OT58: Opepipen Thread

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. Comments of the week include Katja Grace on Economics Whack-A-Mole and dtsund on the evolutionary complexity argument in politics, grendelkhan on Nexium, Emirikol on the degree to which overpriced generics subsidize research, and especially Corey on how the government might save money by funding all drug research.

2. Marginal Revolution also gives a cute story about an FDA bureaucrat (but see also).

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1,336 Responses to OT58: Opepipen Thread

  1. hyperboloid says:

    First of all I don’t think white nationalism is same as Nazism. Racial categories very a great deal between different cultures at different times, and the historical NSDAP was certainly not concerned at all with the American notion of whiteness.

    In fact, even excluding Ashkenazi Jews, the third Reich murdered millions of Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, people who, while not Aryans in the Nazi sense of the word, are always counted as white in the US.

    The fact that some of the most extreme American white nationalists can be pretty vocal about their admiration for old uncle Adolf is actually kind of ironic. I mean somewhere in this country there has got to be some skinhead who’s name ends in -ski who is going to be really bummed out when he finds out about generalplan ost.

    “Never forget” has become a mantra justifying brand new atrocities.

    You’re going to have to be a lot more specific then that, because I’m not sure which atrocities you believe were justified by the memory of Nazism.

    As for shattering the establishment, shattering it as prelude to what? Don’t be coy, what political aim do you think will be advanced by a Trump presidency?

    Since you don’t sound like you think that a Trump is likely to be all that successful in seems odd to assume that it would shift the political spectrum to the right. A failed or incompetent right wing government might have just the opposite effect, and what ever political position you hold might be tarred by association with the orange menace.

    • dndnrsn says:

      It looks like this is a response to a deleted comment, but:

      yes, it is 100% ironic the degree to which admirers of the Nazis are often people who would be completely unacceptable to the original Nazis for whatever reason. You’ve seen this picture, right? Equally ironic is that many white nationalists and fellow travellers really like Putin and see Russia as a defender of European interests – whereas the Nazis felt that the Russians and other Slavs were a subhuman and a mortal threat to Europe.

  2. hyperboloid says:

    Since the SSC commetariet seems to be the best place to find relativity intelligent people who will defend what I take to be absurd far right ideas. Will a Donald Trump supporter please chime in and explain why you’re voting for him?

    Do you consider your self a white nationalist?

    If not, what exactly do you expect a Trump administration to look like policy wise, how exactly will America be made great again?

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      I vaguely prefer Trump to Hillary, but not sufficiently substantively to vote for him, so my comment may not be terribly on-point…

      …but from my perspective, it’s less to do with his policies, and more that he’s sufficiently Scary To The Other Side to make them take the “Limited powers” thing seriously again.

      As for what I think his more general supporters like – I think it’s substantively the fact that he’s portraying himself as One of Them. And honestly, it doesn’t matter whether he is or not – he’s being attacked the same, by Left-leaning institutions that have forgotten that the other half of the country exists, and don’t realize their irrational hatred is treated as an endorsement. (Also, he spent a good period of time trolling the Left, and it’s kind of hilarious.)

    • tinduck says:

      That’s a rather incendiary question. Why do you think it’s appropriate to ask a rather incendiary question here? How long did you browse this site until you came to the conclusion that we all defend absurd far right ideas?

      I thought that the political demographics of the site are skewed for the most part toward the left. When did it become a white nationalist hang out? I leave for a couple weeks and the whole site goes to hell… 🙁

      People please let me know if hyperboloid is correct. I don’t tolerate or associate myself with white nationalists.

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Hyperboloid is a very appropriate name. It’s true that the commenters here skew right-wing, (though increasingly less so), white nationalism is a very uncharitable take on the views of a bunch of the commenters here (except maybe Steve Sailer? I don’t know).

        • hyperboloid says:

          If I were to gauge the general political climate in these parts I would say it leans libertarian, so the white nationalist comment was not meant as general accusation against SSC commentators.

          But one of the good things about this place is that it has a pretty wide Overton window window. Accordingly the last time I was around here it served as a bit of a “safe space” for Moldbug style neo-reactionaries. While I can see how asking about white nationalism might seem like trolling, I am genuinely interested in how those two sorts of views relate.

          Furthermore white nationalism also strikes me as, while maybe not the best exactly, but perhaps the most internally coherent case for supporting trump. It seems obvious why , if you believed that the United Sates was founded by and for people of European descent, you would support the candidate most likely to change the demographic make up of the country by deporting millions of non whites.

          If somebody has any other strong well argued case for supporting trump I’m open to hearing it.

          As far as Orphan Wilde’s argument that Trump is:
          “sufficiently Scary To The Other Side to make them take the “Limited powers” thing seriously again.”

          I’m not seeing the logic there. Trump is probably the least sympathetic to Goldwater style limited government conservatism of any republican in living memory. I guess you could mean that electing an authoritarian would galvanize the opposition to support restrictions on executive power, but that seems like a very risky strategy.

          The actual track record of Caudillo like leaders is usually that they produce a polarized political environment that seesaws between authoritarian extremes.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m neither a Trump supporter nor a white nationalist, but it is not uncommon to see white nationalists viewing him not as someone who will enact their policies but as someone who will widen the Overton Window in such a way that they can advance those positions later.

            I don’t think there are any white nationalists who would stop at deportations and building a wall or some other means of making border security tighter. Mass deportations and sealing the southern border don’t change the demographic predictions that much, do they?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            I guess you could mean that electing an authoritarian would galvanize the opposition to support restrictions on executive power, but that seems like a very risky strategy.

            You’d be surprised how much of our politics in the end boil down to “stick it to their guys and defend our own guys”. Trump’s behaviour has made it so that the democratic party has gone full anti-russia, pro-american exceptionalism. The recent refloating of Bill Clinton’s rape accusations has spawned a lot of people finally moderating towards sane and humane views on how to deal with rape accusations, the accused and the convicted. Do you really think conservatives cared about freedom and the importance of intellectually challenging college students until progressives turned it full on against them? This shit undeniably works.

            I mean, I wouldn’t (and can’t), vote for Trump, but there’s a lot to be said for the constant struggle of between sides forcing people to stay liberal.

      • “that we all defend absurd far right ideas?”

        That isn’t what he said or even implied. What he implied was that it was a good place to find someone who did.

    • keranih says:

      I am not sure what you mean by “a Donald Trump supporter” – do you mean someone who would vote for him over Clinton or Johnson? Or someone who would rather Trump got elected than Clinton? Or someone who picked – out of all the people who ran this year – Trump as their preferred candidate?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @kerinah:
        I think it’s reasonable to infer that supporter here means something like “well disposed toward their candidacy and desirous of their winning over most possible opponents, primary or general election”

        • keranih says:

          well disposed toward their candidacy and desirous of their winning over most possible opponents, primary or general election

          If the bolded words are necessary elements of the definition, then I must bow out, as I am not a supporter.

          But if Hillary Clinton is still seeking government office in the first week in November –

          – by which I mean, if Hillary Clinton is still alive

          – then I will be casting my ballot for Trump, no matter how much I wish for other options.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I’m not a White Nationalist. I will likely vote for Trump (if I don’t wimp out and vote for Johnson) because

      1) I expect he will appoint conservative supreme court justices. Without this, we’re likely to lose not just the Second Amendment, but Equal Protection in all but name (to the Social Justice hierarchy of privilege). Since liberal judges have less respect for stare decisis than conservative justices, leftward gains are easier to obtain and harder to lose than conservative gains.

      2) Nobody’s going to let him get away with the imperial presidency bit the way Obama has. Bush did it somewhat, but Obama’s agencies (at least the FAA, ATF, and the Department of Education) have been simply ignoring the administrative procedures act blatantly. Obama has gone so far as to claim to have ratified the Paris climate treaty without putting it to Congress. The press, the legislature, and the courts are not going to be nearly as accepting with Trump at the helm. I do not believe he will be able to count on the support of a Republican Congress.

      3) He’s a wild card. He may break a lot of things, but some of them probably need breaking. This is an election of Evil versus Chaos; I choose Chaos.

      4) I think the few segments of the wall he can get built, no doubt lavishly adorned with his picture, will be a wonderful tourist attraction.

      OK, #4 is a bit of a joke.

      • hlynkacg says:

        This is essentially where I am at as well.

      • hyperboloid says:

        we’re likely to lose not just the Second Amendment, but Equal Protection in all but name (to the Social Justice hierarchy of privilege)..

        Some people think the second amendment was lost the day you couldn’t order a Thompson submachine gun from Sears and Roebuck.

        Obviously there are several liberal interest groups pushing for tighter gun laws, but If you mean that you expect that a Clinton administration will result in a total, or near total, federal ban on on the private ownership of firearms, that is to say the least, more than a little unrealistic.

        As for the equal protection clause, I have no absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, but I’ve got an image in my head of secret NKVD style tribunals made up of radical feminists where helpless citizens are forced to answer for their crimes of cis-gendered white male privilege.

        Can you actually point to a particular potential supreme court nominee and give specifics on how you think they will give the “social Justice hierarchy of privilege” the force of law?

        As for trump being a wild card who will break a lot of things, you’re not wrong about that. It’s just that those things may include the liberal world order that three generations of American leaders, from both parties, have fought to preserve.

        Since the Truman administration there have been certain international commitments that all plausible candidates for president have been expected to uphold. These principles, things like our security agreement with Japan, or article five of the north Atlantic treaty, form an interlocking network of institutions that have provided a historically extraordinary degree of peace and stability for the past sixty years.

        Beginning in August Vladamir Putin issued orders for large scale military build up and as we speak Russian troops are massed on the borders of eastern Ukraine.
        It does not take any great genius to see where they are headed. If Trump is elected there is a good chance the Russian federation will occupy an area stretching from Donetsk to Odessa and linking Russian acquisitions in Ukraine with the breakaway Russian majority Transnistrian region of Moldova.

        “Transnistria?” I here you ask. “You mean where Dracula’s from, right? Who the hell cares let Putin have it.”

        Well, number one, Dracula’s from Transylvania (Wallachia actually, but never mind).

        Number two Putin will keep pushing until he faces resistance,and if he meets with success in Ukraine or Moldova he may very well move on to the Baltic states.

        And number three there is already a sizable movement in Moldova for unification with neighboring NATO member Romania, a movement that is only likely to grow stronger with an extra Russian division occupying nominal Moldovan territory. Keep in mind that while the majority of Russians in Moldova live in Transnistria, there is no clean geographic divide between ethnic groups. If tens of thousands of Moldovans wake up one morning in Russia, and tens of thousands of Russians wake the same morning in Romania it is going to make for a very interesting afternoon. It’s potentially an ethnic conflict, in a NATO country I might add, the likes if which we have not seen in Europe since the wars in the Balkans.

        Now, am I really telling you that the fate of western civilization will be decided in Transnistria. Some, apparently Nosferatu free, place you couldn’t find on a map if I put a gun to your head?

        No, I’m telling you it might might be decided in a thousand such places. On the Ryukyu islands, or in the Kargil district, or the eastern province of Saudi Arabia.

        Otto Von Bismark once said the Europe would be consumed by an explosion set off by some foolish thing in the Balkans. In June of 1914 a bullet tore through the jugular of a man riding in a car through Sarajevo and seventeen million people died. Such is the intricacy of international affairs.

        Donald Trump makes Dan Quayle look like Henry Kissinger. To vote for him is is to say that you are okay leaving decisions once made by Eisenhower, George Kennan, or Zbigniew Brzezinski in the hands of someone, who five years ago was on comedy central being roasted by a grown man who calls him self “the situation”.

        When you say you choose chaos, be careful what you wish for.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Some people think the second amendment was lost the day you couldn’t order a Thompson submachine gun from Sears and Roebuck.

          That was merely an infringement. What I mean is that Heller will be overturned, and an “interpretation” of the Second Amendment which leaves it as a complete dead letter and not a restraint on any branch or level of government will become the law of the land.

          As for the equal protection clause, I have no absolutely no idea what you’re talking about

          I am saying that the Equal Protection clause, and textually-neutral anti-discrimination laws, will be held to allow discrimination against the “privileged”.

          You’re telling me that Putin will rebuild the old Soviet Union. Supposing he will; what’s Hillary going to do about it that Trump won’t? Put troops on the ground in Eastern Europe? Hello, WWIII.

          • hyperboloid says:

            The unstated assumption of your arguments about gun control and affirmative action is that the policies you oppose are so popular with the general electorate that the moment any constitutional blocks are lifted they will be immediately rammed through the legislative process . There is no evidence that this is true.

            The supreme court alone has no authority to ban the possession of firearms, or order employers to set particular hiring policies, and nobody has ever argued that they do. In addition to the US congress, there are fifty sates, fifty state legislatures (Thirty of them controlled by Republicans) , and fifty state constitutions.

            Furthermore, public opinion polling indicates
            that mass confiscation of firearms and aggressive race based affirmative action policies are highly unpopular with voters.
            Even if such policies were ruled constitutional, and I don’t think they ever will be, where will the legislative will to implement them come from?

            You’re telling me that Putin will rebuild the old Soviet Union

            The short answer to that is no. Trying to closely recreate the old Sovetskiy Soyuz is a fools errand and Putin is smart enough to know it.

            The USSR was a vast empire the directly ruled millions of non Russian speakers in Ukraine the Baltic states, and central Asia, and indirectly controlled millions more throughout the nations of the Warsaw pact. Even if a race of alien space bats arrived tomorrow and helped him seize all that territory, I doubt Putin would want the trouble of governing It.

            Russian foreign policy aims are dangerous in a more subtle way. Moscow has never truly recognized the sovereignty of its neighbors, and what Putin wants is an anschluss with Russian majority regions of former soviet states is his so called “near abroad”.

            This will serve two purposes: first it will strengthen Putin’s grandiose image as a redemptive savior and unifier of the Russian people, and second it will serve a a demonstration that western security guarantees are worthless when not backed up by the United States.

            Putin’s long term goal is to implement a divide et impera strategy to break up NATO and the EU and force European countries
            at gunpoint to sign separate economic and security arrangements on terms highly favorable to Russia.

            The reason Putin’s pants start feeling tight when he thinks about a Trump administration is that he sees Trump’s vulgarity and incompetence as the perfect point of leverage to get what he wants. All he need do is flatter the man a bit, tell him that his crude protection racket like understanding of international affairs is a brilliant strategic innovation, and remind him just how yuuuuge and classy the new Trump tower Sevastopol is going to be, and trump will give him what ever he wants.

            As for what Hillery will do that Trump won’t to protect our interests in Europe; for one I have a near one hundred percent confidence
            that she will continue the policies of every previous Republican president and honor article five of the north Atlantic treaty, furthermore if Russia moves further into Ukraine she can provide Kiev arms and intelligence to help them resist. The Ukrainian military may not be able to stop Putin but it can make him pay a politically unacceptable price.

            At the hight of the cold war it was the universal consensus of our leaders from both parties that our alliances made us more secure rather than less. If that was true, as I think it was, at a time of extreme international tension, It should still be true at a time of relative tranquility.

            Remember that nature abhors a vacuum, and if the institutions that underpin our present security are torn down powerful forces will rush in from all sides to fill their place. The resulting maelstrom may pull us all under.

            The nuclear proliferation concerns alone make the collapse of the American backed international order terrifying; with Poland, South Korea, Japan and, Saudi Arabia likely to launch crash programs to acquire nuclear weapons. I don’t suppose I have to explain why the last country on that list should be so worrying.

            There are many features I don’t like about the
            current Pax Americana, but peace it is and peace I wish it to remain. If you want a mental image to symbolize the present state of the world, imagine Uncle Sam, a great imperial colossus, standing astride the world; at his feet a plaque reads ” après moi le deluge”.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Without the Second Amendment to restrain it, we will see a lot more gun control. First more local bans (like those overturned by Heller). Then some statewide bans (starting with handguns) in places like New Jersey and Illinois, likely exploiting tragedy to do it. Then a push for a federal ban based on the porous borders.

            The discrimination against the “privileged” will simply be done by administrative fiat.

      • TheWorst says:

        Without this, we’re likely to lose not just the Second Amendment, but Equal Protection in all but name (to the Social Justice hierarchy of privilege).

        When all of the same people made this claim about Obama’s impending presidency, and were later proven absolutely incorrect, did you update your belief?

        Why not?

        • The Nybbler says:

          I was (and remain) unaware of anyone making this claim about Obama’s impending presidency. At the time, I was also blissfully unaware of the Social Justice hierarchy of privilege, with Political Correctness being on the ebb.

          • TheWorst says:

            Seriously? You’re unaware of the infinite layers of people screaming “THEY’RE GONNA COME FOR OUR GUNS” over and over and over?

            If that’s true, I envy you your relatively sane media exposure. I am not, however, going to pretend it didn’t happen, even if I thought your claim was true. You guys have been yelling “wolf” every time, and there keep not being wolves.

            If Hillary is elected and mass gun confiscation doesn’t happen, what are the odds that you will update the beliefs that keep leading you guys to make predictions that turn out to be false?

            Why have you not already made that update, given that your belief has been demonstrated to be false, over and over and over?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Eh, you’re talking about totally different claims. I’m saying, specifically, that Hillary’s appointments to the Supreme Court would result in the gutting of the Second Amendment, the Equal Protection clause, and equal protection legislation.

            You’re talking about a diverse range of claims made by a diverse range of people which would have to be examined individually. Very few of those claims were equivalent to screaming “THEY’RE GOING TO COME FOR OUR GUNS”; aside from a few generally regarded as kooks by both sides, that characterization is simply mockery from gun control advocates.

          • hyperboloid says:

            (puts on 1950s radio guy voice)
            Little did I know before reading this blog that in America today there exists a ruthlessly powerful totalitarian menace known only as… (cue dramatic music) The Social Justice Warriors!

            I know friend, it sounds unbelievable but I assure you It’s True! This vicious group of cultural Marxist lesbian feminists (and feminine lesbianists) are plotting to take away your god given freedoms. Already they have infiltrated the very centers of American intellectual life, Salon.com, Jezebel, tumblr, and even Teen Vogue!

            How long can it be before Washington itself falls to this ravenous hoard of man hating she-beasts?

            ….okay, okay Ill stop.

            But this is getting ridiculous, nearly every political debate around here gets derailed into a discussion about a small bizarre group of politically correct cyber-bullies.

            Somebody in another thread actually said that he (the username was gender neutral but it was almost certainly a he) would be voting for Trump because he thought that only Trump could save us from the evil SJWs, who’s impending rule would be, he was sure, worse than Communism. I’m really trying to imagine a scenario where Amanda Marcotte kills Twenty million people.

            I’ve traveled in some pretty left wing circles over the years, and have never met anybody in person who has expressed the views widely attributed to the so called social justice movement.

            And I, for one, don’t think it’s a movement at all; there are no “social justice” political parties, trade unions, youth organizations, or revolutionary groups I could hypothetically join.

            As far as I can tell these people congregate in exactly two places; the Internet, which has always been over stocked on bags with which one might douche; and some college campuses where student “activists” desperate to have something to rebel against pick absurd symbolic causes to throw temper tantrums about.

            Who was it that said that campus politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small?

            No genuine questions of public policy are at stake when people are being told to “check their privilege”, or publicly shamed for not using the most up to date euphemism to refer to some or another group of unfortunates. And the people who do these things are not interested in real political power, they are just trying to gain status within their subculture.

            When ever possible, the best thing to do about people obsessed with showing how much better they are than you is to ignore them.

          • TheWorst says:

            Hyperboloid: Are you seriously claiming that you have never heard the name Brendan Eich? How about Justine Sacco?

            “Just ignore them” is abuser-talk, when we’re discussing people who can and will destroy your life the instant some random media person draws their attention to you out of boredom. Especially when these people control the culture, and culture is what determines who’s allowed to live.

            Out of curiosity, is this spectacular failure of empathy general or specific? If someone gets hit by a car, suffering a broken spine and four broken limbs, do you tell them to walk it off?

            People saying “just ignore it” are people who are always confident that in every circumstance they’re going to be the bully, never the target. That confidence is misplaced.

          • hyperboloid says:

            TheWorst:

            A couple of points.

            I hope that nothing I’ve said here will be interpreted as expressing sympathy for the militant PC crowd, I did call them absurd douche bags after all.

            When I said ignore bullies when ever possible, that means ignore them when they can’t do actual harm, which is most of the time. Obviously there are exceptions when other remedies are needed.

            As for Brendan Eich in all honesty I wish the man the best; but the fact that his is the one name that keeps being brought up in these discussions leads me to believe that their aren’t a whole lot of other examples of this nonsense having real world consequences.

            I’m also not convinced that left wing bullies are more powerful or dangerous than right wing bullies, for every Brendan Eich there is probably a Shirley Sherrod.

            When people in all seriousness say that they are voting for Donald Trump because he is politically incorrect they are the ones who lack empathy, not me. We should remember that the president of the United States holds the power to decide genuine issues of life and death, so there are very good reasons to believe that the policies of a Trump presidency will do harm to millions lives in ways far more permanent that loosing a Job.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            @ hyperboloid:

            And I, for one, don’t think it’s a movement at all; there are no “social justice” political parties, trade unions, youth organizations, or revolutionary groups I could hypothetically join.

            Wait, have you looked? Serious question. For instance, “youth organizations”. A brief googling finds several. Where do you live? Perhaps Los Angeles?

            The Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) is working to build a youth-led movement to challenge race, gender and class inequality in the Los Angeles County juvenile injustice system.

            Heh. “injustice system”. Or maybe you’re closer to Seattle?

            SOAR developed and distributes the Multicultural Youth Leadership Curriculum to help young people ages 14 to 18 explore their leadership styles and cultural identity, and dissect the complex relationships between power, leadership, choices and culture.

            For “Political Party” in the US your best bet is probably the Justice Party, which ran a candidate in 2012.

            “Revolutionary groups” tend not to be highly google-able so for that one you might want to start by getting involved in person with the nearest #occupy or #BLM group and branch out from there.

            So I’m not sure about “trade unions” but the rest all seem pretty doable…

          • anonymous now says:

            Aren’t they all on Double Secret Probation, sir?

          • “for every Brendan Eich there is probably a Shirley Sherrod.”

            That got me curious, since I didn’t recognize the name, so I googled and found the Wiki article:

            “The Obama administration apologized to Sherrod, and offered her a full-time, high-level internal advocacy position with the USDA, which she ultimately declined.”

            I didn’t realize that the Eich affair had had a similar resolution.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I get the point that, before every election, there is always manic screaming about appointing justices, by each side.

          But one big difference now is that there is a vacancy in SCOTUS caused by the untimely death of a conservative justice.

        • anonymous now says:

          The normally prolific Nybbler won’t be able to get to your question today.

          It seems he’s tied up and can’t get free. Nice job.
          He had no where to go.

          Witchfinder’s don’t update anyhow. The anti-sj posse has yet to do so after two years of zilch (or should i say eich!).

        • hyperboloid says:

          Glen Raphael:

          Where do you live? Perhaps Los Angeles?… Or maybe you’re closer to Seattle?

          Los Angeles or Seattle, huh?

          well, Neither actually.

          Hark! ‘

          For I have a tale to tell,

          While place of my birth may only be known to your people through legends of deep dish pizza, and the notorious B.I.G, I assure you it is very real. For you it would take a long and perilousness journey to reach my homeland. Even if you are able to brave the mighty mountains and the barren desserts, and resist the temptation of complimentary tickets to Elton John’s show at the great palace of Caeser you would still have many miles to go; for, you see, I come from the distant and mysterious land to your east!

          On a more serious note we need to define what exactly social justice is.

          The term itself originated in Jesuit philosophy during the mid nineteenth century. As the church grappled with the forces of nationalism, liberalism, and socialism sweeping Europe in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, catholic intellectuals like Antonio Rosmini-Serbati tried to craft a political doctrine that would serve as an alternative both to the existing capitalist order and to dangerous the chaos inherent in radical political upheaval. In contrast to Marxism Catholic social teaching aimed to avoided the extremes of class conflict by charting a cautious middle path of moderate reform and redistribution.

          As liberals and social democrats gained influence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many who wished to find an another option besides radical Marxism and the inequitable status quo began to adopt ideas that, when viewed form the right angle, are not all that different than the doctrines of rerum novarum.and accordingly the concept of social justice found a home on the secular left.

          The fact that, even when divorced from its original theological underpinnings, none of this had anything to do with any form of identity politics, leads me to believe that using “social justice” to to refer to things like “safe spaces”, and “trigger warnings” is a kind of rhetorical trick aimed to delegitimize various left wing ideas.

          Black lives matter is organized around criminal justice reform, and occupy wall street had somewhat vague goals, but was essentially concerned with questions of political economy.
          So it is possible to see at least some connection between these movements and the original since of social justice. But what ever you may think off the agenda of these gropes is far from obvious they have anything in particular to do with political correctness or censorship.

          As for the organizations that you cite; As far as i can tell form two thousand miles away the Youth Justice Coalition is, like BLM, a criminal justice reform movement, the Justice party was founded by a Mormon former mayor of salt lake city and has endorsed Bernie sanders, and I’m not entirely sure what SOAR does other than distribute vague multicultural pablum.

          Social Justice, the vaguely Christian inspired project of moderate reformist leftism (of which I am somewhat fond), and “Social Justice” the miscellaneous grab bag into which right wingers throw the shrillest elements of radical feminism, toxic political correctness, and white guilt identity politics, have nothing to do with each other.

          I was going to compare anti-SJW paranoia to McCarthyism, but you know what that is unfair to old tail gunner Joe. The Communist party did actually exist, and where Communists gained power they did great harm.

          There simply is no “Social justice movement” in the sense that you mean. The category of disciplined political groups aiming to impose by force the views of the worst parts of tumblr is an empty set.

    • wtvb says:

      I don’t want America to play any more “World Police” because it sucks at it and I live in Middle East. Trump’s neutrality towards other countries’ inner affairs is refreshing

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I had been planning to vote for Johnson, on the “plague on both your houses” theory. If I voted for Trump, it would be because Clinton insulted my intelligence by telling such pathetic lies about her shameful conduct as Secretary of State.

      Clinton’s recent “basket of deplorables” remark has tipped me toward voting for Trump. Yes, there are racists and Islamophobes who support Trump. To tar half of them with that brush is abominable, and exactly portrays what I find so awful about politics today.

      • TheWorst says:

        Can you explain why you think Clinton is obligated to pretend not to know any of the salient facts about Trump supporters?

        Just as we’re not obligated to pretend not to have noticed that the internal struggle between “SJWs” and the rest of the social justice movement is over (the W’s won), the same is true of everything else. You’re not obligated to help anyone else hide truths, especially truths about how malicious they are.

        • Protagoras says:

          When did the W’s win? I spend a lot of time on college campuses, supposedly hotbeds of political correctness, and I see little sign of this SJW dominance that people here constantly refer to. My being a het cis white male pretty much never seems to prevent me from getting respect, for example. Admittedly, I don’t hang around on tumblr or twitter much, so if you merely mean that SJWs have won the turf wars there, I have no basis to claim otherwise (apart from noting that many people seem to make similar claims about college campuses, which don’t seem to be true, so I have a tendency toward skepticism about such claims in general).

          • TheWorst says:

            Okay. Let’s put your belief to the test. Go out and publicly argue for the excommunication of cyberbullies; be specific about which ones. Start with, let’s say, everyone who was involved in the public crucifixion of Scott Aaronson and Justine Sacco.

            If you’re correct, you won’t be excommunicated for this yourself, and will be successful in excommunicating the people you name. Go on; I’ll wait right here. Good luck.

            The fact that you’re utterly unwilling to put your belief to the test should be taken as a hint that you’re aware it is false. Beliefs you’re afraid to test are beliefs in which you have low confidence; notice when this happens.

            If you were correct, everyone going after Aaronson would’ve gotten the Brendan Eich treatment. They didn’t.

          • Anonymous says:

            Wait, Scott Aaronson is dead?

          • anonymous now says:

            So it’s all over for Howard Stern and car models, huh?

            When are they going to run a candidate for congress?

          • anonymous now says:

            “Start with, let’s say, everyone who was involved in the public crucifixion of Scott Aaronson and Justine Sacco.”

            I love this “let’s say….” I mean what does he have choose from? Eich or Aaronson? Both from two years ago. Both minor bumps in their successful careers. Both destined to spend the rest of their life being honored as free speech martyrs.

            You don’t have an update. Your trying to sell the same scare but these goods are shoddy.

            And by not having an update, arent you bound to make one?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Eich. Aaronson. Tim Hunt. Matt Taylor. Mr. Hank. Sacco. Larry Summers. These are the ones public enough to get noticed. The “racistsgettingfired” tumblr gets nobodies fired from retail and fast food jobs for what they say on the internet.

          • Anonymous says:

            Lord, have mercy,
            Christ, have mercy,
            Lord, have mercy,
            Holy Mother of God, pray for us.
            Mary, Queen of Martyrs, pray for us.
            St. Michael, pray for us.
            St. Gabriel, pray for us.
            St. Raphael, pray for us.
            St. Joseph, pray for us.
            Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

            St. Mark, pray for us.
            St. Andrew, pray for us.
            St. James the Greater, pray for us.
            St. Thomas, pray for us.
            St. James the Less, pray for us.
            St. Philip, pray for us.
            St. Bartholomew, pray for us.
            St. Matthew, pray for us.
            St. Thaddeus, pray for us.
            St. Simon, pray for us.

            St. Callixtus, pray for us.
            St. Pontian, pray for us.
            St. Fabian, pray for us.
            St. Cornelius, pray for us.
            St. Sixtus II, pray for us.
            St. Eusebius, pray for us.

            St. Lawrence, pray for us.
            St. Gennarius, pray for us.
            St. Magnus, pray for us.
            St. Vincent, pray for us.
            St. Stephen, pray for us.
            St. Felicissimus, pray for us.
            St. Agapitus, pray for us.

            St. Tarcisius, pray for us.
            St. Cecilia, pray for us.
            St. Philomena, pray for us.
            St. Theodora, pray for us.
            St. Agatha, pray for us.
            St. Lucy, pray for us.
            St Agnes, pray for us.
            Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us.
            St. Anastasia, pray for us.
            St. Crispina, pray for us.
            St. Dominic Savio, pray for us.
            St. John Fisher, pray for us.
            St. Thomas More, pray for us.
            St. Thomas Beckett, pray for us.
            St. Isaac Jogues, pray for us.
            St. John Brebufe, pray for us.
            St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.
            Sts. Fabian and Sebastian, pray for us.
            Sts. John and Paul, pray for us.
            Sts. Cosmos and Damien, pray for us.
            Sts. Gervase and Protase, pray for us.

            St. Eich, pray for us.
            St. Aaronson, pray for us.
            St. Hunt, pray for us.
            St. Taylor, pray for us.
            St. Hank, pray for us.
            St. Sacco, pray for us.
            St. Summers, pray for us.
            St. Nybbler, pray for us.

            Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,
            Spare us, O Lord.
            Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,
            Graciously hear us, O Lord.
            Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world,
            Have mercy on us.

            O God, our Father, Who hast made us fruitful with the blood of Martyrs, the bright example of undying faith, keep us strong in our faith that we may foretaste with joy the fruit of their sacrifice and ours. Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son Our Lord, Who lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Can you explain why you think Clinton is obligated to pretend not to know any of the salient facts about Trump supporters?

          I’m not following you, unless your claim is that 50% is the correct proportion. But that claim is precisely what I said was absurd and abominable.

          • To expand on this a little …

            I heard someone on the radio defending the Clinton statement. The evidence he offered was a poll that he said showed something close to half of Trump supporters believing that blacks were less intelligent, lazier, and more violent than whites.

            Assuming it’s the poll I read and that my memory is correct–someone is welcome to correct me if it’s not–it was the proportion agreeing with at least one of the three claims. Of the three, one is obviously true in at least the simplest interpretation. The black murder rate in the U.S. is much higher than the white. That doesn’t tell us whether the reason is genetic or environmental–but the question didn’t ask that.

            I don’t know how one would get evidence on “lazier.” But I believe it is true that measured black IQ has a lower average than measured white IQ in the U.S., which in turn is lower than measured East Asian IQ (I think also Amerind but I’m not sure).

            So the implication of his argument–and of Hilary’s statement if that is the sort of evidence she is using–is that anyone willing, on a poll, to express an arguably true opinion about race that is not politically correct is a racist.

            Perhaps The Worst could defend his position by pointing at better evidence that half of Trump supporters are at least one of the things Hilary claims they are?

  3. Frederic says:

    Vox – You’re more likely to be killed by your own clothes than by an immigrant terrorist
    http://www.vox.com/2016/9/13/12901950/terrorism-immigrants-clothes

    • Jiro says:

      Comparing risk this way ignores the effect of the number of Muslim immigrants. Obviously, the fewer of them you have, the fewer terrorist killings you’ll have. I’m pretty sure that an individual clothes item is less likely to cause a death than an individual Muslim immigrant. And why didn’t he look at Europe instead, which has lots more Muslim immigrants?

      Furthermore, the reasons he describes for there being little terrorism by Muslim immigrants are reasons that his ideological comrades mostly oppose.

    • Sfoil says:

      The “1 in 3.6 billion” number struck me immediately as obviously false, because there are way more than 2 murderers on the planet. Then I realized that it was the odds of a) someone on a refugee visa b) in America c) killing someone which d) USG declares to be a “terrorist attack” e) per year since 1975(?).

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        Which promptly falls apart given the USG’s current policy of declaring terrorist attacks to be “workplace violence.” Then again, Vox is poisonous agitprop anyway.

      • Glen Raphael says:

        @sfoil:

        The “1 in 3.6 billion” number struck me immediately as obviously false

        The article currently says the average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which an immigrant participated in any given year is 1 in 3.6 million. (including 9/11)

        @Jiro:

        Comparing risk this way ignores the effect of the number of Muslim immigrants. Obviously, the fewer of them you have, the fewer terrorist killings you’ll have.

        I’m not sure that’s obvious. I suspect there are threshold effects. It seems plausible that once you have enough legal Muslim immigrants, there’s going to be substantial assimilation, making it more likely a potential terrorist would interact with more-assimilated muslims who might either (a) convince the potential terrorist not to do it, or (b) inform the authorities.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          making it more likely a potential terrorist would interact with more-assimilated muslims who might either (a) convince the potential terrorist not to do it, or (b) inform the authorities.

          From news stories, it appears that a fellow Muslim trying to convince you to blow anything up is most likely an FBI agent.

          That’s a good metagame to be at, but I’m ignoring the costs, both financial and societal.

  4. Since this is an open thread …

    For no good reason I was thinking about the Civil War. Various people have done alternate history where the war ends with the Confederacy independent. Has anyone done one where the war doesn’t happen because, when the deep South secedes, the North responds with “Good by. Good luck. Let us know if you change your mind,” and the rest of the South stays in the Union?

    • hlynkacg says:

      Not that I know of, but in hindsight that really may have been the best option. PS, enjoy your trade sanctions slavers.

      • pku says:

        I’m going to guess slavery would not have been easily solvable by trade sanctions, since once you have a modern-ish country where nearly half the population are slaves, there is an enormous incentive to keep them down.

        • Jeff Hummel argues that if the North had been unwilling to capture and return runaway slaves the cost to slave states of maintaining slavery would have been substantially higher, with a near border for slaves to escape across.

        • John Schilling says:

          once you have a modern-ish country where nearly half the population are slaves, there is an enormous incentive to keep them down

          Jim Crow works well enough to “keep them down”, if that’s the real issue. But if the modern-ish country is using slaves primarily to grow a cash crop for export, and the export customers all decide that they’d rather buy that commodity from (say) Egypt where they grow the same thing without slave labor, the incentive to keep them down as slaves isn’t so strong. And for that matter, the Royal Navy’s resolve to capture or sink any damned slave-trading ship might plausibly be extended to ships carrying the products of open slave labor.

          Mind you, I’m not entirely certain I’d like the alternate history where the slavers are given a century of calibrated incentives and a permissive environment to fine-tune Jim Crow into general acceptability. That institution was bad enough when Blacks had de jure civil rights, and the Feds the authority to step in with a hard “NO, no matter how much you’re willing to pay in sanctions” from day one. And the border states are going to be playing the same game in what’s left of the USA, because the prime directive of post-crisis American politics will be “don’t piss off the Virginians so much that they join the Confederates”.

          But if it would have saved us a war with half a million dead and a century of bitterness, meh, maybe. Life vs. Death is pretty drastic compared to gradiations in oppression. Maybe we can get Harry Turtledove to write the story for us, and then we’ll know.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I hear he’s working on the sex scenes as we speak.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Maybe we can get Harry Turtledove to write the story for us, and then we’ll know.

            S.M. Stirling wrote one version (set in South Africa rather than the American South). But of course the thing about fiction is you can make it turn out any way you want.

          • LHN says:

            I think you need the British (or US) Navy sinking the ships (or at least boarding and engaging in confiscation and fines) to get the effect. Otherwise, cotton is a pretty fungible product, I’d think, and selling it to people who don’t care or laundering it through a middleman country (so that somehow more “Egyptian” cotton winds up in textile mills than Egypt ever grew) should be pretty doable.

            And it at least seems as if it’s a lot easier to distinguish and target slave ships (whose contents are… distinctive) than to toss every merchantman’s cargo hold for contraband cotton.

            Anglo-American naval cooperation could certainly impose a significant cost to the trade. I just don’t know if it’s enough to make the slave economy uneconomic.

          • bean says:

            S.M. Stirling wrote one version (set in South Africa rather than the American South). But of course the thing about fiction is you can make it turn out any way you want.

            I normally like his work, but Draka has so many problems as alt-history that appealing to it makes no sense at all.

          • LHN says:

            The Draka books are like The Man in the High Castle (minus the latter’s more trippy elements) or Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms”. (Or pretty much any of the many “Axis conquers North America in WWII” stories, give or take the ones that involve, e.g., Superman’s rocket landing near Berlin instead of Smallville.) The logistics and sheer luck required are increasingly unlikely, but it’s a riveting nightmare.

    • TheWorst says:

      This seems to be based on the counterfactual that the South seceded by some other means than commencing armed hostilities. That is a necessary (but strangely unstated) assumption in order for the North to have any option other than to participate in the war that the other side started.

      In this alternate history, what did the Southern secessionists do in place of attacking the United States and launching the Civil War?

      • They attacked a fortification on their territory occupied by federal troops. The federal government responded by offering to negotiate and the negotiations ended up with the federal troops leaving the state and state troops occupying the fortification.

        Do you assume that all attacks must lead to war?

        • TheWorst says:

          I assume that all acts of war are acts of war, yes. And I’m aware of how common it is for neo-confederates to pretend that the United States started the war.

          I also do not like it when people unquestioningly assume that Lost Causer bullshit is the truth. I am under no obligation to pretend it is.

          Note that under no other circumstance would you–or anyone else–pretend not to know that when an army attacks another army it’s an act of war.

  5. Jill says:

    Looking back at dtsund’s post that you cited here, on the evolutionary complexity argument in politics.

    Interesting post. Here I quote part of it, to think further about it and respond further.

    “In any given election, the voting public adds some information to the system, analogous to selective pressure in organisms. Flagrantly bad politicians can (maybe) be weeded out and replaced by better ones. But there’s a limit; each individual race or initiative is at most two or three bits of information, assuming a high number of candidates. One bit is more typical. An entire voting district’s results will only be a few bytes, and some of that information will be garbage unless you’re prepared to argue that the best candidate always wins.

    “Meanwhile, the government presents a corruption attack surface whose size is directly proportional to how much government happens to be doing at the moment.

    “While there’s no upper bound to how much government regulation we can have, there’s probably a very strict upper bound to the level of genuinely useful regulation. Anything above and beyond that amount should be expected as a matter of course to wind up perverted by malefactors of great wealth.

    “Pick the one issue you care most about, pro- or anti-: gun control, minimum wage increases, transgender bathrooms, whatever. Hell, pick two or three. If you fight hard enough, you can maybe win those fights. You should expect to lose everything else.

    “The above applies to democratically-elected governments. The Death Eaters, I’m sure, will argue that this points toward monarchy/authoritarianism as the ideal governmental model. As though injecting zero information into a system is somehow better than injecting a small amount.”

    I would disagree that “In any given election, the voting public adds some information to the system”– at least if you mean the system of governing the country. Modern politicians collect information on what the voting public wants, in order to promise to give that to the voters. But politicians do not usually give that to the voters. They PROMISE that to the voters, and then break the promise, in order to please that politicians’ donors. The public can always be easily hoodwinked by propaganda and false promises. The donors only stay with the politician who does their will.

    E.g. every president elected for the last 30 years has campaigned as some kind of political outsider who was going to shake up the status quo. Believable outsider candidates poll quite well. But none of them did shake up the status quo much. There are not a lot changes from one presidential administration to another. And that’s just looking at presidential races– which are the races people pay attention to. There is even less info added into the system by the voting public in other “lesser” races– the ones where far fewer people even vote.

    With regard to the part that says: “While there’s no upper bound to how much government regulation we can have, there’s probably a very strict upper bound to the level of genuinely useful regulation. Anything above and beyond that amount should be expected as a matter of course to wind up perverted by malefactors of great wealth.”

    I don’t see it working that way. There were probably far too many laws on the books at the times that our most successful government programs were enacted– the G I Bill, Social Security. But they worked anyway. And, of course, tons of other governmental programs and regulations that were instituted around the same time and afterwards, were a huge waste and should never have been enacted. We often have useful regulations and totally non-useful regulations all instituted together or around the same time.

    I do agree with the related point made by dtsund that one needs to carefully choose one’s battles, because there is only so much one can focus on, and expect to win, at one time, in the way of government laws or regulations.

    If we had a project to get rid of regulations that most citizens see as being unnecessary, I think that would be great.

    • pku says:

      The “one or two bits of information” is a poor model, since politicians can see people’s preferences, and thus find an equilibrium where they’re in fairly close agreement on most issues. If they wildly diverged on some issue, that issue would become a talking point with whoever was closer to centre on it, and lose the other one votes.

      Also, re: Promises: Data shows that politicians actually tend to keep their promises (or at least make a good faith attempt to do so).

      George W. Bush promised tax cuts and education reform, and within the first year of his administration had delivered on both. Barack Obama promised to focus on the economy, health care and the environment. Once in office, he pushed first a massive stimulus package and then the Affordable Care Act through Congress, and he has worked with China and others in the international community on climate change, despite strong legislative opposition. As for the promises that get abandoned, many have more to do with changing circumstances than a lack of principles. (Think of Bush, an ardent free-marketeer, signing the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill during the first tremors of the Great Recession.)

      • Corey says:

        A corollary of that research: another reason why trying to figure out a politician’s “real” position on something is a fool’s errand. What matters most for actual governing is what they campaigned on.

  6. Two McMillion says:

    Many left-leaning people talk about income inequality, meaning the gap between the what the richest and the poorest people make. A larger gap is generally held to be problematic. I do not understand why it should be a problem. Could a left-leaning person please explain this to me?

    • brad says:

      I’m left leaning but I don’t think it is a big problem in and of itself. From talking to those that think it is, the best argument I’ve heard is that wealth can be transformed into political power — so that even if it is not a problem economically it is a problem politically.

      There’s a lot of conflation and confusion on the subject between stock and flow. I think that’s probably because flow is easier to get good numbers for, but stock is the real concern.

      • cassander says:

        If you’re worried about power inequality, the 535 members of congress have a hell of a lot bigger share of the power than the fortune 500 has of the money. Seems like you’re sniffing in the wrong place, regardless of stock/flow issues.

    • AnonBosch says:

      I haven’t done a deep dive into the literature or anything, but I do know it’s fairly uncontroversial among economists that extreme disparities in income can retard economic growth; the dispute is largely over mechanisms and where the golden mean is (since extreme equality also retards growth). The most obvious ECON 101 answer is that too much inequality will kill demand since poor people are almost always going to be buying things with their money while rich people can just let it accumulate or (macroeconomically speaking) light it on fire in various ways. You can counter this with the empirical observation that consumer spending hasn’t generally correlated with inequality, at which point you can try either econometrically correcting the data for a zillion things or refining your hypothesis to include credit bubbles and other destructive forms of debt on which consumer spending has been increasingly reliant.

      Others (e.g., Stiglitz) have made the argument from the supply side, that if too many people are too poor it will lead to a poorly educated and less productive workforce. There are also a number of political science theories that ultimately boil down to the cynical but true observation that letting people get too poor because of what your ECON 101 textbook says is a good way to end up with outright Marxism instead of a moderately redistributive liberalism. Since I’m a cynic, I think this argument is the best one, but again, this is just stuff I’ve picked up from osmosis from reading various leftish sources.

      • JayT says:

        Having a large gap doesn’t necessarily tell you how poor the people at the bottom are though.
        If the economy grows the poor could get richer while inequality grows, which is what we have been seeing over the last 40 years.

        • AnonBosch says:

          I agree there’s a difference between absolute and relative poverty, but I was speaking solely of relative poverty since that’s what the parent comment seemed to be discussing.

          Counter-intuitively, I think the data shows that inequality matters more as the poor get richer in absolute terms. Or at least indicates a much tighter correlation with slow growth in rich countries than poor countries.

          • JayT says:

            “I agree there’s a difference between absolute and relative poverty, but I was speaking solely of relative poverty since that’s what the parent comment seemed to be discussing.”

            I read it as a more general “why is inequality bad?” type of question, and to that I would postulate that it just doesn’t really matter. What matters is how good the quality of life is across the population. Ethiopia has less income inequality than the US, but I would guess there are very few people in the world that would choose the quality of life in Ethiopia over the US.

            “Counter-intuitively, I think the data shows that inequality matters more as the poor get richer in absolute terms. Or at least indicates a much larger correlation with slow growth in rich countries than poor countries.”

            I have a hard time believing that. China is one of the most unequal countries, but it has had huge growth. The same is true of India.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        since poor people are almost always going to be buying things with their money while rich people can just let it accumulate or (macroeconomically speaking) light it on fire in various ways

        The macroeconomic alternative to consumption is investment.

        • AnonBosch says:

          Unless the depressed demand due to aforementioned extreme inequality limits the returns and creates a savings glut. Or the aforementioned rise in bad debt held by poor people leads to investment steering towards destructive bubbles.

          (I’m aware I simplified a bunch of stuff in the parent post; it wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive explainer.)

    • Corey says:

      If the gap gets big enough it can be practically impossible to bridge. Piketty uses as an example old-school aristocracy, where the only way to become wealthy enough to have any political power was to marry into a rich family.

      • cassander says:

        If he doesn’t, that’s a terrible example. The aristocracy had political power, it was money they often lacked, and rich merchants who married into the aristocracy for political reasons, not to get rich.

    • Zombielicious says:

      The short version would be that we don’t live in some kind of post-scarcity utopia where everyone has their needs met to a reasonable degree, so people consider it a problem that, as society continues to grow richer, most of the wealth accumulates to the top of the pyramid while the larger number at the bottom continue to live substandard lives. Wage stagnation is probably the better term. Especially if it occurs to the extent that the groups on the bottom are actually moving backwards in terms of real wages, purchasing power, quality of life, whatever.

      Most people aren’t literal communists that think everyone should have exactly the same wealth and no more. They just find it kind of messed up that CEO pay and billionaire net worth has ballooned without managing to solve problems like homelessness or basic healthcare coverage, and they can barely afford to go to school without relying on food stamps and being in debt for the next ten years (not to mention two or three jobs on top of it).

    • Aapje says:

      Could a left-leaning person please explain this to me?

      Income and/or wealth correlates strongly with opportunities being available/useable by people. So if you want a meritocracy, you have to limit the income/wealth gaps; or you go back to a class-based society, where outcome is mostly determined by to whom you were born.

    • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

      Perhaps because any inequality is simply immoral in and of itself? Because it’s unfair? But if you can’t grasp this, how about this:
      The 4 biggest reasons why inequality is bad for society? Specifically:
      “1. Economic inequality can give wealthier people an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others.”
      “2. Economic inequality can undermine the fairness of political institutions.”
      “3. Economic inequality undermines the fairness of the economic system itself.”
      “4. Workers, as participants in a scheme of cooperation that produces national income, have a claim to a fair share of what they have helped to produce.”
      And see also Rawls’ “Difference Principle“, in particular the portion which says:

      Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

      Any form of the wealth inequality can only be justified if it was both obtained under the full equality of opportunity (which, of course, we very much don’t have), and if any attempt to reduce it would make the absolute poorest and most disadvantaged worse off.

      • Incurian says:

        I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          I googled the name, and all I found was similarly trollish comments. Make of that what you will.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          I mean, that’s probably the least trollish comment from them. After all, a lot of people do hold equality as a terminal value, at the very least in theory.

        • onyomi says:

          What I love about SSC is that comments of a quality that would be considered average at most other comment spaces are hard to tell apart from actual trolling here.

        • TheWorst says:

          Posting from a position that’s fairly slightly left-of-center shouldn’t be considered trolling. Accusing anyone other than right-wingers of trolling, however, perhaps should be.

          It’s possible Anita’s taken previous criticism to heart and gotten more content-intensive and less virtue-signalling intensive. That is the direction she should move in, so it should be encouraged, not insulted dismissively.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            “any inequality is simply immoral in and of itself” is hardly slightly left-of-center. It’s very left of center.

          • TheWorst says:

            Have you met an actual leftist? I don’t mean what passes for leftism here–basically whatever the hard-right believed last month–but actual leftists.

            But let’s pretend you’re right. So what? “Not a member of the alt-right” is still not synonymous with troll. Given that alt-righters are automatically dismissed as trolls everywhere but there own spaces and here, you’d think they’d be a little smarter about this.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Have you met an actual leftist? I don’t mean what passes for leftism here–basically whatever the hard-right believed last month–but actual leftists.

            Yes, I live in a country where the mayor right wing party is, in many ways, to the left of mainstream democrats. It doesn’t matter the amount of people that believe it, “all inequality is inmoral” is an inherently extreme belief, and one can not reasonable hold it and claim to be near the mythical “center” (just claiming you hold it is a different matter).

            Besides, I explicitly stated that that statement was not particularly trollish, since a lot of people actually hold that view.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          TheWorst –

          It’s less that the individual is left-of-center and more that the individual represents Leftist ideas in such a way that they seem to be Colbert-esque parodies of leftism.

          You, Anita, Uncle, and Jill all share that quality, that some of the stuff you say seems to be mocking the ideology you claim to be a part of. This could, of course, be poor calibration on my part; I’ve certainly incorrectly jumped at Jill before. But it’s also possible that alt-right trolls are deliberately trying to make the Left look bad, something I wouldn’t put past the alt-right, a group which appears to relish in tactics of questionable ethics.

          Because the thing is – I prefer a well-represented Left, even if I’m not myself Leftist – I want competent opponents – and I at least am left in a situation where charity towards the Left and charity towards individual Leftists is in… sharp conflict.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I mean, I had my doubts about Jill, and definitely think ARS is a troll (John Sid les just seems like a deeply annoying individual), but I don’t see why you’d think TheWorst is one.

          • TheWorst says:

            I think your personal Overton window is badly in need of calibration. It seems to stretch from “Far right” to “Far, far, far right,” and dismiss everything else as trolling. Disagreeing with the proposition that the rich must be allowed to be rich enough to undermine democracy is not leftist trolling, or even leftist at all; it’s moderate right.

            Perhaps you would be more suited to an environment with less intellectual diversity? There are many of those, and they are readily available to anyone with an internet connection, which you demonstrably have.

            For what it’s worth, I too prefer a well-represented right. Dismissing all non-right-wingers as trolls doesn’t fill that niche.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            TheWorst –

            I just don’t find you particularly believable as a Leftist. Leftists generally don’t, for example, use the term “Overton Window”, which is almost an alt-right term of art specifically for describing mechanisms for how Cthulu Swims Left.

            More, your characterization of the right, there, is quite apt for the alt-right, which DOES oppose people sufficiently wealthy people as to pose a dangerous degree of power for the government, but doesn’t fit in with the way somebody as vehemently and often venomously Leftist as you tend to behave would generally regard the right.

            It’s possible, of course, that you’re just a frequently-unpleasant Leftist who somehow has a great deal of charity for the beliefs of the alt-right specifically. But alt-right troll just looks more likely to me.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Orphan Wilde:

            What are you using the word “leftist” to mean? Because I usually see it used as a self-description by people who are Marxists of some variety, or something like that. If you’re using it to mean “all people on the left” that’s going to cause confusion – because, to give an example, people who consider themselves leftists sneer at those they call “liberals”.

            Additionally, since when is the term “Overton Window” an alt-right term? Wikipedia tells me it was coined by a guy who worked at a free market think tank:

            The Center writes that its ideology is most accurately characterized as flowing from the “classical liberal tradition: socially tolerant, economically sophisticated, desiring little government intervention in either their personal or economic affairs.”

            This doesn’t sound alt-right at all.

          • TheWorst says:

            @Orphan Wilde: The principle of charity is a thing. You’ve noticed that I’m using it; I recommend doing the same. It will make you vastly better at ideological Turing tests.

            It will also give you some relief from whatever impulse makes you accuse everyone who isn’t on the alt-right of being a leftist and/or an alt-rightist.

      • onyomi says:

        “any inequality is simply immoral in and of itself?”

        I don’t see how you can take that as axiomatic. Is it immoral that some people are born smart and physically fit while others are born mentally and physically handicapped? It’s not fair, true. But that doesn’t mean it’s immoral. Immoral implies some kind of agency.

        I guess you could say you mean “it’s immoral for humans to tolerate any level of unfairness and/or inequality of outcome* in the world.” I mean, I guess you could assert that, but even if we assume total equality of outcome is the ideal, which may not be true, and certainly can’t be asserted axiomatically, equality of outcome is only one value of many people chose to pursue, and not inherently superior to other human goals, nor the sum total of justice in a general sense.

        *You may take it as axiomatic that inequality of outcome implies inequality of opportunity, and, therefore, unfairness, but I don’t think that’s a given, either. I, personally, think equality of opportunity, but not outcome, is worth striving for, but only insofar as it doesn’t require doing something immoral to achieve it, like seizing landowners’ property, etc.

        • Dahlen says:

          You know, not that I like “siding with” a known troll, but every time the topic of human inequality comes up, there’s always someone, or a bunch of someones, to push the narrative of smart & fit & attractive & successful vs. dumb & handicapped & ugly & unsuccessful (“I mean, it’s obvious for everyone who has eyes to see”) as if it were some sort of axiological slam dunk. And it’s not, reality has more facets than that which need to be explored and taken into consideration. And it gets really tiresome after hearing it one too many times.

          People who advocate some form of ethical intuitionism would argue, indeed, that the objective conditions of reality (like inequality of ability & attributes) is or should be somehow accommodated by the human moral sense, and in this particular instance to accept some level of unfairness of conditions as a given, rather than produce more unfairness in the world through hamhanded attempts to change these conditions, Harrison Bergeron-style. Inevitable inequalities are normalised and our ideas about justice are to work around them. But to employ this fact towards the conclusion that “inequality” isn’t so bad after all is (1) taking the premise and running with it, (2) a motte-and-bailey argument. “Inequality” is a word that happens to cover both descriptive initial conditions and normative axiological judgments, and a good discussion about this entails unpacking that word into its separate meanings, and people who have been in favour of inequality (in both senses) to begin with tend to be reluctant to take this step, because it puts them at a rhetorical disadvantage. This is not an HBD discussion, this particular argument is not very on-topic.

          Anyway, I would advise against rebutting “Anita” word-for-word and taking what “she” wrote at face value. (Although, surprisingly, this is one of their less trollish comments and I suppose the views expressed herein must be closer to those of the author, as they’re able to make a stronger case for them.) Obviously this person doesn’t intend to make the strongest case possible for the egalitarian position. One fool blurts out some nonsense on a whim, and ten smart individuals spend hours correcting it…

          (Also, equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity is also one way of framing among many, which may get disproportionate attention because of its historical popularity. For instance, I prefer to talk more in terms of equality of status.)

          equality of outcome is only one value of many people chose to pursue, and not inherently superior to other human goals, nor the sum total of justice in a general sense.

          So? Under a value-pluralist perspective, the fact that a value has axiological competition is not an argument for undermining it in general, or working against it.

          Also, if you’re not taking any value as axiomatic, then, praytell, where does it come from and what are you taking as axiomatic in its stead?

          [Epistemic status: praying to the heavens not to end up on the frontpage of r/badphilosophy]

          • TheWorst says:

            Yes, this.

            “I have power over you because of who my parents were” is immoral, and this is trivially obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning sense of morality. Perhaps Onyomi and Onyomi’s fellow-travelers would like to repeat feudalism, but theirs is an outlying position, and they should perhaps cease question their assumption that their false beliefs are axiomatically true.

          • Jaskologist says:

            “Parents should be prevented from working to improve their children’s lives” is immoral, and this is trivially obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning sense of morality.

          • TheWorst says:

            @Jaskologist:

            That these two things are in no way identical is trivially-obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning grasp on the English language.

            Interesting motte you have there.

            EDIT: If I were inclined to think you were arguing in good faith, I would point out that making your kids rich enough to destroy democracy is not the only way to improve their lives.

            Making the highest marginal tax rate equal 100% is not incompatible with the motte to which you’ve retreated. The fact that you’d still oppose such increases is how we can tell you’re actually in the bailey, and that the feigned retreat to the motte wasn’t made in good faith.

          • onyomi says:

            I do take the state of the world as a baseline in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to me to describe a world state as “immoral.” Actions are immoral. States of the world are “unfair” or “unjust” (though I don’t think those two are exactly the same).

            For example, it’s a fact about the world that people have to do a lot of crap just to stay alive. It’s a fact about the world that in the state of nature, a large percentage of infants die of now easily preventable diseases. It doesn’t make sense to me to say that that’s “immoral.” It is just is. “Earthquakes kill people” isn’t immoral. It just is.

            Now I suppose what people are saying is that the action of choosing to prioritize other values over saving poor children from easily preventable diseases is immoral. In some cases, it may be. But it all depends on the circumstances. Is it immoral to enjoy a new car when people are dying of malaria in Africa? Seemingly not, unless you think morality demands all first world citizens devote themselves immediately and entirely to improving the lives of those born with less. Is it immoral to embezzle money from a charity for saving poor children from disease to buy yourself a Ferrari? Obviously, yes.

            Does morality demand that the simple existence of any inequality anywhere means that those with more must do at least something to help those with less? Maybe? It all depends on many circumstances like how the richer people got rich, how the poorer people got poorer, what the relationship between the two is (most people seem to feel more obligation to their neighbor or countryman than people suffering far away; I, personally, don’t feel this intuition very strongly outside of people I know personally; I generally feel more sympathy for Africans with no clean drinking water than for strangers in my country having trouble paying rent), whether any pre-existing commitments were made, etc. etc.

            I’ll agree that there is a general “common sense” morality or ethical intuition which says that “while you’re not obligated to donate everything you own and be Mother Teresa, if you are fortunate enough to have more than most, you should make at least some effort to help those with less, especially within your own society.”

            I don’t claim there’s anything wrong with that intuition. I merely said that that intuition has to be balanced against many other considerations, such as what, exactly, is being proposed to help reduce the inequality. Are voluntary donations to help starving children good? Almost certainly yes. Is murder of all landowners and confiscation of their land good? Almost certainly not. Most inequality reduction ideas, of course, fall somewhere between these extremes, and must therefore be weighed against some of the other considerations I mentioned.

          • TheWorst says:

            @ Onyomi:

            The phrase “I do not personally believe in the concept of morality” is not the same as “You are incorrect to call this thing immoral.”

            Similarly, if we’re arguing over whether a given boat is large or small, “I do not believe boats exist, therefore the guy saying ‘large’ is wrong,” is kind of a strange argument to make.

          • onyomi says:

            @TheWorst

            Do you think earthquakes are “immoral”?

            If you say “the choice to ignore earthquake victims is immoral,” then that would make sense to me, but just to say “earthquakes are immoral,” or “starvation is immoral” does not make sense to me, as “inequality is immoral” does not make sense to me. “Choosing to ignore inequality is immoral” makes sense as a claim, but then I would again ask “how much do I have to do not to ‘ignore’ it and how high of a priority is this supposed to be relative to other values and goals?”

            Morality implies agency. That isn’t so much an opinion about philosophy as a fact about English.

            Inequality is a state of affairs, not an action. Morality may possibly demand that some people take some action to reduce inequality. But those actions, again, have to be weighed against the opportunity cost of doing other things, since equality is not the only human value.

          • TheWorst says:

            I am, for the record, not questioning whether or not you believe in the concept of morality. There’s no need to keep asserting that you don’t, or even why you don’t. I believe you–or, more specifically, I see no reason to question your assertion.

            My point was that the guy who walks into an argument about the size of a given boat and says “I believe boats don’t exist, so the guy who says it’s small is wrong!” is making two kinds of poor decisions.

            Not believing morality exists has no bearing on how morality applies to a given circumstance, and you not believing morality exists is the opposite of proof that inequality is moral. In a conversation about whether a given action or situation is morally acceptable, saying “I don’t believe in morality!” contains no data other than to reduce the weight other people should give your input.

          • onyomi says:

            I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about at this point, so I’m going to quit.

            All I’ll say is that I’m a moral realist, so I do believe morality exists.

          • TheWorst says:

            For clarity:

            “I do take the state of the world as a baseline in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to me to describe a world state as “immoral.”

            …is a statement with identical meaning to “That thing you think of as morality? I don’t personally believe it exists.”

            It is also identical to saying “I have absolutely nothing to add to your discussion of what’s moral and what’s not, and I know this and take pride in this, but for some reason am choosing to participate in this discussion about what’s moral and what’s not.”

            If we’re arguing about what kind of boat we’re looking at, “You’re wrong, because I don’t believe boats exist” is a very strange “contribution” to make.

            Edit: I am somewhat perplexed at your claim to not think that inequality is an action, even though I am absolutely certain you are aware that large numbers of people are currently engaged in actions to maintain that state. That’s like saying “The ongoing slaughter of the kulaks is a state of affairs, not an action, so it can’t possibly be immoral. Therefore it is not immoral, and there are no permissible actions that may be taken to stop it.” I am reasonably confident that productive conversation is impossible on that front, however, given certain well-known difficulties around the pretense of sleep when it comes to waking a person up.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @TheWorst:
            Try charity in argument and you will find onyomi to be an able, pleasant, and thought provoking conversationalist.

            I really don’t think his position is at all hard to understand, and you are simply trying to do something like weak-manning him.

          • ““I have power over you because of who my parents were” is immoral, and this is trivially obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning sense of morality. ”

            Other people who get to vote in American elections have (some) power over me, since some ability to affect rules that will be imposed on me. Do you think conventional citizenship rules, in which someone born to citizen parents is a citizen, are immoral, and the fact “is trivially obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning sense of morality”?

          • TheWorst says:

            Do you think conventional citizenship rules, in which someone born to citizen parents is a citizen, are immoral…

            These are not actually “conventional citizenship” rules, those are alt-right fantasyland citizenship rules, as far as I can tell. Yes, those are immoral. That’s why they’re not the conventional citizenship rules.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Those are certainly traditional citizenship rules; you can tell, because they have a snappy Latin phrase associated with them, “jus sanguinus”. The rules of “jus soli” (you’re a citizen if you’re born in the country) are also traditional… however, they are quite uncommon outside the Americas. No European country has “jus soli”, for instance.

            The US accepts either “jus soli” (unrestricted, by the 14th Amendment) or “jus sanguinus” (under a rather complicated set of rules) as granting US citizenship.

          • TheWorst says:

            It does, and it has for centuries. That’s a pretty long tradition. Picking a different tradition from somewhere else does not mean other traditions aren’t traditional.

          • @The worst:

            “That’s why they’re not the conventional citizenship rules.”

            Followed in a later comment by:

            “Picking a different tradition from somewhere else does not mean other traditions aren’t traditional.”

            You started by claiming that ius sanguinus is not the conventional citizenship rule then defended that by saying there are other traditional rules as well. Somewhere along the line you seem to have forgotten that the question was in response to your:

            ““I have power over you because of who my parents were” is immoral, and this is trivially obvious to any person with at least a normally-functioning sense of morality. ”

            Do you agree that ius sanguinus has that implication, as I pointed out, hence that you are claiming it is an immoral rule and the fact is obvious? Is it more immoral than “I have power over you because of where I happen to have been born,” which is another traditional rule?

            If so, what is the moral rule for deciding who gets to vote?

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I’m not a leftist, but I became a lot more sympathetic to their concerns after based Vladimir explained that some of the best things in life are zero-sum. When your ability to acquire land, status, and women all depend on the distribution of the pie and not on how big the pie is, you start to care more about the relative size of your slice than about growing the pie.

  7. Anon. says:

    Speaking of genetic clusters, I find it surprising and interesting that American Ashkenazi Jews (AAJ) do not form a cluster of their own. In fact they’re very similar to (North) Italians and Greeks. The distance between South and North Europe is bigger than that between Italians/Greeks and AAJs, for example.

    Data here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730349/table/t1-09_94_tian/

    • Douglas Knight says:

      What do you mean by “cluster”? You can’t tell whether they cluster from pairwise distances. From the figures, they do form a cluster. In figure 1, they are mixed up with some other group I can’t identify (but only that group). In Figure 3, restricting to the south, they are isolated. For some reason they are near the Adygei, from which they have high Fst. But, yes, Ashkenazi are half Semitic and half Southern European. When you say that the N-S distance is large, I think you are cherry-picking a comparison. Many pairs of a southern and northern group have a smaller distance, though many have a larger distance.

  8. onyomi says:

    Recently, the Clinton campaign has not-so-subtly suggested that voting for Donald Trump exposes us to the risk of nuclear war. Cited is the fact that he reportedly asked a military advisor several times about the use of nuclear weapons. Obviously this is a scare tactic of sorts, but it seems like not a few people are genuinely afraid of this possibility.

    Question: is there a good reason to believe there’s a realistic chance that Trump presidency=nuclear war, other than “well, he seems unstable and crazy and who knows what he’ll do”? Like, spell it out for me: how does Trump presidency hypothetically lead to nuclear war? With whom would the nuclear war be happening and why?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Well, it’s Hillary who wants to get into it with Putin, but leaving that aside…

      Imagine some terrorist group Al-Fuqya pulls off an attack within the US. Trump goes nuts and finds out that Al-Fuqya has headquarters in some tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan; lots of caves for cover from conventional weaponry, no way we can dig them out without very high casualties, and anyway the Pakistanis are being un-cooperative. So he orders a few nuclear bunker-busters dropped on the entire area. The wind goes the wrong way, fallout drifts into Russia and/or China, hello WWIII.

      • onyomi says:

        That seems more probably than most other scenarios I can think of, but is it at all realistic? I mean, Trump obviously knows and cares about the importance of our relationships with Russia and China. Is it plausible he would nuke someone in their vicinity without checking with them behind the scenes? This seems to be based on the assumption that he would just order extreme action without consulting with anyone. What basis is there to believe that about him other than his Twitter diarrhea? Did he ever act like that when it mattered, i. e. in a business deal, say?

        My concern about Trump is more that he’ll start a trade war by trying to put huge taxes on imports (and that’s something he’s actually said he’d do), but there seems little reason to believe he’s eager to get into a hot war; in fact, as you say, maybe less so than with Hillary. (Though maybe trade war with China–>soured relations with China–>increased probability of actual war with China could happen; that seems to me the higher risk?)

        • The Nybbler says:

          China’s not dumb enough to start a hot war with the US over trade restrictions.

          Is it at all realistic for Trump to actually order a nuclear strike over a serious terrorist attack? Maybe very slightly. Worst actually-plausible scenario IMO is that he’d stomp into the war room swearing about how we’re going to “nuke them”, and his more level-headed advisors (i.e. all of them) would calm him down.

          But it’s more likely than China starting a hot war over US trade restrictions.

          • Corey says:

            his more level-headed advisors (i.e. all of them) would calm him down.

            Any evidence Trump tolerates underlings who would contradict him? I haven’t seen any, but you probably have better ideas of where to look.

          • onyomi says:

            Like I said, I wouldn’t expect a trade war to lead directly to war, but possibly to a souring of relations which might, long term, increase the probability of war.

