Hey, remember that time when Merv, Turkmenistan was the largest city in the world? What about when it was Dobrovody, Ukraine? Here’s a helpful cheat sheet if you’re feeling a little lost.
Marble quarries somehow look both exactly how you would expect a marble quarry to look and yet also much much better.
Profile of Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, a former naval officer whose motto is “Honey badger don’t give a s***”.
Genetic risk for high sugar consumption is somewhat correlated with genetic risk for substance abuse, suggesting some kind more more general genetic risk for impulsivity and addiction.
Related to Lizardman’s Constant: when polled on whether they have ever been decapitated, four percent of people say yes (hidden in this transcript)
Brookings Institution: “There is a deep well of rigorous, relevant research on the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts…This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.”
One interesting methodology to examine whether school degrees are useful in and of themselves or for signaling value: look at teenage mothers. Someone who delivers a child a month after graduating high school is probably the same sort of person as someone who delivers a child a month before graduating high school, but the former will probably get a degree and the latter probably won’t. Based on this methodology, a paper finds that a high school degree has real value and not signaling value. Possible confounds: maybe the availability of a GED makes this situation different than for college; maybe there’s a ceiling effect for how well people with teenage pregnancies do?
“Related”, by which I mean completely contradicting the above: Danish data (of course it’s Danish data) showing that school effects are mostly just signaling. Maybe a US/Danish difference?
Marginal Revolution asks why bowling has declined in America. Did you know in the 1960s, top bowlers made twice as much as top football stars, and a bowler was the first athlete ever to get a $1 million endorsement contract?
Federal government tells Berkeley they may not offer free online video courses, because they are discriminatory against deaf people who cannot hear the audio. Willing to reconsider if they translate them into sign language as well or add closed captioning, but the college says it can’t afford that and will probably just take the courses down. This is a metaphor for how everything works all the time.
Hey, remember those five different times when thousands of Irish-Americans formed impromptu armies and invaded Canada in order to pressure Britain to free Ireland?
The Daily Show had a whole segment making fun of Donald Trump’s claim that his microphone wasn’t working properly during the last debate. Now the Commission on Presidential Debates has confirmed that his microphone was indeed defective. On the other hand, still no sign that it was part of a giant Clinton campaign conspiracy, and not clear exactly how a microphone malfunction makes you say that not paying taxes makes you “smart”. Come to think of it, every part of this story is also a metaphor for how everything works all the time.
Herman Mashaba started out as the son of an impoverished widowed domestic worker in apartheid South Africa and rose to become a multimillionaire businessman. Now he was just elected as the first Libertarian mayor of Johannesburg, and has vowed to end poverty in the city by encouraging construction and investment. The best thing to happen to African capitalism since Nwabudike Morgan?
Reddit: r/IAm14AndThisIsDeep Also, r/CrabsEatingThings.
Adam Smith Institute argues for the claim that markets will punish discrimination by pointing out many examples of exactly that happening. This is in honor of a recent study which follows up on one of those resume experiments by finding that companies which discriminated against minorities in the hiring process were twice as likely to go out of business as those that didn’t. As welcome as this result would be I’m not sure I buy it – discriminatory vs. non-discriminatory companies likely only differ in a few employees, and that’s not enough to double the company’s chance of surviving. The paper itself points out that this could just be an artifact of more organized companies having a better hiring process that relies less on personal judgment, or the sort of company leaders who aren’t racist also having other good qualities. Related: did you know that the segregation-era South had to pass laws prohibiting companies from preferentially hiring (cheaper) black labor?
Andrew Gelman on the history of the replication crisis.
American television: Let’s see which celebrity can answer trivia questions the fastest. Japanese television: We’re going to tie a piece of meat to a celebrity’s body, take her to the island of Komodo, and film her getting chased by Komodo dragons.
In Denmark, neighborhood of origin does not influence earnings after age 30. In Sweden, neighborhoods also don’t matter for earnings, education, etc. Still not sure why Moving To Opportunity had such a strong effect in the US, unless it’s the whole “US socioeconomic status differs a lot more than Scandinavian socioeconomic status”. I feel bad for being excited that Scandinavia will probably develop its own segregated underclass in the next few decades and we’ll finally start getting good studies about how that affects things.
Lifehack: Align the High and Low Lights of North Shields to escape being caught in the Black Middens.
More praise for SSC sponsor Beeminder.
A physicist on the problems with “publish or perish” and modern science culture. I keep hearing about this but I have yet to read a clear explanation of how a better system would work.
The Insanity And Brilliance At Ethereum’s Developer Conference. “Until you see it for yourself, it’s hard to truly grasp the scope of what is being built. If Ethereum works it will fundamentally change society.”
Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft come together to form Partnership on Artificial Intelligence To Benefit People. Probably more about privacy and cybersecurity at this point, but still useful to have as a framework if larger issues come up in the future. I would link to the organization’s website itself, but I’m boycotting all those sites that are one page full of giant images and two or three sentences of text which don’t explain anything useful.
Only about forty percent of Americans support Trump for US President – so how come fifty-four percent of Chinese do?
China admits that 80% of its clinical trials are fabricated.
There’s a standard argument that sweatshops are good for the Third World because they increase employment opportunity. Now Chris Blattman has studied it empirically.
Helpful 19th century infographic on Albion’s Seed and Bay Area transhumanism (h/t ecstatmonochromat)
Argument: Maybe the surplus of men in mathematical fields is for some biological reason. Counterargument: as the culture has become more accepting toward women, more women have entered these fields, so wouldn’t attributing the remaining difference to biological factors be a very silly god-of-the-gaps argument, arbitrarily saying that all of the already-resolved differences were cultural but all of the not-yet-resolved differences must be biological? A study adds a new perspective to this debate by determining that the percent women in the extreme right tail of mathematical ability was increasing rapidly up until twenty years ago, after which point it has mysteriously remained exactly the same. Women continue to do better at verbal tasks.
Remember how you had to learn cursive in elementary school even though it was clearly useless and inferior to other forms of communication? An Atlantic article argues that there was sort of a rational explanation – cursive was the most convenient form of writing for the obsolete pens of yesteryear, and it took a while for people to realize that better pens made it unnecessary.
Garett Jones has written a long summary article of his theory about how immigrants can change countries’ economic fundamentals.
“Some have claimed that [the city of] Austin put up moonlight towers partly in response to the actions of the Servant Girl Annihilator.”
Reddit: What is a great career path that kids in college aren’t aware exists? Answers include “sailor”, “actuary”, and “person who joins the military for the minimum allowed period of time and then takes advantage of veteran-related programs to get free college and a cushy government job for life”.
The BMJ published an article a while ago pushing a extreme Taubesian view of nutrition. Now it’s facing calls to retract as scientists point out various errors.
The newest front in the replication crisis: basic math errors. A bot finds that 13% of papers may have a math error large enough to potentially change the paper’s conclusion.
Leading environmental scientist James Lovelock was previously famous for his belief that global warming would be much worse than anyone thought. Now he says he’s changed his mind, that global warming will probably be so slow we don’t need to worry much, and that he’s actually concerned about AI risk.
>Hey, remember that time when Merv, Turkmenistan was the largest city in the world? What about when it was Dobrovody, Ukraine?
>US game shows: Let’s see who can answer trivia questions the fastest. Japanese gameshows: We’re going to tie a piece of meat to your body, take you to the island of Komodo, and film you getting chased by Komodo dragons.
>Hey, remember those five different times when thousands of Irish-Americans formed impromptu armies and invaded Canada in order to pressure Britain to free Ireland?
3 more points for the theory that is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
…
Do you think there is an upper limit to how much societal change a person can adapt to in their lifetime?
Not for all people. Because there have been people who moved from one society to an entirely different one and managed fine.
I guess this ability tends to decrease with age. Whenever there is a flood you have people who refuse to leave their homes (or move somewhere else after the flood even though they are still in a risky area, they won’t get any insurance any more and they had to rebuild the house after the flood anyway), because that’s “where they’ve lived all there lives.”
This probably has to do with people getting more conservative (I don’t mean politically conservative but opposed to change and to risk) with age. My father started a company with a loan secured by our house when he was 32, give or take a year. Had the company not succeeded we would have lost everything. I cannot imagine him being this bold now that he’s 56.
Of course, this effect is stronger in some people (some 30 year olds seem to me like they’re 60, even though I am almost 30 myself) and less pronounced in others.
@David Friedman
There is a lot of evidence that migrants are often outliers (especially the successful ones, as remigration rates are substantial for migrants that have the ability to go back). I don’t think you can point at the level of change that migrants can deal with as evidence of what an average person can deal with.
I also wonder how you define ‘managed fine,’ because a lot of migration involves people creating cultural bubbles in their new country, where they maintain many aspects of their source culture (food, clothing, religion, the media they consume, etc). So ‘managed fine’ often seems to be due to reducing the level they need to adapt, rather than quick integration.
“I don’t think you can point at the level of change that migrants can deal with as evidence of what an average person can deal with.”
I made no claim about average people.
If people have not yet read Micheal Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road and of the background of the story, I strongly recommend it.
This idea is very prominent in early Sherlock Holmes. It’s in “The Red-Headed League” and “A Case of Identity”.
Hey, remember those five different times when thousands of Irish-Americans formed impromptu armies and invaded Canada in order to pressure Britain to free Ireland?
Why do you think it took us eight hundred years to win our freedom from England? 🙂
Okay, the first one would have been after the failed 1848 Young Irelander rebellion (also known as the Cabbage Patch Rebellion and not because dolls were involved). Like pretty much every Irish revolutionary movement, it failed because the British had infiltrated it and informers were plentiful. Also we really suck at organising revolutions, how 1916 worked is anyone’s guess. (The Young Irelanders were the reaction to Daniel O’Connell, who was opposed to the physical force tradition after his youth when he’d seen the French Revolution becoming the Terror first-hand. After great initial success but eventual failure in his political campaign to repeal the Act of Union, the young revolutionaries were impatient and decided war was the only way to succeed).
The failed revolutionaries were either transported and escaped, or scattered to Europe and American. Still wanting to raise the rebel flag, the Fenian Brotherhood (in America) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (in Ireland) were founded. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, when there had been Irish regiments and so trained soldiers with experience of warfare were ready, willing and able (more or less), the first raid on Canada seemed like a good idea. The rest of them? Well, that is what you call the opposite of “learning from experience”. Mostly they were attempts to incite rebellion back in Ireland.
A further counterargument: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1713#comic
Counter-counter-example (or is it? this depends on whether or not it was a real newspaper article Conan Doyle was referencing) from the Sherlock Holmes story “A Case of Identity”:
(Holmes is arguing truth is stranger than fiction, Watson is arguing the opposite)
If you could think of it, it’s not strange anymore.
did you know that the segregation-era South had to pass laws prohibiting companies from preferentially hiring (cheaper) black labor?
Oh, hon, it wasn’t just th’ South.
Southern states also regulated out of existence agents who matched up black workers in places where they were treated badly with jobs, typically in other southern states, where they were treated better. The Supreme Court, to its discredit, let them get away with doing so–arguably inconsistent with the Lochner jurisprudence for which it later got blamed.
Similar things happened in South Africa.
I wish Google Translate did a better job with Chinese. I followed the Zhihu link on that Politico article to see that post about Chinese users praising Trump’s anti-political correctness stance, and the translation from Mandarin to English is just gibberish.
I couldn’t find it either. I can see a lot of comments making basically that same point about Islam and political correctness, but no 10000-upvote comment.
This is strange, but I can’t seem to find the 10000-upvotes comment you (and the article) are referring to on the Zhihu link Politico provided. Could you link the original, or just copy over the source text? I’ll give it a try.Never mind found it. Full comment:
[The “reddit” question is: Do Zhihu members support or oppose Donald Trump? If so, why?]
“Of course I support Trump! In fact, even if he doesn’t win, I would rather die than surrender to the Democratic Party!
My background: I have lived in California for 10+ years, from undergraduate to doctorate, have never left here other than for work. The schools I go to are all brand name ones everyone will be familiar with. But now, I am so disappointed, I want to leave for elsewhere.
My father and mother are all disability welfare beneficiaries. But the Democrat Party’s various schemes make it harder and harder for people who really need [welfare] to get it, and are cutting existing welfare. All the money is going to illegal immigrants, or lazy non-working bums (懒人= v. pejorative, cf. slackers, drifters). The Democrats talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. ObamaCare in actuality has many good aspects, but they don’t touch the special interests and leave it to the middle class.
Speaking of education, everyone has talked about the “AA issue” (blacks?) and I shall not repeat it. And UC universities are always broke to the point where it’s no longer news. Every year they’re broke, even Berkeley is full of slacking drifters. And the background of these children’s families are driven by a lot of resentment. The Democrats ostensibly are trying to improve the inner cities, but what is the truth? I have often thought about their schools, that’s why I joined the local Teach for America branch. It turned out, everyone there has the attitude of “if students don’t study well you can’t say they are unmotivated, but this is the result of fundamental inequalities in society”. I was very disappointed and quit, I feel these people are just trying to cheat the government of money, that’s all. And the Democrats daily talk about welfare, it’s clearly just to get minority support.
[and this is the part from your original quote]
Coming to Trump, he is the first to dare to confront Political Correctness, and deserves a vote just for this. He was not the one who created racial divisions, but, instead, racial divisions are inherent in life. “All lives matter”, however, is not Politically Correct, but the ordinary citizens do not dare to say this. Talking about BLM, MoveOn etc organizations, they are ostensibly about civil resistance, but in reality about beating, rioting, and robbing, but everyone can only endure it. Trump may sound like an extremist, but he truly gives the commoners hope. I am honestly not a racist, and the discrimination that blacks faced must be admitted as a reality. But BLM, these people, will not tolerate any dissent. Talking about President Obama, when blacks are accidentally hurt (slightly injured?) Obama has infinite compassion, when blacks break the law he is no where to be seen and does not allow the media to report it, creating an atmosphere where blacks can do no wrong. The truth is, blacks are mentally inferior [!!], and do not even have the physical endurance of Hispanics. Respect is earned, not obtained by screaming around until everyone respects you!!
America truly is a country where only those who have motivation and entrepreunership (bravery?) can lead good lives. From high school graduation I began to take care of my family [monetarily], everything from then till now I have been self-reliant. And I still want to help those who need help, but I will never tolerate those extreme bums and slackers [好吃懒做=extremely pejorative for bums and slackers] people! Nothing to do with party or race!
Talking about Muslims, Trumps’ language is extreme, but their words and actions are clear for all to see. Even though it is just a minority for them, but when they organize there are indeed difficulties. A government that cannot protect its citizens lives, will lose its peoples support. Look at recent Germany for an example.
Talking about Gays, I still moderately support them. This is a person’s freedom. So long as it doesn’t bother others, true love should be celebrated. But, recently men have been trying to use women’s toilets in schools and that is really laughable. Does that mean that just because you have rights, all the girl student’s rights don’t need protection? I feel that you should be a post-op transexual before you can do that. The Democrats encourage you [transexuals] into senseless noisemaking, but clearly it is backfiring on you.
In conclusion. Trump can achieve all he has done in the face of tremendous opposition, proving that not everyone may love him, but those who are dissatisfied with the status quo will do. If we don’t make changes now, the future will be apocalyptic.
PS: last night, listening to NPR radio, there was a program showing a party Primary analysis. The first man was a Republican big-shot (slightly derogatory), who said he wanted Rubio and now after Rubio lost he did not want say who he wanted to support [in the general?] The reporter could not prise it out of him. I think the Republican Party should internally keep these things quiet.
The second interview was with the Democratic Congressman from Ohio. Before the reporter could say anything, he [the Democrat] criticized the previous Republican thoroughly, then later interrupted the reporters questions. Then he didn’t answer any of the reporter’s questions, the reporter was so angry he cut him off [hung up on him?] Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be elites? What does this say about them?”
Thanks for the translation! Fairly sure the “aa issue” is affirmative action.
Yes – good hypothesis, the author has no trouble saying “black” elsewhere.
Yeah, in the context of a discussion in Chinese between Chinese people, “the AA issue” is virtually guaranteed to refer specifically to the fact that measures put in place to get more blacks into colleges are keeping Asians out of top colleges en masse. Short version: they don’t like it. They don’t think it’s fair.
It mentions Berkeley – my understanding was that AA is illegal for universities in California, but universities find ways around it. Anyone know if this is roughly correct?
A lot of people who want to change the demographics of universities haven’t actually considered at the demographics of universities – making, say, university mimic completely the country as a whole, or the state/province, or the city, or whatever, would involve a lot of discrimination against Asians, especially East Asians, as well as discrimination against Jews – both groups are far more represented in universities than in the general population. It would also probably involve net discrimination against women, given that they increasingly outnumber men at the undergraduate level, at least. It might even involve AA for white students, who are frequently a lower % of the campus population than their % in the general population.
I believe the situation in California is that private universities are free to engage in affirmative action–the university where I teach does so openly. I think public universities are not supposed to but find ways around that restriction.
I don’t know the current details. One simple way is to evaluate students by class rank rather than by SAT. Being in the top ten percent of your high school class is easier if the rest of the students are from the same low performing group as you are.
The issue of discrimination against high performing groups is an old one. In the early 20th century, universities were concerned about what a large fraction of their class was Jewish. Some that were unwilling to impose explicit quotas instead added geographical diversity to their list of admission criteria. The Jewish applicants were mostly concentrated in a few places such as New York City, so attempting to get equal representation from Iowa and Mississippi and Wyoming pushed down the number of Jews being admitted.
Yes CA state schools like Berkeley found ways around the ban on AA, but they do a lot less of it than they used to. And they probably have only worked to increase the black percentage, not to return to penalizing asians against whites.
dndnrsn, your subtext seems to be: if they don’t face AA, why are they complaining about it? Two points: the removal of AA at Berkeley may have been eye-opening about what its effects are elsewhere; and there is well-founded fear that it might return.
@David Friedman:
Yeah, similar tools once used to exclude Jews (eg, Harvard’s elevation of “character” which in practice meant “Gentile”) are now used, or similar tools are used, to discriminate against Asians.
@Anonymous:
I didn’t intend that subtext; I was just trying to figure out if I understand the situation in California correctly.
I’m more criticizing the people who call for “equal representation” (relative to the population) or “diversity” without actually considering what that would entail (or, without considering whether what they want would actually be equal representation, or diversity).
This seems like a textbook example of Cthulhu swimming left, doesn’t it?
Private universities’ profit objective and teaching objective are both unaffected at best and likely hampered by affirmative action: they do it anyway.
Public universities are explicitly forbidden from affirmative action: they do it anyway.
What exactly is someone supposed to do if he (and the entire public, for that matter) wants to get rid of affirmative action? At times like this I find it very easy to sympathize with the Polish government firing every employee of the state broadcaster.
Universities are to the left of the general population, so even if the majority of the general population wants no AA many universities will want AA. This doesn’t seem any different from any other case of a subgroup of the population having a different political position to the average of the whole of the population.
“What exactly is someone supposed to do if he (and the entire public, for that matter) wants to get rid of affirmative action? ”
Entire public? How about a majority?
Elect a president who supports that. Have him issue an order that colleges that used “diversity” as a pretext to discriminate were barred from receiving all federal funds, including federal student loans. Pretext would be determined by looking to see what they were doing to promote the diversity when they arrived. Just as one could deduce that athletic admissions were a pretext if there were no teams, no coaches, no games, etc., diversity is a pretext if they did not actively demand the students mix with the students of other races. As for those that permitted racial “safe spaces” and other means of segregation, that would go double.
Or start impeaching justices who permit discrimination.
I would be really interested in a literal translation of some of the vague/non-obvious terms used here (anything explained with chinese characters and [] quote). Could I reliably get a sense for them by running them through google? I reckon they probably have a literal meaning buried in chinese references.
Edit, I perhaps spoke too soon – Google translate proved helpful. The second, four-character perjorative breaks down into “good” “eat/consume/live off/enstrain” “lazy” and “do/produce/enact” – in otherwords, someone accomplished at making a life of lazy consumption. A zen deadbeat.
For those who don’t follow China stuff, this is the equivalent to using Yahoo answers as a guide to American public opinion. Its pretty much impossible to get accurate opinion polling in China, for reasons you might suspect.
Coverage of trump has been almost universally negative, with a strong vein of “this is what you get with democracy stupid. Here’s a decent article on the subject: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/14/china-paper-says-rise-of-racist-trump-shows-democracy-is-scary/
For future reference, Baidu’s Chinese-English translation seems to outperform Google’s
This is fairly legible to me. Sure, there are typos (shoes?) and the grammar is poor, but it’s not gibberish.
Heh. I once tried to translate the Seven Kill Stele with Google Translate.
“Official” translation:
Google Translate vomit:
That’s great. Anyone have an idea why the translation would be that off?
Chinglish is a thing. Google up chinese menu translations.
But that’s the result of someone who knows one language but not really the other, right? I would have thought Google Translate, while robotic and kind of dumb, would produce something mechanically more correct.
https://kencamargo.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/chinglish_menu.pdf
This is the most spectacular one I ever ran across.
Basically, each character in simplified Chinese has two or three completely different meanings (that’s how they simplified Chinese) and the machine translation system has to work them out from context. This is why Chinese translates so poorly. Add in attempts to make the English in China American and idiomatic (as opposed to the traditional British-influenced formal English) and you get such gems as wide use of the f-word in machine-translated English (Google doesn’t do this, but Chinese equivalents do), which comes from them reading the word ‘do’ in the sexual sense because it’s ‘idiomatic’.
Basically, you couldn’t design a worse situation for machine translation to have to deal with.
Language log has a good series on this, where they usually unpack where the machine went wrong.
You know, I actually suspected that simplified Chinese had something to do with it. IIRC, it was a Communist Party project, right? Which would perhaps explain why the human-translated version went with the more religious wording, while the dumb machine which can’t handle high-context languages produced something that managed to sound much more bureaucratic and sterile, and whitewashed the religious connotations away.
This is not correct.
There are a handful of cases where two different traditional characters were merged into one when simplified (e.g. the traditional characters 麵 ‘noodle’ and 面 ‘face’ are both simplified to 面), but those are exceptions. For the vast majority, simplified and traditional characters are in 1-1 correspondence, and the simplification works by omitting some strokes (e.g. traditional 學 versus simple 学) while keeping enough of the character to make it unambiguous.
In any case, the stele text on wikipedia is written in traditional characters, so you can’t blame character simplification for this. As for why machine translation works so poorly in this case, I suspect it’s because the software expects a text in Mandarin and the stele is in Classical Chinese.
I know someone who worked on google translate and we talked a little bit about his work. I think many of the commenters here probably understand the basics way better than I ever will, but for the sake of making this post legible, allow me to go into it a little.
Machine translation works by statistical analysis, he tells me. They take a huge body of text/translated text (I believe they used the UN Declaration of Human Rights) and basically do a giant pattern search game, comparing your input to the corpus in the library of your input language and matching to the corpus of the output language.
That’s as much as I can understand anyway. What I then thought, and I have zero confidence that it’s even in the right direction, is that funny way video games keep score like accuracy. If you shot once and you hit, your score is 100%. But if you shoot 10 times and missed once, accuracy drops to 90%, even if numerically you hit 9x more than before. So I wondered if the accuracy of the translation wouldn’t be improved the same way by using smaller chunks.
And it worked to a certain degree. There’s still a piece missing, because if I try to translate to Chinese or Japanese the translation becomes goobledygook again.
So I thought, what if there’s a middle ware sitting just before the translation that rearranges the word order construction of your sentence, into something that the output language would expect?
I ran some tests first on Danish, because Danish word order construction is remarkably similar to English, but with enough differences so that errors can pop out (and also there was a really pretty Danish chick I was trying to impress, who remains very unimpressed with my efforts haha). The long and short of it is that Danish inverts the subject/verb order depending on whether the main clause of the sentence occurs before or after the subordinate clause. So in an inversion case, “I ran to the beach” in English would be “ran I to the beach” in Danish. If I manually rearrange the sentence in English to “ran I to the beach”, then the correct Danish sentence pops out. I tried this with Polish to Danish as well and the limited testing I did seems to work.
So for my last round of tests, I decided to try out English/Japanese translation.
I grabbed this chunk of text from a random news article:
この地区ではホヤの養殖が盛んだったが、東日本大震災の津波で養殖いかだが流され大きな被害を受けた
This sentence says:” this used to be a prosperous area for the cultivation of sea squirts, but the great eastern Japan tsunami washed all the rafts away and great damaged was incurred”
If I do a human translation, I would not be able to get back the target language. However, if I break up the input sentence like this:
“at this district, aquaculture of ‘hoya’ was prosperous, but.
at tsunami of the Great East Japan Earthquake, aquaculture raft is flowed, great damage received”
I get this:
“この地区では、「HOYA」の養殖が盛んだったが、。
東日本大震災の津波で、養殖いかだが流され、大きな被害は受けました”
Which, minus the punctuation (which I used to break the sentences into chunks), is almost word for word the original passage. The error occurred in the last sentence. It should be “大きな被害を受けた“, not “大きな被害は受けました”
I did a second trial:
世界の風力発電施設の発電能力は今年、４億キロワットを超え、原発を初めて上回ることがわかった
Using this:
‘power generation capacity’ of ‘wind power generation institution’ of the world this year,
exceed 400 millionkilowatt,
exceed nuclear power plant first time, thing understood
I get this:
世界の「風力発電施設「今年の「発電能力」、
4億キロワットを超え、
原子力発電所を初めて超え、事は理解しました
Which is really, really close. The main problem I have here now is that there are some words that GT prefers to use (which is not correct in contextual terms) that I can’t change without digging into the API or doing something on the backend.
Idiomatic and colloquial/casual words are also, for obvious reasons, hard to work.
Anyhow, hope this was interesting for like 5 minutes!
It was, nice work ‘non! It’s always something simple like “first rearrange, THEN transliterate” that makes the difference.
Merv could have gotten pretty big, but I don’t think it ever got as big as Constantinople.
“The best thing to happen to African capitalism since Nwabudike Morgan?”
-You mean Botswana?
“Now Chris Blattman has studied it empirically.”
-Not all sweatshops are created equal. Ethiopia is a fast-growing country, but its environment is difficult for manufacturers.
“Related: did you know that the segregation-era South had to pass laws prohibiting companies from preferentially hiring (cheaper) black labor?”
-And yet, the percentage Black in the Deep South kept rising right up until the 1910s.
“Only about forty percent of Americans support Trump for US President – so how come fifty-four percent of Chinese do?”
-It’s way less:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russians-4-trump/
This comment:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/01/he-kept-us-out-of-war/#comment-419579
also suggests there are quite a few Chinese-American Republicans put off by the Donald.
BTW, on the topic of the last post: there was a debate just a few hours ago. I would not be comfortable with either of the two Russophobic yahoos who want to deliberately bomb Syrian Army positions speaking as President. Thank goodness we didn’t get someone like Pence (who won the debate by at least a Kennedy-over-Nixon-first-debate margin) as the GOP nominee. I’m still comfortable with Trump.
>Merv could have gotten pretty big, but I don’t think it ever got as big as Constantinople.
I’m not sure that there are empirical figures, but Constantinople didn’t really hit its golden age until the 10th-11th centuries. I would guess that Merv was largest when it was the Tahirid capital in the mid 9th century and trade was flourishing in central Asia. There’s definitely a “window” when Merv could well have been larger than Constantinople, but I’m not sure how you could be certain.
According to Wikipedia, citing one Tertius Chandler, Merv was the world’s largest city between 1145 and 1153. This seems quite specific — I’d think even a best estimate could easily be off by 50% or more. I’ve seen it argued that ancient Rome had closer to 100,000 people at its peak, rather than a million, but in any case the estimates Wikipedia lists range from 500,000 to 1 million.
Constantinople shows up being largest in the eras preceding the ERE’s two major disasters: the initial Arab invasions and the Battle of Manzikert. Though it’s interesting to me that Justinian’s Plague doesn’t seem to be reflected in those estimates, since it killed maybe 1/3 of the city’s population.
It does not address the question of Merv directly, but I speculate that primary sources which comment on the population of cities will favor large disruptions like resettlement, massacre, and disease.
This would probably include things like importing slaves after a particularly successful military campaign, and/or counting the whole army assembled before a campaign launches.
The claim is not that Merv rapidly changed population, but that Kaifeng was sacked and depopulated and that Hangzhou subsequently grew to replace it, leaving a short period in which the largest city was not in China.
(Looking more closely, I find that Chandler also claims that Merv rose and fell rapidly, but that is less important and less rapid than what happened in China.)
Would it be uncouth for the rest of us to have an impromptu, unsolicited career-advice session for E. Harding? Surely the answer is yes but let’s do it anyway.
Assumptions, gleaned from his posts: E. Harding has a nigh-obsessive interest in social science, with special attention to subtopics including demography, statistical analysis of polling data, and elections.
Propositions (to be debated):
* If seeking to maximize lifetime career earnings, E. Harding should try to become a campaign strategist or polling consultant.
* If seeking to maximize life-satisfaction, E. Harding should focus on his passion for demography.
Do people agree or disagree with my propositions, and why?
Don’t follow your passion
This. Finding a job you can do well which makes you feel better completely outclasses any other concern, includin misguided notions of fun or “liking” a job. You will never like anything that asks you to attend to it every day for hours at a time.
I think I should point out that your comments would be more readable with the blockquote tag.
I imagine Harding doesn’t have the script active. It blocked me from using quotes for a fair while.
A physicist on the problems with “publish or perish” and modern science culture. I keep hearing about this but I have yet to read a clear explanation of how a better system would work.
The problem is too many people chasing too little money, and there’s no “solution” that doesn’t involve a lot of academic birth control and a lot of restructuring of the workforce so that science is produced by people who don’t also churn out new PhDs as by-products. Also, the new system will replace intense competition (which can stimulate productivity but also push people to be safe rather than creative) with a bit more security (which can elicit creativity from some people but also lead to sloth), and people will just have to accept that the upsides will come with downsides. Alas, if we ever tried it people would probably look at the downsides and say “Well, obviously what we need to do is just take the best parts of each…” and ignore that things tend to fit together better in certain ways, and that downsides are inevitable. So they’d create some weird Frankenstein version of the old system.
On the other hand, it’s kind of in the nature of researchers to not regard that which already is as being good enough…
The solution of improving the quality of the funnel being unthinkable and too difficult (for the sort of person who becomes a grantor anyway).
By “improving the quality of the funnel” I assume you mean a better process for awarding money. The problem is that scientific discovery is a risky, uncertain, and creative endeavor. Maybe I’m talking like a Chicago economist who doesn’t believe there can ever be a $20 on the ground, but if there were a good way to spot the promising ideas and approaches then the private sector would probably jump all over it. But the private sector is also risk averse, and has shorter time horizons than federal agencies.
I sit on a grant review panel, and the reality is that there are a lot more creative people with good ideas than there are grants to award. Whether true or not, I fancy myself able to identify the top third of proposals, and also a middle third that are probably also just about as good and can probably be re-crafted to make the case more strongly. If we were funding the top third this job would be easy: Fund that top third today, and send the middle third to the drawing board so they can think things through a bit more (never a bad idea, really) and then rise to the occasion next time and get funded as well. And then the unexpected twists and turns of how research actually works will happen, and some of the great advances will come from that middle third, others from the top third, and a few from people who didn’t get funded but found other ways to scrape by. And a lot of decent “normal science” (in Kuhn’s terminology) will also come out.
But that kind of money isn’t on offer. So we’re stuck doing a slightly more respectable-looking version of throwing darts at the board to select a fraction of the top third. And even if that kind of money were on offer, the universities would just expand their programs and produce more scientists with that money and pretty soon we’d be right back to too many people chasing too little cash. That’s exactly what happened when NIH doubled its funding in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and the universities responded by increasing the sizes of their programs and churning out more scientists in NIH-funded fields. (See Paula Stephan’s _How Economics Shapes Science_ for more info.)
I think that what Steve means by funnel is the shape of the number of people at various stages of the pipeline. “Academic birth control” is one way of adjusting the shape. More generally, we should kick more people out earlier. It is easy for me to imagine such systems because they exist in Europe and in the American past. I am surprised that Scott has trouble imagining this because he has written about it. One extreme is that French math postdocs have tenure. Mathematicians are cheap, allowing such an extreme.
Do you have a source for French math post-docs having tenure ? I am finishing a PhD in France (in CS admittedly) and never heard of it.
What is true in all subjects is that we don’t have a tenure track: you are either a poorly paid post-doc with a one or two year contract, or a poorly paid tenured professor/researcher (based mostly on seniority, it goes from about 2k€/month just after the post-doc, all the way to about 6k€/month if you have 40 years of seniority and a nobel prize).
From what I heard, US universities pay their senior professor more, but getting tenure there is even harder.
I meant CNRS postdocs, but I couldn’t remember the name of the agency. Probably I should have included a disclaimer that I didn’t necessarily mean all postdocs. And maybe they aren’t called postdocs, but that’s what Americans call them because most people leave them to take professorships at other schools, rather than being promoted in place. They are badly paid and the expectation is that if you aren’t promoted you’ll leave academia, but there isn’t a deadline. If I read them correctly, I have seen CVs of people getting such positions out of PhD and keeping them for decades.
Maybe my information is out of date. This (not specifically about math) says that short-term funding was introduced in 2005, although before that there was an expectation of doing foreign postdocs.
I was going to bring up “non-dual awareness.” The problem is that the people making the decisions are the lucky few with the good jobs. They have no incentive to make their jobs worse in order to make the lower rung jobs better or the higher rung jobs more plentiful.
Probably it’s worse in America because it is less centralized.
There are two issues, stress and the effect on research. The winners may not care about the stressful careers of the current generation, in general, but they do care about the stress on their own students, not that there is much that they can do unilaterally to change the system. Most professors’ research programs are inextricably intertwined with those of their students and they distort them towards LPUs for the sake of their students. And there are pressures directly on tenured professors, most obviously grant funding.
From your comment below:
People have seriously proposed research funding by lottery, pretty much on the basis you describe. Here’s a good (open-access!) article:
Research funding by lottery
It offers significant potential to reduce bias, improve efficiency, and minimize incentives towards incrementalism. Largely, this is predicated on the belief that we can’t accurately predict research anyway.
In a way, it seems loosely analogous to basic income in the science world. The arguments in favour are fairness, efficiency, and better-aligned incentives; the arguments against are “it’s politically crazy, and implementation is unclear.”
I’d love to see the SSC community discuss this.
I don’t think “fairness” (as usually understood) is a good argument in science. By efficiency do you mean the administrative costs of distributing grants? They don’t seem to be very high. And the incentives here are to buy as many lottery tickets as you can, that is, produce the maximum number of grant applications that just scrape by to get over the admittance bar.
Bias has been alleged & documented in various ways — against women & minorities (though that is controversial, especially here), against those who work at smaller institutions, and perhaps most damnably against those who have a personal conflict with a member of the review panel. Mainly what I mean by “fairness” is, in this context, the reduction of known or suspected sources of bias.
As for efficiency, I will agree that the administrative costs of distribution are quite small. However, the time cost of preparing grant submissions is extensive, and it’s particularly frustrating for those that do not succeed since it’s almost entirely wasted. There’s some good discussion (beneath the overdramatic metaphor) in “American Idol and NIH grant review.”
Yes, buying a lot of lottery tickets is a problem. Perhaps a hard limit of one application per PI per cycle would help, though even that has flaws.
Fixing complex systems is hard, and so is aligning incentives. I admit there are lots of areas where this is an underdeveloped idea. But it’s a pretty powerful suggestion to keep in mind when we talk about systematic issues in science.
I don’t see it as being powerful, I see it as giving up.
Imagine yourself as a homeowner looking for a contractor to, say, remodel your bathroom. It’s a somewhat complicated and uncertain process: you have several contractors come look at the job and produce quotes; some contractors have reputations known to you, some don’t; some you like personally and some not so much, etc. etc. In the end you choose one but you spent a lot of time on the selection process and the not-chosen contractors wasted a lot of their time on producing rejected quotes.
You are suggesting to shortcut the whole process and just give the job to a random contractor picked by throwing darts at a
phone bookGoogle search.Do you believe it’s a good idea?
Besides, it’s easy to see who would be very enthusiastic about the lottery: incompetents who do NOT want to be evaluated on the merits.
One major problem with bias is, I think, insoluble–the bias towards funding research that the people making the decision agree with. If you are pretty sure that room temperature fusion is bogus, you are not likely to want to allocate money to research on it–except possibly research by other people who think it is bogus and want to debunk the people who claim it is real.
It’s insoluble because it is the flip side of trying to fund research that the person making the decision thinks is worth doing. But it’s a problem because it is a bias in favor of whatever views are currently orthodox in the field, those being the views that most of the senior people making decisions agree with.
@Lumifer
The suggestion has never been an open, free-for-all lottery.
It’s for applications to still get reviewed, and only those judged good enough enter the lottery pool. Particularly exceptional ones (say, top 5%) could be allowed to bypass it entirely.
I think it’s apt to call it giving up. I also think that in certain cases, recognizing when to give up is admirable. If you really can’t predict something, it’s best not to try, since you’ll be prone to confounding.
As for whether or not I think it’s a good idea: it really depends on the context. For most science, it would be a terrible idea. For biomedical research — where much of the data on prediciton difficulty comes from, and many people report frustration at a seemingly arbitrary process — it could perhaps be appropriate to start a pilot program. Similarly, it might make sense for young researchers — they have very little track record to evaluate, and it seems like a more honest way to “narrow the funnel”.
I’d think you’d want *some* kind of accountability, so researchers didn’t just dither the money away, and having one’s track record play a role in determining funding seems like a natural way to introduce accountability.
The notion is interesting, but the question I immediately come up with is what happens to long-term investments in research equipment?
If a laboratory can no longer rely on getting a better-than-average share of grant revenue, how will they maintain their facilities, and why would they invest in new ones?
That being said, if the assertion that we have a lot of surplus science equipment laying around and maintaining it is a waste of money were made, I could accept it.
I never did a doctorate but I know a lot of people who did/are doing one. Mostly outside of the sciences. But I imagine the problem is the same: there’s a lot of smart people who love what they study and really want to be profs, with the result that universities have access to a lot of underpaid labour – I don’t think very many people would agree to the kind of deals TAs and non-PhD instructors get if there wasn’t the possibility of being a prof at the end of the rainbow. But there aren’t enough jobs out there for everyone – certainly not good tenure-track jobs.
Similarly, so many people want to be lawyers that law schools are letting in more people than there are articling positions and jobs.
So pretty much every career that a high school councilor would suggest is flooded.
Wow its almost as if having the state mandate a path of education and set of values make the marginal utility of a person with those traits zero.
Seriously does anyone else see a major problem with encouraging the entire population to pour a lot of resources in being exceptional within the same narrow band. Its like the exact opposite of what the laws of comparative advantage would want us to do. We’d want to produce people who were massively different if we were persuing efficiency.
I think you’re massively overestimating the capabilities of schools.
As far as I know medical school isn’t, but it seems to be a lot harder to get into medical school than law school, and the med students I knew seemed to work far harder than the law students.
In the law school case, the view you are describing became widespread some years back with the result that law school applications dropped sharply and total law school enrollment ended up dropping as well–by how much I don’t know. So there is some feedback in the system, even if with a considerable delay.
Unfortunately for a lot of people I know, they made the decision to go to law school (3 years, after all) right before the feedback started to happen. Someone who started their degree in, say, 2010 is vastly better off than someone who started it in 2013.
I think the worst years for the legal job market were 2008-2010, which affected those that entered law school in 2005-2007. In 2008 job offers were actually rescinded at several BigLaw firms. Except in special cases having to do with problems at a single firm, I don’t think has happened before or since.
There will be observer bias there — naturally there are more people in the larger classes, so it’s less likely that people will know people in the more recent smaller classes.
That said, it’s a sucky position for those people to be in.
I have little faith that replacing one system with another will improve much.
Far better to have several different competing systems.
The basic math errors thing was my introduction to research skepticism. Some cantankerous old professor had a lecture up where he had collected some of these. He had submitted corrections to the journals in question, usually resulting in being ignored, but in a couple cases resulted in the paper having the page numbers and where tables appeared shuffled around without the error being fixed. He made enemies and quit doing it.
I was confused by no one being aware of the military thing in high school. Join the coast guard, get cushy gig because they are short on smart people, exit and continue with cushy gigs. It was a backup plan I came very close to executing on when it looked like college wasn’t going to work out due to laziness.
I believe that the situation may have changed in recent years, due to the very high risk of getting sent to some foreign war, and then stop-lossed forever. I could be wrong though.
Is that going to happen to someone in the Coast Guard, though?
Unlikely but possible. There were instances during the surge of coasties (mostly coxswains, corpsmen, and divers) getting pulled to “augment” the Navy because the Navy’s guys had all gotten detailed out to the Marines and/or Army.
What?
I don’t know about being stop-lossed forever, but according to #5 in this list, Coast Guard _does_ get deployed overseas:
http://allhands.coastguard.dodlive.mil/2014/02/05/from-the-homefront-top-10-things-we-wish-people-knew-about-coast-guard-life/
the vast majority of american soldiers can serve 4 years without going anywhere near danger. That’s true even of those not in the Air Force or Navy.
Also, What?
According to this link, in Iraq, the Coast Guard has seen a grand total of 1 KIA and 2 WIA out of 1,250 deployed, the first losses in military action since Vietnam.
I know a guy who was former Coast Guard. Reasonably smart guy, though he became a cop, hated it, is still looking for a way out. He would have happily stayed in the Coast Guard, but after becoming a father wanted to be home more. He felt that as a guardsman he helped people and as a police officer he’s mostly harassing people.
In general, I think joining the military is bad advice for people unless they actively want to join the military and perhaps make a career of it, or they’re late bloomers. People of above-average IQ who would nonetheless spend their early 20s as baristas might end up ahead in their careers by age 30 if they instead joined the military. I went to business school with a guy who probably fit this mold — working-class but above-average IQ. Wasn’t ready for college at age 18, so he enlisted.
But how do you predict future baristas? I might have been headed down that path, except I matured rapidly in my last year of college and ended up with a good job.
People who would otherwise graduate college and get a decent job will often just find themselves a few years behind in their careers when they finish their military service, any benefits from the military connection easily offset by age discrimination. I think this is even true if your ambition(?) is to work in the Federal bureaucracy.
>A physicist on the problems with “publish or perish” and modern science culture. I keep hearing about this but I have yet to read a clear explanation of how a better system would work.
I would think that one could start by hiring and promoting as teachers people want to and are expected to teach, not to publish. Then we could stop flooding the world with the thousands of mediocre research papers that are needed to maintain the illusion that the pre-1945 academic world is still alive and its members are still a tiny quasi-aristocratic intellectal elite, not a huge swathe of broadly upper middle class, but not terribly special, knowledge workers.
as someone related to a professor, you fucking nailed it
Look, I think the idea is: it’s always good to have more research, right? And sure, it is. But in reality it seems like once a critical mass is reached, you get very little cumulative benefit. Now there’s also a significant downside, in the form of false research which deceives people, propagates lies, and then as a result of these things devalues the whole idea of scientific research and so forth. I guess I don’t have all the answers on this score, but it seems to me like we could re-focus on professors mostly teaching, and also research professors being fewer and mostly researching. That might lead to a lot less P-hacking, because you’ve always got something interesting to chase and you don’t even have to worry about someone stealing it out from under you, more than likely. (especially if there’s not that many professors in your field, because you’d need to maintain good relationships with them in order to keep up the collaborations.)
As an actual professor (sciences): basically, yes. Fewer research professors, more stable funding, more staff-scientist / “permanent” postdoc positions — this would be great for science, society, overall budgets, etc. Why doesn’t it happen? I think two things: (1) Everyone wants to be a professor, and (2) Universities have a huge incentive to have lots of faculty applying for grants. I think (2) is the more important of these. When the NIH budget doubled, for example, the number of faculty applying for grants more than doubled, as universities went on hiring sprees to take advantage of the big pot of money. In the end, success rates for NIH grants went down, to their present abysmal levels.
I wonder if the longer term solution is going to be a much more radical one, a shift in the direction of much academic work being done as a hobby by amateurs. In a way that’s a return to the pattern of a couple of centuries ago, except that then it was mostly limited to the small fraction of the population that could afford it–we are a much richer society, and a lot more people can earn a decent living doing boring job X while they get their real fun and sense of self worth from unpaid job Y.
Consider, for example, our host, who has been doing very good amateur analysis of other people’s articles for quite a long time.
Going back, David Ricardo was a retired stock market prodigy, Charles Darwin trained as a clergyman, Galton was a financially independent polymath. My geologist wife tells me that her field owes much of its origin to a gentleman farmer and a mining engineer.
That might work for social sciences, but physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. are far too expensive (and regulated, in the case of medicine) to be pursued by amateurs.
Biology isn’t far to expensive to be pursued by amateurs. Genome sequencing plummeting in cost, and you can run bioinformatics software on a fairly standard laptop (gonna need an external hard drive for the data though).
hi, can you elaborate on this? what sorts of things can an amateur do in biology?
@joseph pk
Kinda. Bacon is being pretty optimistic. There is a lot of sequencing data out there on public repositories and online courses on data analysis. While genome sequencing is dropping in price, it’s not exactly cheap, especially if you want to sequence something that’s never been done before. * Additionally you get a lot of data and need a fair amount of computing power to analyse it.
For things you can’t do on a computer, then those are different stories.
*Link is a few years old. So the price has gone down a bit, but again for sequencing of an organism that hasn’t been done before you need good depth and coverage for it to be worthwhile in many cases.
First let us remember the context, David Friedman was not talking bout amateur as in layman, he is talking about gifted people who have achieved or been born into financial independence turning their focus to subjects that interest them. If you think of an amateur as someone that took a few biology classes in college and spends some nights playing CS and some nights doing sequencing you have a right to be incredulous, but if you think of someone like Nassim Taleb who made a bunch of money as a trader and then pursued his intellectual curiosities for a few decades after you have a better model.
