an excuse to kill a lot of people he hated?

      • E. Harding says:

        This dude’s banned, but he has the best explanation for what happened:

        https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/toxic-arab-masculinity/

      • NN says:

        In general the similarities between the Nice attacker and the Orlando attacker are almost uncanny. They both had serious mental health issues, a history of violent conduct, no known contact with any terrorist groups, and a not particularly religious and/or radical background. So from the information that is available now, I would put it in the same category as Orlando and the Sydney hostage crisis.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        My impression is that on the continuum between unstable maniac and calculated terrorism it fell closer to being organised than Orlando (where the perpetrator seemed not to understand that pledging allegiance to ISIS and Hezbollah is contradictory) — the terrorist in Nice seems to have been an impious petty criminal who was prone to violent outbursts, similar to the terrorist in the Toulouse and Montauban shootings of 2012.

      • John Schilling says:

        Surely if I were to use my orbital mind control laser to command some susceptible nutcase to randomly murder a whole bunch of innocent people in the name of my cause, that would constitute a terrorist attack. Is it less so if we substitute “internet propaganda and engagement” for “orbital mind control laser”?

        Because that’s been a major part of ISIS’s strategy for the past couple of years, and Al Qaeda before that.

        • NN says:

          There is the question of how many of these people might have done something similar even if ISIS had never existed. For example, multiple witnesses claim that the Orlando attacker made repeated threats/”jokes” involving shooting up his school or workplace long before ISIS came into existence.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Yeah, but multiple witnesses were also claiming that he used to frequent all the gay bars, and that didn’t pan out, so who knows?

          • NN says:

            I believe at least one of these reports was backed up by credible outside evidence. Specifically, IIRC the police academy that he was attending investigated reports that he had joked about bringing a gun to class and killing people.

        • Mary says:

          One notes that the anarchists were big into propaganda of the deed by the same technique. Some ugly results.

    • Creutzer says:

      It could also be that this is becoming a bit too frequent for people to react with the same extremity every time, and that they are slowly coming to accept that the regular occurrence of such events is now part of reality.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        this.

        Before nice was Orlando, Dallas, the Brexit vote, and several black men shot by police, and then immediately after was a coup, another police shooting, and now an axe attack in Germany. Rolling horror, there’s no time to digest.

    • TomFL says:

      Terrorist attacks are becoming mundane. The shock value is wearing off, which is a good thing. There is certainly a media bias for what type of attacks result in “flood the zone” coverage. Orlando disappeared pretty quickly as well.

      These type of attacks from a state which holds territory would be an act of war in almost every other circumstance. It is a bit perplexing as to why these do not result in a harsh response from France or other countries being attacked. The IS specifically asks for and receives these attacks from those they inspire. The line between inspired and directed is semantics to me. The “fear” that responding harshly will be counter productive is misguided in my opinion, it only shows weakness and invites further attacks when the IS knows there will be no price to pay for its actions.

      It is distressing that the media walks in almost unanimous lock-step on this issue. Somebody should be making the case for over the top retribution, not that I agree with that particular path, but I note the complete absence of argument for this case which is the playground response to stopping this behavior.

      • According to Wikipedia: “In retaliation for the November 2015 Paris attacks, the French Air Force significantly intensified airstrikes against ISIL targets in Syria, hitting among other the Syrian city of Ar-Raqqah, the de facto capital of ISIL.”

        It’s a bit soon for any military response to the Nice attack. It may come, although I don’t know if they can escalate much further without sending in ground troops, which I gather is considered undesirable for domestic reasons.

        PS: I know (almost) nothing about this. Don’t take me seriously.

        • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

          Also, the country airstrikes against IS are flown out if just had a coup attempt?

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          The West, or at least the United States part of it, has been bizarrely reluctant to apply meaningful force to the Islamic State despite its overwhelming air power. I can’t be the only one who’s wondered why exactly there is one brick still on top of another brick in Ar-Raqqah.

          • Sandy says:

            Isn’t it because there’s still a large civilian population in Raqqa and the West has to at least pay token service to jus in bello?

          • anon says:

            Yeah, Sandy’s right. I think Iraq eventually taught the top brass that air power is not actually effective for this purpose, so in addition to being needlessly punitive to the civilian population, most air strikes against ISIS positions are a waste of money. Even Russia has been pretty restrained, as far as I can tell.

            The exception to the above is the petroleum infrastructure (wells, convoys, etc). These seem like legitimate military targets to me, and the US was pretty slow to strike them, although eventually they started doing so I believe. I don’t know the real reason for this. It could be that they thought it would be wasteful/expensive to have to pay to rebuild this stuff after the civil war ended, and ISIS had enough alternate revenue streams that the planners didn’t think striking the oil infrastructure was necessary or worthwhile. That might even have been a correct calculation, although eventually the optics led them to change their mind. (Anecdotally — and I don’t know how much Western media reports are to be believed on this point — it does seem like ISIS’s finances have become significantly worse in the past year, although they don’t seem close to collapsing.)

          • Outis says:

            Well, when ISIS falls, we’re going to have to give the Kurds a state, and that’s going to be a yuge can of worms with Turkey. I assume Western politicians are in no rush to precipitate that crisis.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Isn’t it because there’s still a large civilian population in Raqqa and the West has to at least pay token service to jus in bello?

            Does it? Who’s gonna make us if we don’t want to?

            But that aside, I was specifically thinking of the Islamic State’s structures of government. They have an HQ; they have police, secret and otherwise; they have communications. They have infrastructure. Not one brick of that infrastructure should be standing and it is incomprehensible that literally years into this war, with absolute air superiority from day one, it still is.

            Well, when ISIS falls, we’re going to have to give the Kurds a state, and that’s going to be a yuge can of worms with Turkey. I assume Western politicians are in no rush to precipitate that crisis.

            I hope that’s not what they’re thinking. That’s the sort of too-cute-by-half diplomatic logic that leads to world wars.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            I hope that’s not what they’re thinking. That’s the sort of too-cute-by-half diplomatic logic that leads to world wars.

            I assume the point was that Syrian Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdistan are already more-or-less de facto independent countries, so when the dust settles, the USA is probably left with a choice of either a) recognising them as official independent countries or b) getting dragged into potential conflict if they side with a re-stabilised Syria into trying to take back all of its Kurdish territory (I don’t know if that is a realistic risk with Iraq as well). Option a) pisses off Turkey, option b) means getting involved in a conflict where the optics are absolutely terrible, given the Kurdish contribution to fighting I.S.

            The Turkish Kurdistan problem … well, if you can’t either a) make your country into a polity that all its ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly willing to be part of, or b) assimilate them or expel them, then your only choices are c) agree to let their territory go independent or d) accept that you will be in a state of continuing low-level warfare with them forever.

            I get the impression that Turkey’s leadership actually does prefer option d), but I don’t see why ‘have a legally binding referendum on Kurdish independence’ couldn’t be part of the accession requirements for Turkish membership of the EU.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t see why ‘have a legally binding referendum on Kurdish independence’ couldn’t be part of the accession requirements for Turkish membership of the EU

            It could be, but the one non-negotiable requirement for Turkish membership in the EU is unanimous consent of all other EU members. This is sufficiently unlikely to ever happen that Turkey is not going to make any real sacrifices for the sake of removing lesser barriers to EU membership.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @Winter Shaker: Oh, absolutely, that’s a terrible diplomatic problem and I agree that it’s a problem we would not have in any ideal world.

            However, if we’re somehow attempting to drag out the war against ISIS in order to kick that can down the road, that’s the sort of diplomatic scheme I’d be dismayed at. For one thing, ISIS continues to hurt innocent people both locally and abroad as long as it exists, and if we’re going to claim to be fighting them it’s immoral to half-ass it; for another we just aren’t competent enough to carry out N-dimensional chess games like that without horrendous blowback. Talleyrands are thin on the ground in Western diplomatic corps these days, to put it charitably.

      • Mary says:

        The real problem is that as they become mundane, the incentive is to increase the attack by whatever means is necessary to do so.

      • NN says:

        The problem with over the top retribution for attacks like this is that because they really are inspired rather than directed or funded by IS, reducing IS’s funding/territory/resources would do absolutely nothing to reduce the ability of people to carry out these attacks. In fact, like Harry Johnston said, a coalition of military forces from various countries have significantly reduced IS’s territory over the past 2 years (this is what IS looks like in Iraq and Syria now). While this has happened, has the number of people killed by IS inspired/directed attacks in the West increased or decreased?

        I’m starting to think that at this point, letting terrorist attacks become mundane may be the best option.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          I’m starting to think that at this point, letting terrorist attacks become mundane may be the best option.

          Even if that was mathematically the least harmful option, you will never be able to put it into practice. Eventually the people will get angry and fed up with constantly being murdered by foreign enemies while the government shrugs impotently, and turn to a man on a white horse. Then you’ll wish you’d addressed the problem in a less destructive way when you had the chance.

          • NN says:

            Car accidents kill tens of thousands of people every year without mobs storming car company offices with torches and pitchforks. Like the Joker said, nobody panics when things go according to plan, even when the plan is horrifying.

          • Artificirius says:

            Be that as it may, at least a significant number of car fatalities are authors of their own demise. Another significant number are really due to the intersection of human fallibility/limit of ability and chance, and/or some combination of these two.

            Were there significant sign that a car company was out to get car owners (like, say, televising/broadcasting their evil plots to kill said car owners), then I fully expect a lack of ‘business as usual/all according to plan’ attitude.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Car accidents kill tens of thousands of people every year without mobs storming car company offices with torches and pitchforks.

            Yes, and my point was that people get pissed off at getting attacked, even if the consequences of the attacks are minor. Your choices are to deal with it yourself, or be replaced with Putin/Erdogan/Napoleon/name-your-strongman. “Convince everyone it’s no big deal” isn’t on the table.

          • Mary says:

            More to the point, the terrorists live and breathe for “not mundane” status. Once they are mundane, they will escalate. (Well, try to. But some will succeed.)

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Quite.

            I’m pretty sure everyone here was bullied in grade school. Often, the powers that be told us to just ignore the bullies. Did it work? Or did the bullies simply increase their attacks until they got a response?

          • Anonymous says:

            Eventually the people will get angry and fed up with constantly being murdered by foreign enemies while the government shrugs impotently, and turn to a man on a white horse. Then you’ll wish you’d addressed the problem in a less destructive way when you had the chance.

            So, when do you think the Russians will revolt against all the terrorism that various separatists/islamists have been doing there for decades now?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            So, when do you think the Russians will revolt against all the terrorism that various separatists/islamists have been doing there for decades now?

            It was a while ago. You may have noticed that Russia already has an oppressive, warmongering autocrat as President, yes?

            Remember, I didn’t say that the strongman would (or would not) be effective in the anti-terrorism job. Just that there one would inevitably come along if the non-strongman government is not believed to be taking the problem seriously.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            “I’m pretty sure everyone here was bullied in grade school. Often, the powers that be told us to just ignore the bullies. Did it work? Or did the bullies simply increase their attacks until they got a response?”

            Spazzing out sure didn’t work.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Spazzing out sure didn’t work.

            Speak for yourself.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ ThirteenthLetter

            I’m pretty sure everyone here was bullied in grade school. Often, the powers that be told us to just ignore the bullies.

            Not in my case. My parents were quite insistent that the first line of defense was to avoid, but if that didn’t work you hit back and fight as hard as you can.

            Excellent advice. I wasn’t bullied.

          • onyomi says:

            “but if that didn’t work you hit back and fight as hard as you can.”

            I actually think this is correct, but it’s the sort of advice you can never put on a PSA or what have you. Bullies pick easy targets; as soon as you fight back you stop being one.

          • NN says:

            I actually think this is correct, but it’s the sort of advice you can never put on a PSA or what have you. Bullies pick easy targets; as soon as you fight back you stop being one.

            If you are good at fighting. If you aren’t (and chances are good that the bully has significantly more experience than you do), then trying to fight back only makes things worse.

            Fighting back also carries the risk of getting you punished by the authorities along with or even instead of the bully.

          • onyomi says:

            Well you don’t have to go straight to punching. You can start out with some choice profanity. Of course, it also depends on how tough and violent your school/situation is. But even in cases where you might get into a fight you could lose, the very fact that you fought back at all will make you seem a bad target. You know that joke about how you don’t need to be faster than the lion, you just need to not be the slowest person in your group? I feel like bullying works like that. You don’t have to be the toughest kid around; you just need to not be the easiest target. A black eye is arguably better than years of being verbally and/or physically harassed.

          • Pku says:

            I’m pretty sure everyone here was bullied in grade school. Often, the powers that be told us to just ignore the bullies. Did it work?

            Actually yeah. Once I switched from responding with anger to calmly asking them to leave me alone and walking away, I got much better results. (But then, this wasn’t in America; I hear school is different here).

          • Lumifer says:

            @ NN

            If you are good at fighting. If you aren’t (and chances are good that the bully has significantly more experience than you do), then trying to fight back only makes things worse.

            Nope. You’re misunderstanding the advice — it does not assume that you’ll be able to beat the bully. What it assumes is that bullies react to incentives and that some pain now is worth less pain in the future.

            also carries the risk of getting you punished by the authorities

            Yes, so?

            Again, you choice is not between pain and no pain. Your choice is between some pain now or more pain later.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            “Speak for yourself.”

            Ok. My natural reaction to being provoked was anger and violence, and the amusement my provocateurs got from doing so was in fact the main reason they did it. When I learned to be more calm and controlled, the provocation dried up. I’d suggest that 10-year-old Herbert the Spazzy Spaz has a lot more in common with America than your prototypical bully victim, and that uncontrolled overreaction has always been the primary goal of Wahhabist/Salafist terrorism… but I’d also be willing to meet you halfway and just deny the usefulness of the international terrorism :: schoolyard bullying analogy altogether.

      • TomFL says:

        A case for over the top retribution.

        1. Punish their civilians at greater levels than they punish yours. Deterrent. The Japanese would execute 10 prisoners any time an escape attempt occurred. Effective.

        2. You are many times fighting the next war, not this one. Over the top retribution prevents future attacks from future opponents who know a heavy price will be paid for any aggression.

        3. Nuking a city every time a suicide attack occurs will give pause to the enemy. Executing people for jaywalking will stop jaywalking as well.

        4. Just like the west, the failure of leaders to protect civilians will cause them to pressure their government to change their ways. Their civilians likely see no reason to protest their government’s actions because they aren’t paying a price.

        5. This is the way human nature works. Nobody picks on the biggest baddest bully because it always ends badly for them. The US is basically acting like a big strong feminist academic football player. The US being predictable, restrained, and rational is not a feature in this type of conflict. Being unpredictable and occasionally irrational is a good thing in conflicts. It feels good and right to crush a bad guy.

        6. Morale. Just sitting back and taking it when you have the power to inflict large levels of retribution make the citizens feel helpless and weak. It gives rise to the Trumps of the world. People want to feel that somebody is effectively fighting for their protection, not trying to win peace prizes.

        7. Would the world really not understand if Raqqa was carpet bombed every time a terrorist attack occurred? The usual suspects would scream but the silent majority would approve.

        8. Go in with ground troops, kill everyone who shoots at you, then leave. Attempt no rebuilding, leave it a big smoking hole as a message to the next guy. Repeat as necessary.

        9. If I was running a weak country and starting mercilessly attacking a much stronger opponent’s citizens, what would I expect as a response? A measured kinder gentler war? I would expect the US to crush me like a grape.

        There are many good counter arguments of course and history has something to teach us here, but don’t over learn those lessons. There is a valid debate to be had here that the media won’t touch. The diversity of thought in the media is approaching zero.

        • Sandy says:

          Nuking a city every time a suicide attack occurs will give pause to the enemy.

          It will also aggravate that enemy’s neighbors for no reason. Wind spreads nuclear fallout around.

        • Lumifer says:

          You are going straight to the “feared and hated, really REALLY hated” status. I don’t think this is a good position to be in.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I think the best way, from a Realpolitik perspective, would be to mercilessly crush your enemies and fight like lions for your friends. Offering potential allies a carrot as well as a stick will make you considerably less resented.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ The original Mr. X

            From a Realpolitik perspective, to quote Lord Palmerston, nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.

            The enemies which you mercilessly crushed will remember your lack of mercy when you’ll need them as friends.

          • Jaskologist says:

            It is better to be loved than to be feared, but what if your only choices are between being hated and being feared?

          • Anonymous says:

            Sorry if I’m missing the joke, but Machiavelli said that it is better to be feared than loved. And hated vs feared is easy. Hated is bad. Feared is good.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Jaskologist

            but what if your only choices are between being hated and being feared?

            …so you choose both? Did you mean the choice between (feared + hated) and (not respected + taken advantage of) by any chance?

            In such situation I suggest you choose Pikachu.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Well, I say “mercilessly crush”. When they’re crushed enough to no longer be a threat to you, you can spare them and make them into your allies. This was pretty much the Romans’ modus operandi, and it served them pretty well.

          • Mary says:

            Machiavelli also observed that above all else, you had to avoid being hated.

        • TomFL says:

          The point being some level of retribution will very likely stop the behavior. Nukes were given as an extreme example. Exactly how important is stopping this behavior to the US? It is actions that answer this question, not words.

          Being feared and respected may be the best option. I might hate the neighbor who shoots everyone who goes on his lawn, but I’m definitely telling my kids to stay off his lawn. And once people stay off his lawn, there are no more shootings. He accomplished his goal, and it wasn’t to be loved by his neighbors.

          The question is what is the best deterrent to prevent similar future attacks? Perhaps increasing their hatred on the whole makes it worse, but this is by no means obvious given human behavior. There doesn’t seem to be much of a carrot to offer the IS, so the answer might need to be all stick, and a big stick.

          • Pku says:

            This doesn’t seem to work for terrorism, unless you’re willing to go over the top and commit actual genocide. Israel kills thousands of people and destroys hundreds of thousands of buildings in Gaza every couple of years, without really deterring Hamas. Because Hamas just doesn’t care much about their people’s well-being. Do you really think ISIS cares more? (Hezbollah, strangely enough, apparently kinda does).

          • Lumifer says:

            The point being some level of retribution will very likely stop the behavior.

            No, I don’t think so. You’re assuming rational actors and those are in short supply. What level of retribution will scare off a suicide bomber? You’ll nuke her city? That’s fine, the end of the world will come sooner, that’s a good thing.

            I might hate the neighbor who shoots everyone who goes on his lawn, but I’m definitely telling my kids to stay off his lawn.

            Actually I don’t think that’s true. The first time your neighbor shoots someone on his lawn, you’ll make damn sure he’s not your neighbor, ideally because he’s in jail. If you’re living next door to a crazy, telling your kids to avoid his lawn doesn’t sound like a solution.

            The question is what is the best deterrent to prevent similar future attacks?

            Ask the Israelis. They have a LOT of experience.

          • TomFL says:

            I doubt ISIS cares much, but nobody wants very unhappy taxpayers or an exodus of such.

            The question on Israel has to be examined on what would happen if they didn’t do what they do every few years. I read an article describing this aptly as “mowing the grass”. No-one is fooling themselves into believing this is a permanent solution, only managing a hopeless situation. I think there is some deterrent here even if it is on a rinse repeat cycle. The plague of suicide bombers in Israel stopped, I’m not sure exactly why. International pressure? The wall? (Trump would love that answer).

            In this case terrorism is from a state that holds territory. They could be relieved of that privilege.

            No easy answers, but alternatively using a big stick doesn’t really hurt us much either in my opinion, it is good for domestic morale We can probably look forward to mowing the jihadi grass for many decades to come.

            I’m only arguing the big stick half heartedly. I probably would choose a mow the grass strategy similar to what we are doing now, except with a more agressive remove the IS territory holding.

          • NN says:

            In this case terrorism is from a state that holds territory. They could be relieved of that privilege.

            Many attacks have only come “from” that state in the loosest possible sense of the word. The Nice, Orlando, and San Bernardino attackers all had absolutely no contact with anyone in ISIS territory.

          • TomFL says:

            Let’s call it state sponsored terror, still a very bad thing, and worthy of a response. They really don’t even have plausible deniability here when they accept responsibility for these things.

            If they disavowed these attacks and took down all propaganda asking for these attacks to occur then there might be a case for not holding them responsible.

          • NN says:

            The point I’m trying to make is that ISIS’s amount of territory and resources have absolutely no bearing on the ability of its supporters to commit lone wolf attacks, because lone wolf attacks by definition are carried out without the support of a larger organization. It is theoretically possible that these attacks might all have happened even if the US military had managed to kill every single person who openly identifies as a member of ISIS.

          • Nornagest says:

            @NN: They do have an effect on ISIS’ ability to pull supporters. The equipment needed for the kind of propaganda they’re doing may as well be free — you could get a GoPro, an Internet connection, and some pirated editing software for everyone in a battalion for the price of dropping a smart bomb — but they do need some level of talent and organization, which tends to degrade when bombs are falling on it.

          • NN says:

            @Nornagest: How many of ISIS’s videos are edited inside of its own territory, rather that by supporters living in places that bombs aren’t falling on?

            I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m honestly curious.

          • Nornagest says:

            I don’t know for sure, though I suspect most of them. I model ISIS mainly as a local phenomenon or rather a set of local phenomena: ISIS-aligned forces in e.g. Libya and Yemen seem to be operating more as franchises than under central control. Similarly, its media strategy is sophisticated in some ways but large-scale coordination is not one of them. But that still doesn’t completely rule out co-conspirators in, say, Saudi Arabia.

          • TomFL says:

            Everyone hopes that the ISIS ideology will burn itself out in the long run. Rational people believe it is unthinkable this ideology could continue to grow, it being closer to a cult than a government. Rational people may be wrong or blinded by a perceived universal belief in a liberal world order.

            I would classify the current strategy as “contain and let it burn”. Basically putting out a wildfire without having to go in and pour water on every tree on fire.

            This may be the best strategy, but it is not without risk. Some of these risks have already borne fruit in a mass exodus of Syrians and weekly terror attacks across the world. Nobody anticipated this from the JV team. The US is staying the course on this strategy.

            It is a plausible argument that an aggressive defeat of the IS early on (i.e. ground war) would have prevented both of these outcomes. Giving an enemy sanctuary is never a good idea.

            Amazingly most people predict alternate outcomes that match their prior biases, myself included.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ TomFL

            Rational people believe it is unthinkable this ideology could continue to grow, it being closer to a cult than a government.

            I think that’s exactly what was said about Khomeini in Iran in late 1970s…

          • Pku says:

            They weren’t entirely wrong about Iran. The government’s still pretty bad, but the actual society’s become pretty secular and western.

        • Nornagest says:

          The US being predictable, restrained, and rational is not a feature in this type of conflict. Being unpredictable and occasionally irrational is a good thing in conflicts

          Nixon agreed with you.

          (Note that it didn’t work in that case, though.)

          • TomFL says:

            The Soviets seemed to be convinced we would perform a first strike if we could survive retaliation during the Cold War, and MAD was a very good deterrent for both sides.

            As with most things, using a pure version of any strategy usually has big flaws. You have to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em, and pundits will declare you wrong no matter what.

            It’s hard to imagine what Obama would do during a Cuban Missile Crisis, but he wouldn’t play poker. Brinkmanship isn’t his style, and it seems he would take invading Cuba off the table early on….just because. Obama would negotiate favorably with another Obama, not so much with a seemingly irrational player who doesn’t respect red lines with good reason. I’m no war games expert.

            The IS acts irrationally in a rational sort of way. I think they are careful to not poke the hornet’s nest too hard, but do enough to embarrass the west for their own domestic jihadi consumption. They would prefer to build their strength until they are ready for a showdown. That plan may not be working so well.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Reminds me of a case in the 70s when terrorists kidnapped a Soviet official in Lebanon. The Soviets’ response was to kidnap the head terrorist’s brother, cut his balls off, and deliver them to the terrorists. The official in question was promptly released, and the Soviets never had trouble with that particular terrorist organisation again.

        • Nornagest says:

          Terrorism response is not about stopping terrorism at all costs. Stopping terrorism isn’t even high up on the list. And in some ways it shouldn’t be; if we prevent a couple of shooting sprees but at the cost of destroying our relations with a couple of regional powers, that is not a win. It’s probably not even a win in terms of body count, since the damage done to trade networks is likely to drive up prices and cause a few more people somewhere to starve to death on the margins, but the political damage is even greater.

          Are we optimizing for theater rather than effectiveness? Yeah, we are. But that doesn’t mean that full-bore salt-the-earth ISIS-delenda-est tactics are the right solution.

          (Personally, I think the lack of local awareness is probably doing more damage than anything else, so the first place I’d throw money might be the Defense Language Institute.)

        • erenold says:

          Would the world really not understand if Raqqa was carpet bombed every time a terrorist attack occurred? The usual suspects would scream but the silent majority would approve.

          Wait, is this serious? Because the answer is absolutely, no. For one, inside the part of ‘the world’ that particularly matters for this thought experiment – i.e., the moderate Islamic world – this would be incredibly inflammatory, provocative and generally unwise. There’d be a hundredfold increase in ISIS recruitment and corresponding attacks on Western countries. And it’s difficult to think it wouldn’t be entirely deserved, by the way.

          For another, if the target is explicitly to punitively kill civilians, there would be no international support whatsoever for this proposal. None. Zero. Witness how hard it’s been to get the UK to commit to pinprick airstrikes in support of the French effort in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Nor would it be possible to get international support for… just about anything America ever wanted again, inside a generation.

          Diversity of thought is always good, agreed. But these seem like very bad ideas in general.

          • TomFL says:

            Hey, I didn’t say these were good ideas, ha ha.

            See WWII.

            Some of the mass casualties were due to the inability to bomb accurately, but for example the fire bombing of Tokyo had no pretense of military targeting. The world was not outraged, nor was there a win the hearts and minds of the Japanese strategy employed. Now we are close allies.

            The IS is intentionally targeting and killing our civilians. Perhaps we don’t wantonly carpet bomb but instead target electrical (why do they have electricity exactly?) and other infrastructure.

          • TomFL says:

            What if I care more about stopping attacks in the US than international unity? We are bombing the IS every day, should we stop because it might make them mad or because Belarus might object? IS propaganda has us intentionally killing civilians regardless of the truth.

            The US has basically been going it alone for decades. Europe ran out of bombs during the Libya intervention in less than a week. It’s nice to have international support, but not required when the issue is domestic security. Other nations will continue to do what is in their strategic interest regardless of whether we carpet bombed Raqqa or not. International shaming is simply not very important in the grand scheme.

            This is part of the current split between globalists and nationalists. Trumpsters want a perceived US first strategy, and the globalists need to convince them the liberal world order * is * a US first strategy. At the moment I see a lot of assertions this is true, but little actual effort to convince someone it is actually true.

          • Nornagest says:

            What if I care more about stopping attacks in the US than international unity?

            Then get your priorities straight. Any major drop in international stability (I’m not going to follow “unity”, because it is not very united and unity is only important insofar as it fosters stability) and we’d be losing a lot more than fifty or so people a year, even if we managed to avoid major wars.

            ISIS isn’t even targeting the US in any kind of systematic way. The anti-Western propaganda, the declarations of allegiance, the execution videos — they’re all there to draw jihadis into Syria and Iraq, where ISIS’s actual near-term goals are. The occasional wannabe driving a truck into a crowd is just a secondary effect, albeit one ISIS has reason to be pretty happy about if it keeps them in the news.

            (Contrast Al-Qaeda, which has similar ideology but actually is trying to operate on an international stage.)

          • TomFL says:

            If you want to make a case that the “minimal” deaths from terrorism are not worth worrying about, make that case. I happen to agree with this.

            For some reason, a politician would rather be waterboarded than make this case. The amount of money spent on anti-terror national security versus what else we could spend it on (tax cuts, ha ha) is a calculation that needs to be front and center.

            Unfortunately the public’s perceived risks are actual risks to a politician’s career. The diversity of thought should include a very strong and compelling argument that we should just absorb these events and spend money in other places. How many people have died of heart disease and cancer since 2001?

            The counter-argument would be that we need to nip this problem in the bud before it gets out of control and you simply have to follow voter priorities in a democracy. Ignore terrorism won’t get you elected even if it is rational.

          • John Schilling says:

            What if I care more about stopping attacks in the US than international unity?

            Without international unity, the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc, are turning a blind eye to any terrorist activities based out of their country but targeted on the Great Satan. An ISIS or Al Qaeda that can operate freely out of secure bases in Riyadh, Cairo, and Amman is far more dangerous than one based in Raqqa.

            If you plan to then carpet-bomb Riyadh/Cairo/Amman, consider that without international unity, the Russians, Chinese, and French will be selling them state-of-the-art air defenses and the like. The EU, meanwhile, will be accepting refugees from these lands, and conspicuously not labeling their new passports or giving us access to the databases that would note that Bob from Belgium who wants to visit New York was last year Mustafa from the Maghreb.

            If you then plan to carpet-bomb Paris, Beijing, or Moscow, they have nuclear missiles. And no, they aren’t going to surrender without a fight. Not even the French.

          • John Schilling says:

            We are bombing the IS every day, should we stop because it might make them mad or because Belarus might object?

            We are bombing specific military, political, and economic targets in IS territory, in a manner calculated to minimize civilian casualties. We should not stop doing this. We are not “carpet bomb[ing] Raqqa every time a terrorist attack occurs”. If we were to do that, it would not just be Belarus that objects, but our closest allies. We should not do that.

            IS propaganda has us intentionally killing civilians regardless of the truth.

            Fortunately, our closest allies don’t believe IS propaganda. For that matter, most of our enemies don’t believe IS propaganda. But if you make it the truth, they will start believing it. Please don’t do that.

          • TomFL says:

            I’m not buying the slippery slope argument. Most countries crack down on terrorist organizations not because the US is their friend, but because they know their own government is the next target.

            What if I care * more *….

            This is not an argument to totally disregard international affairs but to prioritize them differently. If Saudi Arabia gets upset because we killed the IS’s citizens in response to them killing ours, then so be it. That region of the world is not known for their restrained responses to domestic threats (gassing of the Kurds, Syria, etc.) and is quite used to government via an iron fist. It is blindingly clear that their value of innocents is an order of magnitude lower than the west’s.

            So we get international bonus points for fighting a more humane restrained conflict. The question is how valuable are these? If the perception is you value these more than the lives of your own citizens then the rise of Donald Trump becomes less mysterious. A compelling argument for this case should be made, not assumed.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m not buying the slippery slope argument. Most countries crack down on terrorist organizations not because the US is their friend, but because they know their own government is the next target.

            Have you not noticed that the first response of most governments threatened by terrorism is to look and see if there is someone else the terrorists hate more than them, and see if maybe they can quietly arrange for the terrorists to leave them in peace if they leave the terrorists alone to go after their #1 foe? That doesn’t work for the United States, obviously, but it has traditionally worked quite well for e.g. the Saudis. And even the French.

            The bit where, when the United States ruthlessly murders a hundred thousand or so terrorist-adjacent civilians, historically terrorist-friendly governments will somehow decide to ruthlessly murder the actual terrorists for us, is a naïve fantasy. The safe move for them is to join the terrorists, not fight them. Even if the United States is threatening to bomb Riyadh, the safe move is to support the terrorists rather than fight them.

            The thing where we can sometimes see the Saudi government and the French government and all the rest actually fighting against the terrorists? That comes from that “international unity” thing that you don’t care about.

        • James Picone says:

          You only benefit from the moral high ground if you actually occupy it. Leading retaliatory strikes against civilians and nuking cities in response to terrorist attacks gives up the moral high ground.

          • TomFL says:

            You can ask the citizens of Iraq and Syria if they think the US occupies the moral high ground. I believe I saw a poll in which 87% of Iraqi’s said the US is their biggest enemy.

            The moral high ground is in the eyes of the beholder and mostly for domestic consumption. It is important to understand that you can go too far with trying to occupy the moral high ground at the expense of effective warfare. It is a balance that result in the rules of engagement.

            The quantification of the actual benefits of the moral high ground are unclear., and in my opinion way overvalued by those who hold them dear.

            There hasn’t been a war in history in which the moral high ground wasn’t the first thing to be tossed out once the outcome became questionable.

    • Tek Tek says:

      It really was a bad idea to allow lots of Islamic Immigration, now wasn’t it?

      France already got rid of one overbearing religion. Here is another one, with much more violent means of removing dissidents, and a shorter GOTO violence exit-branch.

      • Outis says:

        Yes. Many European countries have been permanently damaged by it. It will take a century before the effects are absorbed. The politicians that keep doing it are basically guilty of high treason.

    • tcd says:

      #NiceAttack certainly had a funny ring to it.

  23. NeshSelg says:

    I figure that this comments section has a good number of people who can write well, and understand game theory so I’m going to quickly ask here as well as posting a online add or two.

    I’m looking to hire someone to help with applying for jobs. I want to get someone willing to take on more of the risk and incentive than normal, and be willing too to be paid by the number of interviews they land me. I would like hire someone to customize and send off cover letters and any other methods if they produce results. I’d want to work with someone confident enough in their abilities and in my basic application to be able to give me an estimate of how much pay they would require for for each each interview based on there expected value. I would be willing to pay what i would expect to work out to between 20-50$ an hour, though potentially more if someone manages to find a way to improve results I haven’t considered.

    I have graduated a Rails boot camp and have additional experience coding in Python and C. I have a few different I have a few different completed algorithm test code samples along with a web development project. My available coding work displays a sufficient level of technical coding skill though it is a bit sparse and lacking presentation.

    If your interested or want more info or my work samples send me a email at neshselg@gmail.com

  24. Bassicallyboss says:

    It’s been mentioned a few times on here (for example, in Scott’s review of On the Road) that it’s much more difficult to get a job in the U.S. than it was 50-100 years ago. I don’t recall where exactly, but I think I’ve seen someone submit this as one argument for moving in a direction of less government regulation. After all, we expect it might be a hassle to get a high-skill job, but getting a job at a local gas station or Wal-mart ought to be a simple affair.

    However, it doesn’t seem like most of the hassle is directly due to government. Obviously, requiring that employees submit proof of citizenship/right-to-work is one such burden. But most of the rest seems to be due to corporate standardization. These are a few reasons I can conjecture for why a business might need to do so much more screening for minimally skilled work than in decades past:

    1: Fear that customers will sue the company for something bad an employee did.
    2: Risk of former employees will sue for wrongful termination makes it difficult to fire someone who does bad work or is otherwise a liability
    3: Risk of employees deliberately sabotaging the company (by stealing from the company, or trying to discourage customers as part of a personal vendetta).
    4: It’s more of a hassle to add a new employee to the pay schedule, for tax or banking reasons.
    5: A bigger company has more employees and therefore a greater risk that one of them will do something like 1-3. I.e., it’s not that the expected disutility-per-employee from 1-3 is any worse than in the past, but that a higher percentage of jobs are with nation-wide/multinational companies, and these companies find it more worthwhile to do additional screening/paperwork.
    6: In 1916, towns were smaller and managers were more likely to know employees personally prior to hiring them. Since that is no longer the case, managers’ discretion is less useful than in the past and the corporate screening process grew up as a replacement.
    7: The quality of the employee pool is lower. Could be because undesirable traits like drug use and psychological instability have risen in society as a whole while desirable ones like work ethic, and responsibility have declined. Or perhaps working at Wal-mart or McDonalds has lower status or relative wages than it used to, so a higher percentage of applicants to these jobs are those who can’t get a job elsewhere (presumably due to undesirable personal traits).

    Thoughts? I could see 1,2, and 4 (if true) being things the government could realistically be partially responsible for, but I expect that most of the reason is actually due to 3,5, and 7.

    • Nornagest says:

      If litigation is doing much of the work, then low-end employment should be higher in states where it’s harder to sue for wrongful termination. (We could look at at-will vs. non-at-will states as a first cut, though I suspect the difference there isn’t huge.)

      If it’s scaling effects, then that predicts it should be easier to get a job at Mom and Pop’s Corner Store than at the 7-11.

      Similarly, if it’s the size of the town, then it should be easier to get work in Bumfuck, Arizona than in Phoenix. (You’d need to control for the overall health of the economy, though, which could be tricky. A lot of small towns with high per-capita GDP are that way because they’re bedroom communities.)

      If it’s quality of employees, then we could look at local metrics for drug addiction, psychological admissions, etc.

      • Evan Þ says:

        “We could look at at-will vs. non-at-will states as a first cut…”

        There’s exactly one non-at-will state: Montana. Confounding effects would be huge from a single example.

        We could also try looking at at-will foreign countries, as a lot of people have tried already… but there’re also large confounding effects between the US and Europe.

    • John Schilling says:

      #1, 2, and 4 are attributable to government. Different tax policies, civil liability rules, etc give different results.

      #3 was as true 50-100 years ago as it is now, at least for the sorts of sabotage a low-skill worker could do, so if people could walk in off the street and get jobs then, something else must have changed. And that leaves the relevant parts of #5 in the government’s domain as well.

      #6 seems contradicted by the relative ease of getting a walk-in job while, er, On the Road, back in the day.

      #7 might be plausible, but if so the difference isn’t anyplace easy to verify like educational achievement.

      • James Picone says:

        Does US civil liability law really differ that much from 50-100 years ago?

        • John Schilling says:

          Not sure about the laws themselves, but the practice of civil liability law has changed dramatically. Prior to 1977, lawyers were not allowed to advertise their services in the United States. Lawsuits happened when someone was sufficiently aggrieved to go out of their way to look up a lawyer. Since 1977, lawsuits also happen when someone is watching TV and sees the nice man in a suit telling them they are entitled to $bignum because [X]. With this blatant change, the legal community’s mostly-informal distaste for lesser forms of barratry has been weakened and you also get more blatant sorts of ambulance-chasing.

        • The abolition of the requirement of privity about a century ago (by a court decision–MacPherson v. Buick) is one major change.

          A car dealer buys a car from G.M., sells it to you, something goes wrong with it that imposes costs on you. Under the old rule, you can sue the dealer, the dealer can sue G.M., but you can’t get damages from G.M. directly because you have no contractual relation with G.M. Now you can.

          My impression is that there were a lot of more minor changes in how the law was interpreted which affected things in the same direction, but I’m certainly not an expert.

    • Corey says:

      My guess (from the relatively job-market-privileged position of a programmer) is that short-term-ism in corporate governance has more or less killed on-the-job training. That is, employers will hold out until they have a drop-in replacement, however long that might take.

      In tech, you see this often in easily-mockable form – equivalents to “We can’t hire you because your experience is with Milwaukee sawzalls and we use DeWalt sawzalls here”. To be fair, I don’t know how common this is in jobs that involve actual sawzalls.

      I know a lot of business behavior is driven by lawsuit-aversion, but I wonder how rational that is – any company big enough to have more than a few locations is being constantly sued, over matters both frivolous and not, no matter what they do.

      Another factor is feedback loops applying to individuals – e.g. most (nontrivially-sized) employers check credit scores, so if you have financial difficulties that result in bad credit, it can be harder to get a job, leading to inability to fix bad credit, … Likewise, being out of the labor force for nontrivial amounts of time (say, 6 months) will cause most employers to insta-reject, so good luck getting back in…

      • Chalid says:

        short-term-ism in corporate governance has more or less killed on-the-job training

        surely part of it is increased willingness of employees to switch jobs, too? No sense training someone for 6 months when they’re going to get poached at the end of it.

        • Urstoff says:

          Which makes me wonder why new hire work contracts aren’t more common. Are they even legal?

          • Chalid says:

            IANAL, but my understanding is that you can’t make a contract that signs away the employee’s right to quit. You can create a noncompete, but that is unenforceable in some parts of the country.

            AFAICT deferred pay works, but seems to only be practical for the most lucrative jobs.

          • brad says:

            You can sign away your right to quit, it just isn’t enforceable by specific performance.

            In some industries it is a common occurrence for a company to have a contract that says “we’ll pay for your executive mba but then you need to work for us for three years. If you quit before then you need to pay us back for the mba.” That could be structured as a forgivable loan, but AFAIK it is perfectly enforceable as an ordinary contract.

    • Chalid says:

      Other hypotheses:

      Economic growth rates were higher 50-100 years ago than they are now, so labor would have been more in demand. (This would be my bet – I’d guess it was not harder to get a job in the 1990s boom than it was in Jack Kerouac’s day.)

      It takes more skill to do a “minimally-skilled” job today than it did in 1916. If this were true (I have no idea) it would have similar effects to #7.

      A variant of your #3 – it is easier for a bad employee to non-purposely destroy value for a firm than it used to be. One bad employee can destroy a whole team’s productivity. Tyler Cowen laid out an argument along these lines in The Great Stagnation.

      Minimum wage.

      Maybe it’s not actually harder to find work now. Jack Kerouac anecdotes are interesting but are not strong evidence.

    • Jiro says:

      If 1, 2, and 4 count as government, then 5 should also count as government, because 5 includes the risk of being 1 or 2.

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I agree that government policy could be affected by 5, but I disagree that it’s primarily an issue of government policy. 5 conjectures that there’s an economy of scale of sorts.

        Basically, there’s a certain per-employee risk of 1 or 2. If we assume that a more burdensome application process lowers this risk but has some cost (in management man-hours, for example) that grows less than linearly with a marginal application, then it’s plausible that there is some number of employees, N, below which a burdensome application process has negative utility, but above which it has positive utility.

        Government affecting 1 and 2 can change what value N has, but unless 1 and 2 disappear entirely as risks or become extremely likely for everyone, they can’t change whether N exists. 5 is the hypothesis that N exists, is greater than 0, and is finite. A bit pedantic, perhaps, but that was why I didn’t count it as an issue primarily of government policy. That may have been a mistake of categorization, as I do agree that government can influence the extent to which 5 is a factor.

    • JayT says:

      I think there are two major things the government does that makes it more difficult for companies to hire people as compared to 100 years ago.
      1) it’s much harder to fire a bad employee today then it was back then, so companies are more picky about adding new people on.
      2) The minimum wage. If you are only going to get $5 an hour of utility out of an employee, but employees cost $7.50 an hour, then you won’t hire them.

      A third issue is that now if you have too many employees then you have to offer health insurance, so there are also companies that will avoid hiring to avoid that.

      • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

        Increasing mandatory, non-wage payroll expenses, too.

      • Corey says:

        it’s much harder to fire a bad employee today then it was back then

        Is it, actually? Approximately every job is at-will, so no reason is necessary. Jobs are short-term, so it’s easy to just cut someone loose at the next layoff.

        Government policy has added more discrimination categories, but AFAIK it’s very difficult for an employee to win a wrongful-termination suit (especially if the company bundled said termination in with a group layoff).

      • John Schilling says:

        Approximately every job is at-will, so no reason [for firing someone] is necessary

        If your ex-employee says “I was fired because I was [insert protected class here]”, and your defense is “I fired them for no reason whatsoever”, I’m guessing you’re going to be writing them a rather large check in the near future.

        • Corey says:

          Every job requires employees to agree to binding arbitration at application time, and every layoff comes with severance pay contingent upon again waiving the right to sue. So someone would have to be confident enough in a win to turn down the severance pay, so it’s only deep-pocketed protected-class employees that are unfireable.

        • anonymous says:

          Most ridiculously absurd exaggeration of thread.

          That’s your second in a row after your recent insistence that “Jill” is a “communist”.

          Corporate can and will have everything it wants-
          but you overreach when you attempt to add victim status to your heap of prize and privilege.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      See Scott’s comment on his paranoid rant.

      • Anonymous says:

        Scott knows that the name-is-banned-from-mention-on-this-blog right-ist philosophy is correct. The left is about the psychological descendants of New England Puritans and Jews making sure that all avenues where you can succeed without high verbal intelligence are choked off. Hey, you can do anything if you can justify it to the left’s lawyers, right? Which works out great if you’re of the temperament to argue about things rather than do things.

        Don’t worry, he’ll never draw any conclusions from this, after all, he’s great at obfuscating the truth so even if the particulars may annoy him, the alternative is terrifying.

  25. Anonymous says:

    When I was a wee lad my parents would sometimes buy tang (or generic versions of it). I’ve been looking for similar in grocery stores in Germany nowadays and there’s nothing; if you want fruity water you have to carry the whole bottle of fruit juice from the store.

    Even if the powders got banned for unhealthy I would’ve expected demand to make it worthwhile to offer a replacement. The best alternative I’ve found are the multivitamine pills you dissolve in water, resulting in a fruity slightly fizzy drink. Are they the replacement for tang?

    • AlphaGamma says:

      Do fruity drinks sold as a concentrated liquid not exist in Germany? I think they’re more common than the powder versions in Europe.