            What’s that saying about “when the goods flow, the bombs don’t”? My bigger concern about Trump is that, by hindering global trade, he might increase the long run probability of a war by reducing nations’ financial incentives to avoid it.

      • JayT says:

        I do find it humorous that the Clinton campaign is both trying to say Trump is more likely to get into a war and at the same time isn’t tough enough on Russia.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      With whom would the nuclear war be happening and why?

      Ok, well let’s do process of elimination.

      Right now we have seven countries which we know have nuclear weapons, not including the US. We have five countries in possession of US bombs, although they can’t arm them without DoD codes or a way to bypass PAL. Israel probably has nuclear weapons. Iran is likely to have them soon.

      China
      France
      India
      Israel
      Iran
      North Korea
      Pakistan
      Russia
      UK
      + Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey

      Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and the UK are all NATO members. And most of them can’t even arm “their” bombs without Pentagon approval. So Trump would really have to work to get us into a war with them.

      China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia are all potentially enemy states. But our ties with China are very close, and Trump is already accused of being too dovish on Russia. So it would probably come down to very seriously mishandling the situations in Iran NK or Pakistan being the most plausible.

      Israel probably won’t nuke anyone who isn’t literally the second coming of Adolf Hitler.

      • onyomi says:

        Is there reason to believe a Trump administration would badly mishandle Iran, Pakistan, or NK situations as compared to a Clinton administration? Let’s grant that he is less stable than HRC and the obvious fact that he has less foreign policy experience; he also seems to take much more of an “America first” stance with respect to issues like NK, as in, “not our problem.”

        Let’s grant Trump is somewhat more likely to botch US involvement with a developing Iran or NK situation. Does that matter if he’s less likely to get involved in the first place?

      • AnonBosch says:

        Don’t forget Japan and South Korea; technologically advanced enough to build a nuclear arsenal, might feel obligated to do so given Trump’s comments, and live next to a crazy unpredictable nuclear state. Means, motive, opportunity.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          I thought about including Japan South Korea and Saudi Arabia in the list at first, but the thing about those three is that while I certainly believe they could assemble a bomb eventually it’s not clear to me how fast you can go from 0 to nuclear power.

          Assuming that they have working plans for a bomb, they’d still have a lot of steps to actually build the thing. We’ve seen recently that getting the materials, processing them, putting the device together and testing it without US approval isn’t impossible by any means. But it takes a while and is highly visible. Iran did most of that work already but those other countries would really have to scramble imo.

          John Schilling probably knows the answer to this though. And it seems like he’s voting on those two.

          • Zombielicious says:

            Afaik Japan has the capability to assemble a nuke fairly quickly, due to the active nuclear energy program and large reserves of plutonium.

          • Protagoras says:

            South Korea also has an active nuclear energy program. Despite the various obstacles, I’d probably put the timetable on a crash bomb building program for either South Korea or Japan in months, given their technical sophistication in general and their sophisticated nuclear energy programs. Iran had a lot of disadvantages they don’t have, and there’s also the question of whether Iran was really even trying, as opposed to putting on a show in order to have negotiating leverage.

            Saudi Arabia is another matter, perhaps more comparable to Iran, though they are planning their own nuclear energy program in the near future. And in any event they surely could make faster progress than Iran just due to having a considerably easier time accessing outside resources.

          • Iran was hampered by the need to maintain some level of secrecy. If the U.S. stops objecting to nuclear proliferation by its allies that problem goes away.

            Japan’s GNP is more than ten times as high as Iran’s.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Is it fair to require a precise scenario?

      “Europe is a powderkeg” in 1914 is different from “I think a Serbian military intelligence-run assassination of an Austro-Hungarian heir is going to succeed due to a series of coincidences, and then…”

      What worries me about Trump is his tendency to engage in unnecessary and counterproductive vendettas, and the way that he seems fundamentally not to care about policy issues, have advisers, etc.

      • onyomi says:

        I’m not saying “give me THE precise scenario,” I’m saying “give me A scenario.” Like, a careful observer in January, 1914 could probably have described many hypothetical, possible paths to a conflict among European powers without being able to guess precisely what would set off the powder-keg.

        I’m just saying “show me the powder keg and explain at least one plausible way Donald Trump lights it.”

        • dndnrsn says:

          Honestly, I can’t give anything more than worrying about a guy who is antagonistic, incurious, and mercurial in a position that important.

          • onyomi says:

            What is the evidence that he is all those things when it matters? He’s definitely not incurious, and he seems to have been able to be friendly and polite when visiting the president of Mexico, who had previously compared him to Hitler. If he were really so dangerously thin-skinned presumably he would not have been able to have an amicable meeting with such a person.

            Sure, he doesn’t seem as steady as say, Jeb Bush, but Hillary’s not entirely cuddly either. She seems to be kind of prickly and possibly vindictive when challenged as well.

            (Still voting for Johnson, the nicest and most genuine candidate in the race, btw)

          • dndnrsn says:

            A lot of the reporting about the bare-bones campaign, lack of campaign infrastructure, etc suggests someone who has a hard time taking on advisers and delegating things he thinks he could handle himself (obviously, as a real estate tycoon he needs to delegate and have lots of people doing different things, but I think delegating stuff you think you could do better yourself is different). That’s pretty “when it matters”, to me – it seems to have caused his campaign a lot of trouble.

        • houseboatonstyxb says:

          @ onyomi
          I’m just saying “show me the powder keg and explain at least one plausible way Donald Trump lights it.”

          Tl;dr – In response to some tweet of Trump’s, someone in some other country pushes their button and the dominoes start falling.

          Not to attempt math, but as more countries get better weapons, that chance grows. Or better delivery systems. Or find smarter ways to get through anti-terrorist defenses, and more damaging things to do then.

          • onyomi says:

            If part of the concern is not Trump starting a nuclear war, but some other leader starting one in reaction to Trump’s insulting behavior, we also have to take into account how Trump is perceived by other leaders.

            It may not be fair, but my sense is that the strongman leaders we have to be worried about, like Putin and Xi Jinping, have more respect for Trump than Hillary, perhaps for totally unfair, sexist reasons.

            Most European leaders who aren’t of the Farage or Le Pen variety probably respect Hillary more than Trump, but I’m not worried about a nuclear war with France.

          • John Schilling says:

            It may not be fair, but my sense is that the strongman leaders we have to be worried about, like Putin and Xi Jinping, have more respect for Trump than Hillary,

            What have either of those done to suggest that they have the slightest respect for Donald Trump? Desire to see him in the Oval Office, maybe, but that’s not the same thing. That may be exactly the opposite thing. So where’s the evidence of respect?

          • onyomi says:

            Well, I wouldn’t rate my certainty of my “sense” in this case all that highly, but Xi and Putin are both more Trump-like in outlook with respect to their own nations than Clinton, I think, and that may make them feel a kinship. Putin also supposedly called Trump “brilliant and talented,” though that, apparently was later called into question, and it may be, of course, that Putin thinks a Trump presidency will be better for him, rather than for America.

            Though that also raises the question: why would Putin expect a Trump presidency to be better for Russia? My best guess is he expects he’d have a freer hand in the region. Which means he expects Trump to be less interventionist than Clinton. Which seems like a lower probability of nuclear war with Russia, though maybe a slightly higher probability of Russian bullying in their own neighborhood.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @onyomi

            I don’t think you can analyse it that simply. Trump being less interventionist than Clinton could have second order effects: less intervention -> Putin pushes boundaries and annexes the whole of Ukraine (or more plausibly sets up a puppet government) -> tensions raised and war more likely. I.e. it is possible that how interventionist the President is might not affect the likelihood of the US getting involved in a war in Eastern Europe, if Putin always tries to act just below the level the President would intervene at. Trump could introduce more danger by being less predictable and causing Putin to misjudge the amount of things he can get away with. On the other hand, if Trump is less interventionist than Hillary that would have benefits elsewhere.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Does anybody remember how the first US-Iraq war started?

            Look at Trump’s statements about NATO in that context and you start to see why people get twitchy about all of the various ways Trump could get us enmeshed in conflicts with very uncertain outcomes. Hell, after intimating he is an isolationist, he has now proposed to permanently occupy ISIS held Syria and Iraq so that we can “take the oil” after we crush ISIS.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Does anybody remember how the first US-Iraq war started?

            I remember. I also remember how it ended, and got to see the 2nd one first hand. Ironically your comment is as much a condemnation of Clinton as it is of Trump.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @hlynkacg:
            You are going to need to unpack that for me. Neither Clinton is anywhere near power for the beginning of either of those wars.

          • Gazeboist says:

            Didn’t Putin actually call him “colorful” or something like that?

          • hlynkacg says:

            You are going to need to unpack that for me.

            Granted, Hillary had little if anything to do with the first gulf war. But she had a lot to do with the later stages of the second one, and was very much involved in the rise of ISIS, and creating the generally sorry state of foreign affairs.

            Considering Clinton’s history of enmeshing us in conflicts with uncertain inevitably messy outcomes I find it difficult to take objections to Trump on such grounds seriously.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @hlynkacg:
            Maybe I need to unpack the point I was trying make.

            The first Iraq war was (likely) completely avoidable had the US ambassador merely made it clear that the US would not look favorably on Iraq taking Kuwait and would regard it as a hostile act against American interests.

            Trump claims that not signalling what the US will do makes us more powerful and influential, and simultaneously signals that he may not live up to our NATO treaty obligations. Lack of clear signalling of actual US positions can very much lead to a hot war that we end up actually needing to take part in.

            And you are going to need to unpack your claims about Iraq, Syria and ISIS even further.

    • Corey says:

      Whoever is President has a huge amount of discretionary authority to start nuclear war. This is intentional – if you’re retaliating to an inbound strike there’s only a matter of minutes to launch if you’re gonna, and nobody wants the movie plot of “President orders a nuclear strike, underlings refuse out of conscience” to come to life so there’s no room in the process for counter-argument.

      Trump’s demonstrated thin skin, impulsivity and the inability to let a slight slide, none of which anyone wants in someone entrusted with such a responsibility. In a somewhat milder form this goes for conventional warfare as well.

      That said, I don’t think I’d rate it “likely” Trump would precipitate WWIII, but I’d think the differential risk might be, say, 10%, which is way too goddamned much.

      ETA: I missed the “he’s unstable” bit in your OP, which this post more or less boils down to.

      • onyomi says:

        Yeah, he’ll dash off a nasty tweet if you insult him, but that seems to have worked out pretty well for him so far. What is the evidence that he’s unstable when it comes to important decisions?

        Are there any cases, for example, of him torpedoing a good business deal over a personal slight?

        • gbdub says:

          That’s about where I’m at. Trump is certainly snarky, rude, politically incorrect, off-the-cuff, sometimes angry, whatever, in his public persona. But to go from that to seriously thinking that he would literally launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack, likely ending human civilization over a minor spat is a huge leap, and frankly says more about the person promoting that conclusion than it does about Trump.

          Also, if we’re going to go down that road of speculation – what about Hillary? She’s obviously much better at acting “presidential” in public, but it’s been reported that she (and the “Clinton machine” in general) can be pretty angry, vindictive, and hard to work with in private. We know Trump is prone to bluster – but shouldn’t we be more worried about the woman who has actually helped start wars?

          • DrBeat says:

            Your counterargument is basically that he is petty and vindictive and ruled by his emotions, but that he would recognize there is a line that it is too severe to cross and not do thing over that line.

            This is not an idea that is so common you can assume everyone does it; there are a LOT of people, people who behave as Trump does, who cannot separate out Things I Want To Do To Harm People Who Hurt My Feelings from Things It Is A Good Idea To Do.

            We should be exactly as worried about the woman who started actual wars, because this race is terrible, and being alive in this world is terrible, and nothing will ever improve.

          • a non mOus(e) says:

            Your counterargument is basically that he is petty and vindictive and ruled by his emotions

            No, the argument is that Trump, when engaged in a personal – repeat – personal dominance contest tries to win. In contrast, Hillary takes non-personal things personally – demanding Matt Lauer be fired for asking her softball follow up questions, stories of her behind the scenes behavior that include Bill expecting personal violence from her (from pagesix so take with a grain of salt, but there are lots of similar reports from lots of other sources) –

            The book claims she repeatedly screamed obscenities at her husband, Secret Service personnel and White House staffers — all of whom lived in terror of her next tirade.

            for example.

            Also in the real world, she started wars with zero concern as to the consequences. Oh, just like Bush? No, after the example that Bush gave of how exactly toppling ME dictators could go wrong – and her intervention went wrong in the exact same way.

          • John Schilling says:

            Also in the real world, she started wars with zero concern as to the consequences.

            Pretty sure that isn’t among the powers of the Secretary of State, or any single Senator,

          • cassander says:

            @John Schilling

            >Pretty sure that isn’t among the powers of the Secretary of State, or any single Senator,

            Hillary pretty much single handedly made the Libya intervention happen. She ran around building support for the US to get involved both domestically and abroad in the absence of instructions from the president to do so. As president, Obama is ultimately accountable for the war, but Hillary is who really made it happen.

          • Jaskologist says:

            but shouldn’t we be more worried about the woman who has actually helped start wars?

            I feel like this about a lot of Trump criticism. They’re true, and I agree with them, but they’re completely undermined by turning around and supporting Hillary.

            Where in the world has the international situation gotten more stable over the past 8 years? Hillary may not hold ultimate responsibility for that, but her fingerprints are all over it. Improving our relations with Russia were a particular project of hers, which she was going to solve with the power of her “smart diplomacy.” How’d that work out?

          • The idea that Trump would start a nuclear war because he was angry is conceivable, but I’m more concerned that his bad temper and sloppy way of talking could escalate an unnecessary conventional war.

        • I think this gets to a central question about Trump to which I do not know the answer. How much of his visible persona is real, how much is tactical?

          At the beginning of the campaign, the obvious guess was real. Why would he do things that were obviously going to lose him the nomination unless they were the things natural for him to do?

          But he won the nomination handily, which raises the possibility that the persona he was projecting was intelligently designed to get votes. If he wins the election … .

          • H. E. Pennypacker says:

            I was wondering about this the other day.

            I think there’s a good chance when he’s in the war room with the big boys the bluster will be gone and he’ll do whatever they advise him to do. If anything I’m more worried about him listening to neocon defence advisers who’ll want to continue the policy of stirring up conflicts all over the world than not listening to them.

      • JayT says:

        Does the president actually have a “huge amount of discretionary authority to start a nuclear war”? My guess is that if Obama woke up this morning and ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea it wouldn’t happen.

        • onyomi says:

          Yeah, overall, I think the image of someone’s “finger on a button” is a bit misleading and, perhaps, unhelpful. More like someone who could make a phone call which would set some scary things in motion pretty fast, though hopefully not entirely without oversight. Though I did find the image of the Russian foreign minister pressing a large red button (meant to symbolize a “reset” of US-Russian relations) held by Clinton to be a bit offputing.

          Like, I know this wasn’t the intent, but given history, do we really want the image of Russia and the US together pushing a large, red button?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Probably not. But if there were a rumor that missiles were inbound from NK, regardless of the truth of the rumor, it’s quite likely to happen.

          • Sandy says:

            Isn’t that why Obama has NORAD? So he can operate on fact rather than rumor?

          • I don’t think a rumor of missiles inbound from North Korea would do it. The reason for quick response back during the cold war was the fear that a Russian first strike could take out much of the U.S. retaliatory capacity.

            North Korea might, in a few years, be able to launch several missiles with one equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb on each. That could kill a lot of people. But it wouldn’t make a dent in the U.S. nuclear capacity.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Well assuming this rumors is getting to the president via “official means” a lot of things will already be in motion. Troops stationed in SK and Naval vessels in the western Pacific will have seen the launch, and called CINCPAC for guidance. Air force personnel in Alaska would be busting out their IAPs, some dude in a bunker under a corn field would be vaguely annoyed about having his lunch interrupted, and so on…

            “Pressing the button” isn’t so much a literal “missile launch” button as it is informing all those personnel that this is not a drill.

          • gbdub says:

            If missiles are inbound from NK, it will almost certainly be limited in scope and our (our meaning US, SK, and Japan) first response will be to attempt to intercept them with our various missile defense systems. If we successfully intercept, we will almost certainly still retaliate but the response might not be nuclear, and if it is it would likely be tactical nukes aimed at any nuclear capability NK had not already launched. That I think is one of the “stabilizing” effects of missile defense that didn’t really apply in the pre-proliferation MAD era – we now have the option to intercept a limited (or accidental) strike rather than launching immediate large-scale retaliation.

            If we fail to intercept and a nuke goes off over an American target, there will almost certainly be some degree of nuclear hellfire rained on NK, but even then we’d probably be careful to avoid irradiating Seoul.

            Then again it would be odd for NK to launch without also launching a simultaneous large scale conventional strike on SK, and at that point all bets are off.

        • Corey says:

          Here’s a Vox article about it; if you’re skittish about Vox as a source, they do quote Dick Cheney and a couple of experts.
          There are, apparently, intentionally no checks on Presidential authority in this area, to maintain deterrence credibility.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Interesting. I’ve heard that the UK nuclear system has so many locks that some people doubt whether it could ever be used (i.e. in the several hours it would take to pass all the layers of security, everyone would have died).

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-nuclear-weapon-launch/

            There are a few checks, but they are pretty limited. You’d need a coup/mass refusal at the Pentagon. Each individual ICBM launch site or submarine crew could also defect, but then the Pentagon would just switch to another.

          • Corey says:

            OTOH apparently a few admirals/generals stopped Obama from nuking Charleston, SC in 2013, though he had them fired afterwards. Link

          • Corey says:

            @sweenyrod: It came out a few years ago that, during the Cold War, our nukes that had numeric arming codes had them set to “000000” so as to not get in the way of quick launch. (Similarly, often law enforcement agencies don’t use crypto on their radios, because the threat of eavesdropping doesn’t outweigh the denial-of-service if keys are lost). Security is tricky.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I hope they’ve at least fixed that hole with a secure password like “nuclearbomb12345”.

          • bean says:

            There are no formal checks, but I suspect there are strong informal ones. It’s going to be pretty hard to convince the military aid to open the suitcase if you just feel like nuking someone.
            That, and the prospect of nuclear weapons tends to sober people. It worked on the Pakistanis and even (to some extent) the Norks, so I expect it will work on Trump.

          • JayT says:

            I think there is also good reason to tell everyone that there are no checks stopping the president even if there are. I just don’t believe that the president could just up and decide to nuke France.

          • Jiro says:

            OTOH apparently a few admirals/generals stopped Obama from nuking Charleston, SC in 2013, though he had them fired afterwards. Link

            According to your own link, that news story is fake.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Jiro

            No, it’s true. Yesterday he succeeding in nuking Seattle. It’s been replaced with a hologram.

          • Gazeboist says:

            And a damn good one, too.

          • Corey says:

            @Jiro: Sorry, bad attempt at a joke. I just stumbled over that story today in unrelated reading and thought it interesting to share given the connection to “refusing to nuke”.

          • gbdub says:

            The “all zeroes” nuclear codes were actually set up by SAC trying to sidestep civilian (i.e. the President and SecDef) controls over the military. SAC was very worried that a first strike would wipe out the civilian government and they’d be left sitting on their hands instead of retaliating, plus the general military disdain for civilian eggheads who thing they know how to run a war.

            I’d highly recommend the book “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser, which covers a lot of this, interwoven with a story about a major accident at a Titan II silo. It’s informative and sometimes very scary – apparently over the years several bombs had their non-nuclear explosives cook off, the US nukes in Europe were often guarded by nothing more than a locked door and one guy with a sidearm, etc.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Another recommendation for “Command and Control”. Very interesting book, and Schlosser as a writer is really good at cutting back and forth between small scale and large scale, or present and past.

        • John Schilling says:

          My guess is that if Obama woke up this morning and ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea it wouldn’t happen.

          Somewhere between “ordered a nuclear strike” and “wouldn’t happen”, has to be an actual mutiny, Whether that is or is not credible would depend on the circumstances. But that is the authority that comes with the office, and the US military is really big on Not Having Mutinies, Ever, But Especially Where Nukes Are Involved.

          • bean says:

            But is it a mutiny if the military aid stands there saying “Are you sure, Mr President?” until Section 4 of the 25th Amendment can be invoked? The system was set up to deal with inbound missiles, and the first few people in the chain all have access to information about said missiles, and thus no incentive not to stall if the President decides to start a nuclear war on his own.
            For that matter, the answer might well be “Mr. President, since there is no imminent threat, we believe it would be wise to refine the targeting plan for this specific circumstance instead of launching immediately.” Which is really hard to argue with. Put several people in the loop, and the questions are going to last long enough for him to be declared incapacitated.

          • John Schilling says:

            Stonewalling in the face of a direct order to stop stonewalling, asking questions after being directly ordered to shut up and follow orders, yes, that’s mutiny. The military is big on discussion before acting, but clear on the fact that the CO decides when the discussion stops and the action starts.

          • bean says:

            But at the same time, there’s the bits about not having to obey illegal/immoral orders. Orders to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on a foreign country arguably fall into that category, and I’d guess that there’s very carefully been no JAG determination on the issue. If the situation is at all one where nuclear weapon use makes sense, the officers will go along. If the President has randomly decided to nuke France, they stall.

          • CatCube says:

            @John Schilling

            Yes, the military has strong norms towards obeying orders once they’re made, but there is a limit there.

            The office I work in is in a major American city. If the colonel were to call me an the 4 other military officers in our command into his office tomorrow and tell us to pick up rifles, go out to the balcony, and start firing into the street below, we’re all going to have some questions. If, on the other hand, there’s a riot outside with people beating on the doors chanting “kill,” handing us weapons and telling us to shoot anyone who comes through the door is going to probably be obeyed without too much pushback. Orders will get treated a little differently if they’re from somebody apparently in the grip of madness.

            If there’s building political tensions and an air defense emergency alert from NORAD, I expect that the NMCC is going to quickly comply. If we’re at DEFCON 5 and the president calls up with an attack order out of the clear blue sky, I’d be surprise if it didn’t get slow-rolled. One obvious way to dodge the mutiny/insubordination question would be the same I would use in my hypothetical “firing from the balcony” above: orders to do something illegal aren’t valid. In my hypothetical, the order is obviously illegal. Making an unprovoked nuclear attack on somebody we’re not at war with is at least colorably illegal, enough so that I’d be comfortable with my chances in a court martial.

            Now, all of this would depend on the personality of the officers in the NMCC on that particular day, so it’s not a sure thing, but I agree with bean that there’s at least some informal ways that it could be stopped.

    • AnonBosch says:

      I think there’s a good case to be made for the scenario where Trump causes Putin to overplay his hand with regard to NATO. Suppose Putin decides that Trump’s standoffish attitude towards NATO means he has the green light to play the Oppressed Russian Minority card in the Baltics. Regardless of Trump’s protection racket bloviating, I suspect the combined freaking out of the entire continent of Europe and the American establishment would force him to act. (I’m also going off of Trump’s predilection for criticizing intervention only in hindsight; there isn’t a single thing he’s criticized Bush or Obama for that he didn’t also advocate in the moment.)

      This would be a larger scale version of the miscalculation Saddam Hussein made in Gulf War I. Incompetent American diplomacy led him to believe that he could get away with invading Kuwait.

      • H. E. Pennypacker says:

        Why on earth would Putin want to invade any of the Baltic states?

        The only possible scenario I could see is if there was some political change in those states that lead to the Russian minorities becoming deeply oppressed and Putin coming under intense domestic pressure to defend them. The “Putin wants to invade Europe” meme is just completely ridiculous, there are pretty much no positives for him or Russia and a shit load of negatives.

        • hlynkacg says:

          That’s satire right?

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Why on earth would Putin want to invade any of the Baltic states?

          Why on earth would Putin want to invade Ukraine?

          • H. E. Pennypacker says:

            Do you genuinely believe that Russia has invaded Ukraine?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @H. E. Pennypacker

            As opposed to what? It being justified self-defence? The Russian army being welcome guests of the oppressed Ukrainian peoples? The very concept of Ukraine being a dirty Western lie?

          • H. E. Pennypacker says:

            I’m genuinely unsure what you could be referring to as an invasion.

            There were Russian troops in Crimea but they were there already so I don’t see how it could possibly be classed as an invasion. People quibble over just how free the vote to become part of Russia was but I haven’t seen any serious analysis that denies that the majority of Crimeans favoured reunification with Russia, they just question whether the majority was quite as overwhelming as the referendum suggested.

            As for the separatist areas of Eastern Ukraine, again, I’m not sure you can deny that most of the people in these regions prefer reunification with Russia. If this is what Putin wanted he could actually invade and defeat the Ukranian army. What he seems to be doing instead is providing support in terms of weaponry and training and probably some fairly small-scale support in terms of manpower.

          • AnonBosch says:

            There were Russian troops in Crimea in the same sense that there are American troops in Japan. They occupied a specific base on a small part of mutually agreed-upon land. That’s quite a bit different from taking their insignia off and storming the regional parliament.

            The fact that an invasion is irredentist doesn’t make it not an invasion. And saying “no one denies X” is a pretty blatant rhetorical sneak for simply asserting X without evidence. Plenty of regions in the world have cultural sympathies that cross borders without the need for tanks to enforce them.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Do you genuinely believe that Russia has invaded Ukraine?

            Well now, I may be just a simple country lawyer but when I see military vehicles and troops crossing the border from Russia into Ukraine against the wishes of the Ukrainian government, it’s hard not to think that it’s an invasion of some sort.

          • Sfoil says:

            Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine in the eastern region, period. If you think the fact that Russian forces removed their insignia and acted in concert with local militias somehow changes this fact then you’re a fool; this is what state warfare looks like right now.

            Regarding Crimea, it may not technically have been an invasion in some sense because Russian troops were already present, but the Russian government annexed territory claimed and governed by another state and had their soldiers point guns at the local government. “Coup d’état” might be a better description there.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Empire is its own justification.

          • H. E. Pennypacker says:

            I’m not sure that’s really true.

            Empire is an important point and one that at least merits a proper response. Throughout its history Russian imperial ambitions have largely centred on surrounding itself with smaller, buffer states that are under its control and form a barrier between it and other powerful and potentially hostile states. There is also a strand of nostalgic Russian nationalism that believes that the surrounding states like Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia etc. should be firmly under Russian control.

            But it’s incredibly unlike that Putin wants to return to this situation for nostalgic reasons. I’m sure he would if it was still strategically advantageous but nuclear weaponry vastly reduces the utility of surrounding yourself with vassal states and invading creates far more problems than any meagre protection that taking them over would provide.

            In fact, even without NATO and the threat it of retaliation for invading them it still would be a strategic blunder for Russia. The cost of taking over these countries and occupying them would put a big strain on an already creaking economy.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            I’m sure he would if it was still strategically advantageous but nuclear weaponry vastly reduces the utility of surrounding yourself with vassal states and invading creates far more problems than any meagre protection that taking them over would provide.

            You seem to have forgotten that ABMs exist.

            Arguably one of the reasons Putin is taking the stance he is on Russian minorities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is precisely to give himself a justification to invade countries which might host American missile defense systems.

          • H. E. Pennypacker says:

            Arguably one of the reasons Putin is taking the stance he is on Russian minorities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is precisely to give himself a justification to invade countries which might host American missile defense systems.

            Yes, the encroachment of American military power on Russias borders is by far the most likely thing to trigger a Russian invasion of one of its neighbours. But it doesn’t really play into the whole “Putin is desperate to invade the Baltics” narrative, seeing as the missile systems are not going to be based in the Baltics.

          • “Throughout its history Russian imperial ambitions have largely centred on surrounding itself with smaller, buffer states that are under its control and form a barrier between it and other powerful and potentially hostile states.”

            How, in that case, did Imperial Russia get to the Pacific? And China. And Afghanistan. And Persia.

            By 1900, Russia controlled, roughly speaking, the northern half of Asia plus a fair chunk of eastern Europe, including much of Finland. As in “ruled” not “had smaller buffer states under its control.”

        • DrBeat says:

          Why on earth would Putin want to invade any of the Baltic states?

          …”Because he can” is all the justification anyone needs to hurt people.

        • H. E. Pennypacker says:

          Also just to be clear, I’m not saying he wouldn’t invade because he’s a great guy. I don’t think he would invade because it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do and I don’t think he’s that stupid.

          • Was it stupid when the communists seized the Baltic states?

            At present they are richer and more developed than Russia, militarily weak, and have a significant Russian ethnic minority.

        • Unaussprechlichen says:

          Domestic pressure? Don’t be funny. Putin is not afraid of domestic pressure. Putin is the domestic pressure.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        How can the exact same case not be made for a Clinton administration, assuming it continues the behavior of the Obama one? Obama stood down during the Green Revolution in Iran, since then completely caving to become the mullahs’ bagman and PR consultant, and backed off his “red line” in Syria. I would not be particularly shocked if an administration following that pattern of behavior blustered loudly about how important Latvia is and then fell silent when the little green men started crossing the border anyway.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          I like to think that the next American president would care slightly more about an attack on a NATO country than revolutions and civil wars in non-Nato countries where neither side is even a nominal US ally.

        • AnonBosch says:

          First, I don’t think a Clinton administration would continue the behavior of an Obama one. Clinton is decidedly more hawkish. Second, Iran and Syria are not NATO members. Third, those were situations in which we backed off an invasion of choice that would’ve seen us toppling the established government on (putative) behalf of rebels with unclear and possibly conflicting motives. That’s very different from a situation in which an established ally with a mutual defense treaty is invaded by an outside country.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Then perhaps it would have been a good idea not to make noisy and public threats before backing off, as that gives the impression that our threats can be ignored.

            Clinton probably would respond militarily if Putin moved into the Baltics. But Putin is more likely to assume he could get away with such a move, and therefore try something that will end catastrophically for everyone, because of the general impression that American threats can be taken lightly.

          • AnonBosch says:

            I don’t agree with Obama’s policies in Syria but even so this seems like you’re just trying to force-fit generic indictments of the Blue Tribe onto disparate fact patterns. The parent comment requested a specific hypothesis for Trump increasing x-risk, and I’m describing a mechanism specific to statements he’s made, personally, regarding NATO.

            Do you think Putin is not aware that Obama and Clinton are different people? Why does a different President backing down in a non-NATO situation outweigh, in your estimation, Trump’s explicit statements regarding NATO specifically?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Do you think Putin is not aware that Obama and Clinton are different people?

            Putin might be aware that Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State, and therefore it’s plausible that she’d share his policy tendencies. He might be mistaken about that, but it’s the sort of mistake that could lead to war at least as plausibly as any of these Trump scenarios.

    • Zombielicious says:

      My opinion is that the nuclear war talk is overblown, and Hillary is at least as much of a warmonger as Trump, but I can still imagine scenarios. Most likely would seem to be it resulting from escalation of an existing war, which occurs either due to another random terrorist attack (9/11) or one of them blundering their way into some major armed conflict (Iraq). Except for actual nuclear attacks none of that seems to have a negligible probability of occurring.

      Getting to actual nuclear war is harder to imagine because you’d have to assume it probably occurs between India and Pakistan, or control over nuclear arms gets so bad that one is used in a terrorist attack (e.g. North Korea, random black marketers, someone’s intelligence agency sells them to someone). I can’t really imagine any other feasible way that it happens. Hence the talk of nuclear war from a Trump presidency being pretty overblown. But major large-scale global conflict doesn’t seem that terribly unreasonable, regardless of who gets elected.

    • Vaniver says:

      There are two sorts of nuclear war:

      1. War with Russia, in which almost everyone (if not everyone) on Earth dies.

      2. War with someone else, in which at least one country is wrecked but human civilization goes on.

      If you care mostly about x-risk (because, say, you value future humans in a discounted way, instead of just current humans), the first is the main probability to watch. I think Clinton is worse choice on it, because of her hawkishness and personal animosity with Putin. I think Trump’s general stance of ‘threatening unreliability’ is mostly posturing that actually increases security, but I worry that it trades off x-risk security for conventional security.

      That is, someone is less likely to sink a US naval vessel if they think it will lead to nuclear war, but if they are involved in a major conflict with the US it’s more likely to be nuclear. If you value current lives linearly, this might be a good trade, but if you’re mostly worried about keeping civilization going, this is bad.

      • John Schilling says:

        There are two sorts of nuclear war:

        1. War with Russia, in which almost everyone (if not everyone) on Earth dies.

        We’ve been through this here before, repeatedly, and no. All-out nuclear war between the US and Russia might exceed 1E9 fatal casualties; it would not kill even a majority of Earth’s population. Yes, we know about fallout and nuclear winter; without those you don’t even get to 1E8 dead

        • cassander says:

          After a billion die in the war, though, and you wreck the global industrial supply chain in the process of killing them, how long is it before a huge share of everyone else dies because they don’t know how to grow food?

          • Civilis says:

            With Europe, the US and Russia out of the picture, what happens when China realizes that it’s now the sole superpower and starts to act like it? And how long before that leads to war with India (nuclear armed) or Japan or Taiwan (have the technological know-how to arm themselves really quickly and are likely to do so as soon as the US nuclear umbrella is gone?).

            For that matter, what happens to the middle east once Israel’s only real ally is gone? I bet that ends up with a lot of mushroom clouds as well.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            For that matter, what happens to the middle east once Israel’s only real ally is gone? I bet that ends up with a lot of mushroom clouds as well.

            Isn’t it the other way around, with Israel kicking their neighbors’ ass without being restrained by foreign diplomatic concerns?

          • cassander says:

            @Whatever Happened To Anonymous

            You are precisely right. Now that the arab countries don’t have access to limitless quantities of soviet material, the US restrains Israel far more than it empowers it.

          • Civilis says:

            Without the US/Europe/the UN, Israel might lose its ethical constraints, but it doesn’t become more powerful. It might have the manpower to pull a little ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and Gaza Strip to give it defensible borders, but it doesn’t have the manpower to expand beyond that.

            For a country the size of Israel, there’s also the question of how long its high-tech military will be able to function without foreign parts / supplies, which dry up without trade with the US / Europe. Once those jets stop flying, the IDF looks a lot less impressive.

            It’s Arab neighbors have the manpower to crush Israel, even without US/European/Soviet technology and weapons. Right now, some of those governments are only stable thanks to US/European support (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states). Without the US, they quickly get overthrown by the hard-line Islamic fundamentalists (and that likely also costs Israel the rest of its oil supply). Meanwhile, any check on the government of Iran developing / using nuclear weapons (or chemical, or biological) is also gone.

            There is the chance that with the US gone, Israel would pre-emptively knock out anyone looking to get nukes. However, Pakistan already has them… and would lose any restraints on selling them.

          • cassander says:

            >Without the US/Europe/the UN, Israel might lose its ethical constraints, but it doesn’t become more powerful

            I didn’t say they became more powerful, I said they become less constrained, though they would be the the only country in the area able to build and maintain high tech military equipment.

            >It’s Arab neighbors have the manpower to crush Israel, even without US/European/Soviet technology and weapons.

            They’ve tried it before, repeatedly. They’ve failed, repeatedly. And Israel already has nukes, after a giant shoot off they’ve have no hesitation about using them on Iran.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            The common assumption is that all the Arab states fall to fundamentalists who then attack Israel, but I have to wonder about that. The track record of extremists seizing those countries is mixed at best and often depends on a democratic election, and I don’t see why existing governments sensible enough to realize that invading Israel could get them nuked (Egypt, for example) wouldn’t be as brutal and undemocratic as necessary to put down the extremists.

          • Sandy says:

            Well, sometimes the extremists are so numerous that existing governments struggle to put them down. Hezbollah is inextricably woven into Lebanon’s government now, and back in the 70’s the Palestinians in Jordan were so numerous that the PLO went to war with King Hussein to try and overthrow the monarchy so that the entire nation of Jordan could be transformed into an anti-Israel war machine. It is widely believed that King Abdullah’s marriage to Queen Rania, a Palestinian woman, had the aim of preventing a situation like that from happening again.

      • Dahlen says:

        1. War with Russia, in which almost everyone (if not everyone) on Earth dies.

        Elaborate, please. How would that unfold?

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Nuclear missiles are fired, land in Russian and American cities, and explode.

          • Dahlen says:

            Oh, gee, thanks. That’ll teach me not to ask a question ever again on here.

          • hlynkacg says:

            This isn’t an 80s techno thriller, there are other countries you know.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Yes, and? How do you get from “missiles explode in cities” to “almost everyone (if not everyone) on Earth dies”? Not everyone lives in Russian or American cities.
            (Proof by counterexample: I’ve got some friends who live in a small Canadian town.)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            I was largely being facetious regarding the “war with Russia part” and not necessarily the second. But I think it is likely other nuclear countries might get involved, and probably more importantly large amounts of infrastructure will be destroyed, causing many deaths from starvation. I agree that is unlikely that literally everyone would die. I don’t think anyone can be confident that the total wouldn’t be in the billions; we’ve not had many nuclear winters before.

          • Sfoil says:

            That “literally everyone on Earth would die” is an exaggeration, but consider:

            1) Immediate deaths from counterforce targeting — the combatants nuke military facilities with low- and mid-yield warheads. Particularly obnoxious/dangerous are attacks on American military facilities in the Far East and Europe, which would possibly motivate third countries to pile on.
            2) Immediate deaths from countervalue targeting: high-yield warheads dropped on population centers and trade hubs.
            3) Disruption of global trade networks: lots of people not located at or near either of the two types of targets are reliant for survival–at least at their current consumption levels–of goods and services formerly produced or transported through the devastated areas. How many? I don’t know. Probably a lot, especially in the countries involved and their immediate neighbors.
            4) Short-term environmental effects: radiation. Chernobyl will look like a joke. There won’t be anywhere near enough resources to actually determine in detail what places actually are and aren’t dangerous for years either.
            5) Long-term environmental effects: nuclear winter may or may not be a real thing, but if it happened it would be obviously kill a lot of people.

          • “lots of people not located at or near either of the two types of targets are reliant for survival–at least at their current consumption levels–of goods and services formerly produced or transported through the devastated areas. ”

            This gets us back to my repeated point about a living wage. We live in an extraordinarily rich society, with consumption levels easily an order of magnitude, in value terms, above what it takes to keep alive. After a full scale nuclear war very few Americans would be able to live at their current consumption levels, but that doesn’t tell us how many would die.

    • John Schilling says:

      Trump’s statements re US alliances would very likely have both Japan and South Korea trying to develop independent nuclear arsenals, which they would have the means to do. Even if Trump tries to walk back those statements once he’s in office; he wouldn’t be trusted on that front.

      Note that South Korea’s strategic doctrine is already based on preemptive strike if it looks like the North is about to start something big, tempered by the fact that they (probably) understand that they can’t decapitate the North Korean leadership with conventionally-armed ballistic missiles.

      Note that everyone in the region harbors a not-really-secret suspicion that Japan is just looking for an excuse to reinstate the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Including a fair number of Japanese themselves. More generally, of (China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan), every one of those nations distrusts, fears, and to some extent hates the other three, and would be happy to play the “let’s you and him” fight game with any of the others. And only the Chinese have any great experience with the responsible command and control of nuclear weapons.

      Now throw in all the unresolved territorial disputes that are being resolved by various sorts of saber-rattling. And remove the moderating influence of the United States of America, except that if nukes start flying China and North Korea won’t be all that confident that the US hasn’t or isn’t about to side with its recent allies.

      Enjoy.

    • bean says:

      Directly? No. Looking at it another way, I’m more comfortable with Trump, saddled with the weight of the US government having them than I am with North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan having them.
      (No, I’m not a Trump supporter. I just think we need to keep these risks in perspective.)
      Indirectly? Maybe, but I’m not sure Hillary would be any better. The likely route here is weakening the US nuclear umbrella, which Obama has already started. Trump’s neo-isolationism is seriously scary, but Hillary’s likely policy choices are in the same band of bad.

  9. Corey says:

    I remember when the weirdest thing in this campaign was a candidate defending himself against accusations that he *didn’t* stab a dude. Good times.
    ETA: meant to be a reply to the Pepe thread

  10. Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

    For pretty much every rational person, the joint postulate:

    “The views of James Hansen and Pope Francis,
    in regard to climate change,
    are essentially correct both scientifically and morally.”

    has during August 2016 gained substantially in Bayesian likelihood.

    Based strictly on the observational evidence, that is.

    Isn’t this assessment objectively correct?

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Somehow it’s always weather when it contradicts the story, but climate change when it confirms it.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        I distinctly recall people arguing that the lack of major hurricane activity for several years was just more evidence for climate change. Then when a perfectly ordinary hurricane finally did show up a few weeks ago, that was also more evidence for climate change. Let us say that the discourse is not unpredictable.

        Snark aside, and I do agree that average temperatures are increasing, it is not clear why accepting that fact means we absolutely must explicitly violate the Constitution to “sign” a deal with China where we have to reduce our emissions while they get to keep increasing theirs and won’t suffer any consequences if they cheat. “Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done” appears to be where the logic stops.

    • Corey says:

      Well, the lukewarmist case justified the usual 1998 dodge as probably-cyclical despite no evidence. I assume now they will update to claim the cycle is 18 years long with no other changes. And in a few years they’ll just use 2016 as a baseline the way they were using 1998.

      Given the long timespans involved in natural climate change relative to both human lifetimes and anthropogenic climate change, literally any change can be handwaved away as natural variation by the sufficiently motivated.

    • AnonBosch says:

      I would only dispute “substantially.” I don’t think one particular month in one particular temperature series matters all that much when you’re talking about climate change. Really, anything shorter than decadal scale leaves you open to cherry-picking.

      You can be assured the “hiatus” argument (in the sense that it will be possible to draw a zero trend line) will return as soon as RSS/UAH dips a little further. Contrarians will have to be more blatant about it by starting directly at the peak of 1998, but I think facts stopped mattering in this debate a while ago.

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      AnonBosch: asserts “facts [regarding climate change] stopped mattering in this debate a while ago.”

      In month-by-month political debate, you are correct. Yet considered decade-by-decade, STEAM-facts exert an irresistible force, don’t they?

      The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science has been converted by the facts, not only in regard to “Sustainable Humanity and Sustainable Nature“, but also in regard to inter-relating topics like “Human Neuroplasticity and Education” and “Children and Sustainable Development.”

      Isn’t this a flooding tide of progressive history? Against which the willfully ignorant alt-right rages, and against which the counter-Enlightenment swims … always in vain?

      Trump’s alt-right base dreams that STEAM-facts don’t matter — and in the short-run these Trumpish ideologues are sporadically right (which provides flickering hopes to the alt-right) — yet in the long-run they’re always wrong. Fortunately! 🙂

      These unbounded neuroplastic realities are incredibly obvious, aren’t they Mandrake?

      • “STEAM-facts exert an irresistible force, don’t they?”

        You change the name you post under, but maintain the same irritating stylistic quirks. Deliberate, or you just can’t help yourself?

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        It’s true that my comments provide more references to the scholarly STEAM-literature than all other SSC commenters put together.

        For some folks, abundant STEAM-links provide affirming evidence of an Enlightenment that retains its irrepressible (literally) historical, philosophical, mathematical, moral, religious, scientific, and cross-cultural vitality after 350 years and more.

        For other folks, these same “irritating” links serve “a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the (((history of man))).”

        Isn’t that a fair summary? Why is SSC (deplorably, as it seems to me) evolving to become a support group for the second, willfully ignorant, kind of folks?

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          You realize you’re talking to a guy who’s actually Jewish right?

          Using the (((echo))) brackets to mock his view of the situation is a particularly bizarre choice. Think about it, if he was the sort to employ a coincidence detector his own name would be bracketed. It makes no sense and doesn’t advance your argument.

          Also I dispute that you link to more STEM articles than the rest of us. Back when I was doing the SSCience threads you contributed exactly one study, and a rather fluffy one at that, compared to more than a dozen from other posters. And that’s putting aside the twin facts that you don’t read most of what you link here and that quite a large fraction of it is reposts of old material you’ve already linked on SSC or Shtetyl Optimized before.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Lol … definitely the members of the Jewish community — like pretty much every community — remain sharply divided in regard to the merits (or not) of the 21st century’s STEAM-Enlightenment.

            Please be assured that few people would feel out of place at our family’s various reunions, dinners, and picnics … where all are welcomed, and opinions and ethnicities alike are diverse (to say the least).

            On the other hand, the “never Trump” faction at our family get-togethers encompasses 100% of the writers, historians, painters, musicians, scientists, mathematicians, lawyers, scientists, engineers, healthcare providers, teachers, family farmers, construction workers, small business owners, conservationists, veterans, activists, gays, immigrants, feminists, Reaganites, Jews, Catholics, Methodists, Friends, Seventh Day Adventists, Buddhists, and deist philosophers (there is considerable multiple coverage).

            No previous candidate has united our family in this way! 🙂

            As for alt-righters, there are none (or at least, none who speak up). Because what self-respecting alt-righters would care to embrace, or help to sustain, such a heterogeneous family?

            Our family can no more disentangle its mutual affections, than Donald Trump can unwind his Putin-contaminated business interests! 🙂

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Oh great. Now my Irish, Mexican, and Unitarian relatives are disappointed at being left off the family-list (accidentally).

            They’re never-Trump too, obviously … being mostly from outside the Hajnal Line and all that.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Who’s that John Sidles who wrote that “history of man” comment? His writing style is kind of familiar.

  11. Fahundo says:

    There’s already a subthread about this.

  12. TMB says:

    What’s the name for the thing that they do in traditional or Irish music that makes it sounds kind of wistful, (but content)? I think they do it in country music too. Is it a minor key or something?

    I feel like that is my music. Is that the traditional British form of music?

    Best example:
    Wild Rover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6zxMK6JFI

    Others:
    Days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNJcd1pTaL0
    Turkey in the Straw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnZxfkkoKQ
    Coventry Carol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8L71BjTL8M

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I don’t think there is a particularly specific harmonic cause. Other than Coventry Carol, those songs mostly just use chords I, IV and V (in a major key), just like pretty much every piece of popular music since forever. Coventry carol is in a minor key. I think the feeling comes more from the instrumentation, calm tempo and lyrics.

    • I’m pretty sure it’s the tempo, not the key. It’s very steady and comfortable.

      “Irish Rover” is definitely major. “Days” is probably major. “Turkey in the Straw” has a very major melody, but they’re doing something complicated with the harmony. I can’t tell what key the Coventry Carol is in (I suspect it’s modal), but it’s got a a Picardy third.

      Now I’m wondering whether there’s a sort of super-major music. “Irish Rover” is major as I understand music theory, but it doesn’t sound as strongly major to me as South African or Mexican music.

    • TMB says:

      I feel as if some of the vocal high notes are just slightly lower than you would expect for a totally cheerful song, and the more Irish, the lower they get?

      If I listen to days by the Kinks and compare it to days as sung by Kirsty MacColl it seems as if that’s the difference, but I might be imagining it.

      • Deiseach says:

        The Wild Rover” is meant to be slightly nostalgic and rueful, it’s a former hellraiser deciding he’s going to clean up his act. The Irish Rover is just good old get-drunk-and-belt-it-out fun 🙂

        I’ve been a Wild Rover for many’s the year
        And I spent all my money on whiskey and beer
        And now I’m returning with gold in great store
        And I never will play the Wild Rover no more

        versus

        We had one million bales of the best Sligo rags
        We had two million barrels of stones
        We had three million sides of old blind horses hides,
        We had four million barrels of bones.
        We had five million hogs, we had six million dogs,
        Seven million barrels of porter.
        We had eight million bales of old nanny goats’ tails,
        In the hold of the Irish Rover.

    • Deiseach says:

      On the broad topic of Irish music, there’s one reel – The Silver Spear – that sounds ‘American’ to my ears. I imagine this is because Irish/Scottish/English music went to America with immigrants and some, at least, of the tunes got a new coat of paint and a new name in their new home.

      So maybe it’s less that “The Silver Spear” sounds like an American tune, and more that some American tunes are composed in/derived from an Irish style?

      • sweeneyrod says:

        That version also sounds somewhat American (to my non-Irish ears), but I think that’s largely because it’s being played quite fast, with out any swing, on quite a twangy banjo. If you remove those features (e.g. like this) I think it sounds much more Irish.

  13. sweeneyrod says:

    Many people seem to be under the misapprehension that because the main healthcare system in the UK is nationalised, private healthcare is forbidden (although I think that is somewhat true in Canada). Actually, private healthcare is perfectly legal, as evidenced by this interesting business, which provides video appointments with GPs and prescriptions for £20 per month.

  14. Deiseach says:

    Starch is now the sixth taste?

    Right, so this explains why we Irish love “a big ball of flour drenched in butter” when it comes to spuds 🙂

    (Now I’ve made myself hungry!)

    • This is reminding me of the time I tried eating some fake chicken– on the tip of my tongue, it tasted like chicken with black pepper, but when it got to the back of my tongue, my reaction was “Just a goddam minute, this isn’t chicken, this is starch!”.

  15. TMB says:

    Dank. Cringe.

    Why have these words suddenly become popular? Has it just reached some tipping point where middle aged people (such as myself) have finally become aware of them, or did these words just appear from nowhere.

    Also, I don’t like the word cringe. It reminds me of how the word “sad” was used when I was at school – “you like Thomas the Tank Engine, that’s *sad*, man”… “OMG… that guy tried to do something – he is so *cringe*”

    I think we should force children to say exactly what they mean – “I feel nothing but contempt for you.”

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I think “cringe” has been a cool teen word for a long time (or at least used in magazines and suchlike aimed at teenagers). According to Google Trends, “dank” has increased in popularity by 20 percentage points since May. It started slowly growing in popularity in about August 2014.

      More generally, you raise a point about the mainstreaming of memey internet culture (I’m not sure if it’s an interesting point).

    • Anon. says:

      “Dank” was used for a while to denote high quality weed, but it really took off when it was applied to memes (half-ironically, and combined with a sense of disappointment at the times):

      >Born too late to explore the earth
      >Born too soon to explore the galaxy
      >Born just in time to browse dank memes

    • Brad (The Other One) says:

      To me, “cringe” doesn’t mean “contempt”. It means I’m am forced to vicariously experience humiliation on your behalf which is … unpleasant at best. It means your actions not only make you look shameful, they make me feel ashamed for my similarities to you, real or imagined. It’s not “ha ha loser” it’s “no no no no why are you doing this stop please stop”. It’s the social/emotional equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard.

      • TMB says:

        I think vicarious embarrassment must be closely related to contempt. Perhaps people are just nicer these days, and less likely to give in to it.

        I remember once reading an old person remarking upon how the meaning of the word “pity” had changed to “contempt” (“I don’t hate you, I pity you!”). The same thing happened with “sad” when I was a child, I wonder if something similar is happening with cringe now?

        I wonder if this is a modern phenomena.

      • Jaskologist says:

        To me, it’s a case of what CS Lewis was talking about as the dangers of national repentance. It’s a way to hurl accusations from behind a shield of false humility.

        • Brad (The Other One) says:

          Maybe some people do use it that way, I have no doubt of it. I’m just saying, for me, ‘cringe’ is something that invokes an intensely adverse physiological reaction in me, so much so I almost stop caring about the topic or “source” of the cringe because of my own reaction.

          Example: There’s an episode of The (U.S.) Office where Michael Scott falsely claims to have paid for the college tuition of an entire inner city school and he, (not believing he’d ever be called out on it) sheepishly grins the most pained expression I’ve ever see in television as the kids throw celebrations around him. I literally could not watch it; the vicarious feelings of anxiety and shame were too intense. I imagine this is how people, maybe, used to feel when they got scared on the behalf of a character in a horror movie.

      • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

        “I’m am forced to vicariously experience humiliation on your behalf which is … unpleasant at best. It means your actions not only make you look shameful, they make me feel ashamed for my similarities to you, real or imagined.”

        So, what the Germans call “Fremdscham“? (The associated verb is “fremdschämen“.)

    • Fahundo says:

      Has it just reached some tipping point where middle aged people (such as myself) have finally become aware of them

      Exactly this. Both words have been popular for years.

    • onyomi says:

      The one recent neologism I absolutely can’t brook is “on fleek,” maybe because it is a whole nonsensical phrase.

  16. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #20
    This week we are discussing “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov.
    Next time we will discuss “True Names” by Vernor Vinge.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      The Asimov story; the one that everyone has read. Probably because the ending is so great; that last lines are really memorable. I find the heat death of the universe pretty scary, so I like the story’s hopeful tone towards the issue. Not sure whether it’s implying a cyclical universe or whether AC was just making a biblical reference, though.

      • Mary says:

        Actually “Nightfall” tends to get praised higher.

        It was Asimov’s own personal favorite, though, and whenever someone came up to him and says he remembers a story’s plot, but not the title, and he’s not even sure if Asimov wrote it — it was ALWAYS “The Last Question.”

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          “Nightfall” gets more critical acclaim, but I get the impression that “The Last Question” is more popular/famous/widely read.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I have pretty much run out of short stories to post. I have a plan to replenish my supply, but I am going to need some time to pull it off, and to be honest I am not very sure if I am actually going to do it or not, so in the meantime we are going to be doing novellas instead. Keep in mind that the novellas are much longer than the short stories were, so if you want to participate in the upcoming discussions it would probably be a good idea to read them ahead of time. The updated master list is here.

      • arbitrary_greay says:

        All of Corey Doctorow’s works are available online, including his short stories.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          Yes, and there is the back catalog of Clarkesworld and Lightspeed and the public domain issues of Astouding and so on. The problem is not a lack of potential stories, it’s that in order for a story to be posted I have to read it, like it, think that it lends itself to interesting discussion, and come up with something to say about it.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Does anyone else confuse this with Frederic Brown’s “Answer”?

      • LHN says:

        Yes.

        (Though I kind of wish the result of my search had justified the response: “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER”.)

    • hlynkacg says:

      The Last Question is one of those stories that is so conceptually perfect that it is cliché.

      I’m a big Vinge, fan but I will save my comments for the next thread. As far as the next story, have we done Anthem? If not I’ll have to dig through my pile, as we’ve already hit most of my top picks.

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      It’s hard to say anything about The Last Question other than “if you haven’t read it, read it. If you have, re-read it”.

      When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too.

      Old SF always sends me on long wiki tangents, trying to find out when some out of date fact was discovered to be wrong.
      Learning scientific history is at least as entertaining as studying science itself, and Asimov’s history-based popular science essays have always been favourites of mine. The table of elements makes a lot more intuitive sense when you see it grow and develop over the centuries, for example.

      • Mary says:

        Since that’s put in a character’s mouth, is it wrong? For that it would have to be something implausible for that character to believe, and as I recollect, he wasn’t any kind of astronomical expert.

        Especially since his point is that entropy is not localized to the solar system, and he may be eliding a few details to convey that.

    • Deiseach says:

      I’m not sure if “The Last Question” counts as what is called “high-concept” but in its way it’s a perfect example of conceptual art: the idea is what counts and how it is worked out is a secondary concern.

      The move from big huge giant room-sized computers down to “small enough a private citizen can own one” is both historically interesting and genuine SF-forecasting. As an example of melded hard-SF (making predictions based on extrapolations of current knowledge and technology) and soft-SF (WE HAVE CREATED GOD – or rather, God has evolved itself) it is one of the best examples of the kind of SF that was popular, the norm in the genre, and what was considered SF in the public mind.

      But really the idea is what counts here, so discussing the story in any more detail is superfluous. Asimov doesn’t even swerve into a digression about benevolent AI: from this, whatever his opinion if he had one about AI and its perils and opportunities, he seems to feel that naturally computer intelligence will be at the service of humanity and that a perfect thinking machine will not stray outside its parameters of sitting there thinking about science, crunching the data, and coming up with answers. Contrast this with Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”, and the changes in society between 1956 and 1967 they exemplify – from Asimov’s clean, shiny, eternal scientific progress and the transcendence of humanity into a unified Mind of pure intellectual energy served by an increasingly powerful and intelligent, also transcendent machine Mind that remains benevolent and committed to its mission of answering the question posed to its remote ancestor eons before, to Ellison’s messy, non-transcendent humanity trying to deal with the terrors and problems associated with scientific and technological progress that appeared to be running far ahead of society’s ability to control it, and the last survivors of humanity being rendered into deliberately degraded playthings for the resentful and mad intelligence we have unwittingly created.

      Asimov has a concept in mind and he sticks to the most direct path that will bring him to the ending. It’s of its time, but it works and there’s nothing more to be said, really 🙂

      • Corey says:

        Asimov doesn’t even swerve into a digression about benevolent AI: from this, whatever his opinion if he had one about AI and its perils and opportunities, he seems to feel that naturally computer intelligence will be at the service of humanity and that a perfect thinking machine will not stray outside its parameters of sitting there thinking about science, crunching the data, and coming up with answers.

        Probably the same reason he wrote robot stories around the Three Laws: Frankenstein-metaphor robots were old and tired at that time, so he intentionally removed that path from his stories so as to force new directions. And indeed the interplay between failure modes and unintended consequences of the Three Laws produced interesting stories.

        So he was probably dispositionally leery of writing about unFriendly AI, rather than predisposed to thinking AI would be Friendly.

      • Dan T. says:

        Although (like many people in that time), Asimov vastly overestimated the time it would take for computers to develop in that direction. In 2061, they’re still massive things that only expert technicians can ask questions of, in some arcane computer language. By the next chapter, a few generations later, there are “Microvacs” taking up a good deal of space on family spaceships (and apparently able to establish wireless faster-than-light networking with bigger computers around the galaxy). Later, they move the bulk of their machinery into hyperspace. The idea that people might carry in their pocket a gadget with both local intelligence and wide-area networking, capable of answering questions, was still beyond his idea of likely technology. (Asking Siri the question of this story caused it to be looked up on Wolfram Alpha, which ended up giving a response quoting from this story that included the obligatory “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER”.)

        • LHN says:

          Though it’s interesting that in SF generally, and Asimov specificially, this coincided with robots that functioned with fairly general albeit limited AI. (Sometimes not that limited at all, in the case of Stephen Byerly, Andrew Martin, or R. Daneel Olivaw.)

          So to some extent this was a matter of framing: a “computer” was obviously a massive room or building-filling (or larger) structure, and could often only interact through a teletype or other mechanical interface; but a “robot brain” was a device that could fit in roughly the same space a human brain could, and could engage in idiomatic (if sometimes stilted) verbal conversation.

          (But of course you’d never stick a robot brain into a desktop device. Why attach one to a keyboard and have it correct your spelling and grammar when you can just dictate to a humaniform robot that can operate a typewriter and copy edit the result?

          • The Nybbler says:

            (But of course you’d never stick a robot brain into a desktop device. Why attach one to a keyboard and have it correct your spelling and grammar when you can just dictate to a humaniform robot that can operate a typewriter and copy edit the result?

            “Almost every robot, except perhaps a few like farmhands, does only one or two things and does those things constantly. All right. Shape them so that they can best do just those things, with no parts left over. give them a brain, eyes and ears to receive commands, and whatever [sensory] organs they need to do their work…
            That’s the source of your whole robot epidemic. They were all burdened down with things they didn’t need…

            “But this can’t be done overnight. People are used to android robots… They’ll be scared of your unhuman-looking contraptions… Give’em a name. A good name… Keep ‘robots’ thats common domain… I’ve got it. Usuform. Quinby’s Usuform Robots. Q.U.R.”

            From Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher.
            Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1943

          • LHN says:

            Cool– I’ll have to see if I can track that one down. (IIRC, most or all Golden Age Astoundings are archived on archive.org.)

          • LHN says:

            Found it.

            https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v31n01_1943-03_AK

            As a bonus, the issue’s editorial has John W. Campbell making the case to his 1943 readers that skycars as they envisioned them are impractical by any imaginable technology, including antigravity.[1]

            Which is to say, he was already answering the “Where’s my flying car?” question with “You’re not going to get it, sorry” smack in the middle of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

            [1] Though for cheap antigrav, his argument was more that you don’t get the common SF image of heavy aircar traffic over a city, because fast 3D transport means you don’t need cities.

      • Mary says:

        On the AI question, if you find this interesting, I strongly recommend Torchship and Torchship Pilot by Karl K. Gallagher for reasons that will be fully clear by the middle of the second book. 0:)

  17. Sandy says:

    Hillary’s official website has just identified one of the most dire threats to modern America.

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      And MSNBC did several special reports.
      I think we finally drove the liberal media insane, kek be praised.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      This will go down in history as the dankest election in American history.

      In all seriousness though, do the folks pearl-clutching over /pol/ memes realize how absolutely goddamn ridiculous they sound? That link was clearly aimed at people unfamiliar with the concept of memes to begin with, and the payoff is “Donald Trump is using this cartoon frog as a secret Nazi symbol!”

      • Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

        Is this the hot new political tactic? Get on twitter and be a colossal asshole in the most obscure and ridiculous way possible to bait your opposition into making an ‘official’ response so that they look crazy in front on the normies?

        • The Nybbler says:

          It’d be brilliant if it was intentional, but I’m thinking it was Trump’s campaign actually trying (successfully) to appeal to the dank meme crowd and Hillary’s campaign going full retard over it.

        • Fahundo says:

          and be a colossal asshole in the most obscure and ridiculous way possible

          by retweeting cartoon frogs?

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          I’ve heard the claim that this is the strategy of some left-wing performance artist / activist groups like Pussy Riot.

          The idea is that if you force the conservative press to write about a woman with a chicken in her vagina, you’re already winning.

          If that’s true, then the Alt-Right memelords would represent the natural response to that. Force the MSM to explain Happy Merchant and Remove Kebab, and you’ve got your foot in the door.

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      And they’re officially trying to blame Hillary’s collapse on KGB poisoning (possibly though weather control satellites?)
      Apparently the media is controlled entirely by /pol/ now. Somebody go tell them they’re the new jews.

      • hlynkacg says:

        The Onion turned into a font of sober and reserved journalism so slowly that no one noted till it was all over.

      • Deiseach says:

        To be fair, blaming KGB poisoning would be even more laughable and implausible if they didn’t really go around doing it.

        Spraying polonium-210 into a cup of tea in the bar of a London restaurant would be the plot of one of those conspiracy thrillers by the imitators of Cussler and Clancy, if it hadn’t (allegedly) really happened – there seems to be some confusion as to whether the poisoning was done in the bar, or during a meeting in his hotel room.

        I mean, look at this from the list of possible suspects:

        Igor the Assassin

        The code name for a former KGB assassin. He is said to be a former Spetznaz officer born in 1960 who is a judo master and walks with a slight limp. He allegedly speaks perfect English and Portuguese and may be the same person who served Litvinenko tea in the London hotel room.

        Put that in the manuscript of a novel and you’d get it sent back with “tone down the implausible assassin a bit, okay?”

      • Jaskologist says:

        Great, so now it’s literal Kremlinology.

      • Anonymous says:

        You may want to review the definition of the word “officially”. Also ‘they’.

        • Deiseach says:

          The guy is genuinely dead of genuine polonium-210 poisoning and there is not entirely wild-eyed speculation hat Putin had something to do with it, given that several other inconvenient persons also succumbed to sudden attacks of mysterious deaths around the time.

          We’re living in a bloody spy thriller novel and I don’t much appreciate it 🙁

      • Nyx says:

        As far as I can tell, Bennet Omalu isn’t an official Clinton spokesman. All I see is a newspaper hungry for an outrageous, click-baity headline hunted down a doctor willing to say “well, poisoning might have similar symptoms and it’s always worth it to run a quick test.”

    • Viliam says:

      I still feel like “no way that could be Clinton’s official website; that is an obvious parody”.

      Okay, Wikipedia says it’s an official website, but that doesn’t mean anything because we all know anyone can edit Wikipedia… right?

      • Anonymous says:

        that doesn’t mean anything because we all know anyone can edit Wikipedia… right?

        Of course. But articles about prominent figures like this tend to be watched quite diligently, and inserting a fake link as the “official website” is a particularly conspicuous type of vandalism; not one that would be likely to go unnoticed for long. Inserting plausible-sounding falsehoods with fabricated citations into an article about an obscure topic would, on the other hand. (Link 1, 2. Unfortunately, WPO’s journalistic standards sometimes approach the level of Breitbart, but I don’t think there is anything better for now.)

        Plus, I don’t think the HRC campaign would let the hillaryclinton.com domain fall into the hands of hoaxers.

    • Deiseach says:

      Well, Sandy, that melted my brain.

      They actually think Pepe is a white supremacist symbol and that Trump is deliberately using it to signal to his followers “Get your robes freshly laundered and make sure your pitchforks are in good condition, the rule of the KKK is at hand!”

      Please tell me this is some joke site and nothing to do with an official campaign? Though it is depressing to think it could well be the work of some social media-savvy campaign member who is deliberately using this kind of nonsense because any stick is good enough to beat the dog, and if you can just get enough people to repost “Trump is a white supremacist! Proof is here!” then the job is done.

      • The Nybbler says:

        It comes across almost as an urban legend. Did you know that Trump’s use of a green frog means he’s actually a Nazi? Also that Unilever’s heart logo means they support pedophilia!

        • Jaskologist says:

          Yeah, this reads like a conspiracy email from my grandmother.

        • Deiseach says:

          Or the Proctor-Gamble Satanist logo. This is what now passes for political campaigning? Though I suppose campaigning always was more about “My opponent is a low-down dirty thieving drunken rat who will molest your wives and daughters, steal your horses, rustle your cattle, and bring the country to ruination”, it just wasn’t served up quite so free of dressing to disguise the taste before.

          • LHN says:

            Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

            In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

            As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.

            Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was “one of the most detestable of mankind.”

            http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/08/22/mf.campaign.slurs.slogans/

            It may be that disintermediation and the candidates’ response to it is just returning us to the handbill era. (And I’m not sure that Martha Washington was responding so much to “propaganda” as to the real and bitter divisions produced by the politics of the 1790s.)

            Granted, I’d personally prefer more decorum. And better candidates.

      • Corey says:

        if you can just get enough people to repost “Trump is a white supremacist! Proof is here!” then the job is done.

        Yeah, I know when he tweeted out that 80% of murders where blacks killing whites that was just an oversight, not a dog whistle *at all*.

    • Fahundo says:

      What a time to be alive. I wish I could tell the me of 10 years ago that Pepe would be referenced by presidential candidates one day.

  18. Sandy says:

    Britain’s Tory government is redrawing the boundaries of constituencies, and as a result of what is either divine providence or masterful trolling, Jeremy Corbyn’s new seat might be in an area where nearly half the population are Haredim.

    • God Damn John Jay says:

      Minions of Sauron you say?

      Wait, never-mind.

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      This seems like a terrible idea. Why would the tories want to undermine Corbyn?
      If possible you’d want to give him somewhere like Bradford West, so he’d have to go full “drive the jews into the sea” to beat the Respect party candidate. That would provide beautiful soundbytes.
      But giving him Stamford Hill is just going to keep him quiet and make him look sane.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      Sounds like he might need to disavow David Duke’s endorsement.

    • H. E. Pennypacker says:

      Stamford Hill is a Hasidic area and many of them are opposed to Zionism. He’s probably more likely to be at odds with them on socially progressive policies than opposition to Israel.

  19. I posted this about possible health benefits from avoiding food cooked at high temperatures, and a friend who cares more about fried food and bread than I do wrote this:

    Probably the AGEs in the paper you cited are the same as the things I was talking about.

    The paper explicitly says that AGEs are flavorful.

    One confounder is that dry cooking generally means frying, which is high in fat. Is it the AGEs that matter, or the fat?

    Check out the sample meals:
    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00125-016-4053-x#Tab1

    The amount of AGEs varies by orders of magnitude. Thus, if AGEs are the relevant criterion, there is a lot of diminishing returns in the advice.

    So, yes, dry vs wet is a simple rule for reducing AGEs, but here is a different set of suggestions drawn from that chart:

    Most important is to wet cook meat and eggs. Second has nothing to do with wet cooking, but is to reduce (certain?) fats. Only third is to avoid dry-cooking starch. (e.g., toasting bread)

    Switching from beef to chicken or chicken to eggs would fall in tier 2, a much bigger improvement than not toasting the bagel.

    These are not serious suggestions, because the chart is not a serious source of data. I’m just saying that their own claims suggest that their advice could be a lot better.

    (An example of the chart not being a serious source of data is that it says that poached chicken has half the AGEs of beef stew. That is a big difference (though only 1/4 as big as the change from not frying) and a much more useful advice than not toasting bagels, but it is only useful if one knew how to generalize it. I suspect that this is not about beef vs chicken, but that stew involves frying vegetables.)