Background: I worked for 3 years (7-10 years ago) part time in a biology lab as an “amateur” (no degree in biology) working on genetic markers for plants (I made a fair amount of money, but not Eff you money, playing poker and had no responsibilities so I was sort of halfway since I was working in an actual lab). Some of the projects I worked on lead to publication (I think I am listed as 3rd author and 5th author on a pair of papers) but nothing of importance. My dad, whose lab it was (and obviously how I got the job) is a professor of biology and has been researching genetics for 45 years and we still talk about his work on occasion so a lot of this represents my interpretation of his opinion of the field.
One of the main inhibitors in progress in biology is that the ability to produce data far exceeds our ability to analyze or understand it. You can sequence a large chunk of genome for analysis, but it is like discovering the Library of Alexandria and looking for something exciting and original, but only having high school Latin as a background in language, while reading the texts one at a time. From a big picture standpoint what was (and still is) needed are good ways to approach and handle this data, and better models of how genomes function.
In terms of small picture, the world is your oyster. There are enormous numbers of interesting results in genetics that could provide valuable (or at least fun) insight into how life organizes itself. Some plants have the ability to rearrange their own genomes within a single generation in reaction to stress (with those changes being passed on to another generation). This, in my view, is effing nuts! More importantly though it seems that a lot (if not all) of labs end up with odd results that they can’t, or don’t take the time to, explain.
@ Odoacer-
If you want to sequence a brand new genome, and attempt to analyze it as a whole (or as a series of very large parts) you need boatloads of money, computing power etc, however progress was being made even during the times when sequencing a single gene was considered a Thesis project, and not something that was done over the weekend after shipping a sample to the lab. Genomes are large enough, and complicated enough, that there is still a ton of room for “bottom up” research, which is certainly in the means of amateurs.
Why would we want that? I don’t meant to be snarky, I mean that sincerely. In every other field, except politics, we recognize that professionalism, in the broadest, most positive sense, is a good thing for making disciplines more rigorous. Are there downsides to professionalism? sure, but they are usually vastly outweighed by the positives that come from people dedicating much of their lives to a pursuit and the knowledge and investment that come with that. I don’t think amateur scholars should be rejected out of hand, but why would we expect them to outcompete professionals in the long run when they don’t anywhere else?
Amateurs don’t have to be paid and will often provide their own equipment. If the business model by which professional scientists are hired and equipped is sufficiently broken, that may give the advantage to the amateurs.
Don’t underestimate the economic advantage of dividing by zero in your ROI calculations.
>Amateurs don’t have to be paid and will often provide their own equipment.
That’s just as true of amateur dentists and realtors, but I still want the professional.
Are you willing to pay for the professional dentist or realtor? And what’s your budget for paying professional scientists?
If the answer is, “I pay taxes and expect the government to pay those people to do the stuff I want done”, that’s the thing that can sometimes work well and sometimes work so badly that the only good work is being done by amateurs. Right now, the funding system for professional scientists isn’t working as well as it used to and it’s trending in the wrong direction.
>Are you willing to pay for the professional dentist or realtor?
Yes, and I do.
>And what’s your budget for paying professional scientists?
My personal budget is zero, but I am not in the business of producing science. Were I a research institution, however, I certainly would prefer professionals for the day in, day out work. I actually do use the efforts of enthusiastic amateurs in for some of the work I do, and believe me, I appreciate them, but there are limits to what they can achieve.
I love amateurism as a gamer who has used mods, romhacks, and Starcraft special maps. But I don’t know if it’d really work well in science. Because frankly, most of that stuff is crap, it’s just that the good stuff rises to the top because it’s continually tested by gamers. So are you also going to find lots of amateurs willing to replicate? How are you going to stop the media from taking these studies and running with them as they normally do with more credible but still pretty non-credible studies?
Also, the amateur is doing it because he want to find out things, not because he needs publications to get hired to get tenured. My rather casual impression is that only a small fraction of publications actually contribute to scientific progress.
Scott Locklin posted a list of 30 unsolved questions in physics and astronomy which he thought that individuals or small groups could contribute to on shoestring budgets.
Not sure how many of these have been answered in the intervening four years…
Well actually
The problem lies in the fact that you are not in a research institution, rendering your preferences entirely moot.
Research institutions prefer that their scientists generate prestige, in the form of publications in high-impact journals. This, and similar metrics, is what gets them funding and power. As these metrics become increasingly decoupled from actual science(*), less science will be done by professional scientists working at research institutions.
Amateur scientists, by etymological definition, do science because they love science. They will continue to do science. Professional scientists who are motivated by science rather than funding and prestige will become increasingly frustrated in their institutional environments; almost certainly some of them will chose to instead do science as amateurs. Bystanders who Fucking Love Science will in some cases chose to fund amateur science as that becomes a more reliable way to get their fix.
This may reach a point where more and better science is done by amateurs than by professionals, only in part because the amateurs are doing more. If you would prefer that science be done by professionals, best get yourself in a position to make the funding decisions for a research institution that hires scientists.
*Particularly the relatively boring, day-in-day-out sort of science that you correctly recognize as vital.
@David Friedman and John Schilling and I’d be willing to bet an even smaller amount of current amateur science contributes to progress.
Look, I’m all for people doing what they want for the most part. If a prodigy wants to analyze published data on her spare time and finds an important connection to a disease, then bully for her! However, how did that data become available in the first place? It takes a lot of time, effort, and money in many cases to do science, especially boring parts of science like documentation of repeated experiments. I’m not claiming that all of currently researched science is worthwhile or even true, but it’s not a bad system. Changes might be welcomed, but I’m not certain what changes are necessary.
Also, maybe I’m being unfair here, but it’s been my experience that really smart people tend to underestimate how difficult things are in fields not their own. I don’t know why that is.
Just to be clear, I’m not against amateur science (science done outside of research institutes/businesses/etc.). But I think the current costs and resources required in many fields limits what the amateur can do.
That is the wrong question. The right question is, what changes are going to happen?
One change that seems to be happening now is that the research institutions that make up the current “not a bad system” are increasingly disincentivized from performing the “boring parts of science like documentation of repeated experiments”, because that’s not the sort of thing that gets funding in a tight budgetary environment.
Relevant Hark! A Vagrant on Irish-Americans raiding Canada: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=364
This is interesting in that I’ve avoided drugs of any kind for a long time, in part for exactly this reason. I can’t keep finger food or sugary stuff in the apartment, because I’m incapable of not munching on it until I’m too sick to continue. I figured that lack of self-control would generalize to drugs.
…on the one hand, it’s nice to have some confirmation that I’m making a good call in that respect. On the other, I’m even more wary of trying any kind of recreational drugs now. One more small pleasure of life that I don’t get to enjoy. Bah.
Counter-anecdote: I too have a hard time forcing myself to stop eating junk food.
I’ve had no problem trying recreational drugs once or twice without getting hooked, and rarely drink alcohol. I also find tobacco repulsive.
My experience as well. Though I note that, if in the presence of an open alcoholic drink that I like, I will often drink it quite quickly. I’m just rarely in the presence of such. But I don’t experience the same cravings as I do for salty/sugary junk food.
>I’m just rarely in the presence of such.
Isn’t this exactly the thing Error is doing…?
I don’t think I was clear enough. I’m around alcohol infrequently, but this is not in any way deliberate. If I haven’t essentially been handed a drink, it’s about 50/50 that I’ll get one (for example at restaurants that also serve alcohol). I have to deliberately not buy eg jerky when I see it in the store, and I struggle with this.
Confirmation from another side: I basically don’t eat sugar and don’t have cravings for sweet foods; I am also unaffected by a popular recreational drug.
I come from a long line of fat alcoholics with a sizable sub-population of drug addicts. I’m skinny and healthy, but only through paying a LOT of attention to my habits and trying hard to stay that way. Booze and sugar give me the same sorts of temptation problems- I try not to keep session beers or ice cream in the house, though baking supplies and my extensive liquor cabinet are fine, since they tend to work better with small doses and more extensive prep-work to consume.
Re: /r/im14andthisisdeep
I reddit a lot, but I’ve started to really dislike these kind of subs (see also /r/iamverysmart, /r/thathappened, /r/tumblrinaction, /r/ anything-with-fedora-or-cringe-in-the-title).
I’m14andthisisdeep isn’t so bad, but the typical mode is laughing at lonely insecure people for not being as smart or self-aware as they should be. I didn’t like the company or how it made me feel to engage as someone who was bullied a good deal when I was younger.
/r/im14andthisisdeep is sometimes a little harsh about what they do, but /r/tumblrinaction is okay. On TIA they have rules against insulting people in their blogs, and they have a scheduled “sanity sunday” where they post things they think are positive and constructive.
/r/iamverysmart is sometimes dumb itself, and it likes to link to reddit threads, which encourages brigading. Same with stuff like /r/srs. Outside reddit agreggators are better.
That’s what r/iamverysmart is?! I had just seen the name once and been comforted to think that there existed a safe space for people who believe they are smarter than most, where they could stop pretending not to believe that.
Well, better to find out this way rather than turning there in a time if actual need…
I believe you are looking for /r/INTJ. *cough*
I agree, and I find those subreddits vaguely repulsive. It’s not that any of the criticism is wrong, but it just seems like on an overall basis, if you have to judge whether the existence of those subreddits are making the world a nicer or meaner place to live, you have to judge it as meaner, and that is probably a negative for society and shared trust. Also, participating in those communities is an extremely poor use of time, but that’s never stopped any internet debate, anywhere.
r/tumblrinaction really isn’t that bad. I won’t deny it’s a time waster, but the people there are pretty nice. Plus, since SJWs took over tumblr, the subreddit is nicely opposed to the radical social justice types and has largely resisted the infiltration most other popular subreddits have had.
“Largest city” is an ambiguous term. I could truthfully say that the largest city in the US is Sitka, Alaska, or that the smallest city in England is London.
Unless someone sets up context or is trying to be contrary, “largest” city always means “most populous”. Of course, there can still be ambiguity around city vs. metro and daytime vs. residential population (a 1000x and 30x difference, respectively, in London’s case). Though none of these apply to pre-Industrial cities.
I was just being cheeky about Sitka (although it now has another claim to fame besides being the setting of an alternate-history novel).
London is pretty unusual in that most of what’s commonly known as “London” is outside the city limits. The only other city I can think of like that is Las Vegas, where the whole Strip (except for the Stratosphere) is in unincorporated Clark County – and even then, the City of Las Vegas has a few hundred thousand residents. The City of London has under 10,000.
Although London (as in the Square Mile) is also the smallest city in England by population- there are two smaller ones in the UK, but both are in Wales.
Ooh, link time! I posted these in the open thread, but this seems an appropriate place to repost them.
#1: Some flat-earthers have a new theory that there are no real trees left on the earth, and that what we now call “trees” are nothing in comparison to the real trees, hundreds of miles high, that once existed. (H/T Sarah Perry)
#2: You’ve likely heard before the theory that autism and schizophrenia are actually opposites, so that you could form an autistic-schizophrenic spectrum with most people in the middle. Well, here’s a pair of articles proposing, based on physiology, that perhaps this axis is actually the same as the domestication axis that’s so famous from canine experiments, with schizophrenic people being more domesticated than usual and autisic people being less domesticated. (H/T Alice Maz)
I am not remotely qualified to evaluate this, but I thought I’d point it out.
1.) I can’t even. I love how the Atlantic has no problem writing 5000 words on a YouTube video even flat earthers think is crazy, or analyzing the impact of the harambe meme
2.) Strange. I’m not an expert either, but I got the feeling I get when someone glosses over the details that don’t fit the narrative. Age of onset seems like a huge descrepancy that needs to be explained. Why does autism kick in during early childhood while schizophrenia appears later? Autism seems much closer to congenital and schizophrenia to pathological.
Can it be reconciled with Simon Baron-Cohen’s overly-male brain autism theory?
I’ve been more under the impression that both condition-groups are conditional; that certain circumstances can bring out schizophrenic and autistic behaviour, but the overal autisticness and schizophrenicness of an individual is overwhelmingly hereditary.
I see validity in Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis, although I think calling the autistic brain flatly “male” proves too much – autism aligns with a very male set of characteristics, but not all distinctly male characteristics align with autism. In any case, does schizophrenia align with a “female” brain? Are delusions of reference, paranoia and reading small things into giant theories feminine?
I stumbled across that kind of stuff a while ago, found it intriguely if not necessarily substantiated. It ties in to Scott’s post about mental processes and the “handshake” – in that model Schizophrenia and Autism are related but not opposites, and the opposite of Autism would be some sort of congenital credulity or super-gullibility, or someone who just accepts things the moment they happen. Not entirely sure if something like that exist.
Both models as well as my own experience confirms to the view that autism is a form of un, anti or maybe dis-domesticaiton. The set of internal standards in autists, rational or otherwise, are very anal and tight.
Adam Smith Institute argues for the claim that markets will punish discrimination …
(sarcasm) Oh, why is it that SSC comments often have a very right-wing leaning? Wouldn’t one expect that liberals and conservatives are equally interested in investigations if discrimination is all the fault of the gummint? We’re rationalists, right? We look at “studies” which might prove it, and anyone who even hints that there’s something dubious about this sort of effort due to political effects is anti-rational, right? (end sarcasm).
Look, this sort of stuff is going to attract far more right-wingers (yes, I include Libertarians there) who are interested in celebrating that it “proves” their worldview about discrimination, than it will attract left-wingers who want to slog through trying to produce a counter-argument against it, in hostile territory. That’s simply an empirical effect. Note I didn’t say the latter is going to be absolute zero. But, on the whole, who is going to find that sort of discussion more attractive? Conservatives who want to just tell themselves that discrimination is all the government’s fault, or liberals who want to assemble a kind, charitable, and also analytic, educational rebuttal?
And the end result is going to be what’s apparent in the election thread comments.
This is observation. I am making no statement about what course of action follows from it. But there’s no mystery in why the SSC comentariat tends to drift to being a more intellectual version of a certain polarity.
Not quite a disclaimer: There’s much very bad material and attitude on the left, which I abhor and oppose. But, I think it’s more like an immune response that turns into auto-immune illness rather than a pure negative.
Are the SSC commenters very right-leaning? Surely there are some Clinton and Sanders supporters here.
“Conservatives who want to just tell themselves that discrimination is all the government’s fault, or liberals who want to assemble a kind, charitable, and also analytic, educational rebuttal?”
-False dichotomy, man, and very unfairly treating one side.
“And the end result is going to be what’s apparent in the election thread comments.”
-Don’t complain about the comments if you can’t refute them.
SSC commentariat leans right != Each and every SSC commenter leans right.
Note I specifically alluded to the opposite idea: “Note I didn’t say the latter is going to be absolute zero.”
I did not say “Each side consists only of these two types”. The idea is that given these two types exist, which of the two types will be preferentially attracted? It’s a rhetorical way of saying “This type will be attracted far more than this other type”, which again, is not a statement that the sides consist intrinsically of only those types.
I submit the relatively simple parsings above as illustration of why there is a disincentive to argue anything that is subject to repeated misparsing in a similar fashion.
Part of the problem is that different people have different views of what leaning right consists of.
My guess, from the recent enormous threads, is that only a small minority of commenters actually like Trump, think his nomination was a good choice. But a substantial number more think he is less bad than Hilary and others, myself included, think both are pretty poor selections and favor Gary Johnson.
Should all those positions count as right?
For another example … . Someone recently had a comment which pretty clearly regarded the traditional freedom of association position, which implies opposition to laws prohibiting private discrimination, as not merely right of center but so extreme right that it was surprising anyone held it. From his standpoint it makes sense to view a lot more posters as right wing than from my standpoint, since I regard that as the obvious position and the current orthodoxy as bizarre.
We are in agreement entirely that “different people have different views of what leaning right consists of.”. For example, I’ve been fascinated in readings of US history how much slavery was a widespread acceptable position in the US before the Civil War. Not every single person supported slavery. But the abolitionists, who we think of as obviously correct nowadays, were considered in the past as what might be termed a very left-wing position. These terms are very relative to one’s political context. Nonetheless, despite the imperfections of language, in 2016 America I believe the stance of relegalizing business discrimination is fairly described as “right-wing” (including Libertarians), given how the phrase is commonly understood in colloquial usage, in ways it would be very tedious to outline in excruciating detail and subject to distracting semantic quibbling.
Well, if you are recalling something I wrote, I would not have been expressing any sort of surprise at the existence itself. I’ve been on the Internet a very long time. Though I can certainly see someone having such a reaction, given the past 50 years of civil rights progress. Regarding considering “the current orthodoxy as bizarre”, you might contemplate how many people in pre-Civil War America believed it was the obvious position that people could be property. In terms of history, it wasn’t that long ago.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393
(emphasis added)
“4. The Constitution of the United States recognises slaves as property, and pledges the Federal Government to protect it. And Congress cannot exercise any more authority over property of that description than it may constitutionally exercise over property of any other kind.
5. The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from [p396] taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitution, and the removal of the plaintiff by his owner to that Territory gave him no title to freedom.”
“But the abolitionists, who we think of as obviously correct nowadays, were considered in the past as what might be termed a very left-wing position.”
Why? They were definitely extreme. Is that identical with “left”?
@Seth:
I agree that if you have to classify my view on private discrimination as right or left it’s right. My point was that you seemed to see it as extreme right, I as “not left.”
You are correct that slavery was an accepted institution for a long time. But it’s worth noting that the 19th c. libertarians, the classical liberals, were among its opponents. Economics got its label of the dismal science from Carlyle in response to the support by Mill and similar people for the emancipation of slaves and related ideas. And Carlyle’s opposition to the radical notion of human equality was supported by people such as Ruskin and Dickens–the people viewed by those leftists with opinions on the subject as the 19th century good guys.
Indeed, as you probably realize, from my standpoint support for nondiscrimination law is support for a very dilute version of slavery–having the decision of who someone associates with made not by mutual consent but by an outside authority.
Right, but he’s saying classical liberals would be classified as “left-wing” relative to the 19th century perspective, where the hierarchies being fought over were those of royalty, slaveowners, and the state church rather than the more meritocratic systems emerging in the 20th. (Some, such as Bastiat, were “left-wing” in the original, literal sense of the word.)
It could also be viewed as a supply/demand issue for the type of forum we are on.
The left and progressive groups are also very fashionable, and widely accepted among a large swath of ‘intellectual’ type forums. There is tons of supply of places where academic and/or intelligent people can discuss the merits of progressivism. Whereas the supply for non-progressive intellectual thought and debate is very low, and basically doesn’t exist in most academic circles.
Don’t you mean demand? X -)
Joseph, they probably would be considered left, but the idea that one could be a committed leftist and also use the language of Christianity without hypocrisy is something the modern left doesn’t do. In that case, being leftist was being leftist in the tradition of Christianity, which bound people together. Now they are leftist in no tradition and with nothing to bind them to conservatives.
@Maware:
This is simply not true.
For instance, one of the major fronts in the gay rights and marriage equality fight was in liberal churches. This caused an actual schism within the Episcopal Church in 2003, I believe.
Religious in the US gets used as if the only real believers are part of the Moral Majority, but the actual picture is much more complex.
“I submit the relatively simple parsings above as illustration of why there is a disincentive to argue anything that is subject to repeated misparsing in a similar fashion.”
Indeed.
10.54% of the comments in the last non-open thread (1,117 total) were yours alone. 5.02% of the 2,310 in the thread before that. It’s no one’s responsibility to waste their time “refuting” all that.
Seth and Jill said it best:
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
“For me, it’s like arguing with the Bible toting missionaries at my door who have come to convert me. No one would expect me to waste my time in discussions with those people, in person. But on the Internet, when the fundamentalism is political rather than religious, many people think this is different. It’s not.”
Especially when he bails if and when you do manage to lock down his arguments.
@ Zombilicious sez Jill or Seth sez:
“For me, it’s like arguing with the Bible toting missionaries at my door who have come to convert me. No one would expect me to waste my time in discussions with those people, in person. But on the Internet, when the fundamentalism is political rather than religious, many people think this is different. It’s not.”
Well, no. Because the JW or LDS are talking to you personally, and generally in private.(*)
But arguments on the internet are done in public, and are not about the person you’re engaging with, they’re about the lurking bystanders. You really do need to challenge bad ideas, and you need to do so in an honest, engaging, amusing, non-threatening way. And dang right, it’s hard.
*shrugs* Welcome to the human race, you want a cookie?
(*) I tend to live in sketch neighborhoods. I invite them in, offer them ice water or lemonade. I tell them I’m Roman Catholic, and not likely to change the way I’m following The Man, and invite them to my parish. *shrugs* Generally they come by at least once more, just to smile and say hey.
Oh i dunno… our host perhaps? Granted he’s more of an “anyone but Trump” supporter… but still…
>Are the SSC commenters very right-leaning?
… you did read the comments on the trump post, right? I realize they were agreeing with you, but it was fairly noticeable.
(I’m not sure if those comments were unusually bad, perhaps because someone linked to them from somewhere, or if the comments have gotten much more right-wing recently while I wasn’t looking.)
Those comments were unusually bad–highlights include E. Harding declaring that the Chinese Exclusion Act was justified because modern Chinese-Americans might not vote for Trump–but the overall fever-swampery was mostly coming from Harding and sometimes Friedman, who are both regulars here.
That’s not a good sample, being a post that will definitely trigger the “someone is wrong on the internet” module of right-wing brains more than left-wing brains.
I start to sympathize with the left when E. Harding is half the thread, but the sympathy evaporates when the complaint becomes “a single link was posted which might back up some right-wing views.” There’s no satisfying that short of “never ever discuss any right-wing views.”
You’re far from alone on this, on both points.
I think the reason SSC gets so much heat for being “right-wing” is that this is a space where none of the usual left wing, or even cosmopolitan centrist, assumptions can be taken for granted.
We do genuinely have people from every extreme of the political spectrum. which isn’t alarming if you have some out there views (your ued to people like that) but is alarming if you aren’t used to it and just saw an in depth discussion of freedom of association vs. anti-decrimination laws in which no one called the other racist.
On the whole I don’t think SSC actually leans right but there are a lot of fat tail political beliefs here that even some college educated probably hasn’t been exposed to.
SSC doesn’t lean left or right. It leans smart and that, evidently, is very unexpected and unsettling for some people.
I agree SSC leans smart. But I really don’t think that the political differences between it and others is entirely down to smartness. There is quite a distinct strain not so much of right-wingness as anti-leftness. Especially the feeling that ‘social justice’ and ‘SJWs’ are leading threats facing US/West.
There are various likely reasons for this: the issues our host has faced himself with SJW-types, the apparently significant numbers of people from tech backgrounds where this seems to be more of an issue, the (I guess) fact that vast majority of posts are by men etc.
“There is quite a distinct strain not so much of right-wingness as anti-leftness. ”
Not “anti-leftness.” Guaranteed Basic Income is generally viewed as a left wing idea and pretty popular here.
Anti a particular sort of leftness exemplified by SJW types, which some on the left are also anti.
I’ll echo the E Harding comment, I’d guess that you could improve the comments sections of most established blogs by banning anyone who breaks certain prolific standards. Ray Lopez on MR for example.
@David Friedman: you’re completely right. I wrote the SJW stuff to clarify the reference to anti-leftist but implied that I was giving an example, when actually what I meant was specifically that lots of people here are anti- the SJW bit of leftist.
Agreed some people on the left are also anti-SJW but lots of commentators here explicitly refer to SJW as ‘left’, so…
Also, I think a fair chunk of pro-GBI people here reach that apparently left-wing position from the right?
It’s basically the libertarian compromise option for welfare (with a side of “worrying about technological unemployment”).
Since you are describing me as fever swampery, would you like to take up my challenge to defend your claims about my blog? You wrote:
—
“David, why do you think I don’t post on your blog? Why would I want to interact with only the people you consider tolerable?
I’m quite aware that you and your fellow-travelers are wildly offended at seeing viewpoints that aren’t alt-right, yes. ”
—
I pointed out that my blog had contained extended exchanges with Robert Frank and Robert Altemeyer. Also that I don’t censor the comments on it. You could easily check that both those statements are true. So unless you are willing to claim that the views of Frank and Altemeyer are alt right, along with the views of the various commenters on my blog, you cannot support what you wrote.
My conjecture is that you had not actually read my blog and formed your beliefs by transforming conjecture about what people who disagree with you must be like into fact without the involvement of data. I could be wrong. But unless I missed it, you provided no support at all for your description and no rebuttal to my evidence that it was nonsense.
You are tremendously biased but nevertheless demand to be regarded as unbiased. You seem to struggle with this.
His claim wasn’t that I am biased, which is hard to test, since bias is relative to the truth, which is one of the things people disagree about.
His claims, however, were that posting on my blog would result in only interacting with people I consider tolerable and that I am wildly offended at seeing opinions that are not alt right. You can prove that those statements are false by simply reading my blog–I provided convenient links in my response. I have long and civil conversations with people well to my left and, while I have nothing close to the volume of comments Scott gets, my commenters cover a range of views.
Do you want to defend his claims, which I think you can easily check are false? If you would prefer to argue about my biases, feel free. I’m willing to discuss that question too.
I don’t think “right-leaning” has much of a coherent meaning. To me the “right-leaning” take on discrimination laws would be that people can discriminate or not discriminate, it’s a free country and they own their shit, let them do what they want with it.
Or maybe that’s the libertarian leaning? The classification system doesn’t make any sense.
That’s the libertarian leaning, but libertarians are quite often lumped in with conservatives as right wing.
That isn’t entirely unreasonable, since the conservative movement from 1960 or a little earlier viewed itself as a libertarian-traditionalist alliance. Candidates such as Goldwater and publications such as National Review showed elements of both positions and Frank Meyer argued for a natural fusion of the two.
But the alliance began to fray some time back. And libertarians are the modern version of the classical liberalism that, in the 19th century, was the chief opponent of conservatism, which makes lumping them together a bit odd.
I favor both open borders and drug legalization, and those positions are not unusual among libertarians. But they are the opposite of the views on those subjects usually classified as right wing.
@ E. Hardin
Surely there are some Clinton and Sanders supporters here.
Me, HeelBearCub, Jill, Uncle Kyrakin, Nita, a few more I can’t remember at the moment. But we more often post about non-political things, not wanting to be dogpiled. If Deiseach were USian, Hillary is financially liberal and socially a mild liberal, not an aggressive one.
What would a similar list of Trump supporters look like? I haven’t tried to compile one.
You might want to distinguish between people who support candidate X and people who would vote for X because they think Y is even worse. My guess is that a majority of those expressing views here fall in the latter category, some with one X, some with the other.
If Deiseach were USian, Hillary is financially liberal and socially a mild liberal, not an aggressive one.
Hillary reminds me weirdly too much of Maggie Thatcher for me to be comfortable with her. I have no idea why. Possibly it’s the hairstyle: I know Mrs Thatcher was groomed and coached into changing her vocal style and pretty much everything to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate, and to avoid seeming too weak (as a woman) to deal with tough decisions to be made, but also to avoid seeming too ‘masculine’ as well.
I think Hillary has done some re-inventing and re-branding along those lines for the sake of her career herself (disclaimer: which is perfectly fine, they all do it, they all have to do it, I’m not singling her or women politicians out for criticism here), so it just strikes the wrong kind of note as far as I’m concerned.
I also don’t know about the “mild not aggressive socially liberal”; I see a lot of “Hillary stands with Planned Parenthood” on Tumblr. A large part of that is probably pragmatism; getting unfavoured by PP hurts your ratings as a Democrat, and I don’t think that half her ‘progressive’ signals are any more than that – signals that her campaign has carefully calibrated to appeal to young women voters. And of course it depends if you see supporting PP as mildly or aggressively liberal 🙂
>Are the SSC commenters very right-leaning?
The couple of the most right-leaning commenters seem [1] to make up majority of the discussion. Now, I don’t have statistics to back that up, but as a ex- social democrat, I can certainly agree with Seth that feel like being constantly on the defense here.
([1] There also might be some perception bias going on caused by that a couple of right-ers / libertarians here are so active that they have bothered with registering a nickname, and so their comments stand out.)
Attempting to answer everything with a counter-argument would probably be require same amount of time as full-time job. I don’t even have time to read majority of the comment threads, and writing well-researched or at least sound responses is even more time-consuming.
nimim. k.m. – “Attempting to answer everything with a counter-argument would probably be require same amount of time as full-time job.”
The two Trump threads burned all my free time for three consecutive days. The last thread I got deeply involved in before that burned roughly two days. At the time, this seems like a good idea because People Are Wrong On The Internet, or else the conversation is just deeply interesting and compelling. Afterward, there is a noticeable crash into regret and self-recrimination, but in the moment the mind burns with glorious illumination.
I doubt I’m the most prolific poster here either. I’ve been actively trying to comment and engage less over the last six or so months. The ability to walk away from low-quality conversations seems like an important one.
Welcome, by the way.
I read through the first 1,000 comments or so on the first Trump thread before I thought, “wait a minute, what am I doing?” and stopped.
I skim comment threads for promising subtopics, and block the rest. With the volume of commenting SSC has picked up over the last three years it’s really my only option if I want to stay engaged with the community (albeit posting perhaps once every two months) and still have time for non-SSC things.
Freaking out for paragraphs at a time about one link in a linkpost is exactly the opposite of how one can improve comments. This kind of tribe-bashing based NOT on content but simply on guilt-by-association of content is obnoxious and far less useful than honest disagreement by members of different tribes.
… about one link in a linkpost
I didn’t say “This and only this will have the effect I observe”. It’s simply an example which leapt out at me, given the context of the past week prominently, and similar discussion before. The problem is not purely outside agitators (as the phrase goes) being imported from reddit or somewhere. Or even being anti-SJW. There’s a ratchet effect which goes much deeper, from the approach in general.
… far less useful than honest disagreement by members of different tribes.
And this is my point, being made in full awareness of the ways which lie madness: What is “honest disagreement”? If you have “honest disagreement” over whether slavery should be relegalized, that’s going to attract a certain demographic. If you think that’s too harsh, having “honest disagreement” over whether business discrimination should be relegalized is going to attract a certain demographic. I know! I know! Take this too far, it becomes the Killing Fields! You don’t have to tell me that. It’s not a killer argument (pun unintended). But there’s still a problem, and the observation holds that there are effects which can’t be wished away with appeals to niceness and charity.
>I know! I know! Take this too far, it becomes the Killing Fields!
Given the context, this already seems “too far” to me.
No, you didn’t say “this link and only this link” — but it is, seemingly, an example of problematic content. If “hey, here’s a link that isn’t 100% on-board with Favored Political Group” is too much, what’s left? If your solution isn’t “ban all non-Party-Approved discussion”, what is it, and how could it possibly apply to this link?
>But there’s still a problem, and the observation holds that there are effects which can’t be wished away with appeals to niceness and charity.
Well, if you enforce niceness and charity, then you’ll get only people willing to discuss things, with which they don’t agree, with niceness and charity. That seems fine regardless of political orientation proportions, but since this blog includes stuff from both sides, surely it won’t be too uneven.
(As a parallel to what you say in this last quote: saying “I know this ends up in a bad place” doesn’t stop it from ending up in that place.)
This is not “… here’s a link that isn’t 100% on-board with Favored Political Group”. It much closer to “Hey, right-wingers, post lots of stuff in the comments about how liberals are really the causes of discrimination, and saying that business nondiscrimination civil rights laws are anti-freedom”.
That’s the effect. I’m focused on outlining how the election comment threads are not aberrations, but the ground is laid well beforehand. Repeat: “This is observation. I am making no statement about what course of action follows from it.”. It’s entirely possible for someone to conclude that this is where they are, and the results are simply beyond their ability to change given the world and what they want to do. But I do think there’s a misapprehension of the underlying mechanism, which is what I’m trying to point out (perhaps to no good result).
I don’t think it’s so much that “liberals are really the causes of discrimination”, so much as “this issue is a lot more complicated and nuanced than the conventional storytelling holds”.
” If you think that’s too harsh, having “honest disagreement” over whether business discrimination should be relegalized is going to attract a certain demographic.”
It could be true. But since there are good arguments against current anti-discrimination law as well as arguments for it, the disinterest of people on the currently conventional side in arguing the question is not creditable to them.
This is a sign-neutral argument. Would you like to go to any leftist site and make it there?
@Seth –
If you have “honest disagreement” over whether slavery should be relegalized…
Well, (a) not we’re not talking about slavery but about race-based socio-economic discrimination. Trying to equate the two is an unforced error.
And (b) – not “relegalized”. Decriminalized, surely.
It’s much less about whether it’s a good idea, and more about the downsides of trying to enforce the ban.
Studies about discrimination are of interest to all sides of the political spectrum. I think you’re misinterpreting the statistical model (probably due to the way it was presented in the blog post) as right wing, when it’s not. There’s a ton of lefty stuff about how racism isn’t about personal animosity (taste) but about structure (statistics). It’s just saying that most economic discrimination is done by actors who believe it benefits them economically rather than because they dislike the target of discrimination. That doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t bar such discrimination or that it’s responsible for it.
hey, sorry if…uh…facts have a conservative bias
🙂
😀
just kidding though. Look I feel you. But I think that the reason I sort of switched more than anything is that right now, the Right is engaging argumentatively and the Left is simply retreating into their bubbles, which to be fair is arguably a function of bubble control to begin with – if you own the bubbles, then retreat is an alluring option. And so, the Right has gained some ideological ascendance, because it is putting out its steelmen and the Left is unable to engage in them. Until the Left puts forth its steelmen, and likely until some rollback of culturally Left bad ideas and politically Left bad ideas occurs, you’re going to see one side start to gain momentum.
Uh, did it ever occur to you that SSC might be a massive far-right bubble? It’s my go-to example for when I want to quickly show liberals and blue-tribers what a conservative tribe thinks about them. Or just illustrate how tribalist behavior and accusations on both sides is basically indistinguishable.
Tbh I was maybe halfway through this links post when I thought it might just be an attempt to regain tribal cred after the last two posts criticizing Trump.
If you think this is “far right” you haven’t looked very far outside the mainstream left.
edit: To be fair we did have some hardcore far right posters in the past, but they got banned for that reason. Anyone as extreme as Jim who’s still around here knows to keep it on the DL.
So all those threads constantly where everyone supports progressive ideals, I just imagined that? Man, it turns out I’m part of a massive far-right bubble! Phew, better stop voting for the Greens then!
Seriously, there have been surveys:
This place has never been right wing on average, or even close to it. It’s just that it tolerates a wide range of opinions, which is unusual nowadays and freaks people out. They think if they see a right wing comment or two it must mean everyone’s on board with that. Well it doesn’t.
That survey is readers. Weight it by comment lines of text and using a moving average and you’ll get a very different result.
@Anonymous: So if liberals are overrepresented as readers, and underrepresented as comment writers, perhaps the solution is simply to encourage liberals to post more comments?
I would love to see more left wing perspectives on SSC. Be the change you want to see in SlateStarCodex, Anonymous!
It sounds like a big thing that’s holding back liberals from posting now is a sense that they will be outnumbered in any discussion. But since liberal readers actually outnumber conservative readers if the survey is to be believed, maybe we have a coordination problem on our hands. All of the liberal readers are holding back from commenting because all of the other liberal readers are holding back from commenting.
To solve this coordination problem, I suggest the creation of a Schelling point for coordination. Scott could post in the description of the next Open Thread and say something like “this is the thread where all the liberals will simultaneously speak up and explain their views”. (Or an early commenter in the thread could attempt to create a Schelling point.) Once you guys get one thread where you are not outnumbered among comment writers, you will hopefully have chipped away at the sense that sharing your views on SSC is useless, and the problem will start to resolve. (And I’ll get to learn more about why you believe what you believe!)
…*blinks*
Why does this solution sound like a mashup of a twitter mob and a quota?
I am sure there is another method to getting what you want. (Serious question – what is it that you want?)
@ The Most Conservative
(And I’ll get to learn more about why you believe what you believe!)
Since you may be our only reader, what are your main questions?
“perhaps the solution is simply to encourage liberals to post more comments?”
I don’t know how you could possibly do that. The more readers observe that liberal people get dogpiled onto when they comment, the fewer liberals are going to comment. The board would have to seek out liberal masochists, for this to work otherwise.
Sounds like you chose to make a hidden inference. See Scott’s essay on this.
To make SSC a place on the internet where liberals and conservatives engage with one another intelligently and thoughtfully.
I’m wondering about lots of stuff! Where to start? I guess I see lots of smart arguments on SSC, which yes indeed do seem to be kind of right wing, and I would be very interested if there are smart left wing rebuttals. So probably a good place to start would be if there’s some belief or argument that’s commonly shared on SSC that you think the left has a pretty good rebuttal to, but this rebuttal is rarely discussed.
@ The Most Conservative
I’m wondering about lots of stuff! Where to start? I guess I see lots of smart arguments on SSC, which yes indeed do seem to be kind of right wing, and I would be very interested if there are smart left wing rebuttals. So probably a good place to start would be if there’s some belief or argument that’s commonly shared on SSC that you think the left has a pretty good rebuttal to, but this rebuttal is rarely discussed.
Okay. Not to pin anything to anyone here … consider all these to be strawmen drifted in.
Here’s a cluster of opinions with a common factor. Does anyone have a snappy name for it?
1) In a ‘rich country’, everyone is rich. When the GNP rises, everyone has more gadgets, and higher income. If a Third World country’s average income is not too bad compared with the US average, then there is no poverty there. (Or here, ftm.)
Rebuttal to 1) Each person has one ovary and one testicle.
2) All First World people are ‘rich’ compared to kings long ago, because we have cars, tv’s, electric heat, etc. Because we are ‘rich’ there can be no poverty here. (Having no heat at all because the electricity was turned off, doesn’t count. The heat we don’t have was electric heat!)
3) The US already has plenty of Social Service resources to take care of everyone who falls through the cracks.
4) For poor USians to expect better conditions than Third World, is unrealistic. Because those people sleep three in a bed, gather firewood in walking distance, use a fire ring for all heat and cooking, etc etc — that is all our poor should expect.
Rebuttal to 4) When poor people in the US try living in Third World conditions, they’re a ‘homeless encampment’ to be cleared by the police.
5) Instead of complaining, unemployed people should move to where the jobs are.
Rebuttal to 5) Tell that to the coal miners.
For your list of five propositions, I don’t think anyone argues for any of them as stated. The closest is 2.
The point is not that it is impossible for someone to be poor in a rich society–for an extreme case, consider someone lost in the woods and starving. It is that the rhetoric around poverty in rich countries depends on treating considerably poorer than average as if it meant starving to death, as in past societies it well might.
People worrying about poverty in the U.S. are not talking about the bottom .01% but about the bottom 10% or so–most of whom are, in material terms, richer than most people that have ever lived. And people talking about poverty are mostly reluctant to recognize that.
Rebuttal?
@HouseBoatOnStyx – “4) For poor USians to expect better conditions than Third World, is unrealistic. Because those people sleep three in a bed, gather firewood in walking distance, use a fire ring for all heat and cooking, etc etc — that is all our poor should expect.
Rebuttal to 4) When poor people in the US try living in Third World conditions, they’re a ‘homeless encampment’ to be cleared by the police.
”
…This argument seems like a vaguely good one to me. The rebuttal to the rebuttal would seem to be to stop the police doing that. I guess I’m asking, if we got the police to stop clearing “homeless encampments”, would the homeless in particular and society in general be better off?
I guess the usual arguments in favor of running them off is that big concentrations of homeless drive crime, lower property value, the homeless are squatting…
If we stop all clearing, are we just trading the homeless problem for the Favela problem? Is that a worse problem or a better one? Are there better solutions available?
[EDIT] – To be clear, this sort of question is one I’m genuinely interested in, and don’t feel like the red-tribe narrative answers very well. It really does seem to me like we have enough wealth to go around, so the problem comes in distribution.
[EDIT EDIT] – 2) All First World people are ‘rich’ compared to kings long ago, because we have cars, tv’s, electric heat, etc. Because we are ‘rich’ there can be no poverty here. (Having no heat at all because the electricity was turned off, doesn’t count. The heat we don’t have was electric heat!)
Are we talking about not having heat in terms of it’s miserable, or not having heat in terms of in danger of freezing to death?
The former was most of the first two decades of my life. Are people in our society actually freezing or starving in appreciable numbers, though? Like, from a utilitarian perspective, do we save more lives with heating and food, or with driverless cars or something like that (assuming the costs are the same, or divide cost by life saved or whatever)?
@FacelessCraven:
I frequently point out that I think value systems tend to work because the various values are in tension with each other. You can’t actually fully optimize on one of the values without ending up in an an untenable place vis-a-vis the other ones.
This mean I rarely think there are any actually optimal solutions to any problem. Homelessness seems to me like one of those issues where attempting to optimize around the value of self-reliance leads to awful edge cases. And we can see that in either of the two options being put forward here. Kicking them out or letting them squat both assume that it’s completely on the homeless to work within whatever set of rules are made and damn them if they can’t make that work to their profit.
Whereas, if we look at the current VA effort to reach zero homelessness in vets, what we see is communal responsibility for our fellow. Responsibility which is not regarded as optional or voluntary, but mandatory. And that approach has actually worked in many areas, and it has worked by starting with the premise that the best way to end homelessness is to .. get the vets into a home (and then work on the problems that led to their homelessness.)
Now, if you try and optimize solely around the value of communal responsibility, this will not work either. But that’s not a good argument for ignoring this value altogether.
@ David Friedman
People worrying about poverty in the U.S. are not talking about the bottom .01% but about the bottom 10% or so–most of whom are, in material terms, richer than most people that have ever lived.
Well, there you go. Defining ‘rich’ as ‘having more luxuries than Mr. X’ is the same idea whether Mr. X is a current citizen of Haiti or King X of Ruritania. Define ‘rich’ that way, and ‘poverty’in the US is impossible by definition. Question begged.
But luxury without security or a smooth longterm situation =/= ‘rich’. Rich needs a balanced budget, no big stresses or conflicts around basic needs. Either your car is dependable or you have a spare car … or your job doesn’t require a car. When your car doesn’t start, that isn’t a crisis that might lose your job. Your income is adequate (with buffer) for living as is normal among your neighbors; no stresses or crises there. Keeping utility bills paid is never a problem.
It’s silly to call someone ‘rich’ if they don’t have that security, or something approaching it, no matter how fancy their gadgets are. If someone through no fault of their own gets squeezed between lower wages and higher rent, and this puts them chronically in crisis and out of sync with ‘normal’ people — that’s poverty. Especially if it’s gone far enough that they are short of food or miserable with cold.
@ FacelessCraven
>> Rebuttal to 4) When poor people in the US try living in Third World conditions, they’re a ‘homeless encampment’ to be cleared by the police.
”
> …This argument seems like a vaguely good one to me.
It’s been made a few times already in response to 4), but at a higher income level. Commenters talk about quite a few USians sharing a single house, and someone brings up the fact that zoning regulations make that illegal in many locations.
The rebuttal to the rebuttal would seem to be to stop the police doing that.
Here you’re going deeper into object level than I want to follow, though I will say I’m on the side of the beach or highway encampments. These are not the shaggy zombies of city alleys. These are a bit grubby in old work clothes, but ingeniously coping in a challenging situation. Most of them are in old travel trailers. They’re not asking for any resources, just to be allowed to camp on some out-of-the-way land. [Source: observation during our motorhoming in the 80s up and down the Pacific Coast.]
@ HBC
I think value systems tend to work because the various values are in tension with each other. You can’t actually fully optimize on one of the values without ending up in an an untenable place vis-a-vis the other ones.
Yes. CS Lewis sets it out in the last part of THE ABOLITION OF MAN, though in quite different words. Setting yours beside his gives rather an SF effect, for me.
@houseboatonstyxb:
I wrote: “most of whom are, in material terms, richer than most people that have ever lived.”
You replied “Well, there you go. Defining ‘rich’ as”
as if I had said “were rich.”
Do you disagree with the claim–that most of the bottom ten percent of the U.S. population are, in material terms, richer than most people that have ever lived?
@David:
I guess the most obvious rebuttal would be that, even if people have more material possessions than most historical (or even most present foreign) people, they’ll still feel poor and inadequate if the societal mainstream seems considerably better off than them and they’ve got no way of bettering their situation. Is that a rational way for them to look at the situation? Probably not, but then people aren’t always rational, and you have to take that into account when thinking about how society should be run.
@The original Mr. X:
I wasn’t defending “there is no poverty here.” I was pointing out the part of claim 2 which people actually make–and which is true.
Whether there is poverty here depends on how you define it. The rhetoric usually implies absolute material impoverishment and usually ignores how rich our society is. On the international level, the rhetoric usually ignores the fact that the only way of hiding the sharp decrease in world poverty is to keep raising the definition.
they’ll still feel poor and inadequate if the societal mainstream seems considerably better off than them and they’ve got no way of bettering their situation.
I am not talking about feelings. I’m talking about whether a person has the cash to function smoothly with the physical requirements of their culture. For example, granted that most people (especially the lowest 10%) need a job; the job needs a car; the car needs maintainance. If the car won’t start, the person is in stressful, crisis mode for saving his job: calling people to beg a ride, or for help to fix the car, etc. This disrupts his family’s and neighbors’ day, causing cascading crises. It is not just about feelings.
I am pretty sure most people in the lowest 10% live on some kind of welfare and a job will seriously interfere with that welfare.
“It is not just about feelings.”
I think you underestimate how much more than feelings was making life difficult for most people at most times and places in the past. The estimate I have seen for medieval Europe is a famine about every ten years. That doesn’t mean going to bed hungry, it means some people starving to death.
Of course, it was a very unequal society. Kings were unlikely to starve to death even in a famine. But for a century or two starting in the mid-fourteenth they had a serious risk of dying of plague, and through most of history diseases we don’t take very seriously, such as measles, were mass killers.
I’ve cited McCloskey’s estimate before that the average real income in modern developed societies is twenty to thirty times as high as its average through most of history. That’s real income, so allowing for price changes. Think about living on $2000/year and having to work fairly hard for that.