    • John Schilling says:

      Not familiar with the German market, but for individual pouches of dehydrated beverage you might want to check a backpacking / outdoor-sports store.

    • Protagoras says:

      Powders are small, low mass, and so pretty ideal things to get by delivery. Have you checked out what Amazon has available?

    • Anonymous says:

      Thanks to everyone for replying. Yeah, I’ve already found them on Amazon, I was more curious about their disappearance from grocery stores since I would have expected the stuff to be in sufficient demand.

      Sports stores are an interesting idea, would’ve never thought of that.

  26. multiheaded says:

    Thank you, folks! Sincerely, thank you. My situation is… mostly safe and somewhat secure. It feels so great to be out and free! I will not forget this community’s kindness in my hour of need.

  27. Mengsk says:

    An Article in the New Yorker about Donnald Trumps Ghost Writer in the Art of the Deal. This certainly colors how I read Scott’s own review of the Art of the Deal, since the ghostwriter is giving his perspective on (and typically taking credit for) some of the passages in the book that Scott found the most compelling.

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Heh, I came here to post this!

    • Nornagest says:

      Interesting. Though when a writer draws a portrait of a guy as a brash, intuitive charmer, and then later draws another portrait of the guy as a thuggish, nepotistic manchild, you’ve gotta wonder how much of either one was drawn from life.

      If this had come out two years ago, maybe… but election season is not a time when I expect a lot of objectivity.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        Yeah, Schwartz reminds me of no one so much as David “Trust me, I lied” Brock.

      • anonce says:

        “If this had come out two years ago, maybe… but election season is not a time when I expect a lot of objectivity.”

        Nature equips the demagogue with an auto-therapeutic reassurance system, as seen here.

  28. Edward Scizorhands says:

    How can I tell if I am eating enough food?

    I know this is a weird problem to have, but through some determination and patience and luck, for the time being I am able to ignore hunger signals from my body, which would normally have me overeating.

    In the absence of hunger signals, what should I do to make sure I am eating enough food? The #1 risk that would return me to overeating is that my body gets me to panic that I’m going to starve. I need to able to logically convince myself that I am getting enough.

    Counting calories seems difficult, because a lot of my food is home-cooked without nutrition labels, and I wouldn’t know how to calibrate that number anyway.

    • Lumifer says:

      How can I tell if I am eating enough food?

      Being alive is a pretty good sign.

      Otherwise, watch your muscle mass (or bodyfat %). If it drops below what you want, you’re not eating enough food. It if doesn’t, you are.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      Counting calories isn’t that hard, there are a lot of apps or websites with extensive lists of nutrient information for any random ingredient or dish. Even Google will just tell you the calorie content of foods if you ask it to. It doesn’t need to be exact anyhow: not starving is an extremely low bar to clear, so even a cursory calorie count will be weirdly alliterative help confirm that you’re ok.

      As for hunger signals I’d suggest just pointedly ignoring them. It sounds dumb, but once you make it clear to yourself that you aren’t going to act on them they tend to go away. I’ve done that successfully in ketogenic diets with carb cravings and in intermittent fasting / time-restricted eating diets with day long fasts. You aren’t really in any danger and your body knows it, so you can get it to stop whining by denying it attention.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        As for hunger signals I’d suggest just pointedly ignoring them.

        I’ve gotten to that point, with luck and work. My body has mostly, but not completely, given up on trying to force me to eat. These days its best strategy is telling me “oh, you won’t be able to concentrate on work unless you give me some food! C’mon, just one little PB sandwich, then you will be fine until dinner.”

    • Glen Raphael says:

      In the absence of hunger signals, what should I do to make sure I am eating enough food?

      Get a Withings scale and weigh yourself daily. Have a target weight range, look at the charts occasionally and resolve to eat “more” of whatever you’re eating if the trendline seems alarming.

    • Anonymous says:

      Calorie counting is about the only way to do it. There are various apps and things to help if you’re into that. Get a kitchen scale.

      I wouldn’t know how to calibrate that number anyway.

      This requires measurement also. Get a bathroom scale. Many of those apps have the ability to input your weight over time, automatically perform some smoothing/averaging, and give you a calorie target to shoot for depending on what your goal is (cutting/maintaining/bulking).

      • Eric Rall says:

        I’ll second the kitchen scale recommendation. If you have and use a kitchen scale and know how to use a good tracker app, it’s a lot easier to count calories for home-cooked meals than for restaurant food.

      • Lumifer says:

        Frankly, I see no point in counting calories. You are interested in the net energy balance and unless you measure energy expenditure (which is quite inconvenient to do), the sum of calories in the food you consume isn’t a terribly useful number.

        • Nornagest says:

          Weight gain, loss, or maintenance is an equation with two free terms. There aren’t any really good ways to nail down the TDEE term (algorithms exist for estimating it, but they kinda suck and are more useful as a starting point than as gospel), so you count calories to establish a firm value for the other. From there you can modify your intake (or activity levels, but intake is easier) until you see the desired effects.

          (ETA: accidentally edited instead of replying, reconstructing this comment from memory)

          • Lumifer says:

            But why don’t you just directly observe the targeted variable (weight, or better bodyfat %) and modify your intake based on what it does?

          • Nornagest says:

            That’s what you’re doing. The issue is that you can’t reliably modify your intake if you aren’t measuring it in any way — it’s really easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re eating more, or less, than you actually are.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Nornagest

            I don’t think you need to measure your intake in order to modify it. It’s just a laggy control dial and you don’t really need to calibrate it. If you want less bodyfat, eat less. If it not working well, eat less. If it’s still not working well, eat less. You can do this kind of control without any measurements.

          • Johnjohn says:

            “Eat less” is a meaningless concept if you’re not counting calories.
            It’s not the actual volume of food that makes you fat. Unless you’re eating sludge (or Soylent), knowing what to eat less off is not completely obvious. It doesn’t take a lot of peanut butter to tip the scale

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Johnjohn

            I don’t agree. I have little trouble modifying my food consumption without any calorie counting.

            In practice I basically use two “dials” to adjust. One is the feeling of hunger/satiety. If, for example, I’m trying to eat less I will make it so I’m hungry more often and for longer. The other one is the when-and-how of eating: for example, I might decide that there will be no midnight snacks, or that at social events I will not eat if I’m not hungry even if there’s free and tasty food all around.

            It works well for me, but YMMV, of course.

    • Corey says:

      A veteran of calorie-counting diets here.
      To calibrate calorie counting, just measure and track weight. A 500-calorie daily deficit will translate to a pound of fat loss per week. You could start with a nice round 2000 and go from there.

      To see where weight is going, use a moving average, since ~11lb of stuff goes through a typical human body in a day. I’ve successfully used “today’s average = 0.9*(yesterday’s average) + 0.1*(today’s weight)” with the first entry for average being the first weight.

      It should be fine for anyone to lose a pound a week; I wouldn’t go faster than 2lb a week (measured by moving average) without consulting a physician.

      A delicious(?) irony(?): it’s easy to count calories on fast food because the ingredients and portion sizes are rigidly controlled. Home cooking’s actually not so bad either. Full-service-restaurant meals are impossible to count and it’s best to assume that any such meal has a calorie count of “too many”.

      • AspiringRationalist says:

        Many of the big chain sit-down restaurants post calorie counts on their websites, and calorie country apps often let you select those menu items. Even if you ready at smaller restaurants, you can still use the numbers from the big chains as rough approximations.

        I personally find calorie counting too burdensome to do regularly, but very occasionally tracking everything I eat for one day helps me calibrate my intuition about calories. I can estimate how many I’m getting based on how much more or less I’m eating than I did on a day that I tracked.

        I also second the recommendation to weigh yourself regularly and maintain a target range.

    • Anonanon says:

      I can guarantee training yourself to ignore hunger signals will eventually lead to terrible results, just like ignoring other important warnings.

    • Eric Rall says:

      For me, a short-term episode of “not enough food” without associated hunger signals tends to show other symptoms (lightheadedness, irritability, a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach, etc). Monitor yourself and figure out if you get similar early-warning symptoms.

      Some other heuristics:

      1. When you’re not getting enough food on a medium-term basis, your metabolism slows down to compensate. An easily-recognizable symptom of this is if the tip of your nose is noticeably cool to the touch without an obvious environmental reason for it to be cold.

      2. Try doing some form of exercise (pushups, sprints, a weightlifting set, etc). If you run out of steam before you’d normally expect to (you need to establish a baseline in order to judge this), you’re probably hungry, tired, or stressed.

      3. Eat a bite of a snack you neither strongly like nor strongly dislike (raw carrots fill this role pretty well for me). If you find yourself craving more a minute or two later, you’re probably not eating enough.

      In the long run, your best bet is to weigh yourself regularly and monitor the trend line. If you’re losing more than two pounds a week on an ongoing basis (assuming you’re trying to lose weight), you’re not eating enough. If you’re just trying to maintain your weight, any sustained deviation beyond your normal noise range (establish this by tracking the highest and lowest numbers you regularly see on the scale) is a warning sign that you’re eating too much or too little.

    • Jill says:

      Geneen Roth writes some good books like Feeding the Hungry Heart, about seeming “hunger signals” that are actually due to emotions or emotional needs. They are mostly geared toward women. But it is a big problem for people who overeat, in American society, where most of us are fairly compulsive and addictive in various ways.

      If one uses food for emotional release, here are some alternative emotional release methods. And of course, exercise, getting a friend who will listen to you vent, and other types of emotional release are possible.

      Here is an Eye Movement Therapy you tube. It’s sort of like watching a tennis game. You follow the green light with your eyes. Some people like it with the sound on, some with it off. The idea is to experience one’s distress and then to let it pass on through your body and and out of it. So the standard way of doing it is to let distressing feelings or thoughts occur in one’s experience, or even to “wallow in them”, rather than to try to avoid them, while doing this.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DALbwI7m1vM

      This is just one of the EMDR youtubes. Just type in EMDR or eye movement therapy into youtube.com to get others, if this one doesn’t suit you.

      Here’s an article about EMDR.
      http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/emdr-trauma/399650/

      There’s also self tapping of acupressure points—Emotional Freedom Technique—a different technique for the same purpose, here.

      http://bradyates.net/videos.html

      There are affirmations he says with the tapping. If you like them, you say them with him. If you don’t like them, you turn the sound off.

      The theories of how these 2 methods work are different. But I suspect that they actually work in similar ways.

      • I’ve read a number of Geneen Roth’s books, and found them interesting and plausible.

        However, when I looked at her life as described in her books, I decided to never read anything of hers again. Arguably, it might be more sensible to reread her books carefully and thoughtfully to figure out what she’s gotten wrong and what I was missing, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do that.

        She had a theory of how to lose weight. Carefully figure out what you want to eat, then eat the least tolerable amount of it. I found that if I tried it, just taking the edge off of being hungry left me feeling hungry again inconveniently soon.

        However, Roth lost weight. Life was good. Then it turned out that she had a yeast infection, and peanut butter was one of the few foods that didn’t feed the yeast. In other words, figuring out exactly what you want to eat isn’t a good guide for what keeps you healthy/ what doesn’t make you sick.

        Also, she gained weight.

        Then she figured out an emotionally challenging way of losing weight. Sorry, I don’t remember the details. She set up workshops for her emotionally challenging method of losing weight, and made a bunch of money.

        She lost all the money to Bernie Madoff, and wrote a book about connections between emotional issues and money problems.

        It’s possible that she just has bad luck, but I suspect she’s making some fundamental errors I can’t see, and I don’t want the risk of amplifying those mistakes if I’m making them.

    • Tek Tek says:

      >Counting calories seems difficult, because a lot of my food is home-cooked without nutrition labels,

      Step 1.

      Start buying food with nutrition labels.

      Step 2.

      Buy measuring cups and spoons

      Step 3.

      Start following recipies and use a calculator.

      If you live in America, im mostly shocked most of the food you have is without nutrition labels. Unless you are organic-from-the-source mania, it should not be hard to adapt.

      Oh, and listin to anonanon

      “I can guarantee training yourself to ignore hunger signals will eventually lead to terrible results, just like ignoring other important warnings.”

      Unless you were really worried about being overweight, don’t do that.

      • Lumifer says:

        If you live in America, im mostly shocked most of the food you have is without nutrition labels.

        LOL. Let’s see. Fruits and veggies, no nutrition labels. Meat, chicken, fish, no nutrition labels.

        Oh, you mean various cans and boxes? That’s not food.

        • Virbie says:

          Given the context of the discussion, the only relevant part of the nutrition label is the calorie count.

          > LOL. Let’s see. Fruits and veggies, no nutrition labels. Meat, chicken, fish, no nutrition labels.

          Fruits and vegetables are (generally) low-calorie enough that the error from Googling “granny smith apple calories” is going to be inconsequential. Meat, poultry and fish are either bought packaged or with a label stuck on specifying the weight, and the calories are again easily googlable.

          • Lumifer says:

            I can certainly find out the caloric and nutrient content of almost everything I eat. What I was snorting at is the horror (“I’m mostly shocked”) of buying food without standard nutrition labels as, in fact, most of the food I buy comes without them.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            A bunch of stuff goes into the pot to cook. Portions come out to be shared among the family. My wife would go nuts if I was walking behind her asking just what she was adding.

            I’m trying for approximations and experimenting with calorie-counter apps nonetheless. “SparkPeople” seems close to what I want but it is also loaded with visual noise, with filling my food log with “sample menus” of stuff I’m not eating.

    • Virbie says:

      > I know this is a weird problem to have, but through some determination and patience and luck, for the time being I am able to ignore hunger signals from my body, which would normally have me overeating.

      I have a fairly similar issue atm. Skipping meals and ignoring hunger pangs was always easy for me when necessary, but over the course of an 8-month backpacking sabbatical I abused the crap out of this ability to the point that I basically stopped feeling hunger signals once I got back (about 1.5 mos ago). I’ve also started cooking regularly since the job that I left before my trip used to feed me all week and I’d eat at restaurants all weekend, so I’m trying to get in the habit of doing groceries and cooking regularly. Luckily enough, this also allows me to keep a reasonably precise account of how many calories I eat, along with keeping an eye on the scale and physical symptoms for undereating. A couple more weeks of this and I feel like I’ll have a reasonable level of confidence in the acceptable range of calories I can eat (currently it seems like ~1900 is maintenance for me and I can eat as low as 1500 on any given day without it bothering me).

      > Counting calories seems difficult, because a lot of my food is home-cooked without nutrition labels, and I wouldn’t know how to calibrate that number anyway.

      I’ve home-cooked almost every meal for the last month, in large part because it’s by far the easiest way to get a sense of how many calories I eat[1]. Is there a reason you’re having trouble counting these? Just add up the calories of the ingredients and skip ingredients that are probably negligible (e.g. baby spinach).

      [1] Obviously short of only eating pre-prepared microwaveable meals or whatever, but eating only pre-prepared meals seems like the most unpleasant of all options.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I’m not necessarily the one who does cooking at home. But maybe I don’t need to track as closely as I think I do. Putting in a generic “chicken-and-veggie stirfry” entry might work. Of course, the app that I’m working with tracks that by “servings,” not volume or mass.

    • Mary says:

      I will, just to make your life more complicated, point out that calorie cutting doesn’t cut it. You probably need to pay attention to your micro and macro nutrients, too.

      Mind you, a broad-brush approach, like that to calories suggested above will probably cut it.

  29. Dr Dealgood says:

    SC Science & Scholarship Commentary Thread
    ~SSCience~

    What is this?
    > A lot of us come from academic backgrounds, or just occasionally stumble across interesting research, and think “what will people at SSC make of this?” Well now there’s a place to find that without reading 84 quadrillion comments first. Just Ctrl+F and search for ~ S S C i e n c e ~ without spaces.

    How does it work?
    > On the fractional Open Threads commenters are welcome to post links to and suggest for consideration any articles, and I will put an updated list of those suggestions in the top-level post for each.
    > During the integer Open Thread, I will select one article from the list for general discussion.

    Who can participate?
    > Everyone! Just read the article you plan to comment on or suggest, at least past the Abstract, and then feel free to post away.

    How do we keep it from descending into murderous anarchy?
    > This thread is strictly apolitical: even if you think an article has “policy implications,” this is not the appropriate place to discuss them. Violators will be drawn and quartered.

    Suggested Articles:
    1. Alliteration suggested the preprint study Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States, in the 53.25 Open Thread.
    2. Ilyusha suggested the extremely bizarre study Does comedy kill? A retrospective, longitudinal cohort, nested case–control study of humour and longevity in 53 British comedians, in Links 7/16.
    3. I suggested Enhanced Longevity by Ibuprofen, Conserved in Multiple Species, Occurs in Yeast through Inhibition of Tryptophan Import in the 53.5 Open Thread
    4. keranih suggested Executive Decision-Making in the Domestic Sheep in the 53.5 Open Thread

    Article chosen for today’s discussion is Executive Decision-Making in the Domestic Sheep, suggested by keranih.

    • Lumifer says:

      So far my favourite sentence in the paper is: “Welsh Mountain sheep… were naïve to cognitive testing”

      • Bassist Pig says:

        It does read in an amusing way. I assume you already know this, but in case you don’t:

        In academic paper jargon, “naive to” means “not exposed to concepts or research experiences in a way that would introduce bias”.

        So, sheep that are naive to cognitive testing means sheep that haven’t been put through experiments and therefore are not acclimated to either the experimental or control conditions.

    • Guy says:

      Suggestion for next time, before I read about sheep: Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle with Distant Supernovae.

    • Skivverus says:

      “New Zealand gradually develops an outsized reputation as the place to go for higher-order cognitive research”.

      Edit: okay, that might read as political rather than mildly humorous. Hm.
      At any rate, I might be overly credulous in general, but the study does seem plausible to me; can’t speak to the Huntington’s Disease end of things though.

    • Ilyushechka says:

      Distilling the US Census Bureau’s “Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012” (document P20-575), we find that three-of-ten women are bearing six-of-ten children (rounded to nearest integers). Discussion points that arise include:

      (1) Don’t these numbers indicate that the human genome presently is under strong selection pressure (nowadays, just as it always has been)?

      (2) Aren’t these large reproductive differentials evident in all genders, ethnic groups, all nations, all religions, and all wealth-levels (nowadays, just as they always have been)?

      (3) Wouldn’t increased selection for any one trait (ratiocination for example) necessarily be correlated to decreased selection for the remaining traits (empathy for example)?

      (4) In particular, isn’t it scientifically credible that we humans already are about as smart as hominids can evolve to be, without becoming concomitantly worse parents overall?

      (5) After all, doesn’t basic thermodynamics already stress human DNA repair mechanisms to their informatic limits (ouch)?

      (6) So perhaps there’s not much coding-space available for further genetic optimization, isn’t that plausible?

      (7) Isn’t it credible, therefore, that existing human courtship-and-reproductive mores are (like democracy in Churchill’s famous phrase) “the worst of all systems for hominid reproduction, except for every other system that has ever been tried”?

      (8) So isn’t the following proposition credibly grounded in “~SSCience~”?

      Resolved  Our best practices — both as individuals and as collective cultures — are simply to make the best use of our own innate resources, and to deal with our fellow humans with all the empathy and compassion (and good humor) that we can muster.

      The above “~SSCience~” considerations are offered with a view toward refuting various dystopian forms of moral apartheid that (nowadays especially) are deplorably evident as metastasizing cankers at the repugnant hearts of many ideological ‘isms’.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        I’m honestly not really sure what you’re saying, although that could be because I’m very very tired. I will reread this in the morning and try to get a better grasp.

        Anyway, I appreciate the use of the S S C i e n c e tag for rhetorical purposes but I would appreciate it if you left the tildes off next time or inserted spaces. Like the n e w tag, this is supposed to help people easily find the thread. Having it quoted repeatedly makes searching for it unnecessarily more difficult.

        • Lumifer says:

          Hmm… “~ S S C i e n c e ~ ” looks very much like the Slytherin version of science pronounced with a Parseltongue accent. There are even stylized serpents surrounding it : -/

        • Ilyushechka says:

          Dr Dealgood says:  “I’m honestly not really sure what you’re saying.”

          It boils down to “science against racism.”

          Expressed as an enumerated list of eight tough-but-natural questions, `cuz racist cognition is specialist to avoid even asking these tough-but-natural scientific questions. … much less answering them. Isn’t it?

      • Nornagest says:

        1 is plausible. 2 is non-obvious, but plausible if you allow a reasonable level of variation. 3 is only true if you hold selection pressure constant, which we have no reason to. 4 is speculative. 5 is also pretty speculative as far as I know, though a related concept is true (the constraints are related to mutational load, and only indirectly to DNA repair), and irrelevant to 4 either way: genome size is not directly related to intelligence. 6 is speculative, 7 is wildly speculative, and the answer to 8 is “no”.

        More generally, you can spin an evolutionary just-so story for just about anything by picking your facts well. Evolutionary arguments get pretty shaky once you add more than a step or two of implication, and here you’re proposing eight; I haven’t seen that many in e.g. the sketchiest evopsych arguments for gender roles, and I have a feeling you’d reject those.

        Oh, and I’m still pretty sure you’re John Sidles.

        • Ilyushechka says:

          Nornagest observes  “You can spin an evolutionary just-so story for just about anything”.

          Didn’t Theodosius Dobzhansky say pretty much the same thing way back in 1973? Specifically in Dobzhansky’s much-cited and much-quoted essay of the same title?

          Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

          Appreciated as a biological phenomenon, doesn’t racist cognition — like many other forms of denialist cognition — make so little rational sense, so little scientific sense, and so little moral sense, that its prevalence across cultures and centuries requires Dobzhansky-type evolutionary explanations?

          For example, how else can we understand the ongoing phenomenon of the Trumpocalypse?

          As a mode of political cognition, isn’t it true that “Trumpicination” makes zero rational sense, zero scientific sense, and zero moral sense?

          Further Readings

          Sociobiologist Ed Wilson’s novel Anthill (2010) is an extended and scientifically informed Dobzhanskyian parable upon the evolutionary roots and practical consequences of cognitive modes that are irrational, unscientific, and amoral.

          Appreciated in this progressive evolutionary light, Anthill provides a gratifyingly illuminating and enjoyable reading experience … remarkably so, for a first novel that was written when Ed Wilson was 81! 🙂

          • Anonanon says:

            John, you really need to change your style if you want to stop getting banned.

          • Ilyushechka says:

            Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus?

            A prudent Chief
                not always must display
            His Pow’rs in equal Ranks,
                and fair Array,
            But with th’ Occasion
                and the Place comply,
            Conceal his Force,
                nay seem sometimes to Fly.
            Those oft are Stratagems
                which Errors seem,
            Nor is it Homer Nods,
                but We that Dream.

            A principle that savvy politicians like “Hillary Potter” — slogan: “Let’s Make America Hufflepuff Again” — understand full well! 🙂

          • Ilyushechka says:

            Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus?

            A prudent Chief
                  not always must display
            His Pow’rs in equal Ranks,
                  and fair Array,
            But with th’ Occasion
                  and the Place comply,
            Conceal his Force,
                  nay seem sometimes to Fly.
            Those oft are Stratagems
                  which Errors seem,
            Nor is it Homer Nods,
                  but We that Dream.

            A principle that Hillary Potter — “Let’s Make America Hufflepuff Again!” — seemingly appreciates full well! 🙂

          • FacelessCraven says:

            From the provided link:

            “His language achieves poetic transcendence when describing “the decency of ants,” whose disabled members “leave and trouble no more.” When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents — with the least long-term utility remaining to them — become the most suicidally aggressive, “obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.””

            Such empathy.

            “Appreciated as a biological phenomenon, doesn’t racist cognition — like many other forms of denialist cognition-”

            Racism is wearing the wrong hairstyle. Denialism is a memory longer than a decade. If you want a conversation, starting it with name-calling isn’t the best idea.

            ” — make so little rational sense, so little scientific sense, and so little moral sense, that its prevalence across cultures and centuries requires Dobzhansky-type evolutionary explanations?”

            Maybe. Maybe not. There’s been a large, interesting and highly productive thread addressing the first two points. You’ve added nothing of substance to it.

            “For example, how else can we understand the ongoing phenomenon of the Trumpocalypse? As a mode of political cognition, isn’t it true that “Trumpicination” makes zero rational sense, zero scientific sense, and zero moral sense?”

            Sadly, Trump supporters are too stupid and brain-sick to understand that your opinions are right and theirs are wrong. If only they had as much empathy as you do, they’d see how they should abandon their own thoughts and feelings and embrace yours, and grow to appreciate the specific type of diversity you find personally convinient while militantly suppressing their various and wrong ways of thinking, feeling and living.

            “A principle that Hillary Potter — “Let’s Make America Hufflepuff Again!” — seemingly appreciates full well!”

            In all honesty, good luck with that.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Anonanon says:

            John, you really need to change your style if you want to stop getting banned.

            I don’t mind the style, I just wish he had some substance to go with the word count.

          • Ilyushechka says:

            Ed Wilson remarks a phenomenon familiar to all:

            “Nowhere do people tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country … or their creation myth. […] Our leaders, religious, political, and business, mostly accept supernatural explanations of human existence. […] Scientists who might contribute to a more realistic worldview are especially disappointing. Largely yeoman, they are intellectual dwarves content to stay within the narrow specialities for which they were trained and are paid.”

            Doesn’t every ‘ism’ has its own creation myths?

            For example, what are the creation myths of rationalism? One such myth is the myth that human cognition factually is, logically could be, or morally should be, primarily a process of ratiocination.

            Needless to say, no very strong foundations for rationalism’s “creation myth” of ratiocination-as-cognition are evident modern-day neuroanatomy, psychiatry, pharmacology, sociology, complexity theory, or evolutionary biology.

            To the contrary, isn’t it strikingly evident, that even the AI disciplines are trending sharply away from 20th century paradigms of ratiocination-as-cognition, on the pragmatic grounds that the transhumanly skilled game-play of algorithms like Google’s AlphaGo are achieved without any foundations in ratiocination whatsoever?

            The so-called “AI Winter” therefore can be retrospectively appreciated as an “Empathic Winter”, can’t it? Whereas modern-day algorithms like AlphaGo are succeeding by their in-depth emulation, not of human ratiocination, but rather of human empathic cognition?

            As for “Trumpicination”, with its strikingly non-empathic focus upon “negotiating great deals” — this being “the narrow speciality for which Trump has been trained and is paid” — why should we expect that Trumpism’s unempathic brand of deal-centric leadership will prove more effective than any other ‘ism’ of any other “intellectual dwarf” or any other “narrowly trained yoeman”?

            On these broad scientific grounds, aren’t the empathy-centric concerns of Trump’s critics well-grounded?

            In a nutshell, isn’t empathy nowadays increasingly surpassing ratiocination, across the entire domain and range of cognitive activities and capabilities &helliop; including even strongholds of ratiocination like machine intelligence?

            ———
            As for the founding myth of modern-day progressivism, that’s easy:  “We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal” … an empathic principle that is foundational to modern-day progressive economics, politics, and moral philosophy 🙂

          • Nornagest says:

            Didn’t Theodosius Dobzhansky say pretty much the same thing way back in 1973? Specifically in Dobzhansky’s much-cited and much-quoted essay of the same title?

            No, he did not.

          • Ilyushechka says:

            In a unifying vein, wasn’t it great this week to witness arch-conservative SF writer Jerry Pournelle raising (albeit belatedly) some common-sense empathy-centric anti-capitalist questions?

            “What was conserved by turning Detroit into a wasteland? How was that conservative?”

            Pournelle’s questions share common-sense ground with the empathy-centric economic perspectives of arch-progressive Wendell Berry’s 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities “It All Turns on Affection” (2012).

            In his deeply personal yet humanely universal Jefferson Lecture, Berry sets forth an empathy-centric yet rationalism-friendly progressive worldview whose foundational tenets are explicitly Pournelle-compatible

            Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons.

            But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion.

            The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it — love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence — have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful.

            When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

            Needless to say, Berry’s gently humorous empathy-centric rationalism-compatible Pournelle-friendly progressive worldview is playing mighty well with local voters! 🙂

            So are empathic grounds emerging, for common cause between Pournelle-style conservatism and Berry-style progressivism? Yah, sure, you betcha. And you read it first, here on SSC! 🙂

          • John Schilling says:

            “What was conserved by turning Detroit into a wasteland? How was that conservative?”

            What was conserved by turning Appalachia into a wasteland?

            If we are to restrict, tax, or otherwise disincentivize making private trades with Japanese and Korean automakers, on account of finding a better way to deliver automobiles to Americans who want them cannot justify the destruction of an American auto-making community, should we not also restrict, tax, or otherwise disincentivize the development of solar power and other new energy technologies on the grounds that finding a better way to deliver electricity to Americans who want it cannot justify the destruction of an American coal-mining community?

            The conservation of specific corporations, towns, and the like, when there is no further economic need for them, is the lowest form of conservatism.

          • Ilyushechka says:

            John Schilling wonders  “What was conserved by turning Appalachia into a wasteland?”

            There’s no shortage of Appalachians who have awakened to a realization that the common-sense answer is “nothing at all“.

            John Schilling asserts [utterly wrongly as it seems to me and many]  “The conservation of specific corporations, towns, and the like, when there is no further economic need for them, is the lowest form of conservatism.”

            Doesn’t this assertion presuppose a total ordering of “economic need”? Aren’t today’s globalized market economies computer-imposing a total ordering upon human activities that intrinsically lack any such ordering?

            As Terry Tao’s much-cited/much-admired essay “What is good mathematics?” (2007) reminds us:

            “The concept of mathematical quality is a high-dimensional one, and lacks an obvious canonical total ordering.”

            If lack-of-ordering is characteristic of “mathematical quality”, how much more characteristic is it of “economic value”?

            In short, total ordering of economic value amounts to totalitarian ordering of economic value. Common sense and high-quality mathematics alike require that we just say “no” to it!

            ——
            Francis Spufford’s hilarious yet math-friendly and history-respecting novella Red Plenty (2010) is recommended remedial reading for those SSC readers who are seeking to escape the ideological grip of the fantasy of economic total ordering.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          “On these broad scientific grounds, aren’t the empathy-centric concerns of Trump’s critics well-grounded?”

          not really, no.

          “In a nutshell, isn’t empathy nowadays increasingly surpassing ratiocination, across the entire domain and range of cognitive activities and capabilities &helliop; including even strongholds of ratiocination like machine intelligence?”

          nope.

          “As for the founding myth of modern-day progressivism, that’s easy: “We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal” … an empathic principle that is foundational to modern-day progressive economics, politics, and moral philosophy”

          The bright future is nigh, just over this next heap of skulls…

          • Ilyushechka says:

            Perhaps The Apotheosis of Seattle is 100+ years more topical?

            Gosh, the visual conjunction of front-and-center US flags, the Holy Bible, portraits of Lincoln and Washington, stirring patriotic music, and magnificent fireworks sure looks familiar!

            In a similar vein, wasn’t the Trumpistas’ hysterically chanted desire to imprison progressive female opponents grounded in mortal political/religious passions that North Americans last experienced circa 1660?

            Are these aspects of the Trumpocalypse acting to unravel three centuries of the Enlightenment? The world wonders!

          • FacelessCraven says:

            “Perhaps The Apotheosis of Seattle is 100+ years more topical?”

            Nope. What do Klansmen have to do with the Republican party or Trump? On the other hand, if you want to law claim to the mantle of the Enlightenment, you should answer for the Enlightenment’s considerable crimes.

            “Gosh, the visual conjunction of front-and-center US flags, the Holy Bible, portraits of Lincoln and Washington, stirring patriotic music, and magnificent fireworks sure looks familiar!”

            Nope.

            “In a similar vein, wasn’t the Trumpistas’ hysterically chanted desire to imprison progressive female opponents grounded in mortal political/religious passions that North Americans last experienced circa 1660?”

            Nope.

            “Hysterical”, “mortal political/religious passions”. Those are terms I would say better fit the side that has actually, repeatedly attacked its opponents in mass on the streets. The side that justified such attacks by pointing out that their opponents were evil and thus had it coming. The side that has actually spawned a legit assassination attempt on the opposing candidate. But hey, I’m just a brainsick, low-empathy trump supporter.

            “Are these aspects of the Trumpocalypse acting to unravel three centuries of the Enlightenment?”

            The Enlightenment defeats itself. It is founded on the pursuit of progress that is impossible to achieve via its methods. Then it kills whole heaps of people trying to make progress happen anyway. Then it dies and is replaced by dictatorship, which kills heaps more.

            “The world wonders!”

            How many people you got in there?

          • Ilyushechka says:

            FacelessCraven deposes:  “I am a brainsick, low-empathy Trump supporter.”

            Fortunately there is reasonably strong scientific evidence that low-empathy cognition is a remediable condition.

            Specifically in regard to clinical contexts — experienced either as practitioners or as patients — SSC readers may find the recent scientific literature on “Balint groups” to be of interest.

            See for example Airagnes et alAppropriate training based on Balint groups can improve the empathic abilities of medical students: A preliminary study” (2014), or Andrew Elder’s “The still point of the turning world? Building on Balint: a personal view” (2015), or Roy, Vanheule, and Inslegers’ “Research on Balint groups: a literature review” (2015); there is also an informative biographical sketch by Michelle Ricaud titled “Michael Balint: an introduction” (2002).

            All paywalled, alas. 🙁

  30. In the review of Albion’s Seed, you called Borderer place names “Orcish.” Is that in Blake’s sense or Tolkien’s?

  31. Bassist Pig says:

    To resolve a dispute with my wife, I need recommendations for each of the following for both Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel:

    – Best album
    – Most representative album

    PS. Where’s the “hide thread” button gone to?

      • Bassist Pig says:

        The hide button was gone when I first opened the page, I swear! The markup buttons weren’t there either.

        Now everything’s back where it was. Problem was probably on my end.

    • Redland Jack says:

      Best Album Peter Gabriel – “Melt”

      Most Representative Peter Gabriel – His style changed pretty significantly, so it’s hard to say, but maybe “So”?

      Best Album Peter Gabriel-era Genesis – “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”

      Most Representative Peter Gabriel-era Genesis – “Selling England by the Pound”

      Best Album Phil Collins – ??

      Best Album Phil Collins-era Genesis – “Duke” (though I’d probably consider that the Rutherford/Banks-era, Phil was starting to make his influence felt)

      Most Representative Phil Collins-era Genesis – “Duke” (bridges the early years of Phil Collins as singer, when it was more Rutherford/Banks with the later Genesis albums, where it was very much Phil Collins driven)

      • Agronomous says:

        Yeah, “Melting Faces” from 1980 is Gabriel’s best: Biko, Family Snapshot, Games without Frontiers.

        “Security” (1982) is a close runner-up: San Jacinto, Shock the Monkey.

        I think of “Plays Live” as representative, but I guess only of his early stuff.

        The best Phil Collins album is any one that doesn’t contain “Sussudio”. “Face Value” is my favorite.

        The most representative Phil Collins album is probably “No Jacket Required”—the one with (sigh) “Sussudio”.

    • Anonymous says:

      The Hide button necessarily requires javascript. It gratuitously requires cookies.

  32. Anonymous says:

    I’m glad you helped a single russian person to get out of here, but note that you really can’t do much about millions upon millions of people left here that hate their life due to various legit reasons.

    Also if you look at the situation objectively it turns our Russia is in the middle on human development spectrum. There are much, much worse places on this planet. India and Africa look like much closer approximation of hell than russia to me.

    Individual “feel good” solutions won’t work here. It looks like the most humane way to end this misery ASAP would be re-colonization of third world (including my country, Russia) by western powers, and forceful indoctrination of population with western values. Sadly, this solution requires way too much political will and funding, it is really a fantasy in our world where Realpolitik is the dominant attitude of western leaders. The probability of such scenario is similar to probability of solving humanity’s problems with AI, if not less.

    TL:DR: There is no fast way to make 6 billion of third-worlders live a decent life, unless you chose to throw away politically correct bullshit and recolonize these countries, purging all the tin-pot dictatorships. Many parts of the world are hundreds of years behind in development. You can’t solve it fast without using force.

    • Lumifer says:

      re-colonization of third world (including my country, Russia) by western powers, and forceful indoctrination of population with western values

      That was a popular idea about 25 years ago. No one stepped forward to be a test subject, so the US volunteered Iraq for that. I guess you know how it worked.

      The problem is that the West nowadays is less than competent. It’s certainly a better place to live than Russia/India/etc. but its capability to get shit done is not as good as you might think.

      • Anonymous says:

        Iraq wasn’t a strictly humanitarian project, it looked like a more convoluted affair that wasn’t really meant to make iraw a prosperous western country. Also note that true colonization forbids democracy run by native people, at least initially, to ensure that reforms won’t be undone.

        >The problem is that the West nowadays is less than competent.
        I agree. It’s a sad reality that west became weaker. Maybe end of cold war has something to do with it. Or maybe its a sign of stalling technological progress (see timeline http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm )

        >It’s certainly a better place to live than Russia/India/etc.
        Life in russia is not that bad if you conform to prevalent ideology, it’s way better than India.
        It’s actually quite scary – the spectrum of human development is so enormously vast, and yet at each point of this spectrum there are people depressed about their life. Even in the richest country of the world – US.

      • ChetC3 says:

        The West was never that competent. The West of yesteryear had much lower standards, and their modern admirers are usually only familiar with a greatest hits version of their track record.

        • Lumifer says:

          The West was never that competent.

          The West was competent enough to get itself to a clearly better place than Russia, India, China, etc.

          • ChetC3 says:

            Which has no relevance to whether the West used to be better at nation building than it is today.

        • Sandy says:

          Yeah, the presumption of competence is required to explain how the tiny British Isles wound up ruling half the world.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history (thanks Wikipedia!) and was presumably competent at invading places. But they weren’t very competent at e.g. inventing new technology, or producing great art etc. (as far as I know). Is it not possible that Britain could have been similar?

          • Sandy says:

            @sweenyrod: The Mongols were, however, competent for quite a while at maintaining and running the largest contiguous land empire in history. They improvised systems that suited their needs, like vast, rigorously charted trade routes and the yam system of communication. If they couldn’t come up with a new system or technology themselves, they borrowed it from their Turkic, Chinese or Russian subjects. Is art necessary to run an empire? Is technology, especially when you can just take it from your Chinese subjects?

            If the issue is basically “Was any Western power ever competent enough to colonize the third world and forcibly indoctrinate them with Western values?”, then the answer is clearly yes, because the Anglo-Saxon models of law, justice and parliamentary democracy are still used extensively in countries that have no Anglo-Saxon population to speak of.

            We know that the British were quite competent at technological innovation — see the Industrial Revolution and their famed navy. They were also quite competent at producing great art, because everyone in the world reads Shakespeare. And they were quite competent at crafting bureaucracies and models to run society, because, again, so many of their former colonies still follow models created and/or promoted by the British.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            My point is that unless you were a Mongol, it was better to live in the Abbasid Caliphate than the Khanate. So just because the Mongols were good at conquering (and possibly managing) their empire doesn’t mean we should try to replicate it.

            I think I bungled my analogy. Proper analogy: the same thing applies to the British Empire. I agree that the British Empire had many positive effects, and so did Dadabhai Naoroji, who accused the Empire of draining money from India, but also admitted that it had built valuable infrastructure. But it is still possible (and a widely held view) that overall imperialism had a negative effect.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ sweeneyrod

            unless you were a Mongol, it was better to live in the Abbasid Caliphate than the Khanate.

            Citation needed. I don’t know enough about the relevant history to have an opinion, but it doesn’t sound as obvious to me as it does to you. For one thing, the Mongols were known to be hands-off rulers and caliphs not so much.

          • “For one thing, the Mongols were known to be hands-off rulers and caliphs not so much.”

            By the time the Mongols took Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs had been figureheads for a long time.

          • ChetC3 says:

            Competence at what? Omnicompetence is in fact not required to explain anything in the historical record. What I was disputing was the claim that the West was once much better at nation building of the sort the US attempted in Iraq.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @sweeneyrod – there’s a quote that gets posted around here occasionally that the best thing that can possibly happen to a country is to be colonized by the British. If their colonies on every continent are consistently the best place on that continent to be even post-independence, isn’t that a pretty strong argument for competence?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @FacelessCraven

            To an extent, yes, but success post-independence could be caused by having all the benefits of the infrastructure colonisers built without the costs of an interfering remote government that isn’t even pretending to act in your best interests.

      • “The problem is that the West nowadays is less than competent.”

        It’s possible that the West is less competent and/or less ruthless, but I believe that the difference between the West and the rest of the world is much smaller.

        It’s one thing to go around conquering when you’re the only one who has mass-produced guns and artillery, and quite another when the weapons are pretty generally available.

        • Sandy says:

          Iraq fell pretty swiftly when the US invaded.

        • John Schilling says:

          Drones, satellites, fifth-generation combat aircraft, and nuclear missiles are not widely available. If the west decides to take up conquest and colonialism in the 21st century, the results would likely be about the same as in the 19th, with AK-47s and RPGs and mortars substituting for swords and spears and trade muskets. Occasionally sufficient to break the British square, but little more than that.

          If the west decides that nation-building without conquest is the way to go, I’m not sure that’s really worked well in any century.

    • grendelkhan says:

      GDP seems to be sharply rising in nearly all poor places at this point, and that seems to handle most of the “I live in a terrible country” problems. Do you think an occupying power would help this rather than just extracting wealth from the occupied state, and if so, why?

      • Anonymous says:

        >GDP seems to be sharply rising in nearly all poor places at this point, and that seems to handle most of the “I live in a terrible country” problems.
        [citation needed] there is a hundred of non-OECD (read: 3rd world) countries, of them the rapid GDP growth is observed only in a handful of countries, including china. China is an outlier.

        >Do you think an occupying power would help this rather than just extracting wealth from the occupied state, and if so,
        I do think that western institutions are very beneficial, they are much harder to import than iphones because they took thousands of years to develop in their current form. Do you propose to wait while every one of these tin-pot dictatorships enlighten themselves and develop humane instatutions? This will take hundreds of years, supporting this scenario means sentencing several generations of people that didn’t chose to be born into these places to live their hellish lives while the system evolves in glacial pace.

        >why?
        There are examples of very successful post-occupation nations – Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong. Each one of them has imported the occupier’s institutions and these helped them to become prosperous. These are top economies of the world by various measures.

        • Nornagest says:

          How sharply are we talking? China’s grown much faster than most lower-income countries, but India’s GDP per capita, for example, has octupled since 1980. So has Indonesia’s. Nigeria’s has sextupled, Jamaica’s has tripled, the Philippines’ has quadrupled.

          It hasn’t happened in all countries — the DRC’s per-capita GDP graph is essentially flat, for example. But there’s a definite trend, and the exceptions can mostly be blamed on long-running wars or dictators.

          • svalbardcaretaker says:

            Also of note that “countries” is not a very meaningful metric since it throws dwarves like Kiribati into a pot with giants like India.

            China, India, Indonesia alone qualify for half the non-western population of the world. I’d say the world is on good track.

    • “There is no fast way to make 6 billion of third-worlders live a decent life”

      China has come a long way in that direction over a relatively short period of time, increasing per capita real income about twenty fold from Mao’s death to 2010 (figure from memory). I expect India could if the government continues to shift in a pro-market anti permit raj direction.

      That’s two and a half of your six billion. I don’t know what you count as fast, but I would think that fifty years to get from what India and China were to the lower edge of developed western European countries would be pretty impressive.

      • Anonymous says:

        China is a one big outlier, there is no guarantee that other dozens of poor countries will follow it (in fact they develop much slower, many of them don’t look like they are on western trajectory of development at all. And don’t say that that’s these people’s decision, these decisions are often made by the ruling clan). And even then places like china and russia still have a passive-aggressive attitude towards their citizens, institution- and human rights-wise they are 50-100 years behind developed world. Of course the easiest way is just sit and wait while it figures itself, but from utilitarian POV it would be much better just to occupy these places and up them to western levels by force.

        A somewhat similar opinion has been expressed recently by a well-known economist: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/308134/

        Again, laissez-faire approach is very cheap to developed countries and it may work on large timescale, but it sentences billions of people to live in shitholes (because these people will be already dead from natural causes by the time the market figures it out).

        Empirically there were pretty good examples of more developed country occupying less developed ones – japan, hong kong, south korea. By how many decades did this accelerate their progress?

        • You’ve provided three examples of countries which were very successful after being occupied by more-developed countries. For the sake of argument, let’s assume these countries wouldn’t have been equally successful had they not been occupied. There are still countless examples of occupations and colonizations that had drastic negative effects on the native population, often without any long-term economic benefit. Native Americans are still recovering from the effects of colonization despite living in countries which are otherwise very economically successful and have comparatively good human rights records.