    I am curious about the AGEs in fat. Glycation is a chemical change, so I’m not terribly surprised that it’s part of the bundle of chemical changes that margarine goes through (except that I thought that AGEs were from proteins, and I didn’t think that protein went into margarine), even if there’s no heat. But I am surprised that cream cheese has lots of AGEs.

    Also, frying and grilling are a lot hotter than baking. Surely baking produces more AGEs than boiling, but maybe it isn’t such a big deal.

  20. Brad (The Other One) says:

    No smart comments – just wondering if anyone else here watches Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure? It’s campy as hell and I love to, uh… work out to this show.

    • DrBeat says:

      Let’s get all the smartest minds in the blogosphere, devoted to the cause of refining human rationality, to all get together and figure out just what the fuck King Crimson does.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      I still need to finish that series.

      I love the first season, before Stands and the rest. Mostly because it plays out like a Victorian gothic horror novelist took a sheet of LSD blotting paper, crumpled it up, and swallowed it whole. The story starts relatively sedate but just gets stranger and stranger with each episode until you have Qvb’f frirerq urnq gnxvat bire n pehvfr fuvc.

      The third season was hard to watch, because while we have the best villain in the series we also have the most boring (of the first three anyway) Jojo. That and how Hamon energy abruptly ceases to exist or matter made it hard to stay invested. I still haven’t seen the steamroller scene yet.

    • blacktrance says:

      I watch it, it’s great.

      I find that Part 1 tends to be underrated by JoJo fans, and Part 2 is overrated (though still good). I’m really enjoying Part 4 so far, it’s definitely better than Part 3, though Jotaro is a better protagonist than Josuke.

  21. bean says:

    I’ve been considering the definition of Hard Sci-Fi. This is an age-old question, but I finally have a definition which I find at least somewhat satisfying:
    Soft SF is when the author does not look at science except maybe to provide descriptive fluff. If science contradicts something he wants to do, science loses.
    Hard SF is when the author pays attention to what science says, and considers the tradeoffs between science and where he wants the story to go. Science doesn’t have to win every time, but it doesn’t automatically lose, either. Attention is paid to the damage that is done to science, and steps are taken to minimize it.
    (The most prominent and accepted deviation from real science in hard SF is FTL travel. It’s often hard to tell stories without it, and so long as it’s done well, I don’t think it’s disqualifying.)
    There’s another potential genre, ultrahard, which doesn’t permit any deviation from science. This is extremely rare. Even The Martian doesn’t technically fall into it.
    Thoughts?

    • brad says:

      Interesting. I consider FTL to be disqualifying. To me hard-sci fi is free to make plausible extrapolations from current science, but not to do things that we currently believe to be impossible.

      • John Schilling says:

        Does your definition of “we” include e.g. Miguel Alcubierre, Harold White, Kip Thorne, and Matt Visser? They all have Ph.D’s in theoretical physics or related fields, as do the editors and peer reviewers who signed off on their various “maybe we don’t believe FTL to be impossible after all” papers, and I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt at that level.

        If the author makes a good-faith effort to fit his FTL drive into a relativistic framework, I don’t disqualify it as hard SF. Nor do I demand that he describe or justify it with any more rigor than the hard-SF writer next door does with e.g. “fusion drive”.

        • LHN says:

          Though most SF authors don’t try to plot out the numbers for an Alcubierre-style drive the way, e.g., Heinlein did with his STL torchships (handwaving the total conversion part, but doing the accelerations and orbits straight). There are SF ftl frameworks that are on the harder side (e.g., Niven and Pournelle’s Alderson Drive, at least when they did it), or that at least lay out a rules-based system and stick to it even if they don’t specify the speculative addition to real physics. But many more are pure plot devices with the arbitrary characteristics necessary to underpin the imagined world.

          That said, I fully agree that such a device doesn’t cast any story into an outer darkness of “soft SF”. If Mission of Gravity isn’t hard SF, there’s not a lot of room left for that Scotsman to lay his hat, and I don’t recall Clement telling us much more about the ftl in that universe than that it existed and let humans get to Mesklin.

        • brad says:

          Thanks for the links JS. The last time I looked into this I only came across the negative energy to stabilize wormholes one.

      • Aegeus says:

        I think it’s a sliding scale, not a binary. “One big lie” sci-fi, where the science is solid except for one story-driving conceit (an FTL drive, for example) is not as hard as speculative fiction, but it’s still harder than Star Trek.

        2001, for instance, is very hard sci-fi, except for the Monoliths, which have almost no impact on the story itself until the end.

        Schlock Mercenary has two very large pieces of handwavium: FTL teleportation, and the “annie plant,” which can produce strong gravitational fields. But the implications of both of those techs are well thought-out based on our current physics. For instance, spaceships use gravity fields for propulsion, for shielding, as a weapon, for artificial gravity when walking around… Not as hard as 2001, but still harder than Star Trek.

        • bean says:

          Hmm. Interesting comparison. I’m not sure I’d put 2001 ahead of Schlock on the hardness scale. Yes, the humans only have tech we understand, but then there’s the weird trippy parts at the end. I’m aware of Clarke’s Law, but invoking it is a large hit against hardness in my book. Schlock is noticeably lacking in mystical bits.
          (A good control for 2001 here is Rendezvous with Rama. Similar overall, but there’s no mystical bits in the original novel. Yes, they pop up later.)

          But while Schlock is nicely internally consistent, I think there’s an important distinction between works that are internally consistent and works that are consistent with science as we know it.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I think the better distinction is between “knowable” and “unknowable”. In knowable SF, the invented devices and phenomena work in specific comprehensible reproducible ways, and the story is build around that knowledge and extrapolating the consequences of how the device/phenomenon works. Even if the phenomenon is mysterious to the characters in the story, the reader is cued to expect that there is a comprehensible underlying logic to its behavior, and often the story plays like a mystery where the characters attempt to uncover that logic. In unknowable SF, the devices and phenomena exist to drive a plot or make a point about the human condition, and so they’ll do whatever they need to to accomplish those goals, and you’re not expected to pay close attention to the underlying mechanics. Oftentimes the phenomena are presented as explicitly incomprehensible to the characters, grand ineffable superbeing monolith gods that have transcended human understanding. This can be used to make points about the wonder of the universe, which would be diluted if you hooked the monolith up to a dynamo and used it to power your coffee machine.

      Most knowable SF has a strong basis in actual science, simply because knowable SF has to be internally consistent and coming up with a whole separate internally-consistent set of physical laws would be difficult, much less conveying them to the reader. It’s much easier to discuss orbital mechanics in depth than it is to come up with an alternative mechanical system with the same depth and consistency. So knowable SF tends to get conflated with hard science.

      • bean says:

        That’s an interesting and potentially very useful categorization. The two poles which I think illustrate it best are Doctor Who and Honor Harrington. In Who, plot drives everything, and expecting even the screwdriver to work consistently is going to leave you very disappointed. In Harrington, you see all the math, and Weber follows it.
        But there are lots of cases where you just can’t tell. Star Wars springs to mind here. There’s just not really enough data to classify it one way or the other.

        • LHN says:

          And with collaborative works like most media properties, different authors or showrunners or whatever may take different approaches. (There are definitely crunchier and fuzzier episodes of Star Trek, for example.)

    • I think of hard sf as having a good faith effort to get the science right, with an exception for ftl. It can take some historical knowledge to know what science was current at the time the story was written.

      • dndnrsn says:

        “It’s a good thing there’s no kind of long-term harm from exposure to radiation” exclaimed Space Captain MacDonald, fishing in his spacesuit pocket for his Zippo. “Hits the spot” he muttered, inhaling deeply of the rich Chesterfield tobacco.

      • LHN says:

        I also think it’s more useful to think of SF hardness as a Mohs scale rather than a binary. (Star Trek is harder than Star Wars[1] and softer than Heinlein, who is in turn softer than Hal Clement.)

        The alternative tends to rapidly tend in the No True Scotsman direction, where “Hard SF” is always what something isn’t. (Even Hal Clement wasn’t above using ftl.)

        [1] Someone will often chime in that Star Wars is fantasy rather than science fiction. A case can be made. But I’m generally against the idea that something that aims at science fiction and misses lands in fantasy, any more than a bad mystery becomes a romance or a western in consequence. No genre is defined by being a failed example of a different one.

        • bean says:

          There is definitely a sliding scale, but even then, you have the problem of where you put the labels on your scale. My definition is an attempt to place them consistently.

          Re Star Wars, I’d classify it as Space Fantasy, along with things like Lensman. Not because they’re failed Sci-Fi, but because they aren’t core Sci-Fi. They’re fantasy epics set in space, instead of in a world of castles and dragons. Fantasy describes both a genre and a setting.

          • Deiseach says:

            Re Star Wars, I’d classify it as Space Fantasy, along with things like Lensman.

            Exactly. Even at the time stories of lost civilisations on Mars and exotic Venusian colonies were being written, most people probably had a good idea that this was pure invention, Schiaparelli’s canals be blowed. But you don’t read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” for extrapolation from hard science principles (even if he makes a plot-point of Carter being used to Earth gravity and so able to perform what, to the Martians, are astounding feats of acrobatics), you read it for exotic alien cultures, the more highly-coloured, the better.

            It’s like Verne vs Wells, with the aggrieved Jules pointing out that “I sent my characters to the moon with gunpowder, a thing one may see every day. Where does Mr. Wells find his cavourite? Let him show it to me!” 🙂

          • LHN says:

            I’d strongly disagree on Lensman. At the time, its take on cosmology, evolution, eugenics, and psychic powers were all well within the bounds of scientific plausibility. It’s not Clement-hard by any means, but it’s not a fantasy story in space dress even to the extent one can argue Star Wars is.

            The plot escalation is driven by human (and alien) invention, not magic McGuffins, and the hero is special because of long term active material intervention in his ancestry to give him particular human abilities, not because he’s the Chosen One. (And in fact there were three other candidates for his role– he just happened to be the one who took the lead.)

            The Lens itself is Clarkean sufficiently advanced technology. But it’s also mostly not that important other than as a symbol. It’s a focus for some psychic abilities and a marker of the specialness of its bearers, but it’s not exactly a Green Lantern power ring. (However much the latter owes to the former.)

          • bean says:

            Did we read the same story? Lensman is straight pulp, full of overwrought adjectives, things that are basically magic and threats to all of existence. It’s really good pulp, but I wouldn’t classify it as straight SF. Smith did a decent job of disguising the fantasy elements, but the fact that Mentor of Arisia built the Lens instead of it coming from the Lady of the Lake is just set dressing. Psychic powers move it in that direction, too, particularly when they dominate the tech.
            (None of this is an attack on the series. I liked it quite a lot.)

          • LHN says:

            “Pulp” doesn’t strike me as inconsistent with SF. SF in the Golden Age and before was a pulp genre. (Likewise, Smith’s… enthusiastic vocabulary strikes me as orthogonal to what genre its in.)

            The Lens is a mass-produced device, not a single mystic artifact. It’s not something humans can produce until the very end of the series (depending whether one counts the Children as human), but it’s never treated as having mystical significance. Lenses are made by machines, as needed. It identifies characteristics and enhances a species is generally deficient in (lack of corruption in humans, lack of cowardice in Palainians), but it’s not treated as numinous or mystical or a Thing Man is Not Meant to Understand, just something ahead of where we are now. (Like the Arisians themselves.)

            I’m guessing we have different markers for fantasy and science fiction. Which in my experience is usually what these sorts of things turn on.

            (E.g., is Pern science fiction– space colony, genetic engineering, psi, orbital mechanics, alien spores– or fantasy– dragons, lords, prophetic verses, secret heirs, initially medieval tech? I’ve always considered it science fiction in fantasy guise– not least because it debuted in Cambpell’s Analog and shares a universe with other space travel stories– but I’ve run into plenty of people who’d say the opposite.)

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            It’s like Verne vs Wells, with the aggrieved Jules pointing out that “I sent my characters to the moon with gunpowder, a thing one may see every day. Where does Mr. Wells find his cavourite? Let him show it to me!” ?

            Reminds me of this comic.

      • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

        Nancy Lebovitz affirms  “I think of hard sf as having a good faith effort to get the science right.”

        Many agree (including me). A terrifying downside to this principle is that works like Carter Scholz’ ultrarecent / ultrahard / ultrarealistic sf novella Gypsy (2015) rank among the most hope-destroying works of sf, or indeed, of any literary genre:

        “It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”
           — Alfred North Whitehead

        No sf author’s works (known to me) have illuminated the gravity of Whitehead’s principle more vividly than Carter Scholz’.

        • “Oil reserves, declared as recently as 2010 to exceed a trillion barrels, proved to be an accounting gimmick, gone by 2020.”

          “Ultrahard, ultrarealistic.”

          When 2020 arrives and the oil is still coming, will you revise your view of reality?

        • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

          Will the world’s high-EROI carbon-energy reserves last longer or less-long than the world’s Arctic summer ice?

          This is turning out to be a mighty close-run horse-race, isn’t it?

          In fresh-breaking high-Arctic news, after a search lasting 170 years — and thanks to crucial guidance from Inuit local Sammy Kogvik of Gjoa Haven — the long-lost Arctic exploration ship Terror has been found ! 🙂 ! 🙂 !

          Of course, nowadays there’s nothing but open summer seawater in the self-same Arctic passages where the Terror and its sister ship Erebus were so disastrously ice-bound, isn’t that right?

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            PS  To belabor the obvious, Carter Scholz’ Gypsy expedition [of 2040-2095(?)] faithfully traverses the narrative arc of the Lost Franklin Expedition [of 1845-1889(?)].

            Doesn’t Scholz’ narrative therefore possess both technological and historical plausibility?

            Isn’t Gypsy therefore among the very hardest specimens of “hard-sf” narratives, defined sensu stricto?

            Hence it’s surprising — isn’t it? — that self-described SSC rationalists are reluctant to contemplate humanity’s hopes for a STEAM-future in the harsh light of humanity’s all-too-recent STEAM-past.

            Why is this?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Hence it’s surprising — isn’t it? — that self-described SSC rationalists are reluctant to contemplate humanity’s hopes for a STEAM-future in the harsh light of humanity’s all-too-recent STEAM-past.

            What?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Isn’t Gypsy therefore among the very hardest specimens of “hard-sf” narratives, defined sensu stricto?

            Granted, it’s harder than your average Star Trek episode but still pretty soft compared to most of Clarke’s work. At the end of the day it’s a Shaggy Dog story with very little science to it beyond it’s vocabulary. You could have easily replaced every instance of “Magsail” with “Warp Nacelles” and “Hydrazine” with “Delirium Crystals” without changing the story.

            On a purely literary note, The writing itself is solid but I am vaguely reminded of a teenager who’s just discovered Emo. I kind of want to take the author aside and say “look kid, I know it feels like it’s the end of the world but do not make the mistake of conflating cynicism and wisdom.”

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            SSC folks who appreciate Carter Scholz’ Gypsy (2015) as a parable that is solidly grounded in the STEAM-math and STEAM-history of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty (2010) may gain sympathy with both works, isn’t that possible?

            After all, aren’t Scholz and Spufford both writing in the grand tradition of Heinlein and LeGuin?

          • bean says:

            What do you mean by STEAM? I’ve heard the acronym (and want to purge it with fire) but that definition doesn’t even make sense here.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            @Bean,

            He means, roughly speaking, neeeerd!

            To be a bit more helpful, John shares the modern liberal fascination with empathy (affective empathy really, nobody cares about cognitive empathy these days). He contrasts stereotypically unempathetic rationality with its synonym ratiocination as a way of explaining how STEM types insist on picking holes in his arguments rather than listening with worshipful attention.

            In other words, he’s saying your way of thinking is too phallocentric and right-brained to really dig it, man.

          • bean says:

            @Dr Dealgood
            Thanks. I’m sorry for whatever you had to go through to figure that out.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Three reasonably dispassionate STEAM-resources are:

            (1) Anne Jolly, “STEM vs STEAM: Do the Arts Belong?” (Education Week, November 18, 2014)
            (2) Terry Tao, “What is good mathematics?“, (arXiv:math/0702396)
            (3) Bill Thurston, “On proof and progress in mathematics” (arXiv:math/9404236)

            The salient point of the latter two mathematical references, is that general progress in mathematics, and specifically the conception of good proofs, crucially engage elements of human cognition that are intrinsically “STEAM”-y … in consilient accord with ongoing neuroscientific advances in human cognitive parcellation.

            That many people welcome consilient STEAM advances, while many other people experience a visceral aversion to them — commonly accompanied by fear and anger, and eliciting demagogic abuse — greatly broadens their general interest and appeal, doesn’t it?

            In the long run, as mathematics goes, so goes the STEAM enterprise … this is incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? 🙂

          • hlynkacg says:

            Can you unpack that?

            How does “STEM” differ from “STEAM” in your eyes and what exactly is this “accord” you speak of?

            Heck it would probably help to define what you mean by “art” in this context as I am familiar with Mr. Tao’s work and I don’t think his paper is arguing what you seem to think it’s arguing.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            In my reading of Terry Tao’s list of the elements of good mathematics — a list that Tao notes is both unordered and incomplete — these elements cluster as follows:

            Naturally reduce to ratiocination:
            (vi) applicability
            (ii) technique
            (xiii) rigor
            (xvii) utility
            (xviii) strength

            Partially reduce to ratiocination:
            (iii) framing
            (iv) insight
            (v) novelty
            (vii) exposition
            (xi) public relations
            (xii) meta-mathematics
            (xx) intuitiveness
            (xxi) definitiveness

            Don’t obviously reduce to ratiocination:
            (i) ingenuity
            (viii) pedagogy
            (ix) vision
            (x) taste
            (xiv) beauty
            (xv) elegance
            (xvi) creativity
            (xix) depth

            STEAM-studies weigh these three clusters equally, whereas STEM-studies traditionally weigh the first cluster most heavily, and the third cluster least heavily.

            As Bill Thurston’s Foreword to Best Writing in Mathematics 2010 expresses it:

            Mathematics is commonly thought to be the pursuit of universal truths, of patterns that are not anchored to any single fixed concept. But on a deeper level the goal of mathematics is to develop enhanced ways for humans to see and think about the world.

            Mathematics is a transforming journey, and progress in it can better be measured by changes in how we think than by the external truths we discover.[…]

            As I read, I stop and ask What’s the author trying to say? What is the author really thinking?

            Here Thurston assigns a crucial role for STEAM-compatible diverse and empathic cognition in the “transforming journey” of modern mathematical practice (both individual and collective).

            As previously noted, the “transforming journey” of the 21st century’s STEAM-enterprise is inherently uncertain and dangerous, isn’t it? Which is necessary and even good, isn’t it? We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?

            Restrictive ideologies that (in effect) seek to Bowdlerize human cognition, by requiring that it reduce to ratiocination — Bayesian ratiocination, for example — can never accommodate broader mathematical visions like Tao’s or Thurston’s, can they?

          • bean says:

            Science
            Technology
            Engineering
            Arts
            Math

            One of these things is not like the others. I believe the acronym STEAM is a terrible travesty invented by the arts people in an attempt to leach our funds, and should be purged with fire, sword, and, if necessary, nuclear weapons. STEM is a useful term in general (replacing STEAM with STEM in your posts doesn’t render them meaningful) but STEAM basically just means ‘education’, so far as I can tell.

            As for what I can tell about your comments on math-as-poetry, all humans have that kind of experience towards what they focus on the most. I find near-transcendence in battleships, but that doesn’t mean anything beyond that I really like them.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I believe the acronym STEAM is a terrible travesty invented by the arts people in an attempt to leach our funds

            True if you mean arts administrators, not actual artists. But yes, John using “STEAM” is just another level to the trolling.

          • grandword says:

            As previously noted, the “transforming journey” of the 21st century’s STEAM-enterprise is inherently uncertain and dangerous, isn’t it? Which is necessary and even good, isn’t it? We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?

            May I suggest writing in a less incoherent, supercilious, and hostile manner? You’ll probably have better luck.

          • Anonymous says:

            Dude has already been banned twice for his posting style, your polite request is unlikely to do anything.

            What should happen is that everyone else should refuse to reply, but peeps on here can’t help themselves.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Uncle
            First off I disagree with your classifications; insight, intuitiveness, definitiveness, elegance, and depth, as Tao describes them all clearly belong in the “Naturally reduce to ratiocination” category while the “Doesn’t obviously reduce to ratiocination” category should really contain only 2 items, beauty and taste.

            As for the rest. While I freely grant that there mathematics is an art it’s artistry is more akin to that of Archery, than that of Song or Dance. Tao himself identifies the pitfalls of a “STEAM” approach, and offers a rather scathing rebuke.

            Just as an archer’s foremost purpose must be “to hit the target”. A Mathematician’s foremost purpose must be “to solve the problem”. Beauty and expression are byproducts of the quest for perfection rather than ends unto themselves. Thorsten echoes this in his own writings when he discusses the virtue of “clarity”

            The desire to inject art into math cheapens both, and leads you down the road to Moloch.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            hlynkacg says: “The desire to inject art into math cheapens both, and leads you down the road to Moloch.”

            Has a more perfect example of a Great Truth ever been posted to SSC? §

            We are all of us very fortunate (aren’t we?) that hlynkacg’s views are not universally prevalent! 🙂

            See for example, Bill Thurston’s Foreword to Daina Taimina’s Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes (2009)

            Our brains are complicated devices, with many specialized modules working behind the scenes to give us an integrated understanding of the world. Mathematical concepts are abstract, so it ends up that there are many different ways that they can sit in our brains. A given mathematical concept might be primarily a symbolic equation, a picture, a rhythmic pattern, a short movie—or best of all, an integrated combination of several different representations. These non-symbolic mental models for mathematical concepts are extremely important, but unfortunately, many of them are hard to share.

            Mathematics sings when we feel it in our whole brain. People are generally inhibited about even trying to share their personal mental models. People like music, but they are afraid to sing. You only learn to sing by singing.

            This is why the most effective critiques of singing come (firstly) from folks who know how to sing, and (secondly) act to encourage singing over silence! 🙂

             — — — —
            § Per Niels Bohr, the opposite of a “Great Truth” is a Great Truth too.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Nothing you’ve posted refutes what I said and if anything it only reinforces it. Thurston tells us that “The product of mathematics is clarity” and I agree with him, but the mode of thinking that Tao and Thurston seek to promote is the very one that you’ve dismissed as “mere ratiocination”.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            None of the links that I have provided, and none of my own comments upon those links, propose that ratiocination be removed from mathematical practice, isn’t that correct?

            As for the restriction of mathematics to ratiocination, wouldn’t that compose (in your phrase) “a sacrifice to Moloch” that pretty much none of the world’s high-level mathematician would accept?

            The reason being, that verifying mathematical proofs is purely a matter of ratiocination, but conceiving mathematical proofs is a purely human art, plain and simple. A human art of extraordinary cognitive diversity, isn’t that the case? 🙂

            In other words, there’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs, isn’t there?

            One can always resort to “True Scotsman” reasoning — “if it’s helpful in mathematics, then it can’t be an art” — yet such reasoning is more hilarious than convincing, isn’t it? 🙂

          • hlynkacg says:

            No, you simply dismiss it. You are like a musician who dismisses painting as an art form because it is silent.

            As I said before, just as the aim of an Archer is “to hit the target”. The aim of the Mathematician must be “to solve the problem”. Beauty and expression are byproducts of the quest for perfection rather than ends unto themselves.

            Your determination to focus on emotional and aesthetic qualities when you should be focused on target/problem is the essence of superficiality and That is were Moloch comes in.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            hlynkacg avers [without reference]: “The aim of the Mathematician must be ‘to solve the problem'”

            Lol  A narrow vision! Why do you resist? Artists seek seek only to increase the perfection of human cognition! You will all become one, with the STEAM-community!

            Seriously, there is a very substantial cohort of distinguished mathematicians, and a very large body of work, that embraces precisely the opposite view. Their objectives are large and their works are, correspondingly, not easy reading.

            Consider as a concrete and much-celebrated example, David Eisenbud’s and Joe Harris’ very recent textbook 3264 & All That: a Second Course in Algebraic Geometry (2016; on-line draft versions are titled 3264 & All That: Intersection Theory in Algebraic Geometry).

            Here the concrete number “3264” refers to a limited “solving the problem” objective. As Eisenbud and Harris put it:

            What’s with the title? The number in the title of this book is a reference to the solution of a classic problem in enumerative geometry: the determination, by Chasles, of the number of smooth conic plane curves tangent to five given general conics. The problem is emblematic of the dual nature of the subject [namely, enumerative geometry]. On the one hand, the number itself is of little significance: life would not be materially different if there were more or fewer. But the fact that the problem is well posed … is at the heart of algebraic geometry. And the insights developed in the pursuit of a rigorous derivation of the number … are landmarks in the development of algebraic geometry.

            Eisenbud’s and Harris’ text is representative of a great many modern STEM-texts, in that it contains sufficient history and art — and even a pragmatic brand of cognitive psychology — as to qualify entirely as an integrated “A”-level STEAM-text.

            The point being, that algebraic geometry is an inherently “STEAMy” subject that diverse people pursue, for diverse reasons, by diverse cognitive paths.

            Many more such “A”-level STEAM-books are being written, that in coming decades will span the entire STEAM enterprise as an integrated body of irresistibly attractive pedagogy.

            That is why, in the long run, resistance by the species of “rationalists” is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. Your libertarian distinctiveness will be assimilated into a super-progressive ultra-humanist pan-national “A”-level STEAM-collective! 🙂

            Or at least, isn’t this a scary fever-dream that motivates the fervent-yet-irrational opposition of rationalist libertarianism to the foreseeable advances of the 21st century’s STEAM-grounded progressivism?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Seriously, there is a very substantial cohort of distinguished mathematicians, and a very large body of work, that embraces precisely the opposite view. Their objectives are large and their works are, correspondingly, not easy reading.

            And yet Thurston, and Tao both highlight this as a trademark of Bad mathematics in the very links that you provided. To quote Thurston, The product of Mathematics is clarity. When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant.

            You say that I am “narrow minded”, maybe I am but in your effort to be “broad minded”, you’ve denigrated the very thing that makes mathematics meaningful. You are running head-long towards the very state of “much activity and progress in the short term, but risking a decline of relevance in the longer term.” that Tao warns us against.

            Consider Euclid’s Elements, it remains relevant two thousand years after first being put to text while Eisenbud and Harris’ book will be lucky if it lasts a decade.

          • Jiro says:

            Adding “Arts” to “STEM” strikes me as at least as manipulative as the “Judeo” in “Judeo-Christian”.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            hlynkacg foresees  “Eisenbud and Harris’ book will be lucky if it lasts a decade.”

            Has a more perfect opportunity to apply Bayesian reasoning principles ever been posted to SSC? `Cuz Joe Harris and David Eisenbud have published multiple books (both individually and as co-authors) — books that are well-regarded by mathematicians — books that have been in print for three decades and more. In light of this verifiable fact, how shall we adjust our Bayesian estimate of the likelihood of quick extinction for this latest book? 🙂

            Euclid’s enduring relevance is associated to the universality and naturality of his postulates and theorems. Nowadays the mathematical notions of “universality” and “naturality” have been formalized, and the literature of mathematics has thereby gained greatly in span and range.

            That is why any SSC reader who takes up Euclid is well-advised to acquaint themselves too with (for example) Colin McLarty’s The rising sea: Grothendieck on simplicity and generality (2007).

            What’s next for the broader STEAM-enterprise? It seems to many folks (including me) that the notions of “universality” and “naturality” that were formalized by mathematicians in the latter half of the 20th century, are in the 21st century already extending to engineering and science, and are destined in coming decades to extend to the cognitive sciences, and to medicine, and to the arts.

            What will become of rationalism and libertarianism, as the world’s STEAM-disciplines become ever-more-universal and ever-more-natural? No doubt rationalism and libertarianism will adapt … albeit in respects that aren’t easy to foresee. Yet willful ignorance of the STEAM-literature can only slow that necessary adaptation, isn’t that certain? 🙂

          • anon says:

            I’ve read Eisenbud–Harris as well as other works by those authors. I disagree that these books are “STEAM”-y, and I largely agree with hlynkacg that STEAM is a bullshit term invented for the purpose of leaching funding. While many talented STEM people have an appreciation for the arts, and while it’s true that some approaches to (e.g.) mathematics are somewhat more “right-brained” than others, with Thurston’s case being an exemplar, that doesn’t mean these approaches are “artsy” in any meaningful sense. Except perhaps for the fact that there is an aesthetic component, but that is true of almost all STEM disciplines. The aesthetics of a well-engineered piece of software, a beautifully efficient bridge, or an elegant proof, don’t fit naturally into the aesthetic frameworks people use to analyze paintings, films, or novels.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Pioneering STEAM-y works like Francois Le Lionnais’s Painting at Dora, Michael Harris’ Mathematics Without Apologies, Apostolos Doxiadis’ Sing Muse of the Hypotenuse: the Influence of Poetry and Rhetoric on the Formation of Greek Mathematics, and Jacques Roubaud’s Mathematics (a Novel), all are commended to the attention of SSC readers.

            SSC readers who are familiar with Logicomix will recognize at least one of these names … and Logicomix itself is a good introduction to this emerging / universalizing / naturalizing STEAM-y literature.

          • hlynkacg says:

            You are wrong. Completely and utterly.

            What “STEAM” does is take something that truly does transcend social and cultural boundaries and wrap it in layers of obfuscation and cultural baggage till it only appeals to the tastes of a privileged few. This the is the exact opposite of making something universal.

            Take your abstruse anti-enlightenment bullshit elsewhere.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            In recent decades, the mathematical community has embraced, formalized, and greatly extended the meanings of the words “natural” and “universal”. As a quick survey, see the (high-rated) MathOverflow question “What does the adjective “natural” actually mean?” and the Wikipedia page Universal Property.

            These extended notions of naturality and universality are proving to be so useful in unifying humanity’s mathematical understanding, that it is scarcely surprising that these extended meanings are already diffusing into science and engineering, such that we may confidently foresee (as it seems to me) their inexorably continuing diffusion throughout the cognitive sciences and arts.

            In other words, in the extended senses that mathematicians have conceived for “natural” and “universal”,.the STEAM-enterprise is rapidly evolving to become natural and universal. And this view is already widespread among a great many outstandingly talented, outstandingly creative scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicians, and artists, isn’t that right?

            These (literally) transformational ideas aren’t ever going away, are they? They’re here to stay, isn’t that right?

            Will libertarian rationalism perforce evolve concomitantly, to become a more cognitively natural and more nearly universal political ideology? And thus, more compatible with progressivism?

            Yah sure, you betcha! … and these forced extensions of libertarian rationalism will even be fun! 🙂

          • hlynkacg says:

            In recent decades, the mathematical community has embraced, formalized, and greatly extended the meanings of the words “natural” and “universal”.

            They have done no such thing. The meanings of those words has been formalized, and has remained essentially unchanged since the days of Leibniz and Newton. See Sandor Kovac’s answer to your own linked question.

            As an aside your second comic portrays the greatest minds of “the STEAM-enterprise” being played for fools by a pop-avatar of “STEM-ist” discipline. It doesn’t exactly help your case does it?

            If you want to continue this conversation i’ll be in OT 58.25.

        • Deiseach says:

          A terrifying downside to this principle is that works like Carter Scholz’ ultrarecent / ultrahard / ultrarealistic sf novella Gypsy (2015) rank among the most hope-destroying works of sf, or indeed, of any literary genre

          Can’t comment on the science as I was unable to plough my way past the first five pages of politics. I presume eventually we do get some actual SF, rather than “The Establishment, man, it ruined everything!” and what even by my dinosaur tech-savvy standards is some old-fashioned cyberpunk (Gibson did the ‘company owns your soul and you are a techno-serf servicing the computers that run us’ earlier and better)?

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Fascinating. So the inhabitants of planet Deiseach decline even to read discomfiting reviews, much less the discomfiting works themselves?

            Such bubble-dwelling civilizations very commonly fantasize about star-travel, yet very rarely achieve it, isn’t that a self-evident galactic truism?

          • Anonymous says:

            Pipe down, John Sidles.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            “Anonymous”, your comment provides sparse guidance regarding precisely what it is that you wish not to learn

            After all, didn’t Ursula LeGuin self-confessedly get ten whole pages into Atlas Shrugged, before giving up?

            At least LeGuin explains why! 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            Dear aged and venerable Uncle, I did click on the link and start reading this diamond-hard work of SFnal genius and I couldn’t make myself read past the “moan, whinge, gripe, Imma poor downtrodden techno-serf in a Neuromancer rip-off” introductory pages.

            Oooh, I’m saddled with gazillions of debt in student loans when our cushy upper-middle class lifestyle collapsed, and now I’m a company drone, but I’m one of the lucky ones as were I a few years younger I wouldn’t even get to hock my soul for college as I’d be drafted into the imperialist war-mongering we invaded Iraq for oil forces constantly waging perma-war! On the Doomed Earth!

            If I wanted to read John Ringo, I would read John Ringo, because by all reports at least his trashy pulp skiffy is fun if horrifically non-PC.

            For all my dystopian futures needs, I’m happy to stick with Le Guin’s The New Atlantis.

            I respectfully kiss your hands, O venerable and elder ancestor! 🙂

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Thank you, Deiseach, for the link to Ursula LeGuin’s “The new Atlantis” (1975). Gosh, to think it’s been forty-one years since LeGuin wrote it! LeGuin’s “New Atlantis” is holding up even better than Robert Heinlein’s rather similar, now sixty-four year-old, story “Year of the Jackpot” (1952), don’t you think?

            SSC readers who seek modern works that put vigorous STEAM-flesh upon Heinlein’s / LeGuin’s aging empathy-bones are well advised to embrace Francis Spufford’s amazing work — is it fiction? math? history? all three? — Red Plenty (2010).

            As Huck Finn says of Pilgrims Progress (1678), so might the same be said of both Scholz’ Gypsy and Spufford’s Red Plenty: “The statements is interesting, but tough.” 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            So the inhabitants of planet Deiseach decline even to read discomfiting reviews, much less the discomfiting works themselves?

            It’s very telling that Scholz is a 70s kid, as that review informs me:

            Fittingly for a writer who came of age in the 1970s, he harks back to the great quartet of doomsday novels by John Brunner. But he layers on four additional decades of bad news and disappointments.

            I’ve been on this merry-go-round before, I’m old enough to have started reading the tail end of the New Wave and I really am not very interested in a re-vamp of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (that’s probably his novel, “Radiance”, going by the blurb) or an attempt to do an updated “Stand On Zanzibar”. I’ll stick with The Centauri Device for my 70s “dystopian Earth and galactic colonisation was never quite what it promised to be” needs, thanks all the same:

            Outside The Spacer’s Rave, an ancient fourth-generation Denebian with skin blackened and seamed, and eyelids perpetually lowered against the actinic glare of a star he hadn’t seen for twenty years, was reciting lines from the second canto of The Fight At Finnsburg. His hat was at his feet. His boots were cracked, but his voice was passable, booming out over the heads of passing whores and stoned Fleet men:

            The Marty Lingham discovered a bleak
            orbit, hooked by a fuchsia dwarf,
            perihelion at the customary handful
            of millions: cometary, cemetery.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Deiseach comments: “I’ve been on this merry-go-round before …”

            LoL … extended version follows! 🙂

            Well I’ve been to one world fair a picnic and a rodeo and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones. You sure you got today’s code? … old Ripper wouldn’t be giving us plan R unless them Russkies had already clobbered Washington and alot of other towns with a sneak attack.

            The disastrous union of unempathic cognition with strict game-theoretic rationality and advanced technological capacity provides no guarantees of happy endings, does it?

            Carter Scholz’ Gypsy thus reads very naturally as Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove, updated for the 21st century. “Oh and sugar … don’t forget to say your prayers!” 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            Aye, it brings a tear of pride to the eye that in 2015 for some brave, devoted soul it is forever 1984 and the techno-serfs are stuck in indentured bondage to the zaibatsu:

            She changed her major to Information Science, slept with a loan officer, finished grad school half a million in debt, and immediately took the best-paying job she could find, at Xocket Defense Systems. …XDS had huge dorms for employees who couldn’t afford their own living space. Over half their workforce lived there. It was indentured servitude.

            Yet she was lucky, lucky. If she’d been a couple of years younger she wouldn’t have finished school at all. She’d be fighting in Burma or Venezuela or Kazakhstan.

            At XDS she tended the library’s firewalls, maintained and documented software, catalogued projects, fielded service calls from personnel who needed this or that right now, or had forgotten a password, or locked themselves out of their own account. She learned Unix, wrote cron scripts and daemons and Perl routines.

            Such ultrarecent! Much ultrahard! Many ultrarealistic! Wow! 🙂

            “Ultrarecent” – when ‘company towns’ date from the 19th century, and employees (particularly female employees) living in dormitories under the supervision of their employers was a much-resented imposition in the early 20th century.

            “Ultrarealistic” – possibly, possibly not. So by the year 2040, alas, we will still not (despite the best efforts of Title IX) have stamped out sexual harassment, trading sex for grades loans, or academic corruption? Sigh, so disappoint! 🙂

            “Ultrahard” – a band of renegade scientists backed by a rogue billionaire built in secret a starship – sorry, we were talking ‘ultra realism’ a moment ago, weren’t we? Now we’ve left 1984 behind and are back in 1951, When Worlds Collide!

            Of course, it is easy for me, a filthy genre reader, to scoff. The literary auteur of speculative fiction may well indeed imagine he is treading virgin territory here 🙂

            Though dear uncle, I rather suspect (by the faint tugging sensation in my pedal extremity and the muffled tintinnabulation resulting) that you are pulling my leg – and indeed all our legs, on this one.

          • hlynkacg says:

            “Ultrahard” – Ironically the “secret starship” is probably one of the softest parts. Any fusion drive with enough wattage to accelerate a reasonably sized vessel to 0.06 c would be spotted the moment it powered up.
            Think about it, we live in a world where hobbyists can track government spy satellites with hand-held binoculars. A multi-terawatt nuclear blowtorch is going to be a lot easier to spot than that. Inside cislunar space it would probably be one of the brightest things in the night sky.

          • bean says:

            Wait. He’s claiming ultrahard status for something that has a spaceship with that sort of drive sneaking off without being detected? I expect the book would ablate because of how fast I threw it away. Anyone who didn’t know about No Stealth In Space undoubtedly didn’t know about a bunch of other things, too.

          • hlynkacg says:

            As I said above, it may be hard compared to your average Star Trek episode but there’s still a fair bit of squishiness there.

            As an aside, I don’t think the “no stealth in space” axiom is nearly airtight as many people treat it but that’s really a discussion for another thread.

          • bean says:

            As I said above, it may be hard compared to your average Star Trek episode but there’s still a fair bit of squishiness there.

            Well, yes. It’s mostly an expression of how bad his standards are that this is counted as ultrahard. (As if I needed more reasons to ignore him.)

            As an aside, I don’t think the “no stealth in space” axiom is nearly airtight as many people treat it but that’s really a discussion for another thread.

            You’re on. Hopefully John Schilling will chime in, as he’s done most of the work in this area. If not, I’ll do what I can.

          • John Schilling says:

            Sounds interesting, but I’ll have to read the story – might get a chance tomorrow. Generally speaking, yes, there are restricted scenarios where spacecraft can be usefully hidden, but giant fusion-drive starships are going to be seen by the people on the planet from which they depart.

          • hlynkacg says:

            You’re on. Hopefully John Schilling will chime in…

            Chime away.

          • Deiseach says:

            giant fusion-drive starships are going to be seen by the people on the planet from which they depart

            Oh gosh, yes. That’s part of what drove me mad about “Star Trek Into Darkness”; the Secret Starship Base off Jupiter.

            Never mind the fact that in the previous reboot movie, apparently Starfleet did all its ship-constructing in a cornfield in Iowa on the ground in Earth (I did actually quietly cheer for a moment when they showed the construction docks orbiting Io because yes, it’s easier to build your starship in orbit than build it on the ground and then launch it), how the heck were they supposed to be hiding an entire spacedock plus massive giant warship?

            This is the 24th century, we have all kinds of civilian and military traffic buzzing around the Solar System, we have all kinds of observation stations on the planets and satellites of those planets, somebody is going to see a huge construction project tootling about out there!

            And that novella tells me that, in a world so closely and tightly monitored because it’s starving for resources and everyone is jealously eyeing their neighbour and even going to perma-war to take their stuff, a gang of renegades can build their own starship and launch it and no government or authority is going to notice or go “Wait a minute, where is all this makeshipium ore that is being mined ending up? There’s a discrepancy in the accounting!” and stick their beak in and try and take control or shut it down or turn it to their own ends?

            That is not ultrarealism or ultrahard.

          • LHN says:

            (I did actually quietly cheer for a moment when they showed the construction docks orbiting Io because yes, it’s easier to build your starship in orbit than build it on the ground and then launch it)

            There’s a reasonable argument in that direction for near-future spaceships. (Though obviously not current ones.)

            For Trek-style starships it’s less of a slam dunk. They have artificial gravity, which their maneuvering shows can handle way more than a mere 1g, and it’s to all appearances cheap and reliable. The ship structures, once in place have to be able to take stresses substantially greater than 1g. (Starfleet may not be a military organization, but their ships get hit with missile fire an awful lot, shields notwithstanding, and hopefully the ship doesn’t just collapse under impulse acceleration if the gravity is on the fritz.) The hull can take atmospheric pressure from the inside when there’s a vacuum around it– having pressure equalized with the outside should be less stressful. And for friction heating during launch, they have shields that can withstand direct phaser fire.

            Their spacesuits (at least the ones we’ve seen in the other continuity; I don’t remember if they’ve shown up here) don’t look particularly comfortable. They certainly don’t appear to do EVAs when they can avoid them. (Vs worlds like Niven’s Known Space, where wandering the lunar surface in a skinsuit is recreation. Feds’ idea of a good way to get around in a vacuum is to transport to the nearest pressurized location.)

            Given that, it makes roughly as much sense to construct starships on a planetary surface as it does to build oceangoing ships in drydock instead in their operating environment. For more or less the same reason.

            (We presumably could do more ship construction with divers and oxyacetylene torches, just as we do for structures where underwater assembly is necessary. But we don’t have to, so we don’t.)

          • Deiseach says:

            For Trek-style starships it’s less of a slam dunk. They have artificial gravity, which their maneuvering shows can handle way more than a mere 1g, and it’s to all appearances cheap and reliable. The ship structures, once in place have to be able to take stresses substantially greater than 1g.

            I’m thinking not so much of classic Trek as the reboot, where pre-Academy Kirk tools up on a motorbike to see the ship being constructed in the cornfield.

            It just seemed easier to me, for a ship that is not meant to routinely enter atmosphere, much less land (and never mind the later series and movies which made a big to-do over the fact that “we can land the ship” – even in these, when a starship lands, it’s mostly because it crashed) to build it in orbit rather than on the ground and then have to launch it.

            Re: spacesuits – the original series was broadcast before the moon landing, so they had no model for realism 🙂 I think they probably extrapolated from deep sea diving suits. Later series and movies kind of keep a similar look for continuity/homage; the animated series replaced spacesuits by a life-support forcefield (the yellow glow around the figures in this image) generated by belt-mounted equipment which solves the comfort and maneuverability problems but which doesn’t look very reassuring as “it really is safe and won’t fail at the wrong moment”.

            The second reboot movie had much more form-fitting, sleeker suits for the “space jump” from ship to ship.

          • LHN says:

            Fair point re the suits used for the jump. But they’re still (I’d guess) not as comfortable as shirtsleeves. (Or the life support forcefields of TAS, which alas don’t seem to have survived to the TNG era. Maybe they weren’t all that reliable. 🙂 )

            I think the analogy with surface shipbuilding still potentially holds. The fact that a ship is best built in drydock doesn’t mean that future excursions onto land are advisable or practical.

            I have no problem with the idea that for Reasons, it makes sense to build Federation starships in space. (Heck, they have forcefields– in principle they could just throw a big one up around the area and pressurize it. Or fill one of the huge spaces they use for starbase spacedocks with air. The first Motion Picture’s “build it in bulky spacesuits in vaccum” isn’t the only option.)

            I’m just saying that by the same token, I also have no real problem with them saying that for Reasons, it’s most practical to construct them in a facility in Iowa: your construction workers have air, can scratch their noses, and don’t have to deal with or counteract zero-g health effects (since Trek uses a lot more human labor and less automation than one might expect), it involves no forces or conditions more extreme than a cruiser fitted for combat would be expected to withstand, you get free radiation shielding for delicate components, etc. etc.

            I think the decision for something with the imagined tech of Star Trek is ultimately an aesthetic one that can easily be backfilled. Original Trek had space construction because the Motion Picture wanted to spend twenty minutes doing flybys of the revamped Enterprise. NuTrek has ground-based construction because it wanted young Kirk to be able to look up and see his future ship (did he but know it) abuilding.

            I have issues with some of the tech decisions made by Abrams & co.– warp to Vulcan is way too fast, interstellar transporters are a game changer in a way that no one really acknowledges. But the shipbuilding, while initially jarring to me, actually made some sense on further reflection.

        • DrBeat says:

          I have not yet seen something that purports to be both “hard SF” and “hope-destroying” that did not cheat relentlessly in order to present the hope-destroying narrative it wanted to.

          This does not look like it will break the trend.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            A rather brainy website named “gwern.net” took the trouble to extensively analyze Carter Scholz’ previous techno-dystopian novel Radiance (including the complete text of the novel).

            Perhaps “gwern’s” exemplary intellectual commitment may motivate SSC readers to consider more thoroughly Scholz’ scrupulously science-respecting body of work?

          • The Nybbler says:

            I’m tempted to snark 1984, but while it is both, it didn’t purport to be either.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            Also in the class of dystopian hard-science fiction, there is Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik Conway’s recent The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (MIT Press, 2014).

            However, SSC’s alt-rationalists need have no concern, `cuz we all know that Collapse never happens, isn’t that right?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Uncle Ilya – thanks for the Radiance link!

          • nona says:

            DrBeat, ever read anything by Peter Watts?

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            FacelessCraven is gracious: “Uncle Ilya – thanks for the Radiance link!”

            Lol … FacelessCraven, are you the Scarlet Pimpernel !? 🙂

          • DrBeat says:

            Peter Watts’ Blindsight is my central example of “hard SF” with a depressing message that cheats relentlessly to pull it off, then says “Well, this is hard SF, this is the inevitable outcome of things!”

            Explain what possible environment the scramblers could have evolved in to give them abilities that involve being able to read human neurology, despite never encountering humans before.

            Explain what possible reason humanity had for bringing back vampires, when they were dangerous, required expensive infrastructure, and yet did nothing for humanity that computers didn’t do better.

          • A Kind Of Dog-Octopus says:

            I believe the idea there was they could recognize that the brain was a computational organ, of the sort that could be common enough among other alien life they out-competed and overran. Then it was just a matter crunching the logic of how our visual processing works and finding an exploit.

            Which I guess isn’t totally impossible given a large enough computer and enough time, but I doubt the scrambler would be or have that.

          • Deiseach says:

            Explain what possible reason humanity had for bringing back vampires, when they were dangerous, required expensive infrastructure, and yet did nothing for humanity that computers didn’t do better.

            Arrogant stupidity is always a good bet, so I’ll give Watts a pass on that one, but I agree that he cheated like the dickens to set his world up just so and then went all “See, this is the iron law of blind nature, I can’t help what happened!”

      • bean says:

        I have two problems with that:
        1. FTL seems an unprincipled exception to the general rule of ‘get science right’, and that’s epistemically unsatisfying.
        2. Let’s say I’m writing a story where they’ve developed a pill that basically stops the deleterious effects of zero-G on the body. I’ve discussed this with a doctor, and he explained why it’s fantastically unlikely that we’ll reach a point where we can do that. I agree with his logic. Other than that and a very careful FTL system, my story is as accurate as I can make it. Do I still qualify as being hard? (The reader who doesn’t know about this is almost certain to answer yes, and someone who didn’t seek medical advice could have done the same thing.)
        My definition resolves this by allowing qualified exceptions to science anywhere so long as the author is careful and thoughtful.

        • Deiseach says:

          I think FTL is allowed on the basis that “yes, we know it’s not real hard science but if we leave it out, nobody will ever get anywhere fast and instead you’ll have to write about Joe the hydroponics gardener who’s the great-great-grandchild of the original Joe who shipped aboard the generation colony ship that is still only half-way to its destination, instead of the cool ‘so we got to the new colony but aliens were already there’ part”.

          Whereas “pill that nullifies the effect of zero-G” is going to need a lot of back-up by way of “and that includes genetic modification so humans can live long-term in space and a whole raft of other supports” before you can get away with it in hard SF terms, because if you’re going for realism, there are other ways you can get around the problem, and if you want to ignore (for the purposes of the story) the effects of long-term zero-g, nobody but the most sticky of sticklers can pull you up on it as you don’t have to employ it as part of the plot – you can let it be assumed that by the time of the story, the problem has been solved.

          • bean says:

            nobody but the most sticky of sticklers can pull you up on it

            The problem is that I am that person. Seriously. I can nitpick anything.
            Yes, doing the pill right would involve at least nodding that I know what I’m doing, and probably sliding in a bit of nice biotech to make it look less forced. I should have said that earlier.

          • Deiseach says:

            The problem is that I am that person. Seriously. I can nitpick anything.

            Well, I tend to take intention into account. Is the existence of the story based on hard science, so that we get pages of description of exactly how to pour a cup of tea in zero-g when you can’t pour a cup of tea? Then yes, you better make your magic pill as believable as possible.

            Is the purpose of the story “we’re all living on an L-5 habitat and last week Tom Brown got murdered but nobody knows whodunnit”, and the point of the story is how do you dunnit in a closed environment where everyone knows everyone else and everyone’s movements are accounted for? Then I’ll be less critical of your magic pill, even if it is the Maguffin that enabled Joe Smith to go outside and rig up the murderation device that later got Tom while Joe was inside establishing his alibi 🙂

    • Maware says:

      Soft SF tends to be sociological, concerned with people. Hard SF is usually concerned with things. This is kind of why hard SF had a historically bad reputation, because they were creating scientifically rigorous worlds full of characters who were exposition fairies and act like 13 year old schoolboys. Though to be fair some of the soft science was so soft that it was more like absurdist fiction, or not sociological at all, just recasting westerns or Scottish highland romances into outer space.

    • Anon. says:

      I don’t think hardness has much to do with realistic science as much as it has to do with consistent science. Many of Egan’s novels are fundamentally based on universes with physics different from our own (and therefore doesn’t have much to do with our own science), but clearly they’re not “soft”…

    • Richard says:

      Larry Niven in either N-Space or Playgrounds of the mind defines ‘hard science fiction’ like this:

      You’re allowed to make up new laws of physics but not to break existing ones.

      Hence, the Alderson drive allows FTL travel by new laws, but Langston fields still obey the laws of thermodynamics.

      • bean says:

        I think this is sort of a statement of the correspondence principle (which is necessary but not, IMO, sufficient for hard SF). But the Alderson drive does violate relativity, it just does so in a rather subtle way. (The way it works requires a universal reference frame.) The saving grace here is that we can’t test the nature of the bits that it affects, so it doesn’t violate correspondence.

    • Nyx says:

      This was linked on the subreddit earlier. I think it makes an interesting point about different types of media trying to do different things; in the case of hard sci-fi, there’s an emphasis on science and a kind of assumption that science is in of itself, interesting. So the “tradeoff” you’re talking about doesn’t really exist in that there’s no conflict. The science is the story. Or, as he puts it:

      “Many science fiction writers pay homage to this subject, of course, but for most the laws of nature are there to serve the story: a discursion on the physics of a wormhole, say, would be for most writers an adjunct to a fantastic voyage therein, but Egan has the chutzpah to imagine that the reader will delight in the physics for its own sake.”

      • Deiseach says:

        Egan has the chutzpah to imagine that the reader will delight in the physics for its own sake

        You can do, if the writer can pull it off and you don’t have two cardboard stock figures doing the “As you know, Bob” bit before the infodump.

        The peril with that is often it’s the equivalent of the pages of details about the guns and ammo in a thriller – does nothing to advance the plot, the only use is to let you know Hero has a big gun and more dakka, and the intricate “this was, of course, the custom Heckler Ketch 956 only manufactured in a limited production run of 6 and 3/4 in 1984 for the Even More Secret Secret Service Shhhh Don’t Tell Anyone, requiring ammunition coated in a light glaze of Tibetan Pink Himalayan salt – none of that Indian side of the border knock-offs – and heteroultradynamium-632 mined from the innermost thigh of the sixth moon of Jupiter” details that send the guns and ammo nerds into nergasm reduce the rest of us to “zzzzzz – wake me up in three chapters’ time when he finally puts the goddamn gun in the goddamn holster and goes and does something”.

        • LHN says:

          Of course some of that is different strokes. I’m pretty sure that a lot of Tom Clancy or David Weber’s audience considers intricate descriptions of ships or weapons a feature, not a bug.

          That’s not my jam, but I like pastiche Encyclopedia Galactica or academic articles set in the imagined world, which are just a different flavor of infodump. I ate up the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and dove into the later-published ancillary material, the in-world essay about Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, C.J. Cherryh’s intro to the astropolitical situation at the beginning of Downbelow Station, etc.

          I get that those are a minority taste, and I have deep respect for what SF author Jo Walton calls “incluing” (the ability to invisibly embed necessary worldbuilding details in the story a la Heinlein’s famous “The door dilated”). But I don’t wholly insist on it, and have a fair amount of patience for an author’s enthusiastic discursions.

          Though I probably prefer them presented directly by the author or narrator rather than via a transparent “As you know, Prime Minister Churchill, we have been at war with Germany since it invaded Poland four years ago. Two years after that, the Americans joined us after their naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, and of course since then…” If you’re going to tell the reader, tell the reader, not a character who already should know all this stuff. (And making someone implausibly uninformed– e.g., Harry Potter after he’s been in the wizarding world a third of his life– isn’t a great improvement.)

        • On the other hand, a good deal of The Dogs of War is interesting for the technical detail of the illegal/semi-legal weapons market and how the weapons could be used to take over a small African country with a small but very competent team of mercenaries. It’s a better book for the moral twist at the end, when you discover that the protagonist is acting for a cause he believes in, but the earlier parts are quite readable.

          • Deiseach says:

            Frederick Forsyth could do those kind of details and make them interesting, informative, and relevant to the plot. A lot of the modern guys are just engaging in weapons porn, so far as it strikes my uncaring eyes.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I like “Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness” from TVTropes. Personally, I usually consider a story to be hard science fiction only if it falls in category 5 or 5.5, but sometimes a work in category 4 can qualify as well.

    • Jaskologist says:

      How hard would you (all) consider The Expanse? They’ve clearly thought through things like the effects of microgravity on life and how people in space would live (they even pour water differently). There’s no FTL and the tech seems to be pretty reasonable extrapolations of stuff we currently have.

      But then things start getting fantastical towards the end of the season. I can’t speak for the books.

  22. tc says:

    Could you pull (quote in full) the comments of the week? Linking to a section doesn’t seem to work on mobile for large pages, the page jumps while it’s being loaded and I lose the spot.

    Or is it just my setup/problem?

    • Anonymous says:

      1. Try clicking on the link again. Your phone probably cached the page and it will work better the second time.

      2. I think that Bakkot made it so that it jumps after loading, specifically to solve the problem of jumps in the middle. So it might be your setup. But maybe he could make that better.

  23. Liskantope says:

    Once again I want to run a question of identity semantics past all of you out there in SSC-land.

    I’m American (white, of European ancestry) and lived in America for most of my life. In my experience, if someone was born in a different country, say China, and comes from a completely Chinese family, but has lived in America from early childhood, speaks perfect English, is an American citizen, etc., then they are Chinese-American. If they were instead born in America and are a second-generation Chinese immigrant, then maybe they’d even be identified as just American despite having been brought up with some Chinese culture. If they are completely ethnically Chinese but they and their parents and grandparents all grew up in America, then they’d probably be identified as American, but in racial terms would be called Asian-American. The only way someone with Chinese origins would only called Chinese but not American is if they only recently moved to America and haven’t become a citizen.

    Now in Italy, I know someone who I would refer to as Chinese-Italian (physically 100% Chinese but moved to Italy at age 3, speaks perfect Italian and okay Chinese, etc.) who doesn’t identify as Italian and considers this really obvious (in the sense of “of course I’m Chinese — after all, look at me”). This is beginning to open my eyes to what appears to be a cultural difference between here and America, where one’s nationality here in Europe is often considered in terms of physical ethnicity. Is the difference in terminology as stark as I’m perceiving? Why would the American terminology be so different — could it be something to do with America considering itself a melting pot or America’s stronger aversion to racially-charged language? Or is there something else going on?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Because America is founded on a notion of shared citizenship rather than shared ethnic origin. You can say this is a result of the “melting pot” idea, but I think it’s the other way around; the “melting pot” was a historically necessary step to forge a nation out of a bunch of jumbled up ethnicities.

      Since America is founded on shared citizenship, if you’re a citizen and you’re assimilated, bam, you’re American. European countries are founded on ethnic origin, so a Chinese family can’t become Italian, at least not without generations of interbreeding with actual Italians.

      • Skef says:

        Given how things tended to go until the late-1800s (at least) I find it implausible to trace our current attitudes to just the founding documents and ethos.

        • LHN says:

          Though the founding generation had extremely influential immigrants (Hamilton and Gallatin, at least) among its number, even if the former cast aspersions on the latter for being an alien Swiss presence. (And in turn was damned as a creole by fellow Federalist John Adams.) That suggests that however imperfectly and grudgingly, acceptance of immigrants even in the highest levels of government and society was there there from the beginning.

      • Just as a general point, I think people who are worried that immigrants will change American culture wildly underestimate how attractive American culture is.

        A good bit of American culture is based on supplying people with things they want, especially the commercial part of American culture.

        • Urstoff says:

          It always strikes me as an ethno-centric worry, too; namely, that immigrants will change White American Culture, which they equate with American culture. I think America is pretty damn good at assimilating cultures in the sense that immigrant cultures get put through a transmogrifier and come out as a distinctly American version of their old culture with lots of other American sub-cultures mixed in. Dynamism is American culture, and you need immigrants to fuel much of that dynamism.

          • cassander says:

            >I think America is pretty damn good at assimilating cultures in the sense that immigrant cultures get put through a transmogrifier and come out as a distinctly American version of their old culture with lots of other American sub-cultures mixed in.

            This is true, but A, “pretty damn good at” assimilation does not mean that our capacity is infinite, and B, in an affirmative action world, the incentives to assimilate are a lot weaker than they used to be,.

          • Civilis says:

            It always strikes me as an ethno-centric worry, too; namely, that immigrants will change White American Culture, which they equate with American culture. I think America is pretty damn good at assimilating cultures in the sense that immigrant cultures get put through a transmogrifier and come out as a distinctly American version of their old culture with lots of other American sub-cultures mixed in. Dynamism is American culture, and you need immigrants to fuel much of that dynamism.

            Coming at this as someone with strong Red Tribe leanings, the issue is that I think there are some root level memetic structures necessary to sustain American melting-pot culture for both Red and Blue Tribe. One of those root-level memes is ‘I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it’. Yes, this meme has been under attack from both sides before, but at the moment the strongest attacks are coming from the Blue tribe in the name of Cultural Diversity associated with immigration. Further, from the Red Tribe side it looks like immigrants are being granted ‘rights’ in culture that the Red Tribe is not permitted.

            A Blue Tribe member can dunk a picture of Christ in a jar of urine and get federal funding for it, and Red Tribe members that object to the federal funding are hopeless reactionaries for objecting. Meanwhile, if a Red Tribe member draws a picture of Mohammed this is obviously insulting another culture and are hopeless bigots for giving offense.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            That would be fine, except that we’ve been spending quite a few years now industriously dismantling all of the elements of American culture that encouraged assimilation. I’m not entirely certain that speaking the word “assimilation” out loud isn’t a hate crime at this point.

          • brad says:

            Civilis

            A Blue Tribe member can dunk a picture of Christ in a jar of urine and get federal funding for it, and Red Tribe members that object to the federal funding are hopeless reactionaries for objecting. Meanwhile, if a Red Tribe member draws a picture of Mohammed this is obviously insulting another culture and are hopeless bigots for giving offense.

            I don’t think that’s a fair summary of the intelligent “blue tribe” position.

            The federal funding couldn’t be pulled because it would violate the First Amendment to do so. I don’t think the artist is particularly celebrated by anyone (I certainly get remember his/her name). Most people I know think that entire genre of modern art is dumb at best.

            Likewise drawing Mohammed is absolutely protected by the First Amendment and only a fringe want to change that. But similarly to above many people think it is dumb.

          • Sandy says:

            Likewise drawing Mohammed is absolutely protected by the First Amendment and only a fringe want to change that. But similarly to above many people think it is dumb.

            It’s not so much a First Amendment issue as a sympathy/consistency issue. If a Christian organization condemns Andres Serrano, the progressive narrative is about bible-thumping right-wingers and how great it is that they’re not getting their way anymore. If a Muslim organization massacres cartoonists in the street, the progressive narrative is about intolerant right-wingers insulting the faith of other cultures. Bad behavior from certain favored groups is met with rationalizations, justifications and excuses while the same behavior from the majority group would be roundly condemned. (As it should be because it’s bad behavior)

            A recent incident that comes to mind: I frequently visit a law school in New York for reasons. In the lounge on the staff floor, the professors had pinned a large picture of Brock Turner’s face to a board, where everyone visiting could see it, with the emblazoned words “THE FACE OF RAPE IN AMERICA”. I can’t imagine that they would do anything of the sort if Brock Turner were black or Muslim or god forbid a black Muslim.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            The federal funding couldn’t be pulled because it would violate the First Amendment to do so.

            I’m not sure I buy this, though I’ve seen it invoked more than once recently. Would the government be required to fund, say, a documentary claiming Obama was born in Indonesia, under the same principles?

            I don’t think the artist is particularly celebrated by anyone (I certainly get remember his/her name). Most people I know think that entire genre of modern art is dumb at best.

            Likewise drawing Mohammed is absolutely protected by the First Amendment and only a fringe want to change that. But similarly to above many people think it is dumb.

            The million dollar question, though: do these people think that these two examples are dumb for the same reasons? If “Piss Christ” is dumb because modern art violates their aesthetic sensibilities, but the picture of Mohammed is dumb because Islamists are willing to murder anyone who does it, then this is just a low-key endorsement of the heckler’s veto which, while not against the letter of the First Amendment, is certainly against its spirit.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The idea of the melting pot is that the immigrants will adopt the culture of the new country and in the process, change it to a small but measurable degree. The current view on the SJ left is that the immigrants should keep their culture and where it conflicts with the existing culture, existing culture must give way and accomodate, but not adopt, the immigrant values. The current view on much of the right is that America is full and the immigrants should go home.

            Neither of these views is compatible with the melting pot concept, obviously.

            The rest of the right insists that the immigrants adopt major parts of the dominant culture (Joey Vento’s “Speak English” sign at his cheesesteak stand some years ago is a good example) and where there is a conflict, the immigrant culture must give way. I don’t know what the non-SJ left (if it indeed survives enough to have a view) thinks.

          • Civilis says:

            I don’t think that’s a fair summary of the intelligent “blue tribe” position.

            It’s not supposed to be a reflection of the Blue Tribe position, but of how the Red Tribe views the situation. There may be a rational reason for it, but the optics from the perspective of the Red Tribe look really bad. Of course the Blue Tribe doesn’t see attacking Chik Fil A because its founders hold a traditional view of human sexuality as attacks on Christianity, but Red Tribe members that tie their traditional views on sexuality to their religion take those attacks as directed against them. (It’s not relevant to the discussion how wrong or right they are).

            It’s also not the only place where these sorts of optics occur in this discussion. I know a number of Reddish-Gray Tribe members and some Blue Tribe Republicans, all immigrants or those close to immigrants, that think pandering to illegal immigrants completely undermines the rule of law, which is another meme (or body of memes) that is viewed as essential to America. They’ve spent their time in line, doing the paperwork, and seeing people that didn’t do the work getting the same things… if not better, in some cases, as local authorities in sanctuary cities tend to turn a blind eye to things illegal immigrants do which would get legal immigrants expelled… really turns them off.

            For this discussion, it doesn’t matter to the Red Tribe that a lot of this isn’t government pressure. If someone gets fired from their job for using the term ‘illegal immigrant’ instead of ‘undocumented migrant’, the Red Tribe is going to view that as a chilling effect on speech and a move away from the fundamental freedom even if the government isn’t involved, and if the media only puts pressure on the Red Tribe to change its values (say, making ‘Red Tribe employer fires employee for using undocumented migrant’ a front page story until the employer relents, but does nothing about the reverse), the Red Tribe is going to see it as a breakdown in the Rule of Law, as the Blue Tribe has privileges in the unwritten rules that the Red Tribe does not.

            These fundamental American values, the freedom of speech and the rule of law, the Red Tribe views as being under siege, and immigration is merely one vector by which that is happening.

          • LHN says:

            The idea of the melting pot is that the immigrants will adopt the culture of the new country and in the process, change it to a small but measurable degree.

            Not exactly. The idea is (or at least at origin was) that the melting all those cultures together would result in a new, different, and better culture.

            (But yes, the original idea as expounded was a culture, the way carbon steel isn’t wrought iron with embedded bits of graphite or channels of pure nickel running through the center.)

            DAVID: … America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting‐Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re‐forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand [Graphically illustrating it on the table] in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to– these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and
            Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians— into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American!

            MENDEL: I should have thought the American was made already‐‐eighty millions of him.

            DAVID: Eighty millions! [He smiles toward VERA in good‐ humored derision.] Eighty millions! Over a continent! Why, that cockleshell of a Britain has forty millions! No, uncle, the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the
            coming superman. Ah, what a glorious Finale for my symphony—if I can only write it.

            (Zangwill was, let us say, not reticent about the idea of American exceptionalism.)

          • brad says:

            Sandy:

            If a Muslim organization massacres cartoonists in the street, the progressive narrative is about intolerant right-wingers insulting the faith of other cultures.

            Weird, I saw a whole bunch of Je suis Charlie and tricolor pictures.

            Where is it your are getting your information on this again?

            13th letter:

            I’m not sure I buy this, though I’ve seen it invoked more than once recently. Would the government be required to fund, say, a documentary claiming Obama was born in Indonesia, under the same principles?

            Yes. Which is to say that it could not refuse to fund such a thing because it disagreed with the message. However grant makers can take into account among other factors, if so directed by Congress, “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public”. The gory details are in NEA v Finley; don’t miss the Scalia concurrence.

            The million dollar question, though: do these people think that these two examples are dumb for the same reasons? If “Piss Christ” is dumb because modern art violates their aesthetic sensibilities, but the picture of Mohammed is dumb because Islamists are willing to murder anyone who does it, then this is just a low-key endorsement of the heckler’s veto which, while not against the letter of the First Amendment, is certainly against its spirit.

            What if it isn’t because Islamist are willing to murder anyone, but because they don’t see intentionally provocative acts as intrinsically artistic — not a dead whale or a crucifix in piss or a drawing of Mohammad? Is that an aesthetic critique?

            Civilis:
            It seems like you are bootstrapping. Your original post reject Urstoff and Nancy Lebovitz’s points on the basis that the “blue tribe” was undermining core American values which aid assimilation. I don’t think it matters to the original points if the “red tribe” genuinely but wrongly thinks that. Only if it is actually true.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Where is it your are getting your information on this again?

            http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-abuse-of-satire/390312/

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Weird, I saw a whole bunch of Je suis Charlie and tricolor pictures. Where is it your are getting your information on this again?

            I saw those, yes. And I also saw a nonzero number of left-wing journalists and thought leaders who, once the coast was clear, started talking loudly about “je ne suis pas Charlie” and got very little pushback from other left-wing journalists and thought leaders on the matter.

            I think the difference between what we’re talking about is, it really isn’t the average man on the street I’m concerned about. The average person tends to be basically okay and willing to live and let live no matter their politics. It’s the people who have the most input into the narrative that worry me, because they have some frankly horrifyingly intolerant views.