I will happily concede that one element in perceived poverty is relative income–status is important to humans. But claims of the form “it really take much more money to live now” are either ignoring the fact that the figures are already allowing for price changes or treating status as in the same category as food and shelter.
It seems that there is no such thing as poor in 21st century America, according to Libertarians, or anyone on the Right Wing. Their needs (theoretically) can not exist. That’s why they are never considered in Libertarian or other Right Wing policies.
@Jill
As a libertarian I care very much for the poor and advocate for policies I think would help. End the drug war which cages peaceful individuals, causes gang violence, and makes it harder to get a job with a record, impacts which fall disproportionately on the poor. End all tariffs to make goods cheaper to allow poor households’ income to go further. Eliminate minimum wage to make it easier for those with little skills and experience, typically the poor, to get a job. Reform the criminal justice system to move it more towards restorative justice, which would primarily benefit the poor. Stop foreign intervention which destabilizes poor parts of the world. Vastly increase immigration to make it easier for the destitute in 3rd world countries to move to a place with greater opportunity. Etcetera.
I do okay as a middle class person, but I think much of what government does harms the poor, and this is one of the main drivers of my libertarian politics.
Interesting. It seems you are most interested in the poor in other countries. It does sound like you want the criminal justice system to not be against them. But getting rid of minimum wage so that employers who are paying people less than a living wage, can start paying them a penny and hour or whatever– that part I would characterize as not caring about the needs of the real poor. Maybe you do care about the theoretical poor who can live on a minuscule wage though.
@Jill
A significant portion of my charitable donations go to the poor in 3rd world countries, as they have to deal with issues like disease, illiteracy, very poor shelters, and getting enough calories, which I prioritize as more important issues to ameliorate than the issues of most American poor.
Minimum wage in the U.S. has historical roots in discriminating against employing poor black southerners moving north to take jobs that whites wanted. Set a high wage floor, and employers will take skilled labor over unskilled labor, harming the least skilled who tend to be poor. A minimum wage makes some people unemployable, giving them a wage of zero. I don’t find it to be a good policy for the least well off.
How do you think people who are making the current minimum wage are doing, trying to make ends meet? Have you ever tried to live on that kind of wage? This author did.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Paperback – August 2, 2011
by Barbara Ehrenreich
https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476076730&sr=1-1&keywords=NIckel+and+Dimed
It seems that a great many people on this board agree with you though, that “Charity begins not at home but in some far away Third World country.”
@houseboatonstyxb: I agree.
” But getting rid of minimum wage so that employers who are paying people less than a living wage, can start paying them a penny and hour or whatever– that part I would characterize as not caring about the needs of the real poor.”
Like a lot of people, you assume that if other people support policies that you believe have bad effects, they must be in favor of those bad effects.
I would think by now you would have figured out that opponents of the minimum wage think it’s effect is to price unskilled labor out of the market, replacing a low wage with a zero wage. You don’t agree–but you might at least try to base your interpretation of their views on what they actually are.
I’m also a little curious about your model of the world. About 2% of American workers are at or below the minimum wage. Since, on your theory, the only constraint on what employers can pay is what it is legal to pay, why does everyone else get more?
@ jaimeastorga2000
Thank you, and for the link
My hunch has always been that UBI/etc would produce local inflation: the merchants in poor areas would raise their prices to whatever the market could newly bear. But it’s worth trying; it would give poor people a break, even if temporary, to do things to improve their situation.
As for zero-sum inhabitable land, I expect technology can solve that, by building space colonies; plenty of space out there.
As to how Moloch is working here, I’m not sure how we can find and solve that, till we can agree that there is poverty in the US.
@ David Friedman
Do you disagree with the claim–that most of the bottom ten percent of the U.S. population are, in material terms, richer than most people that have ever lived?
I do disagree with that claim, and with the definition of ‘rich/richer’ that it tacitly rests on. It requires a non-central meaning of ‘rich’. The central meaning of ‘rich’ combines having plenty of money with accouterments such as a comfortable home, respectable appearance, many possessions, etc — but the key to the definition is ‘having plenty of money’. If someone has the accouterments but it turns out he has no money, we say ‘He isn’t actually a rich man.’ If someone lives in a poor lifestyle but it turns out he has a great deal of money in the bank, we say ‘He looks poor but he is actually a rich man’.
I’m tempted to say, if he has many possessions but has no money, he’s a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If he has a fancy house and expensive toys but can’t pay the rent, he is not rich. Money is necessary (at least a small but regular amount).
Saying a USian without money is ‘rich’ in gadgets etc — is like saying he’s got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. It may work in poetry, but not in practicality.
@Jill
I think people who have little skills and experience and can only get an employer to pay minimum wage have more struggles and stresses than highly productive people able to command higher wages, with respect to affording the basics. The best way for them to do better in life is to gain skills and experience that employers want so that they can ask for and get a higher wage. It’s the same process I went through: I earned minimum wage at my first job (a pizza place) when I was 15, but I worked hard, treated customers well, and took initiative to learn how to do everything (take orders, make pizzas, tend the oven, rout drivers, prep the food, audit the till, etc.) and within a year was earning almost double the minimum wage.
I created and demonstrated value to my employer, and they paid me accordingly when I asked for a raise and told them I was going elsewhere if they couldn’t accommodate. If the minimum wage was $15/hr when I was 15, I don’t think I would’ve been able to get a job, as employers probably would have preferred someone with more skills and experience than a 15 year old kid had. A low enough minimum wage made it easy for me to get on the first rung of success and to climb from there. An elimination of the minimum wage would make it easier for people with less polish and skills than my 15 year old self had to get employment to start climbing the ladder of success.
As far as charity beginning at home, I do take care of my family, friends and coworkers in times of need. A significant portion of my charitable donations also goes to helping kid’s with cancer in the U.S., as I have a soft spot for people who come into misfortune through no fault of their own, and kid’s with cancer really meets that criteria. Outside of helping those I know and kids with cancer, I don’t feel any more obligation to a random stranger in America than one in India, and I find the needs of the poor in India to be more compelling than the needs of the typical poor person in America (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty)
BTW, here’s two more libertarian policies I think would help the poor: school choice so poor kids aren’t locked into a failing school and removal of extensive occupational licensing so it’s easier for poor people to start a business, like hair braiding.
PS to my own comment above.
I said: till we can agree that there is poverty in the US. My hasty use of ‘poverty’ there looks like a question-beg.
I should have said something like: “till we can agree on a definition of ‘poverty’, or invent some neologism to take its place in these discussions.”
Poor Scott. He doesn’t engage in the ritual throwing of shoes at the unclean lepers of the right-wing/conservative inclination, and so he gets a rep as running a bordello for those who like to live in “a massive far-right bubble”.
I don’t know what I can do to help reclaim this as a liberal/progressive oasis of sanity, any suggestions as to how I might express myself in a properly liberal way? Unfortunately, I’m not Blue Tribe by background or education so I’m stuck being a bog-Irish peasant, but I can ape my betters if taken by the hand and guided in how to do so 🙂
But I like spending time in a bordello! X -D
Your modesty is unconvincing, given past demonstrations of your ability to entertainingly mimic views you disagree with.
On the other hand, he does engage in the ritual throwing of shoes at the evil regressive left/cultural marxists/Cathedral. Maybe that’s got something to do with the perception of SSC as right-leaning?
As a far-left liberal, I find the statement that SCC is a “massive far-right bubble” or even just a “far-right bubble” or even could be accurately described as “far-right” to be utterly ridiculous. The far-right definitely have a much greater presence here than in most public spaces, but they hardly dominate, and non-far-right ideas tend to be engaged with critically and in good faith just as much as far-right ideas do.
The strongest defining characteristic of the comment section is a loose grip on reality when it comes to the social left.
The percent of the commentariat that consider themselves under personal sustained attack by powerful shadowy forces is astonishing.
@ Anonymous:
In fairness, probably half of those people who think the dominant factions within the social left have gone toxic are reasonable facsimiles of leftists ourselves.
I wouldn’t say half, but yes those people do exist. And their / your hysteria has somehow lead you to conclude that it is better to be bedfellows with the deplorables than with the large majority of people on the left in the US that aren’t especially far left on social issues but haven’t set their hair on fire because some kids in college are saying dumb things on twitter.
Outgroup homogeneity bias is not a useful tool for learning information about the world. Declaring that everyone who is not in bed with you must be in bed with each other is both false and rude.
Eh.
It’s not a far-right bubble. There are (plenty of) far-right bubbles, but many of those are sectional in nature. Are we talking Stormfront? Breitbart? Various dominionist spaces?
Does Huffington Post (or at least the old crystals and snark HuffPo, haven’t spent time there in a long time) or Daily Kos make for a are “far-left” bubble? Answer that question for yourself before evaluating comparable sites on the right.
But is definitely the case that SSC is “niche-right”. There are just lots of relatively odd right-wing stances here.
“Declaring that everyone who is not in bed with you must be in bed with each other is both false and rude.”
Correct.
And stated by someone who quite recently accused a libertarian anarchist academic of being “wildly offended at seeing viewpoints that aren’t alt-right.”
What are we to make of the repeated invocation of a 40 year old alleged financial scandal from one of the major presidential candidates and zero invocations of the many financial scandals of the other major presidential candidate?
Yes, yes Gary Johnson and anarchism but it is abundantly clear that Trump, conservatism, and the Republican Party are in close second place.
Which is fine, but don’t act all horrified when you are lumped in with them. If you would rather not be seen that way then try to more than occasionally bring up the things you disagree with conservatives on rather than always the things you disagree with liberals on.
Declaring that everyone who is not in bed with you must be in bed with each other is both false and rude.
Nice image, anyway.
HBC,
You seem to enjoy being the only liberal here. When others show up you suddenly decide the board is evenly matched and start policing “your side”.
On days when it’s you vs. a 10-man dogpile you seem much happier.
@JHC
I think a more charitable reading of HBC’s actions (and one I commend him for) is that he doesn’t like seeing people on “his side” be assholes. He’s pretty limited on what he can do about those of us on the right. I can understand why he does it; it’s a big reason why I’m not going to vote for Trump.
I wish, myself, that we could make E Harding at least pipe down.
I just wish he had a single counterpart in the majority.
I still can’t get anyone to tell me who here on the right polices their own side.
This seems significant.
But so does the combined effort to make this subject go away.
“You seem to enjoy being the only liberal here. When others show up you suddenly decide the board is evenly matched and start policing “your side”.
“On days when it’s you vs. a 10-man dogpile you seem much happier.”
I hadn’t noticed or kept track of this, if it is indeed happening. But liberals tend to be wimps and not stand up for ourselves, and many liberal exhort other liberals to be wimps and not stand up for themselves. That’s extremely common, though as I said, I haven’t kept track, so I don’t know if the typical thing is happening here.
To be … “fair” … there are many “viewpoints that aren’t alt-right”, at least some of which I have on good authority would wildly offend you.
@JHC:
I don’t know how long you have been around here (lurking or commenting), but I have been fairly vocal for as long as I have been here (18 months maybe?) that I view the commentariat as being fairly well dominated by those who can broadly be classified as being “on the right”. I’ve also been fairly consistent in wanting more left/liberals to comment here and stick around here.
One of the thing I have tried to do, and have been accused of being a “manners Nazi” for, is to point out the idea of Scott’s walled-garden as being something of a shared sacred value for the space. I don’t claim to always live up to it, but I do think it’s worthwhile to try and reach for it as an ideal.
I spend more time criticizing people on the right than I do people on the left, for all manner of things, but it’s arguably more effective when it comes to the idea of “manners” if the criticism comes from someone who agrees with you on the ideological questions.
As something of a side-note, I actually think I have seen more left-wing comments here recently overall (although not on the two shit-shows of Trump post comments sections). I do think that having evident, even prominent, left-wing comments is one thing necessary in order to show someone new that they are welcome here. I hope I have at least been sort of good at that. But maybe that is humble-brag, or something like it.
@Jill:
I’m not being accused of being a wimp, so much as a narcissist who wants the left wing spotlight to myself.
Or, as someone once accused me of being SSC’s “Alan Colmes”, perhaps I am being accused of being a prop, a useful foil for SSC’s right-wing to trot out to make weak arguments that are easily shot down.
I don’t believe I am either one. And I certainly reject the idea that I am a “wimp” when it comes to defending my values or positions. I think you will see that I am fairly bull-dogish (generally) once I start into a particular argument.
“If you would rather not be seen that way then try to more than occasionally bring up the things you disagree with conservatives on rather than always the things you disagree with liberals on.”
Part of the problem with this is so little of what separates libertarians from conservatives when it comes to specific policy positions is actively being debated these days. For example: marijuana legalization is being pursued at the state level with a good deal of slow but steady success – it’s not a major talking point. Nobody is actively engaging in the meta-question of “why do we have a military?”
Republicans (not to be confused with conservatives) have been engaging in odd activities around abortion, but that’s mostly either being overturned by the courts, or is a wider symptom of government interference that the left doesn’t seem to be interested in engaging with so the responses tend to fall on deaf ears.
Other topics like immigration are not fully agreed within the libertarian community. You want to hear a screed against zoning restrictions?
HBC, excellent then. We need more liberal bull dogs. Seriously. Too many liberals are too much like Gandhi. A wonderful guy. But history indicates that he was successful in part because there were more violent leaders ready to take his place if the British killed him off or otherwise got rid of his influence. So the British decided to deal with a nonviolent leader, rather than a violent one.
Verbal aspects of politics are sort of like Prisoner’s Dilemma. You need something closer to a tit for tat strategy to have an impact– not a constant peace and love attitude, which can cause you to be seen as a doormat. I’m not talking about being mean– just standing up for oneself. And not bending over backward to be 10X nicer to others than they are to you.
HBC
I do think that having evident, even prominent, left-wing comments is one thing necessary in order to show someone new that they are welcome here.
Speaking of new Lefties or Moderates, an important thing for them to know is that many of the off-putting Rightside comments are from recent immigrants who have not assimilated.
I don’t think this is adequate to explain what is going on. Immigration comes up in every single open thread. David Friedman claims to be for open borders, but he is never or very rarely in those threads arguing aggressively for open borders. Yet if someone mentions global warming even in passing he posts twenty posts on the subject.
As a person he may well be a libertarian or anarchist or whatever, but as a poster he makes posts that are: non-ideological / non-partisan (which are the most interesting IMO) and those that are right wing / republican. Common examples of latter include frequent posts on: Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry, Hillary Clinton’s trading history forty years ago, climate change skepticism, and opposition to minimum wages.
Nothing wrong with that, anyone is entitled to post about what he wants to post about and not post about what he doesn’t want to post about. But we know you by your fruits, and regardless of what David Friedman the person is, David Friedman the SSC commentator is a right winger. Ditto for onyomi & DrBeat.
“David Friedman the SSC commentator is a right winger. ”
You make a legitimate point. But you might also consider my absence from certain “right wing” arguments. You will not find me arguing the perils of too much immigration, especially of Muslims. Or arguing that we should have a more aggressive foreign policy. Or arguing for banning abortions.
And my view of the minimum wage reflects the fact that I’m an economist, not my political orientation. As I may have pointed out, back when Krugman was an academic economist rather than a public intellectual, he thought the same thing about the minimum wage as the rest of us.
Also, I may be wrong, but I think I have discussed the existence of legal rules in stateless societies here in the not very distant past. Which ought to at least hint at the fact that I’m an anarchist. Not to mention other posters occasionally mentioning it.
Not exactly a Republican position, but one fairly common among libertarians.
Man, the standards for “far right bubble” have dropped.
Seriously, among people who take Scott’s surveys, “democratic” and “liberal” are the most popular alignments, followed by “libertarian”. If that’s far-right, I have some bad news for you about 4chan, Facebook, Reddit, churches, country clubs, and your average PTA meeting.
If you wanted to narrow this charge to “posters in the SSC comments section” there’d be more room for a debate, but that’d be a very different statement. And even then, I would argue that there’s a lot of left-wing content that might not be standing out to you as strongly.
One note: if you check the comments right after a post goes up, there’s often a lot of fairly far right discussion (by sheer word or post count). This is a small enough place that a handful of really persistent individuals can make up a huge fraction of the top-level comments section. Harding alone was ~10% of the election comment threads, and it would be possible to show up after he posted a lot but before people rebutted him.
So I think your broad assertion is provably wrong (for standard meanings of far-right), and the narrow one is unfixably distorted by the impact of 2-5 hyperactive posters.
I’m not going to continue this discussion, since both Scott and everyone else have made it clear what they think, but fwiw I was referring to the comment section, not the general readership (I wouldn’t even know who they are) or the author himself (one person doesn’t constitute a bubble, and most of the posts aren’t even explicitly political or cultural).
For various reasons, there’s been what I view as a long-running lack of research on issues which may end-up supporting right-leaning positions. Only now are some of them being done and it’s providing a great deal of intellectual interest, in part because in contradicts what was the orthodoxy. This makes the new research results generate more conversation which you might be experiencing here. This isn’t remotely right-wing. Not at all. It’s not even libertarian-leaning, though though there are a number of posters here who do share that sensibility.
If you want to read something actually right-wing that isn’t incredibly crazy, I’d suggest starting with the PowerLine Blog. It’s written by several attorneys from Minnesota.
Please don’t retreat into outright idiocy.
Oh, I had this lovely diamond shape diagram. Actually, there is another one showing libertarians in the upper corner and everyone else as Maoist, but I can’t manage to google it right now.
But saying that SSC is “far-right” is about as ridiculous as when some libertarian anarchists call everyone who is not an anarchist automatically a communist.
This is a far-right bubble. [Warning: NSFL]
SSC seems far-right in the same way the field of Economics feels conservative: those on the left don’t overwhelmingly outweigh those on the right.
SSC certainly doesn’t seem to be a cesspool echochamber for the right (there are plenty of those around; SSC is definitely not like them), and as long as Scott is an active moderator here, I don’t forsee that happening. The only real trend I can forsee is leftwing posters leaving because they’re tired of arguing with the rightwing posters, but that seems to say more about the leftwing posters than the rightwing posters.
Analogous to your point about economics …
The University of Chicago Law School has, I think, the image of being a conservative law school. It’s probably true that it has more conservative or libertarian faculty members than any of the other very elite schools (Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, …).
But having spent most of ten years there, I’m pretty sure that in any presidential election of recent decades the Democratic candidate would have gotten a solid majority of the school’s faculty.
“SSC might be a massive far-right bubble”
No “might” about it. It definitely is one.
Have you ever tried going to an explicit far-right bubble? I’ve seen one or two, and they don’t look much like this.
Of course, it is not the most extreme Right Wing bubble. It’s not all alt right or anything like that. And yes, liberal comments are allowed, although dogpiled.
@Jill:
You get dogpiled.
I end up in three or four or five running threads with individual people on the right. This is both a distinction and an actual difference.
You keep claiming you want to have dialogue, but what are you doing to facilitate it? Be the change you wish to see.
Just … food for thought.
… and again the rabid right wing comes out to demonize and dogpile on someone who dares to post something that goes against the right-wing echo chamber.
Recommend a ban for HeelBearCub.
@anonymous – unhelpful. blargh.
It may be unhelpful, but I did laugh at it. That was definitely one of those jokes that you need to have knowledge of HeelBearCub‘s general positions and charitable posting style for, however.
Come on, it’s an anonymous account with a never seen before gravatar. Let’s not be fooled quite so easily now.
Heel Bear Cub, you can eat your food. I’ll eat mine. I see what people mean by saying that you may be Left of Center, but you reserve your criticism for other people Left of Center, and that you are most comfortable being the one and only Left Wing commenter on a thread. So go ahead. You say you are a bull dog. Perhaps you are a bull dog who only criticizes people who are on the Left?
And, HeelBearCub, maybe you enjoy being dogpiled. I don’t. So I won’t reward those who do it.
Perhaps being dogpiled is your definition of “dialogue.” It isn’t mine.
“So here’s a someone considered measured and reasonable by people all across the spectrum telling me I should reconsider the way I comment. On the other hand, there’s Paranoid Lefty Anon telling me exactly what I want to hear. Who should I listen to?”
“So here’s a someone considered measured and reasonable by people all across the spectrum telling me I should reconsider the way I comment. On the other hand, there’s Paranoid Lefty Anon telling me exactly what I want to hear. Who should I listen to?”
Whatever Happened To Anonymous, What I myself see is this: {Someone who is considered measured and reasonable by people in this Right Wing echo chamber only} commanding me to do what he wants me to do, instead of what makes sense for me–commanding me to “dialogue” with rude Right Wingers like you who dogpile on.
And I see someone perfectly reasonable who happens to be Left of Center, telling me something perfectly reasonable, but that person immediately gets dissed as Paranoid by a rude individual who posts as : Whatever Happened To Anonymous.
You need to go to your eye doctor and get your vision checked.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Whatever Happened to Anonymous:
People have been saying they’d like to invite more Left of Center commenters for variety here. I’m sure that your labeling a a person who is a Left of Center commenter, as a “Paranoid Lefty”, will really help make such commenters feel welcome in the future.
You sure are doing your part to keep this board from being an echo chamber for one political tribe, aren’t you?
@Jill:
I have spent literally days in threads arguing in favor of the principle of affirmative consent.
I consistently argue on behalf of left and liberal positions, although I readily admit your positions are farther to the left than mine.
I have banged on for days trying to get people to understand that the Southern Strategy was a real thing, and the effect it had on the Republican Party and what that means in the modern day.
I have spent hours on posts about why I think carrying a gun for self defense is a mistake.
Attacking me for not being left enough doesn’t make much sense.
I guess I’d ask you to put on your therapist hat and analyze the relationship you have with right wing posters here and ask yourself why the two of you are having trouble communicating effectively.
I’m not poking fun there, I’m serious.
Because what I would really like is for you to achieve what you say you want, which is effective communication of views, ideas and values. In both/all directions.
>Until the Left puts forth its steelmen, and likely until some rollback of culturally Left bad ideas and politically Left bad ideas occurs, you’re going to see one side start to gain momentum.
I think this is an extremely optimistic view of the way the world works.
I think this is an extremely accurate view of the way my outlook works 🙂
The SSC commentariat really, really doesn’t lean right. They’ve done surveys on this.
Perhaps you’ll want to examine your own perceptions before going off on Scott for posting links that interest him.
The surveys are old and aimed at readers rather than only writers.
This. Looking at how the commentariat responds to any non-right-wing poster with a massive flurry of posts saying essentially “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!”
…it’s not terribly hard to see why people start seeing it as being solidly within the rightwing bubble. Certainly all of the most prolific commenters see it that way, and take dramatic offense when they don’t see total conformity.
I mostly lurk, but as a leftist who tends to pay more attention to threads with commenters whose views are closer to mine, I find that characterization of the response to be a plain falsehood. Not even hyperbole, it doesn’t really bear a resemblance to reality. I’ve observed non-right-wing comments being treated about the same relative to the quality of their content as the right-wing ones. When E Harding posts a garbage comment filled with right-wing bubble tripe, they get called out on it heavily, just like when Jill posts a garbage comment filled with left-wing bubble tripe.
It seems like stating up front that you’re paying less attention to the conservative commenters is commendably honest, but undermines your point.
I pay more attention to threads that have non-right-wing content. So it’s possible I’m missing some right-wing lovefests where right-wingers pat each other on the back while stating right-wing tripe. In fact, I know these threads exist, because I’ve observed them. So my observation that non-right-wing comments get responded roughly the same as right-wing ones relative to their quality may be too strong a claim and not something I can actually conclude based on my limited observations.
This doesn’t in any way impede my ability to observe “massive flurry of posts saying essentially ‘OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!'” in response to non-right-wing comments and notice that such a phenomenon doesn’t actually occur. This also doesn’t in any way make this blog a right-wing bubble. Right-wing bubbles may exist within the blog, in the form of certain subthreads, but given how charitably I’ve observed non-right-wing posters being treated here, the idea that this blog is a right-wing bubble is laughable on its face. And, again, bears no resemblance to reality.
Did you read any of the previous two comment threads, in which virtually the entire comment section consist of right-wing commenters being outraged–perhaps “butthurt” is appropriate here?–at Scott for daring to post something that wasn’t right-wing.
If you think that bears no resemblance to reality, then thank you for informing me of your viewpoint; it assists me greatly in calculating how much weight to assign to your future statements.
I did read a good portion of the comments (given the staggering numbers, I’m not confident that I read most of them) in Scott’s last 2 posts endorsing anti-Trump. I saw plenty of right-wingers “butthurt,” yes. But to describe that as in reaction to “for daring to post something that wasn’t right-wing” or being at all accurately described as “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!” is ridiculous. Some posts were of that sort, definitely – basically all of E Harding’s comments, for instance. But the vast majority of what I read actually attempted to engage with Scott’s points and debunk them. Most of those did extremely poorly at that IMHO, and seemed more like the result of knee-jerk “protect my in group!” rationalizations than thought-out arguments. But they were attempts at engaging with arguments, not trolling or flaming or anything close to the sort.
If you see those sorts of posts – those that attempt, however poorly, to put forward convincing right-wing arguments in response to non-right-wing arguments – that made up so much of the comments in those posts as something akin to flaming someone for daring not to toe the line, I imagine you must be about as overconfident in the obvious correctness of left-wing ideology as Jill is.
@llvn
Right-wing lovefest threads exist, but I think part of it is there’s sometimes just no point in interfering with them. For example, once someone’s claimed that Jews (as a whole) have not assimilated into American culture, and someone else has pointed out to no avail that this is ludicrous, there’s no point in paying much further attention to that thread.
So, the first comment, and an extremely-visible portion of essentially every individual thread, and all of the people high-fiving him?
Yes. That’s what I’m saying too.
Is it your position now that George H.W. Bush is left-wing? His is the position you’re describing as overconfident in the obvious correctness of left-wing ideology.
Voting for Trump is the obviously-incorrect choice, and voting against him isn’t the left-wing choice, it’s the not-insane choice. The fact that the Trump enthusiasts are treated with more regard than flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, or bible-literalists is an artifact of the US media’s strange commitment to “balance” posturing; none of the rest of us are obligated to pretend there are sane reasons for supporting Trump.
E Harding’s posts were slapped down for being stupid and blindly partisan just as much as they were high fived. So in your view, one individual making a 1st comment and making lots of other comments that are high-fived by some and slapped down by as many others is enough to constitute or at least prove the existence of a bubble of that commenter’s ideology. That’s a highly unusual meaning of ideological bubble, not to mention doesn’t at all address the existence – or lack thereof – of people piling on with “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!”
Perhaps if you and Jill are quick enough with getting the 1st comment and make enough posts, perhaps you can turn SSC into a non-right-wing bubble or at least not-a-right-wing-bubble?
Trump enthusiasts are expressing a preference, not an empirical claim about reality. The same cannot be said of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, or bible-literalists, who are by definition making an empirical claim about reality. When someone makes an empirical claim about reality, we can and do engage with them and dismiss them if they keep repeating the same debunked arguments and evidence. When someone expresses a preference that we find deplorable, we can engage with them and try to convince them otherwise, and we can dismiss their arguments if those arguments are just repetitions of debunked ones, but their preference is their preference.
You seem to want to just round off some preferences as being so obviously wrong that they’re equivalent to making empirical claims about reality that have been debunked in a million different ways. That’s extreme overconfidence and epistemic hubris.
“You could change [Situation] if you felt like investing massive amounts of time” is not a compelling argument against the situation’s existence.
Perhaps, since you’ve already acknowledged that you didn’t read all of the thread in general, and that you pay less attention to those posts in specific, you could be a bit more restrained about making empirical claims that the people who did read the page are wrong about what it contains?
“I haven’t bothered to find out the truth, but I insist that you are wrong because I prefer it that way” is a bad position to take, and you should stop taking it.
For whatever it’s worth, only one person expressed agreement with E. Harding’s first post (which is where his main argument was), and rebuttals came from across the political spectrum.
It’s a good thing that I was making no such argument, then, and only an insane or highly motivated reading of that statement would infer as such.
You state a complete falsehood, which I bolded. In fact, I stated that I paid more attention to those posts in specific, i.e. posts involving interactions between non-right-wingers and right-wingers. Which are what you were making an empirical claim about with your “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!” claim.
I never did. But it’s clear to me now that you’re just Gish Galloping. You state blatant falsehoods and refuse to actually engage with any of my arguments and keep changing the subject, which started with how non-right-wingers are treated by commenters on SSC, went onto whether or not SSC was a right-wing bubble, and continued to whether preferring Trump as POTUS was as obviously and empirically wrong as believing that the Earth is flat.
It’s depressing that someone with as little honesty and epistemic humility as you has been one of the louder voices speaking in favor of my tribe in SSC recently.
Are you talking to yourself?
Saying true things when challenged with falsehoods is the opposite of what a gish gallop is. Perhaps you should have looked that up before using it.
That is a quote. From you. In this conversation.
When I pointed out that you had said this, you accused me of lying.
I’m done with you.
The Nybbler:
Ha, that’s actually one of the threads I did read, I think. Pretty fascinating discussion, in showing me a few places where right-wing arguments about lack of immigrant assimilation start breaking down. Not sure I’d call it a lovefest, though. I saw it as a right-wing idea being vigorously challenged, and the challengee refusing to back down, then trying to save face.
Whatever Happened to Anonymous:
Huh, I thought there was more than that. Perhaps the case of E. Harding actually provides strong evidence that SSC has a very strong anti-right-wing bias, lol.
Or maybe SSC is just biased against partisans who keep acting like their own beliefs are Obvious Truths and that any denial of that is an affront. That would explain why both Jill and E. Harding get treated so poorly.
TheWorst:
And yet again you lie. While providing the exact evidence required to prove that it’s a lie. It really doesn’t get any more bald faced than this, does it?
Yes, that’s a direct quote. From me. In this conversation. Stating that I paid more attention to posts relating to interactions between non-right-wingers and right-wingers than those that involve just right-wingers. Since the topic under discussion was whether interactions between right-wingers and non-right-wingers could be accurately described as right-wingers saying “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!” I unambiguously was saying that I paid more attention to the posts specifically relating to the topic at hand.
Here’s a direct quote. From you. In this conversation: “you’ve already acknowledged that you didn’t read all of the thread in general, and that you pay less attention to those posts in specific.” This is the precise opposite of what I wrote. Admittedly it’s possible that you were just mistaken, but based on your style of posting, I came to the conclusion that it was a lie.
I’m glad you’re done with me. I didn’t intend to respond to you again, but when you slander me by claiming falsehoods about what I said, I do feel compelled to respond.
“When E Harding posts a garbage comment filled with right-wing bubble tripe,”
-Examples?
“Some posts were of that sort, definitely – basically all of E Harding’s comments, for instance. But the vast majority of what I read actually attempted to engage with Scott’s points and debunk them.”
-None of my comments can be described as “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!”. I can say with great pride I debunked most of Scott’s points and engaged with nearly all of them, though perhaps I could have gone into more depth on why Trump is not a millenarian.
“For example, once someone’s claimed that Jews (as a whole) have not assimilated into American culture”
-Jiro and I agreed on that. And, on net, they haven’t. Here’s the relevant comment:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/01/he-kept-us-out-of-war/#comment-419133
They vote 70% Democrat, are strongly disproportionately urban (most New York City Whites are Jewish), and Jewish names stick out notably in certain fields if you bother to look for them. I cannot call this anywhere near full assimilation.
What’s with this bashing of me when I’m not around?
I repeat my call for TheWorst to be banned for his chronic inability to engage with evidence.
“and Jewish names stick out notably in certain fields if you bother to look for them. I cannot call this anywhere near full assimilation.”
An odd definition of assimilation. In order for an ethnic group to assimilate to a culture it has to have the same distribution of characteristics as the average of that culture?
By that definition, I don’t think very many ethnic groups affiliate, given that generally there is some correlation between ethnicity and other characteristics. WASPs, for example, long dominated certain niches. Irish dominated others (big city politics and low wage labor). Italians other. Does the fact that if you stop at a random motel the proprietor is likely to be an immigrant from India show that Indians have failed to assimilate?
“I repeat my call for TheWorst to be banned for his chronic inability to engage with evidence.””
Banning seems a bit extreme for either of you, but perhaps the two of you could get a room?
“Does the fact that if you stop at a random motel the proprietor is likely to be an immigrant from India show that Indians have failed to assimilate?”
-At this point, yes. Though it seems that it’s mostly first-generation Indians running motels; you’ll have to look three generations ahead to check if this is permanent.
“Irish dominated others (big city politics and low wage labor).”
-Irish were largely unassimilated into U.S. society as recently as the 1940s.
Ivlin or The Worst,
Would you care to name an open thread from the past year that we could examine together to test whether what you say is true?
Or maybe someone could compile a list of the top twenty commenters over a year?
Why is SSC so relectant to examine itself statistically?
With so many mathematicians of programmers it seems strange that we only have subjective impressions to work with.
TheWorst says
“Looking at how the commentariat responds to any non-right-wing poster with a massive flurry of posts saying essentially “OMG! How dare you not be a right-wing nutjob! Muh safe space! Blasphemy!”
“…it’s not terribly hard to see why people start seeing it as being solidly within the rightwing bubble. Certainly all of the most prolific commenters see it that way, and take dramatic offense when they don’t see total conformity.”
Exactly.
As I pointed out in that thread, the reason assimilation was brought up was to deny that demographic replacement means anything. For that purpose, whether immigrants vote like others is relevant, but whether that counts as “assimilation” is a matter of semantics and is irrelevant.
Ivlin,
Seems strange you only speak up to hush complaints about bias. Who is your counterpart on the right here?
If, as you say, there is no problem, then you should be able to name a couple people on the right who dont ALWAYS take the predictable side.
E. Harding recently claimed: He [obama] didn’t do all that badly during his first term, pulling the U.S. out of Iraq, for one, and killing Bin Laden and revealing his birth certificate in one week for another (only later would we find out he only did so in order to take control of the global jihadist movement himself).
Typically, without rebuke. Again, Who is your counterpart on the right here?
Shouldnt the fact there is none mean something?
The SSC right wingers are all team players. The liberals are all on their own. When they pushback
you and HBC seem compelled to pretend there is no problem.
JHC:
Since JHC has described me as a right-winger (I’m a libertarian, which seems to be close enough nowadays), I have to make a note on my calendar. That’s the first time anyone’s described me as a “team player”.
P.S. Scott, please don’t ban keranih for being trolled. Her response was true and at least arguably necessary.
“The SSC right wingers are all team players.”
I wouldn’t exactly put it that way. But there are a number of Right Wingers who seem to enjoy piling on. Some of them say “I don’t want to pile on but” first, which is interesting.
There are also some Right Wingers who I don’t ever see piling on to someone to criticize Left Wing views. But when you get piled onto a few times, it does seem so excessive, and does hurt so much, that it seems like it’s coming from everywhere. Emotional pain can make some situations seem magnified beyond what they are.
To be clear, when E. Harding said Obama coordinates global jihadist efforts, I thought that was idiotic, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t interested in getting into that discussion and I don’t consider it my responsibility to police right-wingers on this blog. I typically just ignore everything E. Harding says, but that doesn’t mean I have accepted those statements “without rebuke” or that I think of him as “on my team”.
@JHC:
I did a very partial version of the statistical test some threads back. Someone asserted that most of the group was right wing and named three posters who he said had contributed ten percent of all posts (this is by memory). His claim was more specific, something along the lines of “most posts here claim X.” I think X was some derogatory claim about liberals or leftists, but I’m not sure.
I went through all the posts that the first of his three people had made prior to that. There were about twenty, of which one or zero fit the pattern he described, many being on things that had nothing to do with politics. I pointed it out. I do not believe he ever responded with evidence to support his claim. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for someone who thinks the group is overwhelmingly right wing to offer evidence.
I apologize for how imprecise my description is, but it was some days back and I’m not going to go searching for the needle of my post in the enormous haystack of recent days.
Someone did this a few months ago with open threads, but it was before the election really heated up. At the time I think Jill was the top poster (by a pretty wide margin), but she was also very new and clearly had not acclimated yet.
The analysis also assumed that each anon was unique. Probably a bad assumption, but it does point to a difficulty in doing such a thing.
The SSC right wingers are all team players.
First time I’ve ever been accused of that! I’m really not a gregarious person, I assure you.
But in the case of some of the more extravagant claims that a specific commenter may make, speaking for myself I don’t bother going “Hey, hang on” because, well, they’re extravagant. The same way I don’t bother getting into arguments on the kind of website that is stuck in 90s design with blood-red lettering and closely, not to say densely, argued proof that the Pope is Anti-Christ and the Catholic Church is the Woman Riding The Beast of Revelation.
Because it would be as much use as shaving a pig – a great cry, and little wool.
That lack of interaction probably does make it seem like I (and others) are sitting back nodding in approval going “They speak for our team” but no, that’s not how it is.
first Anonymous:
Do you have anything better?
> But, on the whole, who is going to find that sort of discussion more attractive? Conservatives who want to just tell themselves that discrimination is all the government’s fault, or liberals who want to assemble a kind, charitable, and also analytic, educational rebuttal?
Did you even read the link? How on earth does it provide support for the fact that discrimination is government’s fault? It’s pretty explicit in its claim that statistical racism exists, and statistical racism is pretty much the kind of racism people are concerned about (on the left and elsewhere). “I’m going to treat the black people I meet like criminals [because statistically they are more likely to be]” is a problem in and of itself, I don’t even think that’s all that controversial.
If it is statistically more likely that black people are criminals, isn’t it rational to increase your prior that a black person you encounter is a criminal?
It may be rational to combine that with statistical links between crime and age, socioeconomic status, neighborhood etc. So it would not be rational to increase your prior that a 58 year old surgeon living in a swanky Midtown apartment is a criminal just because he’s black.
Yea, it’s rational in a first-order, local optimization sense. It’s also rational to steal from people if you can get away with it, but as we know, stealing is both discouraged by society and contrary to most people’s moral compass. The problem is that at the societal level, this (can) end up as a net loss: if everybody went all in on refusing to hire or associate black people because of the blunt-filter statistical racial likelihood of committing crime, you’re shutting the entire communities out of so much of productive society that you’ve got something of a self-fulfilling prophecy on your hands.
” if everybody went all in on refusing to hire or associate black people because of the blunt-filter statistical racial likelihood of committing crime, you’re shutting the entire communities out of so much of productive society”
Statistical discrimination doesn’t imply that you don’t hire people who, on average, are more likely to have traits you don’t want, it means that you offer them less. It’s only when that becomes illegal that they don’t get hired.
Which explains why the Nationalist Party in South Africa under Apartheid supported equal pay for blacks.
The people we need to convert or scare away are people celebrating their own confirmation bias regardless their political position.
I know you are just spinning rhetorics, but ideally speaking: yes, left wingers contradicted by this study should find it far more interesting and worthy of discussion than right wingers confirmed by it.
Who needs studies! am I right?
We already know the answer! We don’t need no stinkin “science”.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I will happily spit on anyone who trys to piss in the fountain of truth because they think they already know the answers.
If you think the research is no good, attack the research and it’s methods, don’t piss on the very idea of people possibly contradicting your world views with study of harsh, inconvenient, physical reality.
If that drives away people who desperately want to believe only what is convenient to their ideology then good. Mission fucking accomplished.
I say that as someone on the left who has misgivings about the methods in that paper. Scaring off the intellectually weak is not a negative.
The right-wingers who are actually willing to think are much more interesting to be around than the kind of people who’ll be driven off at the sight of a research paper contrary to their existing opinions.
So I should never discuss studies that might support a right-wing viewpoint?
(like “companies shouldn’t discriminate against blacks because that makes them go out of business”? That’s the rock you want to die on for this blog being too far right?)
This seems like a really motivated personal attack and future comments along the same lines will result in banning.
It’s probably not good as a general rule, but there must be something positive about basically pissing off people on all sides in the course of about a week and a half.
I am sorry you perceived my remarks as a personal attack. Nothing of the sort was intended.
However, it seems my participation as a commentor is untenable. I will not try your patience, and will voluntarily refrain from commenting in the future.
I respect your prerogative to define the boundaries of the acceptable behavior of your community. If what I have said is near such a boundary, nobody is well-served by future bad feelings.
I wish you well in attempting to build the community you want, and bear no personal ill-will over this incompatibility.
I respect this response.
Sorry to see you go, Seth. I and the other 1 or 2 lonely non-Right-Wingers here are the board will miss you. I hope you’ll consider coming back. I’ve enjoyed reading your comments.
Did you actually say that Scott shouldn’t blog on studies like that? I think he certainly has every right to. And I also agree with you, Seth, that such studies are of more interest to Right Wingers than to non-Right-Wingers, because they appear to prove the Right Wing point of view. But then it’s all the more appropriate perhaps, because this definitely is a majority Right Wing commenter board here.
Scott, I noted that you said in your post that you weren’t sure you buy the results of this study. And I can see why you might not be sure. And that is probably why Seth doesn’t buy the results of the study himself– and why he says that the study would attract more Right Wing than Left Wing commenters.
I disagree with you on pretty much everything, but I’d rather you stay.
And I’m sorry if my response was harsh. But the comment pattern-matched a pattern I hear a lot, where the evidence is against X but X’s supporters threaten “Just warning you if you talk too much about that then you’re at risk of getting lumped in with The Bad People”.
There seem to be whole fields (and I’m not saying this is one of them) where everyone knows that the popular account is wrong, but nobody talks about it openly because it would make them look like they’re on the wrong side.
I’m really against this, but I also respect that these threats are sometimes accurate and easy to carry out, so it annoys me when it sounds like people are making them explicit. If that wasn’t your intent, then I apologize. Of course stay here or don’t based on whatever you think is best for you.
This feels like useful context and/or a related subject.
I’ve run across “lumped in with the bad people”– I’ve been told not to use the word misandry because it will make me look like an MRA.
I’ve continued to use misandry. I don’t know how it’s affected my reputation.
@Nancy
How about Gynocentrism?
I’m talking about hating men, which isn’t quite the same thing as overvaluing women.
Gynocentrism isn’t necessarily overvaluing women (though in practice they happen together very frequently). It’s looking at women’s situation, never looking at men’s situation, and even though you never looked at men’s situation and have zero bits of information about it, being confident that you know how women’s situation relates to men’s situation.
It’s gynocentrism when people say “Look, $INTEGER women had $BAD_THING happen to them! Women are in so much more danger than men, it’s shameful how men threaten women, and men need to step up and take responsibility and change their behavior to make women safer!” without ever looking at if the number of men who have $BAD_THING happen to them is lower or higher (spoiler alert: it is always higher). But though the person doing that is overvaluing women, the mistake they are making is not valuing women too much, it’s looking at women, never looking at men, and drawing conclusions about how men are better off than women.
But on the other end, you have people who hate America, but are still entirely Americentric in their thinking — they look at something about America, never look at it anywhere else in the world, and conclude that America is worse than the rest of the world they never looked at. Not much gynocentrism fits into this model, but it does happen, usually from the Roosh / PUA camp — “I showed women doing something irresponsible, I never looked at if men do the same thing, this proves women are more irresponsible than men!”
I don’t *think* there’s socially obligatory clothing which happens to men which is as dangerous as high heels, though I might be missing something.
What is your list of BAD_THINGS? I’m dubious that life is always worse for men.
@Nancy:
I think the usual list of BAD_THINGS circulated around is stuff like assault, murder, suicide, homelessness etc. Those things tend to be significantly worse problems for men than women.
Relatively recently I read an article about rates of online abuse and harassment suffered by each gender. This is an issue a lot of zeitgeist feminists like to complain about as affecting women terribly. This article cited a study that asserted that men are the targets of online abuse and harassment much more commonly than women are; they just don’t complain about it as much. In practice, I have been called a faggot and told to kill myself several times on various online fora, which I have brushed off as the nature of the internet — meaningless shitposting from bored idiots. But such attacks are commonly the subject of feminist thinkpieces decrying a hostile and misogynistic online environment, or arguing that the abuse women suffer is much worse qualitatively than the abuse men suffer even if it is not quantitatively equal.
I think women more commonly report threats (sometimes very explicit and including their addresses) as well as insults.
On the other hand, men’s shorter lifespans suggest worse living conditions, though it may also be that women are relatively overengineered for childbirth and grandmotherhood.
There are times when misandry is the right word– I know three men who say their mothers just didn’t like males. (Different ethnicities and birth decades– only one of them had a mother who might have been a feminist.) Also, Mary Daly pretty clearly detested men.
Gynecentrism sounds like it’s a thing, but not the same thing, so I’m still hanging on to using misandry.
I may have noticed gynecentrism– I was watching a romance movie, and it occurred to me that the male lead’s virtue was defined by how well he treated the female lead, and nothing else.
Honestly, the male lead of a romance being defined solely by his treatment of the female protagonist isn’t really gynocentrism. It’s… I wouldn’t say “good” storytelling, but it’s not “bad” storytelling either, it’s knowing what your focus is and serving it efficiently.
Gynocentrism isn’t about one man vs one woman, but information that is only about Category Women being used to draw conclusions about how Category Women is doing relative to Category Men. Gynocentrism is when people see how often women get attacked at night, don’t see how often men get attacked at night, and say male privilege is not being afraid of being attacked at night because look at how often women are attacked! Gynocentrism is the thinkpiece-industrial complex producing calls to action to save the imperiled women of El Salvador who are being killed in unprecedented numbers, calling it proof of how our society hates women and disregards the safety of women and how threatening men are to women, when 7% of murder victims in El Salvador are women and 93% of them are male.
And yes, by bad things I mean murder, suicide, rape, domestic abuse (for those two numbers are equal but men are deliberately and maliciously excluded from support programs), assault, harassment, racial discrimination, imprisonment, homelessness, maiming, etc. The example brought up, the current narrative that women are uniquely harassed online, is a result of gynocentrism: when data is actually gathered, it shows men are harassed more frequently across the board. But people who say it is a problem women face just look at how women are harassed, don’t look at how men are harassed, and conclude women have it worse than the men they didn’t look at.