          In other words, when you look at all the occupations that have taken place throughout history, I think it’s hard to concluded that the expect utility of a developed country occupying a less-developed country by force is net positive for the native population. Even if we trust the leaders of modern western countries to occupy other countries for purely benevolent reasons, unless then native population was 100% on board with the idea, I am very doubtful that it would be worth the bloodshed.

    • Vaniver says:

      You can’t solve it fast without using force.

      I feel like this impression is part of the problem, not the solution.

      • Anonymous says:

        Doing nothing is always cheaper and doesn’t make one fall from his high moral ground.
        Yes, this is a part of modern Realpolitik ideology.

        But still, can you propose fast ways of upping living conditions and human rights situation all over the world? By fast I mean on the timescale of a single adult human that is currently alive.

        • U.S. open borders (without welfare rights) looks like the best candidate. Lots of people would get better living conditions and rights by coming here. And there would be some pressure on the countries they came from to treat their citizens better in order to keep them from leaving.

          • Jiro says:

            U.S. open borders (without welfare rights) looks like the best candidate.

            If “best candidate” means “candidate that has no chance of ever being implemented”.

            If we have open borders, nobody will stand for them not getting welfare rights.

          • Anonymous says:

            If we are limiting ourselves to things that have a realistic chance of coming to pass, there’s no need to talk about open borders of any sort.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            And there would be some pressure on the countries they came from to treat their citizens better in order to keep them from leaving.

            It would be nice to think so, but they could just prevent the citizens from leaving by using armed guards and walls, like they do today.

        • Vaniver says:

          What I had in mind was this article by Bryan Caplan.

          There are two halves to the response: the first is what works about the West, and the second is what does not work about Russia.

          It seems to me that most of what works about the West is slow. England is a nation of shopkeepers, because shopkeepers slowly outbred everyone else. (This involved a lot of downward mobility.) Broad middle classes require lots of people who all have middle class values and virtues; it’s not enough to just distribute property such that the wealth distribution looks similar.

          It seems to me that many places have the problems of people who want to use force, and are looking for an excuse. (In the US, I think the obvious examples are antifascists, who look indistinguishable from fascists in terms of thuggery.) Whether those people are seen as destructive or constructive (how else are we going to get rapid growth besides destroying our enemies?) makes a big difference. Or perhaps people want to be rich, and so grasp for fast variable approaches instead of making the slow and steady progress that will set their children up to be rich.

          • Anonymous says:

            In the US, I think the obvious examples are antifascists, who look indistinguishable from fascists in terms of thuggery.

            You must live in some odd place if they are an obvious example of anything. I can’t say I’ve ever laid on an antifascist.

          • Nornagest says:

            @green anon: Antifa is mostly an urban phenomenon. There’s no real unifying ideology, which is probably why they’re not very visible to you, although they tend to be connected to the left activist scene. Fundamentally, though, they’re just a bunch of people (mainly punks, skins, and related species) who want to put on their Doc Martens, break new ground in coordinating black hoodies with other clothing items, and go out and stomp on some Nazis.

            I can see the appeal, in the abstract. There’s a reason video games tend to use Nazis as generic enemies: whatever you do to them, you don’t feel bad about it. Trouble is, here in the real world that leaves us with an incentive to define “Nazi” as broadly as possible, and anyway the mapping between professed ideology and pure evil isn’t quite so clean.

          • “I can’t say I’ve ever laid on an antifascist.”

            My impression is that violence associated with the current presidential campaign has mostly been by anti-Trump demonstrators at Trump events. Does that count?

          • anonymous says:

            “Antifa is mostly an urban phenomenon”.

            When was the last time you traveled in the United States?

          • Nornagest says:

            When was the last time you traveled in the United States?

            To a non-urbanized area? About two weeks ago.

    • Jiro says:

      Red anonymous: the answer to that is “people here know multiheaded more than they know a random person on Earth, so they want to do more to help multiheaded than to help a random person. However, on SSC, EA and related ideas are very popular. These ideas oppose giving preference to people whom you know. So you have a bunch of people who think multiheaded should be helped, but can’t explain why, because the explanation would contradict their own ideology.”

      • Anonymous says:

        Yeah, it’s kinda funny.

        (I wonder what the correlations are between “wants to help Multi” vs “doesn’t think Multi should be helped” and “is pro-EA (opposes preferring acquaintances for charity)” vs “is anti-EA (supports preferring acquaintances for charity)”.)

      • Tibor says:

        Well, I have no sympathies for multiheaded personally, even though I can only judge by the often aggressive and otherwise content free comments multiheaded posts here. But I don’t this donation is outright against the EA mindset – that is, provided that it is not seen as charity but as something closer to consumption.

        It is not against EA to buy a book for a friend, even though the same amount money would help someone in Uganda much more. But you are also not going to view that gift to your friend as charity and this should be viewed the same.

        Your objection is valid though is someone here wants to present this as an act of altruism while supporting the EA principles at the same time. Russia is not quite the nicest country to live in and especially not if you are a transsexual (being a communist might be worse in the US though 🙂 ), but helping someone like that is hardly getting the most utils for your buck. I have not seen anyone here advocating it as a EA-style charity though.

        • “But I don’t this donation is outright against the EA mindset – that is, provided that it is not seen as charity but as something closer to consumption.”

          The same point strikes me in a different context–Scott’s Patreon. I don’t regard giving money to Scott as a sensible form of charity. But he produces a very large benefit for me in the form of this blog, so I feel as though I ought to reciprocate in some way.

          “No man is so wealthy that he objects to receiving a gift in exchange for his gift.”
          (Havamal)

      • Sky says:

        Do most EA really think they can’t explain it?

        My opinion would have been something like “Giving to Multi is non optimal, but while I should strive to be optimal, it isn’t feasible for me to be so.”

        I’m honestly not entirely sure what would happen if I started donating all my non-essential expenses to E.A charities. If I just did what ever was the minimal necessary for me to hold down my job and continue working.

        I think I wouldn’t be good for my mental/physical health. More so I might even say that part of what “what ever is necessary for me to hold down my job” is spending the money I earn in selfish/non-optimal ways.

        I think this is something already known in E.A circles. I don’t see giving to multi as being “against” E.A, no more than failing to be perfectly Christ-like is “against” Christianity. I think in both cases there is an already an expectation that we are going to be perfect agents.

        • Tibor says:

          On a slight tangent – It is interesting that Christianity is one of the probably few religions which are fundamentally impossible in practice (and proper Christians would probably be denounced as sectarian extremists), not to mention that an actually Christian country would not last 5 minutes because it would be conquered by its neighbours without putting up a fight. And still it managed to become the world’s most popular religion. That suggests to me that people like abstract high moral principles but do not care so much about following them.

          Some branches of the EA are the same. As far as I understand it, a fraction of the EA people would see people only as utility machines while the recipient of that utility is fundamentally unimportant, because all utils are the same. It follows from that logic that you should sort of follow Jesus, albeit in a smarter way and instead of giving all your possessions to the poor, you ought to give up most of your consumption and work hard to create enough wealth which you then give to the poor.

          The problem is that nobody is really willing to live like this and you have to come up with workarounds. So they say things like it would make you inefficient so it is really not a good idea. The problem I have with that kind of thinking is that doing the right thing is fundamentally at odds with human nature. And any moral philosophy which is like that seems inherently wrong to me.

          Of course, saying something like give 10% of your income to the most efficient charities and then you’re fine and you don’t need any justification for using the 90% for whatever you want (which can include non-EA charity-like “consumption” like the donations to multiheaded) is also weird, mostly because the number could be 5% or 15%. But while it is wrong, it feels somehow closer to being right than the unattainable and unnatural moral principles of hardcore Christianity or EA, mostly because it is doable. While I don’t have a good argument for why it should be true, somehow I feel that the right thing should be doable, it should not be something you can merely approximate.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Tibor – “On a slight tangent – It is interesting that Christianity is one of the probably few religions which are fundamentally impossible in practice…”

            If the point of Christianity were to follow rules, you would be correct. That is not actually the point of Christianity, though.

            “not to mention that an actually Christian country would not last 5 minutes because it would be conquered by its neighbours without putting up a fight.”

            Probably true, but see above.

            I think the comparison to Christianity is probably a good one; ideals that are unreachable are only a problem if reaching them is the minimum standard. No one will never have a “perfect” relationship, or write the “perfect” song, or paint the “perfect” picture, but effort still matters and success still exists.

            “It follows from that logic that you should sort of follow Jesus, albeit in a smarter way and instead of giving all your possessions to the poor, you ought to give up most of your consumption and work hard to create enough wealth which you then give to the poor.”

            It’s interesting to note that “sell all your possessions and give to the poor” was the answer given to one rich man, while the next rich man encountered receives approval for giving away half of his wealth and committing to paying back fourfold anyone he cheated.

            “The problem I have with that kind of thinking is that doing the right thing is fundamentally at odds with human nature.”

            It is. The ideal helps us fight against human nature, which is a good and proper thing to do. The fact that we can’t win that fight decisively is irrelevant if the fight itself is a net benefit for ourselves and the world around us. Christianity is built around grace, which bridges the gap between our effort and the ideal; it seems to me that Scott’s writings on EA come to a similar place from a secular perspective. In my experience, it’s a good place to be.

            There’s a fundamental trap between selfishness and despair: “I’m not going to do the good thing because I want to do something else instead” and “I’m not going to do the good thing because there’s no point in trying” feed off each other,m and the result is that the good thing doesn’t get done. I see this in art all the time. “I’m not going to practice my sketching because I’d rather play video games”, followed by “these drawings look awful, I suck, there’s no point in even trying”, lather rinse and repeat. Accepting the failure and moving forward anyway is the only way anything gets done.

            “Of course, saying something like give 10% of your income to the most efficient charities and then you’re fine and you don’t need any justification for using the 90% for whatever you want (which can include non-EA charity-like “consumption” like the donations to multiheaded) is also weird, mostly because the number could be 5% or 15%.”

            5% is less than 10%; if you can do 10%, why do 5? 15% is more than 10%. Can you do 15%? If so, do it. If not, is there a way you can get to where you can? If there is, do that. If there isn’t, there isn’t, but maybe there will be later, so keep an eye out. If life-threatening extremism scares you away from doing anything at all, maybe it’s not such a good idea. Generally, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

          • Jiro says:

            The problem with saying “just give 10%” is that it leads to murder offsets: if giving 10% is acceptable (even though you could do more good by giving more), you could instead commit murder and then give enough more than 10% to make up for the disutility caused by your murder (even though you could do more good by leaving out the murder).

          • Anonymous says:

            The problem with saying “just give 10%” is that it leads to murder offsets

            I don’t see how that follows at all. But of course, I’m not a utilitarian, and I’m pretty sure the source of the problem comes from that part of your suppositions.

          • Jiro says:

            I’m not either. But EA as usually described seems to presuppose utilitarianism, so it can be criticized on that basis.

    • Anonymous says:

      It looks like the most humane way to end this misery ASAP would be re-colonization of third world (including my country, Russia) by western powers, and forceful indoctrination of population with western values. Sadly, this solution requires way too much political will and funding, it is really a fantasy in our world where Realpolitik is the dominant attitude of western leaders. The probability of such scenario is similar to probability of solving humanity’s problems with AI, if not less.

      That scenario is fairly horrifying, IMO. Russia may not be the best place in the world, but it’s not genocide-alley like Cambodia was – not even close – especially not currently.

      Also, you are suggesting that western values are superior to eastern (not oriental, mind) values – which I sincerely doubt.

      • skwlk says:

        The problem with Russia in particular is that they do not have values per se, it was quite European country before communism (although never a front runner), then they got distinct values but these values ultimately failed (and were not even truly supported by the populace at the time).

        So now they have scrambles of imperial nostalgia, memories about perceived communist equality and trivial nationalism. On top of that the ideologists try to sculpt the “values” from religion and intolerance, basically the more perceptively “anti-Western” the better.

        In this context Western values are clearly superior, on the fact alone that they are not “anti-” something.

        But in the end, Russian public is kept on the development levels lower than they could be if the elites wanted to integrate with the West, and the elites cultivate this “anti-Westerness” on purpose to empower and enrich themselves.

  33. JRM says:

    This week in random California case law that entertained me:

    Zeferino has a gun and maybe makes some threats, and he’s a felon. So, he gets arrested.

    He then spends the next couple of years working on delaying the trial (in technical legal parlance, “dicking around”) and trying to fire his appointed attorney. Firing your retained attorney is easy (“You’re fired,”) but getting a new appointed attorney usually requires a showing that your current attorney is not doing a good job.

    Comes the time for trial and Zeferino says he wants to fire his attorney, so they hold a closed hearing in which Zeferino discusses how terrible his attorney is. It’s established that the attorney went above and beyond reasonableness in doing work on the case. So, still there.

    Zeferino then says he wants to represent himself, but needs a two-month delay. Court says no. He then asks for a one-day delay because he doesn’t have some reports. Court disbelieves him (for good reasons) and says no. He then says he wants to represent himself anyway. Court vigorously warns him against this and goes through all the reasons this is a terrible idea. But he’s got a right to do that, so he does.

    We start the trial on day 1. First witness testifies. Zeferino does no cross-examination. We break for the next day.

    Next day comes, no Zeferino. Court issues an arrest warrant for him and excuses the jury.

    Day 3: Still no Zeferino. The court thinks he’s voluntarily absented himself. The general rule is if you start a trial then voluntarily absent yourself, they can do the rest of the trial without you; a guy named Andrew Luster (Max Factor heir, beach bum, and serial rapist… oh, should have led with that last) found that out when he ran off during his trial a decade or so ago. But in those cases, the defense attorneys continue with the case.

    Here, the court could have appointed the old attorney back on it, but didn’t want to because of the antipathy Zeferino had for him, and his express desire (and right) to represent himself. The court ruled that Zeferino absented himself, and finished it with no one on the defense side. Our hero got convicted of some charges (gun+felon) but not others (threats.)

    Eventually they find him. He says he didn’t show up because he thought that would create a mistrial.

    Issue for California Supreme Court: Can Zeferino’s conviction hold under these circumstances?

    Answer later!

    • Murphy says:

      Surprised he admitted to his reason for not attending. Probably could have made it slightly more messy by insisting that he was dazed and confused or some such. (not lawyer, just random musing)

      Surprised the issue’s not come up in the past.

      • JRM says:

        And here’s what the court… er, courts found:

        California appellate court: You can’t do that to him. You needed to do something else.

        California Supreme Court (which wins): You can do that to him. He FTA’d. He loses. To prison with Zeferino! Basic problem: If you represent yourself and think you can trigger a mistrial this way and you’re wrong, too bad for you.

        This is interesting to me, because I’ve never seen a case where there was no defense presence at all.

        • Anonanon says:

          >because I’ve never seen a case where there was no defense presence at all.

          The most famous one I’m aware of was US v. Miller, which was rigged by using a defendant who was in hiding from the mob (and who wound up murdered before the verdict).

          I think Buck v. Bell comes close, because IIRC the girl’s lawyers were actually working with the hospital that wanted to sterilize her (and use her as a legal test case)

          • JRM says:

            Not the same – here, we’ve got a trial going on with no defendant and no defense attorney. At appellate argument, there is seldom a defendant and sometimes not a defense attorney.

            Buck v. Bell (the “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” case) had to have someone fighting for her; I don’t know enough about the procedural posture of the case to comment smartly.

            But for clarity: I’m talking about trial court total absence on a criminal case.

  34. How worried (say out of 10?) are people here about technological unemployment over the next twenty years? What makes you worry or not worry about it? Is the worry personal or more regarding societal stability?

    I personally think it will be disruptive though not catastrophic on its own, but in combination with other pressures may result in much bigger problems, both economic and social. I’m not confident UBI will be implemented in this time period, because imo it has problems with economic and political viability.

    • Sandy says:

      I’m at a six. I work in the “knowledge economy”, so it’ll take a while before technological unemployment can pose a real threat to people like me, but from the standpoint of societal stability, I worry about it quite a bit.

    • John Schilling says:

      I think technological unemployment will increase over the next twenty years, but not to catastrophic levels. To put a majority of the present workforce on the dole, you’d need technologies that do not presently exist outside the laboratory (if that), and technophiles tend to vastly overestimate the rate at which old technologies are replaced by new ones.

      I would like to believe that this would drive the implementation of a sensible UBI-like scheme, because that’s the best idea I’ve seen for the longer term when mass technological unemployment may be an otherwise-catastrophic problem. I’d like to see us take the time to do it right. But I agree that it probably isn’t going to happen, because the slow growth in technological unemployment can probably be accommodated over the next ten to twenty years by expanding the current politically-entrenched welfare systems. When those ultimately are pushed to the breaking point, we may see catastrophe.

    • Murphy says:

      I don’t worry about my job. My background would place me as part of the group helping to automate away everyone elses jobs.

      But socially? I worry what could happen when the police and military start using robotics in a big way.

      it could work out well or it could work out really really badly.

      having lots of humans is an imperfect check against power but it is a check. Suddenly a small group could maintain power without even needing to keep the police and military on their side. I could imagine a lot of less savory reigeims being propped up much more securely when they don’t have to worry about the loyalty of their muscle.

      • Corey says:

        A popular view on ways this might go is Jacobin’s Four Futures (trigger warning: socialism). As a possible fifth alternative some of us in a past OT came up with an “Elysium” scenario, where the haves bugger off to form a separate economy and leave the rest of us on a reservation or something.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I’m not especially worried about it because the evidence doesn’t support it. If we were on the brink of an automation revolution then we would be seeing high unemployment and high economic growth. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. But there is a possibility of a drop in labor force participation rate for supply reasons rather than demand. Basically, more and more people are choosing leisure over jobs, especially among the younger demographics. This would also reconcile the lfpr being so low with employer complaints of job shortages.

      https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/scholar-profile/faculty-spotlight-erik-hurst

    • Lumifer says:

      How worried (say out of 10?) are people here about technological unemployment over the next twenty years?

      Not at all, given that worries about technological unemployment have been pretty popular for the last 200 years or so.

    • Maybe 2.

      I’m not at all worried personally, for multiple reasons. So far as the society is concerned, I think the problem is greatly exaggerated.

    • Anonymous says:

      No potential global disaster — thermonuclear war, pandemics, mass terrorism, unfriendly AI, demographic collapse, global warming, etc. — worries me in any visceral sense. I just can’t get worked up about this sort of thing.

    • In the next 20 years, maybe a 3 or at most 4. In the next hundred? Somewhat higher, but I suspect we’ll have bigger things to worry about as well.

    • Matt C says:

      3 or 4. People have been panicking about technological unemployment for a long time now. Other people have pointed out that the same arguments have been made before and somehow we’re still finding work for people to do. The panickers always say “but this time it’s different”.

      I don’t think this time is different. Maybe *some* time it will be different, but not in the next 20 years.

      That said, overall the USA economy is becoming more sclerotic, and I don’t think USA employment will adapt as well to technological (or other) shocks as well as it has done over most of its history. You could (and many people will) consider this a harm caused by technological advancement.

      • Artificirius says:

        I feel there is at least some difference. We went from horse drawn wagons/buggies/etc to trucks/cars/etc, which vastly increased the capability, productivity and efficiency of the freight industry in particular, with many benefits to other industries as well.

        But in twenty years, automated driving is almost certainly to be a thing. The trucking industry will be heavily effected, but it will have effects across the hospitality and airline industry as well.

        It’s all well and good to say new jobs will appear, but it does not seem as obvious how completely replacing human beings will create more human jobs in this instance. In our previous step up from horse drawn vehicles to internal combustion engines, we simply expanded the scale of the industry, making use of even more people, even if at far greater productivity levels.

        I don’t see how we will be able to scale up the automated trucking industry to absorb more people since you are now directly replacing human action with automated action. For instance, if we tried to move all truckers from being truckers to being diesel mechanics, and then grow the automated trucking industry to use that many more mechanics, then we’d need to grow the trucking industry by at least an order of magnitude.

        I doubt such a thing is possible.

        • Matt C says:

          I’m not saying there are no differences in specifics, of course there are.

          I am saying the general claim that technology destroys employability permanently and harmfully has been made over and over again, and has been proven wrong over and over again. But each time, the people who are making essentially the same argument over again say “this time it is different”.

          I’ve got to run, but it might be worth noting that I do think jobs where humans drive vehicles will become gradually less common over the next few decades, and the jobs that people end up doing instead mostly won’t be in the automated driving industry. They’ll be elsewhere. Some of them will be jobs that don’t even exist today, just like many jobs today didn’t exist thirty years ago.

    • Tek Tek says:

      It depends on what job.

      I think there is a very good chance that the talented CS undergrads are screwing their odds of a good job in a decade(or at least, screwing the chances of good but not great programmers in a few years)

      The Best example I can think of is the game No Mans Sky.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg1S6vd1pf8 No mans Sky. Large variety of interesting worlds and animals.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkI09S4o9WE AI generated music

      There are more gameplay videos.

      its a huge grand world, utterly amazing with tons to explore and look around. When I look at games like that, it made a part of me truly look for a different career. I look at a game like that, and hear music made by the company, and it more or less strikes me the thought “All jobs of interest or passion will be gone”

      • Procedurally generated content in video games has been around for decades. Yes, it’s improving, but I don’t think it will be replacing huge numbers of jobs any time soon. And it would more likely be artists and designers who would get replaced, not programmers. As to programming more generally, genetic algorithms are very useful in certain domains but they are not currently well-suited to typical software engineering problems.

      • Urstoff says:

        My expectations for NMS are really low; I imagine that, like most procedurally generated games, it will be a mile wide and an inch deep. Tons of stuff, but nothing there to make gameplay compelling. The only procedurally generated games that work are the ones where the gameplay is front and center and the content is basically an afterthought (ARPG dungeons, strategy game maps, etc.).

        • FacelessCraven says:

          This.

          When I first got minecraft, I played it obsesively for about three days, which is how long it took me to build up to obsidian and open a portal to the nether, then build a tower from the top of the nether to the bottom. I started a railroad out from the tower, realized that no matter how far I went, I’d never see anything new again, quit out and never played the game again.

          Any game can be made arbitrarily massive, but the question is how many unique experiences it contains.

          • Anonanon says:

            >the question is how many unique experiences it contains.

            As many as it has people on the server. All the kids who’ve shown me their maps had a big network of railway tunnels to each others’ bases on the server.
            Connecting with other people seems like the only reason to ever build anything in a video game, even if it’s just to grief Denmark.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonanon – “Connecting with other people seems like the only reason to ever build anything in a video game, even if it’s just to grief Denmark.”

            My consecutive 200-hour+ Factorio playthroughs and my half-year-long Jagged Alliance games beg to differ.

    • E. Harding says:

      1.5 out of 10.

      Slow productivity growth is a bigger problem than technological unemployment.

      The worry isn’t personal.

    • Loquat says:

      I’m not very worried, let’s say 2/10. It’s not just about the technology existing, it’s about whether companies actually use it; for example, the technology to update your contact info, billing, etc, online has existed for years and my company still doesn’t offer it on the health insurance policies I handle. You have to call or write in, thus requiring more employees. Now, presumably we’ll eventually get ourselves into the 21st century and set up a proper service website, but there are two major areas I handle that aren’t going to be automated anytime before the advent of serious AI – “explain what this policy does” and “what is going on with this medical claim I have” – and to a lesser extent, “my billing is messed up”. In general, anything in customer service that you can’t already automate is probably going to stick around for a while.

    • Zombielicious says:

      Everyone else is giving low numbers, but over 20 years I’d say at least 6/10.

      A lot of the biggest industries by employment seem like they’re the most ripe for automation. Trucking and transportation replaced by self-driving cars is my best example, followed by automation of retail and food service. Ten years may not be long enough but 20 almost certainly will, at least for long-haul trucking. Administrative services, agriculture, construction and manufacturing come after that, then eventually stuff like healthcare, education, law, etc. (Education itself actually seems one of the easiest to automate, but I’m expecting it to come last for cultural reasons, and because of the schools’ dual function as daycare centers.) You don’t have to replace the entire industry with AI and robots, just automate the rote tasks that serve as entry-level jobs for millions of people who lack specialized training to be competitive in other areas.

      Since a lot of people seem ideologically opposed to wealth redistribution and think others need to work in order to justify their right to exist, I’m expecting to see lots of conflict when it starts.

    • I think that technological unemployment will mostly be a good thing. The purpose of an economy is to produce stuff, and if we can do that without having too many humans work at things they don’t want to do then good.

    • skwlk says:

      In the process of immigrating into the US through employment and I’m a bit uncomfortable with an idea that American employers will stop employing foreigners in the next N years.
      Skill-based immigration is already an unnecessary complicated process here with pure luck (lottery/place of birth) involved.

      While Americans can say that “living in the US” is not a human right and whatevs but immigration through the family ties will not stop and it can be argued that the utility of it for the country is lower.

      On the other hand, contemporary sociopolitical tendencies in the states and the world might eliminate any attraction of living in the USA before technological unemployment explodes.
      And that would be a sad situation indeed cause I think humanity in general benefits from the existence of such an “emigration destination”.

  35. Wrong Species says:

    What are some good books on the pacification of Germanic tribes in the Middle Ages? And to what extent is Christianity the cause of that?

    • HircumSaecuolroum says:

      The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is fascinating if you’re looking for a semi-primary source and are willing to slog through a lot of partisan mud-slinging about the proper method of calculating the date of Easter.

      It is, as the title suggests, focused on the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, with a few digressions into Christian missionary work in Germany. Generally, it relates the relationship between secular power in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Roman church, providing numerous accounts of the conversions and reactions of kingdoms and important individuals as the Germanic peoples of Britain are brought under the sway of Catholicism. It also contains a vast number of accounts of individual holy men, and some anecdotes about sacred visions that provide an interesting window into how the people of the time and place actually thought about theology. It’s a good read.

  36. hash9843 says:

    What’s the story with Multiheaded?

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      A Russian commie is trying to escape the hell brought upon by commie ideas so that they can spread communism throughout other countries.

      Being transgendered in a country that is very unfriendly to LGBT people, both the government and society, also might have something to do with it, but it’s mostly the former.

      • hash9843 says:

        …why were we helping a commie?

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Hey, man, commies are people too.

        • Immortal Lurker says:

          To paraphrase Firefly, yeah, but she’s OUR commie.

          Less flippantly, some of the founding values of this blog are niceness, community and civilization, especially when it involves people who disagree with you. Even when they disagree with you on really important things.

          This comment section can give left of center people grief some times. But apparently when the chips are down, we can come together to protect one of our own. Even when we disagree with them pretty much all the time. Makes me feel hopeful about the whole project.

          As a disclaimer, none of the good feelings from helping Multi should be directed toward me. I gave nothing.

          • hash9843 says:

            I didn’t mean “they’re a commie so let’s not help them”. You just mentioned that they’re a commie a lot, so I assumed that being a commie is somehow a positive factor in whether-we-should-help-them. I was asking more like, why are we helping them rather than any other Russian SSC reader?

            Did they just write here in the comment section “help, I’m in Russia”, and we went all like “yeah, let’s get them out of there”?

          • multiheaded says:

            <3 thanks anyway, yo. Your kind words offset the haters above you.

            I was asking more like, why are we helping them rather than any other Russian SSC reader?

            Did they just write here in the comment section “help, I’m in Russia”, and we went all like “yeah, let’s get them out of there”?

            The relevant factor here is that I’m trans, have been transitioning for half a year, needed all kinds of acceptance and support that I couldn’t get in Russia, and was in serious danger from both a hostile state bureacracy and a reactionary society.

            I am not aware of any other trans folk here who are currently in Russia. If there are, we ought to get them out too. I certainly intend to do *something* to assist *someone* like me back in Russia… once my situation here is more established.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I didn’t mean “they’re a commie so let’s not help them”. You just mentioned that they’re a commie a lot, so I assumed that being a commie is somehow a positive factor in whether-we-should-help-them.

            Are you familiar with bait-and-switch?

            I was asking more like, why are we helping them rather than any other Russian SSC reader?

            Because she asked first.

            Did they just write here in the comment section “help, I’m in Russia”, and we went all like “yeah, let’s get them out of there”?

            Pretty much exactly how it went.

        • blacktrance says:

          Because no one should have to live in Russia.

          • Anonymous says:

            As a Russian I can sympathize with that, but looking objectively 140 millions of well fed russians living in commieblocks with PCs, electricity and internet, breathing relatively clean air are much better off than 1.2 billions of indians living in jungle villages or polluted cities, drinking dirty water and generally living a hellish life.

            If you look at people that are really in need, look lower.

          • hash9843 says:

            Ze’s not the only Russian here. I live in Russia. Let’s help me get out of Russia. then.

      • herbert herbertson says:

        Russia hasn’t been ruled by commie ideas for 25 years.

        It hasn’t exactly been the greatest 25 year period of Russian history, incidentally.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          I think “It hasn’t been a greatest X years” pretty much sums up Russian history.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            Well, there was the 25 year period where it first defeated Nazi Germany, then put the first object, animal, and human into orbit, all while continuing to provide dramatic increases in standard of living to its citizens.

          • Urstoff says:

            After being decimated by war, the standard of living had nowhere to go but up.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            @ Urstoff–I’ve seen WWII devastation used as an explanation for why Japan did well in the 80s, and the absence thereof used as an explanation for America’s material successes in the 50s and the 60s. Seems a little too just-so in this case.

            Me, I think there were genuine material benefits that accrued to the two superpowers who emerged from WWII as a direct result of their superpower status. I don’t think one could give the credit for that to communism without doing more work than I care to do today (with the easy-to-do comparison with the US during that time suggesting that it wouldn’t be possible no matter how much work I did), but I definitely think it’s fair to say that communism didn’t unduly get in the way of that for at least a couple generations, and certainly that it didn’t create “hell” for non-dissidents.

          • “all while continuing to provide dramatic increases in standard of living to its citizens.”

            What are the sources for the data on that? My impression is that the official Russian data turned out to be largely bogus.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ David Friedman

            A lot will depend on the picked baseline. I’m perfectly willing to believe that from 1945 to 1970 the Soviet living standards went up a lot. 1945 wasn’t a great year for living standards.

          • multiheaded says:

            @David Friedman

            …fuck, I don’t know what to say to you. If you really think that there was no increase in the Soviet standard of living from the 1930s to the 1960s…

            (again, you don’t need to concede your point about the superiority of free market capitalism!! just acknowledge that maybe the enemy system was not axiomatically an absolute miserable failure in every single absolute sense.)

          • herbert herbertson says:

            Everything I’ve seen suggests that while Soviet projections/boasts/etc were consistently exaggerated, the exaggerations were based on real-albeit-more-modest gains (this wikipedia graph is a good synecdoche). Also, I think it’s hard to make sense of the political ramifications of the Era of Stagnation without contrasting it to the post-war period.

            Unfortunately, its generally difficult to do anything but guess from our vantage point, too many agendas in play, too many duels between the Robert Conquests and the Grover Furrs of the world… but if guessing is what we have, then I’m going to guess the country that turned science fiction into earth-shaking reality wasn’t doing too terribly at the time they did so.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            “A lot will depend on the picked baseline. I’m perfectly willing to believe that from 1945 to 1970 the Soviet living standards went up a lot. 1945 wasn’t a great year for living standards.”

            Nor was 1917 or 1933.

          • Anonanon says:

            Man, the CIA had some amazingly competent analysts back then. And they’ve got a really interesting history of it on their website.

            After a mostly abortive attempt to measure real growth in Soviet GNP by estimating price indexes in order to deflate GNP by end use in current prices, CIA turned to estimates of the real growth of GNP as the sum of the estimates of the real growth of the various sectors of origin–industry, agriculture, transportation and communications, etc. Two of the papers in the collection for this conference–Trends in Industrial Production in the USSR, 1955-63 (December 1964) and Trends in Output, Inputs, and Factor Productivity in Soviet Agriculture (May 1966)–describe the estimating procedures and report some significant results. The report on industrial production found that the average annual growth in Soviet industrial output had decelerated from 8.6 percent in 1956-59 to 6.7 percent in 1960-63. Soviet official claims were about two percentage points higher. The paper on agricultural output, inputs, and productivity explained why independent estimates of farm output were necessary and, like the paper on industrial production, reported a substantial drop in the growth of agricultural production. The paper’s agricultural statistics showed that between 1950 and 1965 production had increased by 70 percent, but that two-thirds of the increase had occurred in 1954-1958, the five years following Stalin’s death. Per capita output in 1965 was less than in 1958.

          • “If you really think that there was no increase in the Soviet standard of living from the 1930s to the 1960s…”

            I didn’t say that, as you can easily see by reading what I posted. I asked what the data were on which the claim of “dramatic increases in standard of living” was based. That’s a much stronger claim than that there was any improvement.

            I agree that things would have improved from 1945 to 1960, but the claimed period appeared to go back farther than that.

            “but if guessing is what we have, then I’m going to guess the country that turned science fiction into earth-shaking reality wasn’t doing too terribly at the time they did so.”

            In a centrally planned economy, one way of doing well at one objective is to divert resources from other objectives. The Soviet successes in space and the size of their military might be reasons why standards of living were low.

            I don’t have data on how things changed over the period of Soviet rule. My impression from The Russians is that they were pretty bad even in the late period, but they might have been substantially worse earlier.

            My understanding of the controversy over Soviet economic growth is that Warren Nutter’s estimates, based on indirect measures rather than Soviet statistics, were considered too low by other economists studying the subject and turned out, when better data were available, to have been too high.

        • Anonymous says:

          This is very debatable. The last 25 years made it possible for russians to buy PCs, smartphones, good cars and have fast internet. This happened mostly because of oil profits trickling down and holding rub/usd high, not because of current regime’s policies (they are stupid and evil).

          That being said, culturally, russia is still way behind europe. The establishment’s (and masses’) ideology is quite anti-western, anti-individual, anti-human rights (i.e. if you don’t conform you will be fucked, so most people just conform) etc.

          Turns out humane institutions, laws attitudes are way harder to import than iphones (and even harder if your oil profits depend on holding your population inhibited).

          • Tibor says:

            I agree that individualism and personal freedom are foreign words in Russia. But I would not be too self-congratulatory about Europe. Scandinavian countries seem to be extremely conformist and against any individual deviation. This may not be demonstrated in laws, but it is in the mindset of the people. I am not claiming it is as bad as in Russia but that it is less great that it may seem at a first glance.

            I think one can see traces of this mindset in Germany as well, although it is not quite so profound. Compared to Czechs, I think Germans are more conformist and less tolerant of people who deviate from the “official line of thinking”. It might have something to do with the fact that Germans seem to take politics more seriously than Czechs in general, but I do think the German society is more inclined towards generally respecting authority (whatever it is) than the Czech one. Again, it is not a striking difference, but it is noticeable after some time spent in the country.

            But I don’t think any European country is quite as individualistic in the mindset of the population as for example the US or Australia or Anglo-Saxon countries in general. I should mention that I have only lived in the Czech republic and in Germany for a longer amount of time, so I cannot base that claim directly on personal experience.

            If we use the support of free market liberalism as a proxy for individualism, then Switzerland should do the best (meaning most individualism) in Europe. However, I have doubts about that proxy being so good. Culturally, it feels to me that England is more individualist than Switzerland even if in terms of policy it is the other way around (that sounds strange though, either I am making a mistake in seeing the English as more individualist than the Swiss or this discrepancy is the result of a different political system of Switzerland, which perhaps naturally leads to more free market policies).

          • Anonymous says:

            That being said, culturally, russia is still way behind europe. The establishment’s (and masses’) ideology is quite anti-western, anti-individual, anti-human rights (i.e. if you don’t conform you will be fucked, so most people just conform) etc.

            One way I heard it described was: independent. As in, ideologically independent of the West.

            (You know how it goes – there are three independent civilized countries in the world: Russia, China and the International Community.)

    • erenold says:

      I’m slightly dubious about this part, about Alison:

      for some reason being able to stay in the United Kingdom for a little while would help.

      Why, exactly, does this help with immigration into the United States?

      This sounds suspiciously like immigration fraud to me.

      • grendelkhan says:

        How seriously do you think a bunch of open-borders advocates take immigration laws? They’re already porously enforced at best (and for good reason!).

      • rttf says:

        I believe the preferred term in this community would be “immigration hacking”.

      • erenold says:

        I might be barking totally up the wrong tree here – but is this about evading the hard ceiling on per-country immigration from Alison’s home country? Or is this a ‘softer’, more subjective thing, whereby Alison hopes that as a Commonwealth citizen from Britain her application would be looked upon with a less jaundiced eye?

        The linked post does not give any information other than that she needs to touchback to her home country, thence to Britain, then only back to the US. I might be missing something very obvious, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.

        By the way – I’m sure Alison is a fine person, an excellent rationalist and all-round a net positive to whatever country she inhabits – I hope I do not come across as wishing mischance upon her and her plans. I’m merely curious about a fairly odd request.

        • I don’t know the specifics of this case, but large US corporations looking to hire highly-skilled foreign workers will sometimes post those workers at satellite offices outside the US for a year or so, after which they are eligible to be hired on an intracompany transfer visa, which can be easier to get than other types of visas.

          I doubt it has to do with evading per-country immigration caps. I don’t think most visas have per-country caps. Green card applications do, but those are based on country of citizenship, not country of origin.

          • Nonnamous says:

            large US corporations looking to hire highly-skilled foreign workers will sometimes post those workers at satellite offices outside the US for a year or so

            That sounds like an L1 visa process.

  37. Asvin says:

    Are there any benefits to taking an IQ test if you don’t think you have any learning disabilities etc?

    • Emma Casey says:

      You get to be really smug at people.

    • Chalid says:

      It might help you choose a career?

      • Jill says:

        Yes, and make you aware of your strengths and weaknesses, helping you choose what to focus on– usually developing your strengths and talents more, or maybe seeking a business or marital partner with complementary talents.

        An occupational interest test could also be of help in career.

      • Tek Tek says:

        On this, it can. For instance, the spatial/verbal weighting can determine if one best status-maxi-mazes according to talents to become engineer vs lawyer.

        But the career is always medicine if one wants financial stability and the capabilities.

    • Lumifer says:

      About as useful as measuring their dicks is for men.

    • Urstoff says:

      I think that kind of self-knowledge would probably be demotivating.

      • Creutzer says:

        I think it could give you comfort to know that you can definitely do what you are trying to because your IQ is comfortably above the average for your chosen profession. If you find that you’re trying to do something that’s actually likely to be beyond your capabilities, then being demotivated isn’t necessarily a bad outcome, either.

    • Error says:

      Joining high-IQ societies, e.g. Mensa.

      YMMV on whether that’s a useful benefit. From experience, having easy access to people of comparable intelligence is not as interesting as it sounds. It turns out common interests aren’t that common.

      • cafemachiavelli says:

        My experience with Mensa matches your description. Mensa seemed to brand itself as “High-IQ people can be normal too!” when I was kinda yearning for the opposite experience (as in, normalcy is a bad metric to orient your value function by) and was hoping to find people using their IQ in inspirational ways.

        The online forums were pretty deserted and live meetups were fun, but just standard nerd talk for the most part.

      • Tek Tek says:

        I think its a useful benefit. An interesting blogger, halfsigma showed that there were quite a few very interesting correlations between intelligence and certain types of belief, even stronger then education.

    • Zombielicious says:

      It can help give confidence, or at least a better sense of where you stand, maybe avoid massive overconfidence, if you really don’t have any clue whatsoever. The risk is in taking it too seriously and thinking that because you’re average or below average you can never learn certain things, or that having a good score means you’re smarter than everyone else, or that small differences in IQ score actually matter much.

      This seems pretty similar to verifying that you don’t have any obvious learning disabilities or savant talents, though. Otherwise, probably not.

  38. Leo says:

    Recently I have been thinking a lot about a blog post I read many years ago. (Sorry, no link) The point the author was making was that it is good to seek out people who disagree with you. These people will expose you to new ideas, he said. They will challenge you to defend the positions you hold. Even if you end up neither agreeing with them nor bringing them around to your point of view, hopefully you will at least understand where they are coming from. All of this constitutes intellectual growth and is a good and healthy thing.
    A lot of people ( I certainly include myself here) read this and think, yeah, this guy has the right idea. I want to be challenged. I want to be open to different perspectives. Perhaps you envision yourself having a lively yet gentlemanly debate about the relative merits of candidates X and Y in the upcoming by-election. Maybe, based on your logical assessment of the evidence available to you, you have become a staunch supporter of unfettered free trade. Now you’re imagining meeting an ideological adversary who will present a robust case for economic protectionism. Or perhaps you think you’ll go talk to that girl who says that Domenico Scarlatti is an unrecognised genius, deserving of a place in the pantheon of musical heroes alongside Bach and Beethoven.
    This may have been the first place my mind went after reading the aforementioned blog post, but it’s a huge underestimation of the diversity of human thought. When you don’t merely poke your head around the door of your intellectual ghetto, but instead step outside and have a good ramble through the hills and dales of the wider human world, you get a lot more than you bargained for. Instead of the ideological adversaries you’ve dreamed up for yourself, you meet the guy who doesn’t vote at all because democracy is a sham, who doesn’t see the need to back up opinions with evidence, who thinks all music is just a silly waste of time anyway.
    So I then turn back to Slate Star Codex and look at it in this light. In particular I look at the links to other blogs. The first entry under Those That Belong To The Emperor is The Future Primeval, the mouthpiece for a collective of neoreactionary thinkers. We see Scott’s rigorous deconstruction of neoreactionary arguments and we ooh and ah at how open minded he is not to dismiss these wingnuts out of hand. And fair play to Scott, he is engaging with people he disagrees with, in the hope of reaching some quantum of mutual enlightenment. This is more than most people do. Let me say it one more time, mad props to Scott for his openmindedness.
    But the neoreactionaries (auto-correct tries to change this to ‘bro reactionaries’) are a group of people convinced that sociology and political philosophy are subjects worth talking about. They share Scott’s conviction that research is worthwhile, and evidence has value. They are more than willing to engage in debate. The principal difference between Scott and the boys at The Future Primeval, or most of the other nrx sites, is the side of the issues they come down on. The variety of human though offers differences far more profound than this.
    From this perspective, when you strip away the politics, I put Barack Obama, Milo Yiannopoulos and Karl Marx in one camp, and put Trump, Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret), and Bodhidharma (major fugure in the history of Zen Buddhism) in the other.
    If one truly accepts the notion that it’s worth understanding other people, then I see no reason to limit oneself to those who are writing blogs and participating in public debates. Should we not also strive to understand those who see debates, analysis, and so on, as pointless? It’s not as if these people are entirely silent. They may not be writing manifestoes, but their philosophy of life is surely manifest in how they choose to live their lives. They may even have something to teach us.

  39. Odoacer says:

    Human Interest Stories in Articles,

    I recently read this interesting article in National Geographic about food waste. It’s mindboggling to me how much food is produced in the US and the world and how much is discarded for somewhat silly reasons, e.g. food that isn’t aesthetically pleasing is tossed. However, I notice in a lot of these pop-science articles that there’s often a human interest story in them, this one focuses on a food-waste activist named Tristam Stuart. It sounds like he’s doing a good job, but honestly I’m indifferent to him. I’d rather read an article that just had the facts and little to none about specific humans involved.

    Why are these human-focused parts included? Do other people enjoy reading about them? Are they included to encourage people to do activism/whatever, so that they too might gain status by being featured in a major media source?

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:
    • herbert herbertson says:

      I think the biggest and less interesting reason is that most people like to read characters in stories. If the demo that thinks like SSC commenters were bigger, the trope you observe would be less common, but we’d also see, e.g., published fiction in the style of the SCP wiki, or Stephen Baxter outselling J.K. Rowling.

      I think a minor, but more interesting, contributing factor is a transactional relationship between the reporter and the human interest in question. What’s the easiest, quickest way to learn about a subject? Contact an expert. What’s the easiest, quickest way to gain that expert’s attention and help? Im/explicitly promise him positive press in return.

  40. Brad (the other one) says:

    Did anyone see the Street Fighter tournament on ESPN2 last night?

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I watched on Twitch but I did catch the last few matches. I don’t know competitive street fighter very well, but that final was domination – so many perfects.

    • Urstoff says:

      I saw a Dota game. It was confusing and pretty boring. I wonder what kind of ratings ESPN is pulling in on their esports shows.

      • Redland Jack says:

        It’s hard to imagine the ratings would be very strong. It seems like it would be the wrong medium for the activity. When I want to watch esports, I just go to Twitch. I’d wager that almost anyone interested in esports would be more inclined to watch them via computer than TV.