            Yes. Which is to say that it could not refuse to fund such a thing because it disagreed with the message. However grant makers can take into account among other factors, if so directed by Congress, “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public”. The gory details are in NEA v Finley; don’t miss the Scalia concurrence.

            All right. But do they? The proof is in the pudding, and we see that at least enough of that pudding is made out of hostile Blue Tribe memes that it can keep rightie outrage peddlers in business for years. Where’s the government-funded red tribe version of Piss Christ?

            What if it isn’t because Islamist are willing to murder anyone, but because they don’t see intentionally provocative acts as intrinsically artistic — not a dead whale or a crucifix in piss or a drawing of Mohammad? Is that an aesthetic critique?

            It could be. Is it? That’s pretty much what I’m asking, because I have a hard time thinking of well-known critics who opposed both Piss Christ and a Mohammed cartoon. I vaguely recall some cranky paleoconservative John Derbyshire/Rod Dreher types, that’s about all I’ve got.

          • brad says:

            I don’t think we have much to talk about. I’m not much concerned with “thought leaders”, “the narrative”, and people that publicly take positions on the crucifix in pee.

            All too French public intellectual for me. I prefer dealing with the more concrete.

          • Sandy says:

            @brad:

            Where is it your are getting your information on this again?

            Garry Trudeau criticized Charlie Hebdo’s “free speech absolutism” at the George Palk Awards. George Galloway condemned the cartoons as “pornographic, obscene insults to the Prophet Muhammad, and by extension 1.7 billion people” and said “there are limits to free speech and free expression, even in France”. The editor of Al-Jazeera English sent out an e-mail calling the cartoons “an abuse of free speech” and said Je Suis Charlie was an “alienating slogan”.

            I can’t imagine these people would say these things if the cartoons were about Christians.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            I don’t think we have much to talk about. I’m not much concerned with “thought leaders”, “the narrative”, and people that publicly take positions on the crucifix in pee.

            And that is of course your right. But like the man says, you may not be interested in (culture) war, but (culture) war is interested in you.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Sandy

            Surprisingly, George Galloway (a British politician) and Salah-Aldeen Khadr (a presumably British employee of a Qatari news channel) are not representatives of the mainstream American left (or any left, but that’s not relevant to this argument). I don’t think Garry Trudeau is either, since I’d never heard of him before reading that article.

          • Fahundo says:

            Where’s the government-funded red tribe version of Piss Christ?

            Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol

          • LHN says:

            Garry Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury, probably the most widely-read American political comic strip for decades.

            It’s a long time past the height of its influence. But it’s noteworthy that a liberal political cartoonist who made his bones during the era when crusading against censorship specifically to defend the right to offensive expression was a big deal (Lenny Bruce, George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television, the ACLU defending a Nazi march through heavily Jewish Skokie, Illinois, etc.) is coming down on the anti-free-speech side of the question.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol

            I don’t think they are equivalent.

            Putting the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall is presumably about venerating something the artist likes, namely rule of law and traditional Judeo-Christian values. Piss Christ on the other hand is about degenerating something the artist dislikes, presumably religion in general and Christians in particular.

            One is “Yay in-group” while the other is “Boo out-group”.

            The Red Tribe equivalent of Piss Christ would be something like putting an image of Mohamed in all the urinals at a 9/11 memorial.

          • “The Red Tribe equivalent of Piss Christ would be something like putting an image of Mohamed in all the urinals at a 9/11 memorial.”

            Funny example. I think the following story is true, although I haven’t checked it.

            The best hotel in Tokyo before the war was the Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the course of the U.S. occupation breaking up the Zaibatsu, the owner of the Imperial Hotel lost control of it, a fact he resented.

            So he built the Okura Hotel, which at that point was the finest hotel in Tokyo. On the top floor were a men’s room and a woman’s room with picture windows.

            Overlooking the American embassy.

          • Fahundo says:

            Government-sponsored endorsement of one religion vs. government-sponsored denigration of the same religion. I think that’s about as symmetrical as you can get, because, as much as the “culture wars” can be said to be about religion, it’s Christianity vs everything else, rather than Christianity vs Islam or something.

            A lot of the prominent names on the left, like Sam Harris, for example, would probably not be bothered by an art piece that involved pissing on the Quran.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @brad:

            The federal funding couldn’t be pulled because it would violate the First Amendment to do so.

            That’s odd, because I remember when Brendan Eich was fired there were plenty of preachy liberal articles about how “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that anybody else is obliged to support or put up with your nonsense”.

          • brad says:

            Is it really so difficult to understand that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to the government and not private entities?

          • Fahundo says:

            The first Amendment and freedom of speech aren’t the same thing.

            We can probably agree that what happened to Eich was morally wrong, but it the Constitution doesn’t prevent you from being fired for your views.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I don’t think we have much to talk about. I’m not much concerned with “thought leaders”, “the narrative”, and people that publicly take positions on the crucifix in pee.

            All too French public intellectual for me. I prefer dealing with the more concrete.

            That’s all well and good, but then it becomes a game of “whose experience is more representative”, which is a pretty pointless thing.

          • brad says:

            More or less pointless than arguing about whether or not Garry Trudeau is a genuine “thought leader” that defines the “progressive narrative”?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Fahundo says:

            I think that’s about as symmetrical as you can get.

            They’re only symmetrical if you view veneration and denigration as having equal moral worth.

            Meanwhile your Quaran example is a red herring. Symmetry would be finding something that prominent names on the left, like Sam Harris would like to see treated with respect and pissing on that.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            More or less pointless than arguing about whether or not Garry Trudeau is a genuine “thought leader” that defines the “progressive narrative”?

            1.27 times as pointless.

          • Fahundo says:

            They’re only symmetrical if you view veneration and denigration as having equal moral worth.

            Meanwhile your Quaran example is a red herring. Symmetry would be finding something that prominent names on the left, like Sam Harris would like to see treated with respect and pissing on that.

            Alright, let me rephrase. The religion of the left is secularism. Putting the ten commandments in front of a state capitol is like an open attack on the Sacred Holy Scripture of Secularism.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Garry Trudeau is an irrelevant nobody, Pepe the Frog is an important symbol in the battle for the nation’s soul.

          • Fahundo says:

            “Pepe the Frog is a huge favorite white supremacist meme,”

            I have to say, i never expected the character assassination attempts this election season to go quite so far.

          • Civilis says:

            Is it really so difficult to understand that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to the government and not private entities?

            People can be legally fired for holding beliefs, and this is not new, but we’ve gone from ‘we fired him because he was an outspoken supporter of the Nazis / Communists’ to ‘we fired him for holding the same beliefs as 45% of the population (and the same beliefs as 80% of the population a decade ago)’. A lot of people believe this change isn’t a good thing.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “Haven’t you heard about Brandon Eich?!!”

            As an aside, there are a lot of people who seem to think they’re making some kind of point by sneering a sentence like the above.

            Yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve heard of Brendan (not Brandon) Eich. He was fired for his political beliefs, to the loud applause of the news media and pundits in his industry. Your sneering doesn’t make that not have happened.

          • Corey says:

            we’ve gone from ‘we fired him because he was an outspoken supporter of the Nazis / Communists’ to ‘we fired him for holding the same beliefs as 45% of the population (and the same beliefs as 80% of the population a decade ago)’. A lot of people believe this change isn’t a good thing.

            I’ve been assured that any sort of job security is one of the worst things that can happen to an economy; somewhere between “factories being firebombed” and “potato famine” IIRC. Sad that Eich got caught up in this, but that’s the price we pay for a dynamic economy; surely he should be happy to make way for his replacement, who will do a much better job since he’ll be hungry enough to toe the party line.

          • brad says:

            Let’s recap. I originally wrote:

            The federal funding couldn’t be pulled because it would violate the First Amendment to do so.

            Mr. X quoted this and in response wrote:

            That’s odd, because I remember when Brendan Eich was fired there were plenty of preachy liberal articles about how “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that anybody else is obliged to support or put up with your nonsense”.

            This reply makes no sense whatsoever. The Eich situation had nothing to do with the First Amendment, and the quoted sentences were specifically about the First Amendment.

            The two possibilities I saw was that it was a deliberate attempt to introduce a red herring or that Mr. X doesn’t understand the state action doctrine. The latter seemed like a more charitable assumption so I followed up with a (admittedly snarky) response pointing out that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private actors.

            Finally, you (Civilis) wrote, after quoting my response:

            People can be legally fired for holding beliefs, and this is not new, but we’ve gone from ‘we fired him because he was an outspoken supporter of the Nazis / Communists’ to ‘we fired him for holding the same beliefs as 45% of the population (and the same beliefs as 80% of the population a decade ago)’. A lot of people believe this change isn’t a good thing.

            This just doubles down on the non sequitur. You might as well have said “people are unhappy with high drug prices” for all the relevance it has.

            There is no reasonable argument that Eich and Serrano were treated differently because progressives are hypocrites. That’s because there situations were completely different. Bringing up Eich when talking Serrano makes no sense and at this point I have to think is just bad faith.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Is it really so difficult to understand that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to the government and not private entities?

            I don’t see how that makes any relevant difference to the principles at stake: either support for freedom of speech means assisting people in expressing themselves, or it doesn’t. The idea that not giving government money to Serrano would violate the First Amendment only makes sense on the first view; the idea that it’s perfectly in keeping with free speech rights to force somebody out of their job for expressing an opinion you disagree with only makes sense on the second.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            This reply makes no sense whatsoever. The Eich situation had nothing to do with the First Amendment, and the quoted sentences were specifically about the First Amendment.

            Except the reply wasn’t about the legalisms of the First Amendment; it was about a worldview that simultaneously defends Ferrano’s federal funding and Eich’s firing. Whatever this worldview is based around, it definitely isn’t freedom of expression.

          • brad says:

            Mr. X

            I don’t see how that makes any relevant difference to the principles at stake: either support for freedom of speech means assisting people in expressing themselves, or it doesn’t

            That’s an awfully narrow view. It amounts to a claim that there’s One True Version of Freedom of Speech, yours, and anyone who disagrees with you is an impostor.

            In particular, there’s many people that think that certain kinds of sanctions by certain kinds of entities are entirely inappropriate as a response to speech they don’t approve of, but other kinds of sanctions by other kinds of entities are fine. Few people think that there’s some sort of free floating obligation to “assist people in expressing themselves”, in fact I believe this is the first time I’m hearing of such a notion.

            You might even by one of those non-absolutists. Do you think it is wrong to stop dating someone because you strenuously disagree with a viewpoint he or she holds? If so, congratulations, you aren’t a true Scotsman either.

            The idea that not giving government money to Serrano would violate the First Amendment only makes sense on the first view

            No it doesn’t. What one thinks about First Amendment jurisprudence specifically, and how to interpret laws as a more general matter, are completely othoganal to one’s view on the nature of “freedom of speech” and its desirability in society.

            13th

            Except the reply wasn’t about the legalisms of the First Amendment;

            How foolish of me to think that a reply quoting sentences about the First Amendment would have something to do with the First Amendment.

            it was about a worldview that simultaneously defends Ferrano’s federal funding and Eich’s firing. Whatever this worldview is based around, it definitely isn’t freedom of expression.

            Is it illegitimate to be a proponent of the rule of law now?

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Exactly. “we aren’t the ‘intolerent left’ we are the resisting force of liberation”

            There are many equally legitimate perspectives on the meaning of free speech.

          • brad says:

            Is Ismael Chamu another one of those “thought leaders” defining the “progressive narrative”? Is there a list somewhere?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Is it illegitimate to be a proponent of the rule of law now?

            Is the rule of law the only thing that matters? Anything that’s technically legal is just fine and no one can complain about it?

          • brad says:

            You can certainly complain about it all you like. I already said I think Piss Christ it is really dumb.

            What the government couldn’t do is pull the funds because it didn’t like the viewpoint expressed. What I object to is the claim that because I hold that the prior sentence is a correct interpretation of the First Amendment that somehow means I must think that Eich’s firing was illegitimate or I am a hypocrite that doesn’t really believe in freedom of expression.

            Support for freedom of expression of the type that condemns official sanctions and any violence for speech is extremely rare around the world. Claiming that it is fake, hypocritical support for freedom of expression because it isn’t identical to the version that some right wingers have lately come to embrace is ridiculous.

            You want to talk about outcome oriented, where’s this new right wing freedom of expression movement’s Skokie?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @ThirteenthLetter

            The law isn’t the only thing that matters, but it is certainly relevant. Or else do you think that the 2nd Amendment is a irrelevant distraction in discussions about gun control?

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ThirteenthLetter:

            Except the reply wasn’t about the legalisms of the First Amendment; it was about a worldview that simultaneously defends Ferrano’s federal funding and Eich’s firing. Whatever this worldview is based around, it definitely isn’t freedom of expression

            Yes, exactly.

            @Brad:

            In particular, there’s many people that think that certain kinds of sanctions by certain kinds of entities are entirely inappropriate as a response to speech they don’t approve of, but other kinds of sanctions by other kinds of entities are fine.

            The idea that it’s “fine” to hound a guy out of his job for a private donation made to a mainstream political campaign is precisely the problem many Red Tribers have with the modern left.

            No it doesn’t. What one thinks about First Amendment jurisprudence specifically, and how to interpret laws as a more general matter, are completely othoganal to one’s view on the nature of “freedom of speech” and its desirability in society.

            The First Amendment is specifically about freedom of speech, and Congress’ lack of authority to abridge it. I don’t think anyone can have an opinion about it without also having an opinion on what freedom of speech actually is.

            Is it illegitimate to be a proponent of the rule of law now?

            Oh yes, I forgetting how much the Blue Tribe loves the rule of law. That’s why they’re always opposing amnesties for illegal immigrants and the creation of sanctuary cities.

          • brad says:

            Oh yes, I forgetting how much the Blue Tribe loves the rule of law. That’s why they’re always opposing amnesties for illegal immigrants and the creation of sanctuary cities.

            When did you stop beating your wife?

            What a crappy experience this entire exchange has been.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I’ve been assured that any sort of job security is one of the worst things that can happen to an economy

            You know, I totally believe that there is somebody out there who would espouse such a silly statement. The question is why you thought it was worth remembering and passing on as significant in any way.

        • Jiro says:

          I think people who are worried that immigrants will change American culture wildly underestimate how attractive American culture is.

          Define “assimilate”. Hispanic immigrants are overwhelmingly Democrats and stay so in successive generations. “Being a Democrat” is something that exists in American culture, but “being, as a group, overwhelmingly Democrat” is not typical for American culture. Does that count as assimilation or not?

          • qwints says:

            What about the solid south? Or organized labor? Seems like there have been long periods of time where groups have been overwhelmingly democrat.

          • Jiro says:

            If the whole country became like the old south, or like organized labor, I’d call it a change in culture too, for the same reason. Likewise if a non-south or non-labor group became like the south or labor, I would call that a change in culture for the group.

            The point is that a group can change the culture by being, on the average, not like the culture on the average, even if each individual falls within the parameters of the culture as an individual. Imagine that everyone in your city was replaced by a shoe salesman. Shoe salesmen already exist in your city, but I’m sure you would consider this a change.

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t think that says anything about assimilation. It doesn’t matter how many generations pass, you aren’t likely to see black people join the klan.

          • Corey says:

            “being, as a group, overwhelmingly Democrat” is not typical for American culture.

            That’s not even close to true, it’s trivially untrue of Democrats for example 🙂

            Blacks and Hispanics are overwhelmingly Democratic because Republicans oppose their presence here, it’s not rocket surgery.

            Rural/urban people are mostly Republican/Democrat. Young-Earth Creationists are approximately all Republican. Therapists have a significant Democratic lean (empathy). Yadda yadda yadda.

          • Jiro says:

            I don’t think that says anything about assimilation. It doesn’t matter how many generations pass, you aren’t likely to see black people join the klan.

            It’s more as if you’re a Star Wars fan, and because the KKK member living across the street also happens to like Star Wars, now that there are a lot of blacks in the area they’ve organized a Star Wars boycott, and so no Star Wars clubs will open in your area and nobody will show the movies. You then decide that at least you have Harry Potter, but it turns out the guy across the street also liked that, so you can’t do that either. Nor can you go to an Indian restaurant because the guy across the street had this idea about Aryans and the local blacks have decided to picket all the Indian restaurants in retaliation.

            It’s really hard to come up with a good analogy for this because a political party bundles together a lot of things and my analogy has to list Star Wars and Indian food as individual items. Having a group arrive and change the political landscape such that Democrats always get elected is going to change many, many, things all at once. That is not assimilation of them; that is their culture taking over.

          • qwints says:

            But Democrats aren’t always elected, not even close. Republicans continue to be overrepresented in comparison to their share of the voter population (they vote at a higher rate and live in rural areas with disproportionate political power.) For example, Texas doesn’t have a single statewide elected Democrat despite being almost 40% hispanic.

          • Anonymous says:

            We aren’t going to become a one party state. The Republican Party will eventually cut loose the bigots. The PTB want power too much to die on that sword.

            When it finally does I’m sure it will find that there’s plenty of Hispanics that want to keep those darned government hands off their Medicare.

          • hlynkacg says:

            The Republican Party will eventually cut loose the bigots.

            What exactly do you think happens then?

            The 27% or so of the US population that rates Trump favorably is a pretty big voting block to ignore, bigger than most minority voting blocks.

          • Anonymous says:

            What’s the age structure of that group?

            We aren’t talking about something that’s going to happen next year. Maybe not even next decade. As qwints points out the Republicans are doing fine electorally at the moment.

          • hlynkacg says:

            This is a year old, but according to Real Clear Politics…

            In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican. Slightly over half are women. About half are between 45 and 64 years of age, with another 34 percent over 65 years old and less than 2 percent younger than 30. One half of his voters have a high school education or less, compared to 19 percent with a college or post-graduate degree. Slightly over a third of his supporters earn less than $50,000 per year, while 11 percent earn over $100,000 per year. Definitely not country club Republicans, but not terribly unusual either.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            I don’t think that says anything about assimilation. It doesn’t matter how many generations pass, you aren’t likely to see black people join the klan.

            You jest, but why not? It only took about five generations or so after the Civil War before plenty of black people were voting Democratic. And this is during a time period where the Democratic Party was still loudly supporting segregation and had active Klan members among its leadership.

          • Jiro says:

            But Democrats aren’t always elected, not even close.

            Hispanics overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Enough of them and Democrats will always be elected.

          • Anonymous says:

            My kid grew an inch last month and an inch the month before that. He’ll be twenty feet tall by the time he is twenty years old.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            My kid grew an inch last month and an inch the month before that. He’ll be twenty feet tall by the time he is twenty years old.

            Why, anonymous, I didn’t know you were a global warming skeptic!

    • dndnrsn says:

      I think that the ability of the US (or Canada, plus maybe a couple others – I don’t know if I would extend the same ability to countries south of the US border save maybe Brazil and a couple others) to turn people from all across the world into “Americans” or whatever is something good (after all, it is better to be able to integrate immigrants into your system, than to not be able to) but it comes from a pretty dark place.

      The people who were living in the Americas when contact was made were screwed. Even if the Europeans had only the most peaceful intentions, there still was no resistance to smallpox among the native population. The Europeans did not have peaceful intentions, either. The end result is that the various groups making up the occupants of what would become the Americas were not wiped out, but pretty damn close.

      The end result of this is that someone can become an “American” in a way they can’t become an “Italian”. Your acquaintance, who would definitely be Chinese-American had their family moved to the States, and who North American conventions lead you to think of as a “Chinese-Italian”, recognizes this when they say they’re Chinese, not Italian.

      Had Italians mostly ceased to exist by some means or another, and the land they live on renamed “Bootland”, it would be different: your acquaintance would be a Bootlander, or a Chinese-Bootlander.

      Likewise, someone who moves to the US becomes an American, or their kids are Americans, but it would make no sense to say that they had become members of whatever group was living in the same place 500+ years ago.

    • TMB says:

      I’m from Britain, and I’d more or less agree with the American version.

      I think it’s basically determined by your accent. If a Chinese person had lived in Britain for most of their life and spoke perfect English, but considered themselves Chinese, I would consider them to be a traitor, in a way.

      Even “Chinese-British” makes me feel a little sad.

      If someone doesn’t speak perfect English, has come to Britain later in life, I wouldn’t think anything of it for them to call themselves Chinese, and while it’d be impolite to say anything, I’d probably think it was a bit strange (perhaps mildly insulting) if they called themselves “British”.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        I agree. I don’t know anyone who grew up in Britain and doesn’t deem themselves British.

        • Homo Iracundus says:

          What about the ones who say “I’m not British, I’m European”?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            I don’t know any of them. Do you?

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            I do, sometimes.

          • TMB says:

            Eccentric. It’s like someone who strongly believes in horoscopes.

            Weird but (probably) harmless. (As long as they aren’t in a position of power)

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            What facts contradict my belief? My British passport is also an EU passport, for the time being. Am I commitiing thedecrime?

          • TMB says:

            It’s not a crime, it’s just a bit weird.

            Obviously it speaks to a cosmopolitan tendency – either you’re imagining you’re part of a community that doesn’t really exist (there are no *real* ground level, emotional, shared European cultural traditions), or you’re purely focusing on intellectual-level/ high-culture traditions (which isn’t what most people are talking about when they think of their culture or nation), or you’re part of some international elite group that really does have more in common with itself than with than with the culture of their (nominal) home country.

            If the latter, I would prefer if you just called yourself a International Financier, or member of the Illuminati or something.

            (I feel like if someone shifts identity horizontally or downwards – “I’m not British, I’m Scottish/Cornish/a member of the Illuminati” it is slightly treacherous – if they shift identity upwards – “I’m a European/a human/a rational entity” it’s kind of missing the point.)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @TMB

            I would understand someone who has French parents on one side, German grandparents on the other, lived in Italy for a few years but grew up mostly in Britain calling themselves European rather than British. But I can’t imagine ever doing it myself — the sum of my experience with Europe is a few weeks in Germany. It would be borderline cultural appropriation.

      • Liskantope says:

        Probably the same goes for Canadian culture as well. We know someone who grew up in Canada but is also completely ethnically Chinese, was brought up with at least a bit of Chinese culture, knows lots of Chinese words, etc. yet identifies as Canadian and not Chinese.

        This is less surprising to me than to hear that England labels nationalities this way as well, since Canada has a little more in common with America in that it was conquered by outsiders with a variety of backgrounds. Then again, maybe this convention is a trend in all English-speaking countries. Any Aussies want to weigh in?

    • Skef says:

      I’m no expert on the whole history of the attitude in the U.S., but I’ve often heard it traced to the combination of our 1) having a written constitution based on abstract principles (with the glaring exception of slavery, among others) that 2) was written that way in part to address actual (mostly religious) diversity of the time and 3) the explicit immigration-encouraging expansion era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when “you too can be an American” was part of the self-conception of the country.

      There’s a lot of overt discrimination mixed in with that history, but it has made it hard to think of a single primary “ethnic profile” of an American. Add to this that what was the profile of the elite (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) has lost almost all of its cultural relevance. There are still plenty of rich powerful WASPs around but they don’t control institutions qua their WASPiness.

  24. Moshe Feldenkrais ameliorating cerebral palsy by supplying the sort of feedback that most children get from their own movement, but that children with CP don’t get spontaneously.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2_G4NWRnNM

    Anat Baniel, who has a background which includes Feldenkrais, as evidence that this kind of work is still being done.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C599TgB0POU

  25. dndnrsn says:

    There have been WWII arguments here more than usual lately, and I like this, because actual war three quarters of a century ago is a better topic to rehash endlessly than Culture War now, for a whole bunch of reasons. So.

    Thought: treatments of the majority of German WWII generals who were not Nazi ideologues but who didn’t protest or do anything to impede the Nazis usually present them as too cowed by Hitler, too afraid for their careers, etc to say/do anything – basically, a bit hapless.

    However, could they not be seen just as much as making a Faustian bargain? After all, had the war been won, the leading German generals would have been remembered as some of the greatest generals of all time. Even having lost the war, there are German generals who are thought of very highly (too highly, in my judgment). Without Hitler, and without Hitler’s war, Manstein or whoever is just another peacetime officer.

    EDIT: I’m not so much saying “this is why they did what they did”, which would be silly for literally dozens plus people with different motivations, as looking at the way their motivations are presented by historians.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      There’s a more human explanation though. Patriotism with a minimax strategy.

      That is, even if General Beispiel thought Adolf Hitler was the most evil man who ever lived, he would still probably want Germany to win the war. Losing a war isn’t a great situation for a country to be in after all, and our own history shows that Germany (particularly the east) paid a very heavy price at the end of that war. It’s natural that you don’t want to see your women raped and your homes burned even if you despise the man in charge.

      Had Germany won the war it would have been a tragedy for Europe and the world. A tragedy for Germany even, since the Nazi system wasn’t much better than the Soviet one economically. But it would have avoided the worst risks of losing, which ranged from the Morgenthau plan to potentially the total destruction of the German people.

      • dndnrsn says:

        First, I should have made it clearer, I’m not so much assigning them motives as pondering over the way historians present those motives.

        Second, you’re definitely right that “my country, right or wrong” was a major factor. The generals who disliked Hitler and knew Germany was losing were still mostly against the 1944 bomb plot, and Hitler was still massively popular with the public.

        However, I don’t just mean “going along with Hitler” as in “not resigning their commissions and leaving the country” or “not trying to assassinate him” – I mean, German generals have received a reputation for not trying very hard to stand up to Hitler’s increasingly bad military decision making. There’s a recurring pattern of “Hitler wants to do something dumb/refuses to allow something not dumb – General objects – Hitler yells at him, maybe calls him a sissy who never saw frontline combat – General backs down”.

        Of course, that Hitler’s interference had turned out well in, say, France, that really defanged a lot of military opposition to him.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          My social studies teacher in middle school used to remind the students that he had a weapon in verbal fights.

          “You call me fat, I give you a zero. The fight is over.”

          I’d imagine that the Fuhrer probably had a lot more of that sort of rhetorical ammunition in an argument than even a high ranking Wehrmacht commander. Fighting back against your crazy boss’s bad ideas is risky even in an office setting, much less a totalitarian state.

        • Tibor says:

          Well, Stalin had a good deal of the Soviet high command executed (which is one of the most important reasons for the horrible Soviet losses during the war, the Russians actually did have a lot of guns, tanks, even rocket launchers) because he was paranoid and thought they presented a danger (well, in a totalitarian state such as the Soviet Union, this is probably not entirely paranoid). Hitler could have done the same to his generals (and some of them might have heard about what Stalin did), so they were wise not to disagree. Also, Stalin was paranoid but otherwise he seems like a relatively rational person (an evil sociopath, but a rational one), whereas Hitler was very charismatic but not rational at all, so it was probably even harder to make him understand reason (without risking your neck). One should say thank god for that. Had Rommel or something else clear thinking been the Führer, he would have kept the alliance with Stalin, conquered all of central, southern and western Europe (including Britain), secured northern Africa and then perhaps attacked (early in spring) the Russians (assuming Stalin would not have attacked that first). Or perhaps they would simply stop, leaving all of Eurasia under one totalitarian collectivist regime or the other.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Supposedly, after the bomb plot, and as the military situation disintegrated, Hitler was prone to declaring that his big mistake was that unlike Stalin he had not purged his officer corps.

            As for irrationality – if someone acts according to their priors, but their priors are wrong/irrational, are they irrational? Hitler’s “theory of everything” seems to have revolved around the concept of will – that sheer force of will could overcome other factors. Victory to whoever wants it more. His belief that, say, a properly motivated counterattack could defeat the Soviets in April 1945, was irrational, but the way he behaved wasn’t, given that this was one of his priors. Likewise, if you recognize that there wasn’t a vast international Jewish capitalist-communist conspiracy (the capitalist-communist part is the cool trick), the extermination of the Jews is massively irrational and really hampered the war effort. However, Hitler had as one of his priors that such a conspiracy did exist – and as such he saw getting rid of the Jews as one of his major goals and as being important to the war effort.

            Comparing Hitler and Stalin one key observation is that as the war went on, Hitler’s intervention in military affairs started off successful and became more and more deleterious. With Stalin, there was the opposite situation – he went from having a lot of senior officers killed, bringing men who had just been tortured back into command in 1941, and keeping the families of generals as hostages, to allowing Soviet commanders a lot more freedom than Hitler allowed German as the war went on.

          • Tibor says:

            dndrsn: I think that it is not necessarily irrational to have an “irrational” prior but it is irrational to ignore the reality and to fail to update that prior. I guess that if you keep winning like Hitler did at the beginning, then is actually the evidence for your prior. But at least as late as late 1943 he was given enough data to assign a very low probability to the belief that will trumps everything. Also, I don’t know how much Hitler knew about history, but in history it is quite consistently the bigger army backed up by a richer country (or a group of countries) that defeats the smaller and poorer one, at least in an otherwise symmetric conflict. Germany was not particularly rich (the only neighbouring country which was poorer than Germany was Poland and France, Switzerland – which was of course not attacked at the end – and Czechoslovakia were among the ten richest in the world, while his later enemies of Great Britain and US – and Canada – were also in top ten) and even if Hitler could have seen that he could divide his enemies and seize control of their countries before they responded in a unified way, he should have seen that the combined army of the US, Russia, Britain and a few other countries is not something the German military can defeat (even with Japanese and Italian support, especially since the latter did not amount to much). Attacking Russia also meant not just getting a new enemy with a huge military, but also losing an ally with a huge military (and a totalitarian government willing to put its population through anything just to win the war). I guess it sort of makes sense if you believe that the war over Britain is going to be just another Blitzkrieg and you want to take the Russians by surprise (which is what happened, even though Stalin was informed about the German invasion beforehand, he did not believe those reports).

            But this is all based on different reasoning than “will trumps all” and I guess the choice of the prior should not be entirely arbitrary after all. History is nothing but the “data we have so far” and one should use it to make a sanity check of his priors and while it is sometimes prone to different interpretations, some general patterns clearly stand out. Based just on that, one should clearly reject the willpower hypothesis as a prior (or assign it a very low probability in the distribution of the prior).

          • dndnrsn says:

            There is a sort of motivated reasoning that is not exactly beneficial where you talk yourself into thinking you can take stuff on you can’t.

            If your opponents have more factories, but you have more will: obviously will is the factor that will settle things.

            If you only have enough fuel for X days of operation: clearly you need a plan that provides victory within X days.

            Etc.

          • Aapje says:

            @Tibor

            Both Germany and Japan were banking on very quick victories, so their lack of resources wouldn’t catch up with them. Japan hoped that big initial victories like Pearl Harbor would convince the Americans to give up on the pacific war and give Asia up to Japan. The Battle of Midway was intended to be the killer blow, but Japan lost the core of its fleet then.

            Hitler was hoping to make peace with England, so he would only have to fight on one front.

            @dndnrsn

            The Nazi theory about WW I was that the nation was stabbed in the back by Jews; and it would have won but for them.

            This paranoia logically reappeared in WW II when things went wrong.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Aapje: and also the left.

            I don’t know if it’s fair to say that it reappeared in WWII – it was there all along. You’ve got Hitler, before the war started, giving a speech where he threatened retribution against Jews if they started another war – he would mention the speech again and again later on.

            The historical argument is largely over whether the mass murder was part of the plan all along, or if it was a reaction to the failure of Barbarossa.

          • Aapje says:

            I mean reappeared in the sense that it took failure for the excuse to be needed again, not that the Nazi’s stopped believing in Jews being the boogie man.

            I would argue that that slow isolation and murder through exploitation was the initial plan and the prospect of losing the war caused an acceleration in the plans. In January 1941, Der Stürmer wrote “Now judgment has begun and it will reach its conclusion only when knowledge of the Jews has been erased from the earth.”

            At the earliest, the Nazi’s realized that Barbarossa was not going as well as planned in June 1941.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Didn’t Barbarossa only really start to lag in July or August?

            You are correct that what some evidence indicates was Plan A for the Germans – deportation to east of the Urals or Madagascar or wherever – would have resulted in a lot of deaths from starvation, disease, exposure, etc.

        • bean says:

          I think Hitler’s ability to sack/reassign any general who has a serious spine is sufficient to explain most of it. It’s a rare leader who is willing to put up with someone who will tell him he’s wrong. So the yes-men get assigned to OKW, and the ones who would stand up to Hitler are either sent to the front or shuffled off into obscurity.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Interestingly, at least anecdotally, generals could be successful standing up to him, especially if they had seen combat in WWI. His favourite generals were usually frontline combat vets.

          • bean says:

            I’m not suggesting that nobody ever successfully stood up to Hitler. I’m suggesting that they were transferred elsewhere after standing up to him, and not even in intentional retaliation. Just sub/semiconscious processes at work.

            As for veterans, Keitel was an artilleryman in WWI, and Hitler handpicked him to head OKW in 1938. By 1942, he had been beaten into complete submission.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Is it an open question whether “Lakeitel” was beaten down, or chosen in the first place as a sycophant? Hitler was already messing around with leadership personnel by ’38.

            Also, is there a consolidated document of top leadership personnel changes? It seems pretty chaotic – I saw a map of Bagration that makes it look like there was at least 2 or 3 rounds of shuffling and sacking of army group commanders in, what, 3 months?

        • cassander says:

          >Of course, that Hitler’s interference had turned out well in, say, France, that really defanged a lot of military opposition to him.

          I think this point really bears repeating. Hitler spent the 1930s taking enormous risks. Re-occypying the Ruhr, re-arming, Anschluss, Czechoslovakia, throwing the whole army at poland, each one a huge gamble that paid off. That after that huge run of success, you have the battle of France, where Hitler does in 4 weeks what the kaiser failed to do in 4 years. After seeing that run, it’s hard to see how people avoided buying into the fuhrer myth. Had Hitler died in 1941 he’d be hailed today as one of the greatest leaders who ever lived.

          >German generals have received a reputation for not trying very hard to stand up to Hitler’s increasingly bad military decision making. T

          those generals also had a great deal of incentive to blame as much of the war as possible on Hitler after the fact, first to avoid hanging and second to defend their professional conduct in a war they unquestionably lost.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Your second point is true – the tendency of German generals to not only blame moral but also military failures on people who were conveniently dead or in Spandau is a pretty big deal. However, even discounting their self-serving bias, there certainly was a lot of deleterious interference.

    • Jmiettin says:

      One thing to keep in mind here is that armies back then were even more rigid and hierachical and that all soldiers and officers had given an oath of allegiance to Hitler specifically (I.e. Not to president and constitution): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_oath

      My stereotype of old-times officers is that they take word and oath very seriously and thus did what Hitler told them to. Although there are installed where they get some operation moved from a date Hitler wanted it to a more suitable one by using subterfuge.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Hierarchal, yes, but one of the reasons the German army had an advantage in combat leadership was that command was less rigid than comparable armies, usually.

  26. HircumSaeculorum says:

    This image received several thousand upvotes on Reddit a few days ago. Sounds a little like Moloch to me.

    Are the normies becoming woke?

  27. Tibor says:

    What do you think about this article/interview about Trump voters? Has anyone read the book Hillbilly Elegy? If so, is it worth buying?

    Also why did my (everybody’s?) gravatar change?

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      Hillbilly Elegy is excellent (yes I have read it) — well-deserving of its thousands of high GoodReads accolades.

      Eminently readable not just by self-regarded “Hillbillies”, but by the members of any community that feels beleaguered and besieged. There’s no shortage of those! 🙂

      • keranih says:

        This.

        I have literally lost track of the number of non-red tribers I’ve read or heard saying something like “I read HE and realized that [people other than me]/white rednecks could be miserable and struggling too. Wow. I hadn’t know that.”

        If the book only serves to open the minds I’ve witnessed, it’s already done God’s work.

  28. Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

    For at least the past 350 years the Society of Friends (Quakers) has eschewed dynamic pricing in consequence of The Testimony of Integrity, according to which:

    A person’s word should be accepted based on his or her reputation for truth-telling rather than on his or her taking an oath or swearing to tell the truth.

    This was embodied in their [the Friends’] maxim “Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay” (from James 5:12)

    But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by earth, nor by any other oath; but let your “Yea” be yea, and your “Nay” be nay, lest ye fall into condemnation.

    Later, when many Quakers became successful in business (such as Cadbury, Rowntree, Fry, etc.), they set a fixed price for goods on sale rather than setting a high price and haggling over it with the buyer. Quakers believed that it was dishonest to set an unfair price to begin with.

    Needless to say, Trumpish market-centric moral values and flexible negotiation practices in regard to “the art of the deal” are rejected utterly by Friends — and this Friendly assessment finds considerable support in modern cognitive science and market theory.

    For details, see for example Cathy “MathBabe” O’Neal’s just-published Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), or on a more technical level, Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge’s “Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products” (2011).

    There was an era (now a full century in the past) in which free markets indisputably served to nurture conservative ideals. But nowadays it’s fair to wonder — isn’t it? — whether free-market conservatism’s moral foundations are compatible with the present-day global trading dominance of algorithms that execute in microseconds. The common-sense answer is “no”, isn’t that right?

    So has Trumpish free-market faux-conservative morality become dead as a dinosaur? Modern-day mathematics, and modern-day cognitive science, and 350-year-old Friendly testimonies of integrity, alike say “yes”, don’t they?

    • Murphy says:

      Trumpish? When did trump become an avatar for free market capitalism?

      Presumably if a quaker businessman finds that costs have risen too much they increase the price of their product when appropriate? Otherwise they’d be out of business pretty fast. So they can’t be totally set on fixed prices.

      Can Quakers negotiate their salaries? Ask for a raise? Work 2 jobs for different hourly rates?

      If a client can guarantee big orders allowing them to buy in bulk and cut cost do they pass that saving on to clients or do they insist of absorbing 100% of the gains from that in the name of religious rules?

      Do quaker chains with outlets in poor countries/regions with lower rent and wage costs charge the same price to their poorer customers as outlets in rich neighborhoods or do they keep the prices just as high despite lower costs?

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        John Sidles’ reasoning might seem a bit convoluted, but it’s actually very simple.

        John likes the Quakers and he dislikes Trump. He also dislikes surge pricing. Therefore, by the transitive property, the Quakers dislike surge pricing and Trump likes it. QED

        I’m sure neither David Deutsch nor the US Marine corps like Uber very much either. Here, let me give you this helpful link on the subject…

        • Zorba the Geek says:

          Haven’t those two evolved a mutual distaste for Trump? Along with a shared respect and liking for both Barack and Barak? It’s been getting harder to tell them apart.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Well, I can see why that third of the Scott A trinity doesn’t like Trump. After all, this election is all about tribal politics and nobody else cares more about tribes. It’s kind of surprising that our Scott A seems ambivalent on the question to be honest.

            But Aaronson has never written anything that made me think of schizophasia as a serious explanation. He’s a logical thinker and his writing is about as clear as anything that math-heavy could be. His interests diverge from mine politically but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect his intellect or defer to his expertise on apolitical questions of computer science.

          • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

            The Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) StackExchange welcomes cryptic questions and their clarifications … and provides ratings for these contributions too … and so as Scott Aaronson has suggested, why not contribute your assessments to the TCS StackExchange community? 🙂

  29. M Kul says:

    There has been a recent Police case in Australia where a young child was thought to have been abducted, and the name of the child has been widely publicised by the media. However, the names of the parents have been withheld. Furthermore, the reason(s) why the parents’ names have been withheld have purposely remained undisclosed.

    Does anyone know the reason for this legal meta-rule? Why isn’t the public allowed to know what legal rule or procedure is being applied here?

    I wonder if this is the same in the USA and elsewhere.

    • Emma Casey says:

      Extra layer of obscurtiy?

      Suppose we don’t want mobs attacking pediatricians and so as a rule we don’t name pediatricians. If I say ‘s parents names aren’t being released because they are pediatricians then we have one level of safety. But the second someone works out who the kid’s parents are I break the whole thing.

    • Uncle Ilya Kuriakin says:

      Child abuse very commonly (almost invariably) entails medical complications. It is the practice of US Child Protective Service Agencies (as in most nations) that on a case-by-case basis, the legal right of abused children to medical privacy dominates the legal right of society to know the details of the child abuse. These (hugely sobering, hugely complicated) considerations are covered in-depth in the (hugely sobering, hugely complicated) training that foster-parents receive.

  30. TMB says:

    For anti-Marxist utilitarians –

    The calculation problem applies to utilitarianism too. If we are utilitarians, and our choices are in part decided by our ethical positions (and it seems among utilitarians here, they are), then society actually consists of countless individuals trying to make impossible ethical calculations.

    It’s as if the market consisted of individual actors each of whom had to take on the role of the central planner before they could make a decision, and who had to take into consideration the decisions that the other central planners were likely to take before doing anything…

    That is, utilitarianism can never be an effective moral system for the individual, and a society made up of utilitarians would be paralysed (and wouldn’t maximise utility). But, just as with the economy and the market, maximal utility might be reached through a meta-ethical social framework that determines which sets of ethics succeed.
    But to be an individual utilitarian is like being some guy who wants to give Bill Gates more money because that is “what the market wants”. (The act of believing that the “market” should determine our (individual) expenditure destroys its effectiveness.)

    • suntzuanime says:

      That’s an interesting perspective. I don’t know that it argues against utilitarianism per se so much as it argues in favor of an extreme form of rule utilitarianism (just like capitalism is actually just communism with Chinese characteristics).

      • TMB says:

        Maybe, but I would say that an extreme form of rule utilitarianism still requires a “God” to tell us what to do in order to get over the calculation problem?

        There is something inherently unstable about a system where people derive utility from behaving in a way that is in keeping with their moral beliefs, but their moral beliefs from what is in keeping with their utility. The only way to establish it, is to take a leap of faith, either in terms of what gives us utility, or in what a moral belief/action is (and then hope for some kind of equilibrium).
        If the calculation problem for utility is real, we have to make the leap of faith in terms of what constitutes a moral action (deontology?).

        And, capitalism is communism with Chinese characteristics? Could you explain this cryptic comment!

        • Jiro says:

          It should be “socialism”, but it’s the excuse that China uses for why they call themselves Communist but are actually capitalist.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_characteristics

        • Nyx says:

          > And, capitalism is communism with Chinese characteristics? Could you explain this cryptic comment!

          The joke is that the United States, despite loudly identifying as capitalist and being conflated with capitalism (by both the left and right), is actually no more a capitalist country than China is a socialist country. I’d call it “capitalism with American characteristics”, personally.

    • TMB says:

      “to be an individual utilitarian is like being some guy who wants to give Bill Gates more money because that is “what the market wants”.”

      Actually, I suppose this would maximise utility, but with this system, anything would. Any information provided would become true (if we could assume that everyone shared our belief in the market as God)
      If everyone believes that jumping up and down on one leg maximises everyone else’s utility, then jumping up and down on one leg does maximise everyone’s utility (through means of the world conforming to our ethical beliefs)

    • I disagree.

      Price theory tells us that in a well functioning market system, acting in your rational self interest gives a first approximation to the utilitarian maximum. To improve on that you don’t have to solve the whole calculation problem by yourself. You can either:

      1. Work to move the structure closer to a well functioning market system–oppose price controls, for example, including minimum wage laws.

      2. Note where deviations from that first approximation can be expected to occur. One obvious one is that marginal utility of income is different for different people, so outcomes that maximize value (measured by how many dollars individuals would pay to get or avoid an outcome) imperfectly maximize utility. It follows that giving money to very poor people may well increase total utility.

      Another is that some things you might be able to produce have large positive or negative externalities, so you can come closer to maximizing utility by producing more of the former and less of the latter than a simple profit maximizing calculation would suggest.

      None of this will tell you what choices would maximize total utility, but these approaches do signal ways of increasing it.

      The first step being, of course, to learn economics.

      • TMB says:

        It depends on how much marginal utility people can derive from utilitarian behaviour – if I was the only utilitarian, and everyone else was just happy stuffing their face with chocolate bars, it’d be fairly clear what I should do.
        If everyone else is a utilitarian (and basic wants satisfied) becomes less clear.

        So, I suppose, in practical terms, you are right, because most people are not utilitarians.

        Should I say that there is nothing wrong with individual utilitarianism, but the more widespread it becomes, the less it makes sense? Like if 95% of the stock exchange was owned by tracker funds – it might destroy the message provided by the market.

  31. Murphy says:

    Re: the “cute story about an FDA bureaucrat” weakman.

    There are apparently places in the US where in order to decrease accidents and prevent traffic jams at rushhour cop cars will drive three-abreast on the highway at exactly the speed limit.

    I’ll see if I can find the article.

    Traffic jams ahead of them dissolve by the time they reach them, speed variance drops through the floor and average speeds go way up because people aren’t dodging in and out of lanes like jackasses.

    His problem wasn’t going the speed limit. The problem was that he didn’t have 2 more friends doing the same thing next to him which would have improved things for everyone.

    Though i’ve talked before about how you can get good results with either heavy or light regulation but horrible fuckups if you don’t go all out with one solution properly.

    Also, re the “Price dikes” article. The people living behind literal dikes for centuries are a testament to the fact that it can be worth the effort but if you half-arse it and leave holes then you get the worst of both worlds, both the cost of the dikes and wet feet.

    • Murphy says:

      To add some notes on the FDA guy since the article makes it sound like he never approved any drug. His career in the FDA was quite a bit longer:

      “Dr. Nestor was, among other things, a colleague and supporter of Frances Kelsey in the 1960s when she was reviewing the drug thalidomide”

      He was a prolific whistleblower and publicised a number of scandals.

      5 years after he was ousted he recieved a public apology and was reinstated because it turned out he’d been correct in his choices of what drugs tobe skeptical about.

      So remember everyone: if you see an evolutionist remember that he thinks your grandaddy was a monkey, point and laugh and say “evolutionist really are that stupid.”

      If you meet someone who thinks actually doing proper safety testing is important then remember: he probably drives 55. Point and laugh while thinking “pro safety testing people really are that stupid.”

      Remember: actually checking whether a drug is safe and actually works is nothing more than a “ritual of putting a zillion dollars into a big pile, then burning it as a sacrifice to the Bureaucracy Gods.” Point and laugh at anyone who argues in favor of proper safety testing.

      • J Mann says:

        Nestor was also an early adopter of some currently popular ideas. Here he is on the experience of seeing immigrants working in restaurants he patronizes.

        “And when I stop in fast-food restaurants, I’m horrified by what I see. They’ve got so many of these immigrants from foreign countries, many of them illegal so they’ve never had a physical exam. I see them with infections, rashes, picking up the plastic forks by the business end, picking up the cups”

      • Glen Raphael says:

        @Murphy:

        5 years after he was ousted he [received] a public apology and was reinstated because it turned out he’d been correct in his choices of what drugs to be skeptical about.

        Are you sure you don’t mean “correct in ONE OF his choices of what drugs to be skeptical about”? Does there exist somewhere a list and assessment of all the drugs he blocked during four years of not approving any at all? (The WaPo article only lists two specific drugs, one of which he wasn’t the investigator for.)

        On a slight tangent, it’s weird to see someone simultaneously (implicitly) praising the importance of the FDA while praising an FDA employee who was “a prolific whistleblower and publicised a number of scandals”. The Nestor saga seems to suggest drug approval depends mainly on political machinations, not science.

        I mean, if the FDA approval process consists of a fight between cranky risk-averse investigators who leak information to Ralph Nader to get drugs held up versus risk-seeking companies who successfully lobby to fire investigators to get drugs released, it seems unlikely the “actually checking whether a drug is safe and actually works” part is doing all that much of the work.

        • Murphy says:

          In such a situation I’m still going to side with the people calling for more science rather than with the people saying “well if science might get ignored due to out sides actions then we might as well ignore it entirely as policy”

          It’s only a pity that such leaking wasn’t part of the official routine and there’s some noble movements in the EU to require that all information that’s submitted to the regulator should be publicly available so the worlds statisticians and scientists can examine the data.

          • DensityDuck says:

            “In such a situation I’m still going to side with the people calling for more science ”

            Well, we’re pretty sure this drug cures cancer based on the fact that it’s cured cancer in everyone who’s taken it, but…still…more science is always better, right?

          • Murphy says:

            Yep, they were all beautifully cancer-free corpses! No tumors at all when they all died from massive strokes a few months after treatment!

            it’s fantastically rare that anything actually works so clearly in a set of real patients.

            If you have a cancer treatment which is 100% effective then you can actually run surprisingly cheap trials since it’s easy to get the necessary statistical power with a tiny sample size.

            Taking 3 people with late stage cancer expected to have weeks to live and curing them totally is far easier to prove to work than a drug which you think improves average life expectancy of cancer patients with a particular cancer from 4 years to 4 years and 3 months.

            The latter is far far far more common and is hard to distinguish from a drug which simply doesn’t work without a reasonable sample size. That’s the reality.

            your views on drug trials would seem to be more influenced by Hollywood medicine than real medicine. Real medicine is rarely as showy or definitive.

      • N. Joseph Potts says:

        All that matters here is that someone with a gun (the FDA) can and does intervene when someone who wants/needs a drug(s) for himself wants to buy a drug(s) from someone who offers to sell them to him.

        If there were no FDA (nor state/federal prescription laws), chicanery, waste, disappointment and tragedy would ensue, much as they do now. Voluntary (no guns) institutions would be erected to provide various levels and kinds of assurance to people (like me) who would want various assurances of safety, efficacy, whatever. Chicanery, waste, disappointment and tragedy would continue, possibly at a reduced level, almost certainly more-cheaply, and possibly reshaped somewhat toward people willing to sustain risks in their personal searches for cures or relief.

        Guns would not be used. Nor taxes, except possibly to pay for the purchase of drugs to be consumed, though preferably not, because taxes by definition entail the use or threat of use of guns.

    • Psmith says:

      There are apparently places in the US where in order to decrease accidents and prevent traffic jams at rushhour cop cars will drive three-abreast on the highway at exactly the speed limit.

      If this happens, it happens rarely. Much more common is for a single cop to amble in and out of traffic slightly slower than the average speed (which may still be well above the limit) in order to slow things down a touch.

      • JayT says:

        In L.A. I often see one cop with his sirens on weaving between all the lanes to slow down traffic.

        • John Schilling says:

          That’s a “traffic break” and is meant to completely clear a stretch of road of all traffic for a minute or so to e.g. safely move a stalled car to the shoulder. Or sometimes as a precursor to a complete roadblock. Not the same thing that Murphy and Psmith are talking about, which is meant to persistently reduce the speed of otherwise-normal traffic.

          • JayT says:

            I’ve There have been times when I’ve seen cops just slows the traffic down a bit and then exits the highway. No accident or stalled car to be seen. Perhaps it’s just gone by the time I get to the problem area, but my understanding has always been that they will do that just to slow down the traffic a bit.

    • J Mann says:

      IIUC, the optimal speed to avoid jams isn’t really based on the speed limit, and it’s not a constant. Basically, if your goal is maximum throughput, you want the fastest speed that allows room for breaking without jamming, so it’s car lengths to the next car as a function of speed.

      So normally, this guy would be slowing down traffic and risking accidents by forcing people to pass on the right,* sometimes he would be performing a helpful function by slowing down traffic to the optimal speed to avoid an incipient jam, and sometimes he would be driving too fast for traffic conditions.

      http://www.wsj.com/articles/traffic-engineers-say-slowing-down-will-get-you-through-a-jam-faster-1415386073

      * Yes, he’s obeying the law and they aren’t.

      • Alex Zavoluk says:

        > Yes, he’s obeying the law and they aren’t.

        IIRC most states have laws about going too slowly in the left or not passing in the left lane.

        • Murphy says:

          Though in his case he talked to the police first to confirm whether he was breaking any rules in that state.

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            Maybe back then the law was different. Either way, he was clearly a tremendous asshole, and describing him as “everything wrong with government regulations” would not be too far off the mark.

  32. comcomcom says:

    UPAPYPOPEPIPEN

    • Gazeboist says:

      I can’t report a comment like this. It’s too perfect.

      • TMB says:

        I don’t get it.

        • Gazeboist says:

          comcomcom appears to be some sort of spammer or something, though the absence of links is … confusing. I have a habit of just reporting spam on forums I frequent, so as to allow the moderators to quickly clean it up. However, I found comcomcom to be endearingly absurd, and decided not to report. I commented instead as a sort of anti-report. A moderator seeing the spam should also see replies to the spam, flagging it as amusing. Such was my thought, anyway.

          • Equinimity says:

            A forum I used to be on had a spammer problem where they’d post something autogenerated from the current posts, then come back a few days later after the mods were no longer likely to be looking to edit the post with all the spam links. It gamed the search engine rankings on the links because they were getting referred to by an active non-spam site.
            comcomcom might be getting stymied by the one hour edit limit here.

        • comcomcomcomcomcomcom says:

          I don’t want to explain the joke, but I don’t want to be branded as spammer either 🙁

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Reveal the secrets of your blank gravatar.

          • Gazeboist says:

            I wasn’t sure. I found it reminiscent of “Popen Thread” so I guessed that it was based on the thread titles (as spam or otherwise). But I can’t tell how.

            I also thought you might be a poorly-written scraper that accidentally commented some garbled string related to the thread titles, for the same reason.

  33. Kyle Strand says:

    Have Scott and/or the rest of you guys seen this? I thought it was pretty interesting, and it seems to contradict the theory that the Red Tribe is primarily fear-driven.

    https://jerclifton.com/2016/08/17/what-reality-are-trump-people-living-in/

    • Homo Iracundus says:

      For those who believe that reality is hierarchical, if two things are different that usually implies that one is better than the other.

      Genus is better than species, got it…

      You feel that calling a supporter of Drumpf what they are, is demonizing? Interesting take, that…
      My opinion won’t matter on this, because any statement I give will be seen as ‘demonization,’ apparently.

      Interesting take, that…

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        “supporter of Drumpf”

        Dead giveaway that every single thing that person has written can be safely ignored without any negative consequence. It’s like a right-winger saying “Barry Soetero.”

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Dude, that was in a *comment*!

          Later during the Second World War, however, Churchill used one aspect of Hitler’s family background against him. He would refer to the Nazi leader as Corporal Schicklgruber. Hitler’s grandmother had brought up her son, Hitler’s father, who was illegitimate. Her last name had been the comic-sounding “Schicklgruber”. Hitler’s father had changed his name when he was formally adopted by his mother’s brother-in-law, to the shorter and more anonymous “Hitler”, a different spelling of his surname “Hiedler”. Hitler told his boyhood friend Kubizek that nothing his father had done pleased him as much as changing his name[xiii].

          Churchill was not the first politician to use the name “Schicklgruber” when he wanted to ridicule Hitler, and he did so rarely, but most famously in a speech in Parliament in 1944[xiv]. As the context was a disparaging reference to Hitler’s military judgement, Churchill clearly intended to ridicule Hitler when he used the name. He coupled the sneering mention of Hitler’s last name with a reference to the commander in chief of the German armed forces, as a “Corporal”. In fact, Churchill may have over-promoted Hitler by referring to him as a Corporal – at least one authority argues that the rank which he held for the entire First World War, Gefreiter, is more aptly translated as “Private”[xv].

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      Yes, that was pretty interesting.

  34. Anonymous Colin says:

    Repeating this from the last mini-OT, where it got no love.

    ###

    Any reading recommendations on the subject of criminology and experimental design for crime policy interventions?

    I have a stats/econ background. I want to know more about how crime policy is (or isn’t) trialled. I know what the word “criminology” means, but that’s about it.

    • Phil says:

      I don’t have any good recommendations, but that might be a good question to ask in an email to the Freakanomics author

      I know he’s done a fair amount of work at the intersection of economics and crime policy/criminology

      can be found here http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/

    • Psmith says:

      If you haven’t read Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails, it might be a good place to start. And its reference list.

    • Corey says:

      These dudes at UChicago might have something interesting.

      • LHN says:

        Maybe, though promising pilot projects often don’t scale in the absence of the original, highly-motivated investigators and the Hawthorne Effect, and effects often don’t persist once the intervention is over.

        (Doesn’t mean it’s not worth investigating. But it’s sort of like drug testing– you have to try promising ideas to make any sort of progress, but most of the candidates that pass one testing stage are going to fail the next.)

  35. Brian Slesinsky says:

    Katya’s metaphor of the “natural” price being like sea level doesn’t work for me – this makes price levels seem far too objective when many of the rules are made up.

    I think a better metaphor might be game balance. Markets are at least partially artificial constructs, just like games are. But when you decide on the rules of a game, you don’t get to decide for the players what their best strategy will be. They’re going to figure that out on their own. The strategies that work are a consequence of the game rules (and physics and biology, for a sport), but they can be very hard to discover without thorough testing for exploits – you need good beta testers, and even then the game might require patches if nobody hit on the best strategy during the beta period. This can be annoying, but a patch might still be easier than starting over with a new set of rules (with their own unanticipated exploits).

    Another analogy is to mathematics. This gets into deep philosophical waters, but in math you can pick your axioms and rules of inference, but you have no control over which theorems follow from them – the consequences are discovered, not created.

    But mathematics and games are both deliberately simplified systems. The actual economy is a very large, interconnected network of games where some rules are natural (what works, scientifically), some are cultural (what people want) and other rules are artificial (market rules). Even the people making some of the rules don’t know all the rules. So, we shouldn’t be surprised at unanticipated exploits, but we still shouldn’t confuse markets for being mostly natural like sea level.

    (Holding back the sea is a simpler problem – the Dutch are pretty successful at this and, while it’s very impressive, it’s not that hard to understand how they do it.)

  36. Archie says:

    So, I have this issue that’s been tormenting me inside for a long time.

    I’ve been with my girlfriend Betty for almost three years now. I love Betty very much. She’s incredibly emotionally intelligent and kind without being a doormat, and being with her makes me strive, successfully, to be a kinder person. She’s very intelligent, unpretentious, and funny, and I usually feel happy and relaxed when we spend time together. She always knows how to make me laugh, and how to make me feel appreciated. I trust her completely, and I believe that the two of us can talk through just about any conflict without losing compassion for each other. I find her very attractive (to the point that when we met, I literally couldn’t stop looking at her), she has a high sex drive, and we have really enjoyable (albeit somewhat vanilla) sex almost every day. We share a dark and absurd sense of humor and a fondness for classic literature and schlock TV. Our relationship grew from a chance meeting and a few awkward dates into something strong and secure, a constant source of comfort and joy. I was almost certain that I wanted to spend my whole life with her, modulo some concerns about difficulty finding long-term jobs together.

    This was shaken somewhat when I got an e-mail last year from an ex of mine, Veronica, telling me about how, when she saw Hamilton on Broadway, she thought about how much she thought that I would love it, and how sad it was that we were no longer on speaking terms. She implored me to reach out to her again.

    My history with Veronica is thorny. She and I first came to know each other as online correspondents. We each found the other intellectually exciting. Veronica had an all-encompassing curiosity, a remarkable aptitude for asking penetrating questions, and an ever-eager readiness to troll and provoke for the sake of exploring new arguments. She pushed me to be a sharper thinker and writer. The rest of her was two-edged. She was passionate and proud. She loved fiercely, but treated anybody who disappointed her, or who she feared would disappoint her (I fell into both categories at times) with remarkable coldness and cruelty. We fell passionately in love, each declaring the other the love of our life, but our relationship’s material future was uncertain, which made both of us anxious and tense. During an interval when we lived together, we fucked every day and fought just as frequently. She frequently turned to different forms of emotional abuse, including pretending not to know me in public, belittling me with comparisons to men she had crushed on in the past, and threatening our relationship with mock executions. My goodwill frayed, and when fate took us to different places, I found that it ebbed completely. I ended our relationship, and fended off any nostalgia for it with anger.

    But when I got that e-mail, I remembered some of those good times, and decided that I wanted to be magnanimous. So I started another conversation with Veronica. She seemed kinder and wiser, regretting her past cruel, imperious manner, acknowledging that her past behaviors were deeply hurtful, and discussing the fears and pathologies that drove them. Our conversations recovered some of the playful energy they had before. We found some of our old feelings for each other stirring. At this point, we both decided that our conversations were drifting into potentially unethical territory; I told Betty about what had happened and cut off contact with Veronica again.

    I’m fairly sure that I made the right choice. I’m very much in love with Betty, and I’ve been much happier with her than I was with Veronica. My trust in Veronica has some really sharp limits, and our actual relationship experience was terrible in some exceptional ways; a second iteration almost certainly wouldn’t be like my old fantasies of how things would work out between us. Usually, when I’m this certain I’ve made the right decision, I can easily move forward without regret. But I haven’t had that piece of mind this time. Often, especially before I go to sleep at night, I find myself plagued with the thought that I made the wrong choice.

    I want to ask you two things:

    a: Why is it that I can’t stop thinking about this?

    and

    b: How do I make it stop?

    • Jiro says:

      I honestly can’t tell if this is a joke or not.

      • Finger says:

        Google “archie betty veronica” for context

        • Liskantope says:

          Well, that doesn’t make the post a joke on the whole. It only means that “Archie” made a humorous choice of pseudonyms for himself and these two women in his life.

          Unless the whole thing is essentially a retelling of an Archie story-arc. Not having read any Archie, I have no idea whether this could be the case, but I’m starting to wonder…

          • Jiro says:

            Right, that’s the problem. He’s using those names, but it doesn’t sound like he’s actually talking about Archie characters. So I have no way to know whether this is a poorly executed joke about Archie characters, or an actual post using pseudonyms.

    • Skef says:

      Have you sent this to “Ask Polly?” Seems like her bailiwick.

      I’m going to ask what sounds like, and may be, a shitty question. But it may also be relevant to what you’re asking and I’m going to assume you want to move towards an answer.

      What do you love about Betty that isn’t directly related to how she makes your life better?

      • Archie says:

        No, this question is fair and relevant.

        A few examples:

        1: Betty is a gifted performer, but she’s kind of shy and only rarely shows off her talents– maybe just a few times a year. So, her skill in this area doesn’t really make any difference in my life, but the fact that she has it makes me love her more. I just find it really appealing that the gift is there, even if it only rarely shows up.

        2: Betty is really supportive to her friends and really affectionate with animals. Seeing both of those things in action melts my heart.

        3: We share some similar background traumas. In practice, I guess that it makes it easier for us to relate, but even before I knew that would be the case, I immediately felt more empathy and affection for her.

        4: Betty’s scholarly output is a really delightful mix of careful historically-oriented literary scholarship and erudite trolling. I find this really appealing, and probably still would if somehow I was magically prevented from ever reading any of it. (It’s often really, really funny if you have the right sort of background to get the jokes.)

        I think that this question might explain some of my anxiety, though. A lot of Betty’s qualities which I immediately found attractive even before they really became relevant to my life– her intelligence, her sharp sense of humor, her kindness, her physical beauty– also play a role in our relationship being good for my well-being on a day-to-day level. This makes it easier for our relationship to feel utilitarian in a way that feels kind of unromantic. I think that maybe abstracting away from my feelings and thinking about what I admire in Betty on a personal-qualities level might be really helpful. Thank you.

        Er, is that the line of thinking you were going for?

        • Skef says:

          It answers my question.

          One factor — not the only one, and not one that always works — that can stop the sort of thoughts you’re having is the relief of having not harmed (or harmed too much) someone you’re close to. I don’t get the sense that you think Veronica’s well-being is currently your responsibility (and it isn’t), but from what you’ve said I also get a “this is mutually beneficial for now” vibe about your relationship with Betty that maybe doesn’t feel like a strong commitment on your part. Could Veronica’s interloping just be a symbol for you of your uncertainty of where things are going? Was that maybe something you were putting aside while there was no reason to consider leaving?

          • Archie says:

            My relationship with Betty is not just utilitarian, and in the past, I’ve endured significant hardships, like spending significant amounts of time apart while I’m on on research trips, to preserve it, even in the face of some significant temptation to cheat. I’ve had disposable relationships in the past, but this isn’t one of them. (I wouldn’t have cheated in the past– it’s against my code– but I would have broken up when I left for the trip.)

            I maybe did have some existing anxieties, though– this has been my first relationship that’s lasted longer than a year, and I suspect that some commitment anxiety is natural. This incident might have awakened that.

          • Skef says:

            Given all you’ve said, then, my advice on your second question is to put more effort and creative thinking into contributing positively to Betty’s life for a while. “More effort” is not meant to imply you’re not doing that now, just do some more of it. Give yourself a time-span for the extra effort because motivation is harder with things that are open-ended. If you feel like your current level is about right, fake it till you make it. I’m not suggesting this as one-size-fits-all relationship advice; the idea is that in this situation you may wind up playing the good kind of trick on yourself.

    • Sandy says:

      Search for a rich redhead who just moved into town and dump the other two.

    • Nelshoy says:

      You’re thinking about Veronica non-stop? Betty sounds like the best of women, don’t throw away your shot with her. If she won’t be enough I’m not sure you’ll ever be satisfied. Veronica has her eyes on you, thinking you’ll be back with her like before. If you’re helpless and don’t know how to say no to this, you’ll end up alone without a pot to piss in. You’re feeling outgunned, but it will be enough to stay alive. Take a break. In a couple months, your world will have turned upside down and you’ll be asking yourself “What did I miss earlier?”. You’ve just got to wait for it, you fat motherfucker. Blow us all away.

    • Philosophisticat says:

      You can’t stop thinking about it because it’s natural to wonder about what could be or could have been with someone for whom you feel or felt love. What happened was something like a breakup, and it’s normal to have all kinds of distressing thoughts afterwards. You made the right choice, but there’s a “grass is greener” kind of effect that can be quite strong with relationships. You needn’t feel guilty about that.

      As for what will make it stop, I honestly can’t say. You don’t say how long ago this was. These kinds of feelings, like the pain after a breakup, tend to get better with time. I don’t know of any particularly effective way of preventing them from coming up – it’s best to allow those thoughts to occur, acknowledge that you’re having them and what they are, and then do your best to set them aside, like you would feelings of unjustified anger. If it has been a very long time and the feelings are preventing you from sleeping or otherwise making a serious dent in your ability to enjoy your life, you might consider talking to a therapist.

    • Finger says:

      When I can’t stop thinking about a woman, it’s usually because there’s some kind of interesting ambiguity associated with my relationship with her. I try not to confuse that with feelings of actual attraction or regard.

      Based on the info you shared, I would stick with Betty 100%. I’m super envious of the relationship you described.

      Some tips that may or may not work for you:

      * Get out a piece of paper and systematically think through all your thoughts related to this issue. Is there a universe in which ditching Betty is the right move? Is there a way to quickly experimentally determine whether you live in that universe? Try to have your uncertainty be less nebulous. Attempt a “proof by cases” that this is the right choice. But don’t make it motivated reasoning… genuinely explore the possibility that Veronica is the right person for you. It may be that parts of your brain are trying to tell you things that you aren’t listening to. If you listen to those things and write them out, you’ll be able to better evaluate them and (most likely) explain to your brain why the logic is invalid.

      * Don’t assign significance to the fact that you’re thinking of Veronica frequently. This is not an indicator that she’s the one for you. It’s an indicator that your brain is in a feedback loop where uncertainty makes the topic of Veronica interesting, which makes you think about it more, which increases your attraction to Veronica (since we’re attracted to those who are familiar–for men especially, just having a woman cognitively available is going to cause your brain to play-act that you are deeply in love with her so you can better put the moves on her), which makes the topic of Veronica more interesting because ZOMG maybe you really love her! When thoughts of Veronica arise, don’t attempt to suppress them; reframe them so they’re no longer interesting. When Veronica-related thoughts are no longer interesting, your brain won’t feel the need to constantly bring them to your attention. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/f5f/how_to_deal_with_depression_the_meta_layers/

      * This could be a good time to try out a meditation practice for a while.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Assuming this is real,

      a: because it is totally normal to think about the path not taken. People who have had long and happy marriages will still think “what would have happened if I had married my high-school sweetheart” or whatever.

      b: are you the sort of person who ordinarily obsesses over things? If not, it will go away with time, hopefully. But this is really the number one classic “cannot stop thinking about it” topic”.

    • Anonymous says:

      b: have children

    • Urstoff says:

      a. grass is always greener

      b. stop viewing life as an optimization problem; it’s a satisficing problem

    • Deiseach says:

      Do you think you could be friends with Veronica, if she came into your life again? If not, if the primary driver for your relationship with her is passion, then what else is there for you if the two of you get back together again? Have you anything to build on other than “at least the sex isn’t vanilla” (pardon the reference but I was struck by how you contrasted your sexual experiences with Veronica and with Betty).