Fair point on high heels, though neckties might match them depending on how you’re measuring the harm (I would naively guess that one necktie causes less harm from general usage than one pair of heels but there are more frequent opportunities for a necktie to straight-up kill you). But usually people aren’t talking about high heels, they’re talking about overt forms of victimization as things inflicted by men unto women, when it actually happens way more to men.
The nearest I can think of is the detachable stiff collar, called Vatermörder in German. Two caveats, though:
1. I’m not sure how much it lived up to the reputation it’s acquired. I can find three obituaries describing death-by-collar and one close call in the NYT, but it doesn’t seem to have been a common reference at the time; two German encyclopedias from the turn of the (20th) century give two different (and rather dubious) etymologies, neither of which suggest they were actually dangerous.
2. If we’re going back that far there’s an awful lot of interesting corsetry to point at, so it’s hardly evidence against women having it worse in this area.
Your blog, your rules Scott. But if it makes any difference, here are my two cents: Eeven though I personally strongly disagree with the tone and the message of that comment I think that it was really not aimed personally at you and that threatening Seth with a ban is a bit too much. He appears to be on the partisan level of Jill or E. Harding but that is not a good enough reason to ban people, I think.
EDIT: After reading Seth’s reply to your comment, it seems that the main result was to help convince Seth that this is a very right-leaning blog where the left is discriminated. A second order effect is that other partisan people on the left here who are like Seth will only be convinced in the same (IMO very wrong) conclusion, becoming even more partisan and bigoted (i.e. close minded). I don’t know if that is the desired result. If people are unreasonably partisan, the right course of action is to ignore them until they give up and try to write something less tribal and more charitable, not to ban them. Banning them will reduce the number of such people on this blog but kind of increase the number of such people in total and it could possibly lead to a less intellectually diverse SSC comments in the long run (more “middle of the road” rather than very right or very left wing).
Jill and E. Harding aren’t equivalent, fellas. Jill is an apparently blindly partisan Democrat; I support Trump for the reasons I outlined in the two Trump v. Clinton megathreads.
The two of your are not equivalent. You are a little more coherent in your arguments than she is.
But you share a common attitude–that your (in my view highly dubious) views are not merely true but obviously true.
Both of you have 1 post written 100 times. Dial back the need to respond to every last person and I think you’d be fine.
But since you didn’t support Trump in 2012 or 2000, all of those reasons are clearly post-hoc rationalizations. There’s no reason to think Trump isn’t the same man at age 70 that he was at 66.
“If people are unreasonably partisan, the right course of action is to ignore them until they give up and try to write something less tribal and more charitable, not to ban them. ”
Yes, wait for me to write something more Right Wing. 90% of the comments here are very Right Wing tribal. And responses to Left of Center posts are 90% very uncharitable. So I see that your rules you are desiring, apply only to Left of Center people. Good for me to become more and more aware of what this board is like, so I don’t mistake it for something else than what it is.
Agree.
Seconded, err… thirded
That’s pretty chilling, Scott. Seth’s comment takes care to make all sorts of qualifications.
+1 on chilling effect.
Meta: this kind of stuff discourages Scott from continuing this blog and stresses him out probably (on the margin).
Good on both.
If Scott wants to run a far right echo chamber then he should feel stress – especially since his real name is known and he’s said some very problematic things.
Scott should keep this in mind when he allows right wingers comment here and posts things that seem to support violence against the most vulnerable groups.
Moreover, when someone tells him that what he posted is problematic he shouldn’t defend it he should acknowledge his privilege and apologize.
@anon:
Apropos of something else I posted, yours is the sort of comment that makes me wonder if it might be someone pretending to be on the opposite of the side he actually is on in order to make the side he is pretending to be on look bad.
^I’m hoping that’s a troll, because otherwise this blog is a place where some on the left insist that the culture wars are not real and people who say otherwise should stop living in their bubbles while others on the left toss out not-so-veiled threats for saying “problematic things”.
… and predictable as privilege out come the right wing attacks for someone on the left even daring to exist.
I think you can dare to exist without telling our host that you know his real name and he should feel nervous about what he posts on his blog.
My confidence that anon is a troll increases. Of course I’m pretty convinced Anita is a troll, so my detector may be too sensitive.
Nice try anon@12:50 am EDT, but that reads like a precis of the SJW position from one of their opponents, not something they’d actually say as a single coherent statement.
(an accurate precis, mind you…)
Scott, I didn’t see this as a personal attack on you (although it might have come across that way) as much as it was an expression of frustration.
I dunno who you’ve been dealing with pinging you for attention over the last couple days, and I suspect you’ve had to communicate with people via 2×4 more than you like, and perhaps that bled over to Seth, whom I think isn’t as much in need of percussive therapy.
I’d rather Seth stayed, and more so that he felt ok with staying.
If this is the reaction to even measured criticism from the left I have to say I understand why more and more people are perceiving this as a right-wing echo chamber.
Yep.
Yes, I read that only as a lamentation that the topics covered in the posts attract more right-leaning commentariat, and that contributes to the echo chamber effect.
I’m not sure what your point is. I also have the feeling that some people here (you apparently among them) are not used to interacting with people who are more “right wing” than they are (which for you apparently includes libertarians as well, although to me it does not make much sense to put libertarians either to the right or to the left – even though even some libertarians would disagree).
I have no statistics, but to me it seems that the commenters here consist of a few very vocal “right wingers”, a few very vocal “left-wingers” and a majority which is not strongly either. I find some conservatives here mildly annoying but to their credit, they at least do not keep complaining about how incredibly left-wing the majority of the commenters here are. That I cannot say about the vocal left-wingers (with the left and right switched, obviously). Occassionaly, some people on the left here are suspected to be trolls, because their arguments are so clichéd and stereotypical they could come from the “I’m 14 and this is deep” reddit page. Again, I’ve probably only seen one or two such extreme cases from the people on the right. By no means o I want to say that the majority of the left-wing commenters are like that but the very unreasonable left-wing comments are at least as prevalent as the very unreasonable right-wing ones.
Scott writes many things which are definitely not right-wing at least not in the sense socially conservative. To me, he is kind of a libertarian-leaning centre-left guy, if it makes any sense. Most importantly, he seems to be someone who genuinely takes epistemology seriously, way more than partisanship, which is why it is interesting to read what he writes. But it seems to me that you have a tendency to notice every article he links to or writes which supports a libertarian or (more rarely) a conservative viewpoint and to ignore those which support a left-wing viewpoint, presumably because you see that as “normal”.
Your troll point gave me an idea for an SSC competition–a sort of extended ideological turing test. Create a persona and leave comments for several months espousing the side you disagree with. See if anyone else fingers you as a fraud. Competitors who aren’t fingered as a fraud get voted in to 1st, 2nd, 3rd place by the commentariat at the end of the competition.
(I may or may not already be doing this with my current persona)
Edit: David Friedman’s comment below explains why this might be a bad idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/04/links-1016-new-urleans/#comment-420392
“I have no statistics, but to me it seems that the commenters here consist of a few very vocal “right wingers”, a few very vocal “left-wingers” and a majority which is not strongly either.”
Off the top of my head I’m seeing:
sandy, jiro, gdub, lumifer, jaskologist, orphan wilde, cassander, john schilling, faceless craven, jaimeastorga2000, glen raphael, Mai La Dreapta, Dr Dealgood, blacktrance, TheNybbler, onyomi, Nornagest, DrBeat, suntzuamine, Mary, David Friedman, keranih, Hylinka, ThirteenthLetter, Randy M, original mr. x, deiseach, and e. harding as reliably partisan commenters on the right
vs.
jill, heelbearcub, corey, ……?
I could name a lot more left-leaning commenters here, but I just want to say, as I have said previously, that I find the listing of commenters by ideological orientation, especially on a site where we try to at least consider things in a non-tribalish way, to be unseemly.
And, again, this whole “is SSC too right-wing???” debate is so tiresome and pointless. If you want more intelligent left-wing commentary invite some of your left-wing friends to check out the blog.
Why not just ignore those threads Onyomi?
If some people feel there’s a problem
you cant say there is none, can you?
“I find the listing of commenters by ideological orientation, especially on a site where we try to at least consider things in a non-tribalish way, to be unseemly.”
Again, I dont believe you because I’ve never seen you find an alt-right comment unseemly. Like Mr. Friedman you enjoy the privilege of being a political partisan masquerading as an open-minded dude
You seem embarrassed that a simple counting of pseudonyms gets to the truth about your dogpiling club.
It may actually be true that there are more right-wing commenters and/or libertarians here than left-wing commenters. Even if it is true, what are we supposed to do about it? Demand Scott stop posting any interesting information he might find which supports a right-wing interpretation? Make a list categorizing all the posters and say “uh-oh, we’ve got 64 right-wingers and only 48 left-wingers right-now: time to hand out 16 bans.”?
And as for dogpiling, are we supposed to just not comment when we agree with people? I have been “dogpiled” when I made statements on here which hardly anyone agreed with (see, e. g. my contention that it’s morally wrong to defend a client you believe to be guilty). It’s not a problem so long as people are polite.
Again, if you want to see more left-leaning comments on here there’s only one solution: introduce left-leaning people to the blog. Calibrating his posts in terms of how many of which side they might attract is not and should not be Scott’s responsibility, and he already does a much better job being balanced than almost everyone. Having him second-guess himself about how any post or link might affect the ideological makeup of the comments section would reduce the quality of the blog overall.
“are we supposed to just not comment when we agree with people?”
Of course not. Be as right-wing majority as you like.
Be a majority right place and embrace it.
Stop pretending.
“uh-oh, we’ve got 64 right-wingers and only 48 left-wingers right-now: time to hand out 16 bans.”?
I think acknowledging that the ratio is closer to 64 to 10 would be a start.
And there it is.
Is the ratio closer to 64 to 48 or 64 to 10?
If its the first you have no problem.
Im curious why no one wants to know.
“Im curious why no one wants to know.”
If you want to hire a research assistant, categorize every SSC comment over the past year as “left” or “right”-leaning, and provide us with statistics, by all means. I don’t really care about the results, because ideological balance for the sake of balance doesn’t matter to me, but go right ahead.
I dont care about balance.
I care about the truth.
Too many people on the right play with disguises while working together to make GOP dreams come true.
Ive seen you deny you’re a partisan and ive seen you come out strongly in support of Ted Cruz.
You want to say there is a powerful social justice movement in the U.S. You want to talk about this for two years without any evidence of this movements existence in politics or on the ground.
You are concerned about this group and its capacity for spreading groupthink.
Well i am concerned about another case of groupthink that i can provide evidence for.
It flourishes on a blog that thinks itself beyond such a thing.
It seems infinitely more surprising (and somewhat frightening) that on a blog where lip service is paid to epistemic hygiene that such virulent bias could take hold, but worse, that it would sustain itself through simple denial of what is apparent. This second part is what concerns me. Be as right as you like. Just stop pretending youre anything other than embarrassed Republicans.
Are you arguing that supporting any candidate at all makes someone partisan?
that would be so broad a usage as to be useless.
“Ive seen you deny you’re a partisan and ive seen you come out strongly in support of Ted Cruz.”
“Strongly” relative to the other options at the time, none of whom I liked. I also don’t recall ever denying partisanship. I freely admit I’m more apt to side with the Republicans than the Democrats in US politics, and have frequently described myself as “right wing,” even though I’m also usually very dissatisfied with the Republicans on issues like foreign policy, drug prohibition, immigration, actually cutting spending instead of paying lip service to it…
Calling libertarians (and, in my case, an anarchist) who grudgingly support Cruz or Trump over Hillary “embarrassed Republicans” is no better than calling Noam Chomsky an “embarrassed Democrat” because he prefers Hillary to Trump (but identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist and varies greatly with the modal Democrat in terms of his actual views).
And believe me, it’s just as frustrating from my perspective to see someone like Scott, with infinitely better and more nuanced views, grudgingly endorse Hillary on practical grounds, as it is for you to see libertarians grudgingly support Republicans. But that’s the crummy two-party democracy we have. When 300 million people are forced to pick one ruler, it ends up being a case of “pick your poison.”
I also care about the truth, which is why I don’t don’t care about equal ideological representation. The whole reason I am a repeatedly self-professed libertarian is because I find the arguments for libertarianism better.
As for SSC, I again freely admit I’m more apt to take a typically right-wingish or libertarian stance on most issues. And I often get intelligent push back on those posts. Good enough for me. If right-wingers are drawn to SSC, maybe it’s because it’s one of the few places where you can express an idea like “I’m against the minimum wage” and get some intelligent objections without all the “I guess you must hate poor people, huh?”
If I just wanted a Republican or Libertarian echo chamber there are plenty of more echoey places I could go.
>I dont care about balance. I care about the truth.
I agree, but weren’t you just complaining about a lack of balance a couple comments ago?
>Too many people on the right play with disguises while working together to make GOP dreams come true.
Are you really criticizing right wingers for supporting the more right wing party?
>Ive seen you deny you’re a partisan and ive seen you come out strongly in support of Ted Cruz.
Do you think it is impossible to support Ted Cruz for reason that are not partisan? Or is support of cruz simply illegitimate, end of discussion?
>You want to say there is a powerful social justice movement in the U.S. You want to talk about this for two years without any evidence of this movements existence in politics or on the ground.
The SJW movement is getting laws passed as we speak. How on earth is stuff like this not evidence that you have a powerful movement?
>Well i am concerned about another case of groupthink that i can provide evidence for.
And yet you somehow deign to do so.
JHC, humans are being capable of infinite self-delusion.
@JHC: What disguises do you mean? I’m sorry but this sounds a bit like some kind of a conspiracy theory. Either that or I misunderstand what you are trying to say. The way I see it, you are basically saying that people here have a “reasonable” persona while they are in fact all alt-right or something. That is kind of similar to accusing anyone of secretly being a communist just because he advocates some left wing ideas.
By the way at least some people on the “blacklist” above are not even from the US (Deiseach for example) and hence have a zero interest in the GOP.
vs.
jill, heelbearcub, corey, ……?
You know what really fucking pisses me off? I’ll tell you what really fucking pisses me off.
What really, really fucking pisses me off is god-damn fly-by-night low-context shallow one-stop thread participants who don’t even fucking invest the goddamn time to observe what they’re slagging before starting to run off at the mouth about things they aren’t even a part of.
If that’s all the left-wing partisans you can name on this board, you’re an illiterate ignant idjit. STFU and go back and actually read the comments being made. Because you’re missing a shitton of insightful commentary by left-wing partisans who don’t deserve to be tarnished by association with the likes of you.
Jesus.
I’ve done nothing wrong. What is this rage all about?
Is this your place? Actually it kind of is.
Yes there are liberals on the board this week.
My point is about the other 51 weeks of the year.
The other 51 & 1/2 weeks of the year, they’re here, too.
And you just erased them.
Nice going.
Keranih, wow. Rage city, here we are.
@keranih
I think you’re right to be pissed here, but this doesn’t feel like a good conversation to get involved in. I mean, you post something like that here, and the best you get is Jill just kind of smugly glad to have pissed you off. This subthread ain’t a good place to be.
Keranih banned for two weeks
@Scott: Now this ban actually does makes sense (although I also think it is fair that it is only temporary).
I have a feeling that the comments are sliding to a more tribal and partisan discussion now, maybe it is the US elections. But it would be sad if this ended up, well, just like any other internet discussion. I normally prefer it when moderators are very liberal about what is allowed, generally only banning obvious trolls and spam bots. But at the same time if people start doing this, it threatens to bring about some kind of a flame war where a few loud people shout at each other and everyone else leaves with disgust. So I guess careful interventionism is justified here 🙂
Tibor +1
For some reason replies I’m making to this thread aren’t working. What is up?
@LPSP:
Monikers of those banned become banned words, I believe. That might be your issue.
Ah right, I’ll use a cypher.
Thank you Scott. I think dddfewdwad has good content to contribute, but he’s been pretty silly on occasions over the last week or so, and time out is a good call.
@JHC
Grouping alt-right people with Libertarians doesn’t make any sense, man.
Does anyone remember the thread about the estate tax? I thought it was in the preceding OT but I cant find it.
I was really struck by how overwhelmingly one-sided that was.
“Grouping Maoists with Trotskyists doesn’t make any sense, man.”
Wow, I was involved in a discussion about estate tax. Is that the one? IT was not at all one sided. I was arguing that they made sense, except for their complexity, and most of the others disagreed. One sided in the sense that I don’t think anyone agreed with me. But that’s how arguments work; sometimes it is difficult to find an ally. But it wasn’t anything tribal.
Heh. This is actually quite revealing. “If you are not with us, you’re against us” — if you’re not left-wing, you must be a reliably right-wing partisan.
All non-white colors are black. Why do they pretend they are not black? X- /
Lumifer, yes, it is revealing about you. I don’t see where anyone said that.
See yellow anon below, along with Houseboat’s comment and Tibor’s reply.
Heck, see yellow anon above
Actually, JHC himself says:
brad, houseboatonstyx, ChetC3, Stefan Dirnic (or however it’s spelled), null, nil, up until recently Seth & apparently Zombielicious, Bitter lefty anon (not actually all that bitter, but the nickname stuck), paranoid lefty anon, birdboy2000, lvln…
Besides, there’s two arguments here being equivocated.
One is that the comment section here leans Right Wing, the other is that this is a right-wing bubble where left wing ideas get shouted down.
The first one is easy to notice, and fairly undisputable. The latter is far more contentious, and you’re providing evidence for the former, as if it supports Jill and TheWorst’s statements, which are about the latter.
fuck you
be better than that.
Or at least say who you are responding to.
Quality content.
Really please calm down. What makes Scott’s blog and the comments (usually) unique and interesting is that you have people of very different political opinions who can usually get along quite well and actually listen to each other. There have always been strong partisans who only want to speak but who don’t want to hear. But if people here start being like this, then this is quickly going to collapse into either an actual right-wing or a left-wing bubble, or more likely, to a forum full of angry partisan right-winger and angry partisan left-wingers who just throw insult at each other. In short, this is going to become a regular internet discussion. It would be nice if that could be prevented.
Also, David’s comment to suntzuanime’s post made me laugh out loud 🙂
Though Sun’s language is clearly beyond the bounds of SSC rules and intended to provoke (only a tempban, I hope), perhaps in response to the banning of Keran, I do think people are a little justified in getting angry at the “call-out culture” aspect of the never-ending and tiresome “is SSC getting too right wing???” debate.
I think the debate itself is petulant and pointless, but if people insist on having it, I think they should do it without calling out a bunch of people as, essentially, mindless partisans. This feels doubly creepy when the person calling out is not a regular commenter on other issues but instead feels more like a stalker seeing fit to publish a list categorizing all the frequent posters, who often post on many apolitical issues, by his own, personal yardstick, despite being largely only an observer and not participant.
Though I personally would prefer a soft, unofficial ban on the whole topic of ideological makeup of the comments section which, thus far, has produced a great deal of acrimony and nothing useful, I would strongly suggest that anyone who wants to do it in the future at least talk in generalities (preferably backed up by actual statistics and not just “off the top of my head, these seven people are really right-wing…”) and not call out specific users.
This relates to the complaint some had earlier about getting called out for previous statements, which JHC did below, saying essentially, that Deisea has too many covertly pro-Trump posts. Having someone, especially a non-participant, jump in to say, “you have too many posts like this,” or “why is this different than what you said last month”–THAT has a chilling effect on good discourse and drives people to go full anon.
What is the saying? “Great minds discuss ideas, good minds discuss events, average minds discuss people.” Keep it about the ideas.
I think it’s a pretty tedious discussion, but putting a ban on it seems like essentially conceding the point. “If you kill your enemies they win” or something like that.
I agree and so suggest “soft ban.” Something like “no hard and fast rule you get automatically banned for bringing it up, but a consensus/norm to not engage with it, especially if it offers nothing new, like stats instead of ‘off the top of my head…'”
I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to see it discouraged outside the case where someone has a substantive proposal or question about addressing a specific issue, like “how can we get the Reddit communists to post here more often?”
Actually, “how to get x group to post here more often” would, in general, seem a much more congenial and potentially productive discussion to have than “how can we scare off all these awful people Scott’s measured consideration of right wing ideas seems to attract?”
I guess this must be one of those “you’re not allowed to notice” situations. Is it characteristic to a conservative safe space that everyone pretend that it isn’t a safe space?
If you want more left wing comments on this blog, why don’t you write some instead of sniping from the cover of perceived anonymity?
Another problem: repeating the false claim that SSC is a “conservative safe space” over and over might have the potential to create an “my id on defensiveness” effect, linked above: to the extent they believe the claim, the more open-minded conservatives might seek out other venues.
Yeah, I think paranoia-anon has it right.
This is an unproductive and unreasonable response. We shouldn’t try to prevent people from asking questions about site demographics by shaming them.
The problem isn’t when people say “there are a lot of rightists here.” Either they’re wrong and can be corrected or they’re right and can correct others.
The problem is when people say “there are a lot of rightists here therefore their points should be dismissed out of hand.” And combating that problem by dismissing their points out of hand is totally self-defeating.
Is that a doxxing threat baby killer?
“This is an unproductive and unreasonable response. We shouldn’t try to prevent people from asking questions about site demographics by shaming them.”
Yeah, I’m definitely not trying to encourage a culture of “too many rightists? We don’t talk about that here…” It’s mostly the “off the top of my head…” assertions categorizing people I object to. Though I do think this kind of discussion has proven unproductive in the past.
It’s especially surprising coming from a site where we have Gwern, and where I’ve been called out for relying too heavily on personal experience and subjective impression. Claims like “SSC is too right wing” should be backed up by something quantifiable, ideally in non-personal terms.
@ Anonymous
Not a threat, a question and an observation.
Considering your posting history I find it difficult to believe that you are genuinely interested in increasing the representation or reputation of left-wing ideas on this forum.
How about claims about what “feminists”, “progressives”, “the Blue Tribe”, or “SJW” do or believe? Should those claims also be backed up by something quantifiable?
I continue to be amused by people considering me a conservative or a right-wing partisan : -)
Anonymous:
Really….yes. Everything should come back to something quantifiable. Or, rather, you should be capable of giving reasons for your claims. And giving reasons for your reasons. And ultimately falling back into a scientific falsification cycle because infinite regress isn’t fun.
Isn’t that what this place is supposed to be about? Being reasonable, engaging in rational discourse that asserts by argumentation instead of argument? I’ll come right out and say I’ve not read most any of the Sequences, have had no attachment to the ‘Rationalism’ movement (especially when it seems Less Wrong was still a thing), and ultimately have little cultural similarity with Scott or his ilk…but I do like the idea. That’s why I’ve kept coming back here for quite some time now: They seem to care about Reason. The people who post here seemed to care about Reason.
If you want SSC to get better and seem less like a ‘right-wing echo chamber’ to you…maybe you should show us how much you care about Reason? Be rational, give reasons for what you believe. Keep giving reasons when people disagree with those first reasons. The danger isn’t that SSC becomes an echo chamber for anyone, the danger is that it becomes another discussion board where conversations essentially stay first-order in that regression of reasons. You can have a perfectly diverse discussion board, with equal representation from all sides of the political spectrum, but it can be worthless when ALL the discussion is first order. You can have a discussion board that is all people coming from the ‘correct’ (whatever your preferred value for ‘correct’) viewpoint and it still won’t be that great a place if EVERYTHING stays first order.
Go second order on us. Third. Forth. Keep digging. Quantification is valuable because it covers fifty orders at a time, giving really good reasons that contain their own reasons going down several layers. Go through posts here in Open Threads going months back. Collect post counts on ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ posts. Give some methodological justification, share your results! Maybe SSC really has become a right-wing echo chamber. Who knows? None of us do! Not until someone gives us the reasons.
The tragedy that could happen here isn’t that SSC could stop being left-wing or have too many right-wingers, the tragedy is that it could stop being a place where people think about what they believe and justify what they have to say. Places where intelligent people can carefully, deliberately discuss various issues (not always political ones!) with other intelligent people who may or may not agree with them are vanishingly rare. It would suck for this one to die.
@Lumifer:
There is a saying “If you wake one day and meet a jerk, you just met a jerk. If you wake up every day and meet a jerk, you are the jerk.
So, if you are continually being confused for someone who is on the right half of the political spectrum, it’s probably because you are playing a reasonable facsimile of one.
I can’t think of times when I have seen you disagreeing with right-wing positions or agreeing with left-wing ones. My memory of names is bad though, so that is (of course) very non-dispositive. Just a thought.
@ HeelBearCub
I’m not being continually confused for a right-wing person, or, rather, people who do that belong to a specific type.
I don’t identify as right-wing and right-wing people will not acknowledge me as their own. People who call me right-wing are invariable left-wing people who think solely in terms of “us vs them” and I’m clearly not “us”, which means I’m “them” and out comes the right-wing label to stick onto me.
It’s not that I’m bothered by that, it’s just that it’s a clear sign of black-and-white vision which is, unfortunately, widespread.
@Lumifer
As far as I can tell, you are a libertarian, which makes you right-wing (since you don’t seem to be a left-libertarian). You may be a different kind of right-wing to the social conservative one that prevails in mainstream politics, or the alt one that prevails in this comment section (where libertarians are common enough that it is sensible to distinguish between them and other right-wingers), but that doesn’t stop you from being right-wing.
It is possible to transcend the left-right binary, such as by simultaneously believing that free markets are the solution to everything, but that we need to violently confiscate and redistribute wealth to get them; or that gay marriage should be both legal and mandatory. But I can’t remember you expressing any obviously non-right-wing sentiments.
@ sweenyrod
Why is this so?
It makes sense only if you define “right-wing” as “anything which is not left-wing” and, as I mentioned, I don’t find this a useful approach.
@Lumifer
Well, words mean what you choose them to mean and all that, but libertarians tend to be part of right-wing parties (the Pauls, Gary Johnson when governor, Douglas Carswell etc.) and their ideas tend to influence right-wing politicians (Reagan, Thatcher). There is a very permeable boundary between libertarianism and the mainstream right-wing. There is no such link between libertarianism and the mainstream left-wing. Hence it is right-wing.
@sweenyrod:
Indeed.
Yeah, a left-right dichotomy doesn’t really accurately describe all political nuance. We all (should) know that.
However, and this is a big however, at the end of the day, in a democratic system, you end up in a coalition, and the coalitions tend to be stable in the short term and move slowly in the long term. And there are only two of those coalitions because, again at the end of the day, when a matter comes before the political body it can only vote “aye” or “nay”.
If I were a person who’s continually being confused for a scold-happy net nanny, I’d probably be a bit reluctant to deploy the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument.
@Cerebral Paul Z:
I think I actually admit to being a “scold happy net nanny”. 😉
@ HeelBearCub
No, I don’t. We’re talking about me and I’m not running for any office or is much interested in jumping into some local political tussle. I do not end up in a coalition.
That’s just not true. Look at political landscapes outside of the US.
@Lumifer:
Yes, I was considering outside the US as well. Specifically when considering parliamentary systems, which are typical, you still end up either in the coalition that elects the PM or not.
Sure, you are going have countries that are far more sectarian where the splits aren’t left/right but geographic or ethnic, but given a country that has a true national identity, the two-way split will tend to be evident.
As far as you, personally, not being in a coalition, that just seems to me like a version of a “free rider”. Nevertheless, if your consistent set of political views map to views that sit within one of the coalitions, and all we have to judge you on is those views which you express, it’s a little weird to object to having those views so labeled.
@ HeelBearCub
Not true. Those who elect the PM are a coalition, but those who do not are not.
So… anyone who is apolitical is a free rider? That seems a bit extreme of a view. Not to mention that I still don’t think that everyone has to pick one of two and only two coalitions.
I keep on telling you that it does not and you keep on telling me that it does : -/
This subthread seems like a good example of the outgroup homogeneity concept.
@Lumifer:
Then point me at views expressed here that don’t sit comfortably within “libertarian right”? I’m not claiming to know the whole, real Lumifer, only the one that I notice in the SSCC.
Yes, everyone who is apolitical is, to a certain extent, a free rider. I think that applies even more to people who claim strong views that fall in the political sphere and the claim to be apolitical.
Now, don’t mistake me. Professionally or even societally remaining apolitical is not what I am talking about. Not expressing political views at work or to random people in the grocery store is not what I’m pointing at.
“As far as you, personally, not being in a coalition, that just seems to me like a version of a “free rider”. ”
Not directed at me, but it was a general comment.
I’m not a free rider–everyone else is. I try to create and analyze ideas and put the results into circulation, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. That is a way of influencing political outcomes–a more effective way than voting, arguably more effective than what most politicians do. It doesn’t require me to be part of either coalition–with luck I can influence both.
How many political leaders had more effect on the world than Keynes or (M.) Friedman?
@ HeelBearCub
First, I don’t know what your definition of “libertarian right” is, you might have noticed that “libertarian” is a very fuzzy label, and second, it’s not like I use SSC as a soapbox to promote my political philosophy to the whole world. Especially during the pre-election madness I think the political discussions here get a bit too… mindkilled.
Of course it’s fully within your rights to assign me to the “right-wing” bucket. Just as it is within my rights to look at that and snicker.
That’s an interesting idea. In which way is it different from “if you are not in the front lines killing the enemies of our tribe, you’re useless and a burden for the tribe”?
Or, to look at it from another direction, would you like everyone to be more politicized than they are now? Is there a limit to that or the more the better?
@Lumifer:
Politics is the means by which we don’t have tribes literally fighting, among other things. Like it or not, our lives are inter-connected and we live within a system. We all live off the fruits of the polity, whatever that system happens to be.
So, you can remain apolitical, but that doesn’t mean you do not benefit from the polity. It also doesn’t mean you are a net detriment to society.
@David Friedman:
You are apolitical? Not buying it. You take far too much joy in rubbing liberals’ noses is what you think is the mud.
@ HeelBearCub
Given the popular expression “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, that doesn’t seem to be so.
I define politics as “about power”. Political science studies how power works in a society and politicians practice the craft of acquiring, keeping, and enhancing power.
Um. What happened to the standard left-wing tropes of exploitation, colonialism, etc? Do the slaves, the serfs, the generally-screwed-over also live off the fruits of the polity? Does all the population of, say, contemporary Iraq live like that?
Besides, it’s not like the polity is giving me its fruits out of the goodness of its heart.The polity imposes its rules on me regardless of whether I like them or not. It takes my money on the same basis. If I object, it has men with guns ready to make sure I don’t make too much trouble.
Are we all in debt to the state? Always?
“@David Friedman:
You are apolitical? Not buying it.”
I didn’t say I was apolitical and I’m not. My point was that I am not a supporter of either of the coalitions that has a chance of getting serious political power, which was the question being discussed. You had written:
“you end up in a coalition, and the coalitions tend to be stable in the short term and move slowly in the long term. And there are only two of those coalitions because …”
At the moment my preferred outcome for the election, among those having any significant probability of happening, is Hilary as President and the Republicans keeping control of both houses. A few elections back I commented on my blog that, of the serious candidates (McCain, Obama, and Hilary), Obama was probably the least bad–and got mislabeled in various places as an Obamacon for saying it.
I have strong political views, enjoy arguing about them, and have been doing so for well over fifty years. But they don’t happen to map into Republicans vs Democrats.
Some time back, I suggested that the Democrats ought to try to pull the libertarians into their coalition. So far they don’t seem to be interested in doing so, unfortunately.
David Friedman, you think you are apolitical? Other people here say you are a famous Libertarian. And I’ve certainly never seen you write anything even close to Center politically, much less Left Wing sounding.
Jill:
Where did I say I was apolitical?
What made you think I said so? Can you quote me?
What I said was that I did not fit into either of two major coalitions that were competing for political power. I plan to vote for Gary Johnson, not either Trump or Clinton.
Center, left wing and right wing do not exhaust the political possibilities–there is more than one dimension in the world.
@DavidFriedman:
Interesting that you completely ignore that my objection works just as well for your clarified position. If you claim to be want be neutral and influence both sides, you should evaluate your strategy. I think you just like to claim neutrality, to try and grant your positions the appearance of more weight, but the claim is not very credible.
Also, it’s pretty easy to see why we could be unclear on whether you were claiming to be apolitical, given that is a specific claim of Lumifer’s being discussed previously. I don’t see why you don’t just clarify, as it’s fairly obvious what happened.
@HealBear Cub
You wrote:
“in a democratic system, you end up in a coalition, and the coalitions tend to be stable in the short term and move slowly in the long term. And there are only two of those coalitions because, again at the end of the day, when a matter comes before the political body it can only vote “aye” or “nay”.”
A little later in the thread you wrote:
“Specifically when considering parliamentary systems, which are typical, you still end up either in the coalition that elects the PM or not.”
And still later:
“As far as you, personally, not being in a coalition, that just seems to me like a version of a “free rider”.”
I responded to the final quote with:
“I try to create and analyze ideas and put the results into circulation, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. That is a way of influencing political outcomes–a more effective way than voting, arguably more effective than what most politicians do. It doesn’t require me to be part of either coalition–with luck I can influence both.”
You were claiming that the only way of participating in the political system rather than free riding on it is to support a coalition, of which there are only two.
You responded to my comment with “You are apolitical? Not buying it.”
I said nothing about being apolitical. I said that I was not part of either coalition—the coalitions you were discussing being political parties (or party coalitions in a multiparty system).
If “apolitical” means “not supporting either party,” I am apolitical. I linked to two blog posts of mine in which I stated my preferred electoral outcome, and in neither case was it for the Republicans, the coalition you apparently imagine I am part of, to win everything.
If “apolitical” means not trying to influence the political system, I am arguably more political than almost anyone else here, since I write books, teach courses, give public lectures, try in various ways to influence the mix of ideas which ultimately affects political outcomes.
You were insisting that supporting one of the two coalitions is the only option other than free riding. That was the claim I disputed.
“Interesting that you completely ignore that my objection works just as well for your clarified position.”
Your objection being that I enjoy pointing out errors in Liberal arguments and that must mean I am part of the Republican coalition? It isn’t possible to be critical of one movement without being a supporter of the other?
Jill wrote:
“David Friedman, you think you are apolitical?”
And she wrote it immediately after the comment in which I wrote:
“I didn’t say I was apolitical and I’m not.”
Which leaves me wondering if she bothers to read the comments she responds to.
@David Friedman:
Members of a coalition don’t always vote with the coalition. If you only critique Democrats or liberals, and never conservatives or Republicans, it’s a strong indicator. The joy with which you do so, the fact that you find it fun to tweak them, speaks even more to this.
The free-rider problem was about people who were apolitical, not about those who are claimed to be political, but neither left nor right.
It’s important to understand that coalitions haven’t always mapped in quite the way they do now. The Democratic and Republicans coalitions didn’t really map so neatly onto left and right, because they were regional.
I’m talking about tendencies and trends and why much of politics necessarily is reduced to binary classifications. You can claim not to be in the coalition, but when you are in the right neighborhood and wearing the right (or wrong) colors, the coalition claims you and you find yourself beating on the same enemy.
“The free-rider problem was about people who were apolitical, not about those who are claimed to be political, but neither left nor right.”
That may be what you meant but what you wrote and I responded to was:
“As far as you, personally, not being in a coalition, that just seems to me like a version of a “free rider”.” (Emphasis mine)
Being political in the sense of wanting to change political outcomes doesn’t put you in a coalition. I don’t try to change outcomes by voting but by writing, speaking, and teaching, none of which requires a coalition.
“The joy with which you do so, the fact that you find it fun to tweak them, speaks even more to this.”
I like arguing. I’ve spent my life in blue tribe areas–I’m an academic–so most of my arguments are with blue tribe errors. But I also argue on immigration and drug laws and free trade, where the positions I am arguing against are more common with Republicans than with Democrats.
For many years, back when Usenet was a functional place for conversation, the bulk of my online argument was on humanities.philosophy.objectivism, where I was most often arguing with Objectivists. If sufficiently curious you could probably find those threads on the archive, although Google Groups has done a pretty bad job of making it searchable. One chapter of the current edition of my first book is a critique of Rand.
I’m not right-wing. I’m just afraid of how the left-wing has been taken over and, instead of being used to actually push varying left-wing ideas such that the good ones will be adopted and the bad ones abandoned, leftism is now a vessel for the punishment of the unpopular.
If “being afraid when explicitly threatened by people on the left” is all it takes to be “reliably right wing” then SSC is right wing, but the whole goddamned world should be right-wing along with it.
Res ipsa loquitur.
It is not and should not be my responsibility to constantly signal left-winginess loud enough that nobody could ever possibly mistake me for a right-winger if they decided they wanted to do that.
The idea that people should have that responsibility is what got us into this mess.
Right to disengage!
For whatever it’s worth, not every left-leaning commenter thinks you’re right-wing. I don’t, and I think this post is basically entirely true* and I’m pretty far out of the leftward side of the Overton window for here. In an odd kind of way, you’re one of the people here I trust the most.
*If someone’s having a different reaction to that post, I suspecting they’re glossing over the word “been.” You do an admirable job of not mistaking the demon for the summoner.
reliably partisan commenters on the right
Flattered as I am to be included amongst the august names on that roll of honour, where exactly does Fianna Fáil fit in to your schema?
I will admit that I’m religiously conservative therefore on the “bad” side of many Culture Wars-type matters, and am nationalist about my own country (we’re currently celebrating the centenary of 1916 and the Easter Rising, and I’m one of those who think that, all in all, independence was a good thing) and yes, I’d class myself as on the right.
On the other hand, had I emigrated like so many of my nation, I’d probably have ended up voting Democrat like so many of my nation when they got settled in America. I don’t particularly like or trust the Republicans, from my ill-informed viewpoint on this side of the water. But I can’t trust the Democrats either because they’ve nailed their colours to some dubious masts. And I think capitalism is an economic system created by fallible humans, not some divinely ordained natural way of things that is impeccable and infallible. And when I partook in this quiz which was linked on here before, I came out as a Solid Liberal 🙂
Going by Scott’s Blue Tribe and Red Tribe (and Gray Tribe) classification, which encompasses a lot more than politics, I’m Red Tribe (of my country, which doesn’t quite map onto it the same way) but with some smattering of Blue Tribe interests or sympathies.
I mean, this is the kind of rural/small town background I come from, and (even though slightly exaggerated for comic effect) this is a sample of the kind of local politician we are
infested withgraced with as public servants 🙂FWIW, I don’t consider myself “on the right”. I’m somewhere on the left-libertarian/anarchocapitalist spectrum.
The “left-” part of that is important; I started out (very) liberal and then learned some economics, which turned me libertarian but still left me liberal in all sorts of ways that happen not to come up much in debate here. When I favor libertarian policies it’s usually for liberal reasons – it’s specifically because I think those policies are likely to help the poor and disadvantaged classes more than whatever the alternative is. (I don’t do enough to emphasize that connection, so some people incorrectly assume “partisan right winger” rather than “bleeding heart liberal” explains why I oppose, say, the minimum wage.)
Some positions I favor: legalize (all) recreational drug use. Unilateral free trade. Open borders to immigration. Eliminate the TSA. Make it LEGAL to build housing poor people can afford close to where they work (a more Japanese approach to zoning would help in this regard). Make it LEGAL for entrepreneurs to create jobs that employ people at EVERY level of ability and experience. Reduce or eliminate zoning/ licensing/ regulatory laws that make it difficult for people to start their OWN businesses (food trucks, hair braiding, all that stuff the Institute for Justice fights for). Make it LEGAL to feed the poor. Limit the military to defending Americans in America – bring the troops back from everywhere they are now and get us OUT of the policing business. Cut military spending along with most other spending. Freedom of speech includes the legal right to be offensive, to criticize political candidates, and to burn the flag.
Some of that might agree with “the right” – but much does not and the emphasis is different.
@ Tibor
I have no statistics, but to me it seems that the commenters here consist of a few very vocal “right wingers”, a few very vocal “left-wingers” and a majority which is not strongly either.
Quite likely. So some of us Lefties may be grouping Libertarians, Romney types, Trump types, etc all under the label ‘Far-Rights’ on this issue. This is unfair to those who are being
mis-genderedmis-labeled. But from the bottom of a dogpile, it doesn’t matter which breed each dog is. They allquackbark the same language.We Lefties should use a more accurate term; any suggestions? I don’t see asking the Rights to change their language; that’s hard. Anyway, Scott has the matter in hand.
Call them what you will, but they all line up on issues like Citizens United and financial regulation.
I have no ideological aversion to financial regulation. I have general market sympathies but I support Dodd-Frank, as an example. I just think there are a lot of carefully cultivated lies surrounding the popular Citizens United narrative.
Call them what you will, but they all line up on issues like Citizens United and financial regulation.
I am conservative/right-wing (I’d say centrist right, but why split hairs?)
I would very much like to see some financial regulation, given that the economic crash in my country was caused by out of control property speculation funded by crazy money loans being handed out like Happy Meals by our banks, and our government of the time not wanting to be anything but “light touch” regulation because they were afraid of anything that might stop the good times from rolling. But the good times stopped anyway, and we’re still paying the price to clean up the mess.
I know sweet Fanny Adams about Citizens United. If the law says that the group or action in question is not breaking the regulations, I’ll have to leave that up to the legal scholars if the decision was right or not.
If a group is violating regulations meant to cool down things right before a ballot is taken, then I think they should be stopped. (I’m very much in favour of stopping all the bloody electioneering before the day of the voting, and indeed I’d like to stop it a good fortnight beforehand, because by then the topics have been flogged to death and I’m sick of looking at all the candidates’ beady little eyes and sweaty little faces).
On the other hand, if a particular candidate is trying to get a group making a political broadcast for the other candidate (which is broadly what ‘Smith is a terrible choice and here’s why’ ads are all about) shut down, I say no dice, buddy. You can’t pick and choose; you can’t have the luxury of using anything you can get your hands on to attack an opponent but not having mud flung at you in return. (I’d dearly love to get away from the days of mud-flinging, but they seem to have been around as long as politics has been).
You want your supporters to be able to run ads and campaigns saying “Smith is great, Brown sucks”? Then Brown’s supporters get to run ads saying “Brown is great, Smith sucks”.
I have been surprised by all the favorable concurrence on CU, since it is such a boogeyman outside the SSC bubble. It may be because CU is an example of SSC leaning smart, not leaning right. Every attack on CU outside SSC has been incoherent in my opinion, completely misunderstanding the opinion.
I think if Lefties better understood CU, they might still be against it, but not so emphatically. And in fact that might be what is happening outside SSC. The Lefties that do understand it realize it isn’t that big a deal, so don’t bother to write about it. This gives the impression (to me at least) that Lefties are just dumb when it comes to SCOTUS decisions, but what we see may be an artifact of just the dumb ones doing the writing.
By the way, I disagree with Onyomi that there should any kind of a ban on this kind of discussion, soft or otherwise. I am very interested in the discussion, and all the comments seem to indicate that others are too (Onyomi, why are you even commenting if you don’t like this thread? I ignore the ones I’m not interested in.) I do think that we could use more on the Left. I lean libertarian, but I would prefer to read what non-libertarians have to say. Slapping each other on the back is boring.
I think you are making a less extreme version of this mistake. Now, many libertarians (not in these comments though, but let’s say in “libertarian echo chambers”) make a similar mistake. But that does not make the first mistake better.
I consider myself libertarian and I disagree on a lot of issues with a lot of the people you all put into the same category as right-wing. With some I disagree more, with some less, but there are let’s say moderate left-wingers I agree with on more issues (or issues I find important) than some of the right-wingers you mention. This is the reason why grouping people together like this makes little sense. This is not about differentiating some let’s say minor differences between different kind of libertarians (consequentialists vs. deontologists for example), but this is differentiating people whose opinions might have a nonzero overlap but the symmetric difference of their opinions is often much larger than that overlap. Similarly, one could group some left-wingers and people like me or David Friedman because all would support some kind of open borders and legalizing (or at least decriminalizing) drugs and put some of the people who support Trump, Deiseach and some other people on the left into another group because they all want to increase the regulation of the finance market.
I personally dislike being called right wing, at least as long as people like Trump or Le Pen are called right wing. I am not not left wing either, at least as long as people who support central planning and an expansive state are called left-wingers. Similarly, you can probably find other groups of people or individuals whose opinions are not all aligned to what is the right or the left orthodoxy. Then if you take a position which is within that orthodoxy and call everyone outside of it right-wing, then you are almost guaranteed to have a right-wing majority – in a still bit simplified model (but much better than the one dimensional one) you have a space divided in four equally big parts and you just called three out of those four right wing. Assuming that the population is not heavily skewed in the direction of the last fourth, you will have “right-wing” majority.
This whole argument -ad-commentariat recurring complaint gets tiresome. Partially because there’s more than one way to slice right and left, but mostly because who cares? There’s interesting and uninteresting comments that are true, false, crazy, conservative, socialist, whatever. But the meta-comments about the community and who’s secretly what and which side gets less agreement, etc. rarely veer into the interesting category. No one can vote you off the island except for Scott, and if you don’t trust his judgement why show up here in the first place?
It’s important in its relation to dogpiling. We could use stronger norms against dogpiling, even if we already have some.
Dog-piling is a real problem, if you are supervising middle school lunch recess. In a forum like this, one is free to pick and choose the points one responds to, and the audience can judge whether the rebuttal was sufficient in their own minds.
Dog piling in terms of personal insults are bad because of the insults, but when five people offer a civil (even if fallacious) argument against a proposition, they can all be responded to at once by a single comment, or, honestly, ignored if the falsity of their position is self-evident. With no harm done in either case sans the occasional cramp in the scrolling finger of an uninterested reader–which is what the hide button is for anyway.
I’m also a little curious about whether any of the posters is someone doing a deliberately bad job of supporting a position he actually opposes. It seems like an obvious, although dishonest, tactic.
I don’t think I have ever seen a clear example, here or elsewhere. There are posters whose net effect is to weaken their own side by the low quality of their posts, but my guess is that most, at least, really support the side they claim to support. We’ve only had one poster here recently who I seriously wondered about.
I think there are a few, but I’ve also one of the quicker ones to fire “troll” accusations, as far as I can tell. I was also very probably wrong on one specific occasion I can think of, so that cuts against my credibility.