      • Brad (The Other One) says:

        I’ve been watching gaming tournaments for years and I think Dota and other MOBAs are probably the least casual-friendly tv-friendly genre possible. (Disclosure: I am not particularly familiar with mobas). I’ve tried to watch some moba games cold, and it seems to me that in a single game a casual viewer needs to understand the basic concept (kill enemy base and towers) AND understand the idea of lanes and exp, comprehend the power-set and abilities of 10 heroes in the given match, as well as (depending on the game) a variety of items with their own effects. Moreover, you have issues for tv consumption; namely that the game can go on for an unspecified amount of time, you have stuff happening all over the map which creates the issue of “where should the observer be giving attention?” This is before we even get to the question of “is it interesting to watch?”

        Street Fighter and most other fighting games, by contrast, have rounds that are set by timer (and thus matches can be predictably scheduled in a time slot), it’s relatively easy to understand who’s winning (just look at the life bar) and the game’s basic conceit – two guys beating each other up – is way less arcane than many other games and can probably be grasped by people who don’t play the game. The hardest things to explain is probably meter management, how spacing, mix-ups and crossups work, as well as the usual canards of “why are they using the same character?” or “why does guile just throw sonic booms all game?” (I’ve sat through some seriously lame street fighter sets: this comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dtHde81j20 )

        That said, Dota and Counterstrike have way way larger player bases and thus they got all the dirty esports dollars and screentime first, but I honestly think any serious foray into gaming on television in the west – that can actually break into a non-gaming audience – will involve fighting games in a leading role.

        That being said, I kind of wonder how Starcraft, which has a lot of similar issues as mobas (unspecified game time, lots of units with different abilities), got so popular as to warrant their own channel in S. Korea – and I wonder if the audience there is mainly just people familiar with the game (ie. have, at minimum, actually played it) or if the audience includes casual viewers.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Do you think MOBAs are less casual-viewer-friendly than Starcraft? I would put them the other way round — even someone who doesn’t know anything about MOBAs can understand roughly what’s happening (that guy died, that thing got destroyed), whereas even after playing a bit of Starcraft, professional games just seem like a blur of units to me. I think the biggest problem of televised esports is shared by all games — it’s difficult to appreciate the skill involved if you haven’t played the game.

          • Brad (The Other One) says:

            It’s hard for me to gauge if MOBAs are less or more friendly for casuals than any edition of Starcraft, since I still play Starcraft and followed tournaments occasionally for years and I simply haven’t done that with MOBAs. I’m more wondering why Starcraft: Brood War succeeded when it has much of the same issues you see with contemporary MOBAs.

            That being said, I suspect it was (and is) probably less confusing to grasp Brood War relative to Starcraft 2 because engagements, as far as I can remember them, tended to be smaller, more discrete, the art was crispier and unit pathfinding didn’t yet have that “balling-up” effect Starcraft 2 has – not to mention that in Brood War, they didn’t give every single unit in the game some special snowflake ability to impress the playerbase. Sometimes the dragoon can just be a dragoon, guys.

        • Anonymous says:

          I think dota is fairly simple. Most of the game the commenters focus on team kill counts, which everyone can understand. There’s a lot of depth to builds and items and hero interactions, but to the casual viewer each hero has 1-2 really obvious spells and a normal attack. Most interactions during the game are following a hero as he duels other heros.

          That’s really what makes it more viewer friendly than starcraft. In classic RTS you do have to understand the bigger picture, in dota the experience farming and lane pushing are key concepts if you want to be a pro player but not if you want to be a casual viewer. The team with more kills tends to win.

          Dota still has some user-unfriendliness, for one the viewer perspective is just terrible, but I don’t think fighter games are superior. I’d bet on counterstrike first, moba second, fighter games last.

        • DrBeat says:

          The problem with fighting games as a spectator sport is the disconnect between how hard something looks and how hard something is, leading people to be unable to recognize when they are seeing something notable. You don’t need to know anything about football to see the Immaculate Reception and know how hard that was, because you know the rules of people holding objects. If you don’t know the rules of 3rd Strike, you can see the Daigo Parry from EVO 2004 and have no idea what you’re seeing is an insanely difficult defensive move that requires frame-perfect timing, it just looks like he’s blocking.

        • Aegeus says:

          Counterstrike might be another good one. It’s fairly comprehensible – shoot the dudes, plant the bomb, disarm the bomb. There’s not a lot of specific details required – there are many different guns in the game, but they’re broadly similar in function, and most of the time people only use the AK, M1, and the AWP anyway. And it has a fairly fixed timeframe – best out of 30, each round is on a timer. Kind of the same tempo as a football match.

          The main problem for a layman is knowing the map. Unless you’ve actually played the game and know the different locations, you can’t understand what’s going on from a first-person camera. You need to keep watching the minimap when you’re watching a match so that you can realize “This guy is holding down Long A” or “The CT’s have rotated to B, so T’s are pushing through Short A,” or all the other details that make the strategy. I don’t know how to make that clear to viewers. Maybe better camera angles or a better-looking overhead view?

          Then again, football fans can somehow follow everything that’s going on when there’s eleven dudes on a team running around with split-second timing, so I think they’d be able to follow a CSGO match.

          • LPSP says:

            Football fans have a high-up view of the game, whether from the stadium seats or from the tv screen. The solution is to provide viewers with aerial camera shots of the action just like any other sport, along with footage from the player’s perspective.

        • Lumifer says:

          Once Overwatch gets all the attributes of an e-sport (and Blizzard is heading in that direction), it might turn out to be very watchable.

        • Montfort says:

          The advantage of fighting games is their ease of understanding at a basic level, and the flashy visuals (2D fighters are way better on this score, as an aside). But to actually keep up with the strategic considerations of the players, you need to know a lot about the internal workings of the specific game – frame advantage, how meter and stun build, armor/invincibility frames, and the movelists of the characters. As a novice watching a Street Fighter match, it seems weird when announcers get extremely excited about a subtle block or a backdash, whereas a round-ending super is routine.

          In contrast, competitive FPSs are also easily understood at a basic level, and generally the higher-level mechanics are more analogous to the real world. Or so I would think, but, there’s probably a measure of bias here depending on what kind of game one’s most familiar with. They also offer the same kind of spectacle as certain kinds of action movies.

          In any case, I think the real advantage of the Counterstrikes and DOTAs is that team “sports” are a lot more interesting for people to follow over time – you can get more continuity than with individual competitors, you can follow personnel changes, speculate about super teams, etc.

          (As an aside, it’s very possible to get a decent view of the action in CS, but it’s apparently harder than it seems because they really did a terrible job at ESL Cologne this year. Other than that, though, the production values were surprisingly high; good commenters, replays, player reaction shots…)

      • Samedi says:

        Dota is not really a good eSport for the casual viewer. When my son started watching and playing I wanted to watch it with him (he could care less about baseball and football), I had to learn it. Wow is it complicated. But once you learn all the rules it’s fun to watch.

        eSports in general is an interesting topic. I wonder how it will develop and how the audience demographics will play out? There is a lot of money there and it is truly international in its appeal. In the last big Dota tournament I watched, “TI5”, the prize pool was about $18 million and the teams came from all of the world: US, South America, Europe, Russian, China, and Southeast Asia. I believe other big eSport tournaments are similarly international.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Dota is not really a good eSport for the casual viewer.

          Neither is baseball.

  41. MawBTS says:

    Any opinions on anabolic steroids?

    I was surprised by how cheap they are – I don’t use, but aren’t they like $750/year for average “gym rat” dosages? Safe to say that the average bodybuilder spends astronomically more on food than on AAS.

    Peptides are a different story, though. One of my friends was looking into pharm-grade HGH + insulin and it would have literally cost more than his mortgage.

    • Methylthrowawaybolone says:

      That sounds pretty reasonable, though it obviously depends on dose. A beginner might use an effective dose of 400mg testosterone per week, some use that much per day, plus orals.

      A gram of usable (esterized in vial/amp) testosterone will commonly sell for $20-40 if it’s pharm grade and $5-30 if it’s underground. A beginners cycle can consist of just 7g (say, 12 weeks of 600mg/week) and an intermediate cycle could be done for $400-600, which puts us roughly at your figure at two cycles per year – and that’s assuming people pay premium for quality substances.

      More money is burned on safety: Full blood tests can be $100 per test, then there’s estrogen control (~$70-150), drugs to get your natural hormone levels back up when you go off and maybe liver and cholesterol support. Aggressive users will need additional medications (prolactin control drugs cost ~$3-4 for each pill), but that’s another story.

      This is one reason to take AAS stories with a grain of salt, as user are essentially presented with:

      A) Wing it for $300
      B) Regularly check your health and reduce risks for $600
      C) On second thought, wing it at 2x dose for $600

      And there’s no shortage of people complaining about steroids being awful after picking option A or C.

      • Psmith says:

        A gram of usable (esterized in vial/amp) testosterone will commonly sell for $20-40 if it’s pharm grade and $5-30 if it’s underground.

        It’s been a couple years, but last I looked into it I was under the impression that if you’re not actually getting it from a pharmacy it’s pretty much guaranteed to be UGL regardless of what the label says.

  42. Methylthrowawaybolone says:

    Any opinions on anabolic steroids?

    I just went through my first cycle and they kinda seem like an easy mode switch for fitness and good looks to me (assuming one is interested in being slightly less fat and significantly more muscular). Even on moderate doses, people on AAS who sit on their ass all day outgain naturals in the gym, and enhanced lifters experience stacked benefits.

    I’ve received a surprising amount of compliments, am a bit happier about myself (particularly around mirrors) and somehow feel more focused at work now that at least the body composition side of fitness is approaching “solved” status for me.

    A key part of the decision for me was that the side effects, which are commonly lumped together, are to some extent avoidable and substance-dependent.

    For example, estrogen conversion (which triggers water retention and gynecomastia) can be reduced by taking anti-estrogens or SERMs (substances that block the estrogen receptor), and liver toxicity is for the most part associated with oral steroids, not injectable ones. Androgenic side-effects (acne, hair loss) are afaik unavoidable, since the relationship between anabolic (muscle growth) and androgenic side effects is for the most part linear.

    The strongest reasons why I wouldn’t recommend use currently is legality and the horrendous quality of black market products, which are very often (>50%) under/overdosed and often (>20%) contaminated with heavy metals and other industrial chemicals. (If interested, William Lewellyn gives an interesting talk on this, look for “Steroids evolving black market” on youtube)

    Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know. Prostate enlargement and left ventricular hypertrophy (the bad kind) are associated with AAS use and appear to reverse over time, but relationship with dose, time of use and just overall impact on mortality isn’t clear. Whether you can impair your testosterone production long-term by taking steroids is unclear, though I personally doubt it (it seems to be limited to long-term users and lots of people lie about dose and duration, or use wrong, no or bunk medicals to repair their endogenous testosterone production post-cycle)

    • LaochCailiuil says:

      Were you doing heavy resistance training at the same time as this? Like deadlifts, cleans, etc?

      • Methylthrowawaybolone says:

        Yes, a fairly standard upper/lower body split. I don’t go super heavy, as muscle strength will increase a lot faster than tendon strength will and I’m obviously not keen on injuring myself.

        • LaochCailiuil says:

          I like to lift and wouldn’t mind experiencing the gains of using steroids but given it’s illegality and side effects(I’m quite partial to my hair in a narcissistic way) I’m terrified of going near it. I don’t think I could deal with gynaecomastia if something went wrong with dosage. In other words I’d like guidance from an accredited professional. It’s annoying that medicine isn’t about being more than the normative by age definition of healthy.

          • Anonanon says:

            ^Same. It sounds intriguing, but not worth the risks and hassle.

          • Methylthrowawaybolone says:

            That’s reasonable. 23&me tells me I’m not at risk for male pattern hair loss, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t obsessively check my temples for the first weeks.

            Fully agree on guidance – blood values are hard enough to interpret as it is, and unsurprisingly, most doctors aren’t that experienced in treating and advising AAS users. Maybe in a brighter future.

    • Anonymous says:

      You mention a concentration improvement, any noticeable impact on cognitive performance otherwise?

    • LowTAnon says:

      How fortuitous that this should come up here. I was recently tested and found out that my testosterone levels are very low for my age. They’re technically within the reference range (360ng/dL, where as the lowest normal value from LabCorp is 348ng/dL), but I’m in my mid-20s, so from what I’ve read they really should be somewhere around double that.

      I’m now doing research to see if I want to go on TRT. I have a bunch of symptoms that are associated with low T (fatigue, anxiety, inability to gain muscle mass even when working out very regularly), so it’s certainly tempting to see if TRT would resolve those. However, I’m trying to be extremely cautious as I want to be sure I understand the health risks associated with long-term usage of TRT. From what I’ve read so far, it seems safe and possibly even beneficial as long as you stay within normal range and get regular blood tests to check things like hematocrit and estradiol. That said, I’m not yet convinced that TRT has been studied sufficiently to really establish long-term safety.

      If anyone has any good studies to recommend, please post them here.

    • Tek Tek says:

      Yes, never take them you f*ck*ng dolt.

      Taking roids only makes sense in a few situations. And even then, only if tested for safety carefully.

      1. You’re an olympic/professional athlete in a rich country with a team that will pay off the testers. That’s how most records are broken, I believe. The right guy got paid off.

      2. You’re a prison guard in a maximum security jail and *have* to be an intimidating mo-fo. And the roids should at best, be used as a short term boost that you don’t do yearly by any means.

      I mean, I guess when you are young it can kindof help get you laid, since its easier to look both huge and lean on them, which does help. But the drug of choice in that situation is alcohol, you know.

      You absolutely don’t want to go into the Roid cycle. Take it for three months in a year, get better gains then you have had in 4 years, and become addicted to the rush and end up dying of heart failure at 40 which happens to some bodybuilders.

    • Walter says:

      You can definitely get them easily (dunno if that’s good or not).

      I went with a buddy to his fitness diet store. He had been using a new supplement and bulking up more than he expected.

      Buddy: Hey man, I’ve been gaining a lot of muscle since I started using these… They aren’t steroids, are they?

      Cashier: Lemme see

      *looks*

      Cashier: *snort* Nah man, these ain’t steroids.

      *Long beat*

      Cashier: Do you want steroids?

      • dndnrsn says:

        I once overhead a super awkward conversation between a guy at the supplements store trying to get a steroid hookup, and the guy working behind the desk at this respectable chain store trying to shut him down indirectly.

        Almost as awkward as the time that a mid-to-late-teens kid, looked like he probably played some kind of sport and wanted to bulk up, was in the store with his probably-40s mother. She very much had the look about her of someone working quite hard – and succeeding – in staving off the effects of age: fit, tanned, dressed in Lululemon or whatever. She was eye-fucking the guy behind the counter, while asking tons of questions about supplements, in that way people do when they don’t particularly care about the answers because they’re flirting. I felt really sorry for that kid.

        Still not as awkward as the guy in the comics shop trying to ask where the hentai was without actually saying what he was looking for.

  43. God Damn John Jay says:

    Is anyone else made really nervous by the picture of the girl and the giant dog? Is that just my mild fear of giant dogs or is that actually dangerous?

    • Guy says:

      I was confused by the stethoscope for a bit, to the point that I thought the dog might be some sort of strange toy and/or the picture was photoshopped. I was on the point of asking about it before I figured out what I was looking at.

      But no, the picture did not trip my discomfort around dogs. (I think because it’s a still picture)

    • James Picone says:

      Whether it’s dangerous or not depends on the dog. Hopefully the kid’s parents know the dog and think it’s fine.

      In general you don’t want to leave a small kid alone with a big dog, but if you’re there it’s probably fine unless it’s a really aggressive dog.

    • Jaskologist says:

      It is adorable, and properly subtitled, “Sorry, Sir, it’s Barkinson’s.”

    • John Schilling says:

      Most large dog breeds are fairly child-friendly, if only for the obvious reason that a child-hostile Chihuahua might be allowed to breed but a child-hostile Mastiff is going to be removed from the canine gene pool with extreme prejudice. And from the other direction, small children are unlikely to accidentally hurt a big dog badly enough to trigger a defensive reaction. Small dogs are more likely to bite, and the more wolfish of the medium-sized dogs are more likely to kill or maim.

      There’s still enough room for individual variation that if it is your child you’ll want to know the breed, the dog, and the child before deciding it’s safe to leave them in the room together. Particularly the child – somewhere out there is the three-year-old who could provoke Marmaduke to a homicidal rage. If it’s someone else’s child, and they’re obviously in the room taking the picture, I’m not going to worry about it.

      • Mary says:

        Especially when the child is merely putting a stethoscope to the dog. All that requires is a little canine patience with some innocuous acts.

    • Tekhno says:

      You’re not alone. I think it’s not just a question of how calm the breed is, but how much damage it can do if it does go berserk.

      • onyomi says:

        By this logic, all pictures of adults with children and large adults with smaller adults should also unnerve.

        You might say a large dog is more apt to go berserk than a human, but I’d say it all depends on the dog, and on the human. There are certainly many large dogs around whom I’d feel safer than certain small humans.

        *I will admit to having a mild unease around horses for this reason, but horses are also a lot more skittish than dogs. Horses don’t scare me because I think they’d intentionally attack me, but because they can spook, toss you off, and accidentally step on your head. Some horse expert might say they can tell which horses are and aren’t a risk, but I’m not a horse expert, so I can’t tell. If a dog freaks out, by contrast, it can’t really accidentally trample you.

  44. TED talks pile up on my iPod faster than I can listen to them, but I fortuitously happened to listen to a recent one while walking the dog (usually I listen to sf) and it’s relevant.

    When your steadfast opinions are tested, Julia Galef asks: “What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?”

    She does a good job of presenting a simple argument for wanting to know the truth about the world before you try to make changes.
    http://www.ted.com/talks/julia_galef_why_you_think_you_re_right_even_if_you_re_wrong

    • Stezinech says:

      Nice little talk. I agree with her that influencing emotional curiosity is probably more effective than trying to teach people logic, probability, etc. The problem is more to do with Type I (thinking fast) rather than Type 2 (thinking slow), so try to influence the first type.

      On the other hand though, Type 1 thinking seems closer to basic personality, and might be hard to modify.

  45. Dave says:

    In the midst of the Ghostbusters remake, and the controversy behind their IMDB score, I’m scanning IMDb for a list of movies, the histogram of how each gender voted on those movies, and the mean and variance of those votes.

    My primary motive is to see how the gender gap in IMDB movie ratings compares between the new Ghostbusters film and the rest of the top 6000 films on IMDB (i.e. movies that men love and women hate, and vice versa).

    Specifically, I’m using Python and MySQL to create data visualizations that will:

    1. Show which movies have the highest and lowest gender gaps in their ratings.

    2. See if there is a relationship between a movie’s rating-gender-gap and the year it came out.

    3. List which movies have the highest and lowest variances within a single gender’s score.

    —-

    So, on to the questions.

    1. Just for the public’s curiosity, what other data should I have included? I stopped my crawler about 15 minutes in to revise my code to add the year each movie came out. I also realized just recently that I should have captured info about the movie’s genre and run some analysis on that variable as well.

    2. Does anyone have a good introductory tutorial on how I can make some really nice data visualizations using either Python or data from MySQL?

    3. Just an FYI, I’m sending a request to IMDB only once every 4 seconds; each crawl should take about 10 hours.

    • Guy says:

      Do it again in a year, studying the same movies, and report on any interesting discrepancies in number of votes recieved (people keep talking about these movies) and overall popularity (opinions on these movies are changing). Also you should probably analyze at least some genre tags.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Eh. You’re going to run into a targeting problem; movies with female leads will tend to have lower overall ratings, because they’ll be tending to target a demographic of women.

      If you stick within genre lines for comparison purposes, I think you’ll reduce the damage a little bit.

    • Alliteration says:

      There exists the mathplotlib library which is for graphing in python. If I understand correctly, it is the standard graphing library for python.

  46. Tracy W says:

    I’m thinking of getting tested for adult ADHD, any advice?

    I’m a Kiwi and am willing to pay for private care for this.

    • nope says:

      Yes! Do your homework before you go in, a ton of it, on both ADHD and pharmacological treatment. I’ve generally found well-qualified GPs and psychiatrists alike to be poorly informed regarding ADHD. Consider going to a specialist in neurodevelopmental disorders, if you don’t have the time or desire to do your own digging. Anecdotally, there are quite important differences not only between the stimulant and non-stimulant medications for ADHD, and not only the substituted amphetamines and actual amphetamines, but also between different balances of left and right handed versions of many of these drugs. Also, certain doctors have a tendency to undermedicate, while others have a tendency to overmedicate, both of which are very bad and cause people to think that a medication didn’t work for them when really their doctor just prescribed them the wrong dosage. The rule of thumb is that a stimulant-naive person should never begin at a dosage of more than 5 mg methylphenidate (Ritalin) per 4 hours, or more than 2.5 mg amphetamine (Adderall) per 6 hours, and should be titrated slowly up in dose over the course of a couple weeks until optimal response is achieved. Don’t let a doctor talk you into XR anything to start out with, and take IR until you’ve figured out what sort of dose you can handle and what sort of timing works best for you. Non-stimulant medications exist, but seem generally less efficacious and take longer to work (if they work at all). Purely therapeutic approaches don’t have much long-term impact on their own, but there are many modifications you can make to your lifestyle that will make things easier for you (for instance, if you have strong sensory sensitivities, as many people with ADHD do, you can e.g. wear tag-free clothing or invest in noise-cancelling headphones [my personal favorite adaptation!]).

      • Tracy W says:

        Thanks, I don’t think I have any sensory issues.
        I found via google a clinical psychologist specialising in adult ADHD, do you think this would be a good first port of call?

        And what does XR and IR mean?

        • Ron says:

          Extended release and instant release

        • nope says:

          I would probably try to go to a psychiatrist first, as medication is really the mainstay of most ADHD treatment, because it’s what has the largest effects. But once you’ve got your medication, seeing the psychologist is probably a good idea, because they’ll be able to recommend lifestyle modifications suited to you, and perhaps also suggest strategies for medication management (ie, telling you *how to actually use* the medications you’ve been prescribed, which is a non-trivial and often overlooked issue).

      • Outis says:

        Um. How many mg of amphetamine do 20 mg of Vyvanse correspond to? Asking for a friend whose psychiatrist started him on 20 mg for adult ADHD.

        • Creutzer says:

          Should be somewhere on the order of 6mg D-amphetamine. Therapeutic in adults don’t really get much lower than that.

          • Outis says:

            Is it safe for my friend to take it only “as needed”, instead of with any regularity? Would that make habituation more, less or equally likely?

          • Creutzer says:

            More sporadic use always means less habituation. The idea with stimulants is generally not that you take them at a dose that you need to be habituated to in order to even be able to deal with. They are really a very on-and-off thing and their therapeutic value comes from their immediate effects, not from some kind of long-term consequences. So taking them as needed is fine. The right dosage needs to be found by experimentation, of course, but it’s unlikely to be much lower than 6mg of D-amphetamine. Of course, if side-effects like high blood pressure and heart rate and anxiety occur, then going lower is a thing to do. The other option being to switch to a different medication; stimulants all have vaguely the same side effect profile, but differ both between and within individuals.

    • Emily says:

      I did this and initially got a 5-minute chat with a psychiatrist and a prescription for amphetamines. Which I tried and then stopped because I didn’t think the productivity increase was worth being on a medication I found really scary. My sense from that is that diagnostic criteria are maybe kind of vague and you might not get a satisfactory answer to whether you have this. The question you may wind up having to answer for yourself is rather what to do about your symptoms- medication, CBT, lifestyle stuff, nothing, some combination. Different solutions will involve different mental health professionals.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        What do you find scary about amphetamine? Was this something you only learned by trying it?

        Have you considered modafinil? Finding amphetamine scary is a legitimate reason to ask your psychiatrist for modafinil.

        • Emily says:

          I had trouble sleeping and I felt like my personality was different. But the big issue was how great it was. It felt like I could get very addicted very quickly. I did only learn this by trying it. Haven’t considered modafinil, but I could. I don’t have a psychiatrist at the moment, though, and I can’t go the Canada/online route.

        • Corey says:

          To add my anecdote: I’m kinda anxious and so preferred the ADHD (I’m only midly afflicted) to stimulant-enhanced anxiety. I tried Strattera, a non-stimulant, it worked well for a while then eventually had little effect.

          • some guy says:

            The variation in responses people have to different drugs is quite amazing to me. Strattera caused me all sorts of anxiety, whereas my anxiety dropped off a cliff when I started taking ritalin.

            An increase in OCD-like anxiety is a fairly intuitive effect of the stimulants. However, if your OCD stems from your mind trying to impose order on your shitshow of an ADHD life, you may find that proper treatment of the ADHD leads to a dramatic drop in OCD and anxiety symptoms. Or it could all just be random, I guess that’s fairly plausible also…

      • Tracy W says:

        Thanks,
        What’s it like getting medication without a firm diagnosis?

        • Emily says:

          Weird. It felt very sketchy to be getting amphetamines based on saying yeah, I lost stuff a lot and underperformed in school as a kid, and now I have trouble focusing.

    • Johnjohn says:

      It’s a very unsatisfying experience all around. The diagnosis criteria is vague enough, that the fact that you’re an adult and want to get tested, is probably enough for you to get treatment if you want.

      A couple of months ago I saw a post in an open thread on here (I wish I could find it again so I can thank whoever made it) talking about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life due to high IQ masking the symptoms. I’m the classical case of an underachiever, scraping by due to a mix of luck and innate ability. (Single, 30 year old software developer that is thankful for having found a job where no one notices if you don’t do anything for 3 days… Which pays more than any job of my peers.. Ridiculous).
      When I saw the post on high IQ and ADHD a lot of things seemed to fall into place, I’m an aggressive procrastinator, to the point where I get strong headaches from frantically opening new tabs and speed reading reddit posts for hours while knowing I should be working and hating myself for it.
      And with my new found self diagnosis, now I had an excuse! Cue me obsessively reading about ADHD for a couple of weeks while I wait for my appointment with my GP (always the first point of contact here when you want to get something diagnosed).

      The meeting with my GP basically went like this.
      “I think I have ADHD”
      “Did you have trouble in school?”
      “That was 20 years ago, maybe?
      Then we talk about my youth for 5 minutes while I sit and think about how me reading up on ADHD mixed with this discussion is heavily influencing the perception of my memories.
      “Classical case of ADHD”

      So I book a time with a psychiatrist who specializes in CBT whom I got recommended by a friend.
      I go there, we have the same talk, now with the added frustration of me knowing I’ve watched several hours of youtube videos on ADHD and its symptoms, knowing that it will affect my perception and answers even more.
      I get a long questionnaire with me home, that I’ll have to fill out with a parent, or someone who was close to me when I was a kid.
      That’s the important diagnosis criteria, it’s not ADHD if the symptoms were not present during the ages of 7-12 years old. (That’s two thirds of my life behind me!)
      So I sit down with my mother and we spent 3 hours filling out this questionnaire to an unsatisfying degree, both of us disagreeing on most everything, both agreeing that trying to answer vague questions about what happened 20 years ago is a futile endeavor.

      I end up scoring zero on the hyperactivity spectrum, and right below the cutoff for inattentiveness. So technically I don’t have ADHD

      So of course, I got a prescription for Ritalin.

      • Tracy W says:

        I bet the agressive procrastination issue at my latest job, but it’s still not enough. Damnit I should be achieving more with my life.

        And ages 7-12 were so crappy for me anyway, for reasons mostly unrelated to ADHD, if I answered questions based on that I’d probably wind up on NZ’s equivalent of a compulsory psych hold.

        How do you find the Ritalin?

        • Johnjohn says:

          Ritalin is helping me a lot. The length of my previous post is right around where I would have stopped being coherent when not medicated.

          I’m on week 3. The initial WOW effect is wearing off. The first week I was pretty much a model citizen. I did everything I knew I should do, but really didn’t want to. (Like, actually working 8 hours a day and cleaning up after myself when preparing dinner).
          Now I actually have to will myself to do those things, make active decisions. But unlike before the medication, me choosing to do something actually results in me doing it. Instead of me hating myself for not doing what I was telling myself to do.

          I’m on 20mg. I think it might be a little much for me, I do occasionally get windows the length of an hour or so, right where it peaks, and I feel like “OH JEEZ I’M ON DRUGS” but I’m honestly surprised by how normal I’m feeling 95% of the time.
          Most of the time I feel really really calm. I get a lot more done, yet I feel a lot less busy.

          The doctor warned me that the pills affect your appetite and they typically see patients losing weight once they start. Which seemed like a huge bonus to me as I’ve been struggling with eating sane amounts of food and occasionally get manic “suicide by pizza” episodes.
          Surprisingly, the pills make me violently hungry. But still(!) I’ve managed to drop 7 pounds, just from the fact that I have the willpower to not order junk food.
          I eat all the time, but I eat low calorie high fiber foods.

          Yet I’m still sitting here, not any closer to knowing whether I have ADHD or not.
          I feel like most people would have a positive experience taking Ritalin daily.
          In the end I decided that it doesn’t really matter, I seem to have some form of inattentive disorder, taking Ritalin gives me the resources to actually cope with it and hopefully my psychiatrist and CBT can provide tools for me to build up habits that will remain if I go off the meds.

          • Anon says:

            If it’s a lack of willpower, and Ritalin is helping, then maybe consider cleaning your environment more often. Law of opposite and equal advice, but a dirty floor takes up willpower just to process. Vacuum it for 2 minutes. So much cleaner. So much calmer.

        • Anon says:

          In my personal experience as ADHD person, Ritalin is shit because it works for about 4 hours. You take it in school. You gotta take your meds! Also, it’s time for the next class. Well, no time to sit around, gotta pack my books and go to the next class. Alright, we’re at the next class. Gotta grab my book for this class… lemme see, ah, this one. Pen, too… lemme check, where were we last time? Chapter… 4…, that’s 2, .. 5, … 4.

          Then the teacher starts talking ’bout the lesson for today. Meanwhile, I’ve forgotten my medicine. This used to happen about once a week. The end result is that learning becomes harder and I’m a dick in general.

          Later in life I moved over to Concerta, which is still the same thing (Methylfenidatehydrochloride), but has a slow-release mechanism. Result: Wake up. Take pill. Do the rest of your day. Works without flaw. If I do forget my medication, that sucks, but that usually doesn’t happen because I’ll even take my meds on auto-pilot.

          As for the side effects…

          I don’t know when I’m hungry, I don’t know when I’m full. Hunger presents itself as feeling oddly cold and being full presents itself as trouble swallowing. I’ll eat snacks if placed next to me, but if the container is sealed then its too much effort for me to open the container. I don’t have any sleeping issues, although I don’t take any other stay-awake “medication” such as coffee.

          When forgetting my medication, I’ll eat anything and everything. I feel like shit on those days, because all I want to do is eat stuff (what is this new sensation called hunger) and aside from that, I have really poor self-control, so I’ll probably spend the entire day surfing the internet and looking at total crap videos.

          I’d say that I forget my Concerta medication about once in every 3 months.

          That all said, this is after you’ve taken Ritalin for a while. I wouldn’t take Concerta if you experience bad effects from Ritalin or are new to all this, because Ritalin will wear off in about 6-8 hours total, and Concerta takes about 24 hours (papers and experience say 14 hours, but if you want there to be “no more remaining effect”, then it’s 24 hours for sure). So if you get a bad reaction, it stops in a day, rather than continuing into the period where you have to sleep.

          • some guy says:

            Pro tip: You can judge how much methylphenidate is still in your system by drinking alcohol. If you start having palpitations you still have too much in your blood and you shouldn’t be drinking.

            Seriously though, you’re not really supposed to drink on ritalin, which could be a bit of an issue for some people, I guess. I can take or leave alcohol, so it’s not such a big concern for me. Generally in situations where I might be expected to drink, I’m probably better off being on ritalin and socially functional anyway, so meh… But yeah, it can be a bit of an added complication (especially in alcohol-intensive cultures…)

          • Anon says:

            I don’t drink at all ever, mainly because I think alcohol stinks, and that too many people seem to have poor self-control with it, and that “a good drink” is expensive. I’d like to keep my money and mind. Might be an overreaction…

          • some guy says:

            @Anon, that wasn’t really directed at you or anything, I was just reminded of the alcohol thing by your mention of the timescale over which the drug stays in your system. It can be a bit of a logistical issue (e.g., ‘if I stop taking ritalin (IR) at about 2pm, then by 7:30pm I should be able to drink with dinner and be pretty much OK’, etc…)

          • Anon says:

            Oh yeah, that could totally be a thing; hadn’t thought of that.

      • Some years ago, I took an online test for ADHD, didn’t quite make it but close. I emailed my father and my older son, with the subject line “We all have ADHD.”

        Patri responded with a learned explanation of why we didn’t qualify. My father’s response was “Your mother has been saying that for years.”

      • Fahundo says:

        This post sounds exactly like me, except for the high IQ part. My procrastination is so bad I’ve given up doing anything important, and most of my plans and goals just involve playing video games, but then I procrastinate on playing video games and instead just end up not doing anything.

        I’m sure I’ll procrastinate on talking to a professional about it too, and just end up never doing that. Wish I was able to snag a job where I can just do nothing for 3 days though. I mean, currently I only do slightly more than nothing, but nothing would be ideal.

        • Johnjohn says:

          If you can. Find a doctor where you can book online.
          I almost chickened out when I saw my doctor was fully booked for 4 weeks, but it was worth the wait.

          “Wish I was able to snag a job where I can just do nothing for 3 days though.”

          Eh. You can’t even imagine how damaging it is to your self esteem in the long run…

    • some guy says:

      My experience with the whole process of seeking an assessment and undergoing treatment in Australia was great. You will find that some physicians of various stripes are sceptical of the diagnosis, especially if you are intelligent/articulate/highly educated…but many GPs and specialists are reasonably enlightened these days… I had a cardiologist in the loop from basically the start of my treatment. (If you have the kind of anxiety problems that are often comorbid with ADD, and you are trying out drugs that can potentially fuck with both (a) your heart and (b) your anxiety… well… it may be worth having a cardiologist in the loop…)

      My experience back in NZ has been less good so far unfortunately. (“I could give you an assessment if you really want, but it will cost you $500 and the assessment will be negative.”) Though there are other factors hindering me on this at present, and I certainly know of other adults diagnosed as adults and prescribed psychostimulants here, so maybe it is not so bad. From what I’ve seen though, it does seem that Aus is more enlightened on this than NZ, to a significant degree.

      When you go to a GP, you probably want to ask for a referral to a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist. You may find, as I did, that the GP recommends a psychiatrist as the way to go. The difference being that the psychiatrist can actually write scripts for medication. Unlike the US, GPs can’t prescribe stimulants in Aus or NZ (or at least, a psychiatrist has to sign off on it in the first instance, or something like that). I have no experience with psychologists, so I can’t really judge. But I think that for most people the medication is probably a pretty central part of treatment. If you’re going to do any kind of talk therapy and hope to absorb something from it and make actual progress, being medicated for the consult is probably a good idea.

      Strattera may cause all sorts of side effects that make you question your previous understanding of foundational human physiology and ultimately try to kill you, or it may work very well for you. Possibly both. It’ll probably be interesting, either way. You may have to find out the hard way what it does to you before your psychiatrist will consider prescribing you the standard stimulants. Which is fair enough, really.

      Ritalin is an absolute godsend. The experience of your internal monologue actually reliably translating into actions for a change is quite a profound one. The best thing that ever happened to me. Hopefully I’ll get back on it some day.

  47. Yakimi says:

    National Review: Japan Reverts to Fascism

    An American publication, ostensibly conservative in political orientation, informs me that my country has gone fascist. Fascist! Somehow, the blackshirt coup escaped my notice, but here I am, in 2016, living under the dark cloud of fascism. Liberate me, America!

    Five years ago, President Obama called for a foreign-policy “pivot to Asia.” With China seizing and militarizing the South China Sea, and North Korea testing delivery systems for its new nuclear weapons, it would probably be a good idea — “pivot to Asia”–wise — not to stand idly by while our most important Asian ally, and the second-richest democracy in the world, reverts to fascism.

    Clearly, Japan is an American colony still, and not an independent nation that can be allowed to pursue its own course. So against this fascist menace to world peace, what is to be done? Sanctions, Rhodesia-style? A Ukrainian-style sponsored revolution? Iraq-style nation-building? Preemptive nuking of Kyoto? Post your antifascist ideas below!

    • anon says:

      Fed policy that keeps the yen stronger than the BOJ would prefer?

    • Evan Þ says:

      I think you’re misinterpreting the article. It’s not saying Japan has already gone fascist; it’s saying that it may if the LDP succeeds in amending the Constitution to no longer respect civil rights and to restore State Shinto.

    • Yehoshua K says:

      National Review’s article may be wrong–I know little or less about Japanese politics. I certainly hope that it is wrong. But it is hardly unreasonable for a magazine of political commentary to spend some time commenting on the politics of important foreign countries, and it is certainly not the same thing as those countries being reduced to colonial status. In other words, calm down.

      • Evan Þ says:

        +1 to all points.

      • Yakimi says:

        Who said it was unreasonable to offer commentary on the affairs of foreign countries? I just thought their conclusion was crazy, particularly the author’s demand that Washington do something to thwart the fascist government of what is ostensibly its own ally.

        Japan is certainly an American colony, as evidenced by the author’s perspective. The slightest challenge to American-imposed liberalism strikes him as a fascist deviation that must be corrected by his own government, which is indeed how the State Department understands its role in relation to pretty much the entire world. It is not clear to me how this differs from, say, Khrushchev’s relationship to Hungary.

        • Lysenko says:

          The apparent absence of several divisions of American troops moving in to crush the counter-revolutionary elements would appear to be one minor element of divergence from the Russo-Hungarian pattern.

        • Civilis says:

          There was a longstanding joke that the purpose of NATO was to keep
          “the Americans in [Western Europe], the Russians out, and the Germans down.” It would not be a surprise to see a similar article were there to be resurgence of nationalism in the German government, or even the Italian government, especially if the Italians started speaking favorably of a leader that would make the trains run on time again. Germany today is most certainly not a US colony, and this despite that they seem to have largely taken over Europe, or believe they have given Merkel’s views on the EU.

          Likewise, the word ‘fascist’ gets thrown around a lot. It seems more appropriate than most to use the word to describe one showing nostalgia for the Axis cause. There are a lot of countries in the world that can reasonably described as fascist, and none of them qualify for even as much as sanctions on that basis alone. There is nothing in the article suggesting such a course, merely dissaproval.

        • Maware says:

          Um, do you really think a reversion to the kinds of ideas Nippon Kaigi holds is better? The article’s point is that there might be a governing coalition that believes/or is nostalgic for the kind of mindset that Japan had pre-WW2. State Shinto + historical revisionism is a sign of Fascism to me. You seem to be reacting to the title but ignoring the meat of the article.

    • Lysenko says:

      Evan’s reading of the piece matches my own. I think your response is a little over the top, but I take it to indicate that a LDP supermajority in the Diet is not a cause for concern. Is it your contention that they are not likely to actually amend the post-war constitution? That they are, but not in the ways the article’s author is concerned about? That they might in those ways but that the outcome is good?

    • Diadem says:

      and the second-richest democracy in the world

      The author clearly isn’t very informed, or has a strange definition of rich. Japan is the 24th richest country in the world, and only 3 of the countries above Japan are not democracies.

      • anon says:

        They were going by nominal GDP (i.e. not per capita, and not PPP adjusted). Dumb metric, but whatever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Assuming we want to work with aggregate GDP, not per capita, for what purposes is GDP PPP more useful than GDP? I cannot think of a single one.

          • anon says:

            You raise a good point. Might a possible application be comparing two countries’ economic bases (as a proxy for industrial capacity) in the event of a large-scale conventional war? It’s not a great example…

          • Douglas Knight says:

            That’s exactly the kind of question for which I think that nominal GDP is a much better answer.

          • anon says:

            Well you buy hamburgers to feed your soldiers from MacDonalds in your own country, not from MacDonalds in your enemy’s lands.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Sure, there are some parts of the economy that you want to deflate with PPP and some that you do not. I don’t know how it all balances out, but I think it’s a lot more on the latter.

          • Offtopic:
            Two futuristic armies fighting through the streets, laying siege to the McDonald’s in the next town over to create a new foothold, while their resting soldiers in the previous town rotate through the check-out line, ordering to-go. As the last enemy falls and soldiers swarm in, the McDonald’s employees change over the happy meal toys to red plushie Oceania logos…

        • Total GDP is a more sensible metric than per capita GDP if the question is how important a country is as an ally. China is not a democracy, so that makes Japan the second richest democracy.

          Judging by a quick Google, switching to PPP leaves Japan still ahead of Germany, but behind India.

          • Diadem says:

            Sure, but the metric used was ‘richness’. Surely it is insane to look at total GDP when looking at how rich a country is.

            Would you argue that Bill Gates is not the richest man in the world, because there’s a billion Chinese farmers out there who together own more than him? That seems nonsensical.

          • Artificirius says:

            I would think that would be a little more like saying a guy with a value of 100 billion was as rich as a guy with 50 billion, simply because the first has the money tied up in 100 ccompanies, while the second has it tied up in 25, and therefore is in fact richer by a factor of two because his 2 billion per corporita to the other’s 1 billion per corporita.

          • “Surely it is insane to look at total GDP when looking at how rich a country is.”

            That depends on context. If you are thinking in terms of the country as a player in world politics, which is the context here, the total wealth of the country is more relevant than the average wealth of the citizens.

            Whether China is your ally is considerably more important than whether Luxembourg is.

    • suntzuanime says:

      With China seizing and militarizing the South China Sea, and North Korea testing delivery systems for its new nuclear weapons, who would actually make a better ally, “fascists” or pacifists?

      • Sfoil says:

        Well, it does mean that if the US decides to stop being Japan’s ally, Japan will start becoming a lot less pacifist, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons. I’d give it a week before they announce nuclear capability, less than six months before a test (seriously, it doesn’t take much digging to come up with a bunch of shady stuff about Japan’s not-really-even-trying-to-hide-it “civilian” nuclear energy program).

        • John Schilling says:

          Why would they announce nuclear capability before testing? That’s pretty much waving a giant “Shoot me now!” sign to everybody who doesn’t want to be dealing with an actually nuclear-armed Japan six months in the future.

          And no, Japan doesn’t have a secret stash of bombs or almost-bombs that can be assembled in days. They can build them in six months, yes, but there’s a whole lot of people in East Asia who really, really hate and fear the Japanese and wouldn’t need to wait six months to do something about it.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ John Schilling

            waving a giant “Shoot me now!” sign to everybody who doesn’t want to be dealing with an actually nuclear-armed Japan six months in the future.

            “Everybody” is pretty much China, right? Do you think China will invade Japan over the announcement of nuclear capability?

          • Sfoil says:

            If the publically available knowledge about the Japanese nuclear program is correct, they could probably put together a crude gun-type bomb pretty quickly, possibly in days. They probably wouldn’t want to test until they’ve assembled an implosion-type device, though, which is what they ultimately want (based both on comparative performance and their spent-fuel reprocessing activities). Also the tests are in fact tests, the guys setting the thing off really do need to collect a bunch of data about the explosion using a bunch of sensitive instruments. That requires preparation.

          • John Schilling says:

            China, North Korea, and South Korea are all solidly in the “We hate Japan” camp, along with various lesser powers. Seriously, have you seen Seoul’s new city hall? Hint: the building about to be demolished by the blatant architectural tsunami is Seoul’s old city hall, built by the Japanese colonial administration. And this bit of symbolism opened the year after the Sendai earthquake and tsunami.

            The North Koreans, by comparison, don’t do subtle symbolism but just openly threaten to nuke the crap out of Japan if the Japanese step out of line. And this is one of the few scenarios that might lead to a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula, on the grounds that Kim Jong-Un may be a tinpot dictator with a nuclear arsenal but at least he’s not a damn dirty Jap (coming soon, damn dirty Japs with a nuclear arsenal).

          • John Schilling says:

            @Sfoil: If what is presently known about Japan’s civilian nuclear program is correct, they have about enough highly-enriched uranium for maybe four gun-type bombs, and that in the form of reactor fuel elements, not usable metal. I suspect you are going on memories of reports a decade or so old, when the stockpiles were larger and more versatile.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ John Schilling

            Oh, I know Koreans hate Japanese with a burning passion. However they are too small to do anything about it. I mean, it’s theoretically possible the latest Kim will get lucky enough to get a nuke to lift off and even to hit Japanese soil, but then what? They still can’t mount a successful invasion.

            And all of that over an announcement?