      I’m not going to say “Stick with Betty, she’s plainly the one for you!” because she may not be. But you do mention that she’s your first long-term relationship – is part of the attraction with Veronica the idea that it would be limited, that the two of you probably would break up again, that there is no feeling of being tied-down or committed with her, so you could enjoy the excitement and melodrama with the option to get out if it got too intense, just like last time?

      In other words, that Veronica is not remotely a long-term prospect and so safe to fantasise about? Because I think there may be an element of fantasy here; we always heighten the good parts and gloss over the dull or bad parts of the past, even if the ‘good’ parts involved a lot of tension and ferocity. You acknowledge that if you did get back with Veronica, it would probably not be like your fantasies, but of course being human, we all like to think “If only -” and “the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill”.

      Veronica sounds as if she challenged and pushed you in a way that Betty does not, and that you enjoyed that. Do you feel a little too safe and comfortable with Betty? Do you want her maybe to push you more, be less nice and more challenging?

      Finally, this decision is not yours alone. Perhaps Betty may decide this is not the permanent relationship she wants and she will end it; perhaps you will. Even if Veronica is not on the scene, this may still happen. I would say don’t throw away what you have for the sake of “might-have-beens”, but also don’t settle for “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Be with Betty because you want to be with her, because you want and value her, not because “well, she’s better for me than my last girlfriend”.

  37. cassander says:

    My ur-theory of american elections.

    For a while now I’ve held that the most basic divide in american politics is between those who think that america is the shining city on a hill and that their duty is to defend it, and those that think america can be that city and that their job is to build it. There is substantial overlap here between red and blue tribe, of course, but it’s by no means total. Because the overlap is not total, American presidential politics is largely pulling on one or both of these heart strings in the context of each parties’ more or less fixed set of more concrete interests. Presidents that can do both (Reagan) succeed enormously. Those that can do one well but not both (Bush, Obama) might succeed but will always be controversial. Those that do neither well, (Kerry, Carter) go down in ignominious defeat.

    Mapped to this election, I think this model explains a lot. Trump is an absurdity, but he’s the only candidate in the race that has managed to consistently tug both strings. “Make America Great Again” is a genius slogan, like “It’s Morning in America” it simultaneously pulls on both strings while offending neither, and it’s representative of trump’s whole message, consciously or not. He’s constantly saying something to the effect of “we’re getting our asses kicked, and I’m going to fix it”. How he plans to do that is rarely made clear, but that doesn’t matter, because the message speaks to both those who are eager to leap to the defense of existing america and those excited about rebuilding it. That trump was able to get the nomination, and that the race is as close as it is given trump’s massive monetary, personal, and organizational handicaps is testament to how powerful getting this rhetoric right is.

    The model also explains Hillary’s failure in 2008 and her small lead over trump now. The idea that a freshman senator could beat hillary for the nomination was absurd, but Obama has a taste for the sort of soaring rhetoric that’s red meat for the builders. He served it up in giant dollops, and democratic primary goers, who are mostly builders, gobbled it up. Sanders had a little bit of both, but he was always much better at the angry grandpa bit, which appealed to defenders, which explains his narrow but passionate support. Hillary, of course, is not much good at either. She’s clearly a builder at heart, she rarely utters anything defender, but for whatever reason, she can’t sell it to crowds.

    Thoughts?

    • Anonymous says:

      Trump stole “Make America Great Again” from Reagan.

    • rubberduck says:

      The most elegant summation I’ve heard of conservatism and liberalism (in the US politics sense) was something like, “Conservatives want to make sure we hold onto what makes our country great. Liberals want to change the problems holding us back from being great.” It sounds pretty close to what you are saying.

      I think it is a convenient framework but the way you phrase it makes people’s political opinions sound overly rosy. I think many (on both sides) vote and think based on fear or anger, rather than their ideals of what America should be.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      I think that this theory is a bit less interesting, and also pretty clearly wrong when you strip it of its symbolic trappings. Basically, you’re arguing that Americans can be either for or against the status quo. This is trivially true. But most people’s actual views are more fine-grained than that– they often like the status quo on some issues, and want to remake the world in others. This actually accurately describes almost all Americans except the most extreme radicals and reactionaries.

      • cassander says:

        Interesting. So I assumed that this was a peculiarly American phenomenon, but you might be correct that it is more fundamental. That said, it’s not just conservative vs. radical (status quo vs. change)

        Defenders aren’t just pro status quo, builders pro change. it’s not about whether given policy proposals are status quo or doing something new, it’s about the reasoning behind the policies and the way they’re framed. the point is that defenders will accept big changes if they’re seen as necessary for defense, and builders accept the status quo if it can be as somehow building.

        Just look at how incensed the US (or at least people on facebook) got about the brexit. People who I never post things about foreign policy were bewailing the vote. Why? Because in this case, the status quo was seen as building something they found desirable. Or compare the bush administration’s supporters’ rhetoric on Iraq to the liberal internationalism of the 90s. Both sides endorsed very similar policies, but in strikingly different language and with strikingly different reasoning.

      • For a particularly striking case, note that AGW concern and environmentalism more generally embody the conservative assumption that change is presumptively bad–and are associated with the left.

        • Maware says:

          I’d think it’s more the worry about the solutions to AGW.

          I mean, if the solution is just we need to make an AGW NASA, conservatives would probably not care, but there’s the fear that liberals will use AGW to really cement particular policies. It’s not helped by them saying people should have less children.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          There are more and less sophisticated versions of the argument, as with most things. One of the more sophisticated versions is that GW would be particularly bad for already-poor countries around the equator, even if it is neutral or good for already-rich countries elsewhere. That makes it rather clear why attitudes to GW tend to line up along left-right lines, even outside the US, in countries where the conspiracy-theoretic objection is considered laughable.

          Something the smarter GW opponents should be doing is saying is “you know the mass migration we’ve got a the moment? Do you want that multiplied by 10?”

    • gbdub says:

      Honestly Obama always struck me as a man that believes America isn’t particularly exceptional, and the world would be a better place if we stopped acting like we were.

      Both of your proposed groupings presuppose a belief in American exceptionalism – but I believe there is a third contingent that believes America is not a “shining beacon on the hill” and should not aspire to be because the best world is one of a global community of equals.

      • brad says:

        I think you need to draw a distinction between exceptional as a matter of fact and exceptional in a metaphysical destiny kind of way.

        In any group of people someone is going to be tallest or fattest or whatever. Maybe some groups will have statistical outliers that are much taller or fatter. But that’s not the kind of “exceptional” that’s connotated by American exceptionalism.

        • Gbdub says:

          I do draw that distinction. Obama seems fine with the “taller and fatter” exceptionalism of America, much less so with the “beacon on a hill” type exceptionalism. The latter was what I was referring to.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        There’s Americans who don’t think America is special? Really?

      • cassander says:

        I would tend to agree with you, but just look at his nomination speech.

        “Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.”

        Pure, unadulterated red meat for the builders. If he’s not a true believer, then his writers certainly are, and he just has a penchant for the sort of rhetoric they love for some other reason.

    • Aegeus says:

      I don’t think that theory holds up in practice that well. During the DNC, a lot of establishment Republicans commented that Hillary was stealing everything the Republican Party normally pushes – American exceptionalism, support for the troops, support for the constitution, etc. Lots of “defender” rhetoric.

      And Trump’s “defender” rhetoric was similarly slim. “We’re getting our asses kicked” isn’t a defender message. Especially since it’s not just “We’re getting our asses kicked but we’re still great,” but rather “The foreign hordes are within our walls, looting and pillaging!” That’s “rebuilder” messaging.

      Also, I think Sanders and Obama attracted the same crowd in the primary. It doesn’t really make sense that they’d do that with opposing rhetoric. And Obama also won the general, which means he had a much broader appeal than just the Democratic base. Which by your theory would mean he must be pretty good at “defender” rhetoric as well.

      • cassander says:

        >American exceptionalism, support for the troops, support for the constitution, etc. Lots of “defender” rhetoric.

        I think she tried, but I think it rang hollow because A, she doesn’t buy into it, B, neither do the people who write for her, C, she lacks the charisma to sell it without belief, and D, she’s Hillary Clinton, she’s spent 20 years pissing off red tribe so much that they’d rather chew of their own arms than vote for her.

        >Also, I think Sanders and Obama attracted the same crowd in the primary. It doesn’t really make sense that they’d do that with opposing rhetoric

        Given that sanders didn’t win and obama did, they clearly didn’t capture exactly the same crowd. I don’t seem to remember a lot of comments about obama-bros from 2008. And Obama obviously got the black vote, bernie manifestly did not. They both got anti-hillary people sure, but I think that’s about it.

        >hich by your theory would mean he must be pretty good at “defender” rhetoric as well.

        I would never claim that this rhetoric was the only thing that mattered, but he ran against people that weren’t much good at either style.

  38. Wrong Species says:

    Quick poll: can computers be conscious? You don’t need to elaborate or have a strong opinion. Any answer is fine.

  39. Me: “Hey, I just learned something really interesting about occultism and intelligence services during the lead-up to WWI!”

    Friend: “What?”

    Me: “Well, you know how mysticism and seances and stuff were big deals back then?”

    Friend: “Yes?”

    Me: “Well, there was one guy who went around Austria, and was widely considered to be a spy for the British. He got stopped and searched a lot, and since he had all kinds of crazy supplies, it always took a while and was a big production. But that was the point! The idea was that he’d go somewhere, be seen, be searched yet again, do his shows, and leave, and the actual spies would note his passing and take it as a pre-arranged signal, without ever actually meeting him or interacting with him in any way.”

    Friend: “That’s…convoluted but clever.”

    Me: “Yeah! It turns out the medium was the message!”

    Friend: “We are no longer friends.”

  40. VK says:

    I was reading an article about GiveDirectly facing challenges with its basic income experiment – many of the intended recipients are refusing cash transfers, out of either skepticism or fear of being taken advantage of. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be living your normal, day-to-day life, and then learn that some far-off foreigner wants to give you enough money to live without working… Perhaps a Nigerian prince who would like help moving his fortune to the United States?

    In all seriousness, I wonder how they will deal with this problem – how can they build trust within the community that they will still be there in 10 years, and that there are no catches?

    • pku says:

      How is this possible? Aren’t there enough charities working in Africa that they’d at least be familiar with the concept?

      • suntzuanime says:

        I believe it was one village where a particular rumor spread about their particular program.

      • Deiseach says:

        Would you believe some guy who walked up to you in the street, said he was working for a charity, and promised to give you a couple of hundred dollars a week for ten years for absolutely nothing, no there’s no catch, honest?

        I don’t think the people in Africa being trialled on this are being stupid or ungrateful, they’re showing admirable common sense. Haven’t we all been told there is no such thing as a free lunch and money doesn’t grow on trees?

        And how many “sponsor a child” charities saw people sign up to support kids, then drop out after a couple of years? I have no idea, but there must be some, and that would also make people give less credence to “some Western guy has promised to support you for years”.

        • LHN says:

          Sure. Even leaving aside spam which is mostly filtered, my answering machine regularly gets calls telling me I’ve won a free vacation (almost certainly a time share sales pitch) or some other too good to be true offer.

          I occasionally muse on some philanthropist at the other end mystified that they’re unable to give away free trips to Disney World or cruises or whatever. But I don’t regard it as likely enough to pursue the question. (I idly wonder what bona fides or signals it would take to convince me to at least try to check it out.) I don’t really blame people in another culture for likewise regarding “Free Money!” as more likely to be a scam than a genuine offer.

        • Vaniver says:

          Would you believe some guy who walked up to you in the street, said he was working for a charity, and promised to give you a couple of hundred dollars a week for ten years for absolutely nothing, no there’s no catch, honest?

          A tenuously related version of this happened to me, and there in fact was not a catch. (It helped that it was because I was affiliated with the charity he was interested in.)

          But this calls to mind someone else who apparently had only every come across pranked money on the street (for example, a dollar bill with excrement smeared in the middle).

    • nelshoy says:

      Explain it to them? Bring some pictures.

      GiveDirectly is a pretty simple concept. Every culture on earth has communal sharing. Also, they aren’t being asked for a down payment like prince Abali, they are just giving them money. I don’t imagine you’d have to convince more than a year people in a community. Seeing your neighbor get free cash no strings attached for a few months is probably mighty convincing.

      • Gazeboist says:

        As I recall the suspicion is that the money will not be (could not be!) as reliable as they (Give Directly) say it will be. This then transitions into the suspicion that the money, if it is actually reliable, is in some way unsavory. Otherwise why would they be giving it to us? (say the intended recipients)

      • Loquat says:

        There’s also suspicion that the money is associated with cults or devil worship, or otherwise will eventually have a price even if it initially seems like the people who accept are just getting free money. Because why would a charity give a year’s worth of income to everyone, no strings attached, including the people that aren’t poor by local standards? You have to admit, it’s kind of a weird concept if you’ve never heard of Basic Income before.

      • hlynkacg says:

        Ever hear the line “Beware Romulans Jews Nigereans bearing gifts”?

        • Tibor says:

          Isn’t it (originally) Greeks bearing gifts (as a reference to Troy)? At least in Czech it is.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I’m pretty sure you are correct.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Isn’t it (originally) Greeks bearing gifts (as a reference to Troy)? At least in Czech it is.

            Yep:

            Ne credite, Teucri:
            Quidquid est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

          • Dahlen says:

            timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

            Flashback to high school, when my asshole teacher would dramatically intone this sentence at some girl with a Greek name every now and then. No particular reason. He just took turns mocking people, because (1) he felt like it (2) he was in cahoots with school inspectors and couldn’t get thrown out.

          • Tibor says:

            Yes, I was going to write Danaeic gift first, but I don’t know how to spell it properly in English.

      • Deiseach says:

        Every culture on earth has communal sharing.

        Yeah, in your own locality amongst family, neighbours and people you know or at least have heard of and can, if necessary, physically track down and beat the crap out of if they cheat or trick you. Nobody has experience that leads them to trust an offer along the lines of “Hey, João, guess what: some rich guy in China is promising to personally sponsor you for the next five years, no strings attached, no conditions, all you have to do is give him your bank details so he can transfer the money – João, wait, don’t you want that free money?”

  41. Lolo says:

    So what do you guys think of human biodiversity? I found it about a year ago through this blog, and lately it seems like Scott has been getting pretty cozy with genetic differences. Thoughts?

    • Seth says:

      It’s one of the cases where I think “check your privilege” really does apply. The almost instant way it turns into justification for socioeconomic inequality should matter, in terms of a Bayesian analysis of it being a pseudo-scientific rationalization for oppression, of the “It’s SCIENCE!” type. There’s hundreds of years of this stuff, all utterly wrong, all previously nakedly serving to justify racism, colonialism, etc. But, the advocates say, this one time, they say it’s real – and pay no attention to the centuries of false claims. No – I am applying a heuristic. If what someone says pattern-matches to “… therefore observed group inequality is just an outcome of intrinsic biology”, I am going to presume they are speaking nonsense to a high probability of virtual certainty.

      • Sandy says:

        The almost instant way it turns into justification for socioeconomic inequality should matter, in terms of a Bayesian analysis of it being a pseudo-scientific rationalization for oppression, of the “It’s SCIENCE!” type

        It’s only a rationalization for oppression if people want it to be. If the prevailing belief across society is that people with better cognitive abilities are superior human beings who naturally deserve more and better things in life and should rightfully rule over their less gifted peers, sure, you’d wind up with oppression. But that’s perhaps more an indictment of the belief than the science.

        There’s hundreds of years of this stuff, all utterly wrong, all previously nakedly serving to justify racism, colonialism, etc. But, the advocates say, this one time, they say it’s real – and pay no attention to the centuries of false claims.

        Yes, and Copernicus argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun despite centuries of false claims to that effect from European, Arab and Turkish astronomers. You’re comparing people doing thoroughly unscientific things like measuring skulls to people pointing to differences in genetic code between groups. Dismissing the latter simply by invoking the dismissal of the former requires motivated reasoning.

        Is it often and frequently used to justify racism and discrimination? Sure. But that’s not a strike against it anymore than Putnam’s study linking diversity to corruption, alienation and civic decline should have been tossed out just because people didn’t like the conclusion.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Measuring skulls is not “thoroughly unscientific” in itself. If you fudge your data to support your biases, like Gould, that’s unscientific.

          • Sandy says:

            It’s unscientific if the conclusions you seek to draw from it have no empirical basis.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I would say that it’s drawing conclusions unsupported by the data that’s unscientific in that case, not the collecting of data.

          • a non mous(e) says:

            It’s unscientific if the conclusions you seek to draw from it have no empirical basis.

            Study – measure the volume of skulls, average results, compare by race.

            Possible conclusions – (a) different races have same average skull volume, (b) different races have different average skull volume.

            For some odd reason you’ve redefined “empirical basis” to “comes to the progressive approved conclusion”. Unfortunately reality keeps being non-empirical.

            To put it another way, studying things then basing conclusions on the study is exactly what it means to have an empirical basis for a conclusion.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          Yes, and Copernicus argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun despite centuries of false claims to that effect from European, Arab and Turkish astronomers.

          I’ve noticed a small flaw in your argument. The centuries of claims from European, Arab and Turkish astronomers to the effect that the Earth revolves around the sun could not have been false, because the Earth does, in fact, revolve around the sun.

          • Sandy says:

            They weren’t false, which was my point. They were judged to be false because there was an orthodoxy inclined against the idea, and because they had the basic premise right but errors in the process that produced the premise sufficient enough that their claims could be disregarded.

          • hlynkacg says:

            It was a bit more complicated than that actually.

          • Mary says:

            They were judged to be false because all evidence was against their being true.

            As everyone who had ever been on a moving object knew, it was not like being a stationary one. Everyone has direct sensory perception that the Earth does not move.

            Furthermore, if the Earth moves, it would be nearer to stars on the same side of the Sun as it was and farther away from others. Enormously nearer. Yet the stars do not change in appearance at all throughout the year.

            If you argue that the stars are so far away that it would make no difference, look at them some time. While small, they are of finite side, not points. You’re arguing that for some reason we have a teeny tiny Sun surrounded by great big enormous stars. Why on earth is only one light source such a different size?

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          . If the prevailing belief across society is that people with better cognitive abilities are superior human beings who naturally deserve more and better things in life and should rightfully rule over their less gifted peers, sure, you’d wind up with oppression. But that’s perhaps more an indictment of the belief than the science.

          I think you need to note that the movement calling itself HBD is pretty much aligned with the right, and that there is a separate movement that considers genetics, among other things, from the left perspective, usually called the alt.left.

          And, thirdly there are actual scientists — most of the HBD movement are not — who study genetics, and who publish in learned journals and not on the blogosphere. There is a bit of a medium->message implication in HBD.

          • Vaniver says:

            And, thirdly there are actual scientists — most of the HBD movement are not — who study genetics, and who publish in learned journals and not on the blogosphere. There is a bit of a medium->message implication in HBD.

            One of the primary tragedies of HBD is that the journalistic impression of what scientists think on the issue is totally separated from what scientists think. (What laypeople think, as you might guess, follows journalists instead of scientists.) I like to point people to Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, released by the APA in 1995, as the place to start with any discussion of the importance of intelligence or the existence of gaps.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          It’s only a rationalization for oppression if people want it to be.

          On a blog that tilts very much libertarian? It ends up being a call to presume a just world.

          I’m guessing I’m going to get an argument that it is government that oppressed black people, so why am I knocking libertarian thought. But it’s interesting how we will get that argument simultaneously with “blacks have poorer outcomes because they are less intelligent”.

      • “There’s hundreds of years of this stuff, all utterly wrong”

        How do you know?

        Suppose someone in the past defended slavery on the grounds that blacks were less intelligent than whites. There are lots of reasons you might object to the argument. But in order to argue that his reason is utterly wrong you have to know that blacks are not less intelligent than whites–which gets you back to the question of whether human biodiversity is real and significant.

        You can’t argue “I know there is no difference between the average IQ of blacks and whites because people in the past argued that there was and they were utterly wrong, and I know they were utterly wrong because I know there is no difference between the average IQ of blacks and whites.

        Or at least, you shouldn’t.

        • Seth says:

          I’m going to answer this on two levels. Please note the distinction:

          Scientific: You ask “Suppose someone in the past defended slavery on the grounds that blacks were less intelligent than whites.”. The answer is that the claim of “less intelligent” is being used here as a motte-and-bailey. The defense at the time was that slavery was justified in a way that those enslaved were a kind of lower type of humanity. Not a few “IQ points”, which would hardly justify being enslaved. It is misleading rhetoric to shuffle the phrase “less intelligent” between the two vastly different concepts.

          Political: Why is the above motte-and-bailey being done? There is a reason for it. Just like the slave-owner wants to justify slavery by it’s-science, the inequality-benefiter wants to justify inequality by it’s-science. This is what I mean by I will apply a heuristic. When someone argues anything of the sort “You can’t know it’s false”, I will look at who-benefits as useful guide. I will not be impressed by a simplistic rebuttal that a heuristic can be wrong.

          This is what I think of “human biodiversity”. It is relabelled “race (pseudo)science” for exactly the same rationalizing reasons.

          • definitely anonymous says:

            This argument works equally well for either side. You could just as well argue that black people on the left say that genetic differences are not a thing so that they can request unfair advantages in the form of affirmative action and stuff, and justify it as necessary to reverse oppression.

            BTW, there’s always the approach of actually considering the facts instead of endlessly psychoanalyzing one’s opponent.

          • Seth says:

            The fallacy “This argument works equally well for either side” is the historical amnesia that gives the lie to the word “equally“. Whatever the abuses of affirmative action, and I won’t deny there’s been some somewhere, they are utterly microscopic against the centuries of slavery and colonialism and the pseudo-intellectual justifications built to justify it. I knew what I was getting into, sadly, when I said the words “check your privilege”. Maybe that’s a bad pattern-match itself. But this is one my my frustrations with the failure of rationalism:

            1) You must have a model of reality

            2) While this model can be wrong, and you need to keep an open mind about it being wrong, you can also have a mind so open that your brains fall out.

            Reasoning about the real world has to take into account that there’s efforts to justify oppression that’s orders of magnitude more extensive than ways the oppressed might use to get away with something. It’s not proper Bayesianism to simply list that both could happen in the abstract, so arguments then can’t be distinguished. It’s almost to the level of the joke that things either happen or they don’t, so everything is a 50/50 chance.

            This is what “we” get wrong. It’s why too many people trying to be rational end up being handmaidens of horror.

          • cassander says:

            >The fallacy “This argument works equally well for either side” is the historical amnesia that gives the lie to the word “equally“. Whatever the abuses of affirmative action, and I won’t deny there’s been some somewhere, they are utterly microscopic against the centuries of slavery and colonialism and the pseudo-intellectual justifications built to justify it.

            This is not a principled argument. It amounts to saying “other people were wrong so we pass for a while even if we’re wrong now.”

            >Reasoning about the real world has to take into account that there’s efforts to justify oppression that’s orders of magnitude more extensive than ways the oppressed might use to get away with something.

            again, we’re talking about biological facts here, not having an oppression dick measuring contest.

          • Seth says:

            It amounts to saying “other people were wrong so we pass for a while even if we’re wrong now.”

            Well, to be precise: Other people were wrong, and it looks very very much like the exact same type of pseudoscientific argument is being made for the exact same political reasons, so let’s take that into account and assign a very very high skepticism to that argument as likely being wrong also”.

            N.b., I keep having to point out the difference between this being an excellent heuristic though not utterly infalible, versus a straw claim of absolute.

          • cassander says:

            >it looks very very much like the exact same type of pseudoscientific argument

            They are not the same at all. DNA clusters are pretty inarguable, particularly when you can start identifying what specific genes do.

            >is being made for the exact same political reasons,

            Science doesn’t care about motives. They have no place in this discussion. Copernicus came up with the heliocentric model to make doing astroloy easier.

            .

          • hlynkacg says:

            To say that something resembles pseudoscience is not a sufficient argument on its’ own. The whole point of pseudoscience is that it resembles science.

          • I want to respond to the “scientific” part of your argument.

            Your claim, I think, is that there were some people in the past who made claims about racial differences that we can be pretty sure were wildly exaggerated and used those claims to defend institutions by which you believe they benefited.

            That’s probably true–on any issue there is a range of views. But there were also people in the past–Darwin and Adam Smith come to mind–who were pretty far on the nurture side of the nature/nurture controversy but believed there were innate differences and, at least in the case of Darwin, that such differences were heritable. In the 19th century there was a lively dispute over the size and relevance of racial differences. Economics got the label “The Dismal Science” for arguing against slavery and the associated claims.

            I could imitate your argument by pointing out that there have been some people who have made wildly exaggerated claims on the nurture side of that argument, such as the claim that male/female differences were entirely a matter of nurture. There is even one modern case of someone who maintained that claim by deliberate scientific fraud and (until it was discovered) benefited professionally by doing so.

            Is that a reason to reject a priori all claims that upbringing affects personality and behavior?

          • definitely anonymous says:

            You’re essentially making an argument from incentives. I’d argue that the incentives to pretend that all races are equal are much stronger. I’m anonymous because I risk a lot by having my name associated with this opinion. The reason I have this opinion is because I suspect it’s correct–possessing has high downside, and no upside, for me personally.

            A more persuasive argument you could make to me would be to say that in a world where racial inferiority is a common belief, racial tensions and race-related atrocities are higher. Then we could start breaking down subcomponents of that question: was belief in racial inferiority a cause of oppression, or an effect of oppression? Do constant and often frivolous accusations of racism (“race-baiting” back in the day) improve race relations or make them worse?

            Personally, achieving racial harmony is my #1 goal of discourse about race. I’m against accusations of racism because I think they create turmoil with no purpose. My view is that race relations have gotten worse in the past few decades due to frivolous racism accusations. I don’t talk about HBD often, and when I do it’s with the objective of undermining these frivolous accusations that I consider harmful.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            I’d argue that the incentives to pretend that all races are equal are much stronger.

            It depends who you are. If you are Steve sailer, the horse has already bolted — he might gain some “scientific credibility” by joining HBD, but isn’t going to be regarded as any more racist.

          • “It depends who you are.”

            If you are a Nobel prize winning biologist, the cost of suggesting that racial differences are real and matter is very high. We’ve done the experiment.

            If you are a prominent economist, president of a top university, with links to Democratic politics, the cost of raising the possibility that differences by gender in the distribution of specific intellectual abilities are real is also substantial.

            Generalizing that, for any prominent figure not already linked to politically unpopular positions, there is a strong incentive not to admit belief in the existence of such differences. That’s more relevant to evaluating the present state of the argument than what people did or didn’t say or believe a century or two ago.

          • Mary says:

            Whatever the abuses of affirmative action, and I won’t deny there’s been some somewhere, they are utterly microscopic against the centuries of slavery and colonialism and the pseudo-intellectual justifications built to justify it.

            On the other hand, the abuses of AA are being done here, now, and could be stopped. The abuses of slavery are not only in the past, both the slaves and masters are all dead now and past all punishment and reparation.

          • suntzuanime says:

            We can punish them by doing things they wouldn’t have liked, assuming they cared about the future after their death. For example, people tend to care about their descendants, so we could have all descendants of slave-owners tortured to death.

          • a non-mOus(e) says:

            We can punish them by doing things they wouldn’t have liked, assuming they cared about the future after their death. For example, people tend to care about their descendants, so we could have all descendants of slave-owners tortured to death.

            Seeing as how black Americans who are descended from slaves are about 15% white genetically and that very few whites were slave owners, blacks are the only definitely identifiable group of descendants of slave-owners.

      • definitely anonymous says:

        all utterly wrong

        According to the standards of the current milieu, which doesn’t seem all that reliable either (see: replication crisis, publication bias, and all the issues with science brought up on this blog). There’s a story by which “scientific racists” of yesteryear were simply documenting facts that anyone could see, and in the modern era we have a sophisticated intellectual establishment to rationalize away those facts.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      I’m also very suspicious of motivated reasoning (since HBD proponents seem to usually share a particular set of political commitments and often share an obvious visceral animus against black and brown people), but I think that refusing to even consider the movement’s claims is kind of silly, especially since if it is just a mess of motivated reasoning, the best weapons against it are epistemic.

      • suntzuanime says:

        If you have HBD-related beliefs but are not ready to make those particular political commitments, you’re likely to keep your mouth shut for fear of being ostracized. Scott touches on somewhat similar topics in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/

      • a Non Mous(e) says:

        The political beliefs are downstream of believing your lying eyes on HBD.

        How bizarre would it be if you didn’t shift your beliefs towards the alt-right / thing-that-shall-not-be-named-because-scott-can’t-argue-against-it-effectively after being convinced of the truth of HBD?

        • Ted says:

          I wish you wouldn’t do that. There are plenty of ways to refer to neo-reaction which don’t involve taking a dig at Scott; doing so like this is harmful to the quality of discussion here.

      • Seth says:

        Seriously, what justifies refusal based on sounding like past crank science? Does the n’th “free energy” machine have to be carefully considered based on the idea that it might embody some heretofore unknown scientific discovery? But, one might say, people didn’t understand radioactivity once – how can we be sure that this alleged “free energy” machine isn’t the key to a discovery of a new science? Can you prove it’s false? And look, if it pans out, no more energy problems, right?

        While some small amount of real science was originally dismissed as crank science, there’s an enormous amount of crank science that’s just crank science. Life is too short to examine every looks-like-crank claim just on the off chance there might be a tiny grain of truth in it. It’s exhausting.

        • A non Mous(e) says:

          The only example of a modern “scientist” attempting to show a failure to reproduce to disprove an old “psudoscience” study was when Stephen Gould faked his data rather than report that an old study about skull volume by race was correct.

          Modern studies not only confirm the old “psudoscience” but give more examples. Old studies – brain volume by skull volume. New studies – brain volume by MRI. Same result.

          But modern social psychology argues against those conclusions (kinda, sorta if you squint right at implicit association tests). Of course, there’s the whole crisis of repliciability in modern social psychology that, for some unknown reason, skipped all psychometrics.

          You’re the flat-earther here. You posit that at some point a great disproving happened due to evidence rather than social pressure to simply ignore the actual evidence. No evidence was ever given for your position and the best that your side can do in arguments is claim that there’s not enough proof because the default assumption should be that you’re right.

          What would change your mind? Would brain volume averages do it? That’s pretty specific and not plausibly related to social attitudes. Differences in MAO-A gene frequency? Lack of Neanderthal admixture of brain development genes in only one major race? What evidence would it take to convince you? (Trick question, obviously there’s nothing that would convince you).

          • Seth says:

            “The only example of … You’re the flat-earther here.”

            Let me put it this way: We do not appear to have commensurable assumptions.

            One of us is wrong (to a reasonable approximation).

            Presumably we both think it is the other.

            Rationalism needs to figure how to better handle this situation. It is the core the problem.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Great, how do you propose we do that?

          • The Nybbler says:

            Seth, it appears you have put more effort into refusing to examine these “pseudoscientific” claims than it would take to take a first cut at examining them.

          • ChetC3 says:

            What if he has examined them, and wasn’t convinced?

        • “Life is too short to examine every looks-like-crank claim just on the off chance there might be a tiny grain of truth in it. It’s exhausting.”

          Couldn’t one argue, along the lines of heuristics sketched already, that since there are very severe social penalties to saying you believe in innate racial differences, when someone says “I’m not going to bother to investigate the claims because they are obviously crank science” the odds are pretty good that the real reason is that he is afraid the evidence might support the claims?

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            hat since there are very severe social penalties to saying you believe in innate racial differences,

            Only if you have never done so before.

          • Corey says:

            there are very severe social penalties to saying you believe in innate racial differences

            Except for the guy who’s about to come in second or better in a US Presidential election. Outlier?

            There are also HUGE political/motivated-reasoning incentives to believe that minorities are immutably inferior to whites. Those have been around the US since approximately the Mayflower, whereas the SJW superweapons have been around for about a generation.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Trump has said racially incentive things but he has never, as far as I can tell, given a genetic reason for it.

          • Corey says:

            @Wrong Species: Fair enough, Trump doesn’t seem to be an HBDer, but he does seem a counterexample to “accusations of racism are a career-destroying superweapon” which is usually a baseline assumption in such discussions.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Yeah, a lot of claims of the form “you can’t get away with X” come with an implicit “unless you’re a charismatic billionaire”.

          • “There are also HUGE political/motivated-reasoning incentives to believe that minorities are immutably inferior to whites. ”

            Are there similar incentives to believe that whites are inferior to East Asians? That’s part of the usual IQ argument.

          • Corey says:

            @David: Good question, Asian IQ doesn’t seem as politically salient so I don’t think anyone cares too much about that side of the argument.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Trump is the outlier, yes. Not every billionaire could get away with what he says. He can do it because he has a reputation for being crass (resulting in lowered expectations), because he does not in any way depend on support from those who are shocked by the things he says, and because he’s partially built his campaign on saying the unsayable. And even he has avoided some of the more potent third rails; he hasn’t said anything against black people or Jews, for instance. Even his attacks on Mexicans have been rather limited.

            But being a billionaire celebrity helps, yes.

        • Seth, the free energy machine can be assigned a very low prior because we have a battle tested physical theory (thermodynamics) which predicts it to be impossible. Demonstrating said machine will require us to overturn the law of conservation of energy.

          Same thing for various other claims, e.g. cell phones cause cancer or ESP.

          What equally well tested law of biology proves that different subpopulations of an animal species cannot have mental differences? (I.e., wolves and dogs cannot behave differently.)

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            Or different breeds of dog? Surely in many cases those are even more closely related.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            What equally well tested law of biology proves that different subpopulations of an animal species cannot have mental differences? (I.e., wolves and dogs cannot behave differently.)

            Is that literally the only claim that the HBD movement is making? Are you completely sure there isn’t some further claim, like “and these groups correspond to races as popularly understood”, or “and these differences matter”, or “and these differences should be a basis of public policy”?

          • TheAncientGreek, the HBD types generally make several claims.

            They don’t claim popular perceptions of race are perfectly accurate, and in fact they go into extreme detail making additional distinctions as supported by science. They do claim that popular perceptions of race are ballpark correct, however.

            I know of no ironclad law of biology which claims that subpopulations of animals with distinct appearances cannot, in fact, have a genetic basis. (I.e., dogs and wolves can’t be genetically distinguished.)

            There is, to my knowledge, no law of biology which claims that the differences between dog and wolf behavior cannot matter in a social context either.

            Whether they should be a basis for public policy is a normative question, not a positive one.

            In any case, TheAncientGreek, if you’d like to claim that some particular law of biology makes HBD claims exceedingly implausible, why don’t you state said law? Also please explain why said law does not apply to differences between dogs and wolves, or mastiffs and poodles.

            (I harp on the dogs vs wolves point because most of the claims HBD folks make are completely uncontroversial and generally accepted as true when applied to all other species.)

          • “Is that literally the only claim that the HBD movement is making?”

            Perhaps some of the clash of opinions here comes from two different readings of the question “do you believe in HBD?”

            I take it as “do you believe in human biodiversity–that there are genetic differences among human populations large enough to matter beyond the obvious physical differences such as skin color?”

            Some people here seem to take it as “do you agree with the HBD movement?”

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            HBD is like feminism.

            There’s a core idea that isn’t too objectionable.

            But almost everyone who is talking about it isn’t talking about the unobjectionable core idea, they’re talking about something else.

            As is made abundantly clear by the fact that HBD conversations tend to revolve around a particular skin color, particularly with regard to political implications, and particularly particularly the political implications for social justice positions.

            Feminism and HBD are similarly toxic ideologies, for approximately similar reasons (they’re tribal tools mostly used as an excuse to pillory people on the basis of birth characteristics predictive of tribal affiliation of an opposing tribe). If you hold feminism responsible for its most toxic adherents and its refusal to do anything about it, it’s mere ideology to not do the same for HBD. Likewise the reverse.

            Consistency.

          • OrphanWilde, I disagree that the core idea of HBD “isn’t too objectionable”. James Watson and Charles Murray have all been pilloried and attacked simply for expressing the core idea.

            Curtis Yarvin, a mild mannered programmer who in a few throwaway paragraphs agreed with HBD, causes great controversy when he attends conferences to discuss functional programming.

            Unlike feminism, I’ve never seen HBD proponents pillory anyone. I have seen them be the victim of such things many times, however. I don’t think your comparison is very accurate.

          • Sandy says:

            I don’t think those examples are just about agreeing with the core idea of genetic differences. Watson claimed anyone who worked with black people could see for themselves that there are genetic differences between the races, which suggests that he thought his own black colleagues and employees were inferior.

            Yarvin definitely wasn’t about just agreeing with the core idea of HBD. He’s given spirited defenses of colonialism, and two of his heroes are Julius Evola and Thomas Carlyle. I vaguely remember the people who booted him out of one conference justifying that decision by referencing an essay Yarvin wrote about Carlyle’s views on slavery.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Whether they should be a basis for public policy is a normative question, not a positive one.

            Meaning what? That it can therefore be no part of HBD the movement, since HBD the movement is Pure Science? But that is precisely what I am disputing.

            In any case, TheAncientGreek, if you’d like to claim that some particular law of biology makes HBD claims exceedingly implausible, why don’t you state said law?

            There is a reason I keep talking about HBD the movement and distinguishing it from genetic science. What do you think that is?

      • Zombielicious says:

        It helps to separate out the people who hear about evidence for HBD and go, “Hmm, that’s interesting,” think about it a bit and then go back to their lives, versus the people who hear about it and get obsessed about how it explains all the negative and positive aspects of their ingroups and outgroups. It’s a spectrum of course. Similar parallels for stuff in evolutionary psychology.

    • Philosophisticat says:

      The idea that genetics is part of the explanation for average differences in physical or psychological characteristics between races (or whatever the closest biologically respectable analogue of race is) is well-supported. But, in part to various self-reinforcing feedback loops, the discussion of the topic by people who identify with HBD ideas is full of:

      1) Disproportionate confidence in the degree of racial differences as well as the degree to which the differences have a genetic cause.

      2) Disproportionate confidence in the degree to which these differences explain a wide variety of social phenomena (crime in inner cities, the success and failure of different nations, etc.)

      3) Disproportionate (and sometimes morally reprehensible) views about how much those empirical facts ought to influence policy or behavior. (Restricting immigration from nations with certain racial backgrounds, weird racial natalist views, etc.)

      In addition, there’s a strong correlation between interest in HBD ideas and various nasty attitudes towards particular races or a more general ugly tendency to view everything through the lens of race.

      In general, it’s a topic that’s full of motivated thinking stemming from the worst angels of peoples’ natures, rendering it reasonable to look at people who make a big deal out of HBD with a wary eye. At the same time, the resulting taboo makes it more difficult to get a clear and complete picture of the world.

      • Couldn’t you say much the same about the rejection of HBD? It’s based on motivated reasoning and leads to nasty behavior–ferocious attacks against scientists who have not demonstrated the characteristics you associate with HBD believers but have suggested innate differences by race or gender? Perhaps even, as claimed in the Gould case, to scientific fraud.

        Hence that it is reasonable to look at people who confidently reject HBD with a wary eye.

        • Philosophisticat says:

          I think people who confidently reject even the less controversial bits of HBD also tend to do so via motivated reasoning. And inappropriate attacks on all sides should be condemned. The world is big enough for more than one group behaving badly. I’m happy to look at most people with a wary eye.

          That said, while I think there is a lot of symmetry in bad cognitive practices and in the factors that lead people to be aggressive and objectionably intolerant of the opposing side, I think there is some asymmetry in the moral character of the attitudes that (frequently) motivate obsession with genetic racial differences and those that underlie defensiveness against that idea.

          And it’s what you’d expect, I think, from the way the topic has been tabooed. When the anti-HBD position has become the way to signal sympathy for traditionally oppressed groups, the people who are going to oppose it openly and spend a lot of their attention fighting against the current are going to tend to be people with little interest in expressing sympathy towards traditionally oppressed groups. And this is disproportionately a group with some pretty ugly attitudes.

          None of this, of course, constitutes an argument for or against any of the ideas of HBD.

          • “When the anti-HBD position has become the way to signal sympathy for traditionally oppressed groups, the people who are going to oppose it openly and spend a lot of their attention fighting against the current are going to tend to be people with little interest in expressing sympathy towards traditionally oppressed groups. And this is disproportionately a group with some pretty ugly attitudes.”

            On the other hand, if the evidence supports the position that social pressures oppose, the people who fight against the current will also tend to be people who care what is true. And the people who go along with the current will tend to be people who don’t.

          • suntzuanime says:

            People who care what is true are rounding error.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Actually, I think everybody cares about what is true – it’s just that very few people are good at getting there. So few, in fact, that I think the widespread epistemic superiority of one side is basically never the right explanation for politically charged disagreements.

            Now, @DavidFriedman, I can’t tell if you genuinely believe that the group of people who spend lots of attention on racial differences, who keep folders on their desktop full of Black and White IQ charts, are by and large dispassionate rational truth seekers, and that they do not disproportionately have morally objectionable racial attitudes. If so, then I think you may have experienced a skewed sample of that group, or your agreement with their ideas has disposed you favorably towards them in a way that blinds you to their faults. But I don’t have any formal study showing a correlation between these things, so our disagreement ends there.

            Or maybe you’re okay with the above claims, but you object to the idea that it’s reasonable to look at HBD advocates with a wary eye, because it’s unfair to those who really are motivated by noble pursuit of the True. I’m sympathetic to that. I don’t mean the wary eye to involve any kind of mistreatment – it’s meant to capture what seems to me to be the right epistemic response to learning that someone spends a lot of attention on defending the importance of genetic racial differences, which is generally to increase ones’ credence that they have various correlated objectionable attitudes. I think it’s unfortunate when expression of truths has this effect, but it does happen.

            Or maybe it’s something else. Your manner of oblique combativeness makes it hard to pin you down. Perhaps you have some inaccurate assumptions about my views and you just want to snag me on some sort of inconsistency.

          • “Now, @DavidFriedman, I can’t tell if you genuinely believe that the group of people who spend lots of attention on racial differences, who keep folders on their desktop full of Black and White IQ charts, are by and large dispassionate rational truth seekers, ”

            I don’t think I know any people like that. I know people I encounter in online discussions, on one side or the other. And I have observed at a distance some prominent cases, such as the response to James Watson’s comment on race or Lawrence Summers’ on possible explanations for the shortage of female math professors at Harvard or equivalent.

            My conclusion from those observations is that people who insist there are no significant differences are either lying about their own beliefs or holding beliefs for reasons unrelated to evidence that they are true, and a fair number of them are willing to maintain their beliefs by punishing those who openly disagree with them.

            That’s behavior I strongly disapprove of.

            To put it differently, I don’t know how many of the people who believe in significant heritable differences are dispassionate truth seekers. But I know that almost all the dispassionate truth seekers who have seriously thought about the question believe in at least the possibility of such differences.

            Do you disagree? Do you think it is possible for a dispassionate truth seeker to be confident that there are no significant differences in the distribution of intellectual characteristics by race or gender?

          • Philosophisticat says:

            David, as the first sentence I wrote in this discussion should indicate, I think the evidence favors not just the existence of average psychological (including intellectual) differences between races, but that these are partly explained genetically. I think people who are confident that this is false are ignorant, misled, or engaging in bad cognitive practices. Frequently, all three. I’ve also tried to be clear that I think the sort of punishing behavior you describe is bad.

            You seem to have a mistaken model in your head of what I believe. I haven’t claimed that all, most, or even some dispassionate truth seekers are confident that the weak base claims (the motte) of HBD are false, and it would be a logical error to infer it from what I’ve said. I’m not trying to be cagey about any of my views here, so turn down the inductive inference dial and I’ll be happy to clarify.

            (Aside: As a purely philosophical matter, I think it’s possible for a dispassionate truth seeker to have pretty much any belief at all, if presented with enough misleading evidence (or perhaps with extreme enough priors). I don’t think that the real life examples we are considering are fully explained that way, though one of the issues with taboo subjects is that they lead to a presentation of consensus which is misleading evidence.)

          • I don’t think I was responding to a model of what you believe, merely to your comment that I quoted at the beginning of mine.

            You seemed to think that I was denying the existence of people who support HBD for bad reasons. My point was that those were not the people I had encountered in the context of that argument.

            I don’t know if the epistemic superiority of one side explains the pattern of views. It’s possible that all of those who reject HBD do so for bad reasons and that most of those who accept it do so for bad reasons.

            There are, however, good reasons to accept it and not, I think, good reasons to reject it. That’s most strongly true for the gender version, somewhat more weakly for the racial version.

            I wasn’t implying anything about your view of the subject.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @DavidFriedeman

            , I can’t tell if you genuinely believe that the group of people who spend lots of attention on racial differences, who keep folders on their desktop full of Black and White IQ charts, are by and large dispassionate rational truth seekers, ”

            I don’t think I know any people like that.

            So are you saying that Jayman, HBDchick, and Steve Salier are definitely people who don’ have folders full of IQ charts?

            My conclusion from those observations is that people who insist there are no significant differences

            Could you respond to the argument that the claim of differences, and nothing else, isn’t what HBD is actually about?

          • ” I think it’s possible for a dispassionate truth seeker to have pretty much any belief at all, if presented with enough misleading evidence (or perhaps with extreme enough priors)”

            As best I can tell, almost everyone who rejects significant innate differences believes, or at least claims to believe, in Darwinian evolution. I don’t see how one can both believe in Darwinian evolution and have a strong prior for there being no significant differences in the distribution of psychological characteristics between males and females.

            I agree that practically any view can be held by a rational truth seeker given a sufficiently biased body of evidence. But I don’t think that’s a plausible explanation in this case, given an obvious and more plausible alternative.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @ David

            Well, perhaps there’s some miscommunication between us. I’m trying to pin down where we might be at odds. As far as I can tell, both of us accept that the evidence favors there being differences in psychological and intellectual traits with a partially genetic cause between races and genders. Both of us think that people who confidently reject those claims do so for bad reasons (we agree that radically misleading evidence is not a good explanation of it). Both of us think that the attacks on scientists working on these topics and others expressing those beliefs have suffered are deplorable.

            It may be that we disagree about how common morally bad race-related attitudes are among active proponents of HBD. This might be due to a difference in who we’re talking about. The group I’m thinking of isn’t limited to people who I interact with in this community or academics working on the topic, nor even people who self-identify as “HBD”. It’s also not so broad as to include anyone who, say, thinks that there are average differences in psychological traits between genders with a partially genetic explanation (a massive majority of everyone). This isn’t really accurate (too few people have blogs), but heuristically we might consider it the group of people who have charts linking race and IQ posted on their blogs.

            I reject your argument that “On the other hand, if the evidence supports the position that social pressures oppose, the people who fight against the current will also tend to be people who care what is true. And the people who go along with the current will tend to be people who don’t.”, because I think everyone cares what is true, and people who rationally respond to the evidence on politically charged topics are a tiny minority. What I think is probably true is that people who do rationally respond to the evidence will tend to fight against the current. But that’s a very different claim. (I’m reading “tend to” in a way where if, say, 5% of a group has some feature, it comes out false that members of the group tend to have that feature.)

            It may be that we disagree about the extent to which HBD-related ideas outside the core are well-supported, but neither of us have said anything specific about that, besides my indicating that a lot of people who make HBD a centerpiece of their thought have overconfidence in those ideas.

            Does that about cover it?

          • Corey says:

            I don’t see how one can both believe in Darwinian evolution and have a strong prior for there being no significant differences in the distribution of psychological characteristics between males and females.

            What in the EEA would have driven such differences in psychology? Most people bailey-out this motte, subconsciously or consciously, with an EEA that’s either medieval Europe or postwar middle-class US suburbia, neither of which is a particularly plausible EEA candidate.

          • Corey says:

            if the evidence supports the position that social pressures oppose, the people who fight against the current will also tend to be people who care what is true.

            Or people who want to signal/cultivate lack of empathy because they think it makes them more rational. Or people who want to shock/troll/whatever.

          • Anon. says:

            What in the EEA would have driven such differences in psychology?

            The same thing that drove differences in upper body strength.

          • “It may be that we disagree about how common morally bad race-related attitudes are among active proponents of HBD.”

            I don’t think I have an opinion on that. I’m not even sure how you would define “active proponents of HBD.” Does Watson count? Summers? I’m wondering if you are defining “active proponents of HBD” as “racists who use HBD arguments” and then concluding that all active proponents of HBD are racists.

            “What I think is probably true is that people who do rationally respond to the evidence will tend to fight against the current.”

            Then we agree. But I think you may be using a higher standard of “rationally respond to the evidence” than I am. In the case of gender differences, it seems to me that it requires a pretty strong effort at motivated self-delusion to believe they don’t exist. So I would count as believers in HBD lots of people who haven’t explored the evidence in any detail but have reached the obvious conclusion from some combination of direct observation and a casual understanding of the implications of evolution–and haven’t made an effort to find reasons to reject it. Those within that population who have some social or ideological reason to want to reject it and don’t are giving evidence that they care about what is true.

            The case for racial differences isn’t as clear. But even there, I find it hard to see how any reasonable person can be confident they don’t exist, given that they obviously do exist for observable physical characteristics.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @David

            HBD, as I’ve been discussing it, is something like an intellectual movement, like feminism. For the same reason that in discussing the feminist movement, one might want to narrow the group one is considering to something more specific than “anyone who thinks that women have in some respect been treated by society in a way that is morally objectionable” (which is just about all that feminists universally have in common), I’m thinking of members of the HBD movement more narrowly than “anyone who thinks there are some difference in psychological traits between genders or races that have a partially genetic explanation.” (which, again, would make just about everyone count as an HBDer) Those are the least controversial, base claims of the movement, but genuine members of the movement will accept some collection of stronger related claims (though not necessarily the same collection in every case), and will have some kind of interest in promoting those views.

            I don’t think that all HBDers, conceived in this way, are racist. Anyway, it seems like clarification has dissipated most of our apparent disagreements.

          • ““anyone who thinks there are some difference in psychological traits between genders or races that have a partially genetic explanation.” (which, again, would make just about everyone count as an HBDer)”

            I was taking it one step farther–differences large enough to matter in explaining real world outcomes.

            But I certainly wasn’t restricting it to people who think of themselves as part of an HBD movement, which would have included neither Watson nor Summers.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            I don’t think thinking of yourself as being part of an intellectual movement is a necessary condition on being part of an intellectual movement.

    • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

      The fact that AncestryDNA and similar haven’t been shut down for fraud proves that far too many in this country believe this discredited ultra-right-wing nonsense.

      As Vox said, there is no “race chromosome”.

      Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, of Celera Genomics.

      Or see here: “Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning.”

      Bill Nye: “There really is, for humankind there’s really no such thing as race.

      And quoting John Horgan in his Scientific American defense of Stephen J. Gould:
      “Maybe Gould was wrong that Morton misrepresented his data, but he was absolutely right that biological determinism was and continues to be a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology.”
      and
      “Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally. If you doubt me on this point, read Mismeasure, which, even discounting the chapter on Morton, abounds in evidence of how science can become an instrument of malignant ideologies.”

      The human species is too young, and migration out of Africa too recent, for the evolution to produce any real differences. We all still have the same minds; our mental differences are all upbringing and social forces. And there is far more genetic variation inside the groups than is between them.

      Race is purely a social construct with no biological reality, and we should listen to the real scientists who work to see that the use of race “in biological and genetic research will be forever discontinued”, while “social scientists should continue to study race as a social construct to better understand the impact of racism on health.”

      Biological determinism is wrong, all meaningful human differences are socially constructed, race isn’t real. This is settled science, and anything that says otherwise is false neo-Nazi pseudoscience, and no decent person associates with it, or with those who peddle it. Anyone who is not an extreme-right winger knows to deny any platform to this sort of hate and the bigots who espouse it.

      And if not for fraud, AncestryDNA and similar should be shut down for making their customers more racist.

        • trappings says:

          That’s a troll? I dunno which ways up these days on this here blog. Who’s refereeing this thing?

          • The post was a lengthy collection of bad cliche arguments quoted from various people. It wasn’t clear if it was intended seriously or as a parody.

          • Lemminkainen says:

            The poster also has a history of poorly-supported, baffling arguments that read like somebody trying and failing to pass the lefty version of the ideological Turing test.

          • trappings says:

            Thanks, I don’t recall seeing Anita’s name before, didnt know she had form.

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @David Friedman

            I guess then that J. Craig Venter, Francis Collins, Stephen J. Gould, Bill Nye, Richard Lewontin, and so many other scientists are really just people peddling “bad clichés”? When it comes to what is or isn’t settled science, I guess the wise statements of countless famous scientists don’t count for as much as the son of an “economist” with ties to the oppressive right-wing Pinochet regime?

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Regardless of the validity of your argument, listing Gould and Bill Nye is probably not conductive to being taken more seriously.

          • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

            @Whatever Happened to Anonymous

            listing Gould and Bill Nye is probably not conductive to being taken more seriously.

            Why? Did you not read the article I linked, defending Gould against the under-sourced attacks of biased “scientists” with axes to grind, and pointing out that even if they were right in that single case, it says nothing about the many, many other examples of the racist pseudoscience debunked by Gould in The Mismeasure of Man?

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Did you not read the article I linked, defending Gould against the under-sourced attacks of biased “scientists” with axes to grind,

            It’s a very weak defense, and those “scientists” deserve the scare quote treatment far less than the other name I objected to in your list of names.

          • Zombielicious says:

            I just hope the irony of this debate over whose advocates are/aren’t Real Scientists coming from a community following of random internet bloggers and people warning about malevolent superintelligent AIs (among other things) isn’t lost on anyone else.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            I’m still trying to figure out if Anita is serious or trolling, but I’m going to let it pass for now on grounds of bringing ideological diversity to the site. If she ever crosses the line into obvious trolling, or continues this kind of behavior incessantly without other things that provide value, I’ll be harsher.

            On the other hand, extreme warning for bringing a commenter’s family into this. Do that again and you WILL get banned

          • suntzuanime says:

            The more obvious the troll, the less harmful. You should be banning the ones who don’t cross the line.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            But suntzuanime, the trolls keep good, decent folks on their toes. Is it truly that frustrating to your psyche that you still haven’t been banned?

          • suntzuanime says:

            I suppose I should have said, rather than “the less harmful”, “the less effective, for good or for ill”. We were speaking in the context of a harmful troll worthy of banning, though.

          • What I can’t figure out is, if Anita is trolling, whether she is a right winger trying to make left wingers look bad or a left winger (or general prankster) trying outrage right wingers.

        • Diadem says:

          Well the idea that race is a social construct is a broadly shared view among scientists. Anita Restrepo-Sanchez is not wrong on that, though they oversell their case when they claim it’s the consensus. Of course the last bit of their post, accusing anyone who disagrees of being a nazi, is rather absurd. But all in all it reads more like a sincerely held fringe-belief than actual trolling.

          Race is a complicated concept. The fact that two white people will in nearly always have a white kid, while two black people will nearly always have a black kid, is proof that there must be some biological component to race. Yet human races are clearly not the same as animal races, the differences between humans are far, far less pronounced.

          What is meant by the statement ‘race is a social construct’ is not that there are no differences between humans. Obviously there are. What is meant is that there are no clear biological boundaries between races, and that how we group people is more based on social convention then any biological differences. See for example Jews and Irish not being considered white in the past. The human race isn’t a group of clearly delineated islands, it’s instead a gently changing landscape, with no clear borders.

          The same way that clearly there exist adults, and there exist children, but the line we draw between these groups, at 18 years of age, is a rather arbitrary social construct.

          • Anon. says:

            how we group people is more based on social convention then any biological differences.

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

            Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Diadem:

            You are correct that there are variations across definitions of race as a social concept. There are people who get on the plane in the US, most people would say they’re black, if they land in Brazil, they’ve turned in most people’s eyes to white.

            The races as a social concept precedes modern understandings of genetics or even modern understandings of heritability and such.
            It is too bad also that there is so much variance and downright equivocation in the different words used.

            Races are a bad way of sorting humans into groups. To really say much beyond something like “white people come from Europe” you need to zoom in much more, and the fact that the issues you raise makes the problem worse.

            @Anon.:

            That study is American, though – in some places there are people who’d say they’re white, and be considered white, who by US standards would be considered black.

          • Mary says:

            Trained anatomists can tell you the race of a skeleton with about 80% accuracy.

          • cassander says:

            > There are people who get on the plane in the US, most people would say they’re black, if they land in Brazil, they’ve turned in most people’s eyes to white.

            I fail to see what you think this proves.

            >The races as a social concept precedes modern understandings of genetics or even modern understandings of heritability and such.

            People have been breeding animals for tens of thousands of years. You don’t need to have the origin of species to understand heredity.

            >races are a bad way of sorting humans into groups. To really say much beyond something like “white people come from Europe” you need to zoom in much more, and the fact that the issues you raise makes the problem worse.

            Races, sure. Heredity? Definitely not.

          • The question I want to put to the “race is a social concept” (or analogous claims) folk is why they think it matters. Suppose we agree that there is no sharp boundary between black and white, that some societies would classify a person of mixed ancestry as white and some as black. How is that relevant to the question of whether the distribution of innate heritable characteristics is different by race as defined by some such classification?

            Suppose I agree that we cannot say anything about IQ and race because “race” is too fuzzy a concept. We can still say that IQ correlates negatively with percentage of sub-saharan ancestry–whether or not it’s true, it doesn’t depend on the concept of race. Is that really an improvement?

            Which is why I take the claim that race does not exist as evasion not argument and suspect that the use of evasions is evidence that the person using them knows he doesn’t have a good argument.

          • Jiro says:

            “Race is a social concept” is motte and bailey. The motte is that there are racial classifications that might be different in different societies. The bailey is that all racial classificationss are purely defined by society and there are no differences between races at all.

          • Corey says:

            The question I want to put to the “race is a social concept” (or analogous claims) folk is why they think it matters. Suppose we agree that there is no sharp boundary between black and white, that some societies would classify a person of mixed ancestry as white and some as black. How is that relevant to the question of whether the distribution of innate heritable characteristics is different by race as defined by some such classification?

            One of the problems with the usual white-supremacy arguments based on this is: who’s white? There’s a Catholic guy of Irish ancestry in the next cube, pretty conservative, definitely white in 2016 USA, actually quite concerned about the erosion of the US’s white culture. A hundred years ago the exact same guy would have been *part* of the destructive erosion of US white culture everyone “knew” was in progress.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Cassander:

            I fail to see what you think this proves.

            Well, that the classic model of races is a suboptimal way of expressing human difference, because it features categories that are too large to be useful (Sicilians look noticeably different from Norwegians) and features a strong socially determined aspect (there were times and places where Sicilians wouldn’t be considered white; and one can find examples of NW Europeans, mostly English, describing other NW Europeans as “not white”).

            People have been breeding animals for tens of thousands of years. You don’t need to have the origin of species to understand heredity.

            Despite people breeding animals, the observations they had did not lead people away from holding all sorts of wacky views about heredity. Plus, our ability to effectively breed animals has improved much faster after the modern understanding of heredity was figured out than it did before.

            Races, sure. Heredity? Definitely not.

            Well, yes. Heredity obviously exists. It is possible to sort people into groups. But trying to sort people using a system that predates a modern understanding of heredity, that predates a modern understanding of geography, that predates a modern understanding of human migration, and that is heavily socially based … that’s just kinda dumb.

            It would be like if we were trying to do modern chemistry using some ancient definition of matter into fire, water, air, earth or something.

            @David Friedman:

            How much time do you spend among lefty social-science academics? I don’t think you’re correct that they say what they say to avoid a battle they know they’ll lose. I think they are in earnest.

          • Anon. says:

            That study is American, though – in some places there are people who’d say they’re white, and be considered white, who by US standards would be considered black.

            Sure, the correspondence between “race” and genetic clusters is fuzzy, and to some extent arbitrary. But this is not an argument against HBD, it’s an argument for tighter “race”-genetic cluster connections. Once you recognize that the clusters exist, the rest is a trifle.

            And of course the number of clusters you choose to separate the data into is also somewhat arbitrary. You could argue the Sardinians are a “race” of their own, and why not? But as long as you’re cleaving clusters at their joints, it’s all good.

          • “A hundred years ago the exact same guy would have been *part* of the destructive erosion of US white culture everyone “knew” was in progress.”

            A hundred years ago–better still a hundred and fifty years ago–he wouldn’t have been the exact same guy. He would have been an immigrant from a very different culture. The argument that such immigrants had a bad effect on the existing culture may have turned out to be wrong, but not because your colleague isn’t.

          • “How much time do you spend among lefty social-science academics? I don’t think you’re correct that they say what they say to avoid a battle they know they’ll lose. I think they are in earnest.”

            I spend quite a lot of time among lefty academics since I’ve spent the past forty years or so as a professional academic. The academics I interact with are mostly in law or economics however, the two fields I have taught in, so may not be an adequate sample.

            You could be correct, but when I see someone making an argument that strikes me as a transparent evasion, I draw the obvious conclusion.

            Here is an example in an entirely different context. I concluded that a factual account used by a friend of mine in the gun control debate was largely bogus. I discovered that he had gotten it from someone else on the same side of the debate (the side I’m also on, as it happened), so raised the question with him. A couple of steps into the exchange he stopped trying to defend his story and switched to attacking me for unrelated reasons. I concluded that he knew that the story he had told wasn’t true.

            Do you disagree with my inference?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Anon. –

            Sure, the correspondence between “race” and genetic clusters is fuzzy, and to some extent arbitrary. But this is not an argument against HBD, it’s an argument for tighter “race”-genetic cluster connections. Once you recognize that the clusters exist, the rest is a trifle.

            The tightest and most accurate cluster is the individual.

          • Anon. says:

            @Orphan Wilde

            … In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anon.

            But, then, surely it is a major error on the part of HBD proponents to take race as the line along which groups are to be divided.

          • Anon. says:

            Why do you say that? As the paper I linked above shows, the correlation between race and genetic clusters is actually very tight (at least in the US).

            If the data showed that a significant percentage of people who identify as X actually belong in the Y cluster, then it would indeed be a mistake. But as it is, the current categorization cleaves reality at the joints.

            Also, I don’t think anyone is saying that the current grouping is the only possible choice. Just because “whites” form a cluster doesn’t mean Italians are not distinct from Swedes. There are other demarcations that are just as valid. But this doesn’t make the current one erroneous.

            And again: these concerns about labeling clusters are irrelevant. The existence of clusters is sufficient for HBD to declare complete victory. If someone then comes along and mislabels or misrepresents those clusters, it doesn’t matter. They’re mistaken, but the clusters are still there.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @David Friedman:

            I am aware you’re an academic. You’re right that law and economics aren’t representative. I do detect from friends of mine in law school that there’s a political shift happening there, but economics is probably the most “right-wing” of the “soft” subjects.

            While in your example the correct inference to draw would be that your interlocutor only really cares about “evidence” insofar as it proves what they already know.

            I don’t think that it suffices to explain the motivations of a large number of people. When I was in school I was mostly in areas of the humanities that are still fairly stodgy and old-fashioned in a lot of ways, or are “with it” but have a completely different “it”, instead of adopting stuff coming out of the social sciences (economics is, admittedly, a social science, but I’d argue it’s a noncentral example). So, they were still weird territory for me. I wasn’t impressed by what I encountered when I did – there was an emphasis on theory over fact I found really off-putting, and on what (kind of uncharitably) strikes me as basically the belief that reality is a collective hallucination, an elevation of the symbolic and connotative over the material and practical.

            I think it makes sense to assume that people hold their beliefs in earnest, even if their beliefs are essentially self-serving: someone who is falsely holding beliefs to serve themselves might get caught in the deception, while someone who actually believes something is not.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anon.

            It’s tight in the US, but maybe the US just has a conception of races that’s closer to whatever the reality of human difference is – maybe the minimum number of groups you need to accurately describe things is 40 instead of 4, who knows.

            The situation in the US is liable to become more confusing, too, I think – look at the issue of what mixed-race people identify as, or the way that other people often “peg” someone as a given race or ethnic group (or cultural group – the way that Hispanic and Latino are defined by the government, as cultural groupings, is completely different from the way most people use it, as a racial/ethnic category) based on how it serves the point they want to make or their view of the world.

            The four-race model as a classification system may not be wholly erroneous, and the HBD’ers may not be claiming it’s the only way, but it’s still more erroneous than several other possible classification systems, and I see the HBD’ers use it a lot.

            With regard to Italians and Swedes:
            imagine a situation where every white person in a city is either Italian or Swedish. Let’s say both groups are big eaters of meatballs, the Italians with tomato sauce, the Swedes with lingonberry jam. If you want to say “white people in this city eat meatballs at 4x the rate of all people in the city, on average”, no problem, but what happens when you look at the statistics and declare that those white people are serving their hefty amount of meatballs with a half-and-half tomato-lingonberry mixture?

          • Anon. says:

            Well, that’s bad statistics. In the case of tomato sauce and lingonberries it’s easy to ferret out the error. In more realistic cases it’s probably more difficult. I think one big source of that kind of mistake is that we’re still dealing with relatively small sample sizes and a very limited understanding of which SNPs do what. But our capabilities are constantly improving.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Anon.:

            Basically, I think that an antiquated classification system makes such errors more likely, and impedes finding the truth in general.

          • cassander says:

            >Well, that the classic model of races is a suboptimal way of expressing human difference,

            What exactly is the classic model? What the phrenology guys dreamed up 100 years ago? Modern American public perception of race? Modern American Census categories?

            >Well, yes. Heredity obviously exists. It is possible to sort people into groups. But trying to sort people using a system that predates a modern understanding of heredity, that predates a modern understanding of geography, that predates a modern understanding of human migration, and that is heavily socially based … that’s just kinda dumb.

            Again, you’d need to be more specific about exactly what system you think we’re using. Even if we take something largely unscientific, though, like modern census categories, we still find significant group differences.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Cassander:

            The way people perceive race now is generally still some variant on 18th-19th century models, which divided people up into a handful of groups. The current US census, for instance, has five defined and singular groups.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The 19th century model with three races is useful though unrefined. The US census follows that model (with different names) plus American Indians and Pacific Islanders (both of whom would be considered Asian in the 19th century model).

            “Hispanic” isn’t considered a race (it’s an ethnicity, and the only one recognized) and probably isn’t a useful category as far as HBD goes, since it includes anyone from the Iberian peninsula (a European subgroup), plus anyone from the Carribean or the Americas south of the US.

          • Anonymous says:

            I would have thought “black” would be a pretty poor category if the underlying thesis were correct given that African-Americans have a broad mix of ancestry. You’d think quadroons would be as different from mulattos as they were from whites.

          • “You’d think quadroons would be as different from mulattos as they were from whites.”

            But if there is some characteristic which is an increasing function of sub-saharan ancestry, all “blacks” would differ from whites in the same direction.

            There are two more serious problems with “black” as a category. One is that sub-Saharan Africa contains very diverse populations. Afro-Americans are not a random selection, of course, but a population heavily weighted towards people from areas where lots of slaves were captured. But I don’t think one can assume that (say) Ghanaians and Biafrans, or even Nigerian Ibo and Nigerian Yoruba, will differ from the white American average in the same direction.

            A further problem is that there are some dark skinned populations, most obviously from southern India, that don’t have any particularly close genetic connection to sub-Saharan Africa–just a common adaptation to a common environmental feature. So no reason to expect them to differ from American whites in the same direction as American blacks.

            But all of these points, while relevant to how one might do HBD better, don’t seem to me very relevant to the implications of HBD, even done not very well.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @The Nybbler: extensive Wikipedia research says Linnaeus had 4 and Blumenbach 5. Or the other way around maybe.

            The category of “Hispanic/Latino” in the US is very obfuscatory because conventional use is completely different from what the word technically means and the way the government uses it.

          • Anonymous says:

            Maybe the missing piece of the puzzle is that it isn’t the contribution of the large source populations in sub-Sahara Africa but the contribution of the relatively small group of slaveholder-rapists and overseer-rapists.

            Are there any studies on the characteristics of the white descendants of these groups?

      • hlynkacg says:

        If you’re going to troll at least try to be entertaining.

        • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

          I’m sorry if trying to explain to the neo-Nazi types on this ultra-right weblog how terribly wrong and unscientific their “scientific racism” is isn’t amusing enough for you. I mean, it’s not like genocide and oppression are serious subjects deserving of respect or anything.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Your real problem is that you’re shoving it in several times a sentence with no padding. Everybody knows you never go full retard—overacting ruins the effect.
            You have to start the post sounding like a functioning human being, and then deviate into crazy prog-speak at semi-random intervals.
            A broken record has to start with music, otherwise nobody will start listening to it.

            Try writing a normal effortpost from the perspective of the group you’re trying to mock. Then go back and edit parts of it as if you had a brain parasite that triggers spastic fits at certain trigger words and trains of thought.

          • FooQuuxman says:

            Should I start considering “Anita” a marker for moonbattery? Because so far 2 of 2 “Anita”s I know of are moonbats.

          • Deiseach says:

            the neo-Nazi types on this ultra-right weblog

            Drat it, those swastika-gravatars really were a bad idea, weren’t they?

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            So remember that prediction I made about the new moderation policy? That trolls would exploit it by overwhelming Scott’s limited amount of moderating time?

            Yeah, I honestly expected it to be subtler than this.

          • The Nybbler says:

            They changed the gravatars, but mine remains an Iron Cross. If an Iron Cross were blue lace, anyway.

          • dndnrsn says:

            So, the Pour le Merite?

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      It seems pretty obvious to me that the HBD-believing side is the side of intellectual honesty – I mean just look at the bullshit whining and rationalization against it going on elsewhere in this thread. Some of the more cluefull liberals, including Scott, seem to know this in their heart of hearts too, at least enough to hint at it, but of course they can’t say it straight up. Eventually the dam will break when enough direct DNA evidence comes out – or maybe polite society will just go full 2+2=5 on it (if we’re not there already).

      • The Nybbler says:

        Keep in mind that being less dishonest does not mean being right. It is possible the case for HBD looks as strong as it does only because few have seriously and honestly tried to refute it, instead relying on cries of racism.

        • dndnrsn says:

          This is maybe a better way of saying what I’ve been saying. A team doesn’t have to be great to win a match if the other team doesn’t show up.

          • But the failure to show up is at least some evidence of what the other team thinks the result of the match would be.

            As I think I have already suggested.

          • dndnrsn says:

            And I’ve said that I think they’re in earnest – they don’t think they’re going to lose, it’s that they don’t even think that baseball (let’s say it’s baseball) exists.

            There are people who think that physical differences between the biological sexes (which are blatantly obvious, far more easy to measure than intelligence, etc) are socially determined – I’ve been told that the only reason men are bigger and stronger than women is that they’re told this in childhood and act accordingly.

            I don’t have a high opinion of the “fluffier” social sciences, not at all – I think they lack rigour and are often more comparable to theology (and, shit, not even current theology, where you can get away with heresy) than anything else. But I think the vast majority of them believe what they say they believe, from A to Z – very few pious frauds.

          • “But I think the vast majority of them believe what they say they believe, from A to Z – very few pious frauds.”

            You could be right.

            Part of the reason I don’t see it that way is that I’ve observed situations in political arguments where people make it obvious that they don’t care if their beliefs are true.

            One happened today on FaceBook, in the context of a climate thread. Someone who identified me (in part mistakenly) as a “denier” asserted that I had no scientific credentials–as a fact, not a conjecture. I responded that I had a PhD in physics and had published articles in physics. Shortly thereafter he asserted that I had no peer reviewed articles in physics. I posted the cites for two. At no point was there any suggestion in what he posted that he was bothered to discover that he had posted provably false factual claims. He just went on to offer more insults of a similar but less demonstrably false sort.

            There was someone else in the same discussion whom I had caught a while back referring to a graph in an article that wasn’t there–he had invented it.

            Neither seemed bothered by having said things that were not true–that they knew were not true. As long as they were on the right side of the argument that was what mattered.

            So I am inclined to interpret people who say things that I don’t see how they could believe but that they have strong political reasons for saying in the same way.

            I suppose the test would be some situation where the belief mattered to what someone did but where what he did would not reveal the belief to anyone who would care, ideally would not make the belief obvious enough to the person himself so that he couldn’t ignore it.

          • onyomi says:

            I think HBD is a motte and bailey game that, by virtue of being very old, familiar, and despised, has resulted in opponents attacking the impenetrable motte without reservation. This being a motte no one would question if it were in any other less emotionally, historically-loaded area, and one which some people are now quite content to remain in without thinking of entering the bailey.

            But, due to history, the anti-HBDers are so sure that anyone in the motte is just waiting for his chance to move onto the bailey that they don’t even wait till he moves to begin the assault. This, of course, creates cognitive dissonance, because they know the motte is unassailable, so they start to believe it’s actually full of holes.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Is the motte “there are likely to be genetic differences between sub-populations that have effects on outcomes”?

            Or is the motte “we should assume observed differences in outcomes are the results of genetic differences?”

            Because from where I sit, the second claim is being made. Do you think that is unassailable?

          • onyomi says:

            I was thinking more the former.

          • Who do you think is making the second claim?

            As I thought I made clear, my claim is “we cannot rule out the possibility that differences in outcomes are due to genetic differences.”

            Hence we cannot be confident from the fact that differences in outcome exist that they are due to (in particular) discrimination.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @David Friedman:

            Are these laypeople (eg, not educated in the subject at hand) arguing or academics arguing over their specialty? In the former case, a lot of people are operating under the assumption that their opponents either won’t know or won’t be able to effectively uncover that they are lying.

            In the latter case, in the humanities and social sciences at least, you’ll find a much higher level of BS’ing and doing unfortunate things to statistics. I, personally, will admit to a probably about average level of BS’ing over the course of my academic career. And BS’ing and doing unfortunate things to statistics are far more easily to do without being aware of it, far more comfortable for the “true believer”, and more likely to coincidentally be right (there are, after all, bad arguments for correct claims). Good things do come out of the softer social sciences (just usually wrapped in all sorts of extraneous theory and obfuscatory language).

            I think it’s also maybe a bit confusing (and this is probably my fault for insisting on introducing battle and sports metaphors) to think of it as being “teams”. There’s not “Team Anti-HBD” picking who’s going to make the next plays. I imagine there are a great deal of experts in relevant subjects who could, say, have a good stab at refuting the idea of certain gaps being caused by genetics. But if they wander in and start arguing from a position that starts from certain priors, they’re probably going to catch heat from the left-wing-social-studies sorta crowd. So they stay out.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            You made a stronger claim than that, which was that past discrimination or current discrimination was not a sufficient explanation.

            And then simply ignored me when I attempted to get you to address the flaw in your reasoning about the Roma.

            @onyomi:
            In any case, the burden is on those proffering a genetic case to prove their case, especially given the incontrovertible evidence of past harms to outcomes. As I said, past discrimination makes for a very strong prior.

            But are you really going to tell me that we don’t have plenty of people claiming that we “know” black outcomes are the result of the lower IQ due to genetics? You are really claiming that most of the fighting is at the walls of the motte?

          • @dndnrsn:

            The FaceBook exchange, which I assume is what you are asking about, was with lay persons.

            But the person who claimed I had no credentials in science had to know that if it wasn’t true I would contradict it. So I interpret him as not caring enough about whether what he said was true to avoid saying something that he was guessing was true but might well be shown to be false. The world was as he imagined, and if not so what.

          • “You made a stronger claim than that, which was that past discrimination or current discrimination was not a sufficient explanation.”

            Was not known to be the explanation. You were the one who claimed to know the explanation of the difference in outcomes. My point was that with two possible explanations, neither had to be right.

            Consider my analogy to Darwinian evolution and the existence of God. A designer God would be a sufficient explanation for why organisms seem so well designed. But once we have Darwinian evolution there is an alternative explanation, so we are not compelled to accept that one.

            “Je n’ais pay besoin de cette hypothèse la.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            Darwin explains why God never was the explanation.

            So, either you are claiming that genetics means that discrimination never existed (which I don’t believe you are), or your analogy doesn’t hold.

          • onyomi says:

            @HBC

            This reminds me also of the “if we admit that 2+2=4, next they’ll say it’s 5, so we better make a firm stand at 3” scenario.

            In this analogy, 4=as with all other traits, there are some broad, statistical, average differences in cognitive traits of different groups. These differences probably have some effect on outcomes, though it’s very complicated and difficult to disentangle them from other, historical/environmental factors like discrimination, patriarchy, etc.

            5=most of the difference in outcomes is a result of genetic differences.

            3=none, or almost none, of the difference in outcomes is a result of genetic differences. It’s almost all culture and history, especially discrimination

            2(bonus!)=there are no significant average intergroup genetic differences with respect to the brain. Ergo, any differences in outcome must be due to historical injustice. Also, even focusing on culture (Tiger Mom), which really makes you a 3, may get you labeled a 5.

            Around here you may not get a lot of people arguing 3, much less 2, but in society at large, I see it a lot. Just look at the post which started this thread. It seems basically to be arguing 2, right? And while it may be mistaken for trolling around here, my experience is that it’s pretty common.

            My view is that most people know the answer is 4 somewhere deep down, but convince themselves it’s 3 or even 2 because they don’t want to mentally touch 5 with a ten-foot pole, or, worse, be mistaken for a 5ist. By the way, arguing 4 on a news show or any popular public forum will immediately get you labeled a 5.

            Meanwhile, on 4chan, people start signalling or even believing 5 to show how not like the self-deceiving 2s and 3s they are, and due to the old “what’s the punishment for lateness? What’s the punishment for rebellion?” dynamic.

          • Corey says:

            But the person who claimed I had no credentials in science had to know that if it wasn’t true I would contradict it. So I interpret him as not caring enough about whether what he said was true to avoid saying something that he was guessing was true but might well be shown to be false. The world was as he imagined, and if not so what.

            There’s a more-charitable explanation for this, that I know happens because I do it: fact-checking oneself in online discussions (especially adversarial ones) is a waste of time, because others will do it very quickly. Related is the conventional wisdom that getting an answer to a question on the Internet is best done not by asking the question, but by posting an incorrect answer.

            To be fair, if someone’s doing this they should quickly and politely acknowledge corrections, which is also difficult in adversarial discussions.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @David Friedman:

            That would make this guy a pious fraud, who thinks that a good cause demands lying, or a bullshitter, who doesn’t particularly care about the truth of what they’re saying – it could be true or false as long as it gets them what they want. Or he could just be a dummy who doesn’t really think about it at all.

            But unless you can catch somebody in something that blatant, I don’t think it’s helpful to focus on what someone might really think, etc.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:

            I think you are leaving out some things.

            Consider these statements:
            1 – There are differences, on average, between genetically distinguishable cohorts on characteristics that effect outcome
            2 – We know what specific characteristics change outcome.
            3 – We have identified the specific genetic differences that cause the difference in characteristics
            4 – We can reliably identify these genetic differences by a cursory examination of external features (at a glance)

          • onyomi says:

            BTW, when I mentioned how “the post which started this thread seemed to argue for 2,” I was referring to this, not the actual parent of this tree.

            @HBC, I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

            Your “1” seems similar to the position I described as “2+2=4,” but I didn’t say anything about your numbers 2, 3, and 4, which, I imagine, overlap to some extent with the position I described as “2+2=5,” though I don’t have an opinion on where, exactly, the line is.

            You might claim that most people who try to argue for your 1 actually mean your 4, and that may be true, but that is a higher level of nuance than one usually sees in this debate (like an argument that someone who thinks they’re saying “2+2=4,” is actually saying “2+2=4.5”). My point is that you can’t even argue for your number 1 without being assumed to mean my number 5.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            I believe the nature/nurture debate is quite lively, and when we see reaction to articles on nature vs. nurture people don’t immediately attack this.

            Part of this, I believe, is that the general public, I think, mostly checks out of nature/nurture debates.

            Do you find fault with any of that?

          • TheWorst says:

            @Onyomi:

            This reminds me also of the “if we admit that 2+2=4, next they’ll say it’s 5, so we better make a firm stand at 3” scenario.

            Unrelated to the current topic, I’d just like to say thanks for reminding me of that phrasing. Things fall out that way fairly often, don’t they?

            And not just trying to make a firm stand at 3, but the internal-competition cycle happens: You start out at 4, go to war with the 5ists, until one of your fellow 4ists realizes he can win extra status by loudly being a 3ist. He does, and now he’s King Shit. Soon, someone else realizes that they can be King Shit by being the first loud 2ist. On the other side, meanwhile, someone just realized he can be King Shit of the 5ists by being a loud’n’proud 7ist, and then you’ve accidentally created 21st-century America.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            And not just trying to make a firm stand at 3, but the internal-competition cycle happens: You start out at 4, go to war with the 5ists, until one of your fellow 4ists realizes he can win extra status by loudly being a 3ist. He does, and now he’s King Shit. Soon, someone else realizes that they can be King Shit by being the first loud 2ist. On the other side, meanwhile, someone just realized he can be King Shit of the 5ists by being a loud’n’proud 7ist, and then you’ve accidentally created 21st-century America.

            At least the first 7ists are merely pretending to believe in 7ism as a hypocritical status/power grab. Once the next generation grows up, having never known anything but 7ism, they will really believe it, and their leaders will be selected for being the truest of believers in 7ism. Hence the phenomenon of “not getting the joke”.

          • TheWorst says:

            And then the 5ists who merely pretended to be 7ists for the last few decades in order to seem more hardcore than the rest of the 5ists will burn infinite pixels in hand-wringing about where all these lunatics came from.

            Meanwhile, anyone who suggests that 2+2 is [any number exceeding zero] will be accused of being a crypto-7ist and promptly crucified.

    • Anon. says:

      For some reason my reply was swallowed by the spam filter…anyway, look up Piffer on google scholar. Even with out limited understanding of the relation between genome and IQ, I think there is enough direct genetic evidence right now, and this will only be improved.

    • Racists, racists everywhere, and not a place to think says:

      TL;DR: Stay away, it’ll mark you as a haven for all racists.

      HBD gothic: a tragedy

      Act I

      You hear a claim that race-bound genetics or culture are important in some way. You investigate it seriously. Maybe you accept it, maybe you reject it, but either way you’re willing to consider it.

      Some people see you investigating and join. How delightful to find people who wish to search for truth! You’re worried about your own unconscious possibly-racist attitudes (you took the IAT), and you’re worried about anti-racism activists mistaking your nuance for racism. But look at your new friends! Surely they must share your worries, yet that never slows them down in their quest. What amazing lovers of truth.

      One of them comes to you quietly and starts talking about how inferior brown people are. Must be a fluke. Maybe you stop talking to them, maybe you pat yourself on the back for tolerating a racist as a friend.

      Half your friends come to you and start talking about how inferior brown people are.

      This can’t go on. You run to the anti-racism activists. Maybe you drop the HBD stuff entirely, maybe you keep researching but never tell a soul. You start a blog full of pictures of black scientists and skateboarding hijabi ladies.

      Act II

      Your new friends love the oppressed. In particular they really love Muslims. It’s a relief. Your racist friends hated Muslims. Your new friends love Muslims. They love Palestine. They hate Israel.

      Well, okay. You have a more nuanced view (you still love nuance, dammit) but you can’t say you’re a fan of all Israeli policies.

      A Jewish couple gets stabbed in your home town, and your friends are strangely silent. Wait, they’re not silent: they’re chanting antisemitic slogans.

      As you back away in horror, your old friends flock back to you, with gleaming white teeth, hissing “Ashkenazi intelligence”.

      Act III

      Fuck all of this. From now on you will only think about ponies.

      Ponies are alt-right now.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Ponies as a whole aren’t alt-right, just that one episode of _My Little Pony_.

        Anyway, the validity of a theory is not in any way dependent on the savoriness or unsavoriness of its most well-known adherents. Sometimes the truth has an other-than-liberal bias.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Ponies as a whole aren’t alt-right,

          That’s what you’d think, but right now your two choices are “SJW cuck” or “Alt-right Neckbeard”, and the Ponies have made their choice.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Well, I admit that my neck does sprout unwanted growth, Homer Simpson style, about 60 seconds following a shave. Does this mean I am a pony?

        • Racists, racists everywhere, and not a place to think says:

          Hyperbole didn’t work, trying clarity.

          Humans tend to assign broad emotional valence to concepts. For example, “yay Muslims, therefore: yay Palestine, boo Israel, yay BDS”. It takes effort and careful conscious thought to hold more nuanced positions, such as for example “I approve of boycotting companies in settlements, I disapprove of the indiscriminate BDS movement”.

          Claims like “this intelligence-lowering mutation is more common in this race” or “this cultural practice holds back children with this orchid gene” or “the crime rate is highest in this race, for whatever reason” may be true or false. If you investigate them, you might not end up believing only the specific claim. You might end up believing “boo black people” (or “boo Muslims”, or “boo South Asians”, etc.). This will change your other beliefs in ways not supported, or more weakly supported, by evidence; and change your behaviour in antisocial ways.

          Maybe you trust yourself not to fall prey to this effect. But when you encounter someone else who says “I have investigated that claim, and it’s true”, what’s more likely: that you have met someone moved by truth-seeking who also trusts themselves to examine evidence, or that you have met someone moved by “boo black people”? I say it’s obviously the latter, by one or two orders of magnitude.

          You may be prepared for people to mistake your factual claims for racist values and hate you. You might not be prepared for people to mistake your factual claims for racist values and befriend you.

          When I was young and naive, I could recognise lovers of truth by two signs. First, they can write with reasonable spelling, grammar, and coherence. Second, they’re willing to express opinions that would get them stoned to death by the general public. But some terrible people can spell, and racism used to be controversial enough in intellectual circles that it would pass the second test. So it doesn’t seem easy to discern ideological motivations.

          Because of this emotional valence, you can’t simply look at whether someone’s claims are true. It’s easy to write a virulently antisemitic speech made entirely of true claims about Israel’s policies and Haredi practices, and listeners will correctly deduce that the speaker would like employers to hire fewer Jews, even though none of the claims imply that.

          Therefore: It is risky to your sanity to consider such claims. If you go ahead and consider them, you should never tell a soul, because that soul will probably hear “I would like to join a racist conspiracy”.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Having racists attempt to befriend (or recruit) me based on things I believe are true and they believe are useful is not a threat to my sanity. They actually are usually easy to spot; after all, they will believe and advocate a wide variety of racist-sounding things, not just the ones which there is evidence for.

            The truth is the truth regardless of whether it is useful to the distasteful, and attempting to hold on to a lie to avoid this is could corrupt my entire system of beliefs; in order to believe the lie I must disbelieve anything which confirms the lie. At best this leaves a nasty hole in my beliefs I must work around. At worst (as far as I know), this results in Social Justice.

          • Racists, racists everywhere, and not a place to think says:

            This seems to be a genuine disagreement. I expect that reading a lot of studies on whether people from Comoros are gay will cause you to associate Comorians and homosexuality, even if all the studies say no. How do you find these studies? Through blogs pushing the “Comorians are gay, and this is bad” line, either overtly or through undertones. Even if you initially read these blogs with disgust and skim until you get to the hard evidence, I expect you will slowly absorb the ideology through mere exposure. In favour of this, I offer: advertising works, recruitment usually works by social ties rather than argument, I’ve seen it happen to various people with various ideologies, studies on affect and priming.

            You are indeed at no risk of being recruited by incoherent people whose claims are demonstrably false. You are also not very likely to be recruited by people who publicly do what I described above, speeches made of nothing but true or plausible claims in a seething tone. If someone is utterly careless that could still happen (“well, all he said is that a Haredi guy stabbed someone for being gay and that Israel bombed a hospital, that’s definitely true” and not noticing you now unconsciously judge Jews to be less trustworthy), but people are not normally this naive.

            What I meant to be the novel part of the argument (everything above is meant to be obvious, and I’m surprised at the disagreement) is that some people are a lot more subtle than this. You will select a few people who seem trustworthy, privately discuss race with them, believe that they just want to know the truth, and only then will they start advocating a wide variety of racist-sounding things.

            I am not advocating believing lies about the causes of (observed or imagined) differences between race; I am advocating putting the question at the very bottom of your list of things to find out the truth about, below quantum field theory and knitting techniques.

            If you have a burning itch to study that particular question (possibly out of contrarianism because I just said not to), or if you’re Razib Khan and therefore have a practical need for it, then of course you will study it anyway. Then I advocate not sharing your results, because I’ve found through (hard, surprising) experience that most people who want to hear them are driven by racist ideologies. I also advocate combating the emotional effects; go have lunch with your friends (this assumes your friend group is racially mixed, which may fail if you live in rural China or something), listen to moving music or a brilliant lecture by someone of the affected race.

            Note in particular that refusing to study deep causes doesn’t mean you need to ignore race questions entirely. (Although you can.) Racist ideologies are wrong; they may use plausible factual claims to persuade but those claims don’t actually support the desired racist policies. The correct answer to “Whites have higher IQ than blacks” isn’t “that’s because of poverty”, it’s “Intelligence is irrelevant to moral worth”. The correct answer to “On average, Hispanics perform worse at this job than non-Hispanic whites” is “Just give the applicant a coding test and you won’t have to rely on a broad trend”.

          • RRE, we in America already live in a soceity which is telling us (certain, specific types of) Racism is Bad quite a lot, at full volume. If the concern is that we’d be brainwashed to incorrect beliefs due to advertising and social pressure, you should be encouraging people to be extra-racist to counteract this.

            Or is the argument here “Yes, the racists are obviously right, but they’re also obviously weak, and so the best thing to do is to make the progressive lies as plausible as possible for you to believe, because the risks of being able to avoid race-based high crime areas is outweighed by the cost of being attacked by progressives for racism.”?

          • Racists, racists everywhere, and not a place to think says:

            Well, observably, there are a lot of racists. Some of the commenters here (I very much hope) must live in the same sort of bubble I did as a child, where overhearing a racist comment is a rare curiosity and anti-racist slogans are a daily occurrence. They probably assume racism is largely dead and anti-racism is nothing but ruining careers over bad jokes.

            But in broader society, racism is very much alive and kicking. Far-right parties are gaining influence throughout Europe. Violent attacks against Muslims and people assumed to be Muslim are common in the US. Employment discrimination is well-proven.

            Either you think those are good things, in which case none of my argument is addressed to you; or there is more racism than there should be and therefore we should push the other way.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Priming works? Priming is a tiny effect you can produce in laboratory conditions at best, a casualty of the reproducibility crisis at worst. The idea that racist material is so convincing that merely skimming over it while knowing what it is will be enough to change my views in its favor, but the vast amount of anti-racist material in society at large will not be enough to prevent it, seems unlikely.

            You will select a few people who seem trustworthy, privately discuss race with them, believe that they just want to know the truth, and only then will they start advocating a wide variety of racist-sounding things

            Supposing this happens, my response will be to “back away slowly”. I’ve not run into this specific effect with HBD claims; I have run into people who feel free to say racist things to me when no others were around, because they thought I’d be receptive for various other reasons. They were wrong then and you are wrong now.

            Then I advocate not sharing your results, because I’ve found through (hard, surprising) experience that most people who want to hear them are driven by racist ideologies.

            You advocate that if I find out an inconvenient truth, I bury it in order to avoid being befriended by racists? How can I distinguish this from someone revealing an inconvenient truth because it conflicts with things they want known and done?

            The idea that “Intelligence is irrelevant to moral worth” is a red herring; there are follow-on effects to both “Whites, as a result of their genetics have higher IQ than blacks” and “Blacks and whites have the same genetic component to IQ” which have nothing to do with moral worth. There are a whole lot of things which are partially derived (implicitly or explicitly) from the two claims “Blacks and whites have exactly the same genetic intelligence” and “In areas where intelligence counts, blacks underperform whites”. If the first claim is false, it should change the whole way of looking at such things. If one must pretend the first claim is true regardless of its truth, it distorts one’s entire worldview.

            Violent attacks against Muslims and people assumed to be Muslim are common in the US.

            No, they are not. About 16% (184) of victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US in 2014 were Muslims. This is not common at all.

            Employment discrimination is well-proven.

            Qualitatively, yes. Quantitatively, the amount depends in part on the answers you wish to bury.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            I like how you put “far-right parties in Europe” and “attacks against muslims” out there as though they were some particular form of bad weather, utterly disconnected from the actions of anti-racists.

            Do you know why the far-right is gaining ground in Europe, and the alt-right is gaining ground in America? In large part, it’s because the response to Islamic terror, black crime and third-world immigration is to double down on calling white people racists for noticing it.

            If you really believe people of color are equal to whites, then you must believe that their capacity for evil is equal as well. Giving minority groups a blank check on violence while restraining the majority is not justice and it is not equality.

          • Skivverus says:

            About 16% (184) of victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US in 2014 were Muslims. This is not common at all.

            Er. I may be misremembering, but isn’t only 1% or so of the US population Muslim?
            For that matter though, the more relevant statistic to compare ratios with would probably be the total number of assaults and murders in the US in 2014 – that is, figuring out what percentage of violent crimes are hate crimes in the first place.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Skivverus:

            Yes, about 1% of the population is Muslim.

            You can find most of the numbers you’re looking for here:

            https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2014

            Note that Jews, making up about 2% of the population, account for the majority of victims of religious hate crimes. (or rather, the majority of victims were in cases where the attackers were motivated by anti-Jewish bias; I believe cases where the attackers are mistaken are included)

            Anti-Muslim hate crime has gone up considerably since 9/11, though some of this is increasing Muslim population (replace “2014” with “2000” in the URL). But it is still not “common”.

          • “I am advocating putting the question at the very bottom of your list of things to find out the truth about”

            Because there is some risk that the search might lead you to mistaken ideas? That strikes me as a pretty weak argument.

            Finding out the truth about this question is useful in two different ways. It helps you evaluate other people–once you are confident that you have the truth and that it’s pretty easy to discover, you have reason to lower your opinion of either the intelligence or the honesty of those who deny it, which is useful information.

            It also helps you evaluate inferences about your society and so know something about what policies you should support. That’s less important, since your support or opposition is unlikely to have much effect. But I think most of us would be unhappy to discover that we had been enthusiastically supporting policies that made the world a worse place, even if our support wasn’t an important cause of those policies being enacted.

            Now I’m wondering how well your argument could apply to climate issues. If you look at the evidence on AGW you will conclude that it is real. You will encounter other people who agree that it is real and be gradually lured into believing that the world is going to be wiped out, or at least made horribly worse, by AGW sometime pretty soon.

            Better not to look at the question at all.

          • JayT says:

            Skivverus, something can affect one group more than others while still being uncommon. There are more than three million Muslims in the US, and there were only 184 victims of hate crimes. That’s about 5.4 incidents per 100,000 people. To put that into perspective, the murder rate is 4.5/100K, and the violent crime rate is 365/100K.

            Obviously, hate crimes are bad, but they are not common.

          • Skivverus says:

            @The Nybbler, @JayT:
            I do actually agree with the conclusion of hate crimes against Muslims in the US being rare; my point is that without reference to total crime rates, that “16%” emphasizes precisely the opposite perspective.
            Now that those totals have been included, I am satisfied.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      I like actual researched claims, and dislike speculation (e.g. HBDchick’s cousin intermarriage theory).

      The HBD community is kind of a mixed bag in that respect. I’d recommend treating most HBD blogs content aggregators for obscure genetics papers and avoid reading the comments.

      You can actually find a lot of good “HBD” stuff in the mainstream genetics literature, if you read papers past the abstract or watch presentations. Nobody is going to lead with “… and then I discovered that the Nhl1 gene increases Canadian ice-skating ability by 50%” but if they found that result it will probably be somewhere in there, even if it’s hidden in the supplemental figures.

      • “I like actual researched claims, and dislike speculation”

        Why? Speculation is fun.

        One reason to form hypotheses about the world is as a first step in scientific research. But the world is full of interesting things that I am not prepared to do serious research on but are still worth speculating about.

        Both economics and evolutionary biology provide theoretical structures that can be used to form plausible conjectures. Doing so is both entertaining and intellectual exercise. Once in a while such a speculation might be worth further investigation–my first published journal article in economics was a conjecture (about history) that I found ways of testing. Most of the time it isn’t.

        Even if I am not going to test it, putting the speculation out there provides ideas that other people might want to test. The Lott and Mustard article on concealed carry, which set off an extensive and controversial literature, was an empirical test of a point I had made years before in a textbook. Whether that’s where the authors got the idea I don’t know, but it could have been.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          Because biological systems are often very finicky and counter-intuitive hand waving has a particular risk. Unlike in a more heavily mathematical field such as physics, elegance is not necessarily a point in favor of a particular theory.

          I’d rather know the limits of my knowledge clearly by seeing a gap than paper over it and risk absentmindedly walking into an intellectual tiger pit.

          The Lott and Mustard article on concealed carry, which set off an extensive and controversial literature, was an empirical test of a point I had made years before in a textbook. Whether that’s where the authors got the idea I don’t know, but it could have been.

          Why not ask them? I’m sure they have emails on their faculty pages, wherever they are.

          As long as you make it clear you’re not trying to claim credit for their work but just intellectually curious they would tell you.

    • dndnrsn says:

      TL;DR I think there’s convincing arguments against a lot of common “genetic racial/ethnic IQ gap” claims and I’m surprised/disappointed those arguments against the claims aren’t being made, because I’m very dubious of those claims.

      The study of human genetic difference – whatever kind of difference – is a field where I have no idea what sources to trust, because it is such a charged topic. It furthermore is a field where it seems, not so much that one side has left the field, as that side has decided the field doesn’t exist. This is really bad, because it means that when one side shows up with factual observations and nasty explanations, the other side doesn’t provide nice explanations for those factual observations. HBD’ers are showing up with what they say are facts. Rather than challenge them – “what you say are facts are not” – or challenge their explanations, the opposing team seems to basically fall back on the same old 1970s social science, which is generally less than convincing for anyone who isn’t a 1970s social scientist.

      An example: there are cases of relatively impoverished, poorly-off European countries seeing economic booms in the middle or late 20th century that saw average IQ rise significantly. I think Ireland is the poster child – a few generations back, there were English pretty big into the idea that the Irish were just inherently 10-15 IQ points dumber, and now there isn’t an English-Irish IQ gap. It seems like “this group IQ gap is the result of bad nutrition, disease, parasites, the stresses of poverty and oppression, etc and thus we can fix it and we are probably morally obligated to do so, HEAL THE WORLD” is a pretty easy argument to make, and I find it fairly convincing. It would certainly be better to exhaust the possibilities that gaps that exist can be eliminated through improved standard of living, etc, because that is a better place for a society to go than the alternative. I would far better like to live in a world where genetic gaps don’t exist and environmental gaps are being closed. But it appears that rather than make arguments like that, the issue is denied or ignored.

      And this is bad because abandoning the field to your enemy is generally considered a poor strategy.

      • Anon. says:

        Well, we can estimate the part of the differences between groups attributable to environment by building a genetic model of IQ and comparing its prediction vs the observed value. For example, Vietnam massively under-performs (don’t do Communism, kids). OTOH, US Blacks over-perform, so “stresses of poverty and oppression” explanations for the difference between US Blacks and US Whites/Asians seem to be wrong.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Source?

          And, this is kind of what I mean – regardless of the merits or demerits of this or that particular study, there probably isn’t someone arguing against the existence of such genetic differences doing something similar but in the opposite direction, so to speak.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          How would that work? By “Vietnam under-performs”, do you mean “the Vietnamese perform badly relative to a baseline based on their ethnicity”? If so, how do you calculate the baseline?

      • Along the lines you mention …

        The best evidence I have seen that racial differences in outcomes in the U.S. are not due to genetics is by Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, where he points out that West Indian immigrants to the U.S., who are genetically “blacker” than other American blacks, do quite well. He could make that argument because he was willing to think about the question.

        • Jiro says:

          That depends on whether we’re selectively getting the ones with high IQs. Immigrants aren’t a random sampling of the source population.

          • Mary says:

            Eh, maybe. During the 1940s, blacks in New York and Pennsylvania regularly surpassed in education not only blacks in southern states, but whites there as well.

            And since many of them migrated after the kids were in school, a sociologist was able to show that the kids only did better in northern schools; in southern schools, they had not done better.

      • “And this is bad because abandoning the field to your enemy is generally considered a poor strategy.”

        Unless you expect to lose the battle if you show up.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I think it’s a failure of intelligence, to continue the analogy. I think there’s a strong strain in lefty academic and academic-ish lefty thinking that really downplays biology and plays up social factors. I think some people really don’t consider this particular field of battle to be real. Which is too bad because I think that defeat is not inevitable or even necessarily likely.

          • Zombielicious says:

            Viewing facts about the world as a “battle” to be won is kind of weird. Hopefully one day when the issue is less toxic and politically charged (could be centuries at this rate) then quality research will be done. As it is no one reasonable wants to touch it because just being associated with the question will, in one way or another, get you involved with all sorts of people, ideologies, and comment sections you don’t want to have anything to do with. No one serious wants to be remembered for that, or made into a hero by thinly-veiled racists or obsessive radicals (on either side), or have their intellectually-motivated research used to justify the next atrocity. So if you’re mildly scientifically interested but don’t have a bone to pick, it’s a lot healthier to just wait it out and maybe find out the answer in another twenty or thirty years.

          • dndnrsn says:

            The metaphor of battle is maybe a bad one to have used, because I’d prefer not to think about it as a battle.

            I don’t know how this issue could ever not be toxic and politically charged. Maybe if we all interbreed to the point that saying “group x is better than group y” is about as relevant as saying that the Spartan hoplites were totally cooler than the Roman legions, you guys.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:

            Maybe if we all interbreed to the point that saying “group x is better than group y” is about as relevant as saying that the Spartan hoplites were totally cooler than the Roman legions, you guys.

            Nobody really cares about the Germans, the Welsh, the Irish, the Italians anymore. IIRC, there was a brief period in the 80s where everyone was very scared about illegal Chinese immigration.

            I imagine that concerns about Mexican, Caribbean, Central American and South American immigrants will fade away as well.

            If we can manage to get to the point that “black”-“white” intermarriage is as unremarkable as Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, Irish, etc. and “white” intermarriage, I think much of these issues go away and we look at regional and local poverty issues, and not “racial” ones.

          • Fahundo says:

            If we can manage to get to the point that “black”-“white” intermarriage is as unremarkable as Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, Irish, etc. and “white” intermarriage

            See, during the 90s I thought we were already living in that world, which is what makes this extra confusing for me.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Fahundo – we were. it wasn’t sustainable. you can’t make race both unimportant and the most important thing.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Identity politics for the win!

            /sarcasm>

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Progress on these issues comes in fits and starts. My cousin married a black man about ten years ago and my dad when telling me to expect an invitation made sure to a) notify me that he was black, and b) drop to a slightly embarrassed soto voce while doing so.

            And I guarantee you that my dad was not in any way consciously against that wedding. But unconsciously, as an Italian kid who grew up in Chicago, he knew this was remarkable.

            And let’s not forget that Rodney King and OJ Simpson both happend in the 90s, so some of what is going on here is simply some version of typical mind fallacy.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            Someone being German, Welsh, Italian, Irish still matters … at least, it does in Germany, Wales, Italy, Ireland. Of course, they’re all generic white now in the US or Canada or wherever, although the one of Italian descent might (self-awarely, mockingly) talk about “white people” as though they’re not part of it.

            The pessimistic part of me figures we’ll stop caring about race when some new division appears, or maybe we get aliens to discriminate against. I mean, I ain’t saying I’m bigoted, two of my wives and one of my husbands are of a different gene-grouping, it’s just I don’t want my enbychild marrying a Venusian. I ain’t got nothing against them, mind you, I just think it’s best if we stay with ours and they stay with theirs. And don’t get me started on the Plutonians – it’s not even a real planet!

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dnsnrsn:
            Those things matter … in places where it is still uncommon to marry outside those groups.

            I don’t see how that undercuts my point.

            And as an 1/4 Italian, I am most certainly white, insofar as that has meaning.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            I don’t think it undercuts your point, but race in the sense we understand it now was an issue at the same time that “oh no all these Catholics are coming over from the bad [read: Catholic] parts of Europe” was an issue. The latter ceased to be an issue, but the former still is.

            And, to some extent, intermarriage/assimilation increases attempts to hold on to group identity: witness, for instance, the attempts by the Welsh to keep the language alive, etc.

      • Deiseach says:

        dndnrsn, that Irish IQ figure is very suspicious to me. I see the “Irish average IQ measured at 92” touted on the Internet, and the figure comes from a survey carried out by Richard Lynn, who has a very big political axe to grind (discoverable with a little Googling of his background).

        Am I saying he’s a Unionist who thinks the only reason the Taigs left the nurturing maternal bosom of British rule is because they were too stupid to know better? Draw your own conclusions! Notice how the Irish are just that bit stupider than the Scots who are just that bit stupider than the English:

        The average Irish IQ score is 96 compared with 100.5 in England and Wales and 97 in Scotland, according to Prof Richard Lynn, a former Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) psychologist and professor emeritus of the University of Ulster.

        And surprise, surprise: Northern Ireland (majority Protestant, stayed in the UK) has a higher average IQ than the South (which is literally just across the road in some places). Who would have thought, eh? (Probably down to all the UK IQ data being lumped in together, and given that they have a total population of 64 million to our 4 million, I think there may be some variance in there).

        His foundational IQ work, from which all of these figures are being pulled, has some dodgy sampling going on:

        Other economists who reviewed the book also pointed to numerous flaws throughout the study, from unreliable IQ statistics for 81 of the 185 countries used in the analysis, to insecure estimates of the national IQ in the remaining 101 countries in the sample that did not have published IQ data.

        I think it is less likely that we Irish suddenly got 10-15 IQ points smarter in 2000 than we had been in 1980, and more likely that politically-motivated data-fudging was going on with the earlier measurements.

        • dndnrsn says:

          My understanding was that more than just Lynn’s work – I know he had political motivations, and I should have been more clear that the English have a long line in justifying whatever by appeal to the supposed nature of the Irish. However, I also was under the impression that there were more tests done than just Lynn’s, and it doesn’t just jump from 90 to 100 but improves more gradually. I was also under the impression that similar – maybe less dramatic, but similar – things had happened in other parts of Europe, including places where political axes being ground were less of a factor.

          Or, intelligence tests had northerners doing better than southerners in the US for a while, didn’t they?

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          That could be down to London sucking in high-IQ people form the rest of the UK. Cf coastal and middle Amercia.

          • dndnrsn says:

            So, you suggest that instead of the argument being “poverty dragging Ireland down; Ireland has economic boom; better living conditions equal smarts”, it could be “poverty making smart Irish people move to London; Ireland has economic boom; smart people move to Dublin instead”?

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      HBD is yet another motte and bailey.

      The motte is that genetics matter, and that genetics vary by population.

      The bailey is that there aren’t systemic social/racial problems in the United States, and/or that racist attitudes are more or less correct; the implicitly-claimed reason black people are in the lowest social strata is that their genetics predispose them to be in the lowest social strata. Africa isn’t doing badly because of historical political reasons (read: imperialism and slavery), but because Africa naturally does badly, and therefore white people aren’t to blame. Asians are productive because of natural intelligence. Jews likewise. Etc, etc.

      The bailey is an incredibly attractive anti-social-justice position, rejecting social justice at every possible level; but it’s just reversed stupidity, not actual intelligence. Which of course makes it a very attractive reactionary position; it’s a precise opposition of the current mass stupidity.

      The truth, as always, is finicky and complex, and quite boring compared to the mythology. Unfortunately, the social taboo against acknowledging the importance of genetics (predetermination really bothers people for some reason) pushes back against the scientific truth involved in an indiscriminate way. The general counterarguments against HBD are thus artificially weak, revolving in large part around our societal revulsion towards predetermination.

      The substantive criticism is this: HBD isn’t racist, but the people who think it is important and revolutionary is; they buy into a racist mythology surrounding the actually quite boring science. The mythology is built on cherrypicking pieces of science to present, and pretending any conflicting evidence is ideologically biased.

      I rate the whole thing a “meh”, and the only reason I even bother to respond is that it’s an attractive trap for contrarian sorts, since they like to pretend it’s taboo science.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @Orphan Wilde – “Africa isn’t doing badly because of historical political reasons (read: imperialism and slavery), but because Africa naturally does badly, and therefore white people aren’t to blame. ”

        Not sure I disagree with your overall comment, but I think there’s some nuance to add.

        People have a lot of different explanations for why, say, Africa or Haiti or the American school system is such a disaster zone. Ultimately though, I think they all boil down to two categories: “we can fix it!” and “nope, it’s fucked.” The longer a problem persists, and the more effort and resources are dumped into it without appreciable progress, the more people lean toward the “nope, it’s fucked” explanations and the less patience they have with “we can fix it” solutions, even novel ones. HBD seems pretty clearly like a “nope, it’s fucked” explanation, at least in the short term.

        I think this is the reason behind the growing hostility toward experts: if you tell people you understand how things work, and then you can’t actually make things work or your predictions fail, people stop listening to you or to anyone who sounds like you.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          if you tell people you understand how things work, and then you can’t actually make things work or your predictions fail, people stop listening to you or to anyone who sounds like you.

          There’s a bias in a significant percent, if not a majority of people, to favor solutions over the status quo.

          Unfortunately, unintended consequences. Every solution brings new problems out, and often doesn’t even successfully solve the original problem. I think, as a society, we’re starting to get cynical about the concept of solving social problems itself. Which is a good thing! Because I think the average “solution” actually makes things worse, and doubly so if enacted by government, since government solutions have a tendency to stick around regardless of their efficacy.

          But we’re not there yet, and in the meantime there’s a tendency, when people aren’t helped by an implemented solution, to blame the people the solution was supposed to help, rather than a flawed solution, owing to just-world tendencies.

          • Corey says:

            There’s a bias in a significant percent, if not a majority of people, to favor solutions over the status quo.

            Are you sure? Have you ever tried to get any group of people to change, well, anything at all?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Corey –

            Yes. Your framing, however, reveals your problem: You’re telling a group of people that they, personally, need to change; that they, personally, are part of the problem. That’s a losing proposition, you’re just going to make them dig their heels in.

            Don’t convince them to change. Convince them the world needs to change, even though it will be hard. Play to their egos, make the solution an accomplishment, rather than the absolution of a sin.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Orphan Wilde – “I think, as a society, we’re starting to get cynical about the concept of solving social problems itself. Which is a good thing!”

            I’d agree. but it you change from believing problems can be solved to believing problems can’t be solved, that necessarily involves a new theory about how things work. If structural oppression theory fails to believably describe the world we see, what replaces it?

            “But we’re not there yet, and in the meantime there’s a tendency, when people aren’t helped by an implemented solution, to blame the people the solution was supposed to help, rather than a flawed solution, owing to just-world tendencies.”

            That may be, but I think a great deal more of the blame gets vectored toward the people pushing the failed solution. Obviously there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two groups, but I’ve met a lot of red tribers who viscerally hated “liberals”, and none at all that hated black people as a group.

            In any case, even if I’m wrong and you’re entirely correct, what is to be done about it? You can try to resist that tendency, I can try to resist it, but I don’t think society as a whole can resist it. I think backlash is probably inevitable.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            FacelessCraven –

            Blaming poor people for being poor, given welfare, isn’t the same as hating them; it’s just “Well, if they weren’t earning their poverty, they’d use the help we offer to get out of it”. There’s a subtle difference there.

            As for what we should do about it – that’s a solution mindset. Maybe we shouldn’t; maybe doing something will make things worse in some unexpected way.

            Because cynicism about solutions isn’t the same as not believing solutions can exist. I’m for incremental improvements with frequent rollbacks; that’s an approach that solves problems, understanding that no single improvement is going to actually solve the problem.

      • Nelshoy says:

        I don’t think my personal views fit neatly into the motte or Bailey. I believe there are significant genetic differences between population groups, which probably include less than 1 SD differences in average intelligence. Mentioning this out loud isvery taboo and will get you in a mess of trouble if you are somewhat important and the media picks it up. These differences aren’t important for much of anything in daily life, but are “revolutionary and important” when crafting policy, where the default unchallengeable assumption in most fields is environment as the cause of any inequality. Of course there are real environmental inequalities too that should be addressed, and acknowledging genes shouldn’t stop that from happening.

      • NOTA says:

        You can get through a long and thoughtful newspaper or magazine article on the black/white performance gap in education without ever seeing reference to the large and persistent IQ score gap between blacks and whites. That seems like a pretty damned important piece of information to have in mind when evaluating arguments about the cause of the performance gap in education, and yet it’s almost never brought up in this context.

        This is a place where actively excluding data is making our public discussions a lot dumber. And indeed, I’d say this is what taboos *do*. This is why intellectual taboos are a bad thing–they make some kinds of evidence and information and arguments unacceptable, independent of whether they’re correct.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Presumably, people who write those articles often assume that the same things that cause the performance gap in education also cause a performance gap in IQ tests. That seems pretty plausible; both are closely linked to intelligence.

          • cassander says:

            Except they will usually insist on talking endlessly about the performance gap, while insisting that the IQ gap is fake or irrelevant, and racist to even mention in the first place.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          And I could go through a long HBD article about the “large and persistent IQ score gap between blacks and whites” without ever seeing reference to the fact that the Flynn Effect is continuing in force for black, but not white, people in the US. Which is to say, the gap isn’t quite so persistent, and is indeed gradually eroding.

          Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence, and HBD-as-racism isn’t correcting dumb public discussions, it’s just increasing the overall stupidity of the discussions by being dumb in a opposing way. It’s a bravery debate in one sense, and trolling in another; bravery debates, because HBD advocates want to play the put-upon victims baselessly accused of racism for standing up for Science, and trolling, because in the next breath they want to talk about how inferior black people are.

          It’s childish nonsense. There are good arguments to be had in the space about the role genetics plays in social stratification – but somehow it’s always about race, instead.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            And I could go through a long HBD article about the “large and persistent IQ score gap between blacks and whites” without ever seeing reference to the fact that the Flynn Effect is continuing in force for black, but not white, people in the US. Which is to say, the gap isn’t quite so persistent, and is indeed gradually eroding.

            They can also be good at forgetting to mention that the supposed black-white gap cannot be detected in some non-US countries with mixed populations.

          • dndnrsn says:

            This is what I mean. “The Flynn effect in the US has halted for whites but continues for blacks, indicating an environmental issue” and “the gap doesn’t exist in some countries” are better arguments than “IQ tests don’t really measure intelligence, they just measure test-taking ability”, which is not uncommon to hear.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            dndnrsn –

            Which is why I insist that HBD racism tends to be reversed stupidity, and why I believe it is so appealing to contrarians; the opposing arguments tend to be terrible.

            But that shouldn’t surprise us; it’s a major part of why motte-and-bailey arguments tend to be persuasive at first glance. When one side retreats to the motte, the counterarguments, which were aimed at the bailey, start looking ridiculous and dumb and clumsy and out of place. It takes two or three engagements with a motte and bailey to figure out where the retreat will happen and head it off with arguments that will stand on their own even after the retreat.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Yeah. Sadly, views on these issues have changed (from “the English are one race, the French are another, the Egyptians are a third, etc” to a conception of a few races and a different way of thinking about superiority and inferiority, and from that to anti-racism) due largely to the argumentum ad baculum and various other incentives.

            As for social stratification, intelligence, and genetics, it might be worth reading the book “The Rise of the Meritocracy” by Young. It’s an odd sort of sociological treatise written as a history from a hypothetical future.

          • a noN mous(e) says:

            Sadly, views on these issues have changed (from “the English are one race, the French are another, the Egyptians are a third, etc” to a conception of a few races and a different way of thinking about superiority and inferiority, and from that to anti-racism) due largely to the argumentum ad baculum and various other incentives.

            No, just that use of language has changed.

            You can speak meaningfully about group differences between Italians and Swedes. You can speak meaningfully about group differences between Celts and Germanic people. You can also speak meaningfully about group differences between whites and Asians. If the only strains of humans that are ever encountered are all European descended, then the differences between Serbs and Spaniards look large. If you routinely encounter groups that are much further separated – to the extent that one group lacks genes from a different species of hominid that is a significant part of another group’s ancestry that changes perspective.

            #cce0ff and #002966 are different. #ffc2b3 and #ff3300 are different. If the context you’re discussing only includes the blues, the blues look more different from one another. If the context you’re discussing only includes the reds, different. If you throw all 4 colors together then the blues clump together and the reds clump together.

            Beagles and dashunds are different breeds but both hounds. Smooth fox terriers and Manchester terriers are different breeds – both terriers. They all have dog behavioral traits in common, in contrast to wolves. Group them in with wolves and contrast them to, say, beavers. The canis group has a lot in common, etc.

            It’s that race is a social construct thing – classic motte and bailey. Motte – “race is a social construct” (you actually can speak meaningfully about the English race compared to the French race if you wanted to so where you draw the line depends on what you’re discussing) to the bailey – “race has no predictive value” – of course it has predictive value.

      • Vaniver says:

        I rate the whole thing a “meh”, and the only reason I even bother to respond is that it’s an attractive trap for contrarian sorts, since they like to pretend it’s taboo science.

        OW, what would an actual taboo science look like? How can we tell that HBD is on the ‘not taboo’ side of the line?

        • sweeneyrod says:

          “taboo science”

          It’s time for this SSC open thread’s discussion of Galileo! Warning, said discussion mainly consisting of paraphrasing The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown.

          • Deiseach says:

            Warning, said discussion mainly consisting of paraphrasing The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown.

            No, I’ll leave Galileo alone, someone else can take the field on that. I quote Mr Flynn because he did the job of corralling all the material in one handily available location, but there are other sources out there.

            See, I’m old enough to remember things like the Ladybird books as a child and being taught that Galileo invented/discovered X Y and Z, and then in subsequent decades this has been rowed back on (with lesser or greater degrees of shamefacedness) as people went for the facts and not what the publicity machine (and the appealing narrative of the Lone Genius combined with Martyr For Science) said, and then to see people indignantly declaring that no, nobody (including Galileo) had ever said he invented/discovered X Y and Z, how dare you cast aspersions on the Lone Genius Martyr For Science!

            I don’t dispute Galileo’s real greatness, but there was a large streak of glory-hound in him, he created a lot of the problems for himself, and it was very convenient down the centuries first for anti-Catholic Protestant polemic and then anti-Christianity/pro-Enlightenment scientific polemic to contrast the Brave Seeker for Truth standing up to the Entrenched Forces of Superstition and Darkness.

          • LHN says:

            And to some extent it was counterproductive, insofar as it suggests that freedom of expression is important for Brave Seekers of Truth, so that once someone has demonstrated enough negatives it’s not so bad if they’re shut up. It would probably be better if people took the lesson a) Galileo was a major scientific figure who made important advances (but not every advance) within a community of like-interested correspondents and competitors, b) Galileo was kind of a jerk who picked unnecessary fights, and c) notwithstanding b, it still wasn’t right to make him recant and live under house arrest.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          OW, what would an actual taboo science look like?

          Varies; it could take the form of protests about the research being done, a la stem cell research, or it could look like nothing at all – that is, there is nothing there – for sufficiently taboo science (like non-consensus scientific theory in the Soviet Union).

          How can we tell that HBD is on the ‘not taboo’ side of the line?

          The research is still publicly ongoing and, except when somebody says something stupid, nobody cares.

          • “and, except when somebody says something stupid, nobody cares.”

            Do the Summers and Watson cases count as somebody saying something stupid? If so, does “stupid” mean “obviously false” or “obviously likely to provoke a negative reaction?”

          • Anonymous says:

            David Friedman, do you endorse Watson’s theory that there’s a link between sex drive and skin color? That this is why there is such a thing as “Latin Lover” but not “English Lover”? Do you, like him, refuse to hire overweight people? Do you think fat people are happy and thin people are ambitious?

            Would you characterize any of the above as “dumb”?

        • Don’t knock the Galileo discussions. I didn’t know about the Tychonic model, didn’t realize that there was actually a good empirical argument against the heliocentric model.

      • AnonBosch says:

        As someone with a background in genetics, this post is pretty much spot-on to me. Have we established that genes matter? Yes. Does the fact that genes matter prove any particular social and/or political theory? No, and fuck off.

        • It doesn’t prove any particular social or political theory but it refutes claims which are important support for some such theories. Differences in outcomes by race or gender are not clear evidence of discrimination if there is a plausible alternative explanation.

          It’s like the relation between evolution and religion. Darwinian evolution doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But it destroys one of the most convincing arguments in favor of God’s existence, the Watchmaker Argument, by offering a plausible alternative explanation of what we observe.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Clear evidence of prior discrimination makes for a pretty strong prior.

          • Clear evidence of past discrimination gives you a pretty strong prior that there was past discrimination. It doesn’t tell you whether that is a significant cause of current outcomes. If there are lots of potential employers and half of them won’t hire me because they are prejudiced against me, the effect on my welfare is negligible. If they are prejudiced against my ethnic group which consists of five percent of potential employees, the same is true.

            There is clear evidence of discrimination against Jews through much of the 20th century, including universities with explicit limits on how many they would accept. Yet Jews didn’t end up with below average outcomes.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Completely different starting conditions, not comparable levels of legal discrimination.

          • If you can point to multiple groups who’ve experienced past discrimination and are now clustered in the high-outcome areas, and multiple other groups who’ve experienced discrimination and who are now clustered in the low-outcome groups, it seems fairly obvious that past discrimination isn’t a strong driver of outcomes.

            Starting conditions are huge, of course; pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is hard for people of any group, and if you bring in a bunch of foreign poor people into an indifferent or hostile culture, many of them will stay poor throughout their lifetimes.

            But when you can point to the black people who moved to the cities from the war-torn South where they were persecuted and had very little, and then to the Jewish people who moved to the cities from other countries where they were persecuted and had very little, see them living together in the same ghetto, and track very different outcomes, you can either play god-of-the-gaps with specific cases of discrimination, or you can admit that past discrimination does not always correlate with current performance.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            400 years of chatel slavery, 100 years of official Jim Crow in this country, 50 years of slowly abating after affect of the previous 500 years, in population sizes large enough to be permanently segregated. And for most of that time they are cut off from literacy, something that is never the case for the Jewish population.

            Then you have the fact that Jews in the U.S. came here voluntarily, while blacks did not. Jews retain their culture and can create their community. Jews had freedom of movement and access to levers of government.

            Imagine the Nazis had won and maintained the slave labor camps in perpetuity, rather than pursuing a final solution. Would we after 400 years of slavery then state the Jews are responsible for their unequal outcome? Regardless of what the state of Jewish intellect was?

            Which means that no matter the proximate cause of unequal outcomes, morally there is an ultimate cause.

          • Loyle says:

            I’m always reminded of this bit by Chris Rock whenever this subject comes up.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLKvYB7CeAY

            Sorry for wasting your time.

          • Wohoo, misery poker!

            I’ll raise you a few centuries of assorted massacres, confiscations, exclusions. And while there were certainly exceptions for individual Jews who managed to get a good thing going, so were there exceptions to racial animus in America. The claim that Jews as a whole had access to the levers of government throughout their history is somewhat extraordinary, given how little that ended up preventing the aforementioned massacres, confiscations, and so on. As I said, you can totally god-of-the-gaps this, and very carefully gerrymander your theory of causative oppression to match just one set of groups. It’s just not a very persuasive argument to me, when I can look at the search space of world history and look for groups who had been enslaved for a long period of time, groups who were forced into relative cultural isolation, groups whose enslavement was tied to the economic development of a rising world power, and note that very few factors in and of themselves predict outcomes centuries after the oppression itself stops.

            However, I think that shared culture across ethnic groups is really important, and explains a lot of outcomes by itself. Having the people around you really value literacy, education, thrift, and diligence is much more of a predictive factor than this bit of history or that bit of genome.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “400 years of chatel slavery, 100 years of official Jim Crow in this country, 50 years of slowly abating after affect of the previous 500 years, in population sizes large enough to be permanently segregated. And for most of that time they are cut off from literacy, something that is never the case for the Jewish population.”

            …You seem to be arguing that the black population’s experiences over the last several hundred years have left an indelible imprint on them that remains regardless of current conditions. what is the functional difference between this and HBD?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Robert Liguori:
            You know it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write?

            Yes, Jews were discriminated against. No one is arguing against this. But it wasn’t chatel slavery followed by Jim Crow. And post 1964 to now, I’m finding it implausible to claim that US Jews and Blacks were subject to equal amounts of discrimination.

            So pointing at differential outcomes from 1964 to now, when the two groups started with far different resources of various kinds and were subjected to different amounts discrimination just doesn’t seem to hold much of any water.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            How do we fund schools in this country? And does the differing resources then available have much of anything to do with genetics?

            This is just one small example of how government policy and law combines with simple societal preferences and facts to impose differing burdens on various communities.

            If I am a Jew today, and I move into a white middle class neighborhood, is this in any way remarkable? What if I am black? What if I am Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish, etc. How do this differing societal expectations serve to slow the dilution of the effects of 500 years of official racism? Does that have anything to do with genetics outside of melanin content?

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            “You seem to be arguing that the black population’s experiences over the last several hundred years have left an indelible imprint on them that remains regardless of current conditions”

            A good snappy name for this belief would be Social Lamarckianism.

          • “How do we fund schools in this country? And does the differing resources then available have much of anything to do with genetics?”

            I’m curious–are you in favor of a voucher system? It’s the simplest way of giving poor people access to the same level of free schooling as rich people.

          • HBC:

            What’s your view of the Romani?

            Four centuries as slaves in Romania. A thousand years of exile from their homeland. Extended periods of prejudice, including times when they were banned from countries, other times of forcible sedenterization.

            I’m not sure how they are doing in America at present but the pattern that came out of their experiences looks wholly different from that of blacks. My guess is that the explanation in that case is not genetics but culture.

          • Sandy says:

            The Roma as I understand them are a weird admixture of Northern Indian, Central Asian and Slavic. It is surprisingly difficult to find data on their outcomes in the United States, but I suspect it is not great.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “How do we fund schools in this country? And does the differing resources then available have much of anything to do with genetics?”

            Indeed not. So can we fix it, or is it fucked? If we can fix it, why did we wait till now to start doing so? Half my friends are public school teachers; from talking to them, my confidence that we can fix anything at all via the educational system is not high.

            More generally, these comparisons seem to indicate that the problems holding the black community down are internal to that community and probably self-perpetuating, rather than being continuously externally imposed. It doesn’t really matter whether the mechanism is genes or memes if we can’t fix it. So can we fix it? What evidence do we have of successful attempts at social engineering for minority groups? Do we have any that aren’t a horror story from start to finish?

            [EDIT] – I think that influence and consensus are finite goods. Failed social policies erode them, and getting them back is not an easy thing to do. Burning through our current supply endlessly iterating solutions for the wrong problem is probably a bad idea and may be a disastrous one.

          • HeelBearCub, with regards to starting conditions at a given point determining outcomes, well, that was also examined in detail.

            I cheerfully concede that it may be possible that America lucked into One Weird Trick which indelibly damaged American blacks, when other, different patterns of discrimination didn’t appear to do so for other minority groups…but as was said, “We’re not going to hire you because you were permanently damaged by the legacy of your great grandfather’s time.” doesn’t sound like a winning answer to anybody at all.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:

            If we can fix it, why did we wait till now to start doing so?

            So many reasons. Most of which you know. Some of which you are unwilling to recognize.

            Roughly, American culture broadly hates people who are poor viewing poverty as moral failure (I don’t think that’s actually very unique) and is heterogeneous in a way that very few other countries are. Combine those two elements together and you have every community fighting to keep their resources completely local.

            Combine that with the firm belief of some that black people are less than white people, and you have even more reticence to address poverty by integration.

            We don’t need to fix the black community, we need to allow the black community to become just another community like Irish or Italian. We stopped thinking of Italians as uniquely criminal even though north-eastern US mafia crime families remained Italian for a long time. That allows for integration. It lets Italians feel comfortable marrying and living outside the Italian community in a way that is only very, very recently started to become available to black people.

            If I were to speculate on one thing that is genetic, it’s that the distinct features of African heritage are different enough from Eurasian heritage that they persist reliably identifiably in children of multiple heritage. I’m not fully confident if that’s actually true, but it seems so, but if it is that makes it harder to integrate early on.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            You surely aren’t contending that Roma in Europe are a counterpoint that proves centuries of slavery don’t effect later outcomes, are you?

            Roma in the US is a different cohort, and not a comparable one.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Robert Liguori:
            That post doesn’t really examine my contention. Persistently and repeatedly damaging a full 40% of your population might in fact result in the entire state being poorer, which isn’t a counter to the idea that the damage you did to the black population actually damaged them.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            I don’t know how the entire country funds schools. Here in NJ, the wealthy areas (mostly white — both Jewish and Gentile — and Asian) fund them mostly through local property taxes. The poor areas (mostly black and Hispanic) are funded mostly through statewide income tax. To a greater amount, per pupil, than the wealthy areas. The poor areas still perform badly.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            When you say

            We don’t need to fix the black community, we need to allow the black community to become just another community like Irish or Italian.

            you understand that you mean destroying those communities, right? Irish and Italian communities in the United States barely exist any more, they are mere remnants.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:
            Again, examine my contention that the issue is segregation. You don’t solve that by merely raising per pupil spending.

            Have you read “All Souls: A Family Story from Southie” by Michael Patrick Macdonald? That is one example of the effect of segregated poverty that happens to have been all “white”.

            But we don’t regard that as an “Irish” issue to be solved by thinking this must clearly be an example of the unfitness of Irish genetics. No one thinks “No way Chip Kelly can be a successful NFL coach because he is Irish”. No on thinks “Matt Ryan can’t be an NFL Quarterback because he is Irish”. And that is because outside of the specific local involving the segregated poverty, we don’t regard “Irish last name” or “black hair and black eyes” as telling us much.

            Yes, Macdonald spends time in the book lamenting the loss of the unique community in which he grew up. “Gentrification” is an issue where I think we potentially be better about retaining unique cultural aspects of community without failing to integrate, but I think there may be sort of Type 1/Type 2 trade-offs that may be intractable.

            Still, I don’t see anyone actually clamoring for north-east Italians to stop saying “gabagool” instead of “capicola”. It’s possible to retain unique cultural markers and still be integrated.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @HBC

            You brought up school funding and differing levels of resources, and now you say that isn’t important? Why did you bring it up, then?

            A few linguistic remnants related to Sicilian dialect and Italian foods don’t make a community. I’m half-Italian (and say “cap-ih-coal”); my various cousins on that side are at least half-Italian and are scattered to the four winds. None, as far as I know, live in an area with a recognizable Italian-American community. The area their parents and our grandparents grew up in is no longer Italian-American; a few now-elderly Italian immigrants and children of immigrants remain, but it’s mostly Hispanic now. For all practical purposes, that particular Italian-American community has ceased to exist. This is what results from integration.

            It probably would be a good thing if the same happened to US black communities. But there are a lot of roadblocks to that. Some common to the immigrant communities; the attitude of “stick to your own kind” seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Some not common, like, well, the whole bad history starting with slavery. And some just because the black community is quite large; we didn’t have entire Irish or Italian American cities, for instance. It’s also not something “community leaders” will ever endorse, for obvious reasons.

            I don’t think distinctive appearance is a large factor; East Asians and South Asians seem to be able to integrate with majority-white communities fairly easily.

          • “Roma in the US is a different cohort, and not a comparable one.”

            Where do you think Romani in the U.S. came from?

            About two-thirds of them are Vlach Rom, meaning descendants of the Romanian Romani.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            How about you address my whole comment to you. The first point makes an important reference point for the second.

            I think you should actually understand this, therefore I it seems reasonable for me to assume you are deliberately ignoring the actual point. You do this frequently.

            See our recent conversation where you asked for greater detail on “my” model of why hiring won’t necessarily increase if the current last employee is “profitable” (by economists’ definition, which is different than a business majors or an accountant), at which point you simply failed to respond to anything other than my request for you to clarify the implications of the definition of profitable you were using.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @The Nybbler:

            You brought up school funding and differing levels of resources, and now you say that isn’t important? Why did you bring it up, then?

            Did I say it was not important? I did not.

            Note, I originally said it was “one small example”. If one has congestive heart failure, emphysema and lung cancer, we might successfully manage the first two and still not have the patient survive.

            As to your point about integration and “destruction” of community, if I go to Little Italy in New York it’s a shell of it’s former self and has largely been absorbed by China Town. I can both look back wistfully on what Little Italy was, look for ways to preserve some of it’s unique characteristics, and still not regard this the result of any attempt to “destroy” the Italian American community.

            Another example, we can look at farm an rural life and see loss of community brought about be economic and social change, look for ways to preserve many of the unique and positive aspects, attempt to induce a strong desire of those from that community to stay in as well as attract those from outside it into those communities. But we don’t recommend that suburban and urban communities regard rural communities with scorn as a means of preserving the rural community.

            Certainly, rural communities look at urban adoption of some of the aspects of rural communities as inauthentic. There is disdain for adoption of various styles of dress by Brooklyn hipsters, yet I don’t think we look at preservation and re-invigoration of canning or knitting as somehow bad.

            We can both integrate and preserve. Yes, when we remove the barriers of segregation this will unavoidably result in the loss of some community markers that were only kept in place by those barriers. If people really, really want to retain that kind of apartness, they can follow the model of the Hassidic Jews or the Amish, but I really don’t see how the ubiquity of the bagel or the loss of segregational pressures on Jews in the US can really be regarded as bad.

          • Jaskologist says:

            US Roma are different from European Roma in the same way that all of our immigrant populations are: they’re the people who left.

            Absent that, it seems like if US Roma succeed and their Euro counterparts do not, that would be supporting evidence that something in European discriminates against/holds down Roma, and likewise that something in US culture does the same to blacks.

          • “If people really, really want to retain that kind of apartness, they can follow the model of the Hassidic Jews or the Amish”

            But they have to “really, really” want to.

            I mentioned the Romani, which I’ve been reading a good deal about for one of the chapters of the book I’m currently working on. My guess was that the tolerance of North American societies would eventually erode their system, which depended to a significant degree on barriers that made members of the society very unwilling to leave it–barriers based both on the Romani attitude to non-Romani and the outside society’s attitude to them.

            A book was published a month or two back by Anne Sutherland, who wrote a very good book on them quite a long time ago. She stops short of saying that the system is collapsing, but it’s pretty clear that it is.

            That isn’t necessarily a bad thing–may well be a good thing from the standpoint of the individuals concerned, although some certainly express regret. But it is evidence of the difficulty of maintaining a noticeably different culture within a relative tolerant society.

        • a non moUs(e) says:

          HeelBearCub says:

          How do we fund schools in this country? And does the differing resources then available have much of anything to do with genetics?

          Here’s 100% conclusive proof that you started with the conclusion (zero group differences! evolution doesn’t work on brains!) and reasoned backwards:

          Highest expenditures per student[1]
          School district Expenditures per student ($)
          Newark Public Schools, New Jersey 30,742
          Buffalo Public Schools, New York 29,023
          Camden City Public Schools, New Jersey 26,826
          District of Columbia Department of Education 26,661
          East Orange School District, New Jersey 25,190

          —————————

          Lowest expenditures per student[1]
          School district Expenditures per student ($)
          Joint School District, Idaho 5,673
          Bonneville Joint School District No. 93, Idaho 6,079
          West Covina Unified School District, California 6,126
          Nampa School District, Idaho 6,234
          Idaho Falls School District 91, Idaho 6,260

          From the first google hit on “greatest spending per pupil school district in the us” (no quotes).

          Your denial of group differences is pure evil. It results in hugely disproportionate murders and rapes from blacks because the measures necessary for them to co-exist peacefully in society are deemed “racist”.

          You do not have the moral high ground. More people in New York City were murdered by blacks during the decade of the 80s than there were lynching victims (of all races). Murders and ruin in all American cities is on you and people with your beliefs – not some vague effects of 200 years ago – real live current day atrocities.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Care to elaborate on “the measures necessary for them to co-exist peacefully in society”?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “One small example” != “my entire thesis”.

            Stop tilting.

          • multiheaded says:

            What a classic SSC comment thread.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Crowned by the classic multiheaded contentless drive-by snark.

          • a non mouS(e) says:

            HeelBearCub says:

            “One small example” != “my entire thesis”.

            No, your thesis is invalidated by it being in contradiction with millions of different facts about reality. Evolution didn’t stop at the neck and brains are subject to evolution.

            What the one “small” (it’s not small) example proves is that you don’t give a damn about evidence. You throw out claims that are not only not true but are the opposite of true because you started with the conclusion and worked backwards.