The debates about the ideological makeup of SSC commenters have become really tiresome.
yes, I include Libertarians there
Bit of a tell. Might want to work on it.
Since the year 2000, there have been 17 editions of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and Indian kids have won 14 times. For reference, Indians are slightly less than 1% of the American population. Apparently there is now a small industry within the Indian community dedicated to extending this streak.
I wonder if a sheer refusal to ever lose plays into Amy Chua’s conception of market-dominant minorities.
I suspect that most winners of high stakes spelling bees have hyperlexia.
Never mind found it. Full comment:
[The “reddit” question is: Do Zhihu members support or oppose Donald Trump? If so, why?]
“Of course I support Trump! In fact, even if he doesn’t win, I would rather die than surrender to the Democratic Party!
My background: I have lived in California for 10+ years, from undergraduate to doctorate, have never left here other than for work. The schools I go to are all brand name ones everyone will be familiar with. But now, I am so disappointed, I want to leave for elsewhere.
My father and mother are all disability welfare beneficiaries. But the Democrat Party’s various schemes make it harder and harder for people who really need [welfare] to get it, and are cutting existing welfare. All the money is going to illegal immigrants, or lazy non-working bums (懒人= v. pejorative, cf. slackers, drifters). The Democrats talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. ObamaCare in actuality has many good aspects, but they don’t touch the special interests and leave it to the middle class.
Speaking of education, everyone has talked about the “AA issue” (blacks?) and I shall not repeat it. And UC universities are always broke to the point where it’s no longer news. Every year they’re broke, even Berkeley is full of slacking drifters. And the background of these children’s families are driven by a lot of resentment. The Democrats ostensibly are trying to improve the inner cities, but what is the truth? I have often thought about their schools, that’s why I joined the local Teach for America branch. It turned out, everyone there has the attitude of “if students don’t study well you can’t say they are unmotivated, but this is the result of fundamental inequalities in society”. I was very disappointed and quit, I feel these people are just trying to cheat the government of money, that’s all. And the Democrats daily talk about welfare, it’s clearly just to get minority support.
[and this is the part from your original quote]
Coming to Trump, he is the first to dare to confront Political Correctness, and deserves a vote just for this. He was not the one who created racial divisions, but, instead, racial divisions are inherent in life. “All lives matter”, however, is not Politically Correct, but the ordinary citizens do not dare to say this. Talking about BLM, MoveOn etc organizations, they are ostensibly about civil resistance, but in reality about beating, rioting, and robbing, but everyone can only endure it. Trump may sound like an extremist, but he truly gives the commoners hope. I am honestly not a racist, and the discrimination that blacks faced must be admitted as a reality. But BLM, these people, will not tolerate any dissent. Talking about President Obama, when blacks are accidentally hurt (slightly injured?) Obama has infinite compassion, when blacks break the law he is no where to be seen and does not allow the media to report it, creating an atmosphere where blacks can do no wrong. The truth is, blacks are mentally inferior [!!], and do not even have the physical endurance of Hispanics. Respect is earned, not obtained by screaming around until everyone respects you!!
America truly is a country where only those who have motivation and entrepreunership (bravery?) can lead good lives. From high school graduation I began to take care of my family [monetarily], everything from then till now I have been self-reliant. And I still want to help those who need help, but I will never tolerate those extreme bums and slackers [好吃懒做=extremely pejorative for bums and slackers] people! Nothing to do with party or race!
Talking about Muslims, Trumps’ language is extreme, but their words and actions are clear for all to see. Even though it is just a minority for them, but when they organize there are indeed difficulties. A government that cannot protect its citizens lives, will lose its peoples support. Look at recent Germany for an example.
Talking about Gays, I still moderately support them. This is a person’s freedom. So long as it doesn’t bother others, true love should be celebrated. But, recently men have been trying to use women’s toilets in schools and that is really laughable. Does that mean that just because you have rights, all the girl student’s rights don’t need protection? I feel that you should be a post-op transexual before you can do that. The Democrats encourage you [transexuals] into senseless noisemaking, but clearly it is backfiring on you.
In conclusion. Trump can achieve all he has done in the face of tremendous opposition, proving that not everyone may love him, but those who are dissatisfied with the status quo will do. If we don’t make changes now, the future will be apocalyptic.
PS: last night, listening to NPR radio, there was a program showing a party Primary analysis. The first man was a Republican big-shot (slightly derogatory), who said he wanted Rubio and now after Rubio lost he did not want say who he wanted to support [in the general?] The reporter could not prise it out of him. I think the Republican Party should internally keep these things quiet.
The second interview was with the Democratic Congressman from Ohio. Before the reporter could say anything, he [the Democrat] criticized the previous Republican thoroughly, then later interrupted the reporters questions. Then he didn’t answer any of the reporter’s questions, the reporter was so angry he cut him off [hung up on him?] Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be elites? What does this say about them?”
On the subject of mathematics, I’ll give my perspective.
An argument Milo Yiannopoulos has made is that gender inequality in these fields goes down as income levels drop (and as sexism rises, funnily enough). I’m not up on all the data, as such, but there’s definitely at least a few countries far more traditionally sexist and yet less gender unequal in STEM fields as us. Feel free to post some data that conclusively debunks me, but I don’t think you can and if you can’t, I think this proves pretty clearly that merely sexism or cultural attitudes are not sufficient explanations as to why STEM isn’t gender equal, and instead it’s probably just the sexes having different desires.
(an aside to the complaint of right-wing commenters being drawn here: hey, I get you. That’s how I came here, after all. But a pair of points: the first, that you have an honest chance to convince me otherwise and draw me closer to the position I formerly held. And secondly, if I’m really right, then you guys can abandon a losing issue which helps you politically and helps the nation ultimately.)
I’ll finish with a smoking hot anecdote, because as we all know Anecdotes are to data what I am to your smoking hot cougar of a mother.
Basically, my aunt has an engineering degree and a medium-functioning aspergers son, but never actually got a job using that engineering degree specifically. (ironically worked at an engineering startup but as a receptionist lol). In a third-world country, that son wouldn’t be able to get much work (even in the first world he struggles) and the mother, wanting to provide for him, would probably get a job as an engineer. in the first world, they live in an apartment complex worth like $7 mil overall courtesy of my middle-class grandparents who invested their savings in real estate (very unlikely to see in the third world obviously). the kid will live there free for the rest of his life and likely have an apartment he can rent to get him the income he needs without working much. oh, the baby daddy is the only heir to a multi-million fortune once his mom croaks and that top-class engineering degree was nearly free courtesy of the government
hell, if you want to go there, my sister could’ve gone into any number of super lucrative fields, instead she’s getting her PhD in child psychology, which ain’t nothing but isn’t incredible either. luckily my dad is more than willing to pay her rent and expenses. which isn’t some kind of veiled jab because I’d be more than happy to pay that too because I love her. actually feeling kind of sad right now because she’s doing that PhD far away and I miss her…look, the point is that the first world provides its women with the opportunity to do whatever the frick they want and so they have a blast. (its men too I guess). Why is it so certain that women and men don’t have different desires, and the centuries upon centuries upon eons upon eons of empirical data, stories legends tales and so forth, are all uniformly a result of cultural construction? Why would the idea of a blank slate even make sense? And how does anyone propose to separate the data from the quagmire of endogeneity it’s landed itself into without enacting Reich 4.0 and bringing back the gang together for one more Nazi Medical Trial? Not to mention all the motivated reasoning you can find at a mere glance.
Related anecdote: I am originally from India. Indian women actually have an impressive ratio of male-to-female STEM degree distributions relative to places with much greater gender equality. A large part of this relates to culture and the nature of the Indian economy; an engineering degree is considered a safe entry ticket to the middle class, because for weird reasons it is also transferable to fields like banking and management. The humanities are considered frivolous bourgeois subjects, even more so than they are in America. There is also an element of social prestige that comes with being an engineering graduate, so Indian parents send their kids to engineering schools by the droves even if the kids aren’t doing anything related to engineering after that — even if they aren’t doing anything after at all. You might be a girl who’s going to get married off as soon as a good match comes along, but your parents will still send you to get a good degree just so they can brag about it.
I have a large extended family, because my parents were each the youngest of six children on their respective sides of the family. My parents and their siblings only had one or two children each (two of my aunts chose not to have children at all) around the same time the Indian government started aggressively pushing family planning to tackle overpopulation, which means I got to see a national demographic transition play out within my own family, but that’s a different story. The point is that I have sixteen cousins, twelve of whom are women. Our family could be described as part of the “Westernized elite”; incomes range from upper middle class to wealthy, everyone has at least a college degree and progressive social attitudes abound.
So these female cousins of mine were afforded enough money and liberty to do basically anything they wanted. They went to competitive English-medium private schools in India, and most of them opted for higher education in the US or UK; the few who didn’t attended elite universities in India, the sort that serve as feeder institutes for elite American graduate schools like Berkeley and MIT. And none of us live or work in India anymore. Mostly we’ve emigrated to London and the Northeast United States, but one now lives in Vietnam and another in Japan. All of these women are highly educated and could have done basically anything with their lives. They are essentially as free as any white Western woman of a similar socioeconomic profile would be. No crushing parental or cultural expectations weighing them down. But one by one, they have either dropped out of the workforce or switched to jobs beneath their level of education simply because of disinterest and boredom.
There is literally only one of these women who is still in the job she opted for after high school. She went to medical school and now she’s a doctor in London. Exactly three of them took jobs in HR after careers in STEM disciplines. One of them finished a PhD in economics, worked for Visa for exactly two years, and then decided to permanently retire at the age of 27 after marrying an Australian and moving down under to start a family. Another finished a law degree and an LLM, bounced around boutique firms in Mumbai and Singapore for a while, and then decided she hated the law. Her plan now is to marry rich and never work again. It will probably work out. And another one went to Northwestern for a Masters in Communication, which she never used because immediately after graduation she moved to Vietnam and became a fashion model.
All of this happened in the span of a few years, and on a personal level I found it quite irritating, not simply because these are all intelligent, capable women but because most of them are older than I am, so when I was growing up my parents would frequently encourage me to emulate their drive and academic success. I did pretty well for myself; I have two advanced degrees and will happily stay in this line of work for the rest of my life. But I have watched these women who were supposed to be aspirational figures throw away all their work and settle for less simply out of boredom, and so I’m left wondering if they ever cared about all that work or if they just felt that cultural compulsion to get a good degree even if you have no interest in it. By contrast, I doubt that I or any of my male cousins will ever switch to another career.
“There is also an element of social prestige that comes with being an engineering graduate, so Indian parents send their kids to engineering schools by the droves even if the kids aren’t doing anything related to engineering after that — even if they aren’t doing anything after at all. You might be a girl who’s going to get married off as soon as a good match comes along, but your parents will still send you to get a good degree just so they can brag about it.”
This is how education for women started out in Western countries, too (although with less of the engineering).
Seems to me, the natural inference is that they’re not settling for less at all–that being a housewife or a model or whatever is better, for them, than being a high-flying professional.
Right — so then we should not assume that less high-flying professional women is proof that bad, threatening men have done something bad to threaten women and stop them from being high-flying professionals and should therefore be punished until there are more high-flying professional women.
Good for them. They sound awesome. Throwing away useless work is good, failing to throw it away is the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Pursuing a career you don’t like because it will increase your status and prestige is a terrible idea unless you really like status and prestige.
And the idea that women should do jobs they hate because it increases their status suggests that feminism cares more about the status and prestige of Women than it does about the welfare of individual women, which is bad.
Why not? If you like your current career, stay in it, if you don’t you ought to emulate your female cousins. It sounds like they really have things figured out.
I got a PhD in one field then switched to an entirely different one. I am pretty sure it was the right choice.
“And the idea that women should do jobs they hate because it increases their status suggests that feminism cares more about the status and prestige of Women than it does about the welfare of individual women, which is bad.”
Some feminists do. Most infamously, Simone de Beauvoir
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
While that may be true overall, when it comes to the right tail you wouldn’t find a better ratio in IITs than US colleges. It wasn’t uncommon to not have a single girl for some branches.
It’s my thoughts about education and work relative to female relatives exactly. My parents divorced when I was young, and my single mother settled for leaving myself and my brother alone with video games to work hard for a degree. She preceded to work as a physio for six years, only to switch to a very lax TESOL job with limited hours out of nothing but indifference. It just sort of kills my respect for education and employment altogether.
I will present International Math Olympiad data, where the only country that has sent more girls than boys is Laos. Wikipedia tells me that in Laos, the adult male literacy rate exceeds the adult female literacy rate by 20 percentage points. You get similar results when you look at countries that have sent no more than twice as many boys as girls.
(For reference, Wikipedia tells me that the country that scores highest on the gender inequality index—Netherlands—has sent 281 boys and 17 girls. In the past decade, they’ve sent seven teams with 5 boys/1 girl and three with 6 boys/0 girls. You get broadly similar results when looking at other countries that score at the top of the gender inequality index.)
What I suspect is going on here is that there was some real bias against women in math, feminism happened, and now there’s either not, or it’s been counterbalanced, and the stable levels in the study Scott cites measure ability. Nations that send a lot of girls tend to be third-world, and “best high school mathematician in the country” is mostly determined by who has access to a decent education (almost no one). In the low gender inequality countries, everyone has access to an excellent education, so the main factor that comes into play is ability which, at the extreme right tail (and, please, do note that no difference shows up until you reach the 99th percentile) is male-dominated. Also, since the gender disparity grows as you go further out, this might explain why America (population 320M) sends fewer girls than eg Netherlands (population 17M).
I’m Scandinavian. In Norway, the government was having huge trouble with the fact that none of its equality initiatives with regard to STEM and similar fields were actually taking — if anything, the proportion of women was declining in spite of them. They tried desperately to figure out why they were doing worse than unequal places like India so they could finally fix this once and for all and move on to the glorious future of 50% women in STEM; a huge government investigation was commissioned.
What they found out was that the more prosperous and happy Norway got, the safer people felt, the more free they felt to pursue their inclinations instead of just work for their bread, the less women opted to do men’s work: because they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to get STEM degrees, they didn’t want to do STEM jobs. (They didn’t want to work on trawlers either, by the way, but mysteriously there’s never to my knowledge been a program to reduce the gender imbalance onboard cold, wet boats riding the North Sea swells for cod.) They wanted to be nurses, bakers, actresses, homemakers. Sure, they said, if they’d been poor and worried about the future, they could’ve been tempted to do an engineering degree to be sure of good money; it’s important to have equality so you have the option in times like that. But now, in a time of properity and well-being, with a Nordic safety net and the National Oil Fund? Hell no.
A lot of people were significantly shaken by this. A number of others might have suggested they already knew it.
So what did Norway do after that study?
For the love of god link the report on what happened. Don’t just say something happened. I tried to google this and was unable to find the report.
My Google-fu turned up something potentially relevant:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/16661-why-girls-and-science-don-t-mix
Not an actual study, but a Norwegian documentary that makes the argument described by Anonymous.
It was a documentary by a comedian. I ignored that result from google due to it being from TNA. Just now I read that article, then I googled the stuff it said. Its widely inaccurate. The matter is not nearly as settled as claimed among many other inaccuracies.
[citation needed]
Nor for grinding down long hours onboard an HVG across icy roads, or operating a crane or forkling or digger, or taxi-driving, or sewage and waste disposal work, or building site surveyance, or model tank painters, or…
Or any other job with high loss of life or risk of injury.
I’m reminded of a Louis CK bit from his TV show. He plays a middle aged divorced dad with two elementary school aged girls. He’s at a PTA meeting and the teacher says we need to think up ways to get the kids more excited about coming to school. Louie says that’s dumb because “school sucks. Come on, you all went to school. It sucks, the kids aren’t going to get excited about it.” His ex-wife of course didn’t think that was the best comment to make at the PTA meeting.
Back around to women in STEM. Math is hard, the hard sciences are hard. The work is boring and tedious. STEM sucks. We don’t need any further explanation for why women aren’t interested. What we need is an explanation for why a lot of men stick with the field and the jobs despite how much it sucks. My vote is for traditional societal expectations of men that are not also placed on women.
Is this sarcasm? Or have you not considered that some people might enjoy STEM?
Working in STEM fields can be awesome. The education part, less so. At least that’s my experience.
I recall the same thing coming up in investment banking–wondering why women aren’t usually sufficiently interested in the field to put up with the (frankly awful) drawbacks to working in the industry, when the answer is that almost nobody wants those jobs. Whatever makes 99.999% of women have no interest in the field is probably the same thing that makes 99.998% of men have no interest in it either.
The people who want those jobs are, frankly, freaks; it’s normal for people not to want those jobs. If one group produces a lot of freaks, look at that group, not at the group that produces fewer, because that’s where the unusual thing is happening.
@sweeneyrod: The point is that not wanting to do hard, tedious things is normal. Almost nobody wants to do hard, tedious things. Less-normal people exist, but we should all be comfortable with acknowledging that we’re not the norm. The people who drop out aren’t unusual; the people who stay are. Whatever unusual trait that makes STEM work seem tolerable (or easy, or non-tedious) seems to occur mostly in men, though still in a tiny percentage of them. Whatever is happening is happening there.
You do sound like a troll, y’know.
Wait, so now when someone says something that’s unquestionably true, you dismiss it as trolling? This is a new low, even for here.
Is it your position that the people who get in and stay in STEM or investment banking represent more than a vanishingly-tiny percentage of the population?
The status and attached pay, sure. The ridiculous hours, high dependence on things that are outside your control and massive pressure… eh
@ TheWorst
Please demonstrate how it is “unquestionably true” that almost nobody wants an investment banking job.
Please demonstrate how STEM work is intolerable to everyone but “a vanishingly-tiny percentage of the population”.
@TheWorst
You seem to be saying that only very few people work in STEM because it is intrinsically dull and awful, and only very few people can stick it out (hence the analogy with investment banking, where you have long hours but massive pay). Everyone else is disagreeing, because we think that the small amount of people who work in STEM do so largely because they enjoy it.
@ TheWorst
My position is that out of people who actually have an opportunity to apply for an investment banking job (that’s mostly grad students from the top-ten MBA programs) a lot of them want one.
My position is that T in STEM stands for Technology and there is a LOT of people doing that kind of work.
Your turn.
If you acknowledge that it’s a small number, then you aren’t disagreeing.
Note that even the massive pay in investment banking doesn’t result in all that many people either applying for the job or sticking it out for the length of a career. Wanting a banker’s paycheck or a scientist’s prestige (of a sort) doesn’t mean wanting the job. As people tend to find out to their sorrow.
The exceptions are mostly male. Why?
My point is that that’s a more valuable question than “why don’t many women go in and stay in,” because the answer to that is “Almost everybody thinks (or finds out) that it’s too much work to be worth it.” The answer to what’s keeping women-qua-women out is “nothing.”
There are 300-some million people in America. What percentage of them choose that T as a career path?
@TheWorst: do you think the numbers of investment bankers is simply the number who’d like the job? From very swift googling this suggests 125-135 applicants per job in investment banking grad schemes
https://targetjobs.co.uk/career-sectors/investment-banking-and-investment/advice/394852-beat-the-competition-for-investment-banking-graduate-jobs
Vs. say just over 20 per job in civil service (i.e. working for government: much more sociable hours and Ts+Cs
https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2014/sep/01/civil-service-fast-stream-how-to-join-graduate-careers
@ TheWorst
DavidS: Are you assuming that everyone who applies is someone willing to put up with the actual conditions of the job? If so, how do you explain the dropout rate?
And again, there are 300-plus million people in the US. The percentage of people who go into banking and don’t drop out after getting a taste is very small.
Hard things are hard. People mostly don’t like doing hard things. Some, rare people either do like hard things, or find a particular “hard thing” less hard.
None of this should be controversial. When someone points that out, no one should accuse them of trolling.
@ Lumifer:
Can you read?
@ TheWorst
My initial suspicions are confirmed.
I’m not terribly interested in distinguishing between the cases of a true troll, a genuine simpleton, and someone who lacks reading comprehension.
Bzzzzt! Thank you for playing. Goodbye.
‘Almost nobody wants those jobs’ is different to ‘a significant number of people drop out’. What is the drop-out rate anyway?
Unless the recruiters are supernaturally good at identifying who’ll drop out and recruitment is focused entirely on avoiding that, I’d say such high application figures suggest that the demand for the jobs outstrips the supply. Even those 125-135 are only those who meet the criteria on paper (I imaginge fairly high) AND believe enough that they have a chance to go through with the application.
Your argument from ‘most people aren’t investment bankers’ applies to pretty much every job out there. It may be true that in this case the numbers are because most people don’t want the job because it’s hard/horrible but the stat alone is basically worthless in determining that.
I don’t know if you’re trolling, and I wasn’t the one who said you were. I suspect you feel your conclusion is obviously true and therefore you think that
a) it’s self-evident, and
b) because you believe the conclusion you think the logic of ‘few people do it means few people want to’ is compelling, when you wouldn’t say the same for lots of other jobs (e.g. ‘professional footballer’, ‘ice cream taster’)
I don’t get the “troll” comment – it’s a truism that investment banking is difficult work with brutal hours that attracts hordes of applicants due to high pay and conferred status. No one would pursue it as a hobby. There are obviously plentiful examples of STEM hobbyists, but TheWorst’s point about 300 million people is germane. You might have liked bio/chem/physics class in HS, what fraction of your schoolmates did?
I think the people here are a bit misled by the company they keep. Think back to high school, or about any national polls you may have seen re: math or books. “I hate math” is a phrase entire books have been written about. Most people find intellectual work unpleasant, math most of all.
Similarly, most people find, e.g., modeling or puzzles to be incredibly tedious. These things are legitimately tedious, in the sense that they’re long, involved, painstaking, and not very exciting — but some people enjoy them. I don’t know if it’s vanishingly few, but it’s not most.
Put another way, very few people find engineering or banking to be recreational activities. They’re well-compensated, prestigious, perhaps even interesting or the best of the “work”-sphere activities… but in my own experience, it’s rare to find someone who looks at this stuff and thinks “fun”.
I do think accusations of trolling have become too promiscuous of late.
I agree with TheWorst in the sense that, when you are part of a certain segment of society which values certain things, it is easy to forget how little the rest of society cares about or values those things. I’m not sure if 99% of people have no interest in doing the work of an investment banker even if the position were offered to them is true, but it’s probably a pretty high percentage. Sure, everyone wants the money, but not nearly everyone wants to do what’s entailed.
A somewhat related experience I’ve had lately: realizing how much of a freak I am for thinking nothing of moving several thousand miles every few years. Amongst the people I usually hobnob with it’s totally common to say, “oh yeah, I’m moving to Amsterdam for an internship next year.” “Oh, yeah, we’re moving to Sweden for a postdoc.” To us that sounds fun. But to the vast majority of people, who still live in the same town they grew up in, this is bizarre, unthinkable. It’s not that they want, but can’t get my job, it’s that they would never want my job even if they could get it.
@Lumifer:
This may shock you, but most of the non-STEM people I’ve ever met consider large areas of STEM work (specifically, computer science/biology/physics/math) to be boring, repetitive, and dull. They are willing to concede that the more hands-on disciplines (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering) may be more interesting, but still believe that the amount of studying you have to do to get into them is not worth the effort. This applies to both men and women, though women do express such attitudes a bit more often than men.
I realize that anecdotes are not data, but still: have you entertained the idea that people like you and I might, in fact, be the freaks ?
DavidS: Look. Take the number of people who go into i-banking in America. Take even the number of applicants if you want, though that’s a noisy signal.
What percentage of 300-plus million is that number? Kind of a small percentage, innit?
Yes, I do in fact think that’s self-evident. That’s because division is very very easy, especially for anyone who is currently using a computer. Computers have a calculator function.
OK, every post is upping my ‘you’re a troll’ percentage. Once again, every job is a small percentage of the overall population: there are many jobs and the economy is complex so we’re not mostly farmers. Frankly if we were this would be very little evidence hardly anyone wanted to be farmers.
There are very few rock stars – does this mean people don’t want to be rockstars? Or more mundanely same for teachers, lawyers, literally every job you can think of
Using the fact that a tiny percentage of the whole population does something as evidence that this thing is undesirable just.. doesn’t work when it comes to things people can do relatively few of. Like jobs, or where to live ‘Most people don’t want to live in place X!’ where X is anywhere in the country, or type of car, or anything really.
Sorry Dave I’m with Worst on this one.
Lots of people “want to be rock stars” who doesn’t but the percentage of those people who want to be rock stars bad enough to deal with all the boring stuff like learning to sing / play an instrument, put in the foot work to get their name out there, record a demo etc… is demonstrably very small.
That’s a very good way of putting it.
@The Worst
I’m just commenting to mention that I find your post to be funny, insightful, and interesting. I am baffled that other people think you’re trolling. I had a lot of “that’s so true!” moments when I was reading it.
Ditto
Thanks for saying so. I still have no idea what planet the “You must be trolling if you think that most people are’t STEM types” responses come from.
I’ll completely agree with this. I routinely tell people who ask about Aerospace Engineering that they shouldn’t do it, because if they were cut out for it, they wouldn’t be asking me for my opinion, they’d have already decided to do it.
I’m reminded of Scott’s post on the lottery of fascinations. For some reason, more men than women draw STEM subjects, and they make tolerable what someone who didn’t draw them would see as awful.
That’s very apt. I could talk about language — computer or human — for ages, but my wife would rather cover her ears than hear it. Meanwhile, I have a friend who can spend *days* creating intricate and painstakingly-detailed models, but as hard as I’ve tried, I just can’t sustain enjoyment in it.
Some of these things seen to go together, as if one lottery result is “immunity to tedium”. For example, almost all of the people I know who genuinely like STEMy stuff also like building ridiculously complete databases about X topic, or ridiculously detailed models, or ridiculously involved puzzles (jigsaw or logical), etc. I’ve met few others who are like myself — haphazard and fickle.
Yes and no. If it’s something you enjoy, it’s not tedious. Or at least less tedious. But at least personally, I’m pretty severely ADD, which meant that the school day was usually over by 9 or 10 PM, when my ritalin wore off. Occasionally, though, something was interesting enough to keep going long past that, even though researching thermodynamic properties of every liquid on the planet would normally bore me. (We were doing novel propulsion work.)
Pretty much this. I was going one step further, though: not only that more men than women draw STEM subjects in the lottery of fascinations, but that–in trying to guess why that is–we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that even for men, it’s not a large percentage.
It’s also likely that (some types of) STEM are especially attractive to people with a more autistic brain. We know that autism tends to show differently in women and/or they have autism less; which could mean that fewer women have the brains* for it.
* Not as in IQ, but in the sense of compatibility.
@The Worst:
To be honest, I’m kind of kicking myself for not having noticed this earlier. There seems to be a general belief that ability to do STEM work is normal, and that the problem is lack of interest, not lack of ability. A quick look through a typical engineering washout class should lead anyone paying attention to conclude that this is not the problem. Actually, that would be a really good way to test the difference between interest and ability. Do men fail those classes at a higher rate then women? If we assume that men are more likely to be interested but no more likely to actually have ability, then men should disproportionately wash out, and I don’t recall that being the case at all.
Thinking this over more, I’m not sure fascinations is the right lottery for most STEM people. There’s a weaker version, where people do things that they don’t do slightly different versions of during their free time. Call it the lottery of compatibility. There are things people can and can’t do, both in terms of skills (someone who doesn’t get calc isn’t going to be able to master most types of engineering) and motivation. External factors can fiddle this a bit, but I can’t ever see myself working with small children professionally, and the average preschool teacher probably looks with similar horror on what I do. It’s not just STEM where this happens.
That’s a good point. I, for instance, have no interest whatsoever in teaching elementary school. To the extent that were there a draft for it, I might commit significant self-harm to evade it. There seem to be more men in this position than women, but I don’t think that’s due to any gendered pressures applied to teachers.
@bean
Your assumption seems to be that a preference for STEM by men would result in more poorly suited men to study STEM, but this is hardly necessary.
It’s very likely that there are simply more women than men who have the ability to do STEM, but don’t enjoy the work. So then fewer capable women choose to study STEM than capable men. This doesn’t have to impact the dropout rates at all.
@Aapje
I’m not sure you can separate ability and enjoyment that easily. If you don’t like the work, you aren’t likely to put in as much effort. And keep in mind the situation we’re looking at here, which is an introductory engineering class. It’s full of people who are interested enough in the subject to go to school and try to major in it, and people leave it because they either weren’t interested enough in it to push through when it got tough, or weren’t good enough to be able to get through. There are definitely people in the second category, and I think they’re probably the majority.
Unless we assume that interest and ability are totally uncorrelated (which they aren’t), then with an even distribution of ability between genders, any depression of female interest is obviously going to mean that the average female entering the class is going to have more ability than the average male. Which means that fewer women are going to fall into the second category. This might be balanced by more of them falling into the first category, but I kind of doubt it. They were interested enough to get into the class in the first place, and interest and ability do trade off against each other some. Someone who is good enough not to have to sweat blood over a class doesn’t need the motivation that someone who does have to do so does to pass.
How can anytone find STEM field boring is beyond me. I work at computer science department on topics like distributed computing and fault tolerance. When I want entertainment, I write parsers in my free time.
And I am serious.
@bean
You are assuming that the women have similar backgrounds and motivations, this is not my experience. A relatively very high percentage of the women in my year had a non-native background. In many of those cultures, STEM for women is much more normal than in the west.
So their motivations may be much more external (expectations by family) than for natives.
I am assuming that, because it was my experience. The aerospace program at my school is not what we’re known for, and I’m not recalling offhand any of the undergrads in my class being from overseas. The mining department would be different. In any case, it’s the sort of thing you’d control for if you were doing proper studies.
“Whatever makes 99.999% of women have no interest in the field is probably the same thing that makes 99.998% of men have no interest in it either.”
That’s a reasonable explanation for the shortage of women as math professors at top schools but I don’t think it works for STEM in general. I posted some numbers from the census of professions and it looks as though STEM fields broadly defined employ about ten percent of the labor force.
I’d suspect it’s more like half that, particularly has health care employs a huge number of people who bear no resemblance to traditional STEM people. They have their own draws which make their work tolerable, distinct from those which STEM people need. I’ll agree that The Worst overstated his numbers considerably, but even then, his basic point (most people couldn’t be engineers, and we should worry about why people can) stands.
“but even then, his basic point (most people couldn’t be engineers, and we should worry about why people can) stands.”
We should be puzzled about why some people can be top level mathematicians, since that doesn’t seem like a skill with any value in the environment we evolved in–and it is very rare.
But there are quite a variety of different talents that are both generally useful and useful for STEM careers. And even if I accept your estimate that those careers employ only 5% of the workforce, I don’t think that shows that the needed talents are rare and their existence puzzling. Not everyone who can do something chooses to, in part because many people can do any of several different careers.
@ bean
I really don’t see what’s special about engineers in that context. In the sentence “most people couldn’t be X”, X can stand for a great number of professions, from journalists to surgeons to national park rangers, and I remain puzzled why should we worry about those who can. People are different, yes, and..?
@Lumifer:
Nothing, except that Women In STEM is a controversy, and the distribution of ability/tolerance for STEM is skewed in favor of men. Men In Primary Education isn’t a controversy, even though it appears that the imbalance there is even larger.
@ bean
Sure, but then the argument becomes just a generic one, applicable to almost everything, and thus loses most of its power.
Undergraduate University STEM education is hard, but can often be interesting, with a good professor (Berkeley Comp.Sci./Math here). I had bad professors too, of course.
I imagine there’s a degree of irony going on here, but just for the record’s sake, men were doing STEM before STEM was an official, paying, reputable thing. Men’s doing so made STEM those things. Men, or least a subset of men, clearly and obviously have an innate compulsion to STEM their lives away, and the material or societal rewards be damned.
Some women also did that (and in those cases it is even clearer that there was an innate compulsion, because the material and societal rewards were actually punishments).
Yep. Your point?
It seems relevant to a discussion about STEM and gender.
Here’s the discussion:
Person A:
Person B:
The MRM also makes similar arguments.
For instance, Pakistan has great turnout for women in STEM. The MRM argument is that the more freedom you give to women, the more inequality you’ll find because women want to be mothers and not get PhDs.
I don’t think STEM occupations represent that tiny a number. Checking the BLS National Occupation Survey data:
Computer and Mathematical Occupations: 4,005,250
Architecture and Engineering Occupations: 2,475,390
Life, Physical and Social Science Occupations: 1,146,110
of whom social scientists and related workers: 239,170
(some may want to subtract out this from the previous)
Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: 8,021,800
Just how many of these count as STEM is a bit iffy, but the total is more than fifteen million and I would expect that quite a large fraction do. The figure for all occupations is 137,896,660, so something like 10%.
@James
It’s more an observation than an argument.
word
https://sexcognitioneducation.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/the-gender-gap-in-mathematics-is-unrelated-to-equality-policies/
Could it be to do with the cultural perception of jobs and roles as masculine and feminine? In a less gender-egalitarian society than our own, people would feel less reservations about labelling a job as masculine or feminine. If women suddenly start piling into a sector, everyone would shrug and go “it’s a woman’s job”, and boom, it’s accepted – men would not head towards the role (even if they used to do) for the same reason they don’t fly towards nursing and such. Whereas in the west, such language is taboo, and so only a few lingering – outdated? – senses of male and female occupations inform things. Less women head into jobs well-suited to them because they’re officially gender-neutral and traditionally gender-male.
Any time I see “publish or perish”, I always think of this SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2495
I wanted to leave a sick burn here, but basically take a look at what happened to Wells Fargo as a non-academia example of the problem with certain forms of publish-or-perish. If the goals are badly calibrated, then you have people doing bad things to compensate. One can argue that corporations have done this often and I shall but also that they produce more value to compensate and I shall. I don’t think professor incentives currently produce more good than bad and I think they should be adjusted as a result.
There’s a pretty interesting argument that increasing efficiency directly produces corruption and destructive business practices.
That is, that for every GDP-increasing productivity gain from time-motion studies and worker tracking and staffing calculations, externalities get bigger, corruption increases, and employee health/happiness declines. It’s actually a fairly shocking claim, because increasing productivity is supposed to be the One True Way to improve standards of living across all workers. But it starts to look alarmingly plausible when you dive into what it would predict.
The ‘best’ jobs have historically been the ones with minimal accountability and terrible efficiency. Think academia, unions, and low-importance government work. Those careers are being aggressively squeezed: tenured academics turn into underpaid adjuncts, governments shrink, and unions are broken in favor of lower paid rotating-shift labor. Compare an infamously-awful warehouse job at Amazon to an automotive job from a decade ago.
On the business practices question, a look at Comcast or Wells Fargo should suffice. Comcast call centers had minimum ‘upsell’ rates for each employee, to be hit regardless of who calls and why. So even if 100 people call to cancel their service, you’re expected to retain and upsell several of those people. The result is a horrible customer experience and serial fraud: reps simply lied about prices and rules to achieve the goals. Wells Fargo did the same, but took an end-run around consumers to simply sell them products without their consent.
And externalities? Most infamously, “maximum legal emissions” have become target levels – if it’s December and you aren’t at annual cap, quit paying to clean waste and dump it in the river. But I’ve got a better story:
UPS has famously produced massive increases in efficiency over the last decade or so. The old “no left turns” story. Much of that has been down to Telematics, an in-depth driver tracking system. It finds points of inefficiency and pushes drivers to do more, better.
…or so the company story goes. UPS set efficiency goals that assumed best-case outcomes (packages to be left at a ground floor entrance, minimal wait for signatures, etc). They were absurd, so workers started cutting corners. Speeding was the first step, but that was bad for company reputation so it got monitored. So workers switched to skipping slow deliveries – if it’s bulky and you’re behind, leave a “missed you” note instead of even trying the door (that, not just observer bias, is why people claim “I was home all day, I would have heard them knock!”). But you can only do so much of that, especially once failed-delivery events get logged. So the next was not shutting the back section in residential driving, to save time. But that’s dangerous, so that gets monitored. So the next is not wearing seatbelts, but that gets monitored. So then you buckle your seatbelt behind you, to trick the sensor while saving time. (That’s not insane: seconds count in Telematics.) Another winner is pulling out recklessly, and indeed UPS vehicles seem to be getting in more accidents than ever. The war continues, sacrificing safety and reliability at every turn.
There are entire forums where UPS workers trade Telematics-beating tips, not to skive off but to avoid being fired. The system has finally gotten good enough to prevent most UPS-harming consequences, so workers drive with faked seatbelts, deliver at an awkward half-run, and lift packages unsafely. Chronic health problems abound, but most can’t be provably blamed on UPS. Probabilistic issues continue unabated too, like fake ‘missed deliveries’ and dangerous driving.
The point in all of this? Well, that Frederick Winslow Taylor was a monster. But more broadly, that there’s a real question of whether fully-efficient workplaces are horrifically destructive, and a sensible thing to resist.
great comment. would love to hear some more examples and/or counterarguments.
That seems to be falsified by reality.
I think you’re confusing the trial-and-error mechanism of the markets searching for an optimal solution with an inexorable law of nature. And yes, the agent problem is a huge one with no universal and entirely satisfactory solutions.
However the capitalist survival of the fittest evaluates by end results — if all your management is corrupt and all your workers are unhappy, you’ll go out of business even if your efficiency metrics are stellar.
No you won’t. If the efficiency is giving you a sufficient competitive advantage relative to companies with happier workers, then it will stay profitable. There is a long long history of very successful firms which built their fortune at the cost of crippled and unhappy workers.
@Matthew. I’d like to hear that list. I think that is mostly a myth. I agree that companies can sometimes succeed at this for a while, when they are in a semi-monopoly situation. But eventually other firms find their way into the industry to eat up the excess profits, workers figure out that there are better jobs elsewhere, etc. Why would a worker stay at a firm that made them miserable if they had a better choice elsewhere. The only reason workers do stay at such firms is because it’s the best they can get. Perhaps firms can pay more when they make their employees miserable, but it doesn’t sound very productive to me.
“Companies may sometimes succeed doing it for a while but it won’t last” doesn’t mean that no companes will be doing it. We have a steady state where companies are created and have a lifespan. If some companies do inefficient things and don’t have as big a lifespan, the steady state will still contain a percentage of such inefficient companies.
I think Mark is underestimating the pains and difficulties of transitioning from one state to another.
I think this overestimates the freeness/efficiency of our markets (although I admit I was being hyperbolic).
First, the externalities can grow enormously – there’s no force restricting those unless you do something so unconscionable that you get stopped by the state (severe polluting) or public opinion (blood diamonds).
And second, that ‘corruption’ can often mean something similar to ‘externalities’. I don’t mean managers stealing cash from the till, I mean managers doing unethical, dangerous, or consumer-harming things to improve efficiency. The Wells Fargo scandal may cost the company more money than it earned, but lots of awful practices don’t.
At risk of opening a 20k word rabbit-hold, RibbonFarm’s Gervais Principle has a great bit on leaders who arrange for predictably unethical/illegal outcomes without ever ordering them. When one gets caught out, you fire/prosecute the bagman. When one doesn’t, you profit.
Third, that real-world markets aren’t terribly efficient. Comcast mistreats its call-center workers (and the people who call them) because it can sustain 300% turnover, because it has an incredibly lucrative monopoly that makes sales hikes more valuable than reputation or happy employees. More broadly, employment markets are full of information asymmetry that allows systematic abuses of workers even in a nominally ‘efficient’ labor market.
Beyond that, though, there’s no particular rule of economics protecting employee health/happiness. My suggestion was that efficiency gains make it decline. EV of working can’t ever fall below EV of not working, but you can push it as close as humanly possible. And the EV of “not working” is incredibly low for marginal workers, who lose housing, medical care, and sometimes food for not working. So you can have employees who are miserable all the time, but still prefer working for you to not working at all. You can, in fact, push the suffering of working just shy of the point where suicide becomes preferable – Foxconn walks that line already.
All of this, of course, assumes surplus labor. With a labor shortage employers bid each other up for labor, and life is good for employees. (And this is why you’re right: my principle isn’t universal.) But with surplus labor – which, participation rates considered, we have plenty of – employees bid each other down to the most miserable experience that beats not working.
@ wintermute92
As you yourself note, they can only grow until they piss off someone who can do something about it. Given that the state likes to regulate and given that the judicial system has been dealing with torts for a very long time, I have my doubts about “enormously”.
Sure, there are cases of massive externalities (e.g. adding lead to gasoline), but these tend to result from, basically, not knowing what you are doing and not from evil intent. Tobacco smoking is an interesting case, but I would probably argue that the externalities like the cost to the society come from the smokers’ decisions.
Ethics are in the eye of the beholder and a company which insists on doing dangerous and/or consumer-harming things will find itself in hot water soon enough. Case in point: the current Samsung’s debacle with Note 7.
Well, you would have to look for reasons why a company isn’t punished for non-efficient behavior. Are you quite sure that 300% turnover isn’t efficient for Comcast’s interests? How do you know?
Sure. There’s no particular natural law protecting a person’s health/happiness either. So?
EV of working is EV(work + money) while EV of not working is EV(time). Note that the horribleness of the “work” term can and usually is compensated by increasing the “money” term: e.g. working on a fishing boat in Northern Atlantic in the winter is pretty horrible, but pays pretty well.
David Friedman already asked this question somewhere in this thread: if this is as you describe, why is anyone paid any more than the minimum wage? In reality a lot of people are paid much more than the minimum wage, why is that so?
Employers compete for workers. They very much compete for competent, honest, reliable workers.
I watched a linked Steven Pinker talk on euphemism from the OT yesterday, and on reflection this is another example of a risk-taker hedging his bets. You don’t explicitly say you’re trying to do something illegal (boundary-crossing, relation-changing, role-defying), you just nudge-nudge it in a manner that’s painfully obvious to anyone present, yet has plausible deniability (and if anyone kicks up a fuss, there’s a way to deflect it to something else).
Goodhart’s law, Goodhart’s law everywhere.
Maybe not everywhere, but certainly everywhere the number of relevant factors exceeds the number of (concurrently) measurable ones (which is the vast majority of interesting cases).
Probably a relevant principle for AI, too, in at least two ways.
One, stopping the AI from gaming the system is not going to be successful merely by adding more “things to optimize” (read: “measurable factors”).
Two, even an AGI will necessarily be working from incomplete information; it will have to make assumptions, including about its own source code, which will almost certainly be inaccurate. That is, it will make mistakes.
As soon as we start trying to meet the standards of Goodhart’s law, we will no longer follow Goodhart’s law.
That is powerful, but only in the most “immediate” sense. If one stops to reflect for some moments, one realizes that people in most of academia (i.e. non “Major research Universities”) are expected to perform research but the rationale for their hiring (and the basis for the computation of their salaries) is the number of classes taught or number of hours spent teaching. Therefore “doing their job” is not “publishing” but “teaching and grading”, and firing them for failing to publish is not “firing them for not doing their job”
“Remember how you had to learn cursive in elementary school even though it was clearly useless and inferior to other forms of communication? An Atlantic article argues that there was sort of a rational explanation – cursive was the most convenient form of writing for the obsolete pens of yesteryear, and it took a while for people to realize that better pens made it unnecessary.”
This is also a metaphor for how everything works all of the time
Is the argument that later pen designs made printing better relative to cursive? I would guess that cursive is still faster.
What really made learning cursive obsolete was typing on a word processor. When my elder son was ten or so we were told he was having trouble in school with handwriting. I didn’t see why he should invest a lot of time in an obsolete skill. So I wrote a simple typing game for him, later bought a better one.
I spent years taking remedial handwriting classes in elementary school. Eventually the program gave up on me, and I still remember the teacher telling me that I would probably be best off avoiding college or any job where writing was a requirement. It was a major blow.
By the time I got to college, of course, most of my professors wouldn’t accept handwritten materials.
In elementary school, they told us to practice cursive because it would be mandatory in middle school.
In middle school, they recommended cursive because it would be mandatory in high school.
In high school, they urged cursive because print would be forbidden in college.
In college, they said to do whatever was readable, and type if we had any doubt. “If I can’t read it, it’s like you didn’t write it.” Even when typing wasn’t required, printing was 100% accepted.
A friend at University used to handwrite all of her essays to avoid endless revisions due to perfectionism. One of her supervisors demanded that they be typed. She bought a typewriter.
My handwriting began turning to pure garbage the moment (grade 5?) they stopped forcing me to write in pure cursive. Pretty quickly it developed into a printing-cursive hybrid, but I was forced to be legible because I still did a fair bit of handwriting to be turned in (quizzes, tests, exams, stuff for language courses) through university. Since I graduated, my handwriting has become pretty much illegible – sometimes I write in all caps because otherwise I can’t write comprehensibly unless I do so really slowly.
It would have been better had I never been taught cursive. Sometimes I can’t read my own handwriting.
And when I, a college professor, tell my students to print their names and not write their names in cursive because I find it hard to read cursive names, most students still write their names in cursive.
“If I can’t read your name it is like you never turned it in.”
“If I can’t read your name it is like you never turned it in.”
Professors have a limited number of “meanness points” they can spend before students avoid their classes and consider them jerks. I prefer to spend my meanness points on getting students to turn in assignments on time and on giving them honest feedback.
Handwriting is also fine motor control skills, though.
This is printing vs. cursive, not whether to teach handwriting.
I’ve seen claims that printing is faster than cursive– pen spends less time on the paper.
Also, it seems reasonable that the loops in cursive would eat time.
I think there’s a gap here between ‘academic’ and ‘efficient’ cursive.
The academic stuff may have been efficient once, because those big loops keep your pen nib aligned and moving smoothly. These days, though, fast cursive reduces all kinds of loops and curves to fast, linear motions. It’s damned hard to read, but I honestly believe it’s faster than lifting the pen.
I can write fast cursive and these claims are not true.
Didn’t read the article, but writing in cursive is much nicer and more fun with a fountain pen than with a ballpoint pen. Especially with cheap ballpoint pens everyone uses. Pencils are a little better, and I use them for notetaking during the lectures / classes, but it’s easy to make a mess with the softer kinds of graphite ‘lead’ (accidentally swipe over what you wrote with your hand, oh, text is now unintelligible and you need to wash your hands).