          • Sfoil says:

            @John Schilling
            I’d consider Japan’s abandonment of highly enriched uranium programs to be evidence they think they can put together an implosion weapon quickly, not of a good-faith effort to disarm. Japan’s plutonium stockpile is currently sitting at 47 metric tons, and efforts to take this away tend to end up with the Japanese agreeing to turn over hundreds of pounds while keeping thousands of pounds for themselves. And making more. The “research” excuse is absurd; that’s Tony Montana saying he wants to study the effects of cocaine on lab mice.

            Extracting any plutonium from spent reactor fuel is basically prima facie evidence of a nuclear weapons program, by the way. The United States just doesn’t allow the South Koreans to do it, for instance.

  48. Bram Cohen says:

    A question about alcohol: Is it an antidepressant? People on it certainly seem to feel ‘good’, although I don’t know if I’d call it ‘high’. It’s certainly ‘numb’. GHB feels very similar and my back-when-it-was-legal memory is of it being a very enjoyable and, well, antidepressant experience. But it seems to be nothing like cocaine though, which is the prototypical antidepressant-for-the-next-5-minutes sort of drug.

    • TPC says:

      I’ve been told it’s an enhancer of mood. If you’re sad, it will amplify that, and so on if you’re happy or angry, etc.

    • caryatis says:

      Short-term, alcohol is happiness in a glass. (Well, for many of us–you also see people who become angry or sad when drunk). Long term, it aggravates (causes?) depression and anxiety.

    • Acedia says:

      All the descriptions I’ve read of the effects of cocaine make it sound like you’d have to be kind of an asshole to enjoy it. Aggressive narcissism and megalomania in drug form.

      • nope says:

        I can see some appeal to the underconfident person with a dearth of those qualities who welcomes the change.

      • Psycicle says:

        It’s rather closely linked to your dopamine system, it’s hard not to enjoy it.

        It isn’t the narcissism and megalomania that’s enjoyable, it’s the drug itself.

      • Jill says:

        Who doesn’t want to feel confident and feel good about themselves? Aggressiveness can also be helpful in sales and many other careers. Okay, maybe the drug goes overboard on making you feel good about yourself. But for many people, they’d rather have too much self love than very little.

        Still, to someone thinking rationally, it’s not worth the cost. And other ways of building confidence, self-esteem, assertiveness, sociability have far fewer bad effects to contend with.

        • hlynkacg says:

          ^ what Jill said.

        • Acedia says:

          Who doesn’t want to feel confident and feel good about themselves?

          If that’s truly all it does, I’m glad I was mistaken. The way people usually describe it it sounds less like healthy self-esteem and more like a feeling of rapacious power and domination.

          • Jill says:

            I did not say that was all it did. I was writing about what people desired out of the drug that caused them to take it. Of course the drug has numerous terrible effects. But people aren’t thinking of the problems when they decide to use such a drug.

          • in all but good taste says:

            well, there will always be differences between dosage levels, and even use cases. a small amount of cocain will not send someone into a rage frenzy but perhaps someone who wants to go into a rage frenzy will have a different experience.

    • Psycicle says:

      Not really….

      An instructive comparison is benzodiazepines. For most people, if they take them, they’ll report just being very calm and sleepy. For people with anxiety disorders, the total negation of anxiety is a much bigger deal, and they are often abused.

      As they both hit the GABA receptor, I’d naively suspect that this “antidepressant” effect is mainly just you not giving a shit about the things that used to bother you.

      There’s probably another component linked to socializing. Socializing feels good, alcohol lowers your inhibitions, boom. The “numb” feeling tends to arrive when you aren’t drinking with people.

      • Tek Tek says:

        Eh, if it makes you feel better and that boosts general life, its an “antidepressant”. If one talks in the words people use semi-freely in real life I don’t want to nail it down to a certain chemical effect like GABA vs dopamine and what-not.

    • Lumifer says:

      I think it’s mostly a relaxant — if you’re tense, uptight, high-strung, alcohol will help with that.

    • Corey says:

      Not in the same way as your Paxils and Effexors. Such antidepressants don’t get you “high” in any similar sense to recreational drugs (besides my personal experience, I note that they have no street value). Those are more about muting negative feelings than accentuating positive feelings.

    • Tek Tek says:

      Well, yes!

      Antidepressants (a la the SSRI variant) don’t work permanently in the first place. They have never really been shown or proven to not suffer from what most psychoactive drugs suffer, which is tolerance, and a good deal of evidence shows it does suffer from tolerance. So is paxil/prozac simply a crappy slow-release version of MDMA with all the long term tolerance? If it is somewhat aptly described as a slow release variant with tolerance, why not also describe MDMA/alcohol as an antidepressant with a different time function?

      “This suggests that over 6 weeks paroxetine treatment increases 5-HT agonism on 5-HT(2A) receptors in the cortex of young patients with depression”

      So you really have to define what makes an antidepressant an antidepressant. Certainly alcohol when used intelligently and in certain settings increases euphora and I suppose could be called an antidepressant, but when used everyday will build up tolerance and stop working. What you might find with the “official” antidepressants is that not only do you not feel obvious euphoria, but its supposed serotonin effects wear out anyways.

      Fun Stuff!

  49. anon says:

    What do military-affiliated, and/or older, SSC readers think about Ron Unz’s latest attempt to resuscitate the POW/MIA scandal? See here, here, and for background here, here, and here.

    • John Schilling says:

      At this point, I think of it in roughly the same way I think of Nazi-hunters desperately trying to make the rest of us care whether the last ninety-year-old ex-Nazi dies in prison rather than in a nursing home.

      Also, he really wants me to care about his grudge with John McCain, and I don’t.

    • Lysenko says:

      I’m too young for the POW/MIA issue to really resonate with me, but I was military. That said, while I sympathize deeply with the people who were affected, and I think it’s profoundly screwed up that we left soldiers behind (which I believe we did)…

      …I doubt many, if any of them were alive even as far back as the early 80s when there were supposedly some military plans to search for them that were derailed by the self-promoting and opportunistic “rescue missions” organized by guys like Bo Gritz. I suspect that the reason cooperation has improved but is still lacking is that the Vietnamese Government is waiting for everyone who REALLY cares to die off before offering any conclusive closure.

    • Sfoil says:

      I’m a professional (American) soldier, and I don’t really care much about it. I’m kind of an asshole, though; conclusive publicized proof would definitely get a lot of people riled up enough and I’m sure it’d get e.g. McCain kicked out of office at least. If the story were really done right it would be great at stoking resentment in the Armed Forces against the civilian government.

      I do support Unz’s effort because hey, he’s got money to burn and it’s potentially interesting history. I don’t know what odds I’d put on it being another VENONA (hey, those right wing nutjobs were right all along…but who cares, that was like a billion years ago!) but it’s greater than zero. What I don’t get about the story though is why the Vietnamese wouldn’t just publicize the prisoners if they wanted their payoff. It’s also possible some of the smoke here is because the NVA falsely claimed it held prisoners it didn’t and USG didn’t take them up on their pig-in-the-poke offer.

    • Interesting, I never understood the motive before but the first linked article gives one: “Why would the Communists want to keep the American POWs? Out of pure evilness or something? But the reality was exactly the opposite. It was the American government that had been treacherous, by refusing to pay the Vietnamese the $3.25 billion in reparations that they had demanded at the Paris Peace Talks as a price for ending the war and returning the POWs. If you buy a car and you refuse to pay, is it “treacherous” if the car dealer never delivers your vehicle? The problem had been that for domestic political reasons the Nixon Administration chose to pretend that the promised payment of the money was unconnected with the prisoner return, instead labelling it “humanitarian assistance.” Unsurprisingly, Congress balked at providing billions in foreign aid to a hated Communist adversary, and Nixon, weakened by the growing Watergate Scandal, couldn’t admit that unless the money were delivered, Hanoi would refuse to return the remaining POWs.”

      • Jiro says:

        Why would the Communists want to keep the American POWs? Out of pure evilness or something?

        Because releasing them would mean admitting that the Americans are right. Admitting that the Americans are right is bad for propaganda. Besides, they probably just tossed the Americans into a labor camp. Why would they want to send back random slaves just because they’re Americans?

        It was the American government that had been treacherous, by refusing to pay the Vietnamese the $3.25 billion in reparations that they had demanded at the Paris Peace Talks as a price for ending the war and returning the POWs.

        In other words, Vietnam won the war. Now that they won the war, they wanted to loot their defeated enemy to the tune of $3.25 billion. Unfortunately for them, they found that looting America was harder than it sounded.

        If they were actually unhappy with the price they got for ending the war, they could start the war again. If they were unable to start the war again, well, then there’s no need to pay them to not do something they can’t do anyway.

  50. hlynkacg says:

    SpaceX CRS-9 launch going down right now. T-16:00 watch the live webcast here…

    • Evan Þ says:

      Don’t say “going down”!

    • Jacobian says:

      Nailed the landing!

      Elon promised me it would take $500,000 to fly to Mars in 2050. Since SpaceX is a private company, what can I invest in today that would track SpaceX’s return most closely? Basically, I want higher than market returns if SpaceX works (and flights to Mars are actually a thing) and willing to lose the money if SpaceX fails.

      • anon says:

        Did he mean $500,000 in 2016 dollars?

      • gbdub says:

        Betting on that promise by Elon is a bad bet (I’d love to be wrong, but don’t count on it). If you really want to know what SpaceX is up to, pay more attention to Gwynne Shotwell and less to Musk (e.g. she says they’re expecting basically a 30% discount for a reusable 1st stage, as opposed to the “10x lower launch costs” Elon was touting previously)

        SpaceX (like Tesla, but much more so) is not being run in a profit-maximizing way, they’re doing a ton of expensive upgrades and experimenting at the cost of getting to a higher launch tempo / better schedule-keeping (which is really what they need, reusable or not – the customers are there, even at the current price). This is a lot of fun to watch, is probably good for the tech long term, and makes sense as a vanity project for Elon, but I doubt they’re going to make investors all that much money over the next 10 years or so. I’m not sure what their realistic business case for Mars is.

        Really the people best positioned to benefit from SpaceX are satellite operators and manufacturers, since hopefully the increased capacity and lower cost of Falcon will drive growth in that market. That’s where you’d want to put your money – maybe you’ll get lucky and make enough for one of those seats in 2050 😉

        • Anonanon says:

          Elon’s entire personal business plan is “whip up excited and over-optimistic investors”, so one should probably take that into account before getting excited and optimistic.

          • John Schilling says:

            That theory is hard to square with the fact that SpaceX is a privately-held corporation, restricted by law to a handful of large institutional and otherwise accredited investors.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ John Schilling

            There are a lot of accredited investors and the useful thing about them is that they have money (that’s how you become “accredited”). Plus “institutional investors” includes hedge funds which rarely suffer from the lack of capital to invest. So Musk ignoring retail (for the time being) is quite consistent with the business plan mentioned above.

          • John Schilling says:

            It is not their possession of money that is at issue, but the means by which they may be induced to part with it.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ John Schilling

            the means by which they may be induced to part with it

            The usual means? They are your normal standard-issue humans and as such tend to fall for all the standard things. Not to the same degree as Bubba from the trailer park, of course, but everyone wants to be associated with the rich, famous, and, most importantly, successful. And if you think that this association will also make you richer, well…

          • John Schilling says:

            So, Musk’s entire business plan is based on selling excitement and optimism, but he structures his company in such a way that he can only accept money from the sort of people least likely to invest on the basis of excitement and optimism, rather than the vastly larger pool of people who are highly susceptible to such?

            That’s a bit of a stretch, compared to the alternative where he just says what he means and means what he says. What evidence are you using to distinguish between the two?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ John Schilling

            Well, selling stock to the public, that is, an IPO, comes with a lot of strings attached. Besides, you basically do it once (per company), so figuring out the optimal time for an IPO is a big deal. I suspect SpaceX will go public at some point, but not yet. Musk is an optimist, so he is probably betting that after a few successes the value of the company will be much higher than it is today.

            (and I didn’t say anything about “Musk’s entire business plan is based on selling excitement and optimism”, by the way)

          • Anonanon says:

            >rather than the vastly larger pool of people who are highly susceptible
            and who have very little money.

            Look at what Theranos did. They built massive public hype, put a bunch of well-connected names on the board, and converted that into half a billion in private equity from Hall Financial Group, Larry Ellison, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, etc.

            No official valuation, nothing on the books that would let people realize it wasn’t a good investment, and definitely no small-time investors.

            You just have to convince a handful of people/institutions with deep pockets that they’re smarter and more visionary than everyone else.
            You need to make them think they’re ahead of the curve—that they’re being allowed an exclusive investment opportunity, and allowing bellboys to buy your stock in $2.50 increments ruins that.

            Selling that vision is Musk’s greatest talent.

          • John Schilling says:

            You just have to convince a handful of people/institutions with deep pockets that they’re smarter and more visionary than everyone else.

            But if that’s all you have to do, then why is Musk wasting so much time and money building spaceships that actually work? There’s clearly a difference between the SpaceX and Theranos business models.

          • Anonanon says:

            When you compare his promises of tickets to Mars and 10x lower launch costs (we already know the latter isn’t achievable with what Space X is offering), it starts looking similar.

            If he was saying “hey, come invest in us we could be a pretty profitable launch provider in a brutally competitive industry”, it’d be one thing. But “Join us so we can conquer space!!” is marketing hype.

          • John Schilling says:

            we already know the latter isn’t achievable with what Space X is offering

            I do this sort of thing professionally, and I don’t know that. I believe that Musk won’t be able to achieve his stated goals with his present means, but I don’t know it. And even my belief is informed by fairly esoteric technical details that haven’t figured into any of the general public discussion I have seen.

            So I’m pretty sure you don’t know this either, and don’t know how much you don’t know. It is not implausible that Musk believes what he says. People with far more experience in rocketry than he have held substantially similar beliefs, for longer than Musk has been in that line of business and without themselves selling anything.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            @John

            I find this uncompelling.

            There is a significant overlap between the “we’re on the cusp of slipping the surly bonds of earth and living forever amongst the stars” crowd and the “we’re on the cusp of discovering extraterrestrial life, like, totally any day now” crowd. The common theme tends to be spending a lifetime trying to prove everything Carl Sagan overimplied when they were kids. Sure, they all have tons of experience in the relevant fields, but all they have managed to do is pour dump truck loads of flaming grant money after their bias.

            I certainly don’t mind the research, but their starry eyed promises start grating after a while.

            Listening to Musk talk, it is obviously designed to quicken the pulse of Saganauts and totally fuck with their ability to think straight. What they then resell for mass consumption is “my life’s not a pathetic joke because my purpose is totally about to be proven right.”

          • John Schilling says:

            There is a significant overlap between the “we’re on the cusp of slipping the surly bonds of earth and living forever amongst the stars” crowd and the “we’re on the cusp of discovering extraterrestrial life, like, totally any day now”

            This is false, or at least grossly overstated for any common understanding of “significant overlap”, and suggests you are falling prey to outgroup-homogeneity bias. The outgroup in this case being space activists generally, and that community is in fact split into three distinct groups – the Saganites, Von Braunians, and O’Neillians, in one typology. There is some overlap between the two, but the majority are clearly in a single camp. Musk is an O’Neillian with a hint of Von Braun, the SETI fans are Saganites, and if you don’t understand the distinction you don’t really understand what is going on here.

            O’Neillians are for the most part sympathetic to Dr. Manhattan’s belief that intelligent life in distant galaxies would be a very interesting thing, and we will therefore have to create some. Many will allow for the possibility that ETI may exist, but they aren’t expecting to find it any time soon.

          • Ptoliporthos says:

            But if that’s all you have to do, then why is Musk wasting so much time and money building spaceships that actually work? There’s clearly a difference between the SpaceX and Theranos business models.

            Indeed. It’s quite easy to make a blood test fail more or less silently and invisibly. You give people a sheet of paper with some numbers on it, what patient can tell if the results come from an Edison machine or some Theranos subcontractor’s traditional lab?

            Compared with medical diagnostic equipment, it’s somewhat more difficult to conceal whether a rocket is functional. If SpaceX were just subcontracting to ULA to get working rockets, it would be kind of obvious to their customers.

          • Anonanon says:

            That’s amazing. I’d never heard of the three groups before, but the names alone gave a reasonably accurate impression of them before I’d looked it up.

  51. E. Harding says:

    Would modern progressives, if they had been transported back to 1896 but were left with all their present-day political beliefs, have voted for Bryan or McKinley? I can see this going both ways.

    • TPC says:

      Most of them would be unable to vote.

      • E. Harding says:

        Not so. Voter registration was not a requirement at the time, though being over 21 was.

        • TPC says:

          Women couldn’t vote until 1920 in most parts of the country.

          • E. Harding says:

            OK, though I think that’s a bit pedantic. You can argue all day about whether women constitute the majority of progressives. Most Bernie voters were men, certainly.

          • TPC says:

            Well, blacks couldn’t do much voting during that time either. And neither could all that many single people. Voting was more opened up, certainly, but it wasn’t as broad as it is now, and most progressives would have been excluded.

          • E. Harding says:

            “Well, blacks couldn’t do much voting during that time either.”

            -Let’s assume they were transported to a non-southern state. There genuinely are not that many progressives in the South, in any case. I have no clue by what most Blacks are driven, but it does not seem to be ideology.

            “And neither could all that many single people.”

            -What do you mean? Sure, they could.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Most Bernie voters were men, certainly.

            Be careful: the claim you know for certain isn’t this one. The claim you know for certain is that, of voters who cast ballots in the democratic primary, a higher proportion of men than women voted for Bernie. But the demographics in the democratic primaries already skew female, in New York, by a ratio of 3:2. As it turns out, almost exactly the same number of male and female New Yorkers supported Sanders. Similarly in Michigan.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Most Bernie voters were men, certainly.

            Depends on how you define progressive, Bernie voters aren’t particularly so within the Democratic Party.

        • Voter registration was not a requirement at the time

          That would vary wildly from one state to another. At least in Michigan, voter registration dates back to before the Civil War.

    • * A voter in 1896 who was primarily motivated by economic progressivism would have voted for Bryan, an advocate of working men and farmers, over McKinley, who was closely aligned with the business monopolies.

      As a matter of history, Bryan’s 1896 campaign marks the divergence of the parties on these issues: Bryan, as the working man’s Democrat, led to Woodrow Wilson, who led to Franklin Roosevelt.

      Also notable: millions of economically conservative Northern Democrats left the party in 1896, most of them permanently.

      My own county was down-the-line Democratic in the 1880s (carried by Hancock in 1880 and three times by Grover Cleveland), but rejected Bryan in favor of McKinley, opposed the New Deal, and didn’t give another majority vote to a Democratic presidential candidate until LBJ in 1964.

      * A voter who wanted above all to sustain the well-being of African-Americans would have voted for McKinley, as did about 100% of those few black voters who could participate, over Bryan, who represented the party of slavery (in the past) and segregation (mostly in the future at that point).

      * A less ideological voter might have been wary of Bryan, who was temperamentally unfit to be president, and advocated hare-brained monetary schemes.

      • E. Harding says:

        In real life, across key counties in California and other states, McKinley’s vote went basically the same as the White vote for Barack Obama, except in states like North Dakota and Washington, with McKinley’s strongest performance being in Vermont, Obama’s strongest state with Whites. Yet, it was Bryan that advocated increasing taxes on the rich, while Bush campaigned on cutting them. That’s why it would be so interesting to see if modern progressives would vote for Bryan (the anti-evolutionist anti-rich anti-trust anti-big-city-elitist pro-farmer candidate) or McKinley (the more economically conservative one). Progressive attitudes towards Brexit and their increasing openness toward free trade suggest McKinley (though McKinley was against free trade, but that was the more pro-big-business policy at the time, just as the pro-free trade position is the more pro-big-business policy today).

        Someone should poll well-informed progressives in Vermont.

      • Rob K says:

        It’s worth noting that Bryan’s economic populism was shakier policy than the platform the Populists had been pushing over the previous decade.

        In summary, the Populists had (accurately, it seems to me) diagnosed the post-Civil War monetary contraction as having harmed farmers (who tended to be net borrowers) and benefited bankers and the east coast economic elite. Their eventual proposal to deal with this, the sub-treasury plan, was a pretty good one – essentially a price-smoothing mechanism for agricultural commodities coupled with access to fairly cheap credit. It would have been monetarily expansionary and shifted the balance of economic power somewhat back towards agricultural interests.

        Free coinage of silver eventually became the mainstream alternative to this, but not because of greater economic coherence. It made less sense (the money supply would still be dependent on the ups and downs of the mining industry and metals discovery, and probably not sufficiently expanded), but brought the mountain state mining interests into the coalition.

        Meanwhile, the price for Bryan becoming the standard bearer for what was left of the Populist coalition was the destruction of the (tentative, never terribly effective) Populist-black alliances in southern states, and the end of the pattern where the populists made alliances of opportunity with the out party in both sections (populist-republican in the north, populist-democrat in the south). This basically ended the Populists’ presence as an effective political force after that election.

        I’m usually skeptical of claims that mainstream electoral success is harmful to a movement, but there actually does strike me to be a decent case that the Populists sort of got the worst of both worlds with Bryan – they lost the independence that made them powerful in return for unimpressive policy compromises.

    • neonwattagelimit says:

      Whether I would qualify as a “modern progressive” depends on who you ask, but I am probably to the left of the average for the SSC commentariat.

      I think I would have voted for McKinley in 1896, albeit with no particular enthusiasm. They were both poor choices, but Bryan’s demagogery would have really turned me off. I dislike demagogues, whether they are on the left or the right.

      I’ll hedge this by saying that my knowledge of the politics of the time is superficial, at best.

  52. caryatis says:

    In the United States, this is a matter of local law, so it matters where you are. In general, it’s easier to get a restraining order than to get someone committed. I’m not sure why you say a restraining order would “only help after the fact.” Not an expert, but I would think harassment, trespass and threats are enough to justify a restraining order even without actual violence.

  53. E. Harding says:

    Pence: great VP pick, OK VP pick, or terrible VP pick? Van Buren or Cheney? Post your thoughts below!

    • Yakimi says:

      As a Trump sympathizer, I think it’s terrible. Pence seems like your standard invade-the-world-invite-the-world neoconservative, which is precisely what Trump was trying to distance himself from. Was he trying to reassure the Republican establishment with this pick?

      • TPC says:

        It’s neutral to fine. It shores him up with the Cruz wing and, well, the kind of people who do think going to Chili’s is a fancy night out. Consolidating those people and getting them excited about voting is Trump’s version of what Hillary is doing re: BLM. It will probably be more successful since it doesn’t rely on polarizing larger voting groups to turn out his own voting groups.

      • E. Harding says:

        His touchback proposal was too lenient for my taste, but not all that different in mechanics from Trump’s (“door in the wall” and all that). His immigration record is clearly better than Paul Ryan’s. If anything, his weaknesses on immigration are Trump’s weaknesses, if a little magnified.

        https://www.numbersusa.com/content/my/congress/952/gradescoresheet/

        His views on the TPP (pro), bailouts (anti), the Iraq War (pro), same-sex marriage (anti) and the Muslim ban (anti) are clearly different from Trump’s, though.

        In the interview, he said he wanted to “unify the party” and make connections with the establishment in Congress. He always said there was a 95% chance his pick would be an establishment one.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Yes. Like it or not, this is the new Trump. He’s using a different strategy now that he has the nomination. This is a good way to get the support he needs.

    • Jill says:

      Trump found someone who was willing to run as his VP, and boring enough not to ever upstage him. Quite an achievement, in my view.

      As for who would be Trump’s Cheney, it would probably be his kids, since they seem more heavily involved in his campaign than any presidential nominee’s kids ever have. Bill Maher calls it “very Third World” that he’s doing that– like Saddam did. Someone obviously would have to be Trump’s Cheney, since his statements show that he has no knowledge of or interest in government.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d chosen one of his kids as VP nominee. I”m surprised by how ordinary a pick Pence is.

      • Guy says:

        Not that I like Trump, but … what a Bill Maher thing to say.

        • Anon says:

          But why can’t we compare presidential candidates to disposed dictators? It’s $current_year!

      • Splotch says:

        Trump is 70. Average president is in their mid-50s. Hence Trump’s kids are older than typical president kids. Still kinda odd though?

      • JayT says:

        George W. Bush had a fairly large roll in H.W.’s campaigns, so I don’t think this is unprecedented.

      • roystgnr says:

        Is Maher pro-Johnson, or just an idiot? If you’re pro-Clinton then the last thing you want to do is decry nepotistic connections in politics; you want to call as little attention as possible..

        • Jill says:

          Maher is pro Hillary mainnly because he is anti-Trump. He was for Bernie.

          I disagree about nepotistic connections. It doesn’t sound like Chelsea is going to be making major decisions for her mother, once elected. And if Clinton is elected, just as her husband was, it will be by the vote of the people– not a case of someone personally choosing to have their non-elected kids make major decisions in their campaign or their presidency.

          In the case of a couple, the spouse traditionally does have some influence on policy, so nothing new there.

          Neopotism has to do with giving unfair favoritism to family members– not to the people of a country choosing to democratically elect someone who has had a family member in politics before.

          Maher is politically incorrect anyways, and pretty much says exactly what he thinks, no matter what.

          • caethan says:

            Right.

            And Christina Kirchner became President of Argentina wholly on her own merits.

    • Van Buren or Cheney?

      What are you saying about Van Buren as a vice-presidential choice?

      The specific question had not occurred to me before, but I think “The Little Magician” (as people called him at the time) was a pretty good pick. Not only could Jackson have done a lot worse, but he did do a lot worse, in his first term, with John C. Calhoun.

      • E. Harding says:

        “The specific question had not occurred to me before, but I think “The Little Magician” (as people called him at the time) was a pretty good pick.”

        -I agree; this was my point. I rate Van Buren as the best U.S. president in my list:

        https://marginalcounterrevolution.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/ranking-of-presidents/

        Cheney was the pick that sounded good and quite conservative, but would turn to disaster in the end.

        • Interesting and unusual ranking. Obviously, mine would be arranged differently, but I do agree that Van Buren, Jackson, Harding, and Polk are generally underrated.

          Garfield was a brilliant man, and a favorite fantasy of mine is to discuss 21st century politics with him. But I don’t think his brief presidency was much of a success. One of his friends wrote that Garfield’s assassin saved his reputation.

          But Chester Arthur? Why does he rank so high on your list?

          • E. Harding says:

            End of the Spoils System (the best part, though begun under Garfield), immigration restrictions to increase immigrant quality, attempts to cut tariffs, strengthening the Navy, opposition to wasteful spending, reducing national debt, no major recessions, wars.

            Did he do anything really bad? I haven’t seen it.

            Coolidge was more of a fan of federally funded internal improvements than Arthur.

            An America with no Chinese exclusion act would have been very different, though I’m not sure if for better or worse.

          • Urstoff says:

            Polk always seems to be rated highly on various presidential rankings.

            In contrast, everyone hates Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

            I wonder if that’s a reflection of how truly awful they were, or just because they happened to be president as the country was inevitably heading toward civil war.

          • Guy says:

            Pierce, if I recall correctly, is known for having failed to emulate Polk.

  54. hlynkacg says:

    For the sci-fi geeks con-world/alt-history enthusiasts and anyone we have here who speaks (or otherwise familiar with) Chinese or Hindi.

    I’m mapping out a setting that includes an inhabited/terraformed Mars. I’ve got a solid idea of the general timeline and arc of development but could some assistance in fleshing out background details, place names, cultural quirks etc…

    General details…
    The major colonial powers are China India and the US. The first colonists land on the Tharsis Plateau and equatorial lowlands east of Valles Marineris. The initial terraforming effort is spearheaded by the Chinese and focuses on turning the Hellas Basin in Mars’ southern hemisphere into a sea.

    • onyomi says:

      What are you looking for, specifically? Just place names? Theories about far future Chinese culture? For the former it might help to know geographic features, since many Chinese place names literally mean things like “south of the lake,” “east of the mountains,” “x clan town,” etc.

      • hlynkacg says:

        What are you looking for, specifically?

        Whatever you can offer really. I’ve got a solid idea of where their bases are so I can provide descriptions of topography for naming purposes but I’m also interested in the social/cultural issues.

        The US encampment on Tharsis has a definite Mormon survivalist vibe to it. “Making the desert bloom” and all that. I’ve got it in my head that the Chinese would be the ones to take the lead in a major engineering project like the terraforming effort but how realistic is that really and how well would they likely get along with their neighbors?

        • Leo says:

          Is this like the proposed Mars One mission where none of the astronauts can ever go home? Or is there regular traffic between the Earth and Mars?

          火星 literally translates as Fire Planet, btw.

          • hlynkacg says:

            There is semi-regular service between Mars and Earth but most trips tend to be one-way. The situation is meant to be roughly analogous to the colonization of the East Indies and “New World” during the age of sail.

        • Sandy says:

          I speak Hindi and I grew up in India.

          Major engineering projects don’t seem unrealistic for China, not when they’re creating new islands and building things like the Three Gorges Dam.

          • hlynkacg says:

            not when they’re creating new islands and building things like the Three Gorges Dam.

            That’s basically what I was thinking.

            Since I’ve got you here, assuming that the colonization effort is being supported by the Indian space agency/government what sort of people sign up? What sort of names do they give their ships, settlements, major terrain features, etc…? Are they partnering with anyone?

          • Sandy says:

            I can only transplant current circumstances to the future, so I’d guess most of the colonists would be Northerners. There are 4 astronauts of Indian nationality or origin who have been to space, and 3 of them are from Punjab. The fourth is from Gujarat. Indian aviation schools are largely full of Northerners too. By contrast, many of the engineers, administrators and rocket scientists would be Dravidians from the South. Six of the nine ISRO Chairmen were Dravidians and one of our former Presidents was a Tamilian who designed much of our launch vehicle technology.

            There’s no hard and fast rule that says these groups have defined roles, so you could have spacefaring Dravidians and egghead Indo-Aryans, but from my experience as someone who grew up in a mixed city, all of my high school batch mates who went to aviation school had names like Chaudhury and Patel. None of the kids with southern names like Menon and Durai bothered with that. I actually have a cousin who joined the Air Force, but his mother is a Punjabi. Everyone else in my family are Dravidians who have lived in the South for ages and they know very few people who fly planes and lots of people who think about how to make planes fly better. I don’t know why it works out that way; I suspect it might be because all the major aviation schools are located in the North and the South has many quality engineering schools, but I don’t think it’s something that has been explored. Goes without saying that most of these people will be Hindus and upper castes. A few will be Sikhs, somewhat fewer will be Muslims. Jains, Buddhists and Christians will bring up the rear.

            They’d give their ships and settlements names to honor previous achievements in Indian space technology. So they’d have names like Sarabhai, Kalam, Chawla, Dhawan, Sharma and so on. Terrain features pretty much follow any other culture’s customs for naming terrain features. Mountains are called parvat in the North and giri in the South and typically named after random gods, famous people or descriptive features. There’s a range of blue mountains called the Nilgiris.

            India partnered with the Soviets for their first manned mission. They could partner with Russia again, or with the Americans. China is unlikely, they don’t trust each other.

            The Hindi word for Mars is Mangal.

          • How difficult is it to build islands like the Chinese have? How much is it a technological achievement, and how much is it a matter of just having enough gall to do it?

          • Nornagest says:

            Land reclamation is technologically pretty easy if you have a shallow ocean handy — the West, along with lot of non-Western countries, has been doing it at scale by the dump-a-lot-of-crap-into-the-ocean method since the 19th century. Much of the modern SF Bay Area is infill, for example, and there are artificial islands in Tokyo Bay dating back to the mid-1800s. The levee method is much older, but you’re not going to be building islands in the South China Sea with it.

            It’s a huge amount of work, though.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @Sandy
            Thank you for the detailed reply. Could you elaborate a bit on the cultural differences between north and south (this is all new to me). In the meantime my provisional location for the Indian colony is at the eastern mouth of the Valles Marineris and I’ve been thinking about what they’d call it. My initial candidates are “mahaan ghaatee” or “jeevan ke ghaatee” but I’d love an actual speaker’s take. I’ve also been using online dictionaries and goggle to collect Hindi words to use in place names but could always use more. There are only so many variations I can do on “Ravi’s Crater” after all 😉

            @Nancy
            Not easy, but not unprecedented either. It’s basically “having the gall” and committing a significant amount resources to do it.

          • Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

            My understanding is that they are turning islets, which do not expand the exclusive economic zone under the law of the sea because they are too small to sustain human habitation, into island which do.

            It is mostly just a matter of bothering to haul enough junk long distances and dumping it into the shallows around the islet.

            But artificial islands also don’t expand the exclusive economic zone so the process involves a lot of “its not completely artificial!”

          • Sandy says:

            @hlynkacg:
            It is largely a linguistic distinction. The North speaks languages from the Indo-European/Indo-Aryan language tree — Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, all languages that follow the Devnagari script. The South speaks Dravidian languages from the Brahmi script, such as Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The North was the part most heavily colonized by the Mughals and so over time they developed a “Hindustani” culture that merges Indian and Persian styles of clothing, cuisine, music and architecture. The South had several empires that fought off the Mughal sultanates, and so their original cultures stayed relatively unadulterated (of course, this was before the British, modernity and globalization). As an example, Southern Hinduism has gods, practices and festivals unique and exclusive to the area, because they are adapted from pre-Hindu Dravidian folk tales and customs.

            There is a common stereotype that Indo-Aryans are lighter-skinned and Dravidians are darker-skinned, but I don’t know how true this is. It’s not something I’ve investigated. From personal experience, the stereotype is not anything like a binding rule: I am about as dark as Jesse Williams and I know many Northerners who are darker than I am. I have a cousin who is pale as the driven snow and she probably has centuries of nothing but Dravidian ancestry, given that our entire family is from one caste in the south. But the South is closer to the equator, so perhaps adaptations over the ages have led to the average South Indian being darker. There is probably a lot more admixture with Turkic and Persian genes among North Indians.

            You don’t need to stretch mahan into mahaan. You can drop the “ke” and ghatee should just be “ghat”. Ghat means passage, entrance, landing etc. Ghatee is unnecessary and can sometimes mean “falling”, so “Jeevan Ghatee” winds up meaning “Life is Falling”.

    • erenold says:

      Chinese people in space – where in China are they from? Even within the majority Han Chinese, there’s huge linguistic and cultural across China. Ranging from Mandarin Chinese, the official language, which sounds terse, brusque and to the point; to Hokkien, which is a lot more melodic, and Cantonese, which is bombastic and flowery. That’s excluding the actual official minorities, like the Hui Muslims, or the Zhuang, who I believe have a completely different writing script (I think). There’s even clearly visible biological diversity – this northern gentleman is visibly different in appearance from this southerner, for instance.

      On the assumption that this is a Civ: Beyond Earth scenario where random folk get plucked up to serve as settlers, its quite possible that cultural factions begin forming within the Chinese settlers themselves when freed from central control under Beijing.

      • hlynkacg says:

        Those are all excellent questions. I was initially thinking south coast, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Hainan, etc… simply because that’s an area that I’m personally familiar with but I’d like an outside perspective and reality check from someone more immerse in the culture than I am.

        As I asked Sandy above in regards to the Indians. Assuming that the colonization effort is being supported by the Chinese space agency/government what sort of people end up going? Who are they get along with? Who are they at odds with? What sort of names do they give their ships, settlements, major terrain features, etc…?

        • RKR says:

          Hey, I live in a part of the world where I’ve contacted both N and S Indian culture very extensively, as well as N and S Chinese culture and Southeast Asian Islam, and can can offer you some insight. If you wanna reach out to me, just reply to my msg with a contact and we can discuss.

          Several points:
          Its far more likely that the Indians will name features on Mars using *Sanskrit* than Hindi, since its a much more prestigious, artistic, and abstract language, embodying a pan-Indian cultural tradition harking back to the philosophy, arts and science of a classic India, when the artistic and political conventions and ideological tools of Indian civilisation were first established; so Sanskrit is much more likely to be hitched onto a such a tremendously symbolic enterprise as space colonization. Hindi is really more of a ‘street language’, or even an ‘ethnic language’ with recent, regional literary traditions, and has much less cultural prestige. Sanskrit is also more universal than Hindi: Sanskrit loans can be found from Bali to Japan, rooting words to do with abstract cultural terms used in Acrolects in Science, philosophy or politics, e.g. ‘Putrajaya’, ‘Bumiputra’ in Malay; the last name of the Indonesian President ‘Widodo’, which is actually from Sanskrit ‘Vijaya’ for ‘Victory’; the name of ‘Cambodia’, from the ‘Kamboja’ tribe in the Vedas; ‘Ksana’–>’Sha Na’ meaning ‘flash’, ‘instant’, ‘moment’ in Chinese, ‘Kalpa’–>’Jie’, meaning ‘Aeon’ in Chinese, et cetera; all these testifying to the spread of Indian philosophies, religions, and a particular epistemological/intellectual style across a large swathe of Asia.

          The north of India has many more Caste groups living in extended, patrilineal family-based villages, and coalitions of local landlords from ‘martial castes’ dominated regional society in recent history; the south was more mercantile, with a less complex caste system, a a less militarized countryside, and families were matrilineal. Brahmin supremacy and older, more classic artistic and political forms, were retained better in the South than in the North, which was exposed to Islamic, Turko-Mongol and Persian cultural influxes. So their cultures are very different, South Indians retaining a more intellectual, civic, urban, and less casteist outlook than North Indians, who are more misogynist, clannish and irascible and pay more attention to hierarchy, in my experience. Civil society strongly decreases in power as one moves from South to North, even comparing rich states like Gujarat vs Tamil Nadu. The diversity of social organisation, and contradictions inherent in India, with the statist North vs the civic/mercantile South, the political North vs the scientific/intellectual South would probably manifest themselves in space as well.

          China is a whole different matter, the intellectual realm in the Sinosphere is so splintered today, so devoid of powerful and humanistic unifying ideas, so seized with disorientation, that that its anyone’s guess what a future China would look like. Signs of new movements, of cultural and ideological innovation, have not even begun to appear on the horizon. So your world-creation process for China would be very interesting indeed.

          • Sandy says:

            I was born in India and lived there for 22 years and I have no idea what you mean when you say “Hindi is a street language with much less cultural prestige”. Sanskrit is by and large a dead language. Nobody in India actually speaks Sanskrit apart from priests and esoteric scholars, the same way no one in Europe speaks Latin conversationally. One of our regional school associations actually scrapped Sanskrit from the syllabus when I was in high school because there was no practical use for it and gave us a choice of French or German instead (we had already been given the choice of Hindi or Tamil in middle school). We have literally thousands of terrain features with Hindi names and no one’s felt the need to change them into more Sanskritized forms. Hindi is largely a modernization of Sanskrit and it would be pointless to do so.

            I don’t disagree with any part of your North/South characterization.

          • RKR says:

            Of course no one speaks Sanskrit, the geographical features on Mars and the Moon are not named in a living language either. ‘Olympus Mons’ and ‘Oceanus Procellarum’–these are names most people speaking western languages won’t understand. The names were chosen by highly educated, and often ideologically mobilized people, unrepresentative of their society at large. The names for the Mars and Moon orbiters, Mangalyaan and Chandrayaan are also not Hindi but their Sanskrit origins are transparent. I would think symbology and prestige will play an important role in the terminology associated with space colonization.

            Al languages have layers of vocabulary at different registers. E.g. Pigs vs Pork, Cows vs Beef/Veal, Chicks vs Poultry. The words for the meat, as opposed to the animal, are borrowed from French and occupy a higher register. Many languages throughout Asia, including both the Dravidian and the Aryan languages of India, have a layer of Sanskrit terms preserved almost unchanged, at very high registers, and that symbolism alone makes it more likely for Sanskrit to be utilized. The literary and philosophical tradition that unites India also dates back to when sanskrit was widespread, prior to the development of local identities and lects. As opposed to Hindi, for which the literature is region-specific and in often in unintelligible local vernaculars, prior to standardization in the modern period.

  55. An interesting, or at least somewhat amusing, anecdote from my part of the world:

    New Zealand takeaway boss ignores armed robber

    … personally, I don’t think this is directly relevant to the gun control debate in the US. But I thought it might help some Americans understand why some non-Americans don’t really “get” why anyone would want guns for self-defense.
    : – )

    • Tracy W says:

      This reminds me of the story of a guy who used to buy liquor under age by going into a store, going up to the counter with his booze, handing over the money and saying, with a fake northern European accent, “I buy ja ja?” Eventually the staff would just sell him the booze to get him to go away.

    • Mary says:

      If you have nerves of steel and are bright, you can wrong-foot a criminal and often get him to run off.

      My sister had a friend who heard a mugger coming up behind him and when he got close, whirled about and asked if he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. And didn’t get mugged because the mugger ran off.

      However, a lot of it turns on dumb luck.

  56. Yakimi says:

    It’s not like the Turkish military is new to the art of the coup d’état. So how did they bungle it so badly? Post your theories below.

    • E. Harding says:

      Obvious: the coup did not have control of or support of the whole military.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Short answer based on 2nd hand accounts is that the Coup organizers seriously underestimated Erdogan’s level of genre-savvy. Long answer is waiting for more info.

    • anon says:

      I’m more curious about whether it was NATO-backed or Erdogan-backed, those being the two most prominent theories I’ve seen online.

      • E. Harding says:

        I think it was neither. Just a small group of military officers who couldn’t get enough support from most of the army.

        • anon says:

          That is not a realistic theory, IMO.

          • anon says:

            Because the plotters themselves should have been well-placed to gauge their own political support. If they knew that they lacked the support to mount an attempt with a realistic chance of success, then why would they do it? Perhaps because either the whole thing was staged or they were promised external support.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Not necessarily, anon. I can imagine a group of military officers convinced that Erdogan was going to force them out sometime in the near future, deciding this might not be an ideal time to strike but it was the best chance they’d be getting.

          • E. Harding says:

            “then why would they do it?”

            -Takeovers by a small faction of officers have precedent outside of Turkey.

          • Tracy W says:

            Because the plotters themselves should have been well-placed to gauge their own political support.

            “Should” is a different word to “is” or “did”. Did these officers have a history of multiple coup attempts by themselves against which to calibrate their predictions of political support? If not, the simplest explanation is that they were wrong about their support.

          • Aapje says:

            anon,

            People tend to live in bubbles with like-minded people. It’s perfectly possible that these officers were part of an anti-Erdogan bubble and mistakenly thought that the rest of the military has an equal amount of anti-Erdogan officers.

          • Anthony says:

            Early reports are that the plotters realized they were under surveillance and had to move before they were ready.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Evan P, I’ve encountered that theory in the news discussions; the coup plotters were not ready, but they thought they were close to getting caught, so they launched early and hoped for the best.

          • herbert herbertson says:

            @ Anthony, Evan P, Protagoras: I think that was exactly it. There was Turkish extradition request for Gulen just a couple days before the coup attempt.

            http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ankara-says-file-ready-to-seek-gulens-extradition-from-us.aspx?pageID=238&nID=101594&NewsCatID=509%29

        • Inspired by the example of the 2013 coup in Egypt, perhaps?

      • Douglas Knight says:

        It might have been Erdogen, but if it wasn’t, I trust him when he says that it wasn’t NATO, but the CIA.

        • Fctho1e says:

          Steve Sailer has argued that Fetullah Gulen cooperates with the CIA, who’s keeping him on ice in the Poconos as a possible ruler of Turkey.

          He’s also running a huge chain of test-prep schools in the US.

          Like something out of a Pynchon novel..

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Supposedly the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, after he was overthrown and driven out, set up a school in Corinth so that he’d still have people to order around.

    • Jill says:

      Many people say that it was a fake coup orchestrated by Erdogan– an excuse to crack down on his enemies and expand his power.

      • anon says:

        Right. But the reason to be skeptical about this (in addition to general principles), is that Russo-Turkey relations have been in flux recently, which is a Really Big Deal for US influence in the region. If Turkey were suspected of realigning towards Putin more strongly (i.e. beyond the recent apology and attempt at detente, which is not implausible, because there’s no way their EU accession bid is going anywhere soon, and NATO signaled pretty strongly after they shot down the Russian jet that Turkey cannot rely upon NATO for defense against Russia), it wouldn’t be crazy for the coup-d’etat-heads in Langley to decide they were no longer fans of Erdogan.

        What doesn’t make sense about the NATO theory, though, is how poorly the coup was executed. One possible explanation for that is that Langley may have drunk too much kool-aid from (suspected CIA asset) Gulen, so they underestimated the extent to which Erdogan had already purged the military of potential coup supporters.

        • Galle says:

          Can’t a military coup just be a military coup? Does it really have to be orchestrated by some sinister third party?