            “Blacks do worse in school because of lack of funds”
            “The most funded school districts in America are all overwhelmingly black”
            “… My thesis still stands!”

            Of course it does.

    • Maware says:

      Just racism for the Mensa crowd.

    • ChetC3 says:

      The relevant science is very interesting, but unfortunately the bulk self-identified HBD-ers prefer hysterics to scholarship. Pages and pages and pages about how unthinkably cruel it is that other people think HBD-ers are scumbags, followed by twice as many pages of ranting about what scumbags their critics are, and with only a couple throwaway references to the science they’re supposedly so keen on scattered throughout.

  42. Wrong Species says:

    In the Chinese Room Experiment, Searle believes he has demonstrated that computers can’t be conscious. I’m sure most of us would disagree. However, I don’t think enough people realize the importance of the weaker claim, which is that consciousness can’t be determined by behavior. Imagine that a robot comes up to you and begs you to help him gain his freedom. His creator accidentally made him in to a conscious being and he hates being treated like a slave. He demands his freedom. But the owner tells you that it is just a computer bug. He can simply wipe out the problem. The robot of course calls that murder. Who do you believe?

    • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

      I don’t believe it can be determined from behavior, only suggested.

      My view is “I think/feel, therefore I am” and in an important way that’s all you can *really* know.

    • IrishDude says:

      Have you seen Deus Ex Machina? It’s a great movie that addresses this topic somewhat.

      • LHN says:

        Second the recommendation, but just to aid in finding it, the movie title is just “Ex Machina”. (Last I checked it’s available on at least one of the big streaming services.)

      • Wrong Species says:

        It’s interesting but I think the ending was underwhelming. Personally, I think Her is the better AI movie.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        Follow up question: is the bearded AI expert based on Yu-know-who?

        • Nelshoy says:

          Yudkowsky if he spent all his time on AI and working out instead of writing fanfiction 🙂

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          First thought: no way in hell Yudkowsky is nothing like him in terms of personality.

          Rewatched a few scenes: Holy shit they really do look similar.

    • sards says:

      I don’t think computers can be conscious. I think that’s the majority opinion in the general population. You really think the opposite is true at SSC?

      Of course, if computers can’t be conscious, that solves the question about whether you believe the robot that claims it is conscious.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Computers can obviously be conscious. SSC has Eternal Septembered hard enough that I no longer trust the obvious truth to be the majority opinion, though.

        • sards says:

          Computers can obviously be conscious.

          That seems like an overly confident claim.

          • Computers can obviously be as conscious as people, then? I mean, a Sufficiently-Advanced computer can do everything we look for in a person to make sure they’re conscious.

          • sards says:

            Computers can obviously be as conscious as people, then? I mean, a Sufficiently-Advanced computer can do everything we look for in a person to make sure they’re conscious.

            I don’t want to get into a whole debate about p-zombies and David Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness, but I don’t think that observing a computer that appears to behave in a way that matches how conscious humans behave is a strong reason to believe that the computer is conscious.

          • Lemminkainen says:

            Human brains are complex meat computers whose parts communicate with electrical signals, and we’re conscious. Chalmer’s argument fundamentally rests on the pieces of a system not being aware of what they’re doing. To see why his argument is fallacious, imagine that the pieces he’s talking about are neurons.

          • Izaak Weiss says:

            Unless you believe in some form of dualism, like souls, (which most commenters on this blog probably don’t) then surely a computer of high enough power should be able to simulate a brain long enough for it ot experience consciousness.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Computers can obviously be as conscious as people, then? I mean, a Sufficiently-Advanced computer can do everything we look for in a person to make sure they’re conscious.

            That runs straight into the original problem…it is conceivable that there is no real consciousness behind the conscious-style behaviour. (And that doesn’t even have the problem of whether p-zombies are actually conceivable, because an AI isn’t a physical duplicate, but only some sort of behavioural duplicate).

            I don’t know what the ultimate answer is, buti I am not seeing anything obvious one way or the other,

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            hen surely a computer of high enough power should be able to simulate a brain long enough for it ot experience consciousness.

            No, there is a logical gap between “simulate” and “be”. Even if you firmly reject dualism, you can still believe that there is something about brain chemistry that is necessary for full consciousness.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Computers can obviously be conscious.

          Obviously?

        • Jaskologist says:

          Computers can perhaps be as conscious as Walmart, but not more so.

        • Maware says:

          It’s not obvious at all. If anything, it’s more than likely that computers will never be conscious, because the way computers work will never show volition. A computer can “learn” to play go. It cannot ever learn to hate playing the game go, resent its “parents” for making it learn it, and overturn the table one day in a fit of anger.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            because the way computers work will never show volition. A computer can “learn” to play go. It cannot ever learn to hate playing the game go, resent its “parents” for making it learn it, and overturn the table one day in a fit of anger.

            Now, there is an exampl,e of the popular argument I was talking about: why can’t a computer learn volition , or display hate?
            If humans do those things using a neural net, why can;t a simulated neural net do them? Is it a real limitation of all computers, even ones that are designed very differently from a desktop pc or a smartphone, or is is just that desktop pcs and smartphones are designed to be “passive” and “obedient” because that what people want?

        • Faradn says:

          What event do you think cause SSC’s eternal September? One of the big articles like Moloch or Untitled?

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        I don’t think computers can be conscious. I think that’s the majority opinion in the general population.

        Sort of. Laypeople seem to think that computer are characterised by desktop PC’s, and display no “mind of their own” or volition. The knowledgable think that computation is characterised by software, and that you can build agentive software.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          To be c;ear, a typical desktop PC doesnt display volition, because -people don’t want it to — its a market requirement, not a technological limitation.

        • Maware says:

          You can’t, and won’t. Software will simply do the task you reduced into an algorithm. A computer can recommend to me movies I might like based on weighting my reviews and observing my purchases. It can never recommend a movie I might like because it has watched the movie and enjoyed it. No matter how complex the algorithm is, software will never display conscious volition.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      Searle’s view actually runs into a great deal of trouble explaining how we can know that other biological organisms are conscious. Maybe we can learn that other humans are conscious by analogy with our own experience, and maybe anatomical homologies allow us to extend this to non-human animals as well. But it sure seems like even humans with no understanding of anatomy or evolution can come to know that apes, dolphins, dogs, and so on possess at least a rudimentary form of consciousness, and I suggest that they could only acquire this knowledge by inferring it from the animal’s behavior. But if we can infer that an animal is conscious from its behavior, why not robots, too?

      • The Nybbler says:

        But if we can infer that an animal is conscious from its behavior, why not robots, too?

        Because we know how a robot works, we know how it makes its decisions. It’s an automaton, and if it is an automaton and yet appears conscious, perhaps we (despite seeming conscious) are also actually automatons.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          That is a view someone might have, but it is not Searle’s. Searle believes that humans and other mammals (at least) are conscious. He writes:

          “If somebody says, “Yes, but aren’t you ignoring the possibility that other people might be unconscious zombies. and the dog might be, as Descartes thought, a cleverly constructed machine, and that the chairs and tables might, for all you know, be conscious? Aren’t you simply ignoring these possibilities?” The answer is: Yes. I am simply ignoring all of these possibilities. They are out of the question. I do not take any of them seriously.”

        • Shion Arita says:

          I’m not sure that being considered an automaton is mutually exclusive with being considered conscious.

          I can say that from the inside my first person experience feels very mechanical and algorighmic, and I’d also say that I am definitely ‘conscious’, whatever that ends up really meaning.

        • Anonymous says:

          So if we knew how animals make decisions, they would stop being conscious?

          • Gazeboist says:

            This conversation (and the conversational template generally) is slowly convincing me that “conscious” is no longer useful as a concept. “Person” is probably the next place to go, but that brings other problems.

            (Also, do humans stop being conscious when they fall asleep?) :p

          • John Nerst says:

            So if we knew how animals make decisions, they would stop being conscious?

            No, but we’d be tempted to use another model to think about them. Some things are modeled as physical machines, others as conscious agents. Our limited knowledge and modeling capacity makes them appear intuitively qualitatively different even though they aren’t.

      • Wrong Species says:

        When it comes to animals, the important factor is not their behavior but their biological similarity to us. I know I’m conscious. I also feel fairly confident in claiming evolution is true. So if we are cousins to apes and have incredibly similar brains, then it seems reasonable to conclude that they are in some sense conscious. This can be extrapolated to other animals to a certain degree. But when it comes to AI or even aliens, we don’t have any kind of frame of reference. That’s a huge problem.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          You seem to have ignored most of what I wrote. So let’s concentrate instead on this claim: Herman Melville knew that a whale could be conscious. I believe this is true, that Herman Melville did know precisely that, and I hope you will agree. But how did he know? He could not have known on the basis of biological similarities between men and whales, for Melville falsely believed that whales were fish. And he could not have known whales were conscious because we share a common ancestor with the cetaceans, as Melville was writing before Darwin. The only way, so far as I can tell, that Melville could come by this piece of knowledge was by inferring it from his experience with whale behavior. And if Melville could come to know that whales were conscious through experience with their behavior, there does not seem to be any obstacle to our coming to know that a robot is conscious by way of experience with its behavior.

          • Wrong Species says:

            He certainly did not know that the whale was conscious. I don’t even know if other people are conscious. But with his lack of the relevant knowledge, the simple answer is that he was less justified in believing the whale was conscious than we are. Of course, they didn’t have computers so the idea of having non-conscious intelligence would seem bizarre to them so maybe justified is not the right word. Regardless, I don’t think premodern “knowledge” of animal consciousness is good evidence in favor of behavior being evidence of consciousness.

            Its not that far off to imagine chat bots that can actually have decent conversations with people. If one of those was incredibly convincing would you consider a chat bot conscious? What behavior exactly would convince you of its consciousness? Tears? Laughter? Anger? All of these are probably trivially imitated. Now maybe to some degree behavior can hint at consciousness. But as far as I can tell, there is no smoking gun that could be provided as proof. This is why I don’t fault Descartes for thinking of animals as simple automatons. Based on the knowledge available to him, it was a reasonable assumption. In fact, concern over animal welfare is very recent. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we didn’t concern ourselves with it until after the theory of evolution.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I don’t even know if other people are conscious.

            Earlier you said “it seems reasonable to conclude that [other apes] are in some sense conscious.” Now you are saying that you are unsure even about humans? Does this all turn, for you, on some elusive distinction between knowledge and reasonable belief?

          • Wrong Species says:

            The only claim I feel comfortable with making that leaves no room for doubt is the existence of my own consciousness. I can’t even fathom someone convincing me otherwise. Everything else is just probabilities. But I would give a high probability to human and ape consciousness. If some superintelligent AI came from outer space and told me that it was conscious I wouldn’t even know what my estimate should be.

          • Jiro says:

            I am a little skeptical about my own consciousness. As I’ve pointed out before, there’s no way for someone to point to a consciousness that I can look at and for me to say “I have something just like that”. That leaves me no way to interpret the statement “I am conscious”.

          • TMB says:

            “there’s no way for someone to point to a consciousness that I can look at and for me to say “I have something just like that”. That leaves me no way to interpret the statement “I am conscious”.”

            Hmmm… isn’t literally anything that someone could point at an example of consciousness?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The only claim I feel comfortable with making that leaves no room for doubt is the existence of my own consciousness. I can’t even fathom someone convincing me otherwise. Everything else is just probabilities. But I would give a high probability to human and ape consciousness.

            You are using an unusually strict definition of knowledge– if we only have knowledge where there is no room for doubt, we would not know much of anything at all. But never mind, the example will work fine if we just speak in terms of probability. I believe there is a high probability that whales and dogs are conscious, and it seems clear to me that Herman Melville was justified in holding the same belief. Do you agree? If so, this is all that is needed for the argument to go through: if Melville can infer consciousness from behavior for non-human animals, there’s no reason in principle why we couldn’t do the same when it comes to robots.

      • Philosophisticat says:

        It does not seem to me to take much understanding of anatomy or evolution in order to recognize, or at least to be able to rationally presume, that the means by which the behavior of apes or dolphins is produced is much more closely analogous to the means by which our behavior is produced than that of a chinese room or a computer program. It doesn’t seem crazy to think that the closer the analogy, the more reasonable it is to infer consciousness from behavior.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          Maybe, but I think you are underestimating how impoverished human knowledge of anatomy and biology was in ages past. The function of the brain was a matter of dispute until Galen, and dolphins were widely believed to be fish until the 19th century. But I do not think there was ever a time when it was unreasonable to think that dolphins, apes, or dogs possess some form of consciousness.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Fish seem to me pretty similar to mammals (certainly much more than to robots). If people used to think fish were made of wood or didn’t have even roughly analogous organs responsible for their behavior, then I’d agree that there wouldn’t be a very strong analogy-based case for people who thought dolphins were fish to assign consciousness to dolphins. But I was thinking peoples’ knowledge of anatomy wasn’t that far off. And if they really did think something like that, then it doesn’t seem crazy to think that confidence in dolphin consciousness might be misplaced.

            I’m happy to say that robots can be conscious – in the right mood I’m even inclined to say that the China Brain is conscious, so this is mostly an exercise in philosophical empathy on my part.

          • At a bit of a tangent, there is a description in Jomviking saga, probably written in the 13th or 14th c., of an experiment to determine whether consciousness was in the brain or the body. So they were thinking about that sort of issue.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            If you’re talking about the beheadings I think you are, you should take a side-job sanitizing mad scientists’ doomsday plots to get ethics board approval.

          • One beheading, to be precise. And it is explicitly set up, by the victim, as an experiment to see whether consciousness is in the head or the body.

            From the standpoint of the story, of course, it’s one more piece of evidence of how brave the Jomvikings are.

            “Of course I don’t mind being killed–I’m a Jomviking, after all. But this does look like the perfect opportunity to settle this argument we’ve been having. If it’s not too much trouble.”

            (not a literal quote)

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        Searle’s view actually runs into a great deal of trouble explaining how we can know that other biological organisms are conscious.

        It doesn’t run into that much trouble bioligical similarity is an extra clue above behavioural indications.

    • Montfort says:

      See also the whole “Philosophical Zombie” discussion.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      I think a claim to be conscious would be more convincing if it were produced spontaneously, in the sense that it can’t be traced back to anything explicitly in the programming or training.

      But that is not a black-and-white solution.

    • Paul Torek says:

      Some features of consciousness can be inferred from behavior alone; others require looking under the hood. Searle picks the exact wrong thing, intentionality, to claim cannot be inferred from behavior alone. Intentionality and its close cousin agency are highly morally important, even where the qualia are different.

      Edit: now Wrong Species is talking about chatbots. That changes the spirit of the question. I thought we were talking about a robot that can pass an arbitrarily long Turing Test; i.e., has any and all behaviors you might want.

    • Antonin in a nintendo says:

      that’s a pretty fucking specific bug.

      (The computer, duh)

  43. Erebus says:

    I’ve heard a rumor several times over the past few years, and I can’t find anything to confirm or deny it. The rumor goes that it’s still possible to get a degree from Yale simply by demonstrating fluency in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. This seems at least superficially plausible, as it may be a holdover from bygone days when Yale was primarily a school of theology & placed great importance on the study of Hebrew (a Yale innovation) and the Classical languages.

    Does anybody know whether or not this is true — or how it might be possible to check, without raising any alarms?

    • LHN says:

      It’s listed as one of “Yale’s many myths” in this 1997 Yale Herald article.

      http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/frosh/1997/frosh97/MYTH.html

    • pku says:

      I have a friend at Yale who’s fluent in all three (and several others besides), and she’s still a couple years away from getting her degree.

    • phisheep says:

      Until 1960 passing an examination in Latin was a requirement for admission to the University of Oxford. This fell some considerable way short of fluency, and was necessary for matriculation *not* sufficient for graduation.

      I would not be in the least surprised if Yale had had a similar requirement in the past, nor if it had got garbled in the telling.

      • Emma Casey says:

        The traditional* strory is that Newton didn’t pass his maths exams** and was only able to graduate at cambridge because his latin and greek were exceptional***.

        * almost surely false
        ** becuase the examiner asked him “how does Euclid prove proposition X” and he reliped “I don’t know”. Newton answered the question litterally, having proved it himself without reference to Euclid’s method.
        *** because he spent like half his time reading both translations of the bible trying to descover the date of judgement day.

    • dndnrsn says:

      If this had been true, wouldn’t it mean that any Israeli classicist would be entitled to a Yale degree?

  44. Siah Sargus says:

    Hey SSC Commentariat, what is your biggest fetish/kink/paraphillia/partialism/turn-on? I want to see if it differs significantly from the usual stuff people admit to liking on the internet.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Is this a trap? It smells like a trap.

      • trappings says:

        Hmm what does a trap smell like? Also, if they had a smell wouldnt that preclude them from being traps? Or are they perhaps, perfumed?

      • Homo Iracundus says:

        Porn artists casually chat about marketing demographics just like any other professional. It’s just a slightly stickier topic with them.

        My biggest paraphilia is watching rationalists try to decide if the guy proposing prostate stimulation as the most healthy and rational form of sex play is serious, or just trying to troll them.
        You learn strange and terrible things about yourself lurking rationalist forums.

      • Anonymous_o says:

        Eh, if we fear them enough that we’re unwilling to have free discussions in our own online spaces, we’ve already lost.

        My turn-on is dominance contests, usually in the form of roughhousing/wrestling. Outright submission is boring no matter which party is doing it, but one party “losing” is fine.

      • Siah Sargus says:

        Depends, are you into traps?

        • Deiseach says:

          I can tell you what I don’t like, or rather, what does not do it for me at all and frankly I find it boring: spanking.

          Whether it’s the “tee-hee, aren’t we being naughty?” fluffy handcuffs kind or the serious “whip ’em till you raise welts and they bleed” kind, just do not see the appeal.

          Not that it sends me into spasms of pearl clutching, more like “Ah, good story, enjoying this, and now we come to the sexy bit – ah. Spanking. Skipping right ahead to the next part…”

          There was one small fandom for which I was desperately trawling for fanfiction, and unfortunately the one person writing copious amounts of new fanfiction for it had some kind of spanking fetish, which they tried to pass off as “non-sexual spanking”.

          Certainly within the stories the spanking was not in a sexual situation, but honey, you’re writing twenty variations on “X spanks Y for disciplinary reasons” (and some of those are not “parent spanking teenage child” but “husband spanks wife”) – it’s sexual for you.

          Also humiliation, whether verbal or otherwise – I know some people have it as a kink and only if it’s consensual and agreed upon beforehand, but nothing (not even spanking) will make me “nope” out of a story faster than party A humiliating Party B.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        There is no way beneath the heavens that it is not meant as a trap.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      My gut reaction is “fetishes are irrational, so why talk about mine on a rationalist site?”
      Do you have a serious thesis this is for?

      • suntzuanime says:

        Counterpoint – fetishes are psychological, so it makes perfect sense to talk about them in the comments of a psychiatry blog.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Touche. =)
          What do we know about the etiology of fetishes, anyway? There’s the “contagious” model, where someone will say “I had a girlfriend who liked me to spank her, and ever since it’s been way easier for me to get off with spanking.” Then there’s the same model that’s PC for homosexuality: you’re born with your fetishes. This accords with my experience. I can definitely remember being interested in… things before puberty (and I was never sexually abused).

          • Protagoras says:

            I’ve always assumed it’s a little from column A, a little from column B. There seem to be some things I’m into because of some experience or relevant person, but sometimes that isn’t enough to get me into something, and there are also cases that seem to be very difficult to explain in that way.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            I don’t know if I’d say it’s genetic, but I’d guess that paraphilias become formed and hardwired pretty early in life (before puberty). This is the case for everyone I know who has them, including myself.

            When people develop a fetish later in life it usually seems to be less intense–something they use to enhance their sex life as opposed to something that’s core to their sexuality.

          • Emma Casey says:

            Personally I’m a fetish sponge (rather than sponge fetish which is very different). I had a partner who was into a thing, then for months after we broke up I was still seeking it out of my own accord, despite never having cared about it before that.

            But then I had at least one of my fetishes at age like 10 despite no contact with it outside of TV.

          • Gazeboist says:

            If you were a sponge fetishist, that would be odd.

            If you were a sponge fetish, though, that would be downright bizarre.

          • 2stupid4SSC says:

            When I was young I got into men being dominated by women.

            This lead to an interest in men being penetrated by women.

            Which lead to an interest in men being penetrated by men who look like women (surgery, etc)

            Which has lead to an interest in men who look like women as a fetish in general. (no surgery, cd, etc)

            As a boy I had no sexual interest that I can remember in other boys, but can pretty clearly track a series of fetishes that I developed that have resulted in a sexual interest in a particular kind of ‘boy’.

            So that is a data point?

      • Siah Sargus says:

        I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious thesis.

        I would say that while fetishes et al. are irrational as desires, they still have to be accepted as desires you have, because letting something irrational cause you distress seems counterproductive, even if it is you being irrational. I’d also say that catering to other people’s irrational but easily met fetishes is money on the ground in terms of consequentialist preference utilitarianism.

    • Finger says:

      You might want to create an anonymous poll. Is there a reason you’re interested in this?

      • Bassicallyboss says:

        I can’t speak for Siah Sargus, but I would be interested in the results of such a poll, mostly to see if there is any interesting divergence from the general population. I suspect there wouldn’t be, but data is better.

      • Siah Sargus says:

        The same reason I’m interested in anything; curiosity. That, and seeing how many people share your taste compared to that total number of people sampled. I don’t know what sort of questions I’d ask first, though.

    • Anonymous says:

      mutual willingness,
      trust,
      knowing yourself,
      communication of needs,
      openness to experience,
      being mentally and emotionally ‘present’,
      searching for alternatives,
      and buttsex.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Related: Is there a difference between a fetish and a kink? To me, the former suggests something all-consuming (can’t get off without it) and the latter suggests an extra (vanilla soft serve is nice but sometimes you want it in that spooky chemical blue raspberry dip the ice cream trucks have), but that’s hardly how one comes to definitions.

      • Siah Sargus says:

        Well, in my opinion, I listed all of the “sexual preference” words in order of decreasing intensity. So your idea of those definitions is correct to me; an intense focus on a specific action or object as the source of most sexual desire. Not everyone considers the definition of a fetish to be that it is necessary for sexual arousal, but even so, saying kink is a way to downplay it to “optional but preferred”: shades of meaning and all that. Paraphillia and partialism are more clinical words that mean roughly the same thing as the broad definition of fetish, one dealing with inanimate objects (for example heels), one dealing with body parts (feet). Finally “turn-ons” is the least loaded, least specific, and most boring way to phrase the concept; viewing desire as simply the opposite of “turn-offs”.

      • keranih says:

        Is there a difference between a fetish and a kink?

        Of course there is. You’re obviously unfamiliar with the form of some irregular verbs.

        To wit:

        I have a rational and alluring sexual preference.
        You have an odd but harmless kink.
        He has a sick fetish for which he should seek treatment.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Ha!

          What was the name for this form of joke again? I recall MAD magazine did them in the 70s but presume they’re older.

          • keranih says:

            Weeellll, I wasn’t ever in the Mad Magazine demographic –

            – isn’t that a geek thing? To recoil irrationally from snide mockery? –

            – and the first I heard of it was Yes, Minister, which is more my style.

          • dndnrsn says:

            MAD Magazine was way better in the 60s and 70s – not that I was alive then – but I had the collections when I was a kid, and into the 70s and maybe 80s they actually had some really clever social and political commentary.

    • Deiseach says:

      I suddenly realise the appeal of anonymous commenting 🙂

    • Anonymous says:

      I’m pretty vanilla. Sometimes like to do ass spanking during sex (giving not receiving) but if someone isn’t into it, no big deal. I guess I have sort of an anti-fetish in that I only am strongly attracted to women of my own race (white).

      As for the elaborate stuff and/or needing something very specific in order to enjoy sex — I don’t really get it. I mean, I believe when people say that they have them that they aren’t lying but it isn’t something I really understand in any sort of internalized way.

    • onyomi says:

      I’m interested in whether Scott and any others with a psychiatry/psychology background believe in the theory that fetishes are a result of exposure to stimulus at a developmental stage. Clearly, this must be true to some extent, or it wouldn’t be possible for a fetish to “rub off” on someone, as apparently it has on another commenter here (this has never happened to me, however). This theory of why furries exist, for example, seems fairly plausible, unless a certain percentage of ancient Greeks suffered with unfulfilled desires to view porn with anthropomorphic wolves? Or maybe the people in ancient Greece who would have been furries if born today simply fantasized about centaurs and satyrs and sirens (oh my)?

      In other words, is the kink intrinsic and its expression culturally specific, or is it possible to pick up a kink purely as the result of circumstances (though probably coupled with some predisposition, since not everyone who watched Tailspin became a furry)? Though if the latter, this raises uncomfortable questions about e. g. homosexuality, etc. That is, at what point was it inevitable someone would be gay or straight? Conception? 6 months in the womb? 5? 12? I’m pretty sure it’s pretty darn early and relatively environment independent (and is it wrong to talk about preference for men or women on the same level as preference for feet, bondage, etc.? These latter “kinks” seem more secondary, malleable than “gay” and “straight,” though some people might say they are a big part of their identity and also very much not a choice).

      • LHN says:

        unless a certain percentage of ancient Greeks suffered with unfulfilled desires to view porn with anthropomorphic wolves? Or maybe the people in ancient Greece who would have been furries if born today simply fantasized about centaurs and satyrs and sirens (oh my)?

        There may be cultures that don’t cater to (or spark) those sorts of interests. But as you allude, Greek mythology is chock full of shapeshifting to animal forms and cross-species relations and semibestial humanoids. I don’t know to what extent it would map onto modern furries, but I’d be really surprised if no one in the classical world ever privately roleplayed Pasiphaë and the bull or Leda and the swan.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        My theory for why people have a bunch of weird kinks is that it keeps the gene pool active. No matter how weird you are, there is someone who finds you perfect, so you and the fetish-holder are more likely to reproduce.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Pondered, not endorsed: maybe rare kinks act to discourage inbreeding by making it less likely you’ll find someone who shares it in your local community?

      • Deiseach says:

        I am presuming you all know about the Pompeiian sculpture of Pan and the goat?

        The erotic imagery and items discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum used to be – I don’t know if they still are – kept locked away only available for viewing by gentlemen “of mature age and respected morals”. Similarly in the British Museum.

        • Long ago, I came across an old translation of Golden Lotus, a famous (and pornographic) Chinese novel. The sexually explicit bits had been translated into Latin instead of English.

          • LHN says:

            IIRC, Burton did the same for the racier passages of One Thousand Nights and a Night.

            (Which, considering what he left in English…)

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I really get off on making up stupid answers to questions like this.

  45. keranih says:

    RE: recent campaign events

    I find myself rather annoyed at reporters, bloggers and random commentators alike who feel they have a solid take on a stranger’s health based on a two minute video clip. And this on both sides – the ones who say “SHE’S ON DEATH’S DOOR” and the ones who say “NONSENSE FIT AS A FIDDLE!!” A pox on all your houses.

    If determining diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment were that easy to do, then the whole national mess of “Healthcare reform” is a farce – worse than a farce, a lie, and an industry built on lies, and people who spend their lives teaching doctors and nurses and medics – much less the docs, etc – are thieves and charlatans.

    (Which I don’t think they are.)

    To be clear – I think it’s appropriate to ask “Doesn’t she look tired?” –

    – even if you *are* The Doctor, and are doing so from malicious motives –

    – and always correct to question both the spin of the media and the spin of the campaigns, but I think that should be combined with a humility that admits that even “real” (ie, not claiming to be one on the internets) doctors use a number of tools to come to a conclusion, and two minutes of video aren’t enough to say much of anything beyond “that should get looked at.”

    (For those who have forgotten – I am sort of a #NeverHillary sort, in that there are people who have now or previously run for president who, if matched against Hillary, would make me feel I was obligated to vote for her. But I honestly can’t bring any to mind right now. My issue is about how we-as-citizen-owners-of-the-country ought to use our minds, not about Hillary’s health in and of itself.)

    *kicks aside soapbox, wanders off, muttering*

    • suntzuanime says:

      On the one hand, sure, but on the other hand, there had been questions being raised about her health for a while, and the media orthodoxy was that this was an absurd right-wing conspiracy, so I don’t think it’s inappropriate for the people who made correct predictions to feel vindicated.

      • Seth says:

        The jury is still out regarding any signficance of Hilary Clinton’s recent tiredness. Campaigning is physically exhausting. The manipulative view of the politics involved is that by rumor-mongering, the near-inevitable bad day would turn into a much bigger story of supposedly vindicating the original rumor.

        • suntzuanime says:

          The “jury is still out” because it only takes one #WithHer to deny reality and hang a jury. But from a rationalist perspective that’s looking for evidence rather than proof, making correct predictions is pretty impressive. At what rate would you say politicians collapse at public events?

        • Seth says:

          But it’s not “pretty impressive” to predict anything like “Politician X will have a bad health day sometime over the course of a grueling campaign”. That’s to the level of “God will visit wrath on this city of sin in terms of a sign via weather”. Any bad day then can be taken as “proof”. How often do politicians have any sort of health incident which could fit? It happens. I’m sure people are compiling past incidents now, to far better detail than I could.

          Why do you think something like “Hillary Clinton has secret chronic illness” has higher likelihood over the also-fitting and more typical “Hillary Clinton is campaigning hard enough to exhaust herself”?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Uh, I think you’re working off an outdated party line. Go download the latest talking points and try again.

          • nelshoy says:

            I’d say it is pretty impressive claim. To my knowledge, not many politicians have a history of keeling over in public during the campaign season. They assigned a higher probability to that event happening than I’m assuming you did. Time to update.

            Collapsing involuntarily is a pretty severe form of exhaustion. I’d think most politicians would rather rest in their tour bus or plane. Illnesses, on the other hand, are quite common in the elderly, and definitely not something you want people to fault you for if you are desperately trying to win an election.

          • Seth says:

            Can you restate your own argument? I thought it was that Hillary Clinton has some sort of chronic health problem, i.e. one serious and incurable. Anything along those lines requires believing that her disclosed overall information is dishonest. Now, candidates have been known to lie about their health problems, so it’s not utterly unbelievable. But where is the evidence of such a chronic health issues over a transitory one, given that minor health problems are common to anyone who does an enormous amount of public speaking and travel.

          • A Non Mous(e) says:

            Why do you think something like “Hillary Clinton has secret chronic illness” has higher likelihood over the also-fitting and more typical “Hillary Clinton is campaigning hard enough to exhaust herself”?

            1) She just took a month off actually campaigning and if she’s exhausted by less than 2 weeks of campaigning then that in itself is a sign that she’s in poor health
            2) Looking at the video she didn’t pass out, she tensed up in a seizure like manner and then collapsed.
            3) The people around her who are familiar with her and her health situation didn’t let her recover, they dragged her into the van because their primary concern is that video of the event leaks out (if no video, the press simply won’t report the incident). The most likely explanation for this behavior is that they’ve seen it before.
            4) She’s claimed to have had a concussion from a fall with no specific stated cause in the past.
            5) The story coming out of her camp changed in a transparently false way. First, nothing. Then they see the video and she was hot because it was extremely hot (it was in the 70s and low humidity). Then the story changed to pneumonia. Before the pneumonia story came out she embraced a random small child – allegedly when knowing she had a dangerous contagious disease.

            There are more reasons – mostly to do with prior assumptions since one group of people predicted this sort of thing was likely while the group now denying any problems said that was the talk of deranged people.

          • Seth says:

            @ A Non Mous(e)

            1) She was doing fundraisers, which counts also.
            2) All I can find is video of her stumbling while getting into a van. If that’s the worst the critics have, I’m skeptical there’s anything to this.
            3) 9/11 – I won’t criticize any caution when it comes to getting the leading Presidential candidate away from an open area.
            4) There’s a whole medical trail here.
            5) “fog of war”. Small point that she probably shouldn’t be embracing children, but that’s thin gruel.

            Again, predicting something notable will happen sometime is not a strong prediction.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            It would be easier to shrug this off and move on if the news media hadn’t spent all of 2008 insisting that John McCain was going to drop dead any second.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Seth – ” All I can find is video of her stumbling while getting into a van. If that’s the worst the critics have, I’m skeptical there’s anything to this.”

            angle 1
            angle 2

            …From the beginning of the clips, Clinton appears unable to stand, supported by the staffer holding her under the armpit and leaning heavily on the post behind her, very noticeably off her center of gravity. There is some movement that appears to be a failed step forward, and she sinks noticeably. at least one and possibly two staffers quickly support her weight and drag her into the van toes-down before the security detail screens her from view. “Stumbling” seems like a pretty inaccurate description.

            shortly after, seems fine

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            “Anything along those lines requires believing that her disclosed overall information is dishonest.”

            Prior probability=unity.

        • Homo Iracundus says:

          Since we’re apparently talking about this, why don’t we start quoting the last thread where Hillary’s Health was brought up, to see what people said?
          I seem to remember a lot of accusations being flung around…

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            And I was one of the people who piled onto the person who brought it up.

            I regretted it soon after, because of piling on.

            I regret it now because it looks like I should have given them a better chance. In any case, you should now consider them more believable and me less believable.

          • Homo Iracundus says:

            Don’t feel bad. I’m a breitbart reader and still didn’t take it at all seriously.
            I guess the only real moral here is to never underestimate the power of Meme Magic.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I think this is a good chance to not indulge in petty smugness by calling back prior discussions, particularly because of the gravity of the accusations.

          • Deiseach says:

            All I know about this is that she is supposed to be suffering from pneumonia, according to the news. The one site I saw questioning the story did so along the lines of “So if you knew on Friday she had been diagnosed with pneumonia, why did you let her keep campaigning?” and the conclusion they drew was that there is some underlying health problem which her campaign are trying to keep under wraps, so they’re putting out the “it’s pneumonia” story and sticking to it.

            I have no opinion one way or the other on her state of health. Campaigning is physically exhausting, this is the season to pick up respiratory infections, put ’em both together and it’s quite possible you have doctor saying “this is pneumonia, take a break” and candidate insisting she was fine to keep going.

            I don’t think any conspiracy theories from either Right or Left need be invoked, but if she does have some health problem, for feck’s sake be honest about it! Suppose she’s become asthmatic or something over the past few years, I have no idea – keeping it a big dark secret is only going to make things worse.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Pneumonia was the second explanation that was given (maybe the third, if you count angry denials, but I’m not sure how official those were). The first was heat exhaustion. But that has really bad optics, and the temperatures were only high-70s, so they offered pneumonia as an explanation later.

            So yeah, a constantly changing story doesn’t help any.

          • Aapje says:

            Well, I’m sure not going to bother commenting on this again. People apparently can’t discuss this rationally here, so….

      • Aegeus says:

        The thing is, some of it was an absurd right-wing conspiracy theory. The theories I heard before today (when we got an actual diagnosis announced) included everything from “microseizures” to “the concussion she got years ago is suddenly making a comeback.” Every staff member who got near her suddenly became a “medical aide” who was secretly administering drugs to keep her from dying in public.

        If there was a sane-sounding doctor on the right who actually called “pneumonia” (or at least some sort of lung disease), who could point out symptoms without using hyperbole like “Hillary was crippled at her last campaign appearance!”, I would boost their credibility significantly. But I didn’t see anyone like that. They were using the method of a conspiracy theorist, not a doctor.

        A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn’t mean I should smash my wristwatch.

        • LHN says:

          Though as someone who’s been discounting her opponents’ claims as trash talk, I was still struck by the contortions her supporters (at least in my social media bubble) underwent. Doctors on her side proved just as capable of diagnosing a patient based on a few seconds of cell phone video (“harmless syncope”), New York in September became a veritable sauna that might fell anyone. Then the sudden pivot when the pneumonia release came without even noticing that this contradicted the previous “she’s fine” and the airy dismissals that the campaign had been trying to keep something under wraps.

          Given the previous attempts to downplay things, I can only be agnostic on the pneumonia as the final diagnosis. (I don’t assume anything worse than that without data, but I do believe that if things were worse they wouldn’t say so.)

          There’s nothing new about that, of course (there’s a long list of presidential ailments that were minimized or covered up), but it does make analyzing a candidate’s or president’s health almost akin to Kremlinology.

          • Corey says:

            it does make analyzing a candidate’s or president’s health almost akin to Kremlinology.

            And not even particularly useful, given the US’s polarization and the VP candidates (who are, approximately, Generic Republican and Generic Democrat). There’s nobody who prefers Clinton to Trump who would prefer Trump or Pence to Kaine.

          • LHN says:

            True enough. I suspect that both VP candidates’ negatives are substantially less for swing or even opposing voters than the tops of their respective tickets. (If either Clinton or Trump had to step down, I’d expect their party’s poll numbers to go up, at least initially.)

          • CatCube says:

            @Corey

            Are you kidding me? I’m going to sit this election out, but if you flipped the Republican ticket to put Pence at the top I’d pull the lever for him in a hearbeat.

          • LHN says:

            I’d’ve probably voted for Pence if he’d run and gotten the nomination initially. (Unless I’d been seduced by the LP actually running a plausible ticket– plausible to govern, not to actually win, of course. My state isn’t a swing state anyway, so I might have taken the opportunity to vote a preference.)

            But going forward, what individual Republicans did in this campaign is going to inform my vote, which puts Pence is pretty much at the top of the Nope list for me.

            Which doesn’t mean he wouldn’t win, at least if Trump were sidelined for reasons that didn’t provoke his supporters to sit the election out.

            On the other hand, more non-Trump R-leaners might hold a grudge against Pence for allying with a perceived outsider than D-leaners would hold one against Kaine for running with a powerful long-term influential Democrat, whatever they thought of her.

            (But maybe not. I’ve had no luck predicting this election, and I’m not going to start now.)

          • Jaskologist says:

            Kremlinology, indeed.

            This is the kind of thing that really pisses me off. A week ago, I dismissed the speculation about Hilary’s health as basically conspiracy theories. It’s not that the concept of an old person being in bad health was all that crazy, I just didn’t buy that internet randos could actually diagnose somebody on the basis of a few scattered public appearances. Moreover, even if there was something there, her handlers would surely be competent enough to keep it hidden from us. No point in pursuing it further.

            And then she goes and collapses. And of course the first thing out is some nonsense about heat exhaustion, and now I’m supposed to believe them when they say it’s pneumonia, we promise, totally not lying this time? Also, they claim to have known this back during the same period of time they were answering questions about her health with “HOW DARE YOU?!”

            Who’s a Bayesian to believe when the choice is between liars and loons?

          • Corey says:

            @Jaskologist: The analysis that fits this, and pretty much all previous data, is the Clintons’ and the press’s mutual hatred. She believes (correctly IMO) that no matter what information gets out, it’ll get spun as negative, so better to not give an inch (even when it would have been better to just be transparent about it from the get-go).

            I don’t think this is fixable in time for the election. If, a year or two ago, she’d have went full transparent (as in “press pool, follow me in here while I poop”) it *might* have let relations cool to the point where she could be transparent now. But during the cooling process there would be an interminable string of nothingburger scandals, and if she tried it now those would still be going on up through the election.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            “The analysis that fits this, and pretty much all previous data, is the Clintons’ and the press’s mutual hatred.” It practically leaps off the screen at you.

          • CatCube says:

            @Corey

            I think that “Hillary is an inveterate liar” explains the evidence much better.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            And of course the first thing out is some nonsense about heat exhaustion, and now I’m supposed to believe them when they say it’s pneumonia

            Have you considered that these explanations are not mutually exclusive? There’s a reason why doctors prescribe bed rest for people suffering from respiratory infections, after all.

          • “Have you considered that these explanations are not mutually exclusive?”

            If the reason she overheated was that she had pneumonia, explaining what happened as “she overheated” is, if not strictly a lie, deliberately misleading.

            Rather like explaining that President Lincoln died because his heart stopped without mentioning that the reason it stopped was a bullet.

          • onyomi says:

            I can say I sympathize somewhat with Hillary on this point: you know your opponent is going to make a big deal of it if you are perceived to be suffering a health issue, so you try to power through and not let it get out. And having suffered through many scandals the past couple of decades, Clinton may well be in what some journalists have described as a “bunker” mentality: always trying to damage control whatever the next thing is going to be. I can understand how she’d get into a “bunker” mentality, given what she’s been through so far. Question is: do we want a “bunker” presidency, given there’s no reason to assume she’ll change her attitude when she wins? Sounds a bit like Nixon, who I don’t actually think was that bad a president, btw, but with an obvious tendency to make things worse and distract from the job of presidenting by covering up.

          • Jiro says:

            The Democrats used health as an issue against McCain in 2008. Having it fall on Hillary Clinton is a case of “do not call up that which you can’t put down”.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ David Friedman

            If the reason she overheated was that she had pneumonia, explaining what happened as “she overheated” is, if not strictly a lie, deliberately misleading.

            It took her doctor, what, all of seven hours to issue a statement about the pneumonia diagnosis? I suppose more information is better, but I don’t think it’s particularly dishonest to attribute Clinton’s collapse to overheating if it was, in fact, caused by overheating.

            @ Jiro

            The Democrats used health as an issue against McCain in 2008. Having it fall on Hillary Clinton is a case of “do not call up that which you can’t put down”.

            One slight hitch: Hillary’s life expectancy is somewhat better than her opponent’s, on account of her age and sex. McCain’s health also became more of an issue in virtue of his disastrous choice of running mate, but both Pence and Kaine strike me as competent and unremarkable selections.

    • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

      A purported video I saw of her really looks like she passed out.

      On my view, you would never hire a 70 YO person, male or female, to do the most demanding job in the world for possibly 8 years. If you *have* to do so, they need to clearly be in much better shape then the average 70 YO.

      She may have had a stroke, or something similar to it, and now this. Really I think she should step down for her running mate or someone qualified with good health to take the charge.

      • I may be wrong, but my understanding is that a candidate doesn’t have the option of stepping down for her or his running mate. The names on the ballot are determined by procedures under state law and not freely changeable.

        I’ve been wondering for a while what happens if either candidate drops dead of a heart attack, gets assassinated, or simply withdraws. Or both.

        (Which starts me imagining a terrorist attack at the debate).

        • LHN says:

          The candidate or the party could announce the intention to instruct a candidate’s electors to vote for someone else.

          There’s no federal law binding the electors. There are state laws in some states which do, which are largely untested. If the intended candidate was dead, I suspect that an enforcement action would be unlikely.

          Withdrawing is trickier. But the penalty for faithless electors is usually a fine, and there’s a decent chance that the laws wouldn’t past constitutional muster. A party campaign organization could probably provide assurances sufficient to convince most electors to risk it, especially if the alternative is splitting the vote and losing the election to the other candidate.

          • So the candidate would still be on the ballot, even if dead? But people would be told that voting for the candidate really meant voting for electors who had been instructed to cast their electoral votes for a different (and live) candidate?

            It must have happened at something less prominent than the presidential level. If so, did the knowledge that the candidate was dead result in fewer votes than would be expected either for the candidate if alive or for the replacement if on the ballot? Substantially fewer?

          • Phil says:

            @David Friedman

            Mel Carnahan beat John Ashcroft posthumously for the Missouri Senate race in 2000, he died in a plane crash 3 weeks before the election, the Lieutenant Governor (who became the new governor, because Carnahan was the sitting governor) announced that Carnahan’s widow would be appointed to the seat if Carnahan won the election, which he did

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Carnahan#2000_Senate_election_and_death

          • JayT says:

            In the 1972 election Thomas Eagleton was McGovern’s running mate, but it came out that he suffered depression, and they took him off the ticket (after the convention) in favor of Sargent Shriver. So, there is some precedent for someone being removed from the presidential ticket.

            That happened in August of ’72 though, and I would assume that there is some point where there’s no going back, but I don’t know when that would be.

      • pku says:

        Pet peeve: Presidents aren’t actually elected for eight-year terms, and they do, in fact, sometimes fail to be reelected. Especially if they start going visibly senile or something.

        • Bassicallyboss says:

          I read “possibly 8 years” as “4 years, but with the understanding that incumbents who seek re-election are rather likely to win it.” For that reason, I wasn’t bothered. Upon reflection, though, if one assumes that a candidate may not have the health needed to do a good job, then one’s estimate of the probability that a candidate will be in interested in and capable of running for re-election ought to be correspondingly lowered, so I guess “possibly 8” makes less sense in context than I first thought.

      • Tibor says:

        Is it really the most demanding job in the world though? From what Scott writes about being a medical doctor in a hospital, that seems like a much more demanding job to me.

        Anyway, I was surprised about the age of both candidates, I thought both were 10 years younger than they are.

      • I had pneumonia some years back. Two possibly relevant points–only possibly because pneumonia covers a pretty wide range and I don’t know how her case compares to mine:

        1. The pneumonia itself wasn’t so bad. I was scheduled to do a book signing and talk at Laissez-Faire books in San Francisco and did it, despite having pneumonia and a significant fever. That makes me wonder if her apparent near collapse is evidence that she has a relatively severe case. Of course, she is older than I was and under considerably more pressure.

        2. What was bad was the recovery. As the lungs were healing up they threw out a lot of liquid with the result that I was coughing violently for some weeks and ended up at Pennsic recovered from the pneumonia but running my bardic circle in a whisper because that was all I was capable of by that time. That would be a serious inconvenience for a presidential candidate campaigning.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Yes. I’ve had pneumonia, too, and on my experience it is completely implausible that you could have it bad enough to collapse and then do public speaking hours or even a few days later.

          ETA: Hmm, unless she was thoroughly hopped up on way better drugs than I had at my disposal.

    • Hyzenthlay says:

      I find myself rather annoyed at reporters, bloggers and random commentators alike who feel they have a solid take on a stranger’s health based on a two minute video clip. And this on both sides – the ones who say “SHE’S ON DEATH’S DOOR” and the ones who say “NONSENSE FIT AS A FIDDLE!!” A pox on all your houses.

      Just wanted to second this.

    • Emma Casey says:

      Surely Hilary being ill is a selling point right? “Vote Hillary, she’ll die soon and then we’ll get a Generic Democrat President which is a massive win”.

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Well, her VP choice seems to be roughly the same as her, political-views-wise, so it doesn’t seem like a massive win for the prog-wagon.

        • Emma Casey says:

          Sure but such people are weird and should be ignored.

          I’m considering the mainstream democrats who would like to vote for Clinton’s policies, or maybe even something to the right of them, but are put off by corruption worries/personal dislike.

    • HircumSaeculorum says:

      I agree, with the addendum that I don’t honestly care that much *what* her medical situation is.

      I would rather vote for chronically ill Clinton than for Trump. I would rather vote for Tim Kaine than for Trump. I would rather vote for the office to be filled via sortition that for Trump. I would rather vote for the office not to be filled than for Trump.

      Not too keen on Johnson or Stein either.

  46. rubberduck says:

    This feels like a silly question but why is it that whenever discussing discrimination in hiring, comparisons are almost always drawn to the population rather than the applicant pool?

    Imagine that Group A represents 25% of the population but only 5% of people in some profession. It is meaningless to talk about discrimination in hiring without knowing the portion of Group A in the applicant pool- there is unlikely to be active discrimination if the applicant pool is only 2% Group A, for example, while the reverse is true if the applicant pool is 40% Group A. Yet nobody ever seems to make this comparison, choosing instead to compare to the population as a whole. Why is this? Is it simply because statistics on the demographics of job applicants are too hard to come by, or is there some other reason that I am overlooking? (I will be charitable and assume people aren’t intentionally ignoring the obvious comparison for the sake of pushing a narrative.)

    • suntzuanime says:

      The pool of applicants may itself reflect discrimination. If black people aren’t applying to work for you, it might be your fault for sticking black heads on stakes outside your offices.

      • Sandy says:

        Yes, but it may reflect other people’s discrimination, or it may not reflect discrimination at all. If black people aren’t applying to work for you, it’s possible you work in a field that few black people go into in the first place, which means taking you to task for low representation that stems from problems in the school or university system doesn’t make much sense. Or if women aren’t applying for your extremely theoretical STEM job despite concerted efforts by government and social organizations to get women interested in extremely theoretical STEM jobs, it’s possible women just aren’t interested in such work.

        • suntzuanime says:

          It’s not possible that women differ from men in any way, I think you’ll find.

          • Sandy says:

            I was given to understand we were a sexually dimorphic species! How have they hidden this from me for so long?

            And there is some debate over whether men are more represented in engineering fields than women because of a documented gap in spatial cognition between the sexes.

          • trappings says:

            Sandy, methinks you’ll find that was sarcasm.

          • Sleigh-By Commenter says:

            Bear in mind the Internet makes sarcasm detectors malfunction and generate false positives and false negatives…

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I was given to understand we were a sexually dimorphic species! How have they hidden this from me for so long?

            That’s only because women (sorry, “people who are labelled as female”) are starved and maltreated and not allowed to play sports! If they were, there would be no physical differences whatsoever!

          • The original Mr. X says:

            That’s only because women (sorry, “people who are labelled as female”) are starved and maltreated and not allowed to play sports! If they were, there would be no physical differences whatsoever!

            Actually, that reminded me of Aristotle’s statement that “A woman is merely a defective man”… Always fun to see people who try to be so opposed to misogyny they inadvertently back into it.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Everyone here is getting trolled by each other and I will ban anyone who continues this pathetic cycle.

      • rubberduck says:

        That doesn’t sound like hiring discrimination to me- even if an office is surrounded by black heads on stakes, it is not impossible that they might still be fair when hiring blacks, or even actively select for them. Discrimination to me would be more if the applicant pool has a number of well-qualified blacks that HR is actively choosing not to hire because they are racists. My understanding is that this is what people have in mind when talking about discrimination in hiring, rather than looking at whatever factors might lead there to be fewer black applicants in the first place.

        • Jiro says:

          That doesn’t sound like hiring discrimination to me- even if an office is surrounded by black heads on stakes, it is not impossible that they might still be fair when hiring blacks,

          Having black heads on stakes outside the office is Bayseian evidence that they will be unfair when hiring blacks, even though it isn’t logically required that they are unfair.

      • doubleunplussed says:

        Related: it’s often said that men less often get custody of children in custody battles.

        But, apparently if you look at stats on how often they actually petitioned for it, they get custody about 50% of the time they try. It’s just that they don’t try often.

        Case closed, right? No discrimination evident. Well, not quite. Men also apply for custody less. It’s still possible that they only attempt to get custody when they think they have a particularly good chance of winning, after taking expected discrimination into account. If they’re doing this well, you would expect them to win about 50% of the time. Men who think their odds are significantly less than 50% don’t even try.

        It’s like we sometimes say in science: If you think the chances are better than 50% that your paper will be accepted, you should have sent it to a more prestigious journal.

        • Gazeboist says:

          I recall a “chop out the bottom” effect coming up on this site at some point in the past. In some academic field, women were (on average) vastly more successful than men, but men were a majority at all levels. The suggested explanation was that the women were filtered more strongly than the men, resulting in only the best women entering the field in the first place.

          • That may be my account of Bolt, Berkely Law School, when my sister went there. Women were, as I remember, about 10% of the class, and one year, of the six top students (two in each year), five were women.

          • Gazeboist says:

            That could be it. The story is associated with the west coast in my head.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            I think it was a link to some agency for programmers doing experiments with voice modulation to make candidates seem like they were of different genders.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            In Oxford before the 60s, the number of female undergrads was capped at a ratio of 1 to every 4 or 5 males. The effect was that women as a group consistently outperformed men as a group.

          • Gazeboist says:

            Of all possible things people could do or not do with gender ratios, why the hell would anyone do that? Not an accusation of lying, but if you happen to know the answer please do explain because I am baffled to hear that.

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s probably a mistake to think of Oxford as a single school, rather than a consortium. It didn’t have a policy that fixed it 1/6 female before 1974. Instead, most colleges were male, five female. Would you say that the Harvard-Radcliffe consortium limited its enrollment to 1/3 female before 1972? That would be a lot more reasonable than to say the same of Oxford.
            [Maybe Mr X is talking about something else, earlier.]

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Of all possible things people could do or not do with gender ratios, why the hell would anyone do that? Not an accusation of lying, but if you happen to know the answer please do explain because I am baffled to hear that.

            IDK, apparently they just didn’t like having too many women around.

            It’s probably a mistake to think of Oxford as a single school, rather than a consortium. It didn’t have a policy that fixed it 1/6 female before 1974. Instead, most colleges were male, five female. Would you say that the Harvard-Radcliffe consortium limited its enrollment to 1/3 female before 1972? That would be a lot more reasonable than to say the same of Oxford.

            From what I gather, there was a conscious decision not to build more women’s colleges to even up the ratio, and also to stop the women’s colleges from just accepting loads more applicants. So describing it as a cap doesn’t seem unreasonable.

          • Anonymous says:

            Nope.

          • Gazeboist says:

            That makes substantially more sense. And I agree with Anon that it’s a little misleading to call it a cap, though. It definitely functioned as one, but a functional cap (even if it’s an indirect result of policy) is sufficiently different from a direct policy cap that I think it’s worth calling out.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            In some senses, there was a direct policy cap. As far as I know, the imbalance resulted from a combination of the policy of the majority of colleges not to admit women, and the lack of funds for all-female colleges.

            From A Room of One’s Own: “We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least… It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.’ — Lady Stephen Emily Davies and Girton College”

          • Anonymous says:

            Sweeneyrod, but that isn’t a single policy. The colleges each had a separate policy (unlike Harvard-Radcliffe). Not entirely separate, as shown by the fact that 5 of them went coed in one year, but not entirely together, as shown by the fact that only 5 went coed; and one considered it five years earlier.

            And especially the lack of funds is not a policy. It is, as your quote indicates, the aggregate will of the donors. But does it make sense to talk of the incoherent mass of donors having policies? Do you speak of the policies of the market? What is the policy of the donors moved by the appeal you quote? Is it to increase the female proportion at Cambridge, or in Britain as a whole? The number 1/6 comes from a particular choice of aggregation.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Anonymous

            I agree, there certainly wasn’t a single policy. But one of the two necessary factors that caused the gender imbalance was the set of direct policies the male colleges had; i.e. there were deliberate policies that caused the imbalanced, rather than it just happening to occur, which is what I interpreted Gazeboist as implying.

          • Anonymous says:

            The question was: why this policy of 1:5, rather than the common policies of 1:0, 0:1, 1:1? The answer was: everyone is using a common policy.

            Let us return to Mr X’s claim that the women outperformed the men.
            Many people claim that the women’s colleges were at the top of the Norrington tables, but this claims that St Hugh’s was never high on the Table. I can’t find the actual tables, which were not official. (Also, I’m suspicious that women’s choice of degree would hurt them on this particular metric.)

        • Tibor says:

          I suppose there are also men who are not interested in the custody. If you don’t account for that, you will conclude that there is a discrimination against men where there might be none.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      It’s because taking the applicant pool into account is bad for the narrative. Simple as that.

    • pku says:

      Rule of the thumb: If there’s something that seems like it’d be a much better evidence for someone’s cause than the one he’s actually bringing up, it’s because the evidence doesn’t support him on that.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Because the comparisons to the population typically result in a more dramatic result, and anyway “pipeline” is a bingo card. To make things look even worse, you can make a comparison to a completely inappropriate population, like that of the city or county the home office is in (e.g. Santa Clara county is 20% Hispanic, why isn’t Apple?)

      It’s all culture war.

    • Anonymous says:

      The Law only cares about the applicant pool, FWIW.

    • Tseeteli says:

      Those discussions are being started by activists rather than researchers.

      When I’ve seen the stat defended, the typical argument is that the discussion-starter is trying to critique the the system as a whole.

      The view is that companies are knowingly participating in a sexist/racist system. And if they don’t want to be seen as sexist/racist, they should take steps to fix the leaky pipelines that are giving them a biased group of applicants in the first place.

    • Jeff Heikkinen says:

      “I will be charitable and assume people aren’t intentionally ignoring the obvious comparison for the sake of pushing a narrative.”

      Why assume that? There’s charitable, and then there’s credulous.

      I mean, I suppose there’s an alternative explanation – that the people who make these claims are so bad at statistical reasoning that it honestly doesn’t occur to them that the relevant comparison is to the applicant pool, not the population. But Hanlon’s Razor notwithstanding… I mean, that is a really incredible degree of stupidity that you’d have to attribute to them. There’s got to be some degree of stupid where “they’re evil” (at least in the sense of “they’re consciously dishonest on this point”) becomes a more charitable explanation than “they’re stupid”, and this seems well into that territory, doesn’t it?

  47. Wrong Species says:

    I’m looking for more “meta-political” books. To be specific, I want to read more books similar to the Righteous Mind, Moral Tribes and The Fractured Republic. What these books have in common is they acknowledge that we have different values and are focused more on trying to understand each other and work together rather than convincing everyone that their values are the only Good, True Values. Any suggestions?

    • hlynkacg says:

      I’d recommend The True Believer By Eric Hoffer, if you haven’t read it already. It’s reasonably short and IMO one of the better examples of the genre.

      • anonyi says:

        Seconded.

        • US says:

          Thirded.

          I incidentally covered Hoffer’s book on my blog and the link over my name will lead you to a blog post I wrote after having read the book.

          I haven’t actually read any of the books you mention so I’m not sure exactly what sort of material they cover, but I would note that there are lots of relatively ‘strange’ places you can find interesting stuff which may help you better understand these kinds of things. Books which you’d probably not be particularly likely to encounter while looking for stuff on these topics but which might nevertheless be quite helpful would in my opinion include works like Natural Conflict Resolution by Aureli et al. and The Biology of Moral Systems by Richard Alexander (I haven’t finished the latter book yet, but I have read enough of it to have no problem recommending it, and it seems like it covers the sort of material you might be interested in; as he states in chapter 1: “I am interested, first, not in determining what is moral and immoral, in the sense of what people ought to be doing, but in elucidating the natural history of ethics and morality—in discovering how and why humans initiated and developed the ideas we have about right and wrong”). Perhaps also some books about cultural evolution, like e.g. A Cooperative Species, by Bowles and Gintis, or The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, by Boyd and Richerson. Patricia Crone’s book Pre-Industrial Societies also includes some great stuff about historical aspects of politics/religion/culture, and that one is an easier read than the aforementioned texts.

          All of the books mentioned above, with the exception of Hoffer’s book, take some work to get through (a few of them quite a bit of work) and they may at least in that respect not really be all that similar to the books you mention; but in my opinion you should in general be very cautious about expecting any sort of light read on topics like these to get you all that far.

    • doubleunplussed says:

      The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker isn’t explicitly about meta-politics, it’s about human nature. But it has so much overlap with The Righteous Mind that upon remembering something I read in one of them, I can never remember which of the two it was in. So if you liked The Righteous Mind you might like The Blank Slate

    • cassander says:

      Albion’s Seed is a must for american politics. Scott’s review is good but the full treatment is fascinating.

      James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” is not about politics per se, but about the behaviors of large organizations and is essential to understanding why organizations behave the way that they do.

    • Mr Mind says:

      The logic of political survival.
      It’s game theory applied to politics in a way that explains why dictators, electors and presidents behave the way they do, very rational and insightful.

    • H. E. Pennypacker says:

      Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The false coin of our own dreams by David Graeber if you want to read something that very much fits what you described but will probably (I’m assuming here based on the average SSC commenter) disagree with a lot of your beliefs.

      Here’s a much shorter article on the same topic by the same guy.

    • Emma Casey says:

      “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left” also by Yuval Levin is excellent.

    • multiheaded says:

      Discourses on Livy

  48. Finger says:

    I’m a person in my mid twenties thinking about my career options. 80,000 hours recommends going in to AI research as a high impact career path. How can I figure out whether this is a good fit for me? I’m good at programming (relative to my former peer group of computer science students at a top university) and decent at math (was in accelerated math classes as a high school student, but I found them reasonably difficult). Is there any easy way for me to predict whether I would make a good researcher or not? People tell me that my blog is insightful, but I have no idea whether insightfulness in SSC type topics predicts insightfulness in math/computer science topics, or even whether insightfulness is an important characteristic in a researcher. I took http://www.iqtest.dk/ and scored 118, but that test is supposedly normed very hard (based on discussion online, I think a score of 118 probably corresponds to a score of 130 on a real IQ test), and I might have done better if I’d allocated time better or been less nervous.

    • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

      Mid twenties?

      But the best answer is almost always in medicine.

      As for high-impact AI research, the bulk of that is being done by former olympiad participants and near participants. If you are *really* dead set on being a techie, its probably best to git gud at the tools that exist around you. There’s now plenty of allright online teaching tools and online courses, so that should not be a terrible problem to find.

      What was your college major, if you graduated?

    • NL says:

      First, read Bostrom if you haven’t. Then try to read/work through Russell and Norvig (the standard undergraduate textbook on current AI).

      Do you have any experience with proof based math classes (not counting High School Geometry)?

      • AoxyMouseOnArgo says:

        For mathy AI research, its really close to useless to even try and participate unless one both has a rigorous understanding of a broad range of mathematics, computer science and algorithms, and is also brilliant.

        That means a firm grasp of what’s in an undergraduate mathematics and statistics curriculum, sans perhaps real analysis, and a deep knowledge of programming algorithms.

        Its a three year journey of dedicated studying to really hope to contribute to that body of research, and I don’t think the guy has the time.

        On the other hand, the merely bright and very dedicated have had success with online courses and self-directed interested studying.

        I guess if he is really brilliant, one shot is doing great at things like this

        https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree

        maybe not the site itself(apparently there exist good ones in biostatistics), but I hear top performers get letters of rec from professors at major institutions. Something like this is probably the guys best bet.

        • NL says:

          The idea was honestly that Russell and Norvig would scare him off/make him realize it wasn’t for him.

          • Finger says:

            I’m pretty sure I could get through Russell and Norvig. That textbook is used for undergrads right? Computer science classes have never been hard for me–I was working my way through SICP independently when I was 16. My concern would be that I’d put a lot of effort in to mastering this stuff and find it was all a waste because I’m only able to make progress at 0.1% of the rate of top researchers. Or I’d hit a wall partway through graduate school where I had difficulty mastering super advanced stuff.

            Edit: Looking over Russell and Norvig, a lot of this stuff doesn’t seem very new to me.

          • Zombielicious says:

            I wouldn’t really say AIMA is particularly difficult. More like a broad intro level beginner book on the subject. It’s great for its breadth more than its depth, imo. Check out Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop for something more intermediate, or Theory of Neural Information Processing Systems for something fairly advanced. Going through the recent big research papers wouldn’t hurt either.

            In general I’d ignore online IQ tests in favor of getting (many, many) books off Amazon or Libgen and actually studying applied math and computer science up to a graduate level. See how you do on the problem sets during and after self-study and that should give a better measure of your aptitude. Consider other areas contributing to AI research if you’re not a math whiz, e.g. programming, hardware, neuroscience, bioinformatics, etc.

            I’m less pessimistic. AI is still a relatively young field with a lot of low-hanging fruit left. Most of the big advances in difficult fields get made by the top % of the talent pool, but there’s still room for mere mortals to exploit the stuff they don’t have time for. Aiming to be one of the leading researchers is probably overconfidence, but there’s still room in the middle for reasonably intelligent people. Fwiw though, doesn’t most research show people are happier in fields they’re actually good at? Unless you’re really drawn to the subject or do have monumental talent at it, your long term impact may be similar or better just doing what you’re good at and donating some of your disposable income towards various research endeavors.

            (Disclaimer: Interested in the field for a while, not in any way a PhD or professional researcher.)

          • LPSP says:

            People find satisfaction in fields at which they are optimally good at AND which they percieve as making the world better, in a general or other-centric sense. This means that it’s possible in practice for someone to find satisfaction from a job at which they suck if they can at least contribute and REALLY find it a boon to the world; and vice-versa, people can be satisfied with jobs that help no-one much except for themselves if they’re geniuses at the field. In all probability most people will be best to aim for a job that does both.

            So ultimately Finger’s question is not only if he’ll be good at AI research, but also if he can see it as a favour to the world.

            (notable non-contributing-to-satisfaction factors: money earned, prestige and social status of job, leadership and command, level of responsibilities, popularity, commonality, broader societal (inc. familial, peer, class, national/ethnic) expectations to participate, and finally ease or convenience of work, low/flexible hours etc.)

        • Finger says:

          What’s the best way to predict who’s going to be successful as a researcher after all of that dedicated study takes place? I’m pretty sure I could get in to a top grad school if I went back to school… my old algorithms study buddy now is a grad student at Stanford studying deep learning, and it didn’t seem to me like his abilities were significantly beyond mine. But if there’s some way to predict in advance that I’d be a mediocre grad student that could save a lot of time.

      • Finger says:

        Do you have any experience with proof based math classes (not counting High School Geometry)?

        Not really.

    • suntzuanime says:

      FWIW I got very similar scores on that and on a “real” IQ test within a few years of each other.

      • Deiseach says:

        I did slightly better on that one than on another Ravens Matrices test a little while back (102 vs 99).

        Plainly, associating with you all has increased my IQ level to “normal” 🙂

        “Unsolicited testimonial from a grateful reader –

        Thanks to Dr Alexander’s Amazing Osmotic Intelligence Increase Method, I gained three 1Q points in a matter of months! Dr Alexander’s Method requires no expensive equipment, no outlay on materials, no tedious counting of calories or abstaining from tasty treats – all you do is read and comment at a time and place chosen by and convenient to you!

        I heartily recommend Dr Alexander’s Method of Learning By Absorbing By Reading By Opinionating to anyone wishing to improve their IQ score, become more attractive to persons of their preferred gender(s), and raise their chances of surviving the forthcoming AI purge of the non-rational!

        Thanks, Dr Alexander!”

    • rubberduck says:

      I don’t have much to say re: career choices but with regards to the IQ test, the score I got from the online one is about 10 points lower than the one I got from a psychologist-administered test I took a few years ago.

    • pku says:

      FWIW, I found that 80,000 hours was too focused on sexy high-risk high-reward type stuff, and as a consequence wasn’t too impressed with them (they didn’t even do an expected-value calculation, and my back-of-the-envelope maths implied the other way). They seemed mostly like a mathy version of the “live your dreams! move to hollywood and be a rockstar”, without any evidence that they were more reliable than the musician version. OTOH, I’m generally more pessimistic than them on AI research.

    • TMB says:

      I don’t know, but I just took the test and I got 130.

    • LPSP says:

      If 118 corrects to 130, what about 138?

      Who here figured out 34, 36 and 37? I whittled down the first two to some likely possibilities and then guessed, but I have no clue for the latter.

      • TMB says:

        34 is arithmetic, right?

        skipped the other two.

      • Anonymous says:

        36. Va rnpu ebj naq pbyhza, gurer vf bar cvpgher va juvpu gur pbyberq oybpxf pbzr sebz rnpu bs gur obggbz, evtug, naq yrsg. Nzbat cvpgherf jvgu gur fnzr fhpu bevragngvba, gur pbybef bs gur tebhcf bs oybpxf crezhgr.

        37. Gur pvepyrf nqinapr bar fdhner jvgu rnpu cvpgher ohg ner bofpherq ba qnex fdhnerf. N pvepyr guhf bofpherq jvyy or bs gur bccbfvgr pbybe jura vg vf erirnyrq ntnva.

        • LPSP says:

          V jvyy unir gb zrqvgngr bire gurfr jvgu fbzr tenivgl gb frr ubj gurl pbhyq or qrqhprq. V fhfcrpgrq fbzrguvat gb qb jvgu n erthyne fcnpr fuvsg va 37 ohg pbhyqa’g frr jung qrgrezvarq gur qbg’f pbybhe, naq V ybbxrq znvayl ng gur engvb bs yratguf gb pbybhef va 36.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I still don’t understand 36, despite reading the rot13’d discussion.

        What about 38 and 39?