I don’t know enough of the relevant physics to be sure about this, but I think it’s because there’s more friction in the rolling ball mechanism and so you also have to press the ballpoint pen against the paper more; compared to that, ideally the traditional pen feels like it… flows.
I grandmother bought me a fountain pen as a birthday present some years ago, and I actively (re-)learned the cursive and started keeping a diary. But yes, it’s mostly a hobby, not a skill everyone needs to learn but a skill that can make normally tedious moments of your life happier (oh, I should write notes vs Yay, I can write!); not unlike drawing.
There’s another problem with cursive. As you get faster, you individualize it by adapting it to your personal physiological quirks. Which means that eventually no one else can read it.
I got tired of teachers telling me they couldn’t read my handwriting, and switched to printing. It only took me a few months to get to a similar speed as with cursive, but it is way more legible (though not perfect – I still got some complaints after, just little enough that I could stop caring).
Story of my life right here. I can’t even print anymore, so my writing is entirely illegible unless I take the painstaking effort to draw each character.
I never learned any other kind of handwriting than cursive, and I don’t think we even have a word in French for cursive/non-cursive. I wonder what makes it so different from country to country ?
Remember how you had to learn cursive in elementary school even though it was clearly useless and inferior to other forms of communication?
Well, thanks for making me feel very, very old 🙂
My primary school still had inkwells in the desks! Though we didn’t use fountain pens or nib pens, but plain biros.
My first elementary school required us to buy fountain pens with plastic ink cartridges in (I think) third grade and learn to use them, but I think that was unusual at that point.
Then we moved before I started fourth grade, and I never saw a fountain pen in school again.
Do you know what I think would be cool? Bringing back shorthand. I’d love to be able to make loops on a touch screen and quickly spell out whole words. Does anyone know if there’s a keyboard app for iPhone that does this? I couldn’t find any when I searched a while ago.
That’s basically how swype-style keyboards on smartphones work.
Yes, but the issue with those is that they sacrifice efficiency for accessibility (everyone knows qwerty layout).
I don’t know how much more efficient specifically gregg shorthand would be, but if there’s a system that let’s you type at 150 WPM with one hand, that seems like a darn useful skill to learn.
There are systems like that, used by court reporters and other people who need to write a lot very quickly, but they’re hard to learn.
My mother actually trained to learn shorthand as a secretary in the ’80s, and I’m vaguely fascinated by it as well. Same with stenography – they both seem like really efficient ways to approach communication and are sadly underused.
Mirabai Knight started Plover, an accessible way to learn stenography. I looked into it for speed (I type 150 WPM on QWERTY) and mobile computing possibilities–she has some fascinating articles on this in her blog.
Not saying 54% of Chinese do, but one could root for Trump if one expects to benefit from turmoil in the US (especially if it causes a brain drain the other way for once) while also expecting Trump will not cause a global nuclear war.
Yep, I can’t deny that I would feel a certain degree of schadenfreude if Trump got elected. But sadly, in this day and age being on the other side of the pond is not enough to keep you safe from Amercian foreign policy…
A new study, published in 2010!
(I happen to be familiar with it because it’s the source in Wikipedia’s article on CTY that says CTYers are in the top 0.3% of their age group and, having attended for five sessions, I have a good idea how I stacked up compared to CTYers and there was a period where I had crippling self-doubt about my intelligence. Anyway, the study doesn’t contain the Wikipedia-cited figure, although comparing where the study puts the top 0.5% to entrance requirements, it seems about right. Also, the thing that got me over my crippling self-doubt was Paul Graham saying that, empirically, success in startups was dominated by factors other than intelligence that. Anyway.)
The study’s results seem broadly in-line with the genders of International Math Olympians. But it doesn’t really explain the prevalence of men in mathy fields. Gender disparity only really begins cropping up once you reach the 99th percentile, and you have to go further out to get any appreciable disparity. Except in domains that are extremely limited by math ability (going to grad school for mathematics), as opposed to merely “mathy” fields where math ability is helpful but can be satisficed at sub-99th-percentile levels or dominated by other factors, this study really doesn’t explain a lot. Certainly not a 9:1 gender ratio in something like undergraduate computer science.
Speaking of things that fail to explain women not being in mathy fields: I’ve been trying to figure out women in STEM—in particular, how to get more women into it. My priors for any particular person thinking clearly about a field this politicized are so low that I expect that any summary I find will do more harm than good, so I’ve been doing it myself. (If anyone knows of a good summary that won’t cause me to believe untrue things, I will be eternally grateful if you link me to it.) Anyway, I was reading this report, which contains data for both female representation in STEM subfields and wage gap in the same subfields. “Hmm,” I thought. “I wonder if there’s a relation?” So, I dump the numbers into a Google Sheet, have it make me a scatterplot and throw a trendline and, sure enough, the higher the female representation, the higher the wage gap.
This is based on all of four data points from one survey, so I’m ready to say “coincidence”, but I also happened across this wonderful chart on Wikipedia that tells me that “construction” is the industry with the smallest wage gap. So now I’m wondering if anyone’s investigated this. Have I just happened across anomalous data? Or is there some obvious-in-retrospect explanation that I’m unaware of?
I don’t think this is true even across your four data points? CS and math roles have the highest wage gap but they aren’t the most gender balanced field.
I do have a theory that there’s a complicated dynamic going on related to the correlation of status and wages, the higher status of “masculine” roles in our society, and the way that salaries tend to plummet in a field that women enter, but you can’t really see it with data this rough.
Also when a field initially opens up to women, there will be more women in entry level roles compared to higher level roles, but a field that isn’t really open to women yet and only exceptional women enter, will have the same small ratio of women to men at every level of experience.
*Checks works*
The correlation between %female and wage gap is certainly positive. CS and math roles have the highest wage gap and are the second-most gender-balanced field. (Compare to engineering, which has half the female representation and half the gap, and managerial, which has marginally less female representation and a 25% smaller gap.
Science has the highest female representation and the second-lowest wage gap. It is exactly where you’d naively expect it to be. Things get confusing when the next-highest female representation group has the highest wage gap and the group with the lowest female representation has the lowest wage gap.
I forgot to mention that I was largely spurred by the report saying that STEM has a smaller wage gap than all industries by one-third.
Agree that the data is rough and appreciate the explanations.
Is there a gender*race interaction factor at all? Some family cultures may push kids of all genders towards STEM as a desirable source of dependable income vs. others that either gender STEM jobs (as per the point above of women getting degrees but not careers), or are neutral, and therefore will probably follow status quo distributions.
I have no idea if your pattern is true, but I think I can construct an explanation of why it could be true.
Suppose that within a subfield there are two sorts of subsubfields, ones that women have comparative advantage in and ones that men do. Suppose that subfields differ in how attractive to women the subsubfields that attract women in them are. If a subfield contains subsubfields very attractive to women that pulls lots of women in, drives up the percentage of women in the subfield, drives down the wages in the subsubfield, thus increases the m/f wage gap.
Bottom up, it’s a TE gap more than STEM overall. If you’re to include social sciences you might even tip the scales.
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/
There are other abilites besides maths. Verbal and spatial where males lack in former and excel in latter. So while there might not be a big separation in the bell curves when you consider maths alone, once you account for other abilities as well you’d expect males and females to make widely different choices. Especially when boys don’t really have a choice since their verbal skills lag way behind girls.
The funny thing about your comment to Anon is that feminism has turned the fact of male disadvantage in schooling upside down, girls have been getting better grades even in maths since the records were kept. A pretty simple way to stop boys concentrating in TE fields would be to improve their verbal skills so that they are more willing to consider other fields but that would also run the substantial risk of widening the maths gender gap even further.
Now this turns the point of this upside down. I thought the main societal reason the gap mattered was because without women the STEM field (or maybe TE field) didn’t have enough talented workers. Decreasing the gap by encouraging men to leave STEM should be contra-indicated.
Personally speaking, I think the previous thread on this made more sense, where the data seems to make it evident that women aren’t in STEM simply because they don’t like it. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and not a problem at all. If we need more STEM workers (which I don’t think is true anyway), then STEM employers simply need to make jobs more in demand through higher pay and better working conditions. I care not at all if there is a gender gap.
It’s the thing which works the best at reducing the gap, though; discouraging men gets much better results. Harvey Mudd College has managed to get more women than men in its Computer Science program through such innovative techniques as telling enthusiastic male students things like
(and no, all the ego-boosting stuff in the beginning won’t fool Joe for a minute. He knows he’s being shut down)
“Marble quarries somehow look”
Woah! It’s like a doorway for giants.
“they may not offer free online video courses,”
This does seem bizarre, but someone else pointed out, does it make a difference that they’re public — do students AT Berkeley have a way of seeing the videos? If not, there’s just as much legal problem.
““publish or perish” and modern science culture”
I think it *used* to be better (though still difficult in many ways). It seems like now, there’s too many people chasing too few roles. Maybe partly because more people can go to university, so a smaller proportion can stay on in academia, and partly because the recession means less science roles overall. And it takes time for people to give up, or learn it’s not worth trying in the first place. So there’s a lot of competition, settled on arbitrary criteria like “who can produce enough ‘good enough’ papers in the first few years” (which correlates with, but isn’t the same as, producing good results long term).
And partly, whatever criteria you used, it might be better to roll a die and pick fewer grad students, then let them get on with experiments, than get them to spend most of their time on useless but competitive activities like “who’s the best at writing grants” and “who’s the best at making results look publishable” to see who succeeds.
Nwabudike Morgan – ah, SMAC. Alpha Centrauri’s still memorable after all these years.
Something else good must have happened to African capitalism, but nothing comes to mind
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I’d settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called “moral value” of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.
I found it suspicious that all of the economic activity in the so-called “free market” faction seemed to be owned and controlled by one man.
I would pay good money for a remake of that classic with modern graphics and an even deeper storyline.
The level of attention to detail and craftsmanship that went into games in the late 90s/2000s has never been matched.
I would enjoy a version of Mass Effect that was as open-world as Star Control 2. The first Mass Effect crept up to it with the planetary exploration but it was confined to an arbitrarily small region and from there it only became a more generic on-rails shooter. High production values, but little depth.
Profile of Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, a former naval officer whose motto is “Honey badger don’t give a s***”.
God damn it, don’t be giving me reasons to like his bloody campaign! (Going by the motto alone, because some days it’s just “Kill everything with fire”) 🙂
Re: decapitation, I wonder if that’s a case of Mrs Malaprop in action:
Re: poor, persecuted, humble Berkeley which can’t afford the crushing financial burden the heartless bureaucrats wish to impose upon them – I’d be more sympathetic to their plight, had I not Googled to see what exactly they spend their endowment on, and the first thing that pops up is a perhaps, perhaps not mini-scandal – how much closed captioning would $1 million get you, even in these days of higher prices?
Or maybe they might shave a few bob from the sports budget?
Then again, apparently it’s hard for them to keep track of exactly where the money goes in their budget, except they know they need more from the government:
Yes, poor, poor, hard-pressed Berkeley and those accessibility check-box ticking fiends that are burdening them with dreadful requirements!
I wonder if this little contretemps isn’t to do with the budget talks with the state government as in the linked article, and the bureaucrats are pushing for more falling into line with equality legislation/regulations while the university is pushing back with “we’ll take our ball and go home”, and both sides are playing hardball?
Look at it this way: they have no obligation to provide free education to everyone in the world in return for nothing.
And yet they did. Probably on the basis that it wouldn’t significantly hurt them to do so.
Suddenly it’s looking like they’ll be faced with a massive bill if they want to continue providing free education to everyone and the easiest and most understandable response is to simply not give stuff away for free when they have no reason to.
Why should they piss away any of their money at all on people who aren’t students to whom they have no obligation? They tried to do the public a favor and instead got spit in their face and legal threats. You can be sure the next time the option comes up to help the world for little cost to themselves they’ll, entirely reasonably, say “nah, lets not, it didn’t work out last time we tried being nice”
Imagine if every open source developer creating free software for anyone in the world to use tomorrow received a threat from the government that they each need to pay thousands out of their own pockets to make their software accessible or stop making things for free. The next day the open source movement would be 99% dead.
How “massive” is the massive bill, though? I’m not seeing any figures, just claims that this is more overbearing government interference. Berkeley seems to be cash-strapped, like many other universities, and I am wondering if this isn’t in part that they’re getting their retaliation in first; “the reason we’re over-budget and under-funded is because we’re forced to comply with all this unnecessary red tape!” rather than whatever they are spending the money on (I have a feeling remuneration is going to be one of the areas looked at, and that’s one where there will be an immense amount of screeching over how A deserves every penny they earn and B won’t stand for the implication that they’re not worth it as well).
does it matter? if you volunteered your time down at the local homeless shelter and some horrible little admin started trying to issue you with “fines” for 10 euro a pop for trivial things how long would you keep going before you said “fuck this” and found other ways to occupy your time ?
Murphy, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
It matters very much if they’re pleading poverty and the “massive” bill turns out to be less than the catering bill for the big jamboree they threw for the tenth anniversary of the Vice-Vice-Provost’s Office for Selecting New Carpeting.
The people pushing the decision to offer free courses probably don’t have budget authority over the catering bill or the carpeting.
Changing their case to the folks who allocate money from “this will be basically free” to “this will require an expenditure to benefit people it’s not our purview to help” is probably going to end the conversation.
(At least my own experience with university budgets is that “but that department wasted ten times as much” is rarely as much as a slam dunk in getting the money as you might think.)
My wife is hard of hearing, and I’m keenly aware of how important accommodations are and how useless their absence can make something. But this really does seem like making the perfect the enemy of the good.
“It matters very much if they’re pleading poverty and the “massive” bill turns out to be less than the catering bill for the big jamboree they threw for the tenth anniversary of the Vice-Vice-Provost’s Office for Selecting New Carpeting.”
Not it doesn’t.
You are assuming that their argument is “we can’t afford to do what you want.” But the much more reasonable argument is “the cost of doing what we want plus what you want is more than the value to us of doing so, so we won’t.”
Suppose a panhandler asks you for five pounds. You decline. He responds with “how can you refuse me? I know you can afford it–you just came out of that bookstore with a stack of secondhand books that must have cost you more than five pounds.”
His point is true but irrelevant, because the reason you turned him down wasn’t that there was no way you could have found the money to give him. Similarly here.
Or in other words, why do you interpret Berkeley’s response as pleading poverty?
A note on the sports budget:
A majority of that funding is likely coming from television contracts that the Pac12 is party to. Another portion will be merchandise and ticket sales (though much smaller).
I cant claim this is certain at Berkeley, but the salaries for most highly paid coaches are paid by booster donation that are earmarked only for that purpose.
While its easy to see $80 million going to sports and say “that’s dumb they should spend it on X” its not exactly fair. The vase majority of that money only exists because of sports and wouldnt be going to scholarships or academic programs otherwise.
Lots of schools lose a lot of money on sports, but Berkeley (Cal, to sports fans) is not, I think, one of them, and most of the “power 5 conference” schools make enough money on men’s football and basketball (plus alumni donations) to pay for the rest of the department.
At e.g. Michigan, the athletic department is essentially an entirely independent entity, with a separate budget. It pays the rest of the university face value for the scholarships it gives athletes, and usually runs a surplus. About the only possible argument you could make against it, budget wise, is that it perhaps draws some alumni donations into sports instead of the rest of the university. But then again sports fandom is a huge thing that keeps alumni engaged with the university at all.
IIRC, most big university sports budgets are actually very far in the black, even before you consider the alumni donations they encourage.
I actually looked into each of the links you posted, and they’re pretty much all frivolous (with the possible exception of college administrator salaries being high, which is a systemic problem that Berkeley has almost no control over). Acting as if fixing up the Chancellor’s Residence even approaches a scandal is laughable: it’s a historical campus building that the current Chancellor lives in. The way you’re framing it is as absurd as equating repairs to the White House to Obama using govt money as a personal slush fund. It’s hardly controversial to attach a nonzero value to maintaining a campus’s history and anesthetics, or every university would just be a trailer park + portapotties.
The “mismanagement” of the endowment is explained in the very link you posted. First of all, the article is about the entire UC, not just Berkeley. UC is ranked as one of the 10 richest schools only because it has something like TEN universities included in it. UC Berkeley alone is triple the size of colleges like Yale. Secondly, as the article mentions, public universities in general are forced to be more conservative in their investments because their funding is a lot less in their control than rich private schools like most of the rest of the list that the article compares it to.
Even your budgetary mismanagement article manages to be almost completely irrelevant. Again, it talks about the entire UC, and every example in the article is something like “pension obligations”, “UC run hospitals” or “health science instruction (ie med school)”, none of which have anything to do with Berkeley and the kind of spending it has control over. At this point, it’s entirely unexpected that even the figures you quoted are irrelevant. 6.9 billion is the budget for actual instruction costs, _across all ~ten schools_.
If you had pulled this horribly flawed analysis from a single article, I mightve just chalked it up to you being really naive and credulous. But the amount of work it took for you to pull together sources and paint this bullshit masterpiece implies some pretty impassioned motivated reasoning. I can’t imagine what Berkeley must have done to you. Was it the dining hall food?
“maintaining a campus’s history and anesthetics”
I see what you did there 🙂
I mean, but he says this, and yet Bannon’s hiring coincides with a sudden increase in campaign discipline and a sharp rise in Trump’s poll numbers. My pet theory is that it’s actually Bannon who somehow managed to tame Trump, not Conway. You don’t run a vast, intricate and many-pronged right-wing apparatus as some wannabe Joker.
… i.e. that people will make up any excuse whatsoever, no matter how ridiculous, for why they won’t do things that would be useful to people in general if doing so would limit their opportunities to maximize their own personal gain?
I don’t follow your logic.
they have no obligation to provide free education to everyone in the world in return for nothing.
And yet they did.
Probably on the basis that it wouldn’t significantly hurt them to do so.
If someone does you a favor out of the goodness of their heart it’s traditional to not turn around and demand (with threats of legal action) that they start spending time and money on improving the favor. The typical result of that is them saying “Nah, I think I’ll just stop doing things for you for free”.
Scott complains in an old post about the use of the term “entitled” as an insult but I’m not sure there’s a more fitting term. There’s also some old phrases about gift horses and whether it’s polite to look them in the mouth.
I was referring to the government in this instance as being the entity that’s behaving in this manner. But then I live in a country where educational institutions as a rule are ultimately government-run, anyway, so I didn’t make a clear distinction in my mind between the college putting the videos up in the first place and the government then stepping in and forcing them to take them down with what seems to me a fairly blatantly transparent excuse. To me it registered more as infighting from within the same entity, with a lower-level administrative subdivision coming up with cheap way to provide a public service only for the higher level adminstration to step in and put a stop to that because it would ultimately endanger the larger entity’s interests (in this case, the government’s interest in maintaining its monopoly and legitimacy in the field of education) and making up what’s a fairly obviously thin fig-leaf of an excuse for that purpose because they obviously can’t just come out and say it’s to prevent people from getting a free education outside of the government-run institutions. Now that you’ve reminded me that the setup isn’t necessarily quite the same in the US somewhat weakens my argument but I’m not sure it stops working entirely.
UC Berkley is funded (approximately) by the state of California. The Federal US government is the one stepping in to stop them.
A good analogy for this would be: You and I are throwing a party for 10 people. I buy chocolate ice cream. 1 Person doesnt like chocolate, so none of us get ice cream and I have to just throw out the ice cream I bought.
Or, you and I are throwing a huge conference and decide to buy everyone lunch. But some people are vegans and …
*ducks*
What do you have against waterfowl?
The federalism (and size) of the US is fairly important when using other countries for comparison. This is most directly relevant when approximating state and federal institutions as the same entity. This is best illustrated by the ubiquitous example of marijuana laws: they’re federally illegal and legal to various degrees within the states. You end up getting weird things like businesses being taxed as legitimate enterprises by the state while having trouble getting funding from banks scared of federal action. The model of “all levels of government as a single entity” is particularly unsuitable.
Berkeley has its very own Web Accessibility team:
And by the bye, when it’s buying in materials from outside (bolding mine):
So they have this stuff onsite. I really want to know what the expense that they can’t cover is; I’d like to see some figures (how much free content are they putting online? And while I don’t doubt they’re doing this as part of their remit as a public university, I have to say that I don’t think they’re doing it purely out of the goodness of their hearts – they’re getting recognition from the public at the very least, and probably some other means of monetising how many hits they get.
I see they’ve taken down their webcasts, and are re-directing people to the edX site. Now, the thing is, if we take all this in toto, if the webcasts were being produced by Berkeley onsite, by their own accessibility policy they would have needed to be “accessible to people with disabilities”.
And indeed, that’s what they are going to do. And they have their own (commerical? semi-commercial? not sure) branch doing it, so it’s not the case that they had to pay an outside company a huge fee:
I would imagine the public is getting to see the same lectures broadcast/webcast as the students, so I do think there’s rather more going on here than merely “imperious government interference forcing university by diktat to do away with free charitable project”. I am getting the impression the university wants to charge people for accessibility materials if they’re not part of the student body officially, the government is telling them they have to make all their materials accessible and can’t charge for this (i.e. if the material is already accessible for students, they can’t provide a different version for the public and charge the public for the accessible version), so they’re doing a bit of PR ju-jitsu and saying “Oh we can’t afford this yuuuuuge expense, we’ll have to pull all our free for you the public materials instead!”
This reminds me of something I remember reading about bakeries and other food-related producers, that they don’t directly give their leftovers to the homeless because it makes them liable to a suit if something happens.
I’ve heard that as well. A couple of restaurants got sort of around this by collecting all of their clean leftovers at the end of the day and throwing them out in a clear trash bag (the other bags were black). The local homeless knew when they could come around and get the good stuff, and the restaurant could say “well, we can’t hardly be expected to police dumpster divers, can we?”
At a slight tangent …
My university sometimes has a drive to get people to donate books and toys and such to give to disadvantaged children. The instructions say it is limited to new books and toys.
We, and I suspect many other people with adult children, have huge numbers of suitable books and toys lying around. At least in theory (I’m not sure to what extent the university takes its own rules seriously) we are not allowed to donate them. I’m not sure if the reason is worries over something going wrong and someone getting sued or if the theory is that getting second hand things is somehow demeaning.
Wasn’t there a law passed recently requiring all products for children to be lead tested prior to being sold, after some poisonings from Chinese imports? There was some reason that anything before a certain date would not longer be able to be sold despite there being no likely danger involved.
@Randy M
I suspect that’s a large part of it. New toys are safe. Old toys may need to be tested, which is uneconomical. Also, asking for new toys means that you either get new or very gently used toys, and don’t become a way for people to dispose of junk.
Goodwill will take your old toys and books, and have the labor to figure out what someone else actually wants.
@Ann:
Are there things you could do that are useful to other people but don’t benefit you–picking up trash along the streets near your house, for instance? Do you do them? All of them?
Re: Berkeley online course videos.
How hard is it to add closed captioning to videos? It seems like it would be very easy to do, and volunteers would also be readily willing to contribute, and it seemed like most of the MOOC sites already had some form of it (EdX and Coursera at least, iirc). I also wonder what qualifies as “closed captioning?” A speech-to-text converter plus a button to notify an admin of errors?
Re: Markets punishing discrimination.
This is like the joke about the economist and the $20 bill, in that it basically ignores empirical reality where discrimination of various forms was ridiculously widespread (see most of U.S. history). It’s also making a big, unjustified leap from some examples of markets punishing discrimination to the conclusions “we can be pretty sure markets are picking only on the criteria we want them to use” and “it is perfectly well and good to lament the fact that for whatever reason, some ethnic groups are less qualified, systematically less hard-working, achieve worse educational results, commit more crimes or whatever.” Plus conflating discrimination in hiring (or better yet, fantasy football picks in ~2016) with discrimination as a whole, and the implied conclusion that therefore discrimination can’t really exist. Good thing we have the link showing degrees aren’t actually about signaling – it’s not like the market would ever allow people to be judged based on broad stereotypes about them, rather than their merits as an individual. Anyone company or individual doing so would be outcompeted quickly, keeping their numbers negligible, just like with the non-existent $20 bill.
I Googled costs to see if this really is hideously expensive, as per the Vice-Chancellor’s letter.
This crowd say they’ll do it for $3 per minute. How long are the videos and how many of them is the next thing; I’ll assume they run for an hour each so that is 60 minutes x $3 = $180 dollars per video. If you have ten in a series, that’s $1,800. Multiply that by however many different lecture series they’re offering. But I’ve seen some small amount of education budgets in a previous job and that’s not too unreasonable. Expensive for an individual, but for an entity like a university not so much, and surely there’s some kind of accessibility grants available?
Okay, they need to cut costs, but on a multi-million dollar annual budget, there must be some fat they could trim, and there does appear to be rumblings about where exactly is the money going?
Berkeley does appear to be feeling the pinch when it comes to its budget, and is facing what seems likely to be swingeing cuts:
So I imagine the “we can’t pay for closed captioning” is a combination of genuinely seeking to cost-cut (if these are free online for the public and not core college coursework, they are going to be very far down the list of priorities) and putting on the poor mouth to get more money out of government.
This is the kind of stupid stuff that happens when budget cuts are made in an emergency; big, splashy, wasteful things keep their funding because they’re somebody’s pet project or they’re guarding their turf, and you get the office staff told they have to buy a cheaper brand of copier paper while the big-wigs are claiming expenses for jetting off to conferences and symposia at full whack.
Looking again at that Vice-Chancellor’s letter, I think this is more of signs of tough times ahead:
Again, you’re working under the assumption that they have some kind of duty to dig the cost out of their own budget when they were providing free education to everyone out of the goodness of their hearts. You know what’s cheaper than close captioning thousands of videos? pulling the network plug out of the server.
If it’s so cheap then it should be super easy for some of these Oh-So-Concerned groups to caption the videos themselves. I suspect the uni would have been happy to add such captions if someone provided them.
But easier to point to someone else’s budget and scream that they should spend the money to enhance favors they have no obligation to provide to the world at all.
You know they are a public university taking taxpayer money. I tried to find out how much, and it looks like it’s been dropping every year, to 12% of their total revenues in 2013, down from 54% of their total budget in 1987.
So, if we want everyone involved to just ruthlessly optimize for self-interest, sure – they should probably pull the program entirely, which would also save on hosting and electricity costs, unless they’re getting some positive marketing benefit out of it, in which case it’s not really a selfless act to “provide free education to everyone out of the goodness of their hearts,” and the state should also stop using taxpayer money to fund the university. Though I don’t really advocate for that, I’m just having trouble seeing them as martyrs here, so much as that their reaction offers a great chance for political opportunism.
Yes they are public university, but they are only obligated to provide education to students who are accepted for enrollment.
The videos are available to anyone, not just students of UC Berkeley.
Yes, which is exactly what I was trying to get at with my earlier comment about conflicts of interest; the perceived value of being accepted as a student is diminished by the availability of the videos to the general public, which may be a (even unconcious) part of the motivation of whichever administrative body to put roadblocks in the way of them being made available to the widest possible audience. That part of the college administration which put them up originally obviously didn’t have any such qualms.
“which may be a (even unconcious) part of the motivation of whichever administrative body to put roadblocks in the way of them being made available to the widest possible audience. ”
That makes very little sense. Improving accessibility would increase their audience by what, a percent or two? If they didn’t want to offer free classes for fear it would undercut their market for paid classes they wouldn’t be providing the videos in the first place.
Murphy, they’re a fee-charging university. They are not providing anything to anyone out of the goodness of their hearts, and I worked in Irish local education provision and saw dealings with second and third level institutions from both the provision and the government side, so I am very cynical when any institution starts crying poverty in response to government directives.
They weren’t charging fees for the video access.
@Soumynona
From further up the argument seems to be “they must be getting something out of giving this away for free, like good PR hence *mumble mumble* evil money grubbing evil *mumble* football bad”
Soumynona, I was addressing Murphy talking about them providing education out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t, they charge fees to the students, which is part of how they pay for the running of the university. If they’re putting up stuff online, that’s part of a wider scheme – yes, part of it is fulfilling the public university mandate, and part of it is branding, getting recognition, etc.
If only part of the public can access their free content, then that limits their charitable and educational purpose. There are members of the public who have disabilities that mean these videos are not accessible to them and so they do not benefit from them. The government is acting in its capacity of treating all the interests of the people equally. If the university really can’t afford to caption or otherwise make the videos accessible, then they are entitled to take them down or look for help in making them accessible.
The protest seems to be “if some can’t have it, none can have it and that’s not fair” – but it’s the university that seems to be doing this, not the government. And if you find it unfair that a free resource is no longer available, imagine then how it feels to be someone who can never access any resources like this because their needs make the ‘free’ content unusable to them – and that’s something they have to put up with every day of their lives. That’s not very fair either, is it? Someone who gets something unexpected for free that they can do without because they have other sources of obtaining it, versus someone who can’t get any advantage of the ‘free’ material and can’t easily access alternatives: there’s no “big bad wolf” here, there’s competing needs and problems, and I think the people who jumped on this as a stick to beat “See? Big Interfering Government strikes again!” are being disingenuous.
Either equality legislation means what it says, or it’s only a face-saving exercise to make ordinary, able-bodied people feel good about themselves and when push comes to shove, they won’t carry through on it.
Frankly, I find all the university’s pledges on their websites of being fully signed up to making things accessible less believable when I take this incident into account, and were I a student with a disability, or a parent of such, I’d think twice about going to Berkeley or that they would live up to their promises.
” The government is acting in its capacity of treating all the interests of the people equally.”
I don’t think that’s right.
Suppose there is some service the government thinks it is good to provide. It can provide it to ninety percent of the population at a cost of ten dollars per person. The other ten percent are much harder to provide it for–perhaps a much more dispersed population–so it costs a hundred dollars each to provide it to them.
Providing it to only the ninety percent is treating everyone equally–treating everyone as if the value of providing the service to him is more than ten dollars but less than a hundred dollars. It isn’t providing the same outcome for everyone, but unequal outcome is not the same as unequal treatment.
By one extremely popular definition of equality, that is literally oxymoronic – “treating everyone equally” means exactly and only “providing the same outcome for everyone”. You may prefer one of the other definitions of equality, but you need to understand and acknowledge this one if you want to communicate effectively with people who don’t share your preference.
Many universities do a lot of things which offer little to no benefit to themselves as long as it costs them little to nothing.
Looking for mirrors for linux repositories? trying to download cran packages? Most of the repo mirrors will turn out to be hosted by universities.
They get ~zero PR for this because people don’t typically feel strongly about linux repo mirror 27 in a list but they play a small part in making highly valuable things available to normal people easily by donating a little of the universities bandwidth.
But if some horrible little scumbag bureaucrat or some little scumbag private individual with an attitude of “if I can’t have something nice perfectly customized for me then nobody can have it” took them to court insisting that they spend chunks of their budget annotating those repos documentation to better support custom tracing machines for deaf-blind children with synesthesia then those mirrors would simply get the plugs pulled because suddenly a low-cost good deed is being turned into a stick to beat them with and is suddenly a cost center with little benefit for them.
The narrative seems more and more accurate the more I read about it.
The link states that:
Does this mean that whenever an image that is referenced it must be described aloud for those with visual disabilities? I don’t know the price of closed captioning, but adding audio descriptions of images sounds like a harder problem. I’m also uncertain if the videos are fully accessible to people with manual disabilities.
EDIT: Looking at the DOJ letter, it appears that a concern for the deaf got this started. The “Aggrieved Individuals” listed work at Gallaudet University and are both members of the National Association of the Deaf.
Also, the DOJ letter talks mentions vision disabilites WRT BerkeleyX:
Finally, there is a section of the requirements on p.9 that Berkeley must follow if it continues this online content. I’m not aware of the costs, but following guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA), probably isn’t cheap.
I was originally thinking maybe they could just run the videos through cloud.google.com/speech-to-text, but this is a whole different problem. Are the lectures from other universities really compliant (and this is only a Berkeley issue)? How are other universities managing this?
Personally I’ve complained about video-only training in my job many, many times (apparently we must not have any hearing-impaired employees). We have many non-native English speakers and, being bilingual myself and having lived abroad for many years, perhaps I sympathize more than others. Furthermore, I like useful information to be searchable, which video and audio is not. I am told these things:
1) Video is cheaper (in terms of wage cost / time) to make. Speakers can ramble and hem and haw and change directions mid-sentence or whatever and not have to worry about grammar or paragraph structure or, you know, generally conveying information in a means that benefits the consumer (which takes additional time and effort). So video might be especially preferable if the source of knowledge is expensive, busy, or self-important–and the destination of that knowledge is more of an afterthought.
2) Text has a higher risk of leakage. I am not sure this follows logically, but it is what I am told. Though not obviously an issue with giving away college lectures for free (compared to proprietary information within a company), they still might want people to watch the videos at *their* sites (for advertising or branding), instead of walk away with, and be able to redistribute, written information. (Although it’s quite easy to walk away with videos as well, I guess it is less common).
3) Video is better for metrics. You can track views and set checkpoints to make sure people at least have them running on their computer (whether they are playing minesweeper and barely listening or not). This is especially good to automate compliance if people are required to have been exposed to certain information, or perhaps for progress tracking at online educational sites.
Anyway, I guess I’m most surprised how other universities are managing compliance if Berkeley does not. If they are, then Berkeley should just do whatever they’re doing. On the other hand no one complying would not surprise me. I haven’t watched any university’s online lectures, because I don’t like video, so I have no idea what’s going on.
Speaking of other universities: in the absence of accessibility mandates, how many of those universities would have provided closed-captioning on their videos? I would expect very few of them. Because of the mandates, people with disabilities now have a wealth of resources that would otherwise have been completely locked away. (I’ve taken a number of free Coursera courses from a variety of universities, and they were all fully closed-captioned, so I’d be surprised to learn that the answer is that nobody is complying.)
It’s obviously regrettable that Berkeley feels the need to take down some of its free content. But it’s far from obvious that the overall mandate is a net negative. At most, all this story shows is that the DOJ is being a little bit over-zealous in this one instance – and, given that other universities don’t seem to have the same problem, I think it’s quite plausible that this is some sort of political move on Berkeley’s part.
PS: From the “Conclusions of Law” section of the DOJ’s letter:
As ultimatums go, that seems quite tame. Less “you have to stop offering free courses”; more “you already have policies about making content accessible, and you aren’t following them. Please fix that.”
As someone who abhors video as a communication medium, I would say this hinges on how much information is unique to lectures. In my experience, professors are eager to share their knowledge and opinions, and I would hope you could get the same information from their books and textbooks. So unless “completely locked away” means “not free”, I hope this is not true. If it is, then I (and others who have very poor aural retention), non-native speakers, and hearing-impaired all are suffering.
On the other hand, if the information is available elsewhere, and the issue is the “knowledge” not the “video”, then perhaps linking free textbooks would satisfy the requirement as well. I, for one, would be ecstatic. Textbooks are not cheap.
Alas, however, I suspect institutions are more willing to give away spoken information than written information, for similar reasons to those my company gave to me: it is less expensive to create, easier to brand, and easier to track.
By “resources” I meant the free classes / videos themselves, not the information contained within. There’s been an explosion in MOOCs recently, without a concomitant increase in (for example) free textbooks. Without the accessibility mandate, people with disabilities would have been unable to benefit from the proliferation of MOOCs. Thanks to the mandate, they can. That seems valuable to me.
One concern with free textbooks is that a good chunk of the value of MOOCs comes from working through the assignments. To get the full benefit, there would have to be a fairly tight connection between the textbook and the coursework. Given the overall benefit of free textbooks, though, the DOJ might have accepted it anyway.
@Iain
Of course it is valuable, but there is also a cost. These laws/regulations are a burden and do affect the ability for people to provide stuff (not even necessarily financially, but at a certain point the burden of a large amount of rules just becomes so irritating and tiresome that people give up). The result is that the majority are denied things, so a minority can have something.
A major objection that I have to the pro-regulation rhetoric is that this downside is typically ignored (and additionally, the debate often involves shaming language implying that the opponents hate the minority). The result is a rather toxic and divisive debate, rather than a rational assessment of what burdens are reasonable (how many people benefit & how much vs the burdens) and which aren’t.
There is also the issue that these regulations de-incentivize actually solving the problem at the source and instead, result in a lowest common denominator society, where non-disabled people cannot have things that are deemed discriminatory (like the trend to gender-neutral rest rooms resulting in the removal of urinals, despite those being much better suited for people with male genitals than using a toilet to pee in).
Another example is that we now have deaf people fighting against implants, which they argue will destroy deaf culture. So you get the weird situation of some deaf people embracing and refusing to solve their disability, but then demanding that society enables this self-segregation by burdening non-deaf people.
society enables this self-segregation by burdening non-deaf people
Burdening? How is this burdening you? If you don’t want or need the closed captioning or subtitles, you need not use them.
If it’s the producers of such material you worry about, it’s the same kind of burden they have in making sure they’ve properly credited and paid for using copyrighted material, got consent, provided bi-lingual materials, etc. Paying to have videos made of a lecture and putting it up online is also a ‘burden’ – these are free courses for the public, and nobody is being charged for them, but at the same time the university has to pay for them being made and hosted and all the rest of what is involved in putting material online to be seen.
Are the non-deaf public who were taking advantage of this material any less of a burden?
@Deiseach
The burden is that a professor cannot just put a camera in his classroom and upload the video, but he has to take extra steps to add captioning which takes time & effort (at minimum). So that is a burden for the professor.
It’s very likely that the captioning process means that it takes longer for the video to become available, as it is an extra step, which is a burden on non-deaf students who don’t need the captioning, but still have to wait for it to be added.
If a professor/college decides that this burden tips the endeavor over from feasible into non-feasible, they can decide to not provide the video at all, which clearly burdens non-deaf students by not giving them the option to see the video. Basic economic theory suggests that all endeavors are on a continuum of viability and any extra burden will make some endeavors unviable.
And keep in mind that my main objection is not so much to this individual case, but rather the stifling effect of having many such requirements. It’s often very easy to make a case that one individual requirement is a small burden, but I object to how cumulative effects are generally ignored by advocates. It’s not that hard to make a tasty meal for a vegetarian or for a lactose intolerant person or for a gluten intolerant person. But it’s very hard to make a tasty meal that has to be vegetarian and without lactose and without gluten. I don’t want to live in a lowest common denominator society.
Anyway, your unwillingness to simply concede that captioning a video is an extra burden above and beyond the basic burden of creating a video without captioning, proves my point how irrational the debates on this topic tend to be.
“Burdening? How is this burdening you?”
I have, webbed and in most cases linked to my web page, the full text of four of my published books, most of my published articles, video or audio recordings of many of my public lectures, video or audio recordings of various of the courses I’ve taught.
The cost to me of putting that material up and keeping it up is very low. If someone imposed a bunch of requirements on me, such as text versions of all the talks and classes, the material wouldn’t be there.
The web is a superb tool for giving information away, a somewhat clumsy tool for selling it. People often find it worth their while to give information away for indirect benefits, such as getting people to read what they have written. Push the cost up a bit and it often isn’t worth doing.
I concede that there is a certain poetic justice to Berkeley being forced to live up to its own stated principles. But forbidding people to give something away to anyone unless they go to the additional trouble to give it away to everyone is a stupid and destructive rule.
@Aapje:
I am perfectly happy to concede that closed captioning imposes an additional marginal cost. I haven’t seen much discussion about how large that marginal cost is, but it is obviously more than zero. I’m also willing to concede that quantity of regulations can have a cost all of its own. That said: given your frustration, I hope you will be sympathetic to my own equivalent frustration. Specifically, I think the anti-regulation discussion in this thread has largely tended to ignore the upside of accessibility regulation.
Nobody would deny that, ceteris paribus, having closed captioning on videos and granting disabled people access to additional resources is a good thing. Nobody in this thread has proposed an alternative mechanism for obtaining those benefits. Instead, all we have is (largely unsupported) speculation that maybe the cost is too high.
And sure. Sometimes the cost of regulations is too high. And sometimes the regulation already takes that into account, and allows for reasonable exceptions (page 8):
Too often, the cost of compliance is used as a one-stop all-purpose argument against regulation. It’s not. It’s a cost, which needs to be reasonably weighed against the benefits of that regulation.
In the specific case of accessibility mandates, there is a long history of positive externalities. Cut curbs on sidewalks were originally mandated in the interest of people in wheelchairs, but they turned out to be beneficial for nearly anybody riding or pushing a thing with wheels: bikes, strollers, shopping carts, and so on. Similarly, closed captioning is important for deaf people, but it’s also useful for people watching a video in their second language, or skimming quickly through a video to find a particular point, or just watching a video in a library without headphones. That’s far from being a “lowest common denominator society”.
I am absolutely down for critical analysis of the costs and benefits of various forms of regulation. I’m just not convinced that cost-benefit analysis is what we’re all doing here.
“I am absolutely down for critical analysis of the costs and benefits of various forms of regulation.”
One complication is that there are two levels of cost/benefit analysis.
1. Does this particular regulation produce net benefits?
2. Do the institutions that produce the particular regulation produce a set of regulations that produce net benefits?
For a very different example, consider the question “should the government put out recommendations on what people should eat?”
It’s obvious that such recommendations can sometimes produce benefits. I think it is now well established that one such recommendation, switching from butter to stick margarine in order to eliminate saturated fat (replacing it with transfats!) did an enormous amount of damage. So in deciding whether you approve of that sort of government activity you have to somehow figure out which will happen how often.
Take this line of argument far enough and you get to the anarchist/minarchist debate. The question is not whether there are things governments can do that should be done but whether having a government results in net benefits or losses.
I concede that there is a certain poetic justice to Berkeley being forced to live up to its own stated principles.
Well, that’s my main angle on this: Berkeley is very big on talking the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk – people like to do nice things as long as it doesn’t cost them. When you’re being tested on what will your principles cost you, do you walk away or do you take the hit?
So Berkeley saying it can’t do this and will take down its material makes me think that they like the aura of being progressive, but won’t put themselves to the inconvenience that living up to those principles actually means.
That may tie in to Ethical Altruism, in a way; at least – I will grant them that much – the people involved are looking at costs and benefits and the most effective and efficient way, and are willing to pay the price to support their principles. I do have some disagreements with the way they judge “what is the best?” but I yield to them that they are (so far) putting their money where their mouths are.
Berkeley isn’t. You can rightfully argue that they are not obligated to put any of this stuff out there for anyone at all, or not for free, and that they have the right to take it down if they so wish. And I agree with all that. But where I don’t agree is the attitude that “those less able are taking our stuff away from the able-bodied!” The people who got the advantage of the free online lectures were no more entitled to them than the deaf or vision impaired; this notion that “this was ours and now we’re losing it because somebody made a fuss” is a troubling one because it’s putting differently disadvantaged groups against one another, when we should all be pulling together to make life easier for everyone – and that means everyone, not “can manage without accommodations so far”.
When some of you get older and start needing glasses or can’t hear so well or the contrast on that screen is looking fuzzy to you, are you going to be willing to drop out of participating in society one way or another, in small or bigger ways, because too bad for you granddad if you can’t keep up any more, I can walk up those steps/read that small print just fine, and your requirements are a burden on me?
This is a very reasonable set of questions, although my answers to them would land us somewhere in the vicinity of the modern liberal democratic state, and I suspect that your government would end up much smaller. I do agree that they are the right questions to ask.
Dietary recommendations are a weird example, though. First, the margarine issue seems more like a problem with the scientific community than the government, although I admit that I am not an expert on the area. Second, given that we’re going to be getting dietary recommendations from somewhere, the government seems like our best hope of getting a unbiased summary of the most recent scientific information. There may be cases of regulatory capture (like the inclusion of “dairy” in the classic food pyramid), but in the absence of government advice it’s not like the dairy industry wouldn’t be free to make its own uncontested recommendations.
@David Friedman
This is a very reasonable set of questions, although my answers to them would land us somewhere in the vicinity of the modern liberal democratic state, and I suspect that your government would end up much smaller. I do agree that they are the correct questions to ask.
Dietary recommendations are a weird example, though. First, the margarine issue seems more like a problem with the scientific community than the government, although I admit that I am not an expert on the area. Second, given that we’re going to be getting dietary recommendations from somewhere, the government seems like our best hope of getting a unbiased summary of the most recent scientific information. There may be cases of regulatory capture (like the inclusion of “dairy” in the classic food pyramid), but in the absence of government advice it’s not like the dairy industry wouldn’t be free to make its own uncontested recommendations.
@David Friedman
Sure. I think those are good questions. I suspect we would tend to disagree on the answers, but I agree that they are the right grounds for debate.
I do think the dietary recommendations example is weird. First, my impression is that the blame for the margarine failure falls much more on the scientific community than the government, although I freely admit that I am no expert in the area. Second, despite its failings, I’m hard-pressed to think of another actor that would do a better job of dietary recommendations than the government. Yes, it’s possible that we end up with regulatory capture (like the inclusion of “dairy” in the food pyramid) – but if the government doesn’t publish any guidelines, it’s not like the dairy industry can’t publish its own now-uncountered press releases.
@Iain
I am not doing that. What I was doing is a meta-debate: arguing that the proponents of these regulations are debating in the wrong way (by not doing proper cost/benefit analysis, but instead using shaming to bully people into submission).
When the debate is done this way, you can’t actually distinguish the useful regulation from the bad regulation, because the proponents are not making a rational case.
Isn’t the burden on people who propose such regulation to make the case for it, rather than demanding that skeptics prove that it isn’t?
The latter seems extremely unfair and unworkable (given that skeptics don’t necessarily want to spend their time and money on disproving every idiot with a plan; and that it incentivizes the proponents to make their plans hard to test).
I’m not actually anti-regulation. I’m anti-‘get regulation by using bullying tactics, rather than rational analysis.’
If I became dictator, I would regulate quite a bit, but only after analyzing the actual effects through experiments and such…and only after honestly examining the downsides as well as the upsides; and accepting the former rationally.