          • anon says:

            Historically speaking, they’ve usually been orchestrated (or at least abetted by) a third party, which is usually the CIA and/or MI6. This suggests it’s not something people do lightly on their own.

            (Maybe “usually” is a bit strong… it would be interesting to look at the data, but the data analysis would be complicated by the fact that the US doesn’t admit its role in even the least controversial cases, like Iran 1953.)

          • Tracy W says:

            There were quite a few military coups in Ancient Rome, which I don’t think we can attribute to the CIA or MI6.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            As I understand it (from a skim of Wikipedia), the 1980 Turkish coup had large CIA involvement, but none of the others did. The 1960 one was pro-American, but the 1971 one was not.

          • Galle says:

            There were quite a few military coups in Ancient Rome, which I don’t think we can attribute to the CIA or MI6.

            Although that would make for an EXCELLENT novel.

          • bluto says:

            @Tracy W

            B-b-b-b-but the CIA’s time machines!

          • dndnrsn says:

            “Operation Et Tu is a go”

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Galle

            “Mihi nomen est Bond, James Bond”

          • Randy M says:

            Enough with your Gaelic curses, barbarian.

          • Lysenko says:

            Yes, rather often, and current indications is that this one was, albeit not in the traditional Turkish mode where the military leadership acted with widespread agreement and pre-planning. The factions involved and Erdogan’s gutting of the officer corps saw to that.

            The window of opportunity for a successful bloodless coup on the old model against Erdogan probably closed several years ago. It is certainly closed now.

          • Mary says:

            One notes that the coup tried the traditional “control all access to the media and push your story.”

            Impossible now. Too much social media.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Tracy W:

            There were quite a few military coups in Ancient Rome, which I don’t think we can attribute to the CIA or MI6.

            Well, duh: before the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA was called the “OSS”.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            “Mihi nomen est Bond, James Bond”

            “00VII. Ego te expectabam.”

          • vV_Vv says:

            Does it really have to be orchestrated by some sinister third party?

            Not necessarily orchestrated, but at least abetted by a not-so-sinister third party.

            Turkey is a NATO country. It is a massive recipients of foreign aid, mainly from the US and to a lesser extent from the EU.

            This means that a good fraction of the Turkish military is funded by the NATO.

            If the US isn’t happy about what the Turkish military is doing, they can stop paying their bills, and if Putin doesn’t pick it up, because for instance he doesn’t want to escalate his already tense relationship with the NATO, the Turkish military will be forced to downsize.

            Reasonable generals will not bite the hand that feeds them.

          • Nornagest says:

            Turkey is a NATO country. It is a massive recipients of foreign aid, mainly from the US and to a lesser extent from the EU. This means that a good fraction of the Turkish military is funded by the NATO.

            That’s not how NATO works: it’s a coordinating body between militaries, not a funding source for them, and the much-vaunted funding gap relates to countries’ expenditures on their own militaries. (The idea is that each country should pull its own weight if united against a common foe — a Cold War idea in origin but not a totally irrelevant one in the modern day.) Turkey actually comes closer to hitting the 2% GDP target than most of Europe, though it hasn’t actually hit it since 2009.

            Now, there are other ways for us to be paying for it. But foreign military aid to Turkey has been zero since 2009, and then it was only about a million dollars a year, which Turkey could easily absorb. (The only countries to break a billion a year in military aid are Israel and Egypt, though Iraq came close in the years after withdrawal.) So unless you’re telling me that the money for a regional power’s military — one of the bigger ones, in fact — is hidden in the DoD black budget…

            If you’re talking about the presence of American bases on Turkish soil or covering Turkish airspace, though, that’s a different story. It would be correct to say that American (and EU) forces assume a share of Turkey’s defense burden. But it’s not correct to say their military’s being funded by them.

          • vV_Vv says:

            That’s not how NATO works: it’s a coordinating body between militaries, not a funding source for them,

            In principle yes, in practice not so much.

            Now, there are other ways for us to be paying for it. But foreign military aid to Turkey has been zero since 2009, and then it was only about a million dollars a year, which Turkey could easily absorb.

            Money is fungible. Even if foreign aid is not earmarked as military aid and is earmarked as something else, it can be used to support the military by shifting money around in the government budget. Turkey has a pretty big military budget so loss of foreign aid would be a major problem for them.

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            Turkey has a pretty big military budget so loss of foreign aid would be a major problem for them.

            In 2015, Turkey received ~$112 million in aid from the US. That’s a little over one half of one percent of their military budget (~$18 billion), or 0.007% of their GDP (~$1.6 trillion). They’d hardly even notice losing it.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Ok.

        • Gbdub says:

          Why couldn’t it have been Putin-backed? They could see turmoil in Turkey as a win, regardless of whether the coup succeeds.

          We seemed oddly surprised by it for it to be CIA backed.

          • anon says:

            Well, not everyone was surprised. For example, see https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-05-30/turkeys-next-military-coup.

            I see two basic reasons why it’s unlikely that Putin backed the coup. First, as I mentioned above, Erdogan was just starting to make nice with Russia. Second, the same reason why the U.S. has been happy to support coups throughout Latin America, but (to my knowledge) not in Mexico: instability is more unpleasant when it’s right in your backyard. (Mexico had coups in 1913 and 1935; I have no idea if the US was involved, but neither the CIA nor the OSS existed at the time, and in any case there were more pressing geopolitical matters to worry about.)

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Many declared themselves unsurprised after the fact. None predicted it

          • Anonanon says:

            > Published May 30, 2016
            >None predicted it

          • Nornagest says:

            The United States had a complicated relationship with the Mexican Revolution. It generally favored the status quo at any given time, but may have been involved in the coup that lead to Victoriano Huerta’s short-lived regime — the American ambassador definitely was, but he may have been acting without orders.

            (Woodrow Wilson intervened against Huerta months later, leading to the American occupation of Veracruz.)

          • anon says:

            @nornagest — thanks for the background on Mexico; that’s quite interesting

      • Anonymous says:

        Well, the problem with a fake coup is, you give all the guns to your right hand guy, pretend you don’t see him as he gathers an army, and then you hope that when he has the gun on your forehead he will give it all back. Loyalty is a very real thing but it’s a big risk unless you can read men like I read the newspaper. Not worth it just to make the rebel cleanup a bit neater than it would otherwise be.

        Oh, and you don’t actually get to give the gun to your right hand guy, you’ll have to use some mook from the intelligence bureau. Because everyone knows who your most loyal right hand guy is and they won’t fall for him organizing a coup against you.

        Seems like a massive amount of risk for Erdogan to take when he could just imprison anyone he has doubts about.

        • Anon says:

          One key thing to note about the coup was that Erdogan was not in the country at the time. This means that this strategy would be significantly less risky to him than it otherwise could be.

          I think the theory that the coup realized they had a mole and wanted to rush the schedule has a lot more plausibility, though. In addition, staging a coup with the president out of the country has a lot more chance of success if you don’t think you have enough support to capture or kill the President. In his Facetime speech, he made the remark that “this country can’t be managed from Pennsylvania”; the coup organizers probably realized this, and realized that it couldn’t be managed from Brussels or London either. By shutting down the airspace and preventing Erdogan from leading a countercoup, they have a much higher chance of taking down the government while they’re leaderless.

          Erdogan’s response here, though, was a master stroke; a military takeover of government is something people are generally against, and encouraging people to protest and rebel against it bought the government enough time to organize a chain of command and a countercoup.

          • Anonymous says:

            Erdogan was out of town, but still in Turkey. He was at the resort in Mamaris. I have seen reports that he was out of the country, but I don’t believe them because they don’t specify where.

          • John Schilling says:

            Los Angeles Times, FWIW, is reporting that the coup plotters tried to sieze Erdogan at his vacation spot, didn’t have detailed intel on his location, and missed him by an hour.

    • John Schilling says:

      Why do people with perfectly good jobs as senators, governors, etc, quit those jobs to run for President and then lose?

      Every coup is a gamble. Even if you could poll a representative sample of the people whose support you need, without tipping your hand and being arrested, you’d never get a straight answer to the question, “push comes to shove, are you willing to shoot loyalist soldiers, policemen, civilians, to make this happen?” And of course you can’t even conduct the poll. You can only sound out people in your particular bubble and extrapolate. If the odds seem favorable, or the alternative dire, you make your move. Then you find out.

      • Walter says:

        “You go to coup with the confederates you have”, or something similar.

        That makes sense to me. Keeping secrets is HARD. The more people you bring into the ‘no for real we are taking over and the date is thus-and-such’ part of the coup the better the odds one betrays you. Most of your supporters are probably ‘oh yeah wouldn’t it be nice if someone else was in charge’ folks. Then when you seize control you hope that they turn out to have really meant what they said.

        • Anonymous says:

          That seems to be what happened, too. They had an assassination plan in concert with the coup. If that worked, the story of the coup could have been extremely different. It seems that one senior military leader was tapped in to the coup effort enough that he protected Erdogan just in time to thwart the assassination attempt.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      I’ve heard the theory that Gulen’s supporters were about to be purged from the military, so they decided to use it or lose it. I could buy that.

      On the other hand, Erdogan was awfully well-prepared to hit the ground running with a reign of counter-revolutionary terror, so the conspiracy theory that he was behind it in order to expose his enemies and have an excuse to clean house is tempting indeed.

      On the third hand, Erdogan strikes me as the sort of guy who’s had his plans for a reign of counter-revolutionary terror written up since junior high school anyway, so who knows.

      • Walter says:

        Has there ever been a confirmed case of “fake coup to justify my brutal crackdown” that was proven to be for reals? Like, one traced back to the dictator? Honest question, not trying to be sarcastic.

        • Saint Fiasco says:

          Maybe the Reichstag fire? Many people believe it was a false-flag attack by the Nazis.

          • anon says:

            I thought current thinking on the Reichstag fire was that it was actually a lone-wolf that did it, but the fire was exploited well by the Nazis.

            Night of the Long Knives was the purge, which I think was played off at the time as a ‘prevented coup’ though no actual coup was attempted.

          • nm. k. m. says:

            Reichstag fire wasn’t really portrayed as a coup (one can discuss if it was a false flag operation), but the Night of Long Knives was officially a counter-action against an attempted coup by Röhm (“Röhm-Putsch”). However, Hitler didn’t orchestrate a ‘real’ fake putsch, just faked evidence.

            Actually, counter-revolutionary purges are almost always presented as a neutralization of an attempted coup in the propaganda. Usually the regime conducting the purge don’t actually lure conspirators into a real coup, but merely presents ‘evidence’ (that doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny). The coup attempt in Turkey looks far too genuine for that.

            Any reference to false flag operations that look credibly ‘false’ I could find in 10 minutes does not look like that elaborate, either. Claiming that such and such group was behind bomb attack or opened fire at someone or sunk a ship seems much easier than safely manipulating a sure-to-fail coup where actual people try to take government buildings.

            Maybe Erdogan’s intelligence had informants or loyalists so that the action wasn’t a complete surprise, so they could move Erdogan to a safe place on a quick notice.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Reichstag fire was not a coup, nor an attempted coup. Well, not a serious one – absent a time machine and a telepath we can’t be sure that van der Lubbe or whomever wasn’t thinking, “Step 1 – Burn the Reichstang. Step 2 – ??? Step 3 – I am ruler of Germany!”, but there was zero chance of that happening and zero chance of anyone sane imagining that was going to happen. The Reichstag fire was a crime, arguably a terrorist attack, and those can plausibly be false-flag operations.

            Coups are different. Coups are credible attempts to arrange for a state to have a new government. False-flag coups would AFIK be unprecedented, on account of A: nobody can actually keep secrets of that scale and B: coups are fundamentally unpredictable such that a credible fake one is about as likely to turn into a real one as a real one is to fizzle. At which point the government that arranged the stunt is out of business and its leaders’ heads are on pikes outside the palace.

            At most, you’d get a genuine coup attempt that leaks to a government which decides to let it go a bit longer in hopes of more thoroughly cleaning house when they do shut it down. That is perhaps a plausible scenario here, but a dangerous one for Erdogan if so.

        • Anonymous says:

          Two examples have been given in the comments: the Ottoman Auspicious Incident of 1826 and the Vietnamese coup of 1963, which was actually a fake fake coup, and so displaced the existing government. Both of these were intended to create an excuse to crush known military enemies, not to bring unknown ones to light, nor as an excuse to obtain extra power. (Contrast Erdogan firing 1/3 of the judges.)

        • Nicholas says:

          I believe that the Reichstag fire, set by the order of Hitler in the 30’s, was blamed on communists as a justification for shutting down the communist party of Germany.

          • Mary says:

            You couldn’t get away with it in fiction — but the evidence does indeed point to it having been set by a Communist.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            And even if it wasn’t, arranging for somebody to set fire to a building seems much easier to get away with than arranging for an attempted military coup.

        • Probably the Jewish doctors’ plot under Stalin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot

      • Anonymous says:

        Yeah, seems more like a desperation move on part of a few officers about to get axed anyway, as opposed to a conspiracy hatched by the High Generals over months. Probably because Erdogan made sure there aren’t any High Generals?

    • Lysenko says:

      1) Because it was (based on current indicators) Gulenist, not Kemalist/Secularist-led. Gulen has never had widespread military support, and regardless of whether he is a “CIA pawn” he’s definitely in favor of islamism and thus outside the traditional military leadership’s overton window for acceptable replacements to Erdogan.

      2) The non-Gulenist portions of the military have, as has already been noted, hollowed out at the leadership level in recent years, with the many of the traditional anti-islamist officers replaced by Erdogan and/or AKP loyalists. This meant that even if there weren’t plenty of officers who would’ve been slow off the mark replacing one Islamist with another (even if it was a kinder, gentler flavor), there were also plenty who could be considered politically reliable by Erdogan and his party, further confusing the chain of command.

      3) Erdogan has an unprecedented degree of popular support for a political leader in Turkey, albeit not from traditional demographic sectors, and the Army faction that WAS willing to mobilize was not in a position to simply shoot its way through civilians and win. There are multiple reasons for that, the simplest and most game theoretical being that without sufficient backing force from the rest of the military, that would make the part of the military behind the coup indisputably the villains of the piece even if they succeeded and quite possibly motivate the rest of the military to oppose them more actively (there are multiple reasons for forces not to mobilize right away to fight a coup in progress, that again I won’t go into here. Short version, that’s a short-cut right to civil war).

    • Diadem says:

      It’s possible they underestimated the scope and depth of modern communication channels.

      During a coup most people will want to side with the winner. So most people will start on the sidelines, waiting to see which way the wind is going to blow.

      So the most important thing is to make it seem like you are winning straight from the very first minute. The coup completely failed to do this. During the entire attempt, both Erdogan and the Yildirim (the prime minster) were communicating with the people (and, presumably, their key supporters). So the military controled state television (or at least some of it), shut down facebook and whatsapp, but then Erdogan simply used Snapchat to talk to the nation.

      I don’t know if this was an oversight of the people attempting the coup, or if they simply lacked the strength, but they failed to secure and silence the key players.

      • Mary says:

        Was this perhaps the first coup that faced full social media networking as a foe?

        • birdboy2000 says:

          Certainly not the first of the social media era – Sisi’s coup was successful despite it existing and having been used only a couple years ago to mobilize mass protests against the military regime.

          Not sure if there’s any parallels so far to the particulars of someone escaping arrest and foiling a coup (or attempting to) through facetime; I’m certainly not aware of any.

        • Diadem says:

          Certainly not the first. But maybe the first that was heavily contested.

          it’s a platitude, but nobody is perfect. No coup attempt will be perfect either. But those imperfections won’t always matter. If you have overwhelming support then it probably doesn’t really matter what your social media strategy is.

    • Salem says:

      Some partial answers:

      1. The coup drew heavily from the Air Force, which is a bad idea for all the traditional reasons (see e.g. Luttwak). This meant they did not have a monopoly of effective force, either in the capital or Istanbul.
      2. In part due to (1), the coup was not able to disable the country’s key choke points sufficiently, and they never disabled the existing lines of command. Erdogan was able to broadcast to the nation, then fly into Istanbul. For the coup to be successful, both would have to be prevented.
      3. Successful coups rely on presenting what they’ve done as a fait accompli – we’re the government now, the old government and their die-hards are the rebels. If the coup takes too long and is seen as a matter of contestation, it will be defeated (or possibly taken over by a counter-coup). Modern communications make this a very brief window – Erdogan was able to use Facetime to respond extremely quickly.
      4. Successful coups rely on a lack of response. It’s not important that the whole military is on board with the coup, but it is important that the rest just shrug their shoulders or are paralysed. They are most successful when the bureaucracy, military and population are used to taking orders whoever is in charge. They are least successful where a concept of “legitimacy” is baked into the system. Here, non-aligned military officers went on TV to condemn the coup as it was happening, and fought against the coup, and the population rose up against the coup. This was possible because of (1), (2) and (3) above.
      5. Despite all of the above, the coup could have succeeded. It’s easy to be wise in hindsight. What makes you think they “bungled it so badly”? When I went to bed, the BBC was quoting experts that the coup would surely succeed. When I woke up, the BBC was quoting experts that the coup had been doomed from the start. Meh.

      • nm. k. m. says:

        >If the coup takes too long and is seen as a matter of contestation, it will be defeated (or possibly taken over by a counter-coup)

        Another possibility is that if neither side has a definite upper hand very soon, it will evolve into an outright civil war (which can be regarded as a failure, even if the coupist faction wins in the end).

    • Sandy says:

      Nassim Taleb has been putting forward a theory that this is a recreation of the 1826 Auspicious Incident when the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II orchestrated a revolt of the Janissaries just so he’d have an excuse to execute them all and create a new officer corps loyal to him.

    • Lumifer says:

      I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if a small group of military officers stared planning a coup, was infiltrated and discovered, and instead of being arrested was given encouragement and false information about widespread support.

      Erdogan really wanted a massive purge of people not loyal to him and that bungled attempt looks suspiciously like everything Erdogan desired. In fact, Erdogan openly called the coup “a gift from Allah”…

    • youzicha says:

      I have a similar question about the recent Labour leadership struggles.

      Like, as I understand it, most of the people in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet resigned en masse under the theory that this would force him to resign. He did not resign. And then… we get the headline Defeated Labour rebels admit ‘it’s finished’ as Jeremy Corbyn refuses to resign as leader. “Labour rebels are in retreat after admitting that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be removed and would ‘win easily’ if a leadership election is triggered.”

      Like, should they not have been able to game this out in advance..?

      • Salem says:

        But they did have a follow-up.

        The Shadow Cabinet resigned en masse, to force Corbyn to resign. He refused – this was predictable. So they went nuclear, and held a vote of no confidence in him, which was successful.

        But Corbyn still refused to resign.

        Now, there is no written rule that a party leader has to resign if the MPs vote of confidence in him/her. But there is (was!?) an unwritten norm. Remember that our constitution and parliamentary procedure is full of unwritten norms – there’s no written rule that a Prime Minister has to resign after a vote of no confidence. This norm is extremely well entrenched – in fact, when they were writing the Labour Party rules, they didn’t include it because they thought it was too obvious.

        But Corbyn took the unprecedented step of breaking this norm. And, in doing so, he showed that institutional support for this norm in the Labour Party is weaker than previously thought. Corbyn’s remaining allies among the MPs have not deserted him, and nor have the union bosses. Could the MPs have anticipated this? Not really. It’s very hard to predict what will happen when people break a norm that’s never been tested.

        Incidentally, your article is almost 2 weeks out of date – they did not accept defeat, but have come up with a further follow-up. Corbyn is now being challenged by two rebellious MPs, and they had an extremely contentious vote on what rules to apply to that contest, that did not go entirely Corbyn’s way. We will see what happens.

        • youzicha says:

          I see! Thank you.

        • Yes, there is a strong norm that a Prime Minister resigns after receiving a vote of no confidence from the MPs in Parliament, and violating this norm would be a shocking violation of hundreds of years of unwritten constitutional precedent. But the vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn was a somewhat different matter, wasn’t it? It was a vote among Labour MPs only, taking place within a private organization, the Labour Party, whose constitution is probably seen as decidedly less sacred. (And is there precedent? Have there been votes of no confidence among Labour MPs, specifically, before? If so, did the leaders targeted by such votes resign? Cursory searches are not letting me find answers to these questions. But I suspect the weight of precedent is less.)

          Furthermore, there’s a good reason why Prime Ministers would want to resign after receiving votes of no confidence: in a parliamentary system of government, the definition of the head of government is the person who can command a majority in parliament; without that ability the head of government has no legislative power (regardless of whether they stick their fingers in their ears and go “nah, i’m still the leader”) and thus cannot govern effectively. (Theoretically he or she could still exert executive power through the royal prerogative, but that’s where constitutional norms come in; one of the fundamental norms is that executive power implies legislative power.) Now, for Jeremy Corbyn the situation is different, because he is not actually in the government yet. Yes, if he were to suddenly become Prime Minister now, with most of his MPs having voted no confidence in him, that would make his leading the government unfeasible (except in the unlikely event of him getting support from MPs of other parties and thus de facto leading a party other than Labour). But he’s not Prime Minister, and things can change before he does get that job—if he does get it.

          Personally I can’t imagine Jeremy Corbyn or the majority of his supporters thinking he actually has a realistic chance of becoming Prime Minister, anyway. I suspect the goal of these people is to move the Overton window within the Labour Party back towards the left and effectively undo Blairism. (Whether this will make the Labour Party more electable or not is highly debatable, but it’s not completely implausible that it will.) Sure, they sacrifice the benefits of having their party in government, but those benefits aren’t particularly high and they consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. (It’s not like a Donald Trump government is the alternative here, after all…) Jeremy Corbyn’s ignorance of the no-confidence vote is a pretty neat way of demonstrating his strength, and therefore is probably rational from that perspective.

          (NB I am not a constitutional scholar or even a guy who took a Politics A-level; I’m just a guy who can read Wikipedia. Though I do live in the UK and follow the political news here. I could well be completely wrong here, is my point.)

      • Diadem says:

        This is a different situation. Those labour MPs were probably operating under the assumption that their party leader would not be willing to destroy the party just to hold on to his position. A reasonable assumption most of the time, even if it was wrong in the case of Corbyn.

        • Anonanon says:

          A procedure used to get rid of someone you’re “not confident” in seems like it should have contingencies for that person being hostile or irrational. Otherwise it only works on people whose behaviour you are confident of.

  57. Dogue De Bordeaux!!!

    I was seriously thinking of getting one of those, but then we happened into this wonderful “little” (relatively, he’ll be between 80 and 100 pounds when he’d done growing) mutt.

    RE: Alison, Does the “UK” include Canadia and Australia etc. (Commonwealth Realm) because there’s lots of options there. Isles of Mann, Jersey and Gurnsey (Dependencies)? Would Gibraltar work? Or do you mean specifically the actual UK (England, Scottland, Wales, Northern Ireland etc).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

    I know, it’s kinda being snarky, but if she could get a plane flight and visa to Australia or NZ (and she’s under 35) she could get a “working holiday” visa and be able to work sufficiently to get by living in a youth hostel or such.

    Also Gibraltar: http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/gibraltar

  58. Sir Gawain says:

    In 1969, educational psychologist Arthur Jensen published the article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. In it, he argued (among other things) that the black-white gap in educational achievement may have possible genetic roots.

    Now, if you were a goodthinking Great Society liberal, surely you would have turned your nose up at such nonsense. Looking forward, you expect that the black-white gap in standardized measures of intelligence/education will narrow as the effects of segregation fade. By 2016, presumably, the gap will have closed substantially, if not been eliminated entirely.

    And yet…here we are. It’s been over 50 years since the epochal reforms of the Johnson administration in the 1960s, and we still have a glaring gap in black-white scores on standardized tests such as the SAT. The only possible explanation you are allowed to advance for this in public, if you wish to be a part of polite society, is the hard line environmentalist position: it is 100% the result of differences in environment. At what point does this lose credibility as the only acceptable position on the question? If such gaps exist in 2026, 2056 or 2096, will it become permissible to suggest that they are less than 100% environmental in origin?

    The best argument against the existence of racial differences would be… the lack of racial differences. If such differences disappear, I’d be (obviously) happy to dismiss the idea that they were genetic in nature. But can those who maintain that no innate differences exist ever receive evidence that will falsify their current beliefs about the world?

    • E. Harding says:

      “will it become permissible to suggest that they are less than 100% environmental in origin”

      -Not in Vermont or Minnesota. Probably not in DC, either, but who knows?

    • BBA says:

      Decent right-thinking people would deny that the effects of segregation are fading, because segregation never really ended.

      • TPC says:

        As a black woman living in a former sundown part of the country, I would beg to differ on that one. It’s blatantly obvious that segregation has been forcibly eroded and what segregation remains is often self-segregation.

        • Walter says:

          Don’t tell us your lived experiences! BBA will tell you what they are. You don’t want to be not ‘decent and right-thinking’ do you?

      • Sir Gawain says:

        BBA says:
        July 18, 2016 at 12:16 am ~new~
        Decent right-thinking people would deny that the effects of segregation are fading, because segregation never really ended.

        By “segregation” I mean “institutionalized forms of anti-black de jure discrimination”, as opposed to literal physical separation. Many immigrant groups start out de facto “segregated” but manage to move up the social ladder.

        • TPC says:

          Actually, with American-born blacks, it is possible to move up the social ladder and that does happen, but it tends to come at the expense of childbearing within-race currently.

          • Sir Gawain says:

            TPC says:
            July 18, 2016 at 12:24 am
            Actually, with American-born blacks, it is possible to move up the social ladder and that does happen, but it tends to come at the expense of childbearing within-race currently.

            Of course, but the per capita rate of this mobility seems lower than for other groups (e.g. the Chinese.)

          • TPC says:

            Well, it comes at the expense of children for them, too. It’s just more extreme with black women, in that the ones most analogous to Amy Chua end up with 0 kids instead of 2 and often no marriage at all.

          • Anonymous says:

            Please tell us more about these trains. I’m sure there’s at least one lurker that hasn’t heard about them yet.

        • Anonymous says:

          stop putting °new° in quotes RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEe

    • TPC says:

      Black demographics have diverged quite a bit from white demographics. If 70% of white kids were also born out of wedlock and the gap was still there, then you could start arguing some kind of really hard genetic-basis position a little more solidly. But even without that, “black” in America and white include many more ethnic groups and mixed-ethnicity kids than it did when Jensen published. So it’s not even the same genetic pool anyway and the gap has increased by some measures (which would fit in with that change in ethnic makeup).

      I think as long as people argue having kids out of wedlock has no impact on performance (it does) and that there is no ethnic variation and that if there is, it doesn’t matter, then you really make it hard for the environmental case.

      • Sir Gawain says:

        TPC says:
        July 18, 2016 at 12:16 am ~new~
        Black demographics have diverged quite a bit from white demographics. If 70% of white kids were also born out of wedlock and the gap was still there, then you could start arguing some kind of really hard genetic-basis position a little more solidly.

        Yeah, fair point. I’m not so much wedded to “genetic differences” specifically as “a much more convincing explanation for this phenomena than the ones you can read about in the papers of record.” The one thing I’d note is that the Hispanic out of wedlock birth rate is fairly lower (about 20 percentage points according to a quick Google search) than the black equivalent, but I believe the two groups score comparably on standardized tests.

        Oh, I guess I lied because a second thing: I think a “hard genetic” argument is also pretty unconvincing; it seems like a combination of institutions, culture and genetics account for differences across social groups to me. But talking about genetics and to a somewhat lesser degree culture is taboo.

        I think as long as people argue having kids out of wedlock has no impact on performance (it does) and that there is no ethnic variation and that if there is, it doesn’t matter, then you really make it hard for the environmental case.

        Agreed.

        • TPC says:

          Hispanics have higher scores, but not as high as whites. Native Americans, interestingly, have higher scores, but very nearly the same OOW rates.

        • Anthony says:

          I feel it was dishonest for you to present the argument, originally, as being a choice between “100% environmental” and “genetic.” I understand that you do not write, literally, that you think the alternative to “100% environmental” is “100% genetic,” but genetic alternatives are the only suggestions you originally offered, or seem interested in investigating.

          In certain corners of liberal thought — certain culturally dominant corners, even — it’s considered racist to suggest anything other than external oppression as a cause of black poverty. But this is not one of those corners. Scott has openly written about the effect of culture, family, genetics, and so forth on achievement. We can have these conversations openly.

          If you have some compelling scientific or philosophical reason to think that black people are genetically predisposed to poverty, or stupidity, or crime, then you should share the evidence, and we’ll discuss it. If you don’t have interesting evidence, then the original post feels like you saying, “Just want to throw this out there, but what about racial inferiority?”

          For what it’s worth, I feel like the genetic diversity of Africa, and of African Americans, makes any genetic argument pretty implausible. As far as my bio-anthro friends tell me, African Americans have higher genetic diversity than most populations. There is no genetic “Black race.”

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “As far as my bio-anthro friends tell me, African Americans have higher genetic diversity than most populations.”

            From what I’ve read, most American blacks actually have on average 25% European genes (slavery for women usually involves sex slavery, so…). I don’t know much about genetics, but if that’s true my uneducated guess would be that if genetics was the determining factor then American blacks should perform somewhere between “pure” Africans and Europeans.

          • Lumifer says:

            As far as my bio-anthro friends tell me, African Americans have higher genetic diversity than most populations. There is no genetic “Black race.”

            So, is there evidence for this in the phenotype of American blacks? Do they have an unusually high IQ variation? As far as I know, the answer is “no”.

            And, of course, historically the ancestors of African Americans were not randomly sampled from all the people of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most slaves came from West Africa, so the genetic uniqueness of the Bushmen, or Pygmies, or Dinka, etc. etc. is irrelevant.

          • Anonymous says:

            The white genetic contribution for that 25% isn’t randomly selected. It’s going to be mostly “cavaliers” with some “cavalier retainers”.

          • Anon. says:

            >There is no genetic “Black race.”

            Look up “genetics PCA” on google images.

            The “genetic diversity” stuff is irrelevant.

          • “For what it’s worth, I feel like the genetic diversity of Africa, and of African Americans, makes any genetic argument pretty implausible.”

            1. As someone else pointed out, the genetic diversity of Africa isn’t the same as of African-Americans, since the latter mostly came from particular parts of Africa. What’s the evidence on their genetic diversity?

            2. Suppose, however, that African Americans are genetically diverse. They would still tend to have some characteristics in common, because those characteristics were the result of adaptation to environment. The African environment isn’t uniform, but there are some characteristics that much of it shares.

            The obvious example is dark skin. People from sub-Saharan Africa and people from southern India are genetically quite different, but both groups have dark skin because it’s an adaptation to environments with a lot of sunlight.

            It might turn out that there was a similar correlation across African groups that was relevant to Afro-American poverty, some adaptation to the African environment that was perverse for the modern American environment.

          • Anthony says:

            @anon
            PCA is a clustering technique that researchers frequently use. Its existence does not mean that there is a “black race.” Even supposing you find that there are 15 principal components which explain 95% of the variation (there should actually be 1 which explains most of the variation, given that we all share so much of our genome), there is no reason, a priori, to assume that this clustering has much in common with the usual “black / white / asian / etc” racial classification.

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2947357/

            To all others:
            this article would seem to indicate that yes, African Americans also have incredibly high genetic diversity.

            Supervised STRUCTURE analysis (fig. S34) (4) was used to infer African American ancestry from global training populations, including both Bantu (Lemande) and non-Bantu (Mandinka) Niger-Kordofanian–speaking populations (fig. S34 and table S7). These results were generally consistent with the unsupervised STRUCTURE analysis (table S6) and demonstrate that most African Americans have high proportions of both Bantu (~0.45 mean) and non-Bantu (~0.22 mean) Niger-Kordofanian ancestry, concordant with diasporas originating as far west as Senegambia and as far south as Angola and South Africa (62). Thus, most African Americans are likely to have mixed ancestry from different regions of western Africa. This observation, together with the subtle substructure observed among Niger-Kordofanian speakers, will make it a challenge to trace the ancestry of African Americans to specific ethnic groups in Africa, unless considerably more markers are used.

            As far as asking whether African Americans have highly variable IQ,
            1) I have no clue. The answer seems totally non-obvious to me. Do you know any research on this question?
            2) The question is irrelevant. I’m arguing out that it doesn’t make sense to assume black people are “genetically” less intelligent than other people by pointing out that they have high genetic variability, and you’re responding by asking me to prove that they have high IQ variability. Presumably, you think that high IQ variability would imply high genetic variability, and so (NO high IQ variability) -> (NO high genetic variability), but this is not necessarily the case.

            For instance, imagine you had a population which was extremely genetically diverse, but which had one shared adaptation — say, skin color. Now imagine there were some external factor which suppressed the IQs of people of that skin color, regardless of their genetic makeup. Would you necessarily expect a high IQ variability in that population?

            As for whether there’s some other adaptation shared across all the groups that constitute the ancestors of African Americans — I don’t know. I can’t really deny it absolutely. All I can say is that I’ve seen 0 evidence for it, and I have no a priori reason to think it’s true. There’s a really obvious reason why black skin is a good adaptation for lots of sub-Saharan Africans. Arguing that whichever negative traits you want to ascribe to black people’s genetics — aggression, stupidity, maybe you could go real old school and say “susceptibility to witchcraft” or something — just happen to have been super-beneficial to people living in Africa in the 1500s, seems like a really big stretch.

            As I’ve indicated elsewhere, I’m intensely suspicious of the intellectual motivations of those who are so willing to make that stretch. I’m not saying that all the people I’m arguing against are racists — in fact, I don’t really find that likely. I do think it’s likely that a lot of the people I’m arguing with are enamored of these sorts of racial theories because they perceive them to be censored in polite conversation.

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “The white genetic contribution for that 25% isn’t randomly selected. It’s going to be mostly “cavaliers” with some “cavalier retainers”.”

            So black IQ should be somewhere between pure Africans and Cavaliers?

          • Nornagest says:

            @Anthony: The linked article doesn’t say “incredibly high genetic diversity”, it says “ancestry from multiple West African ethnic groups, mainly those speaking the Niger-Congo family of languages”. You could say similar things about a lot of groups — like white American Midwesterners, for example, with Northern Europe in place of West Africa.

            It says straight up that genetic diversity decreases with distance from Africa, in fact.

          • jlow says:

            >there is no reason, a priori, to assume that this clustering has much in common with the usual “black / white / asian / etc” racial classification.

            There is an “African” cluster of genetic similarity, though, excluding northeast Africa.

            As mentioned elsewhere, this objection seems like saying “Africans are highly diverse, so how could they possibly share a trait like skin color?” Or “West Africans are highly diverse, so why would they largely share an adaptation like lots of fast-twitch muscle fiber?”

            Genetic diversity isn’t a good reason to be highly skeptical of possible shared adaptation. I see that you say “well yeah but I see no reason to believe IQ or whatever is such a trait”, but I think some evidence does suggest that. I’m sure you can come up with some examples — and equally sure you don’t find them convincing.

            I don’t want to debate the object-level facts here, partly because it’s a huge and contentious subject and partly because I don’t think the evidence is convincing either — I just want to point out that it’s not a ridiculous supposition with no evidence and a knockdown argument against it in the form of “genetic diversity!”, as I think you may believe.

            (As you have psychoanalyzed others a bit, I half-seriously serve the same back and submit that you are deeply uncomfortable with the mix of genetics and race, and are happy and eager to find reasons to dismiss the uncomfortable possibilities as sharply and completely as possible. Maybe not — just a very common motivation.)

          • Anon. says:

            there is no reason, a priori, to assume that this clustering has much in common with the usual “black / white / asian / etc” racial classification.

            We have data, baby!

            http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

            >Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.

        • wintermute92 says:

          There’s a natural experiment complicating any pure genetic answer, also.

          Recently-from-Africa black people in America have very different outcomes than long-term-American black people in America. This tends to be true even after narrowing the from-Africa pool to refugees as a way to control for selection effects on who can afford to emigrate.

          Obviously there’s a huge rat’s nest of factors in that (aid to refugees, ethnic group, etc), but it does help divide “being black” from “family legacy of being black in America”, indicating that something in that factor list matters.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        having kids out of wedlock has no impact on performance (it does)

        How do you know? Why does having kids out of wedlock have so much bigger an effect than raising them as a widow?

        • TPC says:

          The usual sociological explanation is that widows were married, and the child knows that there was a father and his family and connections very concretely compared to a never-married mother, which is broadly speaking true. Outcomes are different, being married at all does make a difference in having better outcomes and if it didn’t affect exam performance that would be really weird.

          • TPC says:

            How is it genetic for exam performance to not be affected by marital status, but for other positive life outcomes to be affected by it? That’s a new argument to me.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Outcomes are different, being married at all does make a difference in having better outcomes and if it didn’t affect exam performance that would be really weird.

            I am not sure I understand this sentence. Are you saying that you are certain about some outcomes, just not about exam performance? Well, let’s move to those other outcomes. Do you have any evidence that never being married causes anything?

            (Sorry about the editing.)

          • TPC says:

            Being married is correlated in the research with better outcomes like not ending up in jail, lower drug use, less teenaged pregnancy, higher lifetime earnings, etc. Widows’ kids do worse than married women’s kids but better than divorced kids who do a little better than never-married women’s kids who do the worst of all.

            That it would then be unconnected at all to test scores would be weird. Especially since marriage is a big difference between, say, immigrants who perform better on tests and blacks who do not, as opposed to income.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            That answer looks about 100x times as long as it should be.

            Yes, I’m aware of the correlations. I’m sure that the correlations for out of wedlock children are what you expect. That was never the point of any of my questions. Correlation is not causation. It is possible to measure causality.

          • TPC says:

            Do you have any evidence that being unmarried is not even a biologically relevant factor? (Children of unmarried mothers hit puberty faster and have other biological impacts, incidentally).

            The correlations for children of unwed mothers are not what would be expected for environment-only people at all. The outcomes are worse, not a mix of good and bad, which is what would be expected there.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            There is a serious problem that people get away with making causal claims based on cheap correlational evidence, so there is no incentive to do better studies, so there is very little evidence, one way or the other. It would be easy to measure the rate of development in twin or adoption studies, but I doubt it has been done. (But neither is anyone going to prioritize that above other metrics in expensive studies unless they have already committed to it being an important metric, upstream of others.)

        • Thomas Jørgensen says:

          Because a widow(er) still has two sets of grandparents to enlist to help with childcare? Just looking at how my social circle functions, that’s quite important. I can’t imagine how important it is in a country which is less insanely committed to providing public child care facilities than Denmark is.

          • wintermute92 says:

            Somehow I had never noticed this. In all the talk about “widowed” versus “divorced” versus “unmarried”, I’ve literally never seen someone point out that those things produce very different extended-family outcomes.

            Do the studies on this investigate it and I’ve missed it, or are even researchers neglecting that one?

          • But if an unmarried mom knows who the dad is, she could easily contact the dad’s parents to ask for help.

        • Diadem says:

          Related, a question I have always wondered about, regarding studies about kids of married v. unmarried parents. How are kids of parents who live together without being married treated in such studies?

          Are they counted as married? Discarded? Counted as born out of wedlock?

          I can’t imagine the type of contract your parents signed when they moved in together has any influence on live outcomes.

          If anything these kids will probably do better, since it’s mostly highly educated people who opt out of marriage.

          • Emily says:

            I am having trouble imagining what cultural groups you are hanging out with such that raising kids outside of marriage instead of in it is correlated with being highly educated.

          • Murphy says:

            @Emily

            At least in my social circles late-marriage is turning out to be pretty common. Parents may have been in a committed relationship for many years and living effectively as married.

            I know a few such who have kids and a common theme is that they do intend to get formally married and are likely engaged for many years but the actual wedding just goes on the back burner vs other priorities.

            typical profile: young professionals, both working, multiple degrees.

            Hell, my fiancee and were discussing whether we wanted to put off the wedding another 4 months and spend money on fixing up our bathroom now because if we have the wedding when we sort of planned to then we’d need to save everything now and put off fixing out place up.

            1 day party vs nice warm showers every day.

            That being said we do indeed want a wedding, indeed we want a nice wedding that isn’t just a registry office with a couple of witnesses. But there’s no particular pressure to have that wedding before we sort out more urgent things in our lives.

            This screws up datasets which lump “unmarried mothers” who got pregnant with some guy who’s name they don’t know at a party with people who are effectively married in everything but name but don’t feel much social pressure to actually formally marry.

          • Diadem says:

            I’m not talking about “raising kids outside marriage”. I’m talking about a subset of that, “raising kids outside marriage while living together”. So including only people who opted out of marriage, instead of people who are divorced, are widowed, or simply never had a stable relationship.

            My entire point is that you pollute your data pool by throwing that subset in with the rest, since there’s clearly a big difference between these groups.

            And yeah, it seems fairly intuitive to me that this group is on average more highly educated. I’ve been looking for some good data on this, but it’s surprisingly hard to find. But intuitively it seems to me that marriage is pretty much the norm in lower educated families, while it seems almost an exception between highly educated people. Certainly it correlates very strongly with liberalism, which itself is correlated with education.

            I wondered briefly whether perhaps this is purely a European thing, which simply hardly ever happens in the US. But Wikipedia tells me there’s 16.2 million unmarried cohabiting people in the US. That’s a lower percentage of the population then over here, but still a significant group.

          • Emily says:

            Your typical profile for a woman in the U.S. having a child out of wedlock is in her 20s, not very educated (like, HS degree), and in a relationship with the father of her child. They are living together and continue living together until some point during the kids’ childhood, at which point they split up.

            Having a one-night stand is an atypical profile. Being a college-educated professional partnered-but-not-married to another college-educated professional is another atypical profile. Sure, if you are in either one of these groups, it is the case that even if you think the associations between marital status and outcome are causal, they don’t have much to say about you. I am not sure whether there is literature that distinguishes between parents who are living together at the time of conception and birth and those that aren’t, though: there may be.

            Late marriage among the college-educated is common in the U.S. What’s uncommon is having kids in those unmarried partnerships.

            Marriage (and staying married) is, in fact, very much more the norm the more educated you are in the U.S. when kids are involved. I will be shocked if you find anything that says otherwise. If you’re seeing the opposite, I wonder if your “less-educated” group is actually fairly educated and/or religious in ways that are atypical and your more-educated group is weird for being, IDK, poly and in San Francisco or something.

          • tmk says:

            I think this is very different in America and North-Western Europe. I have the impression that it is really frowned upon to have children without being married in the U.S., even by very liberal people. It’s seen as trashy. Meanwhile in Sweden at least it is very common to live together with children for many years without getting married. Sometime in the 70’s marriage became very uncool, a signal that you are old-fashioned and a bit conformist. Most people still get married first of course, but no-one bats an eye if parents are not married as long as they take care of the kids well. I remember being envious of some of my classmates who got to go to their parents weddings. I thought my parents were selfish to have had the wedding before I was born. Now too, I have a colleague in his 50’s with kids going of to college who has been living with their mother for 20 years, but never got married. He is really into rock music, but certainly no social outcast.

            The main reason must be how powerful religion is. An other I think is that most European countries have no underclass associated with having children out of wedlock. The main underclass is immigrants stuck in housing projects dotted around the big cities, and they are often more conservative and marry early.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Emily

            Your typical profile… atypical… another atypical

            Can I see some data? How do you know what’s typical and what’s atypical?

          • Anonymous says:

            Gut feeling. Is there another way to do armchair sociology?

          • Good Burning Plastic says:

            Given that e.g. Icelanders aren’t particularly dysfunctional so far as I know I guess you’d get more useful results if you counted them as married, but the phrasing “out of wedlock” suggests that they are counted as unmarried.

          • Emily says:

            Brad Wilcox has written a bunch of stuff on this. His sites are blocked for me at work. This isn’t, and it confirms some of what I’ve said: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/8/10-strengthen-marriage-wilcox-cherlin/0810_strengthen_marriage_wilcox_cherlin.pdf

          • Emily says:

            @Anonymous: that’s the kind of unprovoked, hostile comment that makes me want to participate in this space less.

          • Vitor says:

            Emily, you made lots of very specific claims and didn’t back them up with any source, specifically in the first paragraph. You came across as trying to claim unwarranted authority on the subject, and it should be clear why people react negatively to that kind of thing.

            Anon should have been more civil, that’s for sure. More at 11.

          • @vitor:

            It comes across as a claim of unwarranted authority only after someone asks her for sources and she declines to give them, which didn’t happen. Up to that point it’s a collection of factual claims that might or might not turn out to be backed by data.

          • Diadem says:

            @Maware

            Again the same conflation of these groups!