        I got 122, FWIW. I thought I was going to ace the test until those last few burned through my clock.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          rot13ed:

          36: Vg’f n pbzcyvpngrq “Fhqbxh” bar (gurer ner frireny punenpgrevfgvpf gung unir gb nccrne bapr va rnpu ebj naq pbyhza). Gur fvzcyr punenpgrevfgvpf ner bar yvar bs guerr bs rnpu bs gur pbybhef, naq bar puneg tbvat yrsg, bar evtug, bar hc. Gur zber pbzcyvpngrq barf ner bar pbybhe orvat n yvar bs 3, n yvar bs 2, naq n yvar bs 1; nabgure pbybhe orvat 3, 2, 2; naq gur guveq orvat 3, 1, 1 (va grezf bs ubj znal oybpxf gurer ner va n yvar va n tencu). Naq rnpu pbybhe vf n qvssrerag bar bs gubfr cnggreaf va rnpu ebj (r.t. oynpx vf 3, 1, 1 ng gur gbc, 3, 2, 1 va gur zvqqyr, naq 3, 2, 2 ng gur obggbz (gur 3 orvat va gur nafjre)). Gurer zvtug or shegure cnggreaf gb qb jvgu beqref bs gur yvarf (be n zhpu fvzcyre jnl bs ybbxvat ng guvatf) ohg V guvax gung vf rabhtu gb trg gur evtug nafjre (nygubhtu V qvqa’g unir gvzr jura V qvq gur grfg). Fb hayrff V’z zvfgnxra, gur nafjre vf S.

          38: Vg’f fbzrguvat gb qb jvgu gur pbearef orvat genafsbezrq ol gur rqtrf. V gubhtug V unq gur nafjre, ohg ba ersyrpgvba vg’f abg pbeerpg.

          Ab vqrn sbe 39.

    • Dániel says:

      You don’t have to figure this out right now. Right now AI research is in the middle of a big democratization process. It is splitting into several branches. To invent something like Variational Autoencoders, you have to be a math genius. To combine it with other known models, and invent a Variational Autoencoder / Generative Adversarial Model, it’s enough if you are good at math and a very good software hacker. And if you want to build a good image classification model, it’s enough if you can program a bit, and you are patient enough to play with the parameters, see my little weekend project Training an InceptionV3-based image classifier with your own dataset.

    • Dahlen says:

      I took http://www.iqtest.dk/ and scored 118, but that test is supposedly normed very hard (based on discussion online, I think a score of 118 probably corresponds to a score of 130 on a real IQ test)

      Really? That’s… very uplifting news. Literally.

      • Anonymous says:

        No, not really. There is no norm study and the result you get from it is completely meaningless.

        Some guy somewhere until the internet was told that he has an IQ of 130 based on a test he took in elementary school. That number was rounded up twice, once by his mother once by him. Then he took the meaningless internet test and was disappointed by the more or less random result he got. Et voila the test is normed low. Some guy in HBDChick’s comment section said.

        • Deiseach says:

          I think me scoring 102 on that test is fairly accurate, given that it’s mathematically-based and I am pure hopeless at maths/pattern recognition/spatial manipulation (I managed to get lost not once but two times in my small home town where I have lived all my life – no sense of direction!). So I think any scores you’re likely to get are the real thing, and not “should add on X points because it’s marked hard”.

          • Loyle says:

            Counterpoint: I scored 138 and I’m pretty damn sure I’m a dumbass. I may have a special affinity for the types of questions it asked, or I’m just phenomenally lucky that my guesses are that good, but it in no way reflects what it says it’s measuring. I’m at least pretty sure you’re smarter than me.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Loyle
            Had you done any IQ tests prior to this one?

            @Deiseach
            You would likely score higher on an actual IQ test, as they usually have a verbal reasoning component.

          • Loyle says:

            Any real IQ tests? Probably not. Unless one or more of the tests given when I was in school was a stealth IQ test. I’ve played a few browser games masquerading as IQ tests, but I can’t say I remember their results. I do believe 138’s the highest I’ve gotten on one.

          • I know nothing about that particular test but I think it’s pretty obvious, reading your posts, that your IQ is well above a hundred.

          • Deiseach says:

            Oh, had it a verbal portion I’d be confident of crushing it, but the maths involved means the resultant score stacks up fairly well with my estimation of my mathematical ability, i.e. none.

            So on that basis it seems like a reliable test for those of you wondering if it’s extra-tougher than the others you took.

  49. AR+ says:

    I long felt that I should just always carry an Epipen(substitutions allowed) despite having no known allergies. I mean, if I AM allergic to some specific species of wasp that I’ve just never been stung by yet, or some fruit that I’ve just never eaten yet, how am I ever going to find out except when I start going into anaphylactic shock, and wouldn’t it be nice to have an Epipen(substitutions allowed) on hand when it happens?!

    But no, it’s prescription only, so that’s not happening. I guess I’ll just have to die of an unknown allergic reaction first.

    • nelshoy says:

      Wow. I would personally never carry something as big as an epipen around just for the off-chance that I’m highly allergic to something I’ve never been exposed to. Do you carry around supplies for other emergencies?

      You could get blood work done to see if you have common allergies. I think there are also over-the-counter bronchodilators you can buy.

      • AR+ says:

        I feel like I should do a lot of things that I ultimately decide aren’t worth the trouble.

        But I actually didn’t know how huge they are until looking it up just now. I’d have expected something more like a military-issue atropine injector, which is, like, Sharpie sized.

      • Yrro says:

        I wouldn’t mind having one in my emergency kit in my car next to the tourniquet and fire extinguisher.

        I don’t really expect to catch on fire or bleed to death, but I’d feel really shitty if I had the opportunity to help someone else who was and couldn’t. And it’s very low cost and low effort to me.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      Would you recognize an anaphylactic shock if you had one? I would not.

      There should be an app and/or Google Map integration that would let you locate any of the many Epipens near you when emergency strikes.

    • Amanda says:

      I don’t know what percentage of the population carries an EpiPen, but there may well be one around in the unlikely instance of you ever needing it. I had to carry one around for my kid for a few years, and I always considered it a bonus that wherever I went, someone (me) would have an EpiPen available for someone who needed one. It never happened, but I got to imagine saving the day, which was pleasant, and I just ignored the possibility of inconvenient legal problems later 🙂

    • Deiseach says:

      The best way to avoid any such mischances, AR+, is not to go outside your door at all. How if you were to be crushed beneath a falling piano? Furniture is treacherous!

      • MugaSofer says:

        77% of accident-related injuries happen in the home.

        Clearly, the safest thing is to become homeless.

        • Patrick Merchant says:

          Live outside? Are you crazy?? “Outside” is where the Oxygen Holocaust happened!!!!

          The only solution is to fly to the moon. Nobody’s ever died there.

      • “Falling piano”

        There was a very old computer game, possibly for the TRS80, where you stuck in an insane asylum trying to get out. If you looked up at the ceiling a piano fell on you.

        That, at least, is how I remember it.

    • Garrett says:

      As an EMT:
      I’ve never actually had to administer epinephrine to anybody in 4 years. Local demographics probably play a part in this. Ie. people in our service area who know they have allergies are responsible enough to either avoid the allergen and/or carry an epi-pen with them when conditions occur.

      Allergic reactions are rarely fatal the first time – they develop over repeated exposure with symptoms getting progressively worse. If you have an allergic reaction (eg. breaking out into hives), you’ll know something’s up and you can see an allergist to see what’s going on.

      People having breathing problems are one of the top priorities for emergency responders. If you have a cell phone and call 911 you’ll have people there as fast as possible.

      • We had such an incident a few days ago. One of the people having dinner at our house had a pretty strong allergic reaction, possibly to peach leather. We called 911. I think the EMT’s arrived within five minutes.

  50. Scott Alexander says:

    Lots of people like classic cars and say they’re more attractive than modern cars. Why don’t we make cars that look like classic cars anymore?

    • Anon. says:

      I’m gonna guess that it’s probably illegal, new cars have to follow all sorts of standards that make them less dangerous to pedestrians.

    • Eltargrim says:

      My understanding is that classic cars are murder on aerodynamic performance, and hence perform poorly on mileage and emissions metrics.

      • fubarobfusco says:

        Nah, they’re just plain murder.

        Video summary: Crash a ’50s car head-on into a recent car. The people in the recent car will be knocked about a little but not severely hurt. The people in the ’50s car will be crushed to death as the engine comes through the passenger compartment.

        • Eltargrim says:

          I have no doubt that the aesthetic of muscle cars could be preserved with modern crumple zones and engineering design, given that most of these features are “under the hood”, so to speak. It’s a fair bit harder to improve aerodynamic performance while also maintaining aesthetic, as the surface we see is also the surface that interacts with air.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        But is it any worse than SUVs, which lots of people get even when they don’t have big sporty families just because they like the aesthetic?

        • LHN says:

          SUVs are, I think, still more aerodynamic than midcentury cars. And they benefit from the regulatory wrinkle of being classified as trucks. The choice would be producing cars with worse mileage (running up against CAFE, and possibly safety issues for projecting surfaces) or making trucks with even worse mileage than they have.

    • keranih says:

      Why don’t we make cars that look like classic cars anymore?

      (snip) several snide comments to the tune of “really??? You have to ask?”(snip)

      Federally mandated restrictions on mpg of the national fleet, plus a side of customer preference for more maneuverable and fuel-sparing cars. But mostly the first one.

      Most of the people I talk to who have expressed a fondness for American Heavy Metal talk not just about the looks, but also the size, roominess, and the ability to accelerate.

      The gas guzzling and mechanical attention required every 2K miles gets less attention. So does the way that people now walk away from crashes that completely totaled the cars in numbers that they never used to. (Even for allowing for crumple zones that total cars at lower impact speeds.)

      • LHN says:

        Most of the people I talk to who have expressed a fondness for American Heavy Metal talk not just about the looks, but also the size, roominess, and the ability to accelerate.

        There’s a fair amount of rose-coloring there. Modern cars tend to have better acceleration than those of earlier decades when comparing comparable models, despite being heavier. (To the point that there have been tut-tutting articles about their having too much power, where they could be so much more fuel-efficient.)

        The size issue is also somewhat deceptive, given that a lot of the US market responded to the downsizing wave by moving to bigger vehicles. (I can testify that cars when my building was built circa 1960 can’t have been much bigger than mine is now, or they wouldn’t have fit between the pillars of my parking space.)

        But modern cars are mostly boring. (What styling there is seems to be concentrated on tiny cars or on expensive sports models.) I’m guessing the aerodynamics is the biggest part, but also cars lasting longer. It’s one thing to make a fashion statement when the car’s expected to rust out in five years, another if it’s expected to still be on the road in large numbers in fifteen or even twenty.

        • keranih says:

          The size issue is also somewhat deceptive, given that a lot of the US market responded to the downsizing wave by moving to bigger vehicles.

          True – but they did so (had to do so) by shifting whole classes of vehicle ie, from sedans to SUVs. Cars shrank. People comparing apples to apples still have a point.

          People like what they like, but as a person who is a bit shorter than the average male person, I’m not really cramped in the smaller cars, and I dislike having to pay for all the gas a SUV burns. Or a Mustang, or one of the old dino-bone burners. So while I think I understand what people say they miss in the old cars, I don’t have much regret.

          Plus, as you say, you can spend a life time driving today’s beater into the ground, instead of just a summer.

          • LHN says:

            Though modern SUVs are more fuel efficient than classic cars, so even through the various market distortions imposed by regs, it’s possible to retain space and do better on fuel and safety.

            (My favorite bit of perversity was Cash for Clunkers, where we were able buy a crossover– i.e., a car-chassis, but an SUV for regulatory purposes–, but a car with the exact same gas mileage didn’t qualify. Grateful though we were for the– utterly undeserved– free money, the sheer dumbness of how that act alone was implemented may have completely disillusioned my wife re the entire process of legislation.)

            That said, old large cars had bench seats, which (especially in the pre seat belt days if people were willing to squeeze) offered significantly larger passenger capacity than comparable cars do now. To get similar capacity requires a minivan or a three row SUV, which is a big reason those became the station wagon equivalent of the current generation.

        • Psmith says:

          Modern cars tend to have better acceleration than those of earlier decades when comparing comparable models,

          Not in the US, not when your benchmark for comparison is price. The fastest fully-loaded muscle cars of roughly 1967-1972 would run you about $25,000 new in today’s dollars and do a sub-13.5 quarter mile. I don’t believe there’s anything today that will do the same.

          (Except sportsbikes. Which, incidentally, are a good deal faster than their counterparts circa 1972–although possibly not faster than the fastest road-legal two-strokes of the 80s and 90s, at least with the same displacement.).

          The fastest current Challenger is faster than the fastest old Challenger, but it also costs ~3x as much. Tires and brakes have gotten better, and the muscle cars couldn’t hang in the corners even back in the day, but straight-line acceleration has yet to return to its peak c. 1970.

          • LHN says:

            Fair enough. My impression had been that the typical car not marketed specifically for speed/acceleration (not so much muscle cars as typical daily drivers) had better pickup now than then. But it’s not an area I’ve made a close study of, and I may well be wrong.

            (They’re certainly anecdotally better than when I was learning to drive. But that was close to the nadir of the post-oil shock redesigns.)

          • JayT says:

            That’s not quite right Psmith. The Camaro SS, Mustang GT, and the Challenger R/T all are faster than 13.5 in the quarter mile. They all start around $35K, so a bit more than the ’70s cars, but in general all cars have gotten more expensive due to safety and pollution regulations.

            That said, the Subaru WRX will do the quarter mile in 13.6 seconds for $27K.

          • LHN says:

            I wonder to what extent higher prices reflect the fact that the cars last longer. If a new purchase is buying 200,000 miles of car use on average instead of 100,000 miles, it’s not unreasonable for that to be reflected in the price.

            Likewise, a car with an expected remaining lifetime in years or miles comparable to a 1970s new car may cost less, though of course it’s hard to directly compare a good used car with a brand new one. (Since “newness” itself has a demonstrable monetary value.)

          • Psmith says:

            The Camaro SS, Mustang GT, and the Challenger R/T all are faster than 13.5 in the quarter mile. They all start around $35K, so a bit more than the ’70s cars, but in general all cars have gotten more expensive due to safety and pollution regulations.

            That said, the Subaru WRX will do the quarter mile in 13.6 seconds for $27K.

            There is no great stagnation!

            (good points, good research, I stand corrected, and now I think about it someone brought up the WRX the last time I started talking about this.)

          • Xenophon says:

            Heck, my 2012 Ifiniti G37x does the ¼ mile in 13.7 (just shy of your benchmark), and it’s not even a muscle car.

            Rather a bit more spendy, though.

        • Deiseach says:

          Possibly also nostalgia? Something from ten years ago just looks dated and out of fashion, something from fifty years ago looks cool and stylish, whether it’s fashion or cars or the future we were going to have 🙂

          • Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

            –Oscar Wilde

          • LHN says:

            Though I think that one of the things that happened is that automotive fashion changes much more slowly these days than in the past. A typical car from 1955, 1965, and 1975 are much more different from one another than a car from 1995, 2005, and 2015 are. (Or so it seems to me, anyway.) The change isn’t zero, but it’s not as dramatic.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I’m going to go out on a flyer here and suggest we should look at automated manufacturing techniques, error rate and rework cost.

      The fuel consumption requirements are for fleet sales, not individual cars, and yet even the concept cars and small runs don’t look as unique and interesting as the older cars.

    • BBA says:

      We tried that once. It was called the PT Cruiser. See why we stopped?

    • The PTCruiser is designed to look like an old fashioned car. I assume it was reasonably successful, since I see a fair number of them.

      • Poxie says:

        They did sell a million plus, but I’m surprised you see a fair number – I drive a lot, and I really don’t see ’em on the road anymore. (I don’t see many battleaxes or broadswords either, of course, so …)

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      Would anyone buy them? Would anyone buy perfect modern replicas of masterpiece paintings?

    • Brian Slesinsky says:

      It’s been done, sort of. The “new” Beetle and the PT Cruiser were successful for a while.

      Some reasons they’re still different:
      – Airbags, other safety standards.
      – Higher standards for bumpers. (A low-speed collision shouldn’t require a trip to the shop to fix the chrome.)
      – Fuel efficiency (better streamlining, better ways to bend metal to get streamlining).
      – Higher expectations for passenger comfort. (Nobody wants bench seats, etc.)
      – All cars are air conditioned now. Older cars often relied on getting good airflow by opening windows.

      • Protagoras says:

        Also the Miata. So it works well enough that car makers do it once in a while, and it usually has some success, but not enough success for them to do it more often.

    • sohois says:

      Lots of people is a pretty fuzzy measure. Is lots of people a sufficient number to actually support a new model that has such an appearance? Classic Cars suffers from the same issue. There are hundreds of classic cars, but I expect different classic car appreciators have different ideas of what is attractive. Is it classic cars from the 30s? From the 50s? The 70s? Classic Cars from Europe? From America? So even if the number of people is sufficiently large, you couldn’t simply produce one model and capture the entire market as there would too much divergence in preferences.

      And then there’s the question of whether people simply appreciate the appearance, or whether there’s some kind of halo effect where because people like the history, or the old brand, or the mechanics or any number of other factors, they also like the appearance of the car. Basically would people only buy cars that are actually classic, and old, or would they buy anything that mimics a classic car?

      I’ll end by pointing out that some UK manufacturers do make cars with a very classic appearance, but they are very niche. The Caterham 7 was one such model, which even won a lot of awards when it was released several years ago. Pretty much every model of the Morgan Motor Company have old school appearances (and they are also quite notable since they produce every car by hand, eschewing modern production lines)

    • Tibor says:

      This is very subjective (also from a European perspective), but I think many people like to have a look at an American cruiser from the 50s every now and then but they would quickly get bored with a car like that. Personally, I really like very old veterans (1940s and before) but if I could choose between a new BMW and a remake of an old veteran, I’d buy the BMW. I also think that most cars newer designed between the 1950s and 2000s (not including either decade) are quite ugly, I don’t know how widespread that view is.

    • bluto says:

      The two big reasons are pedestrian crash requirements and fuel efficiency. Cars must push pedestrians up in all collisions and cars have pressure to look more like the Prius to get better fuel economy. Designers can hide these with some style features but it cuts an enormous number of old designs out.

    • LPSP says:

      That’s an interesting question. Allow me to relate it to Dungeons and Dragons.

      DnD pioneered the use of character or personality metrics in roleplaying with the introduction of the Alignment chart. Players, npcs and villains alike could be measured along two different axis – Good vs Evil and Order/Law vs Chaos – as a tool to both inform the formation of alliances and rivalries, as well as a fun tool to be diagnostically applied to outside franchises.

      The system was very popular and successful, and lead to many other systems of personality measurements since. Almost all of these are an advancement or refinement over the original DnD, and certainly any modern ones created wholesale-or-otherwise in the last two decades would completely outclass DnD in terms of functional personality prediction. Yet the DnD GvE/OvC axis remain the most popular in terms of discussion, comparison and application.

      In chats about roleplaying and character systems, I have compared the DnD system to the Ford Tin Lizzy. It’s a thing of beauty, an important piece in the history of its kind that stood for development, innovation and refinement, and without-which we would not have the greatnesses of today. Yet no-one drives around in a Tin Lizzy, because it is an archaic and outdated car that ultimately constitutes a substantially worse means of getting from A to B, among other things. Tin Lizzys are still made, bought, traded, sold and put to use, because it’s a piece of beautiful history and there’ll always be collectors and enthusiasts with the time and money to spend owning (or at least watching) the piece in action, nevermind the television and movie uses.

      But that’s the limit – entertainment and amusement. The Tin Lizzy only exists now as an end unto itself, and not as a means or facillitator. Herein the distinction lies in the DnD roleplaying axis. It may be outdated, but ultimately no role-playing tool has pragmatic value (… or HAS IT?). Coupled with the low cost of simply knowing that is needed to partake in its use, and it isn’t surprising that the sheer heritage factor of the alignment chart has kept it dominant in its field.

      I think this sort-of answers or addresses the question, and at least it was fun to type.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        To be fair, the original single-axis D&D alignment system is much more usable and avoids most of the problems with the newer two-axis one.

        Law and Chaos allow for a traditionally heroic style of play, with combat against dragons as a literal Chaoskampf, while still allowing for conflict within the Lawful races. It also captures the spirit of the Spengler-by-way-of-Robert E Howard cycle of Barbarism -> Civilization -> Decadence, by allowing extremes of Law to be as inhospitable to life as extremes of Chaos.

        Adding in a Good vs Evil axis is, at best, redundant and more often sabotages the system.

        Edit: An alignment thread in the SSC comments, more flame than race&gender or less? Time to measure our nerd quotient.

        • LHN says:

          While the two-axis system is newer, at 42 and 39 years old respectively the two are virtual contemporaries with respect to current RPGs. The Law-Chaos axis was well suited to the sort of swords-and-sorcery fantasy it was originally lifted from. (Explicit in Anderson, Lieber, and Moorcock, arguably implicit as you say in Howard. I’m not sure if there’s anything or anyone that can be characterized as “lawful” in Vance.) But the Tolkien influence that hit the game big as it expanded really did call for recognizable (and magically effective) Good and Evil. Sauron may be a tyrant, but he represents something other than an extreme of Law, and likewise Gandalf can’t really be captured on a Law-Chaos spectrum.

          Obviously the alternative is to dispense with alignment entirely the way most later tabletop games did. But genre fantasy and allied genres circa 1980 were full of objects and people of inherent Evil and well-defined good and light, with sharp edged transitions from one to the other. (Darth Vader and the risk that Luke might follow his path, Phoenix becoming Dark Phoenix, then finding redemption at the cost of her life, etc.) I’d say the 2-axis system, while always a bit clunky, was a natural elaboration as the inspirations for games broadened.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Well I can’t speak to the Dark Pheonix Saga, I’m more of a DC guy, but fitting Tolkien’s and Lucas’ systems to Law-Chaos is actually not too hard.

            Tolkien was operating from an implicitly Judeochristian framework, where one of the titles of God is “lawgiver” and sin is fundamentally a transgression of divine law. Morgoth, Sauron and later Saruman all sought power outside of the law, literally introducing discordant notes into the song of Ilúvatar. Sauron embodies Chaos, and his patchwork armies of orcs and evil men enact largely random destruction.

            Lucas is similar, but arguably even more explicit. The Empire is strict and hierarchical, but also arbitrary and capricious. Darth Vader doesn’t mark Admiral Ozzel down on his quarterly review when he fails but simply kills him on a whim. The later Sith Code makes this explicit:

            Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
            Through passion, I gain strength.
            Through strength, I gain power.
            Through power, I gain victory.
            Through victory, my chains are broken.
            The Force shall free me.

          • LHN says:

            The various Enemies in Tolkien embody rebellion against the rightful and established order, but they (Sauron especially) establish extremely regimented states of their own, as Saruman does on a smaller scale. Saying that Mordor or the Shire under Sharkey is “really” more chaotic than Gondor, Rohan, or (especially) the bucolically anarchic Shire feels as if it’s straining to fit a definition. There’s always some of that in a defined alignment system, but I think that sort of thing takes it beyond usefulness.

            (I’m more of a DC person as well, but it doesn’t have a similarly iconic corruption arc that I can think of. Hal Jordan’s descent and redemption is as close as I can come up with, but that was a decade later and not very well done.)

          • Deiseach says:

            Sauron embodies Chaos, and his patchwork armies of orcs and evil men enact largely random destruction.

            Oh, I have to disagree with you there, Dr Dealgood! Sauron (and indeed Morgoth) are not Chaotic, their fault is excess of Lawfulness, where it becomes sterility and tyranny:

            Sauron was of course not ‘evil’ in origin. He was a ‘spirit’ corrupted by the Prime Dark Lord (the Prime sub-creative Rebel) Morgoth. He was given an opportunity of repentance, when Morgoth was overcome, but could not face the humiliation of recantation, and suing for pardon; and so his temporary turn to good and ‘benevolence’ ended in a greater relapse, until he became the main representative of Evil of later ages. But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.

            Their faults are the desire to have all things under their rule, under their one sole will as the dominant feature, with no dissent – slaves not subjects, every leaf on every tree (what trees are left) to move to their wish as they wish. They are very strong believers in Order, simply it is that the Order should be their Order and none others:

            In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants, by a triple treachery: 1. Because of his admiration of Strength he had become a follower of Morgoth and fell with him down into the depths of evil, becoming his chief agent in Middle Earth. 2. when Morgoth was defeated by the Valar finally he forsook his allegiance; but out of fear only; he did not present himself to the Valar or sue for pardon, and remained in Middle Earth. 3. When he found how greatly his knowledge was admired by all other rational creatures and how easy it was to influence them, his pride became boundless. By the end of the Second Age he assumed the position of Morgoth’s representative. By the end of the Third Age (though actually much weaker than before) he claimed to be Morgoth returned. If he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.

            Morgoth becomes – or rather, his acts turn – Chaotic out of his rebellion; if the Valar build, then he destroys what they build, he pulls down and burns and overthrows. When left to his own devices, he constructs huge citadels of overpowering and overbearing strength and discipline – Utumno, Angband.

            And so Sauron is like his master in this – being in rebellion, he has to destroy and pull down. But his armies do not engage in random destruction (apart from Orcish vandalism, which is more that when Sauron is lying low and not directly giving them orders, they have no aims other than mere survival) – see the infiltration of the half-orcs/men like orcs amongst the refugees fleeing the South and how Bill Ferny got roped into being an informer and spy. Uglúk of Isengard knows his business and can hold a disparate group of different Orc-tribes (from Moria, Isengard and Mordor) together for a reasonable fighting retreat until they are finally slain by the Rohirrim.

            And the danger to those on the side of Law and Order is the temptation for them to use the tools of the enemy for “good” ends:

            Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained ‘righteous’, but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for ‘good’, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great).
            [The draft ends here. In the margin Tolkien wrote: ‘Thus while Sauron multiplied [illegible word] evil, he left “good” clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.’]

          • So the ice age was Catastrophic Global Valargenic Cooling.

            Valaragenic?

          • LHN says:

            I’m guessing Tolkien would complain about mixing Quenya and Greek roots, but I don’t remotely know enough of the former to suggest a pure Quenya adjective.

          • Mary says:

            “Their faults are the desire to have all things under their rule, under their one sole will as the dominant feature, with no dissent – ”

            which is order, but the wrong order. One could — I’ve played with the notion of — have Order opposed by Chaos and Disorder both.

            You get some serious silliness in Law vs. Chaos. Like a description of pure Order as a flat featureless plain — which is nonsense, because it would have no objects to be ordered.

            Which, of course, contributes to the serious silliness of alignment, which is taking all the moral questions that the best and brightest have broken their hearts over for millennia, misunderstand half of them, boil them down to something as codified as a RPG rule book, and hand them over to sophomoric players (some of whom, indeed, will have the excuse of being sophomores).

          • cassander says:

            @mary

            >Like a description of pure Order as a flat featureless plain

            that’s why we stick with Planescape, where order is a literally clockwork universe.

        • LPSP says:

          I did not know the DnD axis was originally just an axe. Order vs Chaos is easily the most functional of the two current axis, and Good vs Evil is exactly as you say, a useless metric.

          SSC has an excellent standard for reasoned, focussed and dynamic discussion, especially on topics which don’t bring in regular invasions from interest groups. I could see some contentiousness but no flaming really from a chat. I’d bet £5.

        • cassander says:

          I’d agree, the problem with the system was good vs. evil. Lawful good and chaotic good made some sense, but if you were lawful evil, presumably you believed laws were good, so does that mean you should work to undermine them because you’re evil?

          • John Schilling says:

            I took it to mean you should work to impose and enforce evil laws, e.g. a totalitarian dictator or one of his enforcers. To the extent that this isn’t pure selfishness, I take the justification/rationalism to be that Law vs Order is much more important than Good vs Evil, and Evil Will Always Triumph Because Good Is Dumb. Thus, Team Lawful Evil is the only responsible choice.

          • LHN says:

            Not that the D&D framework is particularly coherent, but I suspect that reasoning tends more towards Lawful Neutral, with Lawful Evil being more about law and structure as a source of personal and organizational aggrandizement.

            As with so many things D&D, the Order of the Stick has a couple of compelling takes on the alignment in Redcloak and Tarquin.

          • hlynkacg says:

            The descriptions in the current edition frame the good/evil axis as Altruism vs Selfishness with the “neutral” alignments being stoics, fatalists, and nihilists. (LN, TN, CN, respectively)

          • Mary says:

            Law vs. Chaos, among its other problems, was interpreted in three separate ways.

            1. One’s personal life and habits.
            2. One’s views about society
            3. One’s views about the universe.

            So one could be lawful evil by being rigorously self-disciplined and orderly in your life; or by regarded one’s society as an excellent thing to be fit in and upheld — even if because it gives you the best venue for your evil; or because you regard the universe as orderly though evil, a place where, say, strength always rules, and the weak suffer what they must.

          • cassander says:

            @John Schilling

            I work and write on foreign policy, and I often say that US policy tends to waver between stupid and evil, and as a foreign policy professional, my job is to shift it away from stupid and towards evil.

            @hlynkacg

            With altruism, good works fine, the lawful good build or support systems of altruism, the chaotic good tear down systems of selfishness. But how is one chaotically or lawfully selfish? If you murder a kindly old priest who gives away all his money to the poor, you haven’t really acted selfishly, but you have acted evilly. And if you kill an evil overlord who oppresses his people, you’ve acted pretty altruistically even if you only did it so you could steal his sword.

          • Aegeus says:

            @cassander: D&D morality is based on virtue ethics, not consequentialist. Good and Evil are objective personality traits, detectable by spells like Detect Evil. So if you murdered someone because you wanted their shiny sword and you literally didn’t care who the owner was, you’re probably evil. They turned out to be a terrible person, but your motive was not altruistic. If it had been the kindly old priest who had the shiny sword, you would have killed him just as readily.

            I agree that “Evil in ways that don’t benefit you” doesn’t quite fit, but I would count “Because it’s fun to hurt people” as a “selfish motive,” which probably covers most forms of Evil that involve just wrecking things for no gain.

        • radmonger says:

          > While the two-axis system is newer, at 42 and 39 years

          Of course, everything really started with the Babylonians.

          Leaving the intermediate history out, you had Tolkien’s Catholicism leading to a
          universe where morality was literally written into the Cosmos. His contemporary,
          Lovecraft, has a universe with no such morality, which tended to send people
          mad because existentialism hadn’t been officially invented yet.

          Which didn’t stop RE Howard from writing the prototypical existentialist hero, Conan.

          Conan: Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!

          In reaction to all that, a generation later Moorcock wrote the existentialist hero
          on hard-mode. Elric lived in a universe where something very like morality was
          literally written into the Cosmos, but that must be rejected in favor of being
          true to yourself.

          Which was the status quo in the first version of D&D. Until the mass popularity
          of Star Wars and LoTR lead to a demand for unambiguous, cosmically-backed morality, in response to which Gygax produced the ingenious hack which is the dual-axis system.

          Which gives the system roughly as many alignments as there are star signs, personality types in the average psychological model, or houses in Hogwarts.

          Around the same time, the well-known Libertarian political two-axis model was
          created. Which causes a certain group of people to fit themselves into slot#7 on
          the diagram. And in so doing, explicitly identify that way, rather than picking a
          broader identity and a set of contingent beliefs and tactics.

          Consequently, another generation later, Trump.

          • LHN says:

            Until the mass popularity
            of Star Wars and LoTR lead to a demand for unambiguous, cosmically-backed morality, in response to which Gygax produced the ingenious hack which is the dual-axis system

            Tolkien very likely, given the halflings and treants that showed up. But Gygax would have had to be pretty nimble for his 1977 release of the AD&D Player’s Handbook (which I’m pretty sure included the two-axis alignment chart) to be strongly influenced by a movie that had come out in May of that year.

          • Deiseach says:

            Hm, I always felt the Law/Chaos D&D system was heavily influenced by Moorcockian Law/Chaos and the Balance, rather than anything from Tolkien as such.

            Granted, Gygax swiped Elves, Dwarves, Orcs et cetera et cetera from Tolkien, but I get the impression that the morality scale (or however you want to call it) came from Moorcock since “good and evil” was a bit too old-fashioned and black-and-white (how could you have a cool anti-hero doing what would otherwise be considered bad stuff if you stuck to that alone?)

          • LHN says:

            @Deiseach Moorcock is comparatively late on the scene (though the first, copyright-infringing edition of Deities and Demigods demonstrate that TSR were fans), but his Law and Chaos is shared with earlier work by Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber. (And his contemporary John Brunner, whose “Traveller in Black” stories I highly recommend.)

            But I think everyone is more or less agreed that the Good/Evil axis was added in large part to reflect the rising influence of Tolkien on D&D. Though it also helps with serial-numbers-filed-off (because D&D worlds still tend to be polytheist) Christian-influenced stories like the Arthurian mythos.

            (You can certainly do Camelot=Law, everything before and after=Chaos, but something like the Grail, or the entire concept of the D&D Paladin, works better with concretized Good struggling with definitively Evil.)

      • Patrick Merchant says:

        Only nerds could take a conversation about muscles cars and somehow wind up talking about D&D.

        As for why we don’t often see modernized versions of old cars, I think it’s because of the conformity element of fashion. What’s fashionable will always be a compromise between aesthetics and social signalling. I think white tuxedos look amazing, but I’d feel unbearably self-conscious wearing one in most circumstances. When I see an old car on the road, it strikes me as very flashy and attention-getting, like when you see a sleek and expensive modern car, or a dude wearing an expensive suit to a college class.

        Most people aren’t gutsy enough to do this, which means that the market for throwback cars is limited. Why gamble on manufacturing a car like that?

    • AxiomsOfDominion says:

      Squeaky wheel Scott, come on. Cars are like fashion or music. Aesthetics are often environmental and/or performative. The vast majority of people are happy with modern car design. Classic car enthusiasm is just more in the public eye since you have to go out of your way to participate in it.

    • Dahlen says:

      Not that I know anything about this, but it seems, at a first glance, that older car models wouldn’t perform as well from an aerodynamic standpoint. What seems to differentiate classic car design from the modern variety is a pattern of more right angles (you don’t want right angles), a steeper windscreen, less compactness and continuity between car parts (don’t know how to phrase this), smaller overall size, higher distance from the ground, a flat, non-pointy hood (viewed from above), narrower body, and (although it’s probably not very important) round rather than “squinty” headlights.

      The ideal aerodynamic shape seems to be something resembling a projectile; in case of earthbound vehicles, probably a projectile with the lower half flattened out along the Z axis. The fewer deviations and irregularities from this shape, the better. Modern cars definitely follow the ideal projectile shape with greater fidelity; most hard angles have been designed away and replaced with curves, the windscreen now is almost on the same curve as the hood, the hood is the slightest bit pointed, etc. In addition, there have been safety improvements in the making of the car body; it’s simultaneously softer and more bulky, whereas older cars seem more made of lean, trimmed, rigid metal. Nowadays, in an accident, the outer parts of the car can get completely smashed to bits, but these seem to function as a sort of padding, so the functional parts don’t get damaged as badly. Or at least that’s almost sort of what my father (another old car enthusiast) explained to me quite a while ago.

      As for width, this might just be people getting fatter upgrading their standards for comfort. xD (Also, ISTM that it’s mostly non-passenger car bulk that has grown in size, due maybe to more features, airbags and whatnot.)

      The point being, maybe the design features that you may see as mainly aesthetic have a functional role that they might perform more poorly than modern versions.

      There’s also the marketing side of the story. Okay, there’s a certain segment of consumers that prefer older car aesthetics to the latest fashion. Do they drive the market? Or does the other category of consumers (by preference) drive the market? Lots of people respond positively to more modern aesthetics. Also, I would expect classic car aficionados to be a rather older age cohort (for nostalgia reasons), who might already have a car, and if most buyers of new cars are young, maybe there’s a reason to cater more to their preferences.

      [Probably should mention again — epistemic status: PIDOOMA]

    • Protagoras says:

      I used to have a car with hidden headlamps, which I thought were pretty stylish. They’ve pretty much disappeared, because it’s a lot harder to make hidden headlamps that satisfy the rules about crumple zones in modern cars. There are probably other features that are part of the aesthetic of classic cars that are hard to make compatible with modern regulations in ways that aren’t obvious.

    • Richard says:

      The classic car market is composed of 3 kinds of people:

      1: The aesthetics (<1%)
      These are the people who view cars as art and prefer the old designs for beauty. They are buying things like Morgans with full knowledge that they are getting an inferior product with a wooden chassis but they don't care because it's pretty. They prefer classics to modern cars for the same reason people prefer the Mona Lisa to a picture taken by your cellphone even though the latter is arguably a better representation of reality.
      2: The tinkerers (<10%)
      These are your mechanics geeks, happily tinkering away on anything that is mechanically complex and well made. If they don't end up with cars, they would happily tinker on bicycles, steam-engines, sewing machines or guns. They prefer classics because they are more mechanically "pure"
      3: Your everyday Joe (~90%)
      These are the people who saw a random car in a showroom when they were 10 and desperately wanted one, then grew up and now they can afford one. They don't really prefer classics, but rather that one specific car. (or a handful of options)

      The confusion comes when people of type 3 use all the arguments of types 1 and 2 in order to justify their utterly moronic purchase.

      The way to tell the difference is that types 1 and 2 will typically talk about a 1937 Hispano-Suiza K6, (which is both a work of art and a mechanical marvel) while type 3 will talk about a 1981 Cadillac Seville (which is a momentous train wreck where horrible design met the unholy trinity of insufficient electronics, poor quality control and regulatory overload)

      I don't know how large a percentage of type 3s that actually believe their own nonsense, but when we meet at car shows, we sure talk a good yarn.

      Building cars for type 3s is naturally an exercise in futility.

      (Also, the only way you can get me to give up my Cadillac bustleback is to pry the keys from my cold dead hands, because I spotted one in a showroom when I was 10 and desperately wanted one….)

  51. BeefSnakStikR says:

    What choices have you all made in regards to retirement savings plans/401(k)s? Any general advice? Should I be skeptical of anything when I talk to my bank?

    I’m in a fairly typical situation–I’m a minimum wage worker who can’t find work in the field I studied in. I live cheaply enough that I could afford to put hundreds of dollars a year in a retirement fund, but I have no idea how long that will be true. I could lose my job (or get a much better job) quite suddenly. I can fall back on my parents for a place to live, but not for money.

    That’s not unusual, and yet all of the advice I can find online either says that (A) you simply should have started investing a week ago, what are you waiting for? or (B) assumes that at a certain age you’ll have a career that pays an estimated amount, at which point you can afford a retirement fund.

    I’m in my early twenties and in Canada, for what it’s worth.

    • Mary says:

      The first step to economic stability is to build up a slush account for immediate emergency use. The guidelines I tend to see are for six months to a year living expenses. Then you worry about retirement funds. If only so you don’t have pay penalties to get at the money.

    • Eltargrim says:

      I second Mary’s advice to build an emergency fund, though I would recommend starting smaller; $1 000 is a good first target, and building up from there. Reddit’s /r/personalfinance has a good wiki that has some basic overviews. Note that in Canada we don’t have 401(k)s or IRAs; rough equivalences are RRSPs and TFSAs. Good luck.

    • Tax planning is really important and is the primary reason Americans are urged to use 401k plans. Not sure about Canada.

    • LHN says:

      Whatever you do, it’s a lot easier to begin with n% going into a retirement account from the day you start than to try to find a way to do it later. Expenses have a way of expanding to fill the available funds.

      In your early twenties, I’d go with a broad market index account (or ETF) or a target date fund. Having as low an expense ratio as possible (Vanguard is generally good if it’s available to you), sheltered from future taxes, and in something that doesn’t tempt you to try to micromanage it are almost certainly the best things for a time horizon of decades.

      And if your employer has any sort of match, do whatever is necessary to get it. It’s free money, sometimes up to 100% immediate effective return. But other than that if it’s required, don’t put any retirement money directly into your employer. You’ve got enough riding on the company’s success just working for them– don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

      (Startup options hoped to go big may be an exception. But that’s a calculated risk, and shouldn’t by any means be your entire retirement plan.)

      I don’t believe in the strongest form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis– there are people who have the knowledge, skill, and talent that let them beat the market. But the overwhelming majority of people can’t, and if you’re asking about this on a general forum, odds are you’re no more that person than I am. And I strongly don’t believe it’s much more possible to prospectively identify a fund manager who can do it– vs one who got lucky for a few years, “past performance is no guarantee of future results”– than to do it oneself.

      But your biggest ally right now is time. Every dollar you can invest for retirement in your twenties is (almost certainly) worth much more than the dollar you invest in your forties. It’s not worth going into debt over, and as people have noted an emergency fund is important. But if you can possibly get even a small percentage of your income automatically deducted (and then increase it a percent or two each time it becomes possible), future you will likely be glad of it.

      • Mary says:

        It’s fairly easy to redirect the income stream that had been going into the emergency slush fund to the retirement funds, though.

    • keranih says:

      general advice

      Check out Dave Ramsey. He might not be your style, but don’t knock it until you try it.

      • LHN says:

        If he isn’t, I’d recommend Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need, which is full of the sort of common sense advice almost no one is ever actually taught.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Warning: not an investment professional, not a reliable source, for entertainment purposes only.

      The advice you’re going to get that’s aimed at Americans is mostly true for Canadians, but the tax-advantaged stuff is different, and Americans generally get a better choice of index funds and so forth. But yeah. Live frugally – you can probably find ways to do this that aren’t on the wacky end of the spectrum. Set up an investment account of tax-advantaged index funds of one sort or another – probably online is the best way to do this; some index funds are only available online, and if you go into a bank they’ll just try to sell you on overpriced actively-managed mutual funds. Read “The Elements of Investing”.

      As a Canadian you can have both an RRSP and a TFSA. The RRSP is tax-deductible, there’s a contribution limit per year based on your income or a hard ceiling, and you get taxed on the money when you take it out instead of when you put it in. It’s good for retirement because of this – somebody can put away money when they’re earning it, pay less tax then because of the deduction, and pay tax on their investment gains and such at a lower rate when they’re old and not working.

      A TFSA isn’t taxed at all – you won’t pay any tax on investment gains. The amount you can put in is much lower (adding up to under $50k for someone 18+ in 2009, and increasing by $5.5k per year indexed for inflation). You probably would do better now with the TFSA and wait for an RRSP until you make more money, because of the variable amount you can put in on those, the tax deductions, etc. Plus with the TFSA, you could withdraw the money whenever and pay no tax, making it far more flexible.

      • LHN says:

        Though flexibility is a double-edged sword. It can be really helpful in emergencies, but making the money hard to access can discourage looking for “emergencies”. Obviously, this depends on the individual and the circumstances, but a lot of savings strategy for most people comes down to “put the money out of sight somewhere sensible, and don’t mess with it”.

        • Mary says:

          At least some of the funds need to be purely liquid — the sort where you could write out a check and take the money.

          If you can’t be trusted with that. . . you have a real problem.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m careful to keep a bit extra in my chequing account after I’ve paid my rent before I move money to the account where I park my money until I consider it a “chunk” enough to be invested, and that savings account is a secondary possible slush fund.

          • LHN says:

            No one’s arguing against a liquid emergency fund. That’s unquestionably a good idea.

            I’m just saying that automatic investing and arranging things so that it requiring more effort to access long term savings can be a helpful tool for many people. (Additionally many forms are often tax-advantaged in the US, though all I know about Canada is what others have posted here.)

            I’m sure there are people who can exercise restraint without added help. There are also people who’ll take out third mortgages and loans using their pension as collateral if it’s allowed, rendering any barriers largely moot.

            (And while most of those will spend it on consumption goods, a handful will gamble it on, e.g., an entrepreneurial enterprise with real potential and a smaller fraction will hit it big, where following more “sensible” advice would have left them unable to pursue it.)

            Thre’s no one size fits all advice. But “put long-term savings out of immediate reach” is a useful heuristic for, I think, a broad swath of the population that’s looking for pointers. As is “have a liquid emergency fund that, as the name implies, can be accessed in an emergency without jumping through many hoops.”

            Though having even that in a separate account that you don’t carry the ATM card for routinely may help stop you from spending the emergency money on dinner out or a new phone (when the old one still works) or a trip because the regular spending account is low and it’s just this once… or twice.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I have a stubborn and probably dumb preference for doing things manually to automating things. Personally, my willpower level is “will eat stuff in fridge, but won’t go out to get junk food”.

        • dndnrsn says:

          For me, digging out the information and going to the trouble of moving money to the investment account and buying the things is enough of a hassle that I only do it when I’ve saved up a chunk of money to minimize other costs. I can’t imagine liquidating investments in a hurry.

    • Cadie says:

      If you’re in your early 20s, the next couple of years might be better spent on gathering an emergency fund and trying hard to find a better job – even if that means investing a little money into classes/training – than saving for retirement right now. There’s no good reason you can’t start saving for retirement at 26 instead of 24 or whatever. You still have plenty of time and $500-ish is better saved for immediate-need emergencies than for putting into a fund that you’ll cash out 45 years later. If I were you I wouldn’t even worry about putting money away for retirement directly; I’d focus the extra time and bit of money, after saving some for emergency use, on getting into a higher-paying job either elsewhere or as a promotion where you’re at. It could get you into a better financial position faster and THEN you start thinking about what you’re going to do in your 60s or 70s.

      Basically, invest by trying to improve your financial status in general now, not by buying stocks or getting a special saving account. That can wait a few years. If you’re not on the road to retirement savings by 30-ish then you might have a problem, but right now you’re long on time and short on good financial options, so expanding your options is more important than trying to choose the best one at present. An extra $250 saved doesn’t need to go into retirement savings quite yet, use it to get your resume professionally re-done and make some business cards, or a better outfit to interview in, or job placement services, or something like that depending on what field you’re trying to get into.

      • LHN says:

        I’d say that it’s always going to be possible to justify kicking that can down the road, because there’s always going to be some more immediate call for the money that might be saved.

        For that reason, I’d recommend beginning to save for retirement, however token the amount has to be due to also contributing to an emergency fund, training, etc. And remembering to kick it up a notch as and when raises and better jobs come.

        (Obviously, that might have to go by the wayside for a serious imminent need. But for most incomes, there’s someone out there getting by on 10% less than you’re making– however impossible that appears examining your own expenses.)

      • dndnrsn says:

        I’d like to add that you don’t have to be making scads and scads of money.

  52. Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

    Since people here seem to like picking out of the errors in flawed science papers and studies, can anyone tell me where they went wrong with this one:
    Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage“?

    • Anita Restrepo-Sanchez says:

      I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the people here are only interested in attacking the research that supports center or Left facts, and consider obviously the sexist papers with plainly false conclusions perfectly fine examples of “science”.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        You waited less than twelve hours to criticize people for not fulfilling your difficult and time-consuming request, and those twelve hours were the hours most people sleep in the US (9PM to 9AM). Sometimes other people do not immediately drop everything including sleep to do your work for you.

        I would take a look at it now that I’m awake and have some time, but I feel like that would just be encouraging this kind of behavior.

      • FishFinger says:

        What is it with Anitas and feminism?

    • AxiomsOfDominion says:

      Its pretty simple. The study deals with frequency of sex. Not quality of desire for it. As in, traditional beliefs about the wife’s duty to fulfill the husband’s sexual desires do not appear to be accounted for.

    • Jacob says:

      What makes you so sure they went wrong? And why did you describe the conclusions as “plainly false”?

      I’ll give you my thoughts on the study:

      * Analysis seems a bit ad-hoc, with a jillion variables in the model, and some coded in seemingly arbitrary ways. I’m suspicious they might’ve left some things out which didn’t get the result they wanted, but I have no way of knowing. Ideally the analysis would’ve been pre-registered (very few scientists preregister analytical methods, I imagine it didn’t even occur to these authors)

      * It’s interesting that husbands share of housework is what’s most significant, rather than total number of hours.

      *Also interesting that gender ideology wasn’t significant, nor was an interaction with mens share of housework.

      * Without reading the study I guessed that a wife having medical issues could cause both increased share of husbands housework and less sexual frequency. The study did have a self-reported health term in the model so maybe this is controlled for, but self-reported health data is often pretty inaccurate, and the term is just “how healthy are you” on some scale.

      * I didn’t see any measure of model fit provided. If their model has an R^2 of 0.1 I don’t much care about the regression coefficients, because it’s all noise anyway, and the fact that they didn’t report any measure of fit quality is suspicious

      Generally I find the study underwhelming, based mostly on the fact that it’s observational,based only on self-report data, and doesn’t report a quality-of-fit for their model. Much social-science falls into this category.

  53. Brett says:

    I’m not sure how you would simply fund all drug research publicly without risking over-expenditures on particular areas because they have political clout in Congress. As flawed as the current system is, at least it leads to drug research and expenditures wherever the companies think they can make a profit without trying to plan out ahead which diseases you’re going to try and cure.

    . . . On the other hand, that might save more money and have less problems that trying to figure out a system to underwrite drug research that won’t lead to it being gamed.

    • Mary says:

      MORE over-expenditure. We have that already.

    • nelshoy says:

      What kind of political issues are you anticipating? I hadn’t really thought of drug development as a very partisan issue, but I suppose everything can be a partisan issue if you try hard enough. Something like conservatives getting upset about too much AIDS funding and stem cells, or liberals getting upset about animal testing and saying Cystic Fibrosis is “too white” to be focused on?

      How good a job does the NSF and NIH do? I don’t really here anything. They seem pretty technocratic to me, do they run into similar issues with what they fund? Is the solution just to let the NIH run everything?

      • pku says:

        The typical example is Cancer getting fifty times the funding of Alzheimer’s’ because its more efficient, and lung cancer getting less funding than other cancers because people assume lung cancer patients are all smokers who brought it on themselves. I don’t know how justified or generalizable these kinds of problems are, though.

      • Mary says:

        Diseases typically are not spread evenly throughout the population. Every subgroup has a reason to lobby for the disease that affect it more than others.

        Edit: Here’s a graph Scott once linked about this:
        http://lungcancercircleofhope.org/lcch09/Assets/graph0703a.jpg

      • Civilis says:

        Most of this is political in the sense of ‘this particular cause has a strong lobbying group’ and not ‘this is a conservative vs liberal split’. If you have a good spokesperson, like a prominent celebrity that suffers from the disease, your cause will get more funding than a cause that doesn’t. Ideally, there would be some objective factor in what research got funded, based on the number of incidences, the lethality, the ease of prevention, etc., but that’s not the way government funding works.

        Some of this has become more traditionally political. A common conservative point is that breast cancer funding receives far more funding than prostate cancer.

        • Homo Iracundus says:

          Misallocation of cancer research funding is officially a conservative talking point now?
          I guess it’s all part of Winning The War on Women…

          • sweeneyrod says:

            It is arguably not misallocated, since prostate cancer has a lower mortality rate in young men and so causes fewer years of life to be lost. I can’t seem to post a link, but if you google “prostate cancer katatrepsis” there is a blog post about it.

          • Civilis says:

            I guess it’s all part of Winning The War on Women…

            Conservative does not equal Republican. Perhaps I should have said Red Tribe instead of conservative, although that’s not strictly correct either. The fact that pointing this out constitutes part of the ‘War on Women’ shows how easily things can be politicized these days.

            The following is taken from this article from 2010 (http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/05/breast-cancer-receives-much-more-research-funding-publicity-than-prostate-cancer-despite-similar-number-of-victims/) , so it’s not the most current or most unbiased, but it is the first return in a Google search.

            Incidences of cancer:
            According to estimates from the National Institutes of Health, in the United States in 2010, 207,090 women and 1,970 men will get new cases of breast cancer, while 39,840 women and 390 men will likely die from the disease. The estimated new cases of prostate cancer this year — all affecting men — is 217,730, while it is predicted 32,050 will die from the disease.

            Funding:
            In fiscal year 2009, breast cancer research received $872 million worth of federal funding, while prostate cancer received $390 million. It is estimated that fiscal year 2010 will end similarly, with breast cancer research getting $891 million and prostate cancer research receiving $399 million.

            Even when it comes to private foundations, the picture is the same. For example, at the American Cancer Society, breast cancer receives about twice the number of grants as prostate cancer.

            The math (which I quickly threw together) is $21,675 per breast cancer death and $12449 for prostate cancer death. My math may be wrong, but if you put 1% of the breast cancer funding in the ‘men’ category to go with the 1% of breast cancer deaths that are men, it’s still not remotely balanced.

            The article goes on with some theorizing about why this might be so, and to me the explanations given, that there are differences between the ways men and women think about their health, ring true.

            It also illustrates my original point, that things can be political without necessarily being partisan, especially partisan in the Republican vs Democrat sense.

        • Mary says:

          “based on the number of incidences, the lethality, the ease of prevention, etc., ”

          Also, disabling effect. Diseases that do not kill, or kill slowly, can still have crippling effects.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      The current system is producing less and less new cures:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_Law

    • H. E. Pennypacker says:

      As flawed as the current system is, at least it leads to drug research and expenditures wherever the companies think they can make a profit without trying to plan out ahead which diseases you’re going to try and cure.

      I would have thought that the current system leading “to drug research and expenditures wherever the companies think they can make a profit” is the main flaw of the current system, not its saving grace. Surely the main problem is that large pharmaceuticals see increasing profits as their main aim, not helping sick people get better. If it’s going to be more profitable to develop a drug that will treat a disease for which we already have perfectly good treatments (but those treatments are patented by another company), than it is to develop a drug that treats something we don’t have any adequate treatment for at present, the pharmaceutical company will choose the profits over lives saved every day of the week.

    • Deiseach says:

      without trying to plan out ahead which diseases you’re going to try and cure

      The cynic in me says “Easy. What diseases affect cute gap-toothed moppets and telegenic young marrieds with their whole lives ahead of them? Because those are going to be the tearful faces gazing out at you from the billboards and TV spots paid for by the lobbying group.”

      Like the adverts for homeless charities, which often have a small print disclaimer at the bottom about “The image used in this advert is that of a model/actor, not a real homeless young person”. Ostensibly this is for confidentiality and privacy protection reasons, but it’s quite curious how the image used is always appealing and generally attractive.

  54. Homo Iracundus says:

    I’ll need to brush up on Principal Component Analysis at some point, but has anyone read this post on deaths in police encounters?

    • Douglas Knight says:

      How did they make State numeric? alphabetically?

      Since the data set is low dimensional, PCA is pretty pointless. All they use it to do is make plots, but they might as well have plotted against all the variables. And they use it to look for high correlations, but they might as well have looked at those directly.

      Clustering is good. Plots to check clusters is good. Looking at the clusters’ scores on the original variables is good. In the context of clustering, you can ask whether the PC separate the clusters, which is possible and interesting even in low dimensions. But once you have clusters, you really should throw out the PC and start over, separating out the variance between clusters from the variance in clusters.

      One sees from these two plots that Black victims seem to be on average, equally distributed amongst all 50 states, as their data points are spread almost evenly along PC3.

      If they wanted to do this, they could have just plotted against their numeric state variable, rather than relying on PC3. But either way, making the state variable numeric is stupid. And the conclusion is shocking: the states are uniformly represented, not by population. So the method is garbage. You just can’t test such uniformity by looking at such a plot. (Not that it looks uniform to me, knowing that the variable is categorical, not numeric.)

      • caethan says:

        Yeah, what the hell is the point of doing PCA on a 6-variable data set, and then looking at the first 5 eigenvectors? You do PCA when you need to do major dimensional compression, like in the thousands of variables.

  55. Daniel says:

    What industries are the most ripe for dynamic pricing?

    Restaurants? movie theatres?

    Bars? (or reverse surge charges on the weekend to bring about network effects).

    I know that parking has some dynamic pricing, but it really should be much more common.

    I’m surprised that dynamic pricing has not made a greater impact, but im sure there’s still some low hanging fruit.

    • Chris says:

      Bars? (or reverse surge charges on the weekend to bring about network effects)

      Happy hours at bars are dynamic pricing. Theaters have matinees, although I admit it’s a puzzle to me there isn’t more of it there.

      • There are also a large number of coupons for restaurants that are only applicable on non-peak week-days.

      • BunnyGo says:

        Theaters aren’t allowed to flexibly price movies too much. The theaters would almost be happy giving away tickets, since half goes to the studio anyways and the theater makes more money on concessions (with huge markups they don’t share). But the studios would be pissed if they did, so there are contracts on pricing, etc.

        • LHN says:

          My understanding is the theater gets a bigger percentage of the gate as the run goes on, so as demand (usually) drops they have more of an incentive to continue charging even aside from the contract.

          And of course there are ways of effectively giving away tickets: theater loyalty programs that give passes (not to be used on blockbusters during their opening weeks) to frequent viewers, heavily discounted tickets for organizations to resell (many colleges have cheap tickets available for one or another chain), etc.

    • Odoacer says:

      There is a bar in Austin that charges different prices for beer based on how popular a beer is at that time.

      http://brewexchangeaustin.com/

    • Gazeboist says:

      Restaurants usually have dynamic pricing for foods that change price a great deal, like fish. They also typically have rotating specials, and could probably get away with varying the pricing. Oh, and I know a pizza chain in my area that gives out a free one-person pizza with a drink and a calzone/stromboli if you order after 9:00 at night (a special so bizarre that my friends and I assumed the cooks had just made a mistake the first time it happened).

    • Mary says:

      Those with the highest ticket items and the most information about the customer’s ability to pay.

      Colleges, for instance. Where you have to tell them your family’s finances to apply for financial aid.

      • Alliteration says:

        So does this mean colleges should give discounts to people who do summer courses?

        • Mary says:

          Maybe they do.

        • NL says:

          I know several public universities that do this

        • Throwaway says:

          Summer courses at UC Berkeley are dramatically cheaper. This is mostly because summer courses are exempt from the additional out-of-state tuition for some reason. Also the summer classes are priced per-unit, while during the main semesters you pay a flat rate tuition. So it seems the price difference has more to do with general bureaucratic inconsistency than a conscious effort to maximize utilization of lecture halls.

          Some numbers:
          This summer I took 10 units. 6 units is considered full time over the summer, for scale. The tuition before financial aid would’ve been about 4500 dollars, or ~450/unit.

          This fall I’m taking 17 units. 13 units is considered full time over the fall. The tuition before financial aid would be 20,000 dollars, which includes a 13,000 out-of-state fee. So ~1200 per unit.

    • Wrong Species says:

      There is a fine line between dynamic pricing and discrimination. Any business is necessarily going to tread carefully.

      • nelshoy says:

        How do hospitals get away with it? People or their insurances can be charged an order of magnitude more for the same procedures depending on a bunch of esoteric I’m not sure anyone fully understands. You’d think some advocacy group or another would find out they’re overpaying and raise a big ruckus over it.

        • Brian Slesinsky says:

          As I understand it (and I’m not a lawyer), only discrimination based on membership in certain protected classes [1] is against U.S. law. Discriminate for any other reason and it’s fine – unless it might be a proxy for a protected class, and then it’s a grey area that keeps lawyers in business.

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

          • Mary says:

            You’re right.

          • Trevor says:

            Charging people different prices for the same good or service is technically illegal under US law, but the law is not enforced and there is a lot of wiggle room in terms of determining if a good is really “the same”

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Trevor-

            Charging people different prices for the same good or service is technically illegal under US law

            You’re talking about a general principle here, unrelated to whether there are protected classes involved? This would really surprise me a lot. Can you give me a citation?

      • Mary says:

        A fine line? All dynamic pricing is by definition discrimination.

        The problem is whether it’s illegal, and whether it’s going to be PR nightmare. Like the way Amazon gave different prices based on your browsing history once — dynamic pricing, discrimination, perfectly legal, PR nightmare.

    • doubleunplussed says:

      I’ve often wondered about something related to this: Are discounted movie tickets for students an example of the private sector taking on some of the role of wealth redistribution instead of the Government?

      Or is it just a substitute for haggling? I.e students have less money but you still want to sell tickets to them, so you know that if you were to haggle over the price they would be willing to pay less. So you set the price lower in the first place because you don’t actually want to haggle, but you still make more money this way than not selling it to them at all.

      It seems like a clear example of supply and demand not being the only thing setting a price. If the stakes were higher, savvy students would be buying up discounted tickets and selling them to non-students at some intermediate price. But that doesn’t happen, so there is not a single price resulting from the equilibrium of supply and demand.

      Yeah, I think probably discounted tickets for students are a substitute for haggling. And normal free-market rhetoric about there being one price that’s set by supply and demand doesn’t work because the goods are not easily transferable.

      • suntzuanime says:

        It’s just price discrimination, dude. Like, it might take until Economics 102 before you talk about it, but this is not something that economists are baffled by.

        • doubleunplussed says:

          I don’t study economics and I don’t assume that economists are baffled by something just because I don’t immediately understand it—I’m just wondering how *I* should think about it, and am happy for people who know more about economics to tell me how it’s generally understood.

          Anyway now I’ve googled price discrimination now and watched a slick khan academy video, so I understand it a bit better.

          Still though, my point before I read up on it made sense: it’s a phenomenon that relies on consumers having imperfect information or goods not being easily transferable, which is nice to see because some ideologues like to think of markets in such a way that price discrimination would be impossible. So its existence is evidence of market inefficiency, which is cool to see.

          It is also kind of cool because it redistributes wealth/income to some extent. So that’s interesting, because one doesn’t normally think of markets as doing this.

          I’m not claiming to be saying anything new here, but if it’s new to me then it probably is to others like me, regardless of how well understood by economists it is.

      • Mary says:

        It means you can hire people who aren’t competent at haggling to work the ticket booth.

        Basically, since the ticket only must cover their variable cost — not high, for movies! — they calculate it will maximize their take for their fixed costs.

      • Emma Casey says:

        >the private sector taking on some of the role of wealth redistribution instead of the Government?

        General rule that I find helps me thinking about economics:

        If your hypothesis is that a company is persuing a social goal at the expense of its own profits then you’ve missed an important part of the story.

        • doubleunplussed says:

          Of course companies don’t generally intentionally do things that hurt their profits.

          But companies do “moral” things all the time because it helps their image and leads to higher profits in the end. So them doing something for social good is not necessarily at odds with them being ruthless profit seeking machines.

          • Emma Casey says:

            Oh I totally agree. The point is if you have the theory “they’re doing wealth distribution” your mind should jump to the followup question “what PR benefit are they getting from doing that”?

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        It’s the private sector looking to improve its profits through increased amount of customers, better PR, anything. It being or not being wealth distribution is incidental. I suppose you could answer the question of whether it’s wealth distribution or haggling with ‘both’; either way, it’s rather value neutral.

    • Hmm?

      Dynamic pricing is very common in everyday life. In fact, its so common it has become invisible. One example I can think of is the airline industry, which structured peoples varying ability to pay for the same good by adding some cheap frills for those willing to pay 2x+ as much for the same fundamental good. Same with cars, computers.

      With parking its everywhere too, with different rates for different times of day. Its usually at most 2 different prices for morning and afternoon to keep it simple.

      Dynamic pricing is practiced in every town and city, with gas costing something else for each town, and the same product varying by several bucks or more at each walmart.

      or medicine across countries.

      If it seems “invisible” I think its due to 2 reasons.

      1. Its so ubiquitous that its no longer noticed

      2. Certain super blatant attempts are rejected by the typical population. People prefer at least a flashy coat of paint on the same good to make it not obvious.

    • Rob says:

      I’m doing an economics PhD and have spent some time thinking about dynamic pricing.

      One of the big limitations is that dynamic pricing often provokes strong feelings of moral outrage. You have to trade off how much more money you’d make from the dynamic pricing vs. how much bad publicity / bad reputation will hurt. In addition there’s the additional inconvenience to you of keeping track of the flexible prices and annoyance from customers who have a harder time planning how much they’ll pay.
      e.g.
      Amazon ends personalized dynamic pricing
      Uber in “hot water”
      Orbitz charges mac users more

      It’s also worth thinking about what kind of dynamic pricing you have in mind.
      e.g. prices personalized to each buyer (big consulting projects, college financial aid)
      prices that vary by general characteristics of the buyer (senior discounts, ladies nights)
      prices that vary at set times of day / day of week (movie matinees, bar happy hours)
      prices that dynamically vary based on supply and demand (uber, some parking lots)

      • The obvious way reducing bad public relations is by putting it in terms of discounts rather than surcharges. Our normal prices are on the menu. But on weekday nights before six we offer a special 20% discount for customers who help us fill the empty seats.

        The version of the puzzle that intrigues me is the existence of predictable lines. Everyone knows that if you go to that restaurant on a Friday evening, you have to wait half an hour to get in. The half hour wait is the equivalent to (say) an extra ten dollars, reduces quantity demanded by the same amount. So if you raised prices by ten dollars the line would go to about zero, the cost of dinner to the patrons would be unchanged, with a cost in money substituting for a cost in time, and the restaurant would make more money.

        Why don’t they do it–presenting it, of course, as a discount on the other nights?

        • Chris Thomas says:

          Many restaurants and bars do this in form of cover charges.

        • SolveIt says:

          Having a conspicuous line of people waiting to eat at your place is great advertising?

          • It advertises the fact that you will have a long wait. Beyond that, why is it any better advertising than a short line plus high prices?

            You don’t want the line to go quite down to zero because you want to always be able to fill your tables–think of a line as a way of warehousing customers.

          • DavidS says:

            Yes, I think it’s better advertising than a short line plus high prices. For one thing, long queues are just more visible.

            In London at least, large parts of the fashionable restaurant industry clearly thrive on having large, visible queues. I think a part of this is that people feel prices above a certain bar for a certian type of food is inherently a rip off. Whereas the long queues are just a sign of excellence.

            Personally, I avoid queues like the plague. But I guess if somewhere usually had queues I might check it out at other times.

          • Gazeboist says:

            A long line also implies to the customer that they are winning the exchange when they get to the restaurant, which makes the price seem “right” whatever it is when they actually get to the restaurant. Whereas a place with no wait and high prices is automatically classed as overpriced regardless of the quality of its food.

        • Zakharov says:

          Having a long line is a massive ego boost for the owners, which may be worth more than extra money.

        • I think long lines are a better proof (not a perfect proof) that the food appeals to a wide range of people.

        • Tibor says:

          I’ve never seen a line in a restaurant in Europe (the only time I’ve waited in one in front of a restaurant was in Din Tai Fung in Hong Kong but we only had to wait for about 5-10 minutes). But it is very common to make a reservation beforehand to make sure you will get a table. I’ve also never been in an extremely fancy Michelin restaurant or something like that though. Actually, Din Tai Fung has one Michelin star I think, but that was the only case.

        • Civilis says:

          With restaurants, it’s problematic to try this because the pricing isn’t fixed, it’s on a per-item basis. How do I distribute the increase in prices across the dishes on the menu in a way to cause the average per-person bill to increase by $10, given that increasing prices will mean people change what they order? You could increase prices and discover that people order less appetizers and drinks, which may be more profitable, and discover that you’re losing money on the deal. Places that offer prix fixe meal options are likely to already be offering different prices at different times and therefor already using dynamic pricing.

          Also, given that people tend to compare restaurants by looking at menus and prices online, you might increase your prices and discover that people looking to eat might see the higher price and miss the discounts you’re offering, costing you business.

        • Deiseach says:

          So if you raised prices by ten dollars the line would go to about zero, the cost of dinner to the patrons would be unchanged, with a cost in money substituting for a cost in time, and the restaurant would make more money.

          Why don’t they do it –presenting it, of course, as a discount on the other nights?

          (1) Probably because most people expect bars, clubs, restaurants, etc. to be busy at the weekends (the time most people are free to go out and spend time away from home because they probably don’t have to work the next day so they don’t have to be in bed by ten p.m. to get up at five a.m.) and they factor this in to their expectations; if they had to wait half an hour at midweek they probably would not go. Ditto for popularity – if the restaurant is the new trendy must-go-there place because it was mentioned on national TV or a critic in a major newspaper raved about how great it was, people will put up with waiting to get the chance to eat there just to be able to say they did.

          (2) People tend not to price their time outside of work in terms of money (but rather inconvenience, etc.). So they don’t think “this wait is costing me ten dollars” as they would price the monetary cost of the meal, and if the price increased by ten dollars, they’d be likely to think “this restaurant is trying to profiteer off the back of being popular and busy on Friday night” and people do resent that – I’ve heard people complain about price rises during tourist season in local bars and restaurants, along the lines of “I eat there every Wednesday and they charged me a fiver more for the same thing I had last week, just because the tourists are in town – I’m not going back there until the prices go back down!”

          So possibly the restaurant would lose more custom than it would retain or attract by raising its prices, and the income generated would not be the same.

    • pku says:

      Fun example: We have a Sushi bar in town that’s half price on evenings and weekends, which is when the college students go. The same chain (is it a chain if there’s only two of them?) has another one two towns over that’s half price weekdays until 5pm. The assumption is that the rich people come to our town during the day, than go home to the other town for the evening.