@Daeeach
I think that it is human nature to be much more eager to have the rules apply to others, but not want the rules to apply to oneself.
This is not limited to progressives. The number of ‘pro-lifers’ who get an abortion is not insignificant, for example.
I’ve needed glasses for most of my life and yet never expected people to adapt so I don’t need glasses. I would be absurd to demand that, since it would require everything to be printed with 1 foot high characters.
I am visually handicapped and it burdens me, but there is no reason why it is fair for me to transfer that burden to others, when I can manage myself. Of course, some things cannot be managed so easily and work out much better if society adapts somewhat. But then the burden is on the proponents of those adaptations to make a solid case.
AFAIK, this case was never made for captioning. And again, it is not the responsibility of skeptics to do a solid cost/benefit analysis, but for the proponents. ‘My life is so sad so help me’ is not such an analysis, but emotional manipulation.
@David Friedman
I think these are good questions. I suspect we would frequently disagree on the answers, but I agree that they are the right questions to ask.
@Aapje:
This doesn’t seem like an accurate description of the situation to me, whether it is referring to this conversation or to the actual process of adopting the regulations. In terms of this conversation, my impression is that the preponderance of people actually looking up numbers and facts have been on the pro-regulation side. Deiseach was the one who actually researched the cost of compliance, and demonstrated it to be low enough that the cost of closed captioning an hour of video is an order of magnitude smaller than the cost of paying a professor to stand in front of a camera for that hour, even ignoring the time it takes the professor lto prepare. I am a little bit baffled at how you can accuse us of not presenting a rational case.
If you’re talking about the regulations themselves: it seems prima facie unlikely to me that these regulations were adopted without doing any cost-benefit analysis, and your accusation that nobody sat down and researched the cost of compliance before imposing the regulations is completely unsubstantiated. If this were a ridiculous and unworkable scheme, then surely we would have more examples of its failure than one university that is somehow less able to comply than all of its peers.
I’ve tried replying to David’s post four or five times, and it keeps not posting. I suspect that I am triggering some sort of word filter. Staying brief, then, to avoid filtering:
@David Friedman:
I think those are good questions. I suspect our answers would differ significantly, but I agree that they are the correct questions to be asking.
@Aapje:
I don’t know whether you are accusing the people in this thread or the people who crafted the regulations of substituting emotional manipulation for actual reasoning, but in either case I think it is an unfair accusation. In the former, it looks to me like most of the facts and numbers in this discussion have been introduced by the pro-regulation side. In particular, Deiseach hunted down the actual cost of closed captioning (which is, I think it’s worth pointing out, at least one order of magnitude cheaper per hour than the salary of the professor being filmed). If you’re talking about the regulators themselves, then you’ve provided no evidence for that. Given that the only example of a problem that has been presented is a single university that somehow can’t manage to meet the same obligations as its peers, I think the regulation is doing fairly well for itself.
“cheaper per hour than the salary of the professor being filmed”
I don’t know about the Berkeley material, but videos of my classes and lectures don’t cost any of my time. I’m teaching the class or giving the talk to a live audience and someone is recording it.
If you are imagining (for all I know correctly in the Berkeley case) a professor giving a lecture specifically for the purpose of being filmed, then the natural question is how the cost per user for the basic video compares to the additional cost per additional user for adapting it in various ways. If the cost of adapting it is only a tenth the cost of producing it but adapting it only increases the number of viewers by one percent, the relevant measure of cost is higher for the latter.
@Iain
Outside charitable organizations can offer to work with and financially support the universities to make their free content more accessible. If this is an important issue to you, you could donate or start such an organization yourself.
The video lectures in the MOOC courses I’ve seen all appeared to be recorded specifically for the course itself. If I had to guess, I would say that the EdX videos were purpose-recorded, and the YouTube/iTunes videos were recordings of lectures that were happening anyway.
Assorted math quibbles: My one order of magnitude was based on Deiseach’s $3/hour quote, and an assumption that most lecturers make at least $30/hour. If you look at her link, it is an argument from the $3/hour people arguing why you should hire them and not the $1/hour people, implying that there is downward pressure on the cost of closed captioning. I’m also not counting any of the prep time for the professor, or the other fixed costs of producing the video. My hasty search indicates that 15% of American adults are deaf or hard of hearing, although obviously that is heavily skewed by the elderly. As I mentioned earlier, there are benefits of closed captioning that accrue to non-deaf people as well. Furthermore, deaf people are less capable of substituting in-person lectures for closed captioned video lectures, so the marginal benefit they derive from video lectures will be higher.
Anyways: we could go back and forth about the exact metrics to use, but at the end of the day, I think the proof is in the pudding: the costs of accessibility haven’t proven to be too onerous to anybody except Berkeley, and it seems to have created a pretty significant body of accessible material.
Iain, the quoted price is $3/minute, not $3/hour.
Oops! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Yeah, that does kind of shift the numbers.
I hate video and can’t learn through it so I gave up on Coursera a while back.
I came back to Coursera this year and found that the videos all have transcripts now. Was able to do the course I was interested in, in one work lunchtime a week.
I don’t actually believe that UC Berkeley was too strapped for cash to get closed captioning done. Whatever budget they allocated for the courses and videos, they could have allocated an extra 1% of that for captioning. If that 1% of the budget really made the marginal difference between not offering the courses and offering the courses, then they could have redistributed the budget to make slightly fewer courses and made the rest accessible.
They didn’t plan for accessibility and they’re being penalised for that. Seems completely reasonable to me.
…and the non-disabled (and many disabled) that were previously able to access free education from a quality institution are being penalized as well. Seems completely unreasonable to me.
Speakers can ramble and hem and haw and change directions mid-sentence or whatever and not have to worry about grammar or paragraph structure or, you know, generally conveying information in a means that benefits the consumer
For precisely these reasons I find video tutorials etc. nearly useless, and I have no vision/hearing/processing disorders to worry about. I find myself skipping through large blocks of the presentation to find the couple of pertinent points, and if something does not have a transcript (as many online interviews do not), then I will not waste my time watching it.
It’s amazing how out of a 30-45 minute video presentation, once you’ve skipped past the “yeah, well, okay now, I’m going to talk to you a bit about Thing but first I want to tell you this boring and irrelevant anecdote” parts, how little actual content there is: sometimes 5-10 minutes worth of actual information.
I learn more easily and retain information better from written, rather than verbal, sources.
This is especially good to automate compliance if people are required to have been exposed to certain information
That’s probably the main reason for them in work situations: it doesn’t matter if you had the sound muted and never watched the thing, we showed you the training video as required by HR so that’s our liability covered.
“I learn more easily and retain information better from written, rather than verbal, sources.”
So do I, but we seem to be in the minority. This is connected with my long standing puzzle about why the mass lecture survived the invention of the printing press.
Many years ago, when I finished writing my price theory text, I tried teaching according to your and my approach. I told the students “read the chapter for this week. Come in to class and ask me any questions you have about it. When nobody has any more questions the class is over.”
It seemed the obvious thing to do but the students didn’t like it so I switched back to a more conventional approach.
@David
It seems that there are different learning styles and pure text book learning only work for people with one learning style.
But even for those people, mass lectures provide the benefit of forcing a certain pacing through the material on people. A lot of people optimize their time to their immediate desires & demands placed upon them (what is often called being lazy) and need that.
Your request to the students to come up with questions doesn’t actually enforce engagement, since they probably don’t have any questions without reading the chapter, so there is an incentive to not read it. You were basically demanding them to create work for themselves, which doesn’t work very well with human psychology.
Many years ago, when I finished writing my price theory text, I tried teaching according to your and my approach.
Oh, I got into trouble with one particular lecturer in class when I did my usual thing of writing down a précis of her remarks as she was making them (because there was no way I was going to remember what she was talking about unless I wrote it down).
I have no idea what she thought I was doing – writing letters? doodling? skiving off in some way? But she stopped the lecture and called me up to explain what I was doing.
So I have a tiny bit of a grudge against the “hey, a talk is way cooler and more fun than boring old texts and reading stuff!” methods ever since 🙂
Interestingly, my learning style is that I cannot engage with complex material while making (extensive) notes. I did resort to that in one class and it was an indication that I could not follow the material (it worked out all right, in the end).
But it was very common for some students to do that and it seems strange that a teacher would call that out. Could she have been new to teaching? Or perhaps you write in a way that looks weird from a distance? 🙂
@Deiseach
Did I understood correctly? She called you out for taking notes?
Mind-boggling. My professors complain, in a very “youth these days” way, that students don’t anymore take notes in the class, just sit there listening.
@others
Unless the lecturer by some mystic magic manages to hit just right my sweet spot for engagement, I do need to write down something or my thoughts start to wander, either because stuff is boringly simple or because it’s so hard that I don’t understand enough.
The notes don’t usually make much sense for anyone else, and not even to me a couple of days after the class, so I throw them away. Except when it was the case of “too difficult”, then I try to use them as a support when studying from the books.
Now, I don’t learn much from the lectures either (when the material is too difficult, I could presumably benefit from the lecturer by asking questions, but I never can come up with any other questions than “WHY” “HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE” on the spot), and usually prefer the books for this reason, but “lectures and compulsory weekly exercises” is a major motivator to actually study the material on some schedule.
However, there is this one thing I’d wish teachers would experiment a little, if the class size permits it feasibly done: “Next week we will be covering the chapters X, Y and Z. Please read the material beforehand: you are required to email me at least one question about it (this can be detailed question about something you didn’t understand, or a simple request to cover some particular point more in detail).” I had one lecturer who did this, and liked it very much. In my experience, only very talented people can come up with the kind of useful and illuminating questions that benefit whole class during the lecture; mediocre ones like me need a bit more time to see what they exactly did not get and what they actually want explained.
“1) Video is cheaper (in terms of wage cost / time) to make. Speakers can ramble and hem and haw and change directions mid-sentence or whatever and not have to worry about grammar or paragraph structure or, you know, generally conveying information in a means that benefits the consumer (which takes additional time and effort).”
I both write books and teach courses. Converting two days worth of classes into a book chapter is quite a lot of work. Reciting the chapter would convey information less effectively than teaching the class in the usual way, not more–written and spoken English are different.
“This is like the joke about the economist and the $20 bill, in that it basically ignores empirical reality where discrimination of various forms was ridiculously widespread (see most of U.S. history).”
In the future, recommend you read articles before commenting on them.
The article points out that this was maintained only by various laws which banned companies from hiring minorities at lower prices.
I did read it. It’s how I was able to quote parts of it. I didn’t bother following all of the links given.
My point was that it’s going from a reasonable assertion – arbitrary discrimination makes hiring uncompetitive – to the broader assertions of markets never discriminating and if they do it’s justified because of traits of the population being discriminated against (and now even that discrimination in hiring is only maintained by government laws).
Maybe I’m just too dumb to see it, but if I say “I don’t hire black people because I think they’re statistically lower average IQ,” or “they’re more likely to steal,” that still seems like discrimination. As opposed to saying, “I tested this potential hire and didn’t hire them because they did poorly on the test.” You can maybe see where this defense made me eyeroll, especially when the perceived implication is “markets don’t allow discrimination, that’s government’s fault, and if someone does discriminate it’s because the group probably deserved it.” The comparison to college degrees seems apt – we rejected you because you didn’t have the right degree, even though we could have tested you, but that might have cost us a little extra money, so it’s easier just to reject everyone who didn’t go to Stanford.
That’s without even getting into discrimination due to market demand, like not hiring certain types for front-facing positions. These days it seems to be mostly (hopefully) limited to people with weird (i.e. foreign or ethnic) names or bad teeth, but it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t prevalent during Jim Crow and such. Or the other type where the “statistical” discrimination isn’t based on careful calculations of the latest social science research and its implications for long-term hiring costs, but just some manager or HR person going “lazy good-for-nothings, try not to hire ’em.”
This defense aside though, I’ll take the hint and also refrain from commenting in the future. I don’t really want to stir up trouble here, and that seems to be the direction things are headed.
@Zombielicious:
Frankly, I would prefer that you stick around.
I really don’t see why your posting would or should actually “cause trouble”. Your comments have added to the conversation.
Scott’s statement here is one datapoint, not a ban-hammer.
Seconded.
Thirded heartily. You are a consistently high-quality poster, and I would miss your input.
@Zombielicious
An issue is that the testing can be very costly. So from the employers’ perspective, it can be economically rational to discriminate if a stereotype is true often enough. Then the result is a smaller pool of potential candidates, but with higher average quality.
A solution to this isn’t necessarily the banning of this practice, which just incentivizes companies to do it covertly, but you can also try to make the stereotype less true or (if there is a perception-truth mismatch), educate employers that their stereotypes are less true than they assume.
I would argue that the degree is a test. All testing is imperfect. There are pretty much always going to be people who fail the test who would make good employees and vice versa. I don’t see why you consider an imperfect test done by the company to be valid, but depending on external testing by a university to be wrong. I see these on a continuum.
I would also argue that a Stanford degree is a multi-year test, which makes it fairly high-quality. A similarly extensive test by an employer would not just cost ‘a little extra money,’ but would be really expensive.
I would argue that a major reason for this is actually that people want to hire people that are not lower class. Bad teeth are a lower class indicator and many names that are called ‘ethnic’ are actually lower class signifiers within an ethnic group.
Michelle Obama and her daughters are (considered) black, yet their first names are not those that I would expect to result in name-based discrimination, unlike lower class black (or white) names.
“I tested this potential hire and didn’t hire them because they did poorly on the test.”
But the test doesn’t say if the employee actually smart – could be illiterate, or the test is a bad copy, or the answers were scored backwards, or the employee didn’t go to the testing room. All these are possible reasons for the result (“Applicant is smart?: NO”) to be incorrect. We do recognize, though, that the test offers objective evidence of “smart” that trends very well with the employer’s actual experience of how “smart” candidates do as employees. So because of the high correlation between the test result and actual performance, the time & money invested in testing is a good trade-off.
The objection to using race as a test for “smart” should be, imo, sourced from two errors: either race doesn’t track at all with “smart”, or race doesn’t track well with smart – or, at least, doesn’t track well once the time & effort of determining race has been spent.
Whether or not race tracks with “smart” is pretty well established in this country – there’s a persistent difference in test scores and job performance across groups.
And, unfortunately, the effort for determining race is pretty minimal. For a test as simple and easy as looking at a person’s skin, the correlation between race and “smart” doesn’t have to be all that high in order for it to be atleast somewhat useful.
The arguement from the market side is that the “what race” test for “smart” is crude enough to lead to rejecting large numbers of “smart” candidates, and accepting non-trivial numbers of “not-smart” candidates. This is a resource pool that advances in “smart” detection technology –
– which would be more expensive than just looking at a person, but most things are –
– could take advantage of. And those companies that did not innovate and adapt their candidate selection process slowly fell behind, because their labor force wasn’t as good.
TL:DR – using the eyeball to determine who is smart vs using a paper IQ test is just as discriminatory, it’s just a lot more imprecise. So long as one is cool with the selection process being non-random, one is accepting discrimination. The push should be for more accurate & efficient discrimination that focuses on cheaply identifying mismatches between *true* candidate skills/ability and *true* job requirements. Hammering employeers for making accurate assessments of mismatches is bad. Letting the market hammer employers for making inaccurate assessments of mismatches is better.
Assisting employee candidates in identifying job market opportunities and honing their skills to match those openings, even better.
@keranih
Being smart is actually merely one of the things that employers care about and not necessarily the most important. McDonalds merely needs their employees to be capable of following their procedures. Beyond that, extra intelligence may actually make employees perform worse in those jobs (or leave sooner).
They probably care a lot more that people actually turn up for their shift, have decent people skills, etc, than being smart.
It’s pretty clear that certain subcultures make much better employees for certain jobs. For example, in Europe, the native people who want to work for agricultural salaries tend to have much lower work ethic on average than Eastern Europeans. Somehow this discussion is often limited to race, when it is much broader. But the actual truth often disagrees with the tribalist dogma.
On second look, you are right and I am wrong. I framed my reference in the link to carefully say that this was one factor, but the Adam Smith article, which I assume you’re referring to, did make it sound like the one and only thing. I’m sorry I was a jerk to you.
You can refrain from commenting or not as you wish.
Thanks. I figured you were replying in part to what I’d added to Seth’s thread, which was poorly stated and unnecessary, and it probably gets annoying to put in years of work into making a good blog and get constantly criticized for favoring one side or another. So I didn’t really want to contribute to any of that. No hard feelings then, anyway.
By the way, testing of applicants by firms can be very dangerous legally in the US. If you can’t prove that your test directly measures skills needed for the position, then you could well be charged with discrimination against a protected class. The lawyers would just have to show that the test had a lower pass rate by some protected class, which is probably true for almost any test.
About 15 years ago, I needed to hire an accountant for my firm. Since the job required manipulating thousands of line of data in an Excel workbook, I set up a test for all the applicants to take, to show that they could manipulate lots of data in an electronic spreadsheet. The HR Department said I couldn’t give the test, because it hadn’t been “validated,” and we could be accused of discrimination. They said I could send them down to the State Employment office to take one of their “validated” Excel tests. I declined when I looked at these tests, which asked questions about 10 lines or so of data.
It is true that the HR Department was totally dumb, since my test was much more valid for the job than the one from the Employment office. Nevertheless, I am sure they were told by our legal counsel that they could not allow home-made tests because of the danger of lawsuits. I don’t think our legal counsel was incorrect in their judgment.
It does seem to be true that any firm can require a college degree for jobs that clearly have no bearing on the job performed, but apparently the same rules don’t apply for education requirements as do for tests.
The law explicitly mentions testing together with degrees. And yet…
But in some parts of finance, it’s basically standard practice to interview with “brainteasers” that have no relevance to the job. e.g. the very first question in my very first post-graduation job interview was the camel crossing the desert problem, which has no direct relevance to any job anywhere.
Everyone knows this is a standard thing to do (I’ve even been given written tests of this form, again given by very large well-known institutions), and everyone knows it’s effectively an IQ test. And also, in the end, everyone knows that the people who actually get these jobs are almost exclusively white and Asian, and mostly male too.
So is something different about these jobs? or are banks in legal danger, again?
I am a Software Engineer, programmer, developer, what-have-you.
One of our standard questions was a logic problem that would take 30 to 45 minutes to work through, despite being fairly simple.
Most everyone got the problem wrong to begin with, which then allowed us to work with them to solve the problem. It was a very good proxy for “can you work to solve a coding problem in our team”.
The one person who got the problem right off the bat didn’t get the job. Because when we went on to a second problem that he didn’t figure out immediately, it became really hard to work with him to understand how to get the right answer.
So, while it certainly was some portion an IQ test, it was much more than that.
My guess is that no one has caught up to them yet, and for some reason their employment lawyers haven’t shut down these tests. I can imagine the lawyers emphatically telling the finance folks not to do this, but the arrogant finance people thinking they know better. I am not a lawyer, but my guess is there will be a lawsuit about this some day.
Whoa! What happened? That Anonymous is me, I have no idea how it got posted like that. And it doesn’t give me the option to edit either.
Edit: And the gravitar is slightly different too.
How hard is it to add closed captioning to videos? It seems like it would be very easy to do, and volunteers would also be readily willing to contribute, and it seemed like most of the MOOC sites already had some form of it (EdX and Coursera at least, iirc).
Do note that the MOOCs in question are Berkeley courses *on EdX*. The vast majority of EdX, involving many many other universities, is compliant, so there’s something about Berkeley that’s setting it apart – perhaps budget, perhaps internal university politics.
Also the DOJ has been telling Berkeley to get its act together on this for years. This did not come out of the blue.
Is the content on EdX compliant? How do you know?
What do you mean by compliant? Do you mean compliant with the law or compliant to the standard that is required of public institutions, such as Berkeley? That DOJ has not complained about EdX is a sign that it is compliant with the law, but the law for free services from private institutions is much more lax. It does charge for some purposes, but I think that covers very little of its material.
Have you compared the closed captions on Berkeley courses to those from other schools? Are they inferior?
The DOJ letter answers some of these questions. In particular, some of Berkeley’s EdX videos lacked captions altogether, and the majority of Berkeley’s YouTube videos had automatically generated captions, which were frequently “inaccurate and incomplete”.
Also: the DOJ has, in fact, gone after EdX. Last year, the DOJ and EdX reached a settlement requiring EdX to improve the accessibility of its website and provide assistance to universities in creating accessible content.
the majority of Berkeley’s YouTube videos had automatically generated captions, which were frequently “inaccurate and incomplete”.
Oh, that’s probably understating it; has anyone ever tried turning on Youtube automatic captioning when a foreign-language video with no subtitles is playing? Amazing fun but not one bit of resemblance with what is being spoken.
OK, I forgot that the inadequate captions were automatically generated, so it’s not much of a judgement call, rather it’s real captions or nothing. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether EdX videos all have handmade captions. MIT and Harvard have been sued (not directly by the DOJ).
I did not know that the DOJ had gone after EdX. The consent decree seems to say that DOJ claims that because EdX accepts any money at all, it cannot do anything inaccessible, but EdX disputes this. But this is about the website, which is necessary for people to do the paying things, so this does not address whether whether the DOJ would let them give away caption-less videos.
> It’s also making a big, unjustified leap from some examples of markets punishing discrimination to the conclusions “we can be pretty sure markets are picking only on the criteria we want them to use”
I’m seeing this sentiment expressed multiple places in this post’s comments, and I don’t really understand it (note that I truncated the quote because I do somewhat agree with criticism of the latter statement). To me, it’s valuable information that entirely irrational discrimination like “I won’t hire Arabs because I hate them” is punished by markets and doesn’t stick around very well, and this does mean that markets are only optimizing for variables we want them to be optimizing for. This doesn’t let statistical discrimination off the hook: optimizing for the right variables doesn’t mean you’re doing so in the right way. The criticism of statistical discrimination on certain axes is that it’s too blunt and the collateral damage is too high. It’s still something of a societal ill that has second-order consequences, but it’s also a far, far broader problem than racism or sexism (e.g., credentialism or using one’s class-derived accent to assess their work quality), and a far trickier line to draw. In my moral framework at least, this approaches a collective-punishment: from the perspective of the applicant, he’s being reduced to his skin color and punished for the actions of those who share his skin color.
I agree that the article as written does seem to be pretty nonchalant about statistical discrimination, but I feel like here of all places, people are comfortable with absorbing the useful (in this case, uncontroversially factual) parts of any given article without blindly buying in 100% to the perspective taken by the link. Scott’s blurb for that link doesn’t say anything about racism not being a real problem.
There is a lot more to making a course accessible than just captioning videos.
I don’t know about video, but in the past I had to do work to make a fairly complicated website meet accessibility guidelines and it was a major pain in the neck.
Consider one of Scott’s graph heavy posts, this one for example, how long would it take you to write up descriptions for each of those images that would be considered an equivalent substitute?
Navigation and layout constitute another major pain point. You need to essentially design a parallel UI and embed special tags throughout your website to so that a screen reader reads the site in a comprehensible order and can make navigation through it possible. Of course if your site looks like something out of the pre-tables era (never mind css) than everything just works, but if you design a UI like that you’ll be out of a job.
I’m ambivalent about whether we should or shouldn’t have these laws, but no one should fool themselves about the total cost across the economy of having them.
Yep, there are lots of things that go into making a website accessible, and it can be a major pain if the design didn’t have accessibility in mind in the first place.
I think good practice would be to design with the low-hanging fruit of accessibility in mind (proper headers for site navigation, alt text, video captioning, captioned hyperlinks, good color contrast), and stuff beyond that should be dealt with on a case by case basis.
Isn’t the whole point of css that you could put the special tags for the screen readers and then do something pretty with it anyway?
Pretty design is supposed to work independently from the content. Making a design friendly for the disabled will also make it easier to render (less likely that a browser bug will mess it up), easier to test (most test frameworks work similarly to screen readers) and easier to document (the special tags themselves add information about the intent of each part of the site)
If your customers really would fire you for following best practices, maybe it’s a good thing that you were forced to follow them by regulations. Then you could say it wasn’t your fault that it took time and effort to do it properly.
I’m sorry but this is naïve nonsense. The dreams that are separation of presentation and content, progressive enhancement, the semantic web, and so on have never been achievable without sacrificing looks, functionality, time / cost to market, performance, and generally all of the above.
These “best practices” are promulgated by people that have never built anything non-trivial. Go look at amazon.com, apple.com, or news.google.com. Those are actual best practices.
@brad
However, your regular MOOC does not need to be a very complicated website. Certainly nothing that the level of amazon webpage.
The main difficulty would be “adequate text replacements” for graphics and plots, in many cases, I have no idea how that could be done.
It’s not hard, and it costs very little (mainly the cost of reviewing someone else’s work). YouTube lets you crowdsource it. If the channel owner enables that, that is.
I know it’s fun to get really worked up about the costs of accessibility (like that thing about any building you renovate needing to be brought into full ADA compliance, so no one renovates anything), but maybe just this once we can do an end run around all that and just fix the problem?
The only source for this month’s boilerplate “crazy North Korea!” story is Radio Free Asia, which means an evidential value of close to zero. Actual DPRK propaganda is also cited, but only on the rather bland matter of their disliking being condemned by the UN.
Yeah, I have extremely little confidence in most of these ‘You wouldn’t believe what N-Korea did today’ stories.
An extremely closed country + a main source of information about that country being another country that is at war with them = disinformation heaven.
This. Propaganda about North Korea is only slightly more reliable than propaganda from North Korea. And less entertaining, but that may just be a matter of taste.
“Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
Ya, that was a shitty little sarky response by a bunch of people who’s attitude is “who needs science, we already know all the answers”.
I mean, there’s all these studies into “obvious” things where we already know the answer!! we should just not bother with studies!
There’s a relevant lesswrong:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/
To build on this:
For years in A&E, patients with serious head injury were often treated with steroids, in the reasonable belief that this would reduce swelling, and so reduce crushing damage to the brain, inside the fixed-volume box of your skull.
The logic seems almost as solid as using parachutes to prevent fall damage.
Then they actually did a trial, the CRASH trial.
It was a famously hard fought battle with ethics committees.
It turned out that steroids were killing patients.
This is a way that rationalism has turned me into a (more?) annoying person. When someone says “that was obvious” or “that isn’t suprising”, I’ll say “Really?” and ask them whether they really would have predicted it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of snark. But this shouldn’t be interpreted – as Murphy does below – as making a claim, “We shouldn’t do RCTs into obvious things because we already know the answers”; it is actually making a more subtle and interesting point (still snarky though – this is the BMJ Christmas issue where the snark is free-range and delicious).
There is a specific problem in evidence-based medicine (EBM) where trials – in the sense that a hardcore EBM practitioner would accept – are sometimes impossible to conduct. This could be because of ethics, because you can’t blind one or both arms of the trial or because you couldn’t possibly find volunteers who would accept being in the control arm. The genius of the parachute paper is that it hits all three of these objections and more, but for a real-world example consider surgical intervention for knee pain; it is hard to find a surgeon who thinks that their particular technique doesn’t work (so you can’t ethically conduct a trial because no surgeon is in equipoise), you can’t possibly blind a surgeon to the technique they’re assigned to (nor blind the patient to whether they have had surgery or not, unless you make potentially scarring incisions for no clinical reason) and no patient with knee pain is going to accept enrollment in an RCT where they might possibly get no treatment when they can get surgery on the NHS just by asking for it. And yet, we have no idea if the intervention is effective at relieving joint pain, let along effective considering the side-effects or whether such an intervention is cost-effective.
The only practical response to this is to base your clinical consensus off a worse standard of evidence than would satisfy an EBM purist in these cases. In the parachute paper, they’re basically daring you to say that you wouldn’t – daring you to say that even in the case of parachutes you’d demand an RCT. But this leads to a huge and unacknowledged problem with EBM; we basically have to give it up when it gets difficult, and nobody has thought about what ‘difficult’ means in this context. It means that we have excellent evidence regarding the efficacy of drugs (which are easy to trial), but basically no EBM-approved evidence regarding surgical techniques, which are almost certainly where the low-hanging fruit is in terms of survival rates and overall morbidity improvement.
To circle back a little, the parachute question is clearly silly; we would never want to do a trial into whether parachutes work. But there are a lot of questions where the trials are only a little bit more difficult to conduct than normal, and intelligent people might disagree in good faith about whether such a question – given extensive non-randomised evidence – has been ‘settled’ with respect to funding / clinical consensus etc.
A specific and live issue around this is around interventions for long-term cancer survival. There have been a few heroic attempts to get a cohort of cancer patients randomised to two kinds of treatment for the rest of their lives (say, 20 years) but for obvious reasons and through no fault of the authors these studies tend to be of terrible quality. However we (in the UK) have amazing databases on cancer survivorship relative to the kind of intervention you were picking up your prescription for thanks to the more-or-less joined up way the NHS operates. Are the purists right that the RCT evidence supersedes the cohort / database evidence, or should we say that the ‘pyramid of evidence’ is not as important as EBM purists would advocate and we accept huge cohort studies can be better than small but otherwise well-conducted RCTs?
That’s not to say that – in general – we should prefer low-quality non-comparative studies to massive well-designed RCTs. Nor, as Murphy has interpreted the paper, to say expert opinion will supersede a systematic review of the published literature in all cases. But it does highlight a problem which EBM advocates seem a little unwilling to talk about, in quite a sophisticated (if trollish) way
I’m not so sure that was the authors view. Look at their publishing history. Retrospective. Retrospective. Retrospective.
This is not someone who’s become frustrated with the problems of running good RCT’s.
Sure, the charitable way of looking at it is to treat it as someone addressing the practical and ethical problems of applying the RCT model to gain the highest quality evidence about some issues where running an RCT isn’t practical.
The uncharitable way of looking at it is a snarky little guy who honestly believes that simply looking at uncontrolled outcome data is better because he’s such an expert and knows the truth anyway and all this crap with publishing is just a ritual to get people to accept his obvious rightness.
Great comment. I’m not sure where the authors’ intent lies, but I’m not sure it matters.
The point is that this provides, by way of absurdity, a platform to discuss these broader issues in evidence-based medicine. Sure, it can be used to derail the conversation, but it also provides a framework to talk about what’s desirable and possible.
“There is a specific problem in evidence-based medicine (EBM) where trials – in the sense that a hardcore EBM practitioner would accept – are sometimes impossible to conduct. ”
Then you talk to me (or folks in my field). People have thought about predicting RCT results from observational data for a very long time.
Have they, though? From the article:
It sounds like Trump noticed/was told about some problems with the speakers in the hall, and concluded from that that that there was an elaborate conspiracy sabotaging his TV performance.
1. It’s not strange that Trump would blame the microphone, as he merely heard the speakers and was unaware that TV viewers had proper sound. So he didn’t have the information to determine whether the microphone or something else was at fault. If the speakers worked correctly for Clinton, his assessment that the microphone was broken was not illogical.
2. Audience response is a factor in how a candidate is perceived and it’s thus not strange that Trump would be upset if he felt that the malfunction caused adverse responses by the audience compared to everything functioning correctly.
Of course, it’s a little paranoid to argue that the malfunction was intentional, rather that just a malfunction.
I don’t think that the malfunctioning microphone was a deal-breaker in either direction, and I doubt it was anything but an equipment malfunction, but it is pretty unfortunate that it happened (to any candidate). You’re leaving out the feedback loops involved in debate performance, confidence, etc that are affected by the local environment, is the only one the participants are actually exposed to while debating. Especially in a forum full of crosstalk and interruptions, I can’t imagine my performance wouldn’t be significantly affected by my opponents volume in the room being louder than mine. Though of course, I’m not a politician and have little to no practice with loud, public, verbal confrontations, so this effect would probably be mitigated to some extent.
Yup, Merv was huge. The whole of Central Asia was pretty important for a long time and possibly counts as an independent origin of civilization. And during it’s golden age around the 1000s you had things like astronomers advancing the state of the art and speculating about life on planets orbiting other stars. The intellecual orthodoxy and mysticism stifled science. Then the Mongols came and killed all the city dwellers they didn’t ship back to Mongolia and most of the overland trade with China shifted to the Indian ocean.
But if you’d like to learn more I can recommend “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane” which I recently finished reading. It was (puts on sunglasses) enlightening.
Here’s a remarkable quote from Michael Axworthy’s Empire of the Mind about the destruction of Merv:
Another military / rocket-science question: what has changed, technologically, that makes hypersonic weapons a new concern? Is there any connection to SpaceX’s recent success using supersonic retropropulsion to land reusable first stage rockets?
So the trouble with super or hyper sonic weapons (I’m talking missiles here, not more exotic stuff like railguns) is it takes a lot more fuel to make a missile go that fast, which means you have either much shorter range or a much larger missile. The Tomahawk might be slow, but you can cram 100 of them onto a destroyer. Something like this has 50% more payload, but weighs 4 times as much and flies half as far.
That said, going faster gives your opponent less time to detect, track, and then evade or destroy your missile. If anti-missile systems are pretty crappy, and until recently most of them has been, then going faster doesn’t raise the probability of kill (PK) all that much. Say your enemy’s anti-missile system has a 1% chance to shoot down your missile per shot and fires once a second. If you take 10 seconds to get there they have about a 9.5% chance of shooting you down. If you go twice as fast and they only get 5 shots, you shave that to about 4.5%, not a huge gain. But if their system has a 10% chance, going twice as fast cuts them from a 65% PK to 40%. And that math actually understates the effect, because some parts of the kill chain take fixed amounts of time (e.g. if tracking you always takes 2 seconds, then going from 10 to 5 means their odds go from 56% (8 shots) to 27% (3)) and faster moving weapons are harder to shoot down. Now that anti-missile systems are finally getting to be reasonably reliable, speed is becoming more attractive.
All that said, the rise of super and hypersonic weapons has been predicted before, and not come to pass.
You’re mixing types of missiles. Things like Tomahawk have been at least somewhat vulnerable for decades. The big advantage of speed for anti-ship missiles is that it significantly increases the range at which you need to shoot down the missile to keep the debris from hitting you. On most modern anti-ship missiles, the warhead is mostly there to distribute the fuel throughout the ship, so that the resulting fire kills it. This is why systems like RAM and ESSM have appeared to supplement Phalanx. The problem with fast missiles is that you have fewer missiles for a given amount of money, and the missiles you do have are bigger and easier to detect.
Faster anti-ship missiles also reduce the time you have to detect, target, and intercept, so they do have a higher chance to hit.
The thing about hypersonics like scramjets that is particularly attractive is that they can theoretically have the long range of subsonic cruise missiles with the lethality of short-range rockets
I cite the tomahawk more as an example of a missile people have heard of than anything else, though they are working on an asm version, or were last I checked.
They originally had an ASM version (the TASM), but it went away because targeting long-range ASMs is really hard, and after the fall of the USSR, the land-attack version was perfectly adequate for taking out their fleet. The latest Tactical Tomahawk is supposed to have a seeker capable of hitting ships, and modern communications might solve some of the problems that killed the TASM.
I was pointing out that even the P-700 isn’t immune to defenses, and hasn’t been for quite a while (if ever), while subsonics (Harpoon being the canonical example) have had effective defenses since the late 70s/early 80s. Hypersonic missiles are a rather different ballgame.
1. The first generation of effective ballistic missile defense systems is narrowly optimized against ballistic missiles during their midcourse coast phase, and would probably fail against a maneuvering hypersonic boost-glide missile. This is unlikely to be an enduring advantage for the hypersonics; ballistic plus decoys is almost certainly more likely to get through than maneuvering hypersonics against a defense that is designed to deal with both. But military decisionmakers can sometimes get narrowly focused on the next narrow advantage over an adversary.
2. Particularly in the United States, there are a lot of hypersonics engineers who have given up hope on anyone ever hiring them to build a hypersonic spaceplane to fly into outer space, on account of that plan never works. Having only a Mach-umptydozen hammer, their livelihood depends on finding a problem they can convince people is vaguely nail-like for them to come in and fix. Strategic weapons is such a problem, and hypersonic systems make for very sexy Powerpoint.
3. Specifically in the United States, there’s a clear demand for the ability to press a button and have a precision-guided conventional munition strike some terrorist headquarters or whatnot within the hour. We have of course various ballistic missiles that can strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour, but these are generally understood to carry nuclear warheads and there is an understandable fear that if we launch one at say Pyongyang, someone in Beijing will see this as a Big Fiery Arrow of Nuclear Death pointed at them and overreact. Since “everybody knows” that it is the ballistic missiles that have nuclear warheads, there is a persistent claim that we can freely launch hypersonic boost-glide missiles at our enemies and nobody else will be threatened because look, it says on our website that they only have conventional warheads and are only used against terrorists and rogue states and whatnot.
I am not making this up.
And no, there’s no connection to SpaceX’s work in hypersonic retropropulsion. That’s very narrowly focused on a poorly-understood aspect of how to slow down at hypersonic speeds, and one of particular interest to people trying to land on Mars. Doesn’t apply when the plan is to deliberately crash into the ground at the highest practical speed.
> Since “everybody knows” that it is the ballistic missiles that have nuclear warheads, there is a persistent claim that we can freely launch hypersonic boost-glide missiles at our enemies and nobody else will be threatened because look, it says on our website that they only have conventional warheads and are only used against terrorists and rogue states and whatnot.
This is uncharitable. I’m not a fan of the prompt global strike idea, but a hypersonic glide weapon A, has a a very different trajectory than a pure ballistic missile and B, the reason people know we don’t put nuclear weapons on them is the same reason people know we don’t put nuclear weapons on the B-1 bomber, treaty restrictions on nuclear capable delivery vehicles and a mutual inspection regime.
Except that,
A: There is no treaty allowing mutual inspection of hypersonic cruise or boost-glide missiles, and
B: There is no treaty allowing China to inspect anything, and
C: The people who are proposing the US build hypersonic weapons for conventional strike are very much not proposing or supporting new arms control treaties allowing foreign inspection of their toys, and
D: The mutual inspection regimes are for ensuring that peacetime force levels do not exceed treaty limitations, not to provide meaningful guarantees in wartime.
Everybody knows we have about five thousand nuclear warheads in bunkers at Kirtland that are never inspected, and everybody assumes that if we care we can slip a few of those into any missile or bomber we want on short notice. Nobody who is surprised to find a hypersonic missile – or a B-1 bomber – flying their direction a the start of some snap crisis, is going to conclude “we inspected those six months ago, so they can’t possibly be nuclear, so tell the premier to go back to sleep”.
In the case of the B-1s, nobody much cares. Hypersonic cruise missiles, they’ll care. See, e.g., the Russian reaction to the Aegis deployment in Poland – and the distinct lack of any serious proposals to allow Russia to inspect them and verify that they aren’t nuclear.
>A: There is no treaty allowing mutual inspection of hypersonic cruise or boost-glide missiles, and
The arms treaties specify what you can build, not what you can’t. building nuclear capable hypersonic missiles would be a violation.
>Everybody knows we have about five thousand nuclear warheads in bunkers at Kirtland that are never inspected, and everybody assumes that if we care we can slip a few of those into any missile or bomber we want on short notice.
the missiles and bomb bays of nuclear vehicles are deliberately made different shapes from conventional, precisely to preclude this sort of thing. and while the warheads themselves are not inspected, the launch vehicles certainly are.
Of which clause of which “arms treaty”? I’m pretty sure I’ve read them all by now, and I’ve just reread the INF and New START treaties to make sure I haven’t missed anything. They do not say what you think they say.
I’m pretty sure that was not the case for the AGM-86B/C cruise missiles, the BGM-109A/B/C cruise missiles, and the B61 hydrogen bomb fits on the same bomb rack units as the Mark 84 conventional bomb.
Only if the launch vehicles are ICBMs, SLBMs, or heavy bombers.
I believe you are confusing current U.S. Government practice, not subject to foreign inspection, with verifiable treaty requirement. If you are going to claim otherwise, I am going to ask you to specify which clause of which treaty you believe applies.
Good answer. And consistent with what I gleaned from engaging on Twitter with a foreign policy / military strategy academic specializing in air power.
I remain confused as to whether one should *expect* certain types of rocketry advances to materially alter the strategic calculus of nuclear war. If in fact said calculus rests upon potentially falsifiable properties of (only) ballistic missiles, then color me skeptical about geopolitical stability, since it seems to me that we are in a veritable golden age of technological innovation in rocketry, albeit driven by non-military motivations. even on a floating platform
My understanding is that decoy discrimination is basically a solved problem. By the time you build a decoy that is capable of fooling all of the systems, you’re better off either fitting it with a warhead or leaving it off and throwing the missile faster. Care to elaborate as to why this isn’t the case?
Exoatmospheric midcourse decoy discrimination is not at all a solved problem. It is often an overstated problem, e.g. when you hear someone talking about thousands of mylar balloons. But it is probably possible to produce decoys weighing no more than ~5% of the mass of an actual warhead that cannot be remotely distinguished from an actual warhead. If these decoys are deployed from within an intense chaff/flare cloud to conceal the precise kinematics of deployment, the defense is probably stuck with engaging 5-10 times as many targets as there are warheads. If there are any technologies capable of changing this, they are either TRL-1 or -2 handwavium, or they are sufficiently classified that we are not talking about them here, and I’m not betting on the deep black boffins having solved this one.
This is specific to the exoatmospheric midcourse phase of a long range, purely ballistic missile. While the missile is under thrust, decoys can be trivially distinguished by their relative plume signatures. Once they begin reentry, anything much lighter than an actual warhead will be stripped away. And that covers pretty much the entire trajectory of a hypersonic boost-glide weapon.
Fair enough. I’ve heard that exoatmospheric decoy discrimination isn’t as hard as you make it out to be from people who are probably a bit better-placed to know, but I’m not 100% certain they’re right. Obviously light on specifics, but even the peak of ballistic missile trajectories still have detectable atmosphere, and I think that IR got involved as well.
Hypersonic weapons (basically cruise missiles which can fly over Mach 5) become a concern once they are technically possible. Some of the pioneering work on this was done only in the past few decades including the X-43 program. Their main advantage is that as flying aircraft, they have a much smaller heat signature upon deployment, and they fly at a much lower altitude making detection more difficult and providing less early warning.
The SpaceX stuff seems to be completely unrelated. It’s about using small thrusters to generate a gas cushion to increase air resistance and thus aerobrake much faster/safely when arriving at Mars. I think this is to substantially reduce the fuel used for breaking on arrival and thus bring down costs.
Better engines to make it easy to reach hypersonic speeds (the Meteor and Brahmos use ramjets), and better guidance packages to maneuver at those speeds.
There might also be an arms-race thing, where nobody needed to build a huge complicated ballistic missile and glider to deliver their payload until missile defenses got good enough to shoot down regular antiship missiles.
I think SpaceX’s work is unrelated, because they’re working on landing a rocket slowly and safely, but missile work tends to involve landing your rocket as quickly and unpredictably as possible. They might build on similar foundational research (how things behave at very very high speeds), but it looks like SpaceX’s work is specifically about weird things that happen when your rocket exhaust is pointed into a supersonic windstream.
Hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicles are interesting for ballistic missiles because, not only are they harder to intercept, but they’re potentially a threat to large mobile targets, namely aircraft carriers (and other capital ships). The large US fleet of nuclear carriers is essential to American force projection, and currently the are a very hard target. But if you can make them vulnerable, they are too valuable to risk. If an adversary (mostly we’re talking about China here) were able to threaten US carriers in the Western Pacific, that would be a game changer (currently China has no blue-water assets capable of seriously challenging the US Navy toe-to-toe).
Hypersonics will also be more accurate on fixed hardened targets – prompt precision strike with conventional weapons is also a big deal for the American military, as others have noted.
As anti-cruise and anti-ballistic missile systems get better and more widespread, maneuvering hypersonics are kind of the next logical step on the ratcheting scale of defense vs. offense.
A naive question coming out of MilSF: how easy is it to saturate the carrier group point defense? If you launch a few hundreds of AS missiles simultaneously, will it be able to deal with them?
… No.
Carriers are not meant to be used against anything that could be classed as a power- That flashing neon sign you see floating over carrier groups saying “Drop nuke here” is one reason, but also, they’re just too vulnerable to mass missile or competent sub-marine attackers.
@Lumifer
The two halves of your question have different answers.
Hard. AEGIS has made a tremendous difference in the missile defense capability of CVBGs since it was introduced. Previously, you only had, IIRC, ~4 guidance channels per missile ship, and maybe 4 missile ships. Now, you still have 4 missile ships, but each can have a dozen or more missiles in the air at once. Also, modern missiles are a lot more accurate.
Probably not. But launching that many missiles is not easy. China might be able to do it once, or twice at the outside. The same for Russia. That still leaves us with a lot of carriers. Nobody else can do so.
I’m not too worried about the carriers. Keeping track of a carrier group at sea is not as easy as you might think. They’ll shoot down any in-atmosphere snoopers, and satellites aren’t persistent enough (and really expensive). Ships move while the AsBM/AsHM is inbound. The carrier you thought you killed? Actually a Dutch tanker. Or maybe a destroyer with ECM gear operating.
The AMaRV was quite similar to the recent Chinese anti-ship missiles, and it was developed in 1979, so technologically this has been possible for a long time.
I think the issue is more specifically about China. The US strategy in the area was developed when the Chinese military was very weak (because they didn’t have a big budget). In the the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, the U.S. could place aircraft carriers near the coast of China as a demonstration because China had no weapons which could target them. Now the Chinese military can afford to buy expensive weapon systems, including ballistic missiles, so area denial becomes a concern.
But if you look at the Soviet union instead, then they always had area denial capabilities, so perhaps the anomaly is how soft a target China used to be.
There’s a lot more that goes into such things than just the aerodynamics of the reentry vehicle. The big problem for an AsBM is targeting. Finding the target (harder than it sounds against a carrier group in the open sea), getting that datum back to the AsBM before it’s totally stale, and then acquiring the correct target after the missile reaches the area is nontrivial. The Soviets talked of AsBMs in the 60s, but I believe that was either merely talk, or involved firing SLBMs with really big nuclear warheads at places like Gibraltar.