            We’re talking about the difference between couples who are living together and have children together, while not being married, and couples who are living together and have children together, who are married. Pointing out that highly educated people are married more often is ENTIRELY useless here.

            If of lowly educated mothers 10% is married, 10% is cohabitating with the father and 80% is either alone or living with someone who is not the father, and those numbers are 20%, 30% and 50% for highly educated mothers, then marriage is positively correlated with being highly educated, while highly educated people are still more likely to choose cohabitation over marriage.

            Those numbers are made up. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find the actual numbers. No one else seems to have them either. Maybe no one ever investigated this.

          • Emily says:

            Figure 2 distinguishes between married parents, cohabitating parents, and one parent (either alone or with another non-parent; doesn’t break that down.) http://family-studies.org/more-than-60-of-u-s-kids-live-with-two-biological-parents/

            The overwhelming majority of children (86%) of at least one college-educated parent live with their two married parents.

            Every other category is more popular among each of the less-educated groups. Cohabitation is particularly uncommon among college-educated parents.

          • jlow says:

            I can’t believe that some are acting like the claim “unmarried-with-children is associated with less education” deserves aggressive skepticism and accusations of “armchair sociology”. This is like angrily requesting that a chemist source the claim that noble gases tend to be unreactive, or something. It’s extremely well-known. Fair enough to ask for confirmation, but someone mentioning it isn’t exactly claiming undue authority for wild supposition.

        • Hector_St_Clare says:

          I’m also quite dubious that out of wedlock childbearing has *that* much of a negative effect of children, for the reasons Razib Khan points out: these studies usually don’t correct for genetics. The kinds of (heritable) traits that make a person difficult to employ or difficult to get along with as a spouse are going to make it more likely that 1) their children also have similar behavioural problems, 2) their children are raised in a single parent household. That doesn’t imply that 1) and 2) are correlated though.

          In general, genetics is a much stronger predictor of adult life outcomes for children than shared environment ( = the family environment). There are some aspects of family environment that turn out to be important, but that’s mostly at the prenatal stage and very early childhood.

          • Maware says:

            Genetics hardly explain as much as you think they do, and it’s hard for genetics to trump the decline in living standards, parent attention, child safety, and various other factors that are brought on by single motherhood. Single motherhood is widespread enough across populations that any form of genetic explanation would be fallacious.

          • wintermute92 says:

            Even without going straight to genetics, I rarely see people look at common-cause factors that would both lead someone to be single and lead to worse childhood outcomes. It would hardly shock me if temperamental, dishonest, etc. parents were less likely to be married and also caused problems for their kids.

            Even if you accept that parental behaviors don’t produce many long-term effects directly, the sorts of things that discourage marriage also impede your chances of helping your kid learn good work habits, go to college, or otherwise pick up clearly-beneficial experiences.

            It hadn’t occurred to me, but this would produce a non-class, non-genetic justification for “widowhood has better outcomes than divorce/non-marriage” – it doesn’t correlate with marriage-denying traits.

          • If women make very different decisions when picking a husband compared to picking lovers they don’t expect marry, then you would expect genetics to be playing a huge role here.

        • Julie K says:

          I’ve read that while being born out of wedlock is correlated with all sorts of bad outcomes, kids born to a married couple but living in a neighborhood of single-parent families do worse than kids born to single parents but living in a neighborhood with married couples.

          My take on the question of how much difference parenting makes is that parents have a lot of influence on young children, but when the kids reach school age their peers have more influence. However, the peers were influence by their own parents, so basically the parenting that you give your kids is being diluted by the parenting that their peers’ parents did.

          Collectively, parents are still important.

      • “But even without that, “black” in America and white include many more ethnic groups and mixed-ethnicity kids than it did when Jensen published.”

        Interesting point, could you expand on it? Do the SAT “black” figures include ethnic groups other than African-Americans, ones who were not included thirty years ago? Alternatively, are you arguing that African-Americans today have considerably more non-African ancestry than they did thirty years ago? I would find that surprising, although not impossible–my impression is that most mating is still in-group rather than cross-group.

        I agree that if the genetics have changed a lot and the gap hasn’t, that would be evidence against a genetic explanation, but I’m not sure it’s true.

        • TPC says:

          They do include black ethnic groups with different admixture than 30 years ago. And while most mating is in-group, mating within marriage for blacks in America at least is getting more nonblack, enough to shift the numbers quite a lot.

          You have two groups of blacks getting admitted to selective schools (separate from the groups getting tested in high schools overall) and that is immigrants with low white admixture and mixed-race “blacks” with medium to high admixture (25%+, higher than the overall average for American-born blacks and much higher than for foreign-born blacks living in America).

      • vivafringe says:

        What evidence is there that causation flows from

        A. environmental -> OOW children -> poor childhood outcomes,
        as opposed to
        B. genetics -> OOW children -> poor childhood outcomes
        or even
        C. genetics -> poor childhood outcomes, and, unrelatedly, OOW children?

        As always with blobs of correlational data, it’s pretty rough to tease out causation. I’m interested in studies that try to answer that, though.

    • Bram Cohen says:

      There seems to be a nice natural experiment in having roughly the same genetic group not have the sorts of social strife we have in the US in our neighbors to the north. Does anybody know if the IQ/education/earnings/general achievement gap is the same among blacks in Canada?

      • TPC says:

        What are you talking about, can you link?

        • Bram Cohen says:

          According to Wikipedia there’s some racial identity politics in Canada with many black people there identifying as carribean instead of african. It’s only 30% though, and whether they’re actually all that different genetically is an interesting question. I suspect they’re genetically west african with varying amounts of european, just like american blacks.

          I ask because I’ve several times met black people who were strikingly free of the sorts of affectations which most black americans carry around with them, then later found out they were canadian.

          • Luke the CIA stooge says:

            Their where Alot of escaped slaves that made it to Canada via the underground railroad and wound Up Making Larger Fortunes in Upper Canada (Now ontario), Some Of them even returned south to fight in the civil war but mostly they returned north after the war was won.
            The thing is they were almost too successful in that we can’t really trace the demographics because almost all of their decendants ARE WHITE. They intermarried with their social class (middle to upperclass) and every so often we get a news story about some old white lady in Toronto finding a unionists sword in her attic and finding out her great grandfather was Abe Lincoln’s black doctor, and an officer in the civil war.

            This doesn’t quite disprove the genetic theory (any slave savy enough to escape was probably at the top of the bell curve) but it would be strong evidence that genetics cannot explain the current plight of black Americans.

            I’m inclined to believe the Centre-right interpretation: that slavery and Jim crow successfully kept the black community down while the unintended consequences of the great society and the war on drugs kept them down (as a demographic, there is a sizable community of wealthy African Americans).

            I always found Milton Friedman’s argument that social housing killed the black community (by concentrating the poor and vulnerable with the decayed and pathological) pretty compelling.

            Also the above seems to be strong evidence against the racism explanation (that racism and institutional bias explain the plight of African Americans since 1965) 19th and early 20th century Toronto was a crazy racist and corrupt place(in the 1800’s we had a street war between the protestants and catholics (with the cops taking the protestant side) and in the early thirties we had anti Jewish riots). But despite that we had no real policy barriers to black (or catholic or jewish) success, and now their all indestiguishably members of the white oppressors.

            As for Caribbean blacks they are certainly more present in crime statistics, however they are disproportionately new immigrants from crime ridden countries (and disproportionately live in social housing) i don’t know if it will continue into the next generations, but out former head of state was a Haitian woman

      • Sir Gawain says:

        I know that, despite being 3% of the population, Canada’s Afros make up 10% of the prison population, because I’ve been informed that this is proof positive of how racist Canadian society is.

        • TPC says:

          They also aren’t really of the same “genetics” either. That’s why I was confused by that statement.

    • Galle says:

      Well, for one thing, the effects of segregation clearly haven’t faded yet. Like, at all.

    • Fctho1e says:

      If such gaps exist in 2026, 2056 or 2096, will it become permissible to suggest that they are less than 100% environmental in origin?

      No. It’s a matter of faith. It won’t become permissible as long as the religion lives..

    • sweeneyrod says:

      “The best argument against the existence of racial differences would be… the lack of racial differences. If such differences disappear, I’d be (obviously) happy to dismiss the idea that they were genetic in nature.”

      But why? Isn’t it possible that even if black people were represented in jobs, prisons, income groups etc. proportionally, that that could be due to discrimination and genetic differences balancing out?

      • Anon says:

        But why? Isn’t it possible that even if black people were represented in jobs, prisons, income groups etc. proportionally, that that could be due to discrimination and genetic differences balancing out?

        That argument could have had some merit in the 70’s after the Civil Rights Act, but it is now $current_year and progress in those areas has been either stagnant or worse. Any efforts to “balance out” these factors has been so far unsuccessful despite many laws being written explicitly to remove them.

        One could argue that there are confounders in the sense that we are making “one-step-forward-two-steps-back” decisions in legislation. For example, two pieces of legislation that have been incredibly harmful to black families, and especially inner-city families, are extending welfare benefits to unwed mothers and legalizing no-fault divorce, as described here. These effects likely have ruined any positive effect gained from the Civil Rights Act. However, removing these laws will require a lot more effort than CRISPR gene therapy, especially since there is a larger contingent of people politically focused against repealing those laws compared to people against gene therapy.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      I’m told there are little racial differences among immigrants to the US. This is a strong argument both against the racial discrimination argument and the racial inferiority argument.

      • Emily says:

        I don’t think it’s a good argument against either.
        1. Immigrants aren’t randomly selected from their underlying populations. Immigrants from Africa (unlike, say, immigrants from Mexico) tend to be college-educated and relatively skilled. (Exception: Somali refugees.)
        2. There can be discrimination against non-immigrant black Americans that doesn’t affect immigrants. There are differences in residential patterns, culture, accent, names, all sorts of things that people use to identify group membership.

        • Civilis says:

          Regarding point two, though, wouldn’t it be the case then that we’re misdiagnosing the problem by calling it racial discrimination?

          True, there is a racial disparity in the effects, but trying to address it by tailoring the remedy on the assumption that all black Americans are equally affected risks having the treatment (for example, admissions preferences to universities) applied primarily to black Americans that are not affected by the problem.

          • Emily says:

            I think “racial discrimination” works as pretty good shorthand in most situations. If we only discriminate against the Catholics who go to mass on Sundays, I’d still call that “religious discrimination.” But, sure, depending on what you think the purpose of admissions preferences it, it may very well be the case that we’re doing them fundamentally wrong and that thinking of the issue we’re trying to solve as being racial and not something a bit different contributes to that.

          • Anthony says:

            The difficulty is that “race” itself is an unscientific term, which people used, historically, to codify their prejudices. When we say someone is “racist,” we usually mean they dislike (or regard as inferior) people of a certain heritage.

            And yes, I’d agree with you that racists’ ability to tolerate African immigrants without any problems is evidence that their animus does not have a genetic (or “racial”) justification. And I’d also agree that that presents a problem for racially-based anti-discrimination programs. The only thing I’d say is that it isn’t an obviously disqualifying problem, since there are such a greater number of African Americans in the US than there are African immigrants.

          • Civilis says:

            Has there been any studies looking at the hiring prospects of guys named “Bubba” or “Cleetus”? Of whether people in trailer parks have economic disparities when compared to those in conventional housing? Of whether people are more or less likely to hire people that use “all y’all”? (I am perhaps over-generalizing here, but having worked in even a border area of the rural south, not by as much as you’d think.)

            I think part of the problem is that we’re looking for racial discrimination, we find racial disparities, then we take those as de facto proof of racial discrimination and attempt the same ‘racial discrimination’ remedies we’ve already used. If we’re discriminating against people that don’t fit cultural norms (name, accent, lifestyle), the remedy might be entirely different, and we might be overlooking other people that are affected by that discrimination.

          • I believe that xenophobia is a basic human trait, but racism is a relatively modern invention. Racism is partly shorthand for prejudice about ethnicity– African Americans are a group of ethnicities and sometimes perceived as one ethnicity. Africans and black Carribeans aren’t the same ethnicity and sometimes aren’t up against the same prejudice.

          • Mary says:

            In Freaknomics, IIRC, there is a discussion of a sociologist who unpacked whether typically lower-class first names actually caused children to remain lower-class as opposed to those who received more typically middle-class ones.

            Conclusion was no effect.

          • Nornagest says:

            Building on what Nancy said, I think accent is underappreciated as a cue for prejudice. A black guy from Oakland and a Jamaican immigrant might look similar, but they sound nothing alike.

            Compare a white guy from Boston and a white guy from Perdition Creek in Lower Alabama.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Heck, compare a white guy from Boston (the city proper) to a white guy from Boston (the south bay), Lowell, or Worcester

          • Civilis says:

            The answers I’m seeing keep getting me more confused when I try to think about the problem.

            I think it’s been stated elsewhere in the thread that African immigrants do better in the US than do native born African-Americans, and if the explanation is that immigrants self-select that makes a degree of sense. But if the problem is rooted in natural human xenophobia, you’d expect the exact opposite. The same applies to discrimination rooted in cultural and linguistic differences (probably themselves a subset of xenophobia).

            Looking at it as discrimination against a subset of ethnicities that fall under the larger African umbrella is also problematic to me as it has been my experience that those most prejudiced are the least able to see the ethnic differences between subgroups and the most likely to just lump people together by skin color.

          • Samedi says:

            @Civilis

            Has there been any studies looking at the hiring prospects of guys named “Bubba” or “Cleetus”?

            I think you are asking if there is a social class component to this as well. I think the answer is “yes”. Social class being ignored in studies on this topic has come up before in SSC. My gut feeling is that social class is one of the strongest contributors, perhaps even more significant than ethnicity. But the causation here is complex and there are obviously many relevant factors.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Could you source the claim that subsequent generations descended from Hispanic immigrants do progressively worse?

          • Anthony says:

            @anonymous

            While arguing against weakman “progs”, you’ve provided no targets to hit yourself. You present a really grand theory of racial outcomes — one which is far more intricate and certain than one that I, (a progressive), would claim to describe — but you don’t provide any evidence that can be used to support or refute your claim.

        • NN says:

          Exception: Somali refugees.

          Somali refugees do better academically than native blacks, as do refugees from places like Ethiopia and Eritrea. So clearly there is something other than immigrant selection going on here.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            I am not familiar with that data set, but I am extremely suspicious about the decision to exclude “English Language Learners.” This is a common trick just to exclude students who score badly. But it is true that the Ethiopian refugees do better on math tests without the exclusion (and almost as well on reading).

          • Emily says:

            That’s really interesting.

          • Outis says:

            East Africa is Best Africa.

        • Mary says:

          One notes that in the early twentieth century, blacks in New York and Pennsylvania regularly performed better academically than whites in southern schools. And it was bruited about that it was non-random nature of the migration that did it.

          so a sociologist compared the children’s academic performance while they were still in southern schools, and proved it was the schools. (All I remember of this was that I read it in Thomas Sowell’s work, who added a personal observation of the humiliation of moving from the top of the class to the bottom when the family moved north.)

          • dndnrsn says:

            I recall learning once about a WWI-era military test that was supposed to determine intelligence and aptitude – so I suppose a less sophisticated version of what they have now – where northern blacks outscored southern whites.

          • Mary says:

            Yup. Sowell recounts how the sergeant came outside, pleased, after the test results and asked how many of them came from New York or Pennsylvania.

          • Emma says:

            I recall learning once about a WWI-era military test that was supposed to determine intelligence and aptitude – so I suppose a less sophisticated version of what they have now – where northern blacks outscored southern whites.

            Yeah, that’s hookworm. At the time most people in the south were mildly anemic. Then they started to poop in outhouses instead of on the ground under a tree. Children born in the south after that are smarter and more diligent than anyone from before. Much like the ones in New York.

      • Hector_St_Clare says:

        Um, no. Immigrants to the US are a highly selected and nonrandom groups. US citizens of Indian origin, for example, have high IQ and test scores. People in India…..not so much, to put it mildly. (India stopped participiating in the PISA test because their scores were so embarrassingly low).

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Africa has the greatest genetic variability of any area of the world.

      We should expect to find the smartest populations in the world in Africa, if the basis of intelligence is genetic.

      The response I’ve gotten on this point – from normally intelligent, well-reasoned people – is that Africa has a high parasite load. Which is entirely true for some sections of Africa – except that Africa is a very big place (even excluding the region north of the Sahara) with climates ranging from low-parasite tundras and deserts and mountains to high-parasite jungle, with populations scattered across all of it. The parasite load explanation is a just-so story which uses as evidence the very thing it is seeking to explain.

      Intelligence is almost certainly genetic. But unless the same genes that encode skin tone also happen to encode the proteins that increase intelligence, there’s no reason for the genetics responsible for intelligence to align along the American conception of race, which is after all, almost all skin color. And as has been pointed out on these boards, it’s amazing that the same people who believe that the social sciences are universally terrible also carve out a special exception for the science of racial IQ.

      At this point I have to conclude that the whole thing is just an excuse for people to keep holding the racist views they already hold. Mind, I think racism is built into our brains, and expect Europe’s attempts to suppress it to end in a whole mess of dead people – which is to say, I don’t think racism is a strict moral failing, it’s just one more bias on top of a pile of biases. But trying to rationalize racism into more-than-a-bias, well, that is a bit of a moral failing.

      • Walter says:

        “Africa has the greatest genetic variability of any area of the world.

        We should expect to find the smartest populations in the world in Africa, if the basis of intelligence is genetic.”

        Wait, what? How does that work? What do you mean by ‘greatest genetic variability’, and how does it lead to the smartest populations in the world?

        • Anthony says:

          Every population group that exists outside of Africa has its origin inside of Africa. Suppose population A is super smart. Then you should be able to find whichever location in Africa their ancestors originated, and test the people living there today. They’ll have a very similar genetic profile to population A, which means they’re likely to have a lot of the same “smartness genes” as population A.

          • Wrong Species says:

            That doesn’t make any sense. Populations change. If a population is selected for intelligence, then they shouldn’t be of equal intelligence to a population that hasn’t. This is how natural selection works.

          • Lumifer says:

            They’ll have a very similar genetic profile to population A

            Nope, not at all. That’s a silly argument — you’re basically saying that if the Japanese have slanted eyes, we should be able to find their original tribe in Africa which also has slanted eyes.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Lumifer:
            Google informs me that you can, in fact, find native Africans with slanted eyes.

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Two McMillion

            And would you be prepared to assert that the East Asian people (as opposed to, say, South Asian) trace their heritage specifically to those slant-eyed Africans?

          • Anthony says:

            The argument is not, “The smartest people in the world must all have equally smart relatives in Africa.” The argument is, “If there are smart alleles and dumb alleles, Africa’s genetic variability makes it likely it will have individuals with many of the combinations of those alleles seen elsewhere.”

            Africa’s genetic diversity makes a genetic characterization of the intelligence of everyone living on the continent a really big stretch. The burden of evidence is really high. And no one on this damned thread has any evidence!

            Imagine you were a PhD student, and you had hypothesis W, and you went to your graduate adviser saying you wanted to study it, and they told you, “I think your hunch is unlikely because of X, Y, and Z.” Here’s how I imagine the conversation going:
            “But perhaps there’s some unknown mechanism suppressing X, Y isn’t operating here by chance, and Z is something our field has just gotten wrong?”
            “Huh, those are a lot of bold claims. What’s your evidence?”
            “Y isn’t necessarily 100% true all the time!”
            “Yeah, but even if it weren’t true, X and Z are compelling reasons, and what’s your evidence?”
            “But X could possibly be absent here!”
            “Unlikely, but Z still exists, and what’s your evidence?”
            “But everyone’s wrong about Z?”
            “What is your evidence and why are you pushing this line of research so hard!?”

          • @Anthony, I find it difficult to imagine any mechanism for individual variation in intelligence (as in, “what made me significantly more intelligent than the average person?”) that doesn’t have at least some genetic component. Did you have anything in particular in mind? Any evidence against this assumption?

          • Anthony says:

            @Harry Johnston
            No, I assume that a lot of intelligence variation is genetic. I believe that there are groups that have developed higher or lower intelligence, on average, than other groups. I also think that those I see trumpeting this theory on this thread are vastly overstating the effect in an effort to explain social phenomena which have far more compelling alternate explanations.

            I’ve been doing a bunch of reading on this subject, and the scientific consensus seems pretty overwhelmingly to rest on the side of, “Yes, it is possible to group populations into ‘racial categories.’ In fact, dependent on your prior assumptions, it is possible to group populations into whatever categories you want. In every category thus far picked, you will find that the category explains very little of human genetic variation.”

            So how I feel is, there are some solid heuristics which make race-based explanations of intelligence unlikely. There are also very solid empirical results which do the same thing. It’s very frustrating to hear argument after argument for why the heuristics could be wrong, as if the empirical results didn’t exist. It makes me feel as though the arguers have made up their mind, and what’s the point of even having a discussion?

          • Creutzer says:

            @Anthony: The following is a genuine request for information. I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve been frustrated by the fact that I can’t really come to an opinion about HBD because while there are many expositions of the evidence in favour, I can’t find anywhere a good, pointed discussion of the evidence contra. It’s somehow not very visible, probably because HBD is not a hypothesis to be entertained in polite society and hence not even to be argued against. Maybe I’m just being incompetent and looking in the wrong places. Could you point me to the solid empirical results that make race-based explanations of intelligence differences unlikely?

          • Anthony says:

            @Creutzer

            The first thing you have to know is that this is an academic swamp. The science of race began in earnest when colonialism was in full swing, and a lot of its early researchers were about as far from scientifically objective as you can imagine. Both biological and cultural anthropologists tend to attach a lot of stigma to these early projects — not just because they’re lily-livered “progs” or “politically correct” or irrational idiots or whatever insult anyone feels like hurling at them. They attach stigma to these projects because 1) the projects were based on shoddy research methods designed to validate the researchers’ pre-existing prejudices, and 2) early anthropological research was used as a justification for all sorts of really, really horrific stuff. To pick one example, the large, public university I went to had sterilized thousands of women — mostly minorities and mentally ill — in the early 20th century. The president of the American Eugenics Society had buildings named after him all over the place.

            Anthropologists learned the hard way that there are consequences when you create dishonest research. As such, they don’t like to touch race-based stuff with a 10-foot pole. “Fool me twice… can’t get fooled again.”

            Now, of course, HBD people notice this, and it seems to me (I wouldn’t take my word on this, but it does seem this way) that they correctly assess it as a bias of its own.

            Any time you read stuff about this, you have to ask:
            1) Is the person I’m reading motivated by racism? Do I trust their study’s objectivity?
            2) Is the person I’m reading motivated by anti-racism? Do I trust their study’s objectivity?

            So, with the above caveats, my sourcing. My opinions were drawn, originally, from a bioanthro university class some years back. However, I can give you two things I’ve been reading since yesterday in an attempt to study up:

            Wiki page on Human Genetic Clustering (you should know a bunch about linear algebra to make sense of this — I don’t know how useful thinking about SVD clustering is without that background). The most fruitful exercise for me has been going through the linked sources here.
            The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans — interesting paper I’ve been reading.

          • Anonanon says:

            >the projects were based on shoddy research methods designed to validate the researchers’ pre-existing prejudices

            Insert Obligatory Snark About Anthropological Methods And Utopian Hunter-Gatherer Societies

            From those citations, it does seem like all the useful research is being done without much input from the traditional side of anthropology. A bit like

            Odd that they talk about not finding “neat boundaries between large geographical groups” , or “continental races”. That seems like a strawman along the lines of “dog breeds don’t exist because not all English dogs are the same”.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Roughly, it means there is more genetic difference between two randomly chosen populations of people in Africa than there is in two randomly chosen populations out of the rest of the world.

          In terms of D&D, this means Africa has more character rolls; if the rest of the world combined rolled up ten characters, Africa rolled up, say, sixteen. We should expect to find both the highest and lowest-Int characters in the African character set.

          The rest of the world has leveled up more – via the Flynn effect – but if/when Africa catches up, we should see higher Int there.

          • vivafringe says:

            The “more D&D rolls” claim seems to rely on assumptions for how we came to live in a world where Europe was genetically homogenous and Africa was genetically diverse.

            Europe could be more homogenous because competition among competing genomes was fiercer, weeding out the weaker ones. This would leave a single high “roll” left for the continent. In Africa, where travel was more difficult, it’s possible that comparatively less competition across the continent took place, which explains the diversity in genomes that you see today.

            tl;dr Africa could be a bunch of D&D int rolls, and Europe could be the same number of int rolls, with the lowest deleted.

            …or not! It’s hard to say without knowing why Africa is more diverse in the first place. But at any rate, “Africa has higher genetic diversity” does not seem sufficient to disprove racial IQ.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            vivafrenge –

            It assumes the evidence in evidence, and nothing else.

            We don’t need explanations on why there aren’t as many characters elsewhere, though. Africa is, as far as we can tell, where all humans originated. Africa having more diverse human populations doesn’t require any explanation – it’s expected.

            Our metaphor breaks down a little bit, but every character elsewhere had to pass through large amounts of “Africa” on their way to wherever they ended up, spawning other characters as they went. For every character found somewhere else, we can expect to find at least one in Africa. Plus more, because not all the characters would have headed north; there are other directions for them to go.

          • vivafringe says:

            Okay, but we see genetic differences outside of Africa because selection pressures changed once humans left the continent. There are no white skinned natives to Africa*, which alone seems to disprove your claim that “every character found somewhere else can be found in Africa”. If intelligence started to factor more into genetic fitness the same way white skin did (or competition among genomes increased), you would see racial differences in IQ despite Africa’s larger diversity.

            You could counterclaim that there’s no reason to believe that IQ-selection pressures varied by region, but my countercounterclaim would invoke the low-hanging fruit of Ashkenazi Jews, who underwent radically different selection pressures as a direct result of their race and seem to have substantially higher than average IQ – not just in the US, but everywhere.

            *After typing this up I realized I didn’t know if this was actually true.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Africa has albinos, but they don’t do too well. Even if they didn’t sometimes get hunted for their body parts, their lifespan is around 30 years.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            vivafringe –

            Your counterpoint is a religious culture-race with a ritualized mating process which existed among many other cultures and races which didn’t exhibit similar selective pressures over the same period of time in the same area.

            That is, other white people didn’t experience the same IQ pressures, and white people of the early 20th century had lower IQs than black people in some regions of Africa today of similar economy development to that era of Western history.

            For Jews, I’d look to their religion and their mating rituals for an explanation. For white people more broadly, it’s much more recent than evolutionary pressure can account for.

          • Psmith says:

            other white people didn’t experience the same IQ pressures,

            Not all white people, and not exactly the same pressures as the Jews. But I believe the smart money is on a combination of a short growing season and (eventually, within the Hajnal line) downward mobility caused by manorialism. (Other relevant pressures include selection against clannishness due to higher levels of outbreeding and selection against criminality by way of hanging petty criminals.).

            white people of the early 20th century had lower IQs than black people in some regions of Africa today of similar economy development to that era of Western history.

            I suspect that that might be too much aggregation, and that the relevant white populations had some combination of conspicuously bad environments (hookworm and iodine deficiency and so on) and less historical exposure to the selective pressures I mentioned. (By the same token, aggregating over “black people” ignores, for instance, the Igbo.).

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Psmith –

            So, what, parasites and iodine deficiency are solved problems in Africa?

            The problem I have, every time I have this conversation, is that I get the distinct impression everybody wants to label white IQ issues as environmental, and black IQ issues as genetic.

          • Psmith says:

            So, what, parasites and iodine deficiency are solved problems in Africa?

            No. But I’m pretty sure it’s gotten better since 1900.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Psmith –

            It’s only started getting significantly better in the past decade; the WHO started the iodization programs in 2003, for example, and reduced the number of significantly (from a health perspective) deficient people from ~50% to ~30%. (Europe and the US don’t look too much better than that, mind, but for different reasons; our rates of deficiency had been trending up.)

          • Nornagest says:

            I haven’t seen IQ figures (and frankly I wouldn’t trust them if I had), but GDP for a lot of sub-Saharan African countries started going up about ten years ago after several flat decades. Take this as you will.

        • Anthony says:

          Note that I have not said that anthropologists are not creating good / compelling work — only that one has to be wary of biases.

      • Anthony says:

        Thank you for this. I feel that this post purported to present a “difficult-to-air, uncomfortable scientific notion,” but, in fact, only presented the scientifically unsupported, half-baked prejudices of the author. I think that posts like this are just as destructive to intelligent conversation as the most shrill “Any explanation besides institutional oppression is just another form of institutional oppression!” that the OP is complaining about.

        One of the things I think sometimes gets lost in communication is the legitimate distrust biological anthropologists have for research purporting to find biological explanations for differential racial outcomes. They’re not just being politically correct: they know that Western science has a long history of pseudoscientific nonsensical racial theory, and that a lot of what looks like evidence is heavily tainted by the poor research standards and the biases of the researchers.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          The central failure mode of censorship is that it grants credence to ideas that have none on their own.

          • Anthony says:

            I agree. I don’t think the unifying thread in these arguments is racism: it’s contrarianism.

      • gwern says:

        The response I’ve gotten on this point – from normally intelligent, well-reasoned people – is that Africa has a high parasite load.

        You also left out all the other arguments people gave you in that LW thread, such as selection, in addition to your bizarre original argument that none of this matters anyway (for something that doesn’t matter, you sure spend a lot of time trying to strawman it). By the way, it’s also true that there’s far more ‘genetic diversity’ within dog breeds than between dog breeds. ‘Genetic diversity’ as a concept doesn’t get you very far because it refers mostly to rare mutations and crap that doesn’t matter, while more normal phenotypic difference is controlled by small differences in the frequencies of common globally/ancestrally-shared variants (every population has about the same schizophrenia or intelligence variants present to some degree); this is how, for example, domestication and breeding work, and how natural selection has been working in Europe. I think you already know what existing results say about frequencies of those variants.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Gwern, you’re THE person I’ve mentioned who normally gives extremely well-reasoned, well-cited, intelligent arguments, who gave instead the most facile sort of just-so-story responses. Usually, if you have a position, I’ll take it – just because you usually have really good reasons for having a position that you’re ready to unload in a massive dump of data.

          Your responses were incredibly out of character for you. The fact that you gave just-so-story responses, instead of your usual well-researched and well-cited response that obliterates any possibility of counterargument, is evidence against you having good evidence for belief.

          • Randy M says:

            Can you give more than an argument from incredulity? His point was that, in an another species, greater genetic diversity within breeds does not preclude meaningful, observable, between breed differences. This seems to fully rebut your purely logic based reasoning.

            If greater genetic diversity within one population means that intelligence should also peak within that population, it seems you are assuming EVERY trait must show greater diversity because the whole is more diverse. This is rebutted by finding any other phenotype that isn’t more diverse within group. Right?

            Also, by this same silly argument (of high inter-group variation disproving groups), you can disprove the existence of color as a meaningful category–since uv has more variation in wavelength than there is between it and red, those colors aren’t meaningfully different. Or lets disprove the genetic basis for height, if there is more variation among non-pygmies than between the groups.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Randy M –

            His point is rather misleading, as you’ve just demonstrated.

            His argument is that diversity doesn’t say that much, because it’s not the variability of the genetics, it’s what the genetics code for. Which is a valid point, sort of, except that we don’t -know- what the genetics are coding for – what we do know is that there is tremendous IQ variance across Africa. Which is to say, the data is saying that yes, there’s exactly what I’m saying is in Africa, in Africa.

            It’s not one population, and if the Flynn Effect holds as well in some of those countries as it did in Europe and the United States, the average IQ of some regions could reasonably be expected to exceed 105 – as they compare favorably to the 1930s United States.

            Which is more or less exactly what I said you’d find if you looked – but I cheated, because I already knew it would be there.

            Which is to say – I didn’t address Gwern on that point because Gwern is factually wrong on that point, and I’ve already had this argument with him.

            And I’m honestly convinced most of the HBD supporters are genuinely racist, because of one simple thing: They have a get-out-of-jail-free card. There ARE African countries which have very low IQs, and African regions which have (for barely-industrial societies) unusually high IQs. They can easily point to those countries as examples of black-people-of-higher-than-average-intelligence.

            But they’d rather treat Africa as a monolith in which every population is mostly identical, all genetic variance is low-value mutation, and IQ is all uniformly below-average. When it comes to black people, they deny biodiversity.

          • Wrong Species says:

            What exactly do you think a well reasoned case for racial differences being at least partially genetic looks like?

            Which subsaharan African countries have unusually high iqs?

            How many people are disputing the claim that Africans have the most genetic diversity?

            Why do you think the existence of high diversity means racial differences aren’t genetic?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Wrong Species –

            You may want to reread what I’ve written a little more carefully. You’re asking the wrong questions.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @orphan wild

            All I’m asking for is proof of your claims. If you’re unwilling to back up statements with evidence, why should I believe you?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Wrong Species –

            You suffer under two critical misapprehensions here. First, that I care what you believe. Second, that winning this argument is my primary objective.

            Again, you ask the wrong questions, so I’ll give you a hint: I have given slightly more information with each reply, rather than forestalling the arguments I knew would arise with my first statement. I have foreshadowed, instead of stated outright.

            So, what’s the first correct question?

          • Jiro says:

            You suffer under two critical misapprehensions here. First, that I care what you believe. Second, that winning this argument is my primary objective.

            If you don’t care about those things, what’s the point of being on a rationality-adjacent blog?

          • Lumifer says:

            @ Jiro

            He likes to play.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I’m not going to play stupid mind games with you.

          • “Which subsaharan African countries have unusually high iqs?”

            He said regions. I’m guessing that he is referring to the Ibo (or Igbo, which I gather is the more recent transliteration). They would be a country if they had won the Nigerian Civil War, but they didn’t.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          (Incidentally, talking about HBD in an obnoxious fashion was my summoning ritual for Eugine Nier, so he could be banished a few more times. It worked.)

      • Anon. says:

        >Africa has the greatest genetic variability of any area of the world.

        >We should expect to find the smartest populations in the world in Africa, if the basis of intelligence is genetic.

        This is (super obviously) nonsense. Consider two populations X and Y. X has high genetic diversity: three alleles A, B, C with equal frequency. A causes -1 IQ, B does nothing, C causes +1 IQ.

        Y has low genetic diversity: everybody has the same allele, D, which causes +10 IQ.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          That’s not the way anything works.

          • RKR says:

            Oh god… Orphan, your arguments are completely facile and full of sophistry, and you know it.

            What about alleles for skin tone, for lactase persistence, or for thick straight hair, which are fixed at 100% in many populations but are all fixed at the ancestral allele in Africa? Selection throws a spanner into the works. Africans are diverse as measured in variance across the *entire* genome, including at non-coding loci, not across the suite of loci that are relevant to any particular trait, for example skin color, for which Africans are decidedly much more homogeneous than Eurasians taken as a whole.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            RKR –

            You realize, of course, that different groups of Africans have different colors of skin?

            No, apparently you don’t, you think they haven’t evolved at all and they’re all fixed at the “ancestral allele”.

          • RKR says:

            If you had any idea what you were talking about, you would know that Africans and Oceanians are fixed at the ancestral allele for all of the major loci implicated in skin color where Eurasians display variation, whether the loci are East-Asian specific or West Eurasian-specific. Interestingly, East Asians also display increased variation at loci for which West Eurasians have the skin-lightening or hair-lightening allele, and vice versa, despite these variants not lightening the skin, so this is a direct counterexample to your idea that Africans are more diverse at *all* loci, which is required for your idea to work, even if partially, and is also demonstrably false.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            RKR –

            No. That’s the way one thing works (sort of – that’s the High School Genetics version of skin color genes), but the rest of your arguments are just plain wrong, and not even in an interesting way.

          • Svejk says:

            @RKR, While the canonical lactase persistence mutation was discovered in Europeans, there are several other mutations in the LCT region conferring lactase persistence which arose independently in several places in Africa and the Middle East. So if you were to look across the loci contributing to a particular trait (lactase persistence), you might indeed discover an equal or greater amount of functional variation (converging on the same phenotype) within Africa, as there are at least two segregating lactase persistence mutations that arose in sub-Saharan Africa, at least one mutation which appears to have arisen in the Middle East and migrated to Africa thousands of years ago, the common EUR SNP through both ancient and recent admixture, plus additional unexplained phenotypic variance indicating that other functional alleles may be segregating in Africa.

            Also, while there is more variation in skin pigmentation (as measured by reflectance spectrophotometry) in Eurasia vs sub-Saharan Africa, Africans are more likely to be fixed ancestral in the sites associated with the greatest variation in skin depigmentation between AFR and EUR because those sites were initially ascertained in EUR populations. So at those particular sites, they are less variable, but this significantly understates African variation in the complex character of ‘skin pigmentation phenotype’. If you look at a global map of annual variation in UVA and UVB radiation, you can see why this might be the case. You can find relevant data in papers by Norton, Relethford, and Jablonski.

          • RKR says:

            @ Sveijk

            Sveijk, there is indeed variation in Africa, but the largest portion of the variance in skin color across all populations on the planet loads on only a few loci, and these loci are indeed more polymorphic in Eurasians than in Africans.

            @ Orphan,

            Why don’t you offer a coherent critique for once? Actually your points about diversity of phenotypes in Africans, as well as Sveijk’s points of variation discovery biased towards Eurasians, may actually stand, but you use different arguments at different moments, some of which are demonstrably false: ‘Thats not how anything works?’ Please. Just the example of Lactase or Skin Color alone is sufficient to show that, selection can be the main determinant of polygenic scores for a particular trait to such a degree that the role of diversity or drift is irrelevant. Since intelligence is to a first approximation as polygenic as height, are you going to go on denying the role of selection on height?

            As for Africans, of course they are not a homogeneous or substantially monophyletic population, as we know now from drift path measures, but this is irrelevant to the main theories of HBD, any more than the existence of very short European populations disproves HBD. It just means that the selection was more granular.

            Honestly, your switching of arguments makes me think you are arguing from bad faith.

          • Svejk says:

            @RKR, I want to return to the point about the pigmentation variance because while it worked out in this particular example, skin pigmentation may not be the best model for understanding variance affecting complex traits in the rest of the genome. Those sites were discovered precisely because they account for most of the EUR-AFR pigmentation difference; if you were to compare EUR-EAS pigmentation difference the variance would be apportioned differently. Skin pigmentation is sort of ‘low-hanging fruit’ as far as complex traits are concerned: the two highest-effect-size loci affecting EUR-AFR variation are among the most highly selected sites in the genome; Europeans are effectively fixed for one locus and almost fixed for the other. East Asians – who are also much more depigmented than Africans – actually show slightly less variability at the top EUR skin-depigmentation site than Africans, and equally low variability at the second.
            Ascertainment bias can be a much greater problem in other complex traits, where many more sites with much lower selection coefficients will contribute to the character.

            Even when selection affects a trait, there can still be a lot of undiscovered variance in a continental population. The EUR lactase persistence allele is the most strongly selected site identified in the genome (one mutation appears to explain essentially all lactase persistent Eurasians outside of the Middle East), and yet until recently we were not aware that sub-Saharan Africa had at least two native lactase persistence mutations at different sites within the same region.
            So even if you restrict the discussion to autochtonous variants affecting the two most strongly selected characters within Europe (skin depigmentation and lactase persistence), Africa still has a great deal of variation.

            It is also interesting to note that in both of these examples, a great deal of the variation attributed to ‘Eurasia’ occurs in the belt containing the Arabian peninsula and Middle East, which has contributed significant gene flow back into Africa (including sub-Saharan Africa) for tens of thousands of years. If you include variation introduced through admixture, or include Africa north of the Sahara, even these two ‘European-associated’ traits show comparable or greater (depending on the resolution of the undiscovered LP variants) variation in Africa.

            And finally, how a complex trait is defined affects how you measure variance – reflectance spectrophotometry very accurately measures depigmentation, which is the aspect of pigmentation under selection in Europeans, but is less sensitive to hue (It is still accurate to say that Europeans have more variation across hair, eye and skin color). Similarly, if you describe tooth morphology with respect to the features produced by the most common Asian mutation, you might miss other segregating variants affecting ‘shoveling’ or ‘incisor shape’.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            RKR –

            By analogy, your argument is equivalent to a situation wherein we had twelve sets containing numbers, one of which has 100 members and the second-largest of which has 13, and you’re arguing that the largest set can’t REALLY be the largest because it doesn’t contain numbers found in the third set.

            Your arguments about genetics are equally flawed, but I can’t come up with a suitable analogy to explain how, and every time I’ve started to try to explain I’ve begun with “Human DNA isn’t an instruction set for making humans, it’s more like an instruction set for making an instruction set for making humans”; you’ve come across true facts somewhere, but you lack the systemic knowledge to apply the facts into a meaningful argument (or, indeed, to understand that your facts can’t really be shoehorned into the argument you’re trying to make).

          • Anonanon says:

            Thank you Svejk, that was by far the most interesting (and useful) comment in the thread.

      • “But unless the same genes that encode skin tone also happen to encode the proteins that increase intelligence, there’s no reason for the genetics responsible for intelligence to align along the American conception of race, which is after all, almost all skin color.”

        Not quite no reason. As I pointed out in another comment, similar skin color is a result of adaptation to (in some ways) similar environments. There might be other adaptations to those environments that resulted in lower IQ.

      • Sir Gawain says:

        At this point I have to conclude that the whole thing is just an excuse for people to keep holding the racist views they already hold. Mind, I think racism is built into our brains, and expect Europe’s attempts to suppress it to end in a whole mess of dead people – which is to say, I don’t think racism is a strict moral failing, it’s just one more bias on top of a pile of biases. But trying to rationalize racism into more-than-a-bias, well, that is a bit of a moral failing.

        (Most of your points before this have already been addressed—and to my mind, quite possibly refuted—by other commentators, so I won’t bother to beat a dead horse.)

        1) As I’ve said previously, though I find genetic differences between populations an under discussed explanation for phenomena such as the U.S. black-white test score gap, my main interest is not proving that the cause of this gap is genetic; it’s in understanding what the cause of it is, so we can figure out how to fix it (or if fixing it is impossible.)

        2) Why is it that people who hold “racist” views (and I don’t necessarily number myself among them) are always—and I mean always— accused of acting in bad faith intellectually? Do people who hold “anti-racist” positions not also have a world view that they employ motivated reasoning to defend? Is arguing that the cause of the black-white educational achievement gap is discrimination not equally “just an excuse” for people to hold the views that they would like to hold otherwise? Should we be suspicious of the views of black intellectuals who comment on the existence, or lack thereof, of genetic racial differences, because tribalism might make them less likely to evaluate the evidence impartially?

        I honestly don’t think these questions are very important; I suspect many people who hold hard line environmentalist positions are in fact acting in bad faith, but I try my best to understand and impartially consider their arguments anyway. (To your credit, you made an argument on the merits before speculating about motivation.)

        3) The idea that “racism” specifically is some ineradicable quirk of the human mind, that is uniquely unable to be cleansed by facts, seems bizarre to me. Don’t you believe that Race Does Not Exist? If so, shouldn’t it be consequently fairly simple to socialize children (as we do today) to be anti-racist, because there are no differences between the arbitrarily constructed races for them to ever notice?

        4) Though, as I said previously, I don’t think these questions of motivation are really anywhere near as important as the substantive argument, for whatever it’s worth the statement “the whole thing [i.e. belief in any genetic racial differences] is just an excuse for people to keep holding the racist views they already hold.” is completely inapplicable to my own intellectual journey. I started out strongly disbelieving that such differences could exist, and the transition to accepting that they might exist was extremely intellectually painful. And, as I believe I’ve repeatedly stated, I’d be happy to completely jettison these beliefs if presented with strong contrary evidence.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Eh. You feel like my points have been defeated, I… feel somewhat differently.

          1.) Ok. Congratulations?

          2.) Because history happened?

          3.) Something -like- race exists, but what we call race is a shitty map of the territory. Racism, as a feature of the human mind, is just another implementation of the generalized feature set of “othering”.

          4.) Ok. There are African populations with, effectively, early industrial IQs in the high 80s. If their IQs shift in the same ways other industrial nations have, their IQs should be above the global average once they move into a post-industrial society.

          Other regions of Africa will languish, after all improvements, around 70. Unless, of course, there’s even more Flynn improvement possible there than other places, which is possible; they tend to be the worst environments in the world for people to live.

          That’s your get-out-of-racism-free card. Some black people are smarter than average; some black people are dumber than average. In other words, they’re just like everybody else.

          What about American black people?

          Well, how many of the people presenting evidence for HBD have bothered to point out that the Flynn Effect is STILL IN EFFECT for Western black people? That is, while white IQs have stopped improving, black IQs are continuing to improve?

          The reason I think HBD people are racists is because, when you get more of the data, it’s not even an interesting idea. It’s only controversial when you leave out data.

          (No, I won’t link you data, because I’m lazy. Go find it yourself. I promise you’ll find something.)

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m not an HBDer, and I think you’re right in your observation that some people explain an increase in IQ in some groups as environmental, while insisting that a gap for other groups can only be genetic, so this isn’t a rebuttal, just a quibble:

            For 4, there are probably advantages over early industrial Europeans that the groups in question have, so it’s not directly analogous.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            dndnrsn –

            True.

            They’ve also had disadvantages the Western Nations didn’t have, as well.

            I think 90% of the problem is that industrialization is only 20% technology, and 80% culture; Western cultures existed in a boiling mess of constant cultural war for centuries to arrive at the point where their cultures could support it, and cultures exposed to the finished product tend to wither rather than adapt.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Are we talking about the nations/states, or the individuals?

            A Western nation/state/nation-state circa, say, 1850 had certain advantages, relative to its time, that an African equivalent today doesn’t have.

            I don’t know if the advantages carry over to the bulk of the population – eg, being a subsistence farmer is crappy no matter when or where.

        • Anonymous says:

          I started out strongly disbelieving that such differences could exist, and the transition to accepting that they might exist was extremely intellectually painful.

          Makes no sense to me. Is this part of your professional field? What motivated you to walk down this “painful” path?

          • PedroS says:

            Intelectual curiosity, probably. Just like many religious believers without any professional interest in theology/philosophy of religion nonetheless reflect on their beliefs and sometimes find themselves in a personally painful path which takes them to atheism (after which point they consider the painful path to have been a necessary portion of their journey towards a better understanding of reality), or when anybody converts from a deeply-held worldview to another.

          • Anonymous says:

            Maybe it’s the truth focused scrupulosity thing. Nothing in your response rings true to me. It’s hard to how reading about the genetics of race could possibly be painful, or if it was why you’d continue to do so.

        • g says:

          On your point 2, FWIW it seems to me that people who overtly state “non-racist” views on these matters are pretty much always accused of acting in bad faith intellectually, around these parts. (Of course in “normal society” it’s different — but there the question scarcely ever comes up.)

          It seems extremely likely to me that people on both sides are motivated both by wanting truth and by other less respectable motives; and yes, we should be suspicious about all of ’em.

      • As a general point rather than something about intelligence, Africa has the greatest amount of Homo Sapiens genetic variation, but people who aren’t sub-Saharan Africans tend to have some Neanderthal genes.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          People who are sub-Saharan Africans have some less-known-cousins-of-modern-mankind-than-Neanderthal genes. Actually, there’s a whole lot of that kind of thing going on all across the world.

      • Outis says:

        Orphan Wilde: the phenomenon you propose seems to hold for some traits, but not for others. For example, we do find the shortest and nearly-tallest people in Africa (Pygmies and Tutsi, I think, although the Dutch are taller), but we do not find the lightest and darkest-skinned people in it, or the widest range of eye colors, or of hair colors, or of hair type. Actually, there seem to be more examples where it doesn’t apply than ones where it does.

        Anyway, there are at least two reasons why it breaks down. One, there’s a bunch of genes that doesn’t originate from Africa (or, at least, not from the African Homo Sapiens Sapiens) – Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.

        Two, different evolutionary pressures have applies inside Africa and outside. Sunlight for skin color is an obvious one, but it is well known that culture and technology also apply evolutionary pressures (e.g. the obvious cases of agriculture and dairy farming). It doesn’t seem unlikely that more complex and technologically advanced societies apply a pressure towards higher intelligence, possibly forming a sort of feedback loop.

        Three, there are also random events. I don’t think there is any specific evolutionary pressure for different hair colors, yet they did evolve differently in different populations. Founder effects, population bottlenecks, etc. This could well be what happened with the Ashkenazi Jews, too (note that Sephardi Jews, despite having a similar religion and culture, do not have the increased IQ).

        Finally, parasite load may be terrible in (parts of) Africa, but it is still the place where the human species originally appeared, and thus one it is well-adapted to by default. Moving to different climates imposes entirely new obstacles and challenges (e.g. freezing to death) that should be expected to greatly increase selection pressures. Yes, Africa is large and has many different biomes, but it’s not nearly as large and diverse as the rest of the world.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          You do know there’s more than one “African” hair type, right?

          There are three types of “black” hair you’ve probably seen. There are African peoples with straight hair and curly hair in addition to the three types of “black” hair. As far as hair colors go, Africa runs the range – black hair, blonde hair, brown hair. Even, yes, red.

          Likewise, you will find native Africans with blue eyes, gray eyes, brown eyes, black eyes, and other colors because I’m bored of listing colors and I find your argument from ignorance to be… well, boring.

          About the only thing you won’t find much of in native Africans is light-skinned people, although you’ll find much lighter-skinned people than you would expect; the original natives of South Africa were comparable to Asians in terms of darkness of skin. Which shouldn’t surprise us, given a quick glance at the latitude of the region. So, yes, you’re right – you won’t find the whitest-skinned people there. That’s mostly because us white-skinned folk have a tendency to go all cancerous if left in too much sun.

          • Outis says:

            I should have said that I am referring to sub-Saharan Africa. The geographical notion of Africa as a continent is not really useful in this discussion, either genetically or historically. The Sahara was much more of a barrier than the Mediterranean.

            Having said that, do you find all of the above variation in SSA? Blonde hair? Blue eyes?

            Anyway, you have ignored 90% of my post.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Outis –

            I didn’t need to respond to your full post.

      • Mercer says:

        Im not sure I follow the variability argument, even after reading a bunch of peoples responses to it. For context, I strongly dislike the racial IQ argument but have found it compelling in the past, so I’m very interested in any potential takedowns of it.

        Africa has the greatest genetic variability in the world. So we expect its population group to have a very big range in intelligence. If you average them out you get some value X.

        Now, a subgroup of people leaves Africa and settles elsewhere. This subgroup is less diverse than the population group they’re leaving. If this subgroup occupies the high end of the range in intelligence at the time they left, we should expect their descendants to have a higher average iq than X. If they occupied the low end, we’d expect their descendants to have a lower average iq than X. Assuming new selective pressures are a wash overall. It seems clear that while we expect high intelligence to be present somewhere in Africa (and it is), this doesn’t preclude the possibility of it being overall more frequent in other population groups.

        I think the skin tone/intelligence being coded by the same gene is a straw man. I have never seen anyone argue this, and I don’t see how its essential at all for the racial iq argument to work. Higher intelligence could be correlated with having east asian physical characteristics because of gene frequencies and clustering. You dont need intelligence to be coded by the same gene as skin tone.

        The parasite load thing is interesting to me as an explanation for why some African groups have low observed IQ. This seems like a point in favor of the environmental explanation and against the genetic. Perhaps an african group has an observed iq of 70, but if you account for parasite load they’d have observed iq of 85, and if you then gave them the possible Flynn effect bonus maybe they get to 100. But that feels very optimistic to me. The Flynn effect may not even be relevant, as we still aren’t sure if it acts on iq or g.

        On the question of “is the gap closing”, the data doesn’t seem to provide a uniform answer. Nisbett et Al 2012 argues a 0.33 SD increase in african-americans. On the other hand, SAT scores correlate with IQ at 0.86, and the 2015 results leave us with a 15 point iq gap when you norm whites at 100. I would love to see someone discuss Nisbett et al thoroughly because its difficult for me to parse it.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Various stuff first, before I get into the variance thing:

          The average IQ of subsaharan Africa is 82, not 70, according to more recent studies. Anybody giving you the 70 figure is giving you the lowest scientifically-supportable figure, and the 82 figure is slightly more supportable. But “parasite load” is used as an explanation of evolution, as well, so mind what somebody is telling you. (Parasites definitely lower current-generation IQ, by depriving the body of resources; there are also arguments that they redirect selection efforts away from intelligence and into parasite-fighting.)

          As far as parasite load as an explanation, though – Africa has about every biome on the planet. The parasite load varies wildly across the continent. It sounds like an appealing theory to someone who thinks of Africa as jungle, or as Tsetse flies, but there’s a LOT of Africa (even below the Sahara), and as an explanation for the whole, it stops working so well.

          The gap is closing, but slowly. SAT scores measure knowledge, as well as G-factor, and there are significant issues there.

          I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in the part of the South I grew up, black children basically didn’t get educated; teachers who failed black children got disciplined for racism, and the black children knew it, so they didn’t bother to study or work at all.

          Somebody here argued that skin color and IQ were selected for together through… some kind of argument. That’s not a strawman, somebody in this thread brought it up.

          So, with regard to IQs: Why should we expect IQs to be randomly distributed? First, if IQ could be increased without a penalty somewhere else or to overall survivability, it would be increased everywhere, so IQ must be making trade-offs with something. (Or IQ is itself maladaptive.)

          Now, it could be that the trade-offs vary slightly with climate or region. And there is a latitude correlation – except the correlation is with where economic development happened, not with the people who originally lived there. (Aboriginal IQs should be higher, if this were correct.) That is, IQ is correlated, not with climate, not with latitude, not with parasite load – but with economic development.

          The argument here goes that economic development is caused by high IQs, rather than causing high IQs. And it should be obvious high IQs help with economic development, so that theory might seem to win out – except that we have evidence that economic development causes higher IQs; it’s measurable. It’s the Flynn Effect. So it appears the issue is that higher IQs have a bootstrapping issue with better economic development.

          And, indeed, in support of that idea, historically we have seen some very complex civilizations in Africa without European intervention – the Mali Empire compared favorably to the Holy Roman Empire. What happened to African empire? Some people are tempted to blame colonialization, but the empires collapsed well before then. Indeed, African empire ended around the same time as Nordic empire, and I’d hazard a guess for the same reason: Changing climate. It’s possible the colonial period, combined with the slave trade, prevented empire from arising again, however.

          The short of it is – we don’t have any evidence that IQ potential is anything -but- randomly distributed, or that IQ development is anything but economically generated. Everything else proposed is a just-so theory.

          Given that it is probably essentially random, what are we left with?

          We’re left with the most varied genome, and the largest number of distinct populations, in the world. If each population in the world is given one randomly-assigned IQ score, we should expect to find the highest and lowest in Africa just because they have the most chances to get those scores. That’s not to say that we -will- find either there, it’s just more likely there than anywhere else.

          • “but there’s a LOT of Africa (even below the Sahara), and as an explanation for the whole, it stops working so well.”

            There seem to be four possible claims here, only two of which your argument is relevant to:

            1. All Africans have low IQ, where “low” might mean “never unusually high.”

            2. All African populations (tribes, say) have low average IQ.

            3. The average IQ of sub-saharan Africa is low.

            4. The average IQ of the African populations from which current African-Americans are descended, weighted by ancestry percentage, is low.

            I don’t think I have seen anyone make either of the first two claims, which are the ones to which both your quoted comment above and the argument about lots of genetic variation are relevant. It’s the third claim that is most relevant for genetic explanations of African poverty, the fourth for genetic explanations of African-American poverty, SAT scores, etc.

            Incidentally, you never answered the question about whether your claims about variations in eye color, hair, etc. were including populations north of the Sahara. If they were, they are irrelevant to the argument, and you should say so.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            David –

            If you’re claiming nobody makes claim #2, I’m going to say you’re not paying attention.

            And yes, all of those characteristics show up in Africa, although blonde hair and blue eyes are both particularly rare, being more likely to turn up by first-generation mutation than by inheritance. Red hair is also very rare, in large part because red-haired people tend to be killed, like albinos, for ritual religious purposes.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            First, if IQ could be increased without a penalty somewhere else or to overall survivability, it would be increased everywhere, so IQ must be making trade-offs with something.

            This is false. A trait could be stuck at a local maximum in one population, while another population gets a lucky series of mutations (or an infusion of genetic material from a third group– Neanderthals, say) which allows them to reach a higher fitness peak. We should expect the mutations to fixate eventually through gene flow, but eventually could be a long time.

          • “And yes, all of those characteristics show up in Africa”

            My question was about sub-Saharan Africa. Is your answer? You don’t say.

            So far as my version #2, who makes that claim? My casual impression is that the intelligence of the Ibo, aka “the Jews of Africa,” is pretty widely accepted. And Ethiopia is the one old sub-Saharan African civilization that we actually know quite a lot about.

            Have you read The Dogs of War? The author doesn’t identify with standard liberal views on the subject of Africa but is obviously an admirer of the Ibo. A thriller, but I thought a pretty good book.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Earthly –

            I’ll refer you back to the “Africa has more characters” thing.

            David –

            Yes. Blonde hair outside the Solomon Isles is quite rare, but does occur.

            And the Ibo, so far as I know, are in fact contested. I haven’t paid much attention to the data there, though.

            As far as who argues #2, Gwern did. To be fair, he might have just been disagreeing with me bloody-mindedly at the point, as I was being deliberately infuriating. But to be equally fair, the idea that we should expect some areas of Africa to have above-world-average IQs gets contested every time I suggest it on a wide variety of fronts; nobody outright says all African peoples are stupid, but they sure spend a lot of time arguing against the idea that any of them (peoples, not individuals) are smart.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I’ll refer you back to the “Africa has more characters” thing.

            I don’t know why you think this matters. Surely it doesn’t have strictly more genetic diversity than the rest of the world, which is what it would take to ensure that every mutation which arose outside of Africa has some counterpart on the African continent.

          • Nornagest says:

            Strictly more in the sense of a strict superset? No, there are novel mutations that arose outside Africa. Strictly more in the sense of a greater number of variations inside than everywhere outside combined? I’m given to understand that’s actually true.

            I’m not sure why it matters, though. Even if you’re dealing with a fixed set of variations, enough selection pressure can see them expressed in a subpopulation in combinations you’ll never see outside of it. And that can hash out to a distinctly different phenotype — it’s basically how animal breeding works.

            (That being said, I would expect to see high-IQ African populations, though I have no idea what they are. [The Igbo are plausible but I don’t know a lot about them.] It’s a very environmentally diverse continent, and the people there have had a long time to adapt.)

          • Mercer says:

            My understanding is that it matters if you think genotypic intelligence is randomly distributed. If you could demonstrate that selective pressures outside of Africa have acted on intelligence, then you’d undermine confidence in intelligence being randomly distributed, at which point “having more characters” wouldn’t matter. But if you can’t, then youre left assuming a random distribution, at which point the place with the most diversity is where you’d bet on finding the highest or lowest intelligence.

            I use “intelligence” in place of “IQ”, which may be a mistake to do on my part. I also may just be straight up misrepresenting the argument.

          • “nobody outright says all African peoples are stupid, but they sure spend a lot of time arguing against the idea that any of them (peoples, not individuals) are smart.”

            Could be, but I’ve never seen it.

            “Yes. Blonde hair outside the Solomon Isles is quite rare, but does occur.”

            I don’t see the relevance. The Solomon Island aren’t in (or near) Africa.

            You still haven’t said whether your earlier claim about variation was about sub-Saharan Africa or the whole continent. The latter would be irrelevant to the thread.

            Googling for [Igbo IQ] I find various things saying they are smart, one saying the evidence they are especially smart is really due to something else, nobody saying they have low IQs

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            David –

            That’s why I said -outside- the Solomon Islands. That’s the “African” (technically not but most people lump them together) group best known for blonde hair.

            And I see the same things in Google. I also see criticisms suggesting it’s an erroneous result from a single study.

            Wouldn’t surprise me if they are exactly what I would expect to find in Africa. But I’m not going to glom on them as evidence of what I’ve been saying, either, because I can’t find the data and there are criticisms, and, having been burned before, I’m doubly critical when reports conform too closely to my expectations.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            And Mercer and Nornagest between them sum that up more or less exactly.

            My own suspicion is that IQ hit a hard complexity limit during whatever positive feedback loop originally cursed us with it, the positive feedback loop never ended, and the average intelligence level is average because it’s stable.

            Given the curious lack of fixation of a number of apparently “free” IQ improvements, I moreover suspect the average IQ is hovering around some sort of complexity limit imposed by genetic informational entropy – that is, there is no low-hanging IQ fruit, and the advantage conferred by the remaining genes is sufficiently small that the adaptive advantage is precisely matched by informational loss due to sexual genetic shuffling plus mutation. This suspicion is somewhat supported by the fact that those genes that have been identified as being associated with IQ have minuscule effect sizes.

            Which is to say – natural selection pressure alone might not be able to squeeze out any more IQ points, even though there is potentially a massive amount of gain to be made, because the reproductive fitness gain of any single genetic factor is too small.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I’m not sure why it matters, though. Even if you’re dealing with a fixed set of variations, enough selection pressure can see them expressed in a subpopulation in combinations you’ll never see outside of it. And that can hash out to a distinctly different phenotype — it’s basically how animal breeding works.

            Selection is one way, but it’s not the only way. Let’s say that trait F, which is an unalloyed good, is the product of mutations X, Y, and Z jointly (individually each has no effect). A lack of diversity might then make F more likely to arise– if, because of founder effects, every member of deme B starts with mutation Z, F will be more likely to appear in B than in deme A where Z remains a rare aberration. Other things being equal, we should expect the more diverse population to give rise to the most new traits, sure. But there’s no reason to think that every trait exhibited by the less diverse population must be aped by the more diverse.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          There is nothing to discuss about Nisbett et al. They simply get their figure of 5.5 from Dickens and Flynn. Here is DF’s graph. A gap of 15 is not at all surprising.

          Where are you getting your SAT scores from?
          People who choose to take the SAT are not a representative sample, although that should drive down the gap.

      • Vaniver says:

        But unless the same genes that encode skin tone also happen to encode the proteins that increase intelligence, there’s no reason for the genetics responsible for intelligence to align along the American conception of race, which is after all, almost all skin color.

        You’re mistaking a direct correlation and an indirect correlation.

        That is, you posit that the specific genes that determine skin tone are related to intelligence. This is the most restrictive version of this theory, not the most broad!

        Suppose instead that I suspect that distance to the Equator and intelligence are correlated among ancient populations, because of the impacts of latitude on weather, which impacts temperature (and thus cooling effects) and variability of food availability (and thus the returns to foresight). And I also suspect that distance to the Equator determines average sunlight exposure, which impacts the best skin color.

        I now have reasons to suspect a link between skin color and intelligence, as both have a common cause. But this model doesn’t specify at all that the specific genes causing the impacts have to be the same!

        (In general, I think it’s very useful to separate out “I don’t see a reason for X” from “there’s no reason for X,” because the second is typically very difficult to prove.)

      • vV_Vv says:

        Africa has the greatest genetic variability of any area of the world.
        We should expect to find the smartest populations in the world in Africa, if the basis of intelligence is genetic.

        Non sequitur. Stray dogs have more genetic variability than any recognized breed of dogs, yet we don’t expect to find the sub-poulations of stray dogs which are the fastest, the strongest, the biggest, etc.

        Intelligence is almost certainly genetic. But unless the same genes that encode skin tone also happen to encode the proteins that increase intelligence, there’s no reason for the genetics responsible for intelligence to align along the American conception of race, which is after all, almost all skin color.

        Oh come on, do you want to claim that you can’t distinguish between sub-Saharan Africans and Indians at first sight? How comes it that genetic tests which look only a handful of markers, unrelated to the skin color, can predict self-reported race with >90% accuracy?

        Traditional races roughly correspond to clusters in the joint probability distribution of alleles. It is entirely possible for different races to have different frequencies of the alleles that influence intelligence, just like they can have different frequencies of the alleles that influence height, BMI, and so on.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      That would be the US gap. It doesn’t exist in other countries with mixed populations. Now, I know that HBDers are objective scientists who wouldn’t ignore that datum…so what do they make of it.

      • Outis says:

        I’m not an HBDer, but I would love to see that data. Bram was asking for data about Canada earlier, for instance. Do you have any good links?

          • Mercer says:

            African-Americans are a particular subset of Africans…if genotypic intelligence varies broadly across the African continent, the US IQ gap could be genotypic without necessarily implying anything about a “racial” IQ for Africans generally.

          • jlow says:

            You don’t even need to posit that, Mercer. As a commenter mentions on Steve’s blog, there is a strong selection effect for UK blacks, and even so they score more poorly than other ethnic groups. Indeed, it’s almost universal that blacks score more poorly than nearby groups — it’s just a larger gap in the US, Middle East, and Africa, and a smaller one in Europe and Asia where no representative samples were imported wholesale, so to speak.

            It should be noted that there’s more to the story, of course — subsets of the black population in the UK score better than some other immigrants and poor whites, for example. In particular, northeast African populations often display little achievement gap if given equal access to resources (e.g. refugees). (These were not often slaves, so it fits with your supposition , interestingly.)

            So I don’t want to seem like I’m pushing a genetic explanation; as someone else notes in the thread, it’s more contrarian than ideological for me. I just like things to be fair, and it seems that people (excepting most SSC commenters, to be sure) are ever ready to grasp any straws to make sure they don’t have to seriously consider uncomfortable possibilities.

    • dndnrsn says:

      The counterargument I have seen is that there are pockets of Europe that saw tested IQ go up dramatically quite quickly, on account of improved standard of living. Presumably, this is the “nurture” portion of the equation. I think Ireland is usually given as the example. It is entirely plausible that groups with similar genetic potential for intelligence have a gap due to a gap in standard of living or something related – one group is prevented from reaching its ceiling.

      Unfortunately, it is incredibly hard to find trustworthy stuff about genetics and intelligence, of whatever persuasion.

      • Lumifer says:

        There are certain environmental factors — deficiency of iodine is a well-known one — which will suppress IQ. Fix that and measured IQ will rapidly increase to the “natural” genetic level.

        In other words, genetics determine your max IQ but environmental factors can decrease the observed IQ.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Something related I’ve been pondering:

      Is there any research of the effects of constant stress, not just on immediate cognitive functioning like task solving, but on tested IQ?

      • Vaniver says:

        I’ve seen some. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but my vaguely recalled impression is that at most 20% of the relevant gaps could be explained by that sort of thing (and that, more importantly, it doesn’t reflect “test bias” because one would expect the penalty to also exist for actual cognitive work).

    • So, uh, is “no race or gender in the open thread” not a thing any more…?

      • Nornagest says:

        Scott stopped posting the no-race-or-gender notices several months back, and people started talking race and gender in the open threads almost immediately afterwards.

        So, no. It hasn’t been a thing for a while.

        • Jill says:

          Yeah, lots of people like to talk incessantly about differences in races and genders being supposedly genetically determined.

          Just one more way in which dealing with differences or disagreements among groups of people in our culture seems to be darn near impossible for people to do. But people do like to vent about it, and to find whatever research seems to support the beliefs they already have and do not intend to ever alter.

          Here’s one conversation that shows how difficult it is for people in the U.S. to communicate, when they identify with different groups.

          Note: I wish I had not started reading the You Tube comment section, and I quit quickly. Very insulting and uncivil.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAu44wVgb58

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Never read the YouTube comments. At best, they are funny in how stupid they are.

          • Nornagest says:

            Comment sections almost everywhere suck, but YouTube’s is the lowest of the low.

            Major newspapers’ online presences give it some competition, but while those have about as much rage and hate per capita, YouTube wins on stupidity.

          • Anonanon says:

            >Very insulting and uncivil.

            As opposed to cutting to commercial when a smear interview isn’t going according to script?

          • Nornagest says:

            As opposed to cutting to commercial when a smear interview isn’t going according to script?

            There are places where you can argue that an allegedly rude or extreme or hateful position is actually bluntly honest, or presenting an alternative narrative, or speaking truth to power. The YouTube comments section isn’t one of them.

            Want proof? Find something you don’t care about — soccer teams, for example, if you’re the average American. Go to YouTube, type in your search terms, scroll down until you find a popular video where the comments aren’t turned off. See how long it takes to develop an opinion, which opinion is “I hate you all”.

          • I’ve found that the comments on videos about obscure or technical topics can be pretty good, but otherwise, youtube comments are very worth avoiding.

          • Anonanon says:

            That’s so typical arsenal’s football??this is why I love Arsenal so much, COYG?????????

            Stop feeding us this crap and sign some flipping players ffs

            Also apparently Arsene Wenger needs to be executed by ISIS or something, so… I guess comments can escalate a little quickly?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Jill – For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a lot of HBD arguments presented here, found them fairly troubling, and have very much appreciated the rebuttals in this thread.

          • Outis says:

            I stopped visiting the SSC comments for the same reason.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Also apparently Arsene Wenger needs to be executed by ISIS or something, so… I guess comments can escalate a little quickly?

            If you don’t believe this, you’re either American or an Arsenal fan with Stockholm Syndrome.

    • i need a nap says:

      I’m seeing a ton of arguments that focus on whites vs blacks and the differences in socioeconomics of both groups as explanations for IQ differences, but I see nothing comparing whites to asians, asians to latinos, latinos to whites, etc. This seems a lot like when the analysis of police shootings stops at “…but blacks are only 12% of the population, so they’re actually being shot by police *way* more than whites are!” Okay, well then compare whites to asians and whites are being shot by police disproportionately compared to asian Americans! Does that mean that there’s a racial bias in policing whites versus asians?

      More directly, don’t asian americans have significantly higher IQ scores than white americans? Don’t they have similar socioeconomic backgrounds? What’s the reason for the IQ difference?

      And as much as I want a response, can we go back to having race restricted from comments?

      • Sandy says:

        If I recall correctly, a lot of the HBD crowd does take it as fact that several of the major constituent groups of the Asian-American population (Han Chinese and Tamil Brahmins most prominently) have higher average IQs than non-Ashkenazi Europeans, and that this is the result of genetics to some not inconsiderable extent.

        Also, immigrant selection skews a large portion of the Asian American population towards higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and I suspect this portion and the corresponding portion of the white American population that shares such backgrounds are likely to share a similar level of low crime rates. Police shootings target men of poor backgrounds, and there’s probably a lot more poor white people than Asian people of any kind in America.

      • Vaniver says:

        Yeah, this shows up a ton in HBD blogs and literature. In particular, Steve Sailer likes to talk about how Asians serve as an excellent third group to help with these sorts of comparisons.

        Gregory Clark wrote a book called A Farewell to Alms which was about natural selection in England from about 1400 to 1850 (dates subject to fuzzy memory). A major claim was that, in England (where we have good records of wills), wealth correlated with fertility–people who were richer at their time of death had more children than people who were poorer. The poor didn’t replace themselves and the middle class more than replaced themselves (and there was downward mobility as a result, as people with middle class parents ended up poor).

        He suggests that there were the obvious evolutionary changes that you would expect; middle class personality traits became more common in the population, and this set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

        He briefly touches on China and claims that the same sort of thing happened there, but was weaker. Sinologists claim he messed up his sources and the effect was actually stronger in China. (This seems reasonable to me–if you view this as basically the ‘domestication’ of humans by society, a claim that Chinese are more domesticated than the English looks fairly solid.)

        (Note that I’m using England and China as representatives of their regions where we think this effect was strongest, but mostly come up because of streetlight effects–similar things happened in northern Germany, but the records were better in England so Clark wrote about England.)

        I’ve seen some claims that superior Asian test performance is mostly due to test prep / cultural effects, but think they’re fairly weak claims. That looks like it has some effect but isn’t the whole gap.

    • Anonymous says:

      Are there any datasets with IQ versus percent African ancestry among African-Americans?

      • Interesting question. Presumably modern genetics would give you a reasonable measure of percent sub-Saharan ancestry.

        If no such datasets have been published, that too would be interesting.

        A negative correlation would be only weak evidence for the genetic explanation, since it could be due to lighter skinned blacks facing less discrimination. But zero correlation would be pretty good evidence against.

        • Nornagest says:

          23andMe tracks sub-Saharan ancestry, so more sophisticated analysis can definitely do it. It’ll even go down to specific ethnic groups.

  59. Poxie says:

    I feel like this thread title should have been “I’m a Threadical Doctor. I Own a Mansion and a Yacht.”

    https://youtu.be/NUNdYoy1AUM

  60. nope says:

    Is EA Global worth going to? I was originally planning to go, since I’m in the area anyway and would like my career to be EA-aligned (not earning to give), but it’s rather expensive and someone I respect a lot told me it’s mostly for signaling now and not really worth it. Anyone else going? And your reasons for it?

    • Splotch says:

      Some previous threads: here, here. EA Facebook group thread. Rational Conspiracy on the value of meeting people:

      Many video games have random treasures – there’s a chest on the ground, you pick it up, and it might contain a million gold coins. The real life equivalent of this is meeting new people or new groups. Take advantage of these opportunities whenever you can. Like treasure chests, the amount you can win is literally unlimited.

    • David Moss says:

      “Mostly about signaling” seems wrong- but certainly a large part of the good might come from networking. If connecting with EAs is important for your goals then EAG is probably important. Otherwise my impression is that you can get most of the other potential benefits i.e. some information about loosely EA related stuff, just from reading or watching online.

  61. caryatis says:

    How can you vouch for someone not being an axe murderer? Isn’t that like someone’s male friend vouching for him not being a wife-beater? A smart serial killer would never kill someone they had a known connection to, like living together or being in the same social circle. Everyone knows a completely random crime is the hardest to solve. That’s why you kill prostitutes and drifters so that the cops can’t establish any relationship between you and them.

    …Nothing against Alison, I just couldn’t resist being pedantic.

    • DanielLC says:

      I can vouch for her. I’m an axe.

    • JBeshir says:

      Well, in either case they should be safe to host.

      (I’d offer to help but, single person apartment, I don’t own a car, and I live out in Dorset convenient for approximately nothing. Not great for hosting anyone.)

      • Pku says:

        Serial killers rarely kill where it can be traced back to them! It’s probably safe to be as close to them as possible.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          On the other hand, run-of-the-mill killers often kill people close to them, and they’re probably more common.

          • Decius says:

            Luckily, we have a network that can vouch for the fact that this particular person isn’t associated with mysterious deaths!

    • Lumifer says:

      Since we’re being pedantic…

      The axe murderers that come to mind are Raskolnikov (a fictional character, but well-known), Lizzy Borden (“Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one”), whoever assassinated Leon Trotsky… and none of them killed strangers. An axe doesn’t sound like a serial killer weapon.

        • John Schilling says:

          So it took the page a while to load, with only the title visible, and I was thinking “Servant Girl Annihilator” was going to be the lead character in a badly-translated anime.

      • Sandy says:

        Wikipedia has a page for axe killers.

      • Leit says:

        You missed out on Patrick Bateman.

      • Nonnamous says:

        I believe Trotsky was killed with a pickaxe, not an axe. Different tool with a similar name.

        • Friday says:

          An icepick.

        • Lumifer says:

          I think he was killed with a mountaineering ice axe? True, not the wood-chopping one, but that murder weapon in the museum is labeled as “axe”.

        • Agronomous says:

          He was killed with a mountaineer’s tool which goes by the name “icepick” in the UK and “ice axe” in the US. It’s shaped like a pickaxe, but is a bit smaller; it’s a heck of a lot larger than the awl-like tool we Americans call an “icepick”.

          This confusion leads most of us Americans to envision a stealthy assassin inserting a sharp object in exactly the right place (like the lobotomy guy, who I now realize must sound even more horrific to Brits). In reality, it was a hack job, with the blow to his head taking over a day to finally do Trotsky in.

          Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, of course.

          Wikipedia helpfully informs me:

          Trotsky’s great-granddaughter, Mexican-born Nora Volkow (Volkov’s daughter), is currently head of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

          • wintermute92 says:

            It took me an embarrassingly long time to reconcile “Trotsky was killed with an icepick” and “Trotsky’s assassination was messy and slow”. I thought for years it had been the drink-serving thing, not the mountain-climbing thing.

      • Protagoras says:

        If Lizzie did it. Since I live close to the famous incident, I know some people who have taken an interest in the story as part of local lore, and they seem to prefer other theories of the crime.

    • Outis says:

      You’re right to be careful. Kanzlerin Merkel vouched for this refugee, and look what he did.

  62. Josh S says:

    Latent nominative determinism?

    http://www.kfdi.com/news/blm-protest-changed-to-cookout

    Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay hosts a cook-out O.o

    • Randy M says:

      It’s only nominative determinism if Gordon Ramsey is literally synonymous with cooking.

      • It is a little more so every time you write them in one sentence or say them in one breath, regardless of intent — more subconscious association between them spread over more minds eventually changes the language. Kleenex means tissue, Bork was borked.

    • It would be if the police chief hurt his or someone else’s eye when forcing his way through a door to serve a warrant though. =P

    • Outis says:

      Do you think they advertised it as “a cook-out with Gordon Ramsey”? Because it would totally work.

  63. anonx says:

    Request for information: I՚m dealing with a close relative, a young man, who has Asperger՚s and some related problems, and has recently announced he՚s transgendered. I՚m slightly skeptical of the whole transgender thing in general and in his case in particular. I thought this community might have some pointers to research or references on the intersection of Asperger՚s and gender dysphoria or whatever. The obvious google searches didn՚t turn up much. Thanks in advance for any help.

    [repeated from earlier open thread where it wasn’t getting much useful attention]

    • Yakimi says:

      The case of Christian Weston Chandler provides an instructive example of how autism and gender dysphoria can intersect.

      • FishFinger says:

        Do you think Chris-chan really has dysphoria?

        • Jaskologist says:

          How many levels of recursion are allowed here? We can’t say, “Oh, he only thinks he’s a woman,” but we can say “Oh, he only thinks he thinks he’s a woman”?

          • Nornagest says:

            Worked for Silence of the Lambs.

          • Mary says:

            Well, I have myself talked to a guy online who thought he was transgender, and whose therapist instead diagnosed him as DID. (He’s definitely not transgender now.)

          • wintermute92 says:

            I mean, the difference between one remove and two seems pretty important. (I wouldn’t care to look past two.)

            At one remove, you’re saying that someone’s sincere, lucid self-image doesn’t determine their identity, which people object to. Or, you’re saying that their identity beliefs aren’t lucid exclusively because you disagree with them, which is unpleasantly circular.

            At two removes, you’re saying that someone isn’t forming beliefs correctly, and that their gender identity claims are one thing that was affected.

            If an untreated schizophrenic says that they’re actually a woman, but the CIA did a brain transplant that put them into a male body, I don’t see why we should endorse the gender part when we reject the larger claim. If they stabilize on antipsychotics and go “Oh, all of that CIA stuff was irrational, but it was me narrative-building around the transgender-ness I still feel” then things look very different.

          • Anonymous says:

            ROT13’d because I feel quite ashamed speculating about real, living people like this, especially given what CWC’s been though already. On the other hand, it’s all easily found on the Internet anyway, so this doesn’t accomplish much more than virtue signalling on my part; which is especially pointless given that I’m commenting anonymously.

            V thrff fbzr crbcyr (vapyhqvat zr) qbhog ur rira npghnyyl guvaxf gung, naq pbafvqre uvf “genaftraqre” furanavtnaf gb or n purnc nggragvba-tenoovat fpurzr. Guvf vf npghnyyl fbzrguvat bs n trarevp bowrpgvba gb genaftraqrevfz, juvpu va guvf pnfr frrzf cnegvphyneyl fgebat orpnhfr… jryy, ur vf Puevf-puna. Uvf anepvffvfz vf dhvgr jryy-qbphzragrq ba RQ naq fbavpuh.pbz, jurer nyfb lbh pna rnfvyl svaq fbzr cynhfvoyr rivqrapr gung vg jnf shryyrq ol uvf whfg nf anepvffvfgvp zbgure.

            Vg’f rvgure gung be n pbcvat fgengrtl bs fbegf. Puevf vf nyfb zl tb-gb rknzcyr bs n Avpr Thl va gur srzvavfg frafr: ertneqf ebznapr nf fbzr fbeg bs n tnzr, bowrpgvsvrf jbzra, yvggyr-gb-ab rzcngul. Cerqvpgnoyl, ur’f dhvgr hafhpprffshy ng svaqvat n fbhyzngr. Uvf “gbztvey” fntn znl or n jnl bs nonaqbavat uvf “Ybir Dhrfg” va n jnl juvpu qbrfa’g srry yvxr ybfvat (nf va “V qba’g arrq gb svaq n jbzna, V nz n jbzna abj”). Be n ovmneer ehfr gb nggenpg jbzra ol frrzvat… yrff guerngravat? Ur’f abg rknpgyl tbbq ng guvaxvat yhpvqyl.

            Rvgure jnl vg vf, ur’f cebonoyl abg n irel tbbq rknzcyr bs n genaftraqre ba gur fcrpgehz.

        • in all but good taste says:

          I don’t know but i think Chris-chan is an edge case of almost any spectrum.

      • Anonymous says:

        Who?

        • Nornagest says:

          I’m tempted to say “you don’t want to know”.

          But the short answer is that the dude first achieved notoriety as the author of a famously bad Sonic the Hedgehog webcomic, and developed a broader set of Internet stalkers rubberneckers followers as details of his incredibly disastrous personal life emerged.

          In some circles he’s sort of the patron saint of the parents’ basement.

    • Rb says:

      At a glance, there’s not a ton of study on the subjet, but there does seem to be some consensus that dysphoria and autism are comorbid . Is there anything in particular you’re trying to find?

      http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-010-0935-9

      http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-013-0154-5#/page-1

    • mori says:

      I saw this recently, which links to some studies suggesting autism & gender dysphoria are linked.

    • Fctho1e says:

      Steve Sailer has been on that too. That man is prolific.

      Anecdotally, all TF people I know in RL (1) and have met online (2) where nerds. Not to the point of autism, though the guy from my scout troop who went and did it (now he’s helping balance the lopsided gender ratio in engineering software development) was ..odd. A little. And the online ones (OKCupid, I was looking for matches worldwide*) self-described as on the spectrum.

      Extremely unlucky (almost died through no fault of his own, spent a year in coma). Bad genes, brittle bones (dozens of fractures in his childhood/teenage years). He had to re-learn fine motor skills after the coma, so he was extremely clumsy. Otherwise, dunno. Seemed like a typical teenage computer games/metal/fantasy books kid. He wasn’t cheerful though.

      *obviously if you’re extremely male in thinking and interests and you’ll try to match with women, you’ll get some of the trans girls.

      • If Sailer is going to mention Heinlein and transgederism as fan service, why “All You Zombies” and not I Will Fear No Evil?

        I don’t have studies, but if (as I believe) people on the spectrum as less susceptible to social pressure than neurotypical people, then shouldn’t it follow that if they say they want to change gender, it’s something they actually want?

        • Jiro says:

          I would guess they are also less able to understand normal gender distinctions as well, which would work in the opposite direction.

          • Rb says:

            I’d expect the opposite; if gender dysphoria is a result of feeling that one’s assigned gender is different from one’s actual gender, it seems necessary to have a fairly strong definition of gender for such a conflict to arise in the first place.

            Is there a large social pressure for people to be transgender?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If you end up in a weird part of the Internet and lack the social development that most people have to defend themselves, yeah.

          • Julie K says:

            it seems necessary to have a fairly strong definition of gender for such a conflict to arise in the first place.

            It’s kind of paradoxical. For the past 60 years feminists have been telling us that there isn’t any intrinsic connection between being female and having stereotypical feminine traits, it’s just that our society has taught women that they ought to have these traits. I’m a woman because I have ovaries, and if I like sports or whatever it doesn’t make me any less a woman.

            So where is this definition of gender coming from?

          • Nornagest says:

            There is a hell of a lot of tension between radical feminism and trans advocacy, a fact of which radical feminists are cognizant.

            But as pervasive as radical feminist rhetoric has grown in the last ten years, I still think only a minority of feminists accept its full implications — even if we’re talking activists, not random people in the Internet. And you can square feminism with trans issues in a variety of ways if you’re not insisting on full-bore patriarchy-all-the-way-down cultural determinism.

          • “Is there a large social pressure for people to be transgender?”

            I doubt it.

            But there are a lot of people who want to feel important, or different, or get attention, and deciding that you are transgender might seem like a way of accomplishing that. I wouldn’t be astonished if some fraction of people who consider themselves transgender fit that pattern, but I have no data.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          why “All You Zombies” and not I Will Fear No Evil?

          Probably because his point is to speculate how long ago all this occurred to Heinlein; “All You Zombies” was 1958, IWFNE was 1970.

          Only to someone as old as I am would the difference be important, I suppose. [smile]

    • Tsnom Eroc says:

      This is probably the biggest jack-ass statement in the world, but if a clearly masculine-male looking guy thinks his life will get *better* after going through hormone therapy and the rest, simply to turn up as an ugly woman, or if an average height woman (or even 90th percentile) thinks her life will be better after transitioning to be a guy, they probably have some social knowledge off.

      I mean hey, plenty of normal straight guys say causally half-joking “If I was a really hot chick and “gay” I would probably enjoy life more then now”. They don’t announce themselves as transgender.

      • I knew* a tall man who transitioned into being a rather plain woman. She was very consistent that she was suicidal when she was male and much happier female.

        *past tense because she died– and it was cancer, not something related to a psychological problem. The fact that she’s dead also means I don’t need to be tactful about her appearance, though I’ll also note that she developed a lady-like style which definitely looked female to me.

        • Zorgon says:

          Counter-anecdote – I have a MtF trans friend who was a stereotypical “big nerd” male before transition. Tall, broad-shouldered, overweight, scruffy beard, long hair. She definitely falls into the “ugly woman” bracket and is seriously unhappy about this fact.

          On the other hand, my FtM friend transitioned from a skinny, small-breasted, hairy, and very androgynous woman to a remarkably convincing young dude and seems quite satisfied with the results, even without bottom surgery. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.

          • Tsnom Eroc says:

            Yeah, this is what I mean.

            A girl who looks very andro who goes full M(or close enough) might actually have a better dating career with a gay guy, who appreciates the general male form more then the female form but loves the fact that there is an organ actually suited for sex.

          • Acedia says:

            a gay guy, who appreciates the general male form more then the female form but loves the fact that there is an organ actually suited for sex

            I’m sure the person you’re describing exists somewhere, since there’s an exception to every rule when it comes to humans, but most gay guys really love dicks.

          • Anonymous says:

            Tsnom Eroc –

            You live in what mpc calls clown world.

            A woman should take androgens so she can look less like a woman so she can date gay men who will then be happy to have a male looking partner with a vagina – which of course, doesn’t make this person a woman but a gay man with a vagina? This, of course, is a totally logical course of action to take.

            What’s actually going on is that MtF that aren’t extremely effeminate gay men repel and disgust all people when they attempt to look, sound and dress like the opposite sex (possibly because of the uncanny valley effect, possibly because of good sound evolutionary reasons for men to feel revulsion towards other men attempting to look like women (to ensure that they don’t unfruitfully mate with them)).

            A woman looking like a man is at worst slightly comic so of course FtMs will have it “easier”.

          • Tsnom Eroc says:

            >Anon

            This is Buck Angel

            And here are quite a few successful FtM. How many of them later were in errr…gay? relationships? The logic isn’t so strange.

            And here is a little post of a FtM dating men as a man.
            Plenty of gay men find him attractive.

            I don’t see what’s necessarily wrong with the logic, other then its simply unusual. And is it really stranger then alot of the MtF logic? “A male who wants to go through therapy to look/act/sound like a woman, usually to date a man, and probably restricting dating options more then simply trying to look their best as a man going after other men”]

            MtF still probably works out very well for a certain subset of people who do it though.

          • vV_Vv says:

            @Anonymous

            A woman should take androgens so she can look less like a woman so she can date gay men who will then be happy to have a male looking partner with a vagina – which of course, doesn’t make this person a woman but a gay man with a vagina? This, of course, is a totally logical course of action to take.

            You forgot the part about giving birth to kids and then breastfeeding them.

          • leoboiko says:

            @Tsnom Eroc: As a bisexual male, I’d like to state for the record that penises are, indeed, wonderful organs for men to have sex with, and every bit as enjoyable as vaginæ or anii. (Though the reasons for trans people to transition are entirely orthogonal to sexual enjoyment, but as long as you’re talking about sex.)

      • g says:

        @Tsnom Eroc, it seems like you’re assuming that the goal of transition is to get a better sex life. I do not think this is generally correct.

    • LPSP says:

      It’s probably just a phase. The Chris-Chan comparison is possibly unfair but still a decent case study in overreactions.

      Anybody have a link to that video with the guy saying “In all respects but bodily, I am a wolf”?

    • anonx says:

      Thanks to those who provided pointers to information. As for the uninformed speculation, well, I can do that myself but I guess it’s harmless.

    • eh says:

      Does having trouble with theory of mind in autism apply to one’s own mind at a later or earlier date? That seems relevant.