Also, note that the Chinese are just now reaching the point the Russians were at in the 80s, and the US has moved on a long ways from there.
Is the targeting problem different for hypersonic and non-hypersonic missiles? From what I read, China is going to rely on a combination of radar satellites and airplanes to locate the carrier groups. That’s what the Soviet Union used in the 1980s (RORSAT + suicidal Tu-95 scout missions) to support their non-ballistic anti-ship missiles.
There’s several different problems. First, the number of missiles the Chinese can throw vs the number the Russians could, with the resulting effects on the number of missiles likely to find the right target. I don’t have good numbers on the DF-21D, but you’re looking at tens of missiles, not the hundreds the Soviets could put out.
Second, the US has gotten better at self-defense. Yes, the DF-21D is faster than the Kh-22, but AEGIS is fantastically more powerful and the latest SM-2 variants are a lot better than those of the 80s. Third is time lag. The Kh-22 had a maximum time of flight of about 6 minutes, and, IIRC, was updated by the aircraft radar just before launch. The DF-21 is at least a minute longer, and that doesn’t count the time lag to get data from the sensors to the missile battery.
“Dan” on MR says exactly what I was going to say about the decline of Bowling:
“Dan September 17, 2016 at 3:57 am
Ceiling effects. Bowling doesn’t work well as a highly competitive spectator sport because the best bowlers are so close to the ceiling of optimal performance on any given roll. As bowlers get better (through training, technology, etc.), the game gets more monotonous. In contrast, improving NFL players make more exciting, spectacular plays. With the exception of field goal kickers, who (much like bowlers) make <40 yard field goals with boring regularity."
So in boardgaming, there are some games where most of your effort is against other players and others where you play against the board. Take vanilla settlers of catan, or this game. In both, your goal is to build up a resource extraction network. The other players’ decisions certainly influence you, but opportunities to undo the work of others is limited and the game is mostly about exploiting the board to its fullest in relative independence. Compare that to a game like chess where the other player is the entirety of the challenge.
You’re absolutely right that there’s a skill ceiling problem, but the reason is because bowling is a game played against the board (the goal is to knock over pins) not other players (the same is true of field goal kickers, actually). Football remains interesting not because it gets more spectacular (rising skill levels makes the game less variable), but because any rise in skill level raises the difficulty level of the game (your team is better, but so is the other team). With games you play against the board, the difficulty level is fixed.
Golf is the counter-example of a game played “against the board”, but still a viable spectator sport with lucrative endorsement deals. Of course the skill ceiling is higher.
Hasn’t golf made courses harder/longer in the recent past to address these types of issues?
Good point, though, as Lumifer says, it’s conceivable to have an “against the board” game with a higher ceiling, like Golf. Presumably we’re not close to the point where the best players score holes-in-one all the time. Gymnastics, figure skating, and similar sports seem not to suffer the ceiling effect so much because there’s more potential to e. g., invent a new move. With Bowling a strike is a strike and you can’t do any better than a strike. You don’t, for example, get a super bonus for making a 7-10 split.
But it’s true that “against the competitor” games have something of a built-in difficulty curve like that.
I love the fact that we’re using Settlers of Catan as the familiar reference point to explain the mysteries of bowling!
On the ‘playing against the board’ v ‘playing against the player, I find it interesting that some games are currently the latter but could become the former if people are good enough. E.g. if you’re good enough at snooker/pool then whoever goes first could clear up. Would be interesting to know if any sport has been ‘broken’ by this. E.g. if a single rugby player could reliably drop-kick for posts from his own half of the pitch (3 points whenever you get the ball, basically, when the unlikely maximum you can get before handing over control is 7) it would totally transform the game
My understanding is that popular (that is, lucrative) games tweak the rules on a regular basis to prevent slam-dunk strategies and keep things exciting and full of drama.
What I’m getting from this is that 100-pin bowling could have endured better.
Or ten pins, but a half-mile long alley.
That’s because the best football players play against the best football players, while the best bowlers compete against the best bowlers, but are really playing against the same pins and tracks everyone else does.
We need to innovate on the sport, add some animatronic or a defensive aspect. Or have both players bowl at once!
Curling is basically bowling with a defensive/strategic aspect, an extra degree of freedom (you need to get both your angle AND distance right) as well as a bigger element of luck. Plus it’s goofier (giant rocks? brushes? ON ICE?), always a plus for obscure sports. All this makes it way more fun to watch.
Also, the Norwegians have great pants.
I think the lack of TV (and now, internet) appeal is a big part the issue with bowling. For entertaining viewing, a sport needs to have high drama and visually spectacular replays that make for good highlight shows.
Bowling can be dramatic/tense, but only in the moment. Over the course of a match, yeah, who misses when can be big. But separate any individual shot, and it looks more or less just like every other one. Unless you watch the whole match, there’s little drama. And it’s not like you can count down the “top ten strikes of the week!” because every strike looks the same.
Golf is brought up as a comparison – it works better on TV because there are many matches going on simultaneously, and at any given time there is plenty of dramatic stuff going on somewhere on the course to make for a compelling broadcast. And there will always be unique, visually dramatic shots to replay on ESPN. And yeah, it’s less “solved”, and luck plays a bigger role even at the pro level just because the course, weather conditions, etc. can vary dramatically.
Someone said something like “Bowling is like golf, if golf consisted of nothing but 10 foot putts on a flat green”, and I think that’s about right.
The MR thread brought up a good point about bowling’s intial popularity: in the early days of TV (black and white, low resolution, and before instant replay), watching football, baseball, or golf kind of sucked because it was hard to tell what was going on. Bowling (and boxing, also popular at the same time) looked a lot better on TV.
There’s also the fad aspect – bowling took off like crazy when automatic pin setters and scorers were perfected, and suddenly everyone was into bowling. Once the novelty wore off it faded, and there was correspondingly less interest in paying big money to sponsor pros and tournaments.
TV has been a major influence. I’ve heard claims that the reason football=soccer is not as popular in the US as in the rest of the world is that it was deemed to be not well-suited for TV broadcasting because of the difficulties of inserting commercial breaks.
That’s really funny, I was just summarising my thoughts on the principles on game balance with regards to linear challenge games versus head-to-head battle games earlier, and this is perfectly relevent.
In the former game type, which includes any regular sort of race, throwing contest and so on, there is a single optimal method, and so all skill narrows down endogamously towards aptitude in this field. As such, spectation boils down to seeing the latest and going “yup, our javelin throwers are still tickey-boo”.
The latter game type, including football, tennis, paintball fights and so on, by contrast has no best strategy, and where any team has to constantly adapt and evolve to stay ahead of the game. So there’s a constant reason to pay attention to constant games and their minutae.
I agree with a lot of the “publish or perish” essay, but see a problem with this:
“In this system, a scientist to be successful he/she needs to be good at not only doing scientific work but also at selling their idea, which I think not often come hand-in-hand. Quite the opposite, in fact. Great scientists are usually terrible at marketing their idea. Science has become too corporate and hierarchical. And becoming corporate is a great innovation killer.”
I remember being surprised at the same thing when I finished my PhD in literature and not everyone was enthralled by my breakthroughs in interpretation of esoteric points of Chinese prosody. But I’ve since realized that learning how to sell your research to a wider audience is part of the process of understanding its wider significance yourself.
The idea that becoming “corporate” is an “innovation killer” seems precisely backwards to me. A physicist may be excited about the discovery of one more subatomic particle, but for the rest of us, the question is “so what? Can we have our warp drive yet?” And as much like philistines “the rest of us” sound, some degree of the “so what?” impulse is a good thing, because it keeps research pursuing real answer to real problems/desires, rather than delving into unapplied minutiae only a few people who are paid to think about it care about.
You’re seriously underestimating the importance of unapplied minutiae only a few people care about.
Well, my minutiae is very important to me! But I bet it isn’t to you. Unless I contextualize it in terms of bigger issues.
Sugar paper: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jorien_Treur/publication/307550012_Heritability_of_high_sugar_consumption_through_drinks_and_the_genetic_correlation_with_substance_use/links/57c8822f08aefc4af34ec88e.pdf http://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/correlation/2016-treur.pdf
Speaking of which, in my ongoing catnip survey, despite offering prizes to make people take it more seriously, I'm still getting a lizardman's constant of… 4% of respondents say they have 'sometimes or often had fatal heart attacks while watching television'. (Humans are why we can't have nice things.)
It didn’t, they just kept reanalyzing the data for various followups and subgroups until they finally got a result they liked. (What was it, only benefits in female children under the age of 12 in education/income but nothing else?)
Eh. Not sure how that explains the genetic evidence: schizophrenia is a large chunk of shared risk with other psychiatric disorders such as bipolar and depression, with contribution from copy-number variants, affecting genes associated with the immune system, which are heavily under natural selection (“Genetic Markers of Human Evolution Are Enriched in Schizophrenia”, Srinivasan et al 2016 http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223%2815%2900855-0/pdf ); while autism is not shared that much and primarily due to de novo mutations. I don’t see how any of that works as a ‘extreme end of a domestication spectrum’ theory, whatever laundry list of phenotypic correlations one may come up with (and the lack of genetic consideration is striking considering how much schizophrenia/autism have been researched and how many major papers have come out in the past few years) – the genetic architecture of domestication in cats/rabbits/etc doesn’t look like schizophrenia/autism at all.
Huh, is it that different? I know there is at least some genomic evidence for the hypothesis, e.g. this, which finds that, for the CNVs they checked, if having more copies promotes one, then having less copies promotes the other. But I don’t know what the contradicting evidence is or if that’s outdated or anything.
OK, that would seem to be a pretty big hole with the domestication idea then!
Also, those who participated in the program did so voluntarily, which means the results might need to be deflated if there was self-selection of the most determined public housing residents.
If neighborhood quality was as super duper important as the Ta-Nehisi Coates theory of racial inequality claims, it seems to me that MTO would have had much stronger positive effects on income and educational attainment.
“It didn’t, they just kept reanalyzing the data for various followups and subgroups until they finally got a result they liked. (What was it, only benefits in female children under the age of 12 in education/income but nothing else?)”
Eh, I’m going to have to look this up, but I thought the original results were weak and then after a few more years of watching people and seeing how they did they became pretty strong and I wasn’t able to find any problems with them. I’ll have to search out the study I’m thinking of.
Regarding the gender divide in the top levels of math: I’ve thought a lot about this, and it has been disappointing to see essentially no change in the last 20 years. What I have seen, though, does a decent job of explaining that discrepancy.
At the top levels of math, high achievement is almost entirely justified by math competitions. From Mathcounts in middle school to the IMO in high school, students are motivated to go above and beyond the classroom curriculum mainly for the purpose of doing well in math competitions. This was my experience growing up. I trained hard for those competitions because I wanted to be the best, and math provided me an unambiguous opportunity to compete.
In the past 20 years, there’s been something of an arms race in competition math. Websites like the Art of Problem Solving (which I’ve taken and taught classes on) have sprung up to provide both supplementary advanced math education and resources and classes for students hoping to do well in competitions. As a result, the tests have gotten harder year after year, as the population of advanced math students doing very well on these competitions has grown. And it’s paid off, at least in the US, as we’ve won the last two IMO’s.
In this context, it’s not too surprising that the gender divide has stayed steady despite broader acceptance of women. Competitiveness is directly linked to testosterone levels, so a disproportionate number of boys have been attracted to math competition achievement. As the competition has heated up in the last 20 years, those students who are most competitive have tended to rise to the top, keeping the upper echelons predominantly male.
I think about this as I teach kids contest math. With this population, it’s always easier to motivate them by making each class into a mini-competition. To balance out the testosterone a bit, though, I try to make the students work together in team competitions, which require the social skills that the girls in my classes tend to have more of.
If competitiveness was directly linked to testosterone levels there were be no competitive women at all. Setting aside actual physical disorders, even a 1st percentile man has orders of magnitude more testosterone than a 99th woman. Yet clearly, again setting aside actual physical disorders, there are women that are more competitive than the least competitive men.
Maybe stick to math competitions and leave biology to the biologists.
“Directly linked to” is not equivalent to “is the one and only factor of.”
In that case Sam’s entire argument falls apart. Just knowing that competitiveness is related to testosterone levels in some completely unspecified manner or other is not nearly enough to support the conclusions he is drawing.
Just because something isn’t “the one and only factor of” doesn’t mean that it’s “related to… in some completely unspecified manner or other.” The world of biology is filled with shades of grey. Things affect other things in ways that are more nuanced than and that usually lie somewhere between “one and only factor” and “completely unspecified manner.”
Well — what’s the relationship, and does or does not it lead directly to Sam’s conclusion?
Of course I meant that testosterone correlates with competitiveness, and of course it correlates with gender. I suppose it might be easier just to assert that boys are more competition-driven than girls, and the upper tiers of high school math are becoming a more competitive field recently, so boys have tended to be motivated to reach there more frequently. Although I haven’t read it entirely, this paper seems to suggest that this assertion is not far off in a related question of career choices:
https://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/BNO.QJE.pdf
And just to get the argument straight: I’m assuming (as Scott does) that one would normally expect the top levels of high school math to become more and more gender-balanced over time, as with most things in society. But they haven’t, and my explanation for why not is the increasing dominance of competition-related motivations for going above and beyond to reach the top levels of high school math, which have disproportionately attracted competitive boys (like my teenage self).
What do you by the top level of high school math? Do you really think math competitions are driving enrollment in calculus BC? It’s not that hard a class …
Introverted girls who are strong solo workers at math, but are unmotivated by competition and temperamentally averse to collaboration, get nothing?
We still have individual work and tests maybe 20-30% of the time. That’s the default mode, as far as I can tell, of other classes, but I didn’t find it typically motivated many of the students.
The bigger reason for the ‘improving’ ratio is rise in Asian numbers, who do exceedingly well and so SMPY isn’t as far out on their right tail. For example,
Even at the very start, Asians were the majority of females iirc.
…makes you say that not paying taxes makes you “smart”.
This is a clear sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome. So what is it? Paying taxes makes you smart? OK, let me help:
US Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.
Washington, DC 20220.
IRS
1111 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20224
Send as much money as you want all you “smart” people. Signal your intelligence to your peers! Frame the checks and put them on your wall next to your diploma and Facebook feeds. What, you minimize the amount you owe? You pay the legal minimum? How not smart of you.
Seriously, of all the ways to criticize Trump, this is by far the most incompetent way to do it.
I won’t say that the commentary on this has been very smart or clear. But I think the outrage comes from a widespread intuition that extensive use of tax loopholes is immoral — whether that’s by Donald Trump or Apple. Something like taking all the deductions you are entitled to is fine, but by the time you are setting elaborate structures solely for tax purposes it crosses a line in many people’s minds.
I agree with this assessment, but why bring Trump’s past payments into it? If you have an issue with the tax structure one could look at the proposals of the candidates on reforming the tax law instead of past personal returns. I would expect everyone to minimize their tax liability.
The example given with Apple is interesting in that Tim Cook is not held personally responsible or accused of being personally immoral for Apple’s far more egregious tax exploits but Trump is. It’s just partisan yammering.
The creation and exploitation of tax loopholes is a bipartisan exercise. See the Cadillac tax on union healthcare as an example.
I’ve seen plenty of attacks on Apple for being immoral and/or unpatriotic. While it isn’t generally framed as against Tim Cook specifically that’s the strong implication and certainly how he has taken the criticism.
Direct your anger at the tax lawyers and accounting firms who lobbied to create the Byzantine system in the first place.
Why not at the wealthy, unscrupulous people who hired them to do that, and then profited from doing so?
I don’t think that’s correct. Wealthy people would definitely prefer to not pay tax lawyers and accountants a ton of money to navigate the system for them.
But they demonstrably have a much stronger preference for not paying taxes, and demonstrably prefer paying tax lawyers and accountants over paying taxes.
I’m not interested in assuming spherical cows.
It seems everyone should have an equally high preference to paying the least amount required. Doing so does not make anyone immoral.
Anyone can “take advantage” of the tax break that Trump did. Its very easy.
Start a business and then lose a bunch of money. Report that on your taxes to reduce your income.
Unless you are committing fraud, you are going to end up with less money than if you had just paid the tax on the money you had.
As Matt Levine at Bloomberg says, the first rule of tax is that more money is better.
Ignoring the possibility that Trumps return was fraud, he still lost $900 HUNDRED MILLION dollars. Not sure how that is a good thing for him.
The correct analysis of this is not that Trump is a crook for using a tax loop hole, but that he is a bad at business which is ultimately more damning to his persona.
If I buy a business for $10,000 dollars that has lost $1 million in the last 5 years, in what sense have I lost any money? Why should I be allowed to offset $1 million in future income?
That’s the kind of thing Trump went to Washington to lobby for.
Everything has to even out in the end. If you can only tax gains but losses magically disappear, you are just going to pay to create yet another lawyer of accountants to make sure that losses find some way to pre-load themselves against existing gains. And new start-ups creation is going to be much worse, because often the most valuable thing coming out of them (which could be used to pay the last few days of employee wages) is the tax loss.
Financial regulation is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t know anything about finance beyond vague “I don’t like those people” feelings, because you don’t know WTF you are doing.
@Julian:
It’s quite possible that Trump declared an on paper loss of his real-estate holdings, personally, then formed a public company based on those holdings. This would mean that the public shareholders actually took the real loss, not Trump.
That kind of loss is limited to real-estate dealings, and isn’t comparable to a run of the mill business balance sheet.
“If I buy a business for $10,000 dollars that has lost $1 million in the last 5 years, in what sense have I lost any money?”
Why would someone be willing to sell you for $10,000 a business one of whose assets was several hundred thousand dollars worth of tax deductions? It isn’t as if you are the only person in the world who would like to pay less in taxes.
@ryan
If you want to do something really evil, first make sure it’s really boring. That’s what the Byzantine tax structure is for rich people, expensive camouflage. Rhetorically, lots of people argue for a flat tax or some such, but when push comes to shove, the actual proposals are in areas like the estate tax or reducing the top rate. I.e. they help the rich pay less money, but preserve the Byzantine structure.
But this isn’t even a case of elaborate structures. This is a case of not paying income tax when you have not made any income, with the additional wrinkle that you can average your net income over the course of several years so that if you lose $10 million in one year and make $5 million the next you are still recognized as being in the red. This isn’t a crazy loophole, it’s how any sane income tax regime would need to operate.
The fact that it’s being described as a “loophole” is the most frustrating aspect of the whole thing! Trump declared enough losses that he made no adjusted income – therefore there was nothing to tax. And the IRS isn’t going to take a declared $900 million loss on faith – I guarantee it was looked into, and if it was sufficiently shady we’d likely have heard about it already. Yeah, he’s allowed to carry forward losses, but it’s clear that this is basically essential. Otherwise there are pretty easy to envision scenarios where you end up with exorbitant marginal tax rates.
Say you’re a small business that lost $500k last year, but netted $1 million this year. Over 2 years, you’ve made $500,000. Say there’s a 30% income tax. In the “carry loss forward” scenario, you would pay $150k in tax on your $500k total net for the two years – exactly the same as someone who made $250k both years. Seems fair, right?
But if you can’t carry loss forward, then you have to pay $300k in tax – twice as much, for an effective tax rate of 60% on your actual profit, all based on an arbitrary date cutoff. How is that fair?
The anti-1%ers seem to want us to tax “rich” people heavily, but their mental image and rhetoric of “rich” is tied to wealth – in the US (and most places) we primarily tax income and capital gains (and to a lesser extent that is can be higher in other places, consumption and real estate).
Would these people really be happy with the government taking a percentage of their savings account and cash out of their mattress every year, even though it just sat there? I doubt it.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Trump. That he had a tax lawyer who appropriately carried forward his massive losses to avoid extra taxation is not one of them. The especially annoying one I saw was “Undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than Trump did!” Which, yeah – they made more money than he did over the relevant time frame. The especially amusing one is that the New York Times, which broke the story, also did not pay any tax for at least part of the relevant time frame (because they’ve been hemorrhaging money).
It’s like saying that capital gains are paid on all the daily accumulated rises of stock market value and daily market declines are ignored. It makes no sense to do something like this.
Do you really think there was a realized loss that large? I think we are dealing with a tax loss that does not match what would be considered a loss in day to day business.
That’s not Trump’s fault, but given the large disparity between what tax law considers a loss and reality, I think it is fair to call it a loophole.
What was the situation? Is this an argument from incredulity or do you have reason to believe it is exaggerated? Ok, trump is somewhat synonymous with exaggeration, but I assume actual lawyers were involved in submitting the details.
I have no doubt it was legal, what I’m saying is that a loss for the purposes of tax law often doesn’t match up with what most people, or even GAAP, would consider a loss.
Can you give an example? I am neither a lawyer nor a business owner, so providing and example would be more persuasive.
There’s two parts to it: for the ordinary person, big businesses and people like Trump not paying their full whack does seem like cheating or stealing.
On the other hand, if Trump (or any other businessman) paid their full tax bill with no attempt to use any of the perfectly legal mechanisms to reduce their liability, that would not be perceived by their peers as being smart. “Honest but dumb” will get mean you get taken advantage of.
Tax avoidance is a pain for the state and the public, but as long as the businessman and his accountants don’t step over the lines of the law, they’re not doing anything wrong (arguments over the morality or ethics is another question).
How is it honest or ethical to say “I made more money than I actually did”? It’s certainly dumb in the context of taxes, but it also hardly strikes me as moral and ethical to lie (or be lazy in your calculations) just because doing so increases your bill.
There’s a spot on your tax form that you sign stating something like “These numbers are all accurate to the best of my knowledge”. Intentionally failing to calculate appropriate adjustments to your gross income would make that statement a lie, regardless of the direction.
I think you have an overly simplistic view of the tax structure. There have been experiments when a bunch of tax accountants were given the same information and got wildly different results, despite everyone following the law. I forget how much, and google isn’t helping me find anything about this, but the idea that someone like Trump has a single correct value for how much he owes in taxes is not realistic. By getting a worse tax preparer, he could easily raise his tax burden. And I’m not sure how anyone could accuse me of failing moral and ethical duties if I took the standard deduction instead of itemizing, even if that would get me more money back.
For that matter, how he structures his operations is going to have an effect on how much he pays in taxes. If someone wants to pay more than they have to, all they have to do is decide not to use structures which shield more of their money from taxes.
Also, as George W Bush once pointed out, the IRS does accept checks and money orders.
You’re still saying, precisely, that it is more honest and ethical to calculate your income in a way that gives you a greater tax bill, despite your knowledge that there is a perfectly legal way to calculate it that reduces the bill.
Everything else in your statement is an argument against the excessive complexity of the tax code, not against the morality of taking or not taking deductions you are legally entitled to take.
Nothing you’ve said addresses the Trump situation, which was primarily him carrying forward a declared loss to reduce future tax liability. Others and myself have already argued that that sort of deduction is essential to tax fairness, and you’ve said nothing that would refute this.
@gbdub:
No, I’m not. I’m saying that there are ways to calculate your income that give you a greater tax bill that would still let you sign the line marked ‘everything above is true and correct’ in good conscience. I’m very much not in favor of imposing a moral duty on anyone to pay taxes that they are not legally required to. I’m on your side here.
Agreed. The tax code for someone at Trump’s level will always be complex, but it’s certainly too complex now, and it could be a lot simpler for normal people.
Why would I? I agree with you on this. I was bringing up the point that the amount of taxes someone who is honest pays could vary quite a bit depending on decisions they make that do not take them outside the bounds of honesty. Note that the tax professionals the experiment I mentioned were all given the same brief, namely ‘find the lowest taxes you can for this guy’. Some of them did a much better job than others.
Apologies, I read your comment as a defense of the notion that paying more tax was more ethical.
Not a problem. In retrospect, I should have been more clear that I was agreeing with you, and just trying to point out how complex taxes are for someone at Trump’s level.
How much tax you pay reflects your ethics, not your intelligence. Trump claims not paying taxes makes him smart, those who dispute that say it makes him unethical.
“How much tax you pay reflects your ethics”
I couldn’t disagree with that statement more. Please expand on it. It makes absolutely no sense.
Gun manufacturers, alcohol companies, gambling institutions, and porn sites pay plenty of taxes. Religious organizations pay none. I suppose all those who don’t pay federal income taxes are by definition unethical.
This argument is a non-sequitur, Trump didn’t say not paying taxes makes him “ethical”.
I’m not saying tax reflects ethics in a direct “more tax = more ethics way” but that paying very low amounts of tax can be unethical.
‘This argument is a non-sequitur, Trump didn’t say not paying taxes makes him “ethical”.’
Consider an analogical scenario. Imagine someone who pretends to be homeless and begs on the street, claiming that this is a “smart” way to avoid work. Do you see why some people might consider this indicative of a lack of morals?
The analogy fails: the pretend-homeless lies about his situation (if he doesn’t and, say, just silently stands on a street corner with a donation cup in his hands I don’t see any problems with his morals). And we’re not discussing fraud to avoid taxes, we’re talking just about arranging one’s affairs to minimise them.
So you are saying that if I scrupulously follow the rules, taking only (but every) deductions that *Congress* builds into the tax code, then use MY FREAKEN MONEY on things I value (buying goods and services, which employs people, or investing the money in stocks and bonds which help companies and/or cities build stuff), then I am less moral than some other guy who doesn’t take *any* deductions and then gives HIS MONEY to the government?
Yeah, because only through the government can we do any good, right?
If you structure your income or investments in order to minimize taxes, you know what else you’re doing?
You are doing things that Congress, the (alleged) representatives of The People think are valuable.
There are these investment vehicles called “Tax Free Municipal Bonds” whose interest is tax free at the federal (and usually state) level. Congress wrote this into the tax code to allow municipalities to sell bonds at a *lower* rate than otherwise. This makes them attractive investments to certain classes of investors (folks who prefer a more reliable rate of return than in the stock market) AND makes them a better deal for city tax payers (because they can borrow money at cheaper rates).
So when Warren Buffet parks a bunch of his money in tax free munis, he pays a lower *rate* of tax than his secretary, but he is also getting a slightly lower rate of return on his investment AND this benefits the cities whose bonds he buys.
How is *this* immoral?
Another thing that gets peoples knickers in a twist is the difference in taxation between long and short term capital gains. The latter is taxed as regular income, the former at a (almost always) lower rate. This is seen as “unfair” because it’s really all the Governments Money, so you should let them take as much as you want.
In reality it is *intended* to encourage people to think longer term in their investment strategies and to provide a reward for people who buy and hold rather than people who day trade, or flip.
Again, a deliberate decision on the part of Congress that gets demagogued by the sorts of people who think that profit is inherently immoral.
This is the same with almost all “loopholes” in the tax code. Some set of congresscritters thinks that X benefits society, so they make X a tax deduction, tax free or whatever.
Now, there probably are some bits of the tax code (I don’t know it well enough to give examples, but I will grant this) that are carveouts of dubious morality. Some of them were designed that way, some were well intentioned but wrong.
But in the general case when one does things to optimize one’s tax liability one is *ALSO* optimizing for what Congress has decided is the right way to do things.
These are distinct from the case where someone is clearly abusing the tax code[1], engaging in fraud, hiding income etc. which are usually unethical.
[1] For example in the early 1990s a well known politician and his wife deducted $2 from their tax liability for every pair of USED underwear donated to charity. This is probably overstating the value of used underwear. BTW, this politician thinks I don’t pay enough taxes).
This. There’s more to smartness than being a defect-bot in a place with a cooperative norm.
A cooperative norm? Nah, tax lawyer is a huge industry. People don’t just buy turbo tax because it is simple, but because it advertised finding out ways you paid money you didn’t need to.
You start getting into the unethical aspects when the business paying low taxes is doing so because of laws they specifically wrote and/or lobbied for, and even then it isn’t slam dunk unless some corruption is involved on the part of the legislature.
Is that the kind of thing alleged against Trump?
In all fairness, I imagine basically everything is alleged against Trump by someone or other. I mean, he’s a presidential candidate.
But not paying for services you use is defecting against the norms of America–America is a large country, the presence of even a million defectors wouldn’t even challenge the stronger statement that there’s an impossibly-strong cooperative norm–and Trump is basically a defect-bot (paying half of what his contracts say he owes was his policy in Atlantic City) so it tends to stick.
Personally, I don’t think it makes him either smart or unethical, since it’s not a choice he made, it’s something that happened to him–a consequence of being either spectacularly incompetent or amazingly, impossibly, absurdly unlucky in the 90s such that he lost a billion dollars in an industry that was booming at the time.
See, that’s a pretty good rejoinder–“if you were smart, you wouldn’t have lost enough money to avoid paying taxes for a decade.”
I think there are norms that are strongly pro-cooperation intrapersonally (like help someone change a tire–but seem to be fraying over time*) but I don’t think these really filter much down to “Be proud of paying income taxes and don’t try to minimize them” except for A) talking about other people (especially rich or corporations, ie, “Benedict Arnold corporations”) and B) Hank Hill.**
*People just don’t even seem to get out of the way for emergency vehicles anymore.
**(That’s from a US television show, a cartoon character that was a stereotypical Texan stoic middle-class somewhat naive but rather respectable family man)
It’s worth pulling this out of the parenthetical. Are the “he’s just a smart businessman” people really willing to defend the behavior of
1) Ordering some goods, 2) taking delivery, 3) paying less than what was agreed to, 4) and telling the vendors to go sue him if they didn’t like it?
Where’s the concern for a high trust society now?
I’m pretty agnostic on whether Trump is smart or not, for a variety of reasons.
But on the norms: Let’s say there’s a legal loophole that lets me get away with murder. And I do it. Bragging about it doesn’t prove that there aren’t norms against murder, or that I’m smart (or not smart), it just means I’m a murderer who got away with it and brags about it.
The norm against murder is pretty strong, even though a lot of people want to do it and some try very hard. Probably very few people who did it would feel obligated to turn themselves in, and we’d probably all have at least some sympathy for a murderer who wanted to avoid prosecution–of course they’d want that, anyone would–but I don’t think that’s evidence against there being a strong no-murder norm.
Since it’s dropped whenever it doesn’t support their current tribal interest, I’m pretty sure that’s another instance of a stated preference turning out not to match a revealed one.
Agreed that’s unethical [assuming correct and other obligations were fulfilled]
I think very few people equate murder and not paying taxes, perhaps only wonderfully naive utilitarians. I don’t know what I would do *as a murderer* because the kind of person who engages in unjustified killing is usually not terribly pro-social in other ways [citation needed].
I believe in a strong moral obligation to refrain from killing. I do not believe in a moral obligation to give money to the government beyond what is required by law. There are other, and in fact better, ways to cooperate than taxes that are better reflection of character, though I’m not engaging in this argument in order to paint Trump as a saint, or even better than average person.
That’s pretty far afield of the point, which is why I wasn’t equating murder and not paying taxes, or saying that anyone, anywhere ever did. I thought that was obvious.
The things you pointed at as evidence that there isn’t a strong “pay your taxes” norm are also evidence that there isn’t a strong “don’t murder anyone” norm.
There are TV shows depicting murderers favorably. This isn’t evidence that we lack a strong norm against murder.
I wasn’t aware TurboTax had an assassin division. I’d better make sure to read the fine print on the EULA next time.
Well you were not saying they have the same magnitude, but implying they had the same sign. I don’t think people agree with even that, outside the legal requirement.
There isn’t even a strong norm to not _cheat_ on your taxes. People are willing to pay cash to retailers and tradespersons in exchange for a small discount. They do this believing that the main reason for this is that the income will not be reported.
@The Nybbler – a lot of places prefer cash even if they aren’t cheating on taxes, because credit card companies charge a fee to the retailer to accept payments. This fee is nominally just a couple percent, but sometimes there’s a minimum fee that can wipe out the profit on small purchases.
I will say that not reporting cash tips is pretty common.
Other people have focused on taxes, but I’d like to focus on the murder bit. In particular, a lot depends on what you’re packing into the words “loophole”, “get away with”, and “murder”. Let’s stay away from other political topics, so abortion and using guns are out. Instead, you killed an adult human without a gun. That being said, a jury of your peers unanimously agreed that it was a completely justifiable act of self defense – the other guy really was going to kill you if you didn’t act first.
The boring answer is to say, “That’s not ‘murder’, because it’s justifiable.” But that just shifts the problem. It’s better to say, “There’s a legal loophole that let you get away with that murder. And you did it.” There are still norms against murder, but this situation is precisely the reason we also have norms for self-defense! If you found yourself in this situation, it might literally be that the smart act was to defend yourself… even if one can kind of squint and imagine that it falls under the anti-murdering norms while ignoring the pro-self-defense norms.
That’s why many responses to this talking point are of the type, “How much money do you send in that isn’t legally required,” or, “There is a reason we have tax norms for loss carryover.” Like the person who wants to completely ignore the existence of pro-self-defense norms, someone has to ignore a whole bunch of norms that are closely related to the don’t-cheat-on-your-taxes norm in order to lay guilt on the man in orange.
I have good friends – strong progressive liberal friends – who don’t deduct their mortgage interest or their land taxes on their federal taxes because “they want to pay their fair share.”
They are doing ok, but they are not at all rich. I started yelling that they were insane and wasting money on the federal gubmint and about got thrown out of the house.
People really do have different values about this.
keranih, wow, they should have taken the deductions and contributed the money they saved to Bernie then. Too bad they didn’t think of that.
@ Jill –
This was before Bernie. And before Obama.
I think they would say that it was better the money was spent “by the people” than by a particular politico.
The lesson is that there will always be some people with weird values. Now, whether those values are widespread enough to be considered societal norms is an empirical question. I think the answer to that empirical question is also an important starting point for whether people with the other set of values we’ve mentioned can suitably be called “defectors”.
In Massachusetts, you can elect to pay state income tax at a 5.85% rate instead of the standard 5.2%. Only about a thousand people do.
Trump claims not paying taxes makes him smart, those who dispute that say it makes him unethical
And I’m sure all, each and every last one, of the rich donors Hillary was shilling to when she made her “basket of deplorables” remark have never, ever so much as taken a penny of legitimate tax reduction measures but instead have insisted on paying their full tax bill. No, they won’t even claim charitable deductions. Every cent to the government!
(I’m not trying to spite Hillary, I’m just saying nobody wants to pay more tax than they have to, and if you have enough money to be worth it, you will find ways – like setting up trusts and foundations and what-not – to lessen the burden).
I think Trump would rather be perceived as having avoided paying a huge tax bill he owed, rather than being granted a tax credit, because being seen as smart if slightly crooked means he’s rich enough to dodge tax and canny enough to have made enough money to be worth dodging tax, whereas not owing that tax in the first place due to losses makes him sound less successful than he portrays himself as being.
I think that’s your two hundreth “i’m not for Trump, but…” post.
And this is why people are driven to go full anon.
No, I’m not a fan of Trump. But putting all the virtue on one side and all the evil on another is unrealistic. We’re talking about an election where one of the candidates is a career politician who is ambitious, has wanted this job for a long time, has connections, has been in office under a previous administration, and has a track record that shows they are comfortably part of “the way things are done”.
The other candidate has no political or administrative experience, is running on a mix of being an allegedly successful businessman and being precisely the kind of political establishment outsider that his opponent is not, thus he will shake up the status quo. There’s bombast, populism, appeals to self-interest and a lot more (and worse) in his campaign and not too much actual policy.
Money is needed by both parties to run their campaigns, such being the facts of life. Both candidates are probably trying to appeal to donors, but we can more easily tell in one instance than another because that candidate is going the traditional route of campaigning, which is appealing to likely donors on their particular special interest.
Since you don’t get rich by simply going out to the money tree and harvesting it, and since the tax codes of just about every nation in the world are tangled and contain exceptions, loopholes, and schemes for large businesses, non-profit and charitable bodies, and wealthy individuals to lessen the burden of the taxes they pay, it’s more than likely some at least of those rich potential donors have availed of similar schemes.
Attacking one’s opponent on a perceived weak point is part of campaigning. But is Trump the only person in the room who has used tax avoidance schemes? No, is what I’m saying.
And that’s all I’m saying, apart from Hillary is not running on a platform of a moral crusade, and some of the money her donors are giving her is coming from the same kind of “write-offs” she’s lambasting Trump for. As Vespasian reminded his son, Money has no smell. We’re not talking about a candidate who is shocked to the core of her being about an ethical breach, we’re talking about someone who knows how many beans make five when it comes to her career attacking her opponent on any front she can find a chink in his armour.
If Trump is a crook, give him a good pasting! If he’s a criminal (and not merely doing what’s legal if unpleasant to contemplate), then let the IRS who are auditing him prosecute him, or if Hillary has evidence of criminal wrong-doing, let her hand it over to the authorities.
I agree tax avoidance is something very like a scam, but there are a lot of businesses and others doing it, and if Hillary is so exercised about it, let her put forward solid proposals as to how she’ll shut these schemes down (and cope with the lawsuits that will flood in afterwards from all the firms who took advantage of these schemes).
Denmark, 5,593,785 population.
Ethnicity:
Scandinavian, Inuit, Faroese, German, Turkish, Iranian, Somali
Languages:
Danish, Faroese, Greenlandic (an Inuit dialect), German (small minority)
Religions:
Evangelical Lutheran (official) 80%, Muslim 4%, other (denominations of less than 1% each, includes Roman Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, Serbian Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Baptist, and Buddhist) 16% (2012 est.)
Sweden, 9,880,604 population.
Ethnic groups:
indigenous population: Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities; foreign-born or first-generation immigrants: Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks
Languages:
Swedish (official), small Sami- and Finnish-speaking minorities
Religions:
Lutheran 87%, other (includes Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist) 13%
US, 323,995,528 population.
Ethnic groups:
white 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61% (July 2007 estimate)
note: a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean persons of Spanish/Hispanic/Latino origin including those of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican Republic, Spanish, and Central or South American origin living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.); about 15.1% of the total US population is Hispanic
Languages:
English 79.2%, Spanish 12.9%, other Indo-European 3.8%, Asian and Pacific island 3.3%, other 0.9% (2011 est.)
Religions:
Protestant 51.3%, Roman Catholic 23.9%, Mormon 1.7%, other Christian 1.6%, Jewish 1.7%, Buddhist 0.7%, Muslim 0.6%, other or unspecified 2.5%, unaffiliated 12.1%, none 4% (2007 est.)
From the CIA world fact book.
The US is orders of magnitude larger than either mentioned country and ethnically FAR more diverse. This allows for large, ethnically homogenous neighborhoods with shared culture and values that are different from the larger culture. Even the most innocuous of these (e.g. color choices for clothing) can be signals and cause divergent outcomes. This doesn’t even get into different sub-cultures and their notions of “success”.
…the very next sentence in my link is “…US socioeconomic status differs a lot more than Scandinavian socioeconomic status. I feel bad for being excited that Scandinavia will probably develop its own segregated underclass in the next few decades and we’ll finally start getting good studies about how that affects things.”
It could also have to do with the fact that the USA has this weird system where your neighbourhood determines what schools you can attend. In Denmark, you can live in the bad neighbourhood and still go to the good school. In the US, that’s illegal for some strange reason.
The reason is that in the US the schools are local, that is, they are typically run (and paid for) by the town — not by the state and not by the Federal government.
And it’s not illegal — it’s just that the town is unlikely to let your kid into the school if you don’t live there. But it’s not like it’s a criminal offense or something.
Residency requirements are a leftover from the days of segregation, meant to stop white parents living in mixed neighborhoods from sending their kids to white schools in other neighborhoods.
By the way, 54% of Global Times readers – even assuming this poll at least pretends to be scientific and not a self-selected poll, which I somewhat doubt – is NOT by any reasonable definition equivalent to 54% of PRC nationals. Just for reference, the Economist had Hillary+12 in China, illustrating the wide variance depending on who you ask.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times
I can’t think of an equivalent state-controlled, far-nationalist, sensationalistic mass tabloid other than Der Sturmer, and that’s not a comparison I particularly want to make. Maybe the Völkischer Beobachter? But hopefully my point is clear – quoting a poll of the Global Times readership as evidence of Chinese public opinion is not far off doing the same with the National Enquirer.
Lovelock has now managed the rare feat of being misinformed about IPCC predictions from both extremes. His predictions in 2006 were outlandish, and his statements now are just… incoherent:
First of all, as far as I know the climate models don’t predict forcings. They assume the forcings from several different scenarios ranging from a BAU coal-fired dystopia (RCP 8.5) to emissions-peak-tomorrow (RCP 2.6) and then predict the net feedbacks from each. Future CO2 emissions are just fed into the models as input. I suppose those emissions scenarios are generated with the aid of “models” originally, but now we’re talking about economic models, not climate models.
And as of now we’re only slightly below the BAU RCP, with the difference being mostly due to the global recession. Certainly not “nowhere near as fast as they thought.” Even comparing it to the old SRES inputs, we’re also somewhere between highest and second-highest. Furthermore, most of the input scenarios don’t start to significantly diverge until 2020, so it’s entirely unclear what would’ve happened in the last decade to precipitate this particular change of heart.
The second part is just… incoherent. What is 2.5 times higher than the worst-case scenario in Singapore specifically? CO2 concentration? Temperature? Sea levels? I’m trying to imagine a variable that’s both locality-specific and would fit the bill of being “2.5 times higher” than some prediction and coming up blank.
This sounds a lot like a Freeman Dyson situation where you have a scientist suffering from emeritus disease making breezy claims about how “the computer models are bad” while giving no specifics and very clearly not bothering to look into the details.
Who are you going to believe? Some 95-year-old contrarian, or your own lying eyes?
Haven’t I banned you like three times now?
Then let all past and future manifestations of UIK “softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again,” leaving behind yesterday’s exchange with FacelessCraven and Hlynkacg — whose testimonies I sincerely respect — as my own concluding testament and apologia.
PS: although please let me say, on the other hand, that this week’s essay / book review by 92-year-old Freeman Dyson, “The Green Universe: A Vision” (New York Review of Books, Oct. 13, 2016), is crystal-clear and well worth reading. Good on `yah, Freeman Dyson! 🙂
well shit I’m old enough to remember when Climate Scientists were obviously right about what was going on, and questioning them was something that only stupid Science Denier Republican racist homophobes did because they didn’t want to give up those precious, precious dollars.
So now I guess it’s…okay to talk about how Climate Scientists might be wrong about stuff?
Depends on talk where. I wouldn’t recommend it on the grounds of, ahem, institutions of higher education.
What is the point of this reply?
The story was, all along, that Human-Caused Earth-Ending GabbleWabble was totally for real because Climate Scientists said so. Whenever anyone suggested that they might be wrong, the questioners were asked to present their degree in Climate Scientology; lack of said degree was seen as all the rebuttal needed to suggestions that the Climate Scientists might be wrong.
and, um, now here’s a Climate Scientist saying that GabbleWabble might be different, and he’s misinformed, incoherent, an out-of-it old fool who doesn’t deserve to be listened to be anyone and should have been turned into Soylent Green about ten years ago.
Whose story? Are you arguing with me, or are you arguing with some Straw Warmist who isn’t in this thread and doesn’t believe, for instance, that argument screens off authority, or that AGW is real because of evidence, rather than the pronouncement of some arbitrary authority?
If you want to re-litigate some dumb argument you had in the past with a left-wing echo chamber, maybe go back and do it there instead of here.
I guess if you want to pretend that there isn’t a history around Global Warming arguments, then there’s not much more I can say.
I’m going to quote Asimov here.
My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”.
Questioning of the climate models is like questioning the exact bulge of the oblate spheroid earth. It is magnitudes of different from dropping a snowball on the floor of the Senate.
Contrarianism is receiving scant respect too, from politically non-partisam citizen-scientists, and wilderness-hikers, and polar explorers … for these wilderness-loving folks the evidence of their own eyes compellingly affirms the consensus climate-science moral and economic narratives.
On the other hand, at age 90+, it’s understandable that James Lovelock — and Freeman Dyson too — no longer get out into the wilderness much! 🙂
If it received more than scant respect, it wouldn’t be contrarian.
Your schtick is amusing at Judy’s place, not so much Scott’s
Who?
I think the reference is to Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist who doubts CAGW. She has a blog whose comments were/are a big battleground in the Climate Wars.
Yes. If you search judithcurry.com for comments left by “A fan of *MORE* discourse” they will feel familiar.
When’s the last time you saw anybody in the media quote a scenario other than RCP8.5 or similar worst case? 1M sea level rise is the maximum of the range for RCP8.5. People routinely quote 2M or higher and generally never mention the number they use is the worst case number of the worst case emissions scenario. Hansen put out some ridiculous paper with 10 feet by 2050 and the media ate it up.
For the most part they never quote the IPCC anymore and use the paper of the week with some dubious numbers. The biggest problem with “climate science” is the selection bias from environmental journalists.
All scenarios are BAU at the start, it is a matter of when peak emissions occur. If one was to believe China then we are way below RCP8.5 and well into one of the medium emission trajectories.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a mainstream media outlet discuss model performance vs. observations or drug up the endless doomsday predictions from decades ago that haven’t come to pass. If they want to quote crazy estimates, they should at least follow up 10 years later.
I don’t know what the 2.5x number is. He might be referring to Singapore’s average temperature already being higher than estimate of temperature rise elsewhere.
Don’t recent mainstream media articles like the Miami Herald’s “Sea rise could force millions in Florida to adapt or flee, study finds” (March 14, 2016) provide entirely reasonable summaries of the social and economic implications of climate-science research?
Insurance actuaries broadly agree — “Sea level rise could cost Florida $400B in property loss” (August 3, 2016) — and these dry-eyed hard-noised evidence-driven folks cannot reasonably be afflicted by excessive liberal bias, can they?
In breaking news, scientists say sea-level rise-rates are accelerating. Are they right? The world wonders … and insurance company actuaries wonder especially.
And Trump’s worried too! 🙂
No.
#1: “Floridians alone make up nearly half that number if seas rise six feet”
#2: “at least partially underwater if sea levels rise six feet by 2100”
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580
Currently 2.37 mm/yr. 1 inch per decade. Do the math. How large of a change in rate will it take to get to 72 inches by 2100? Over 10x. Is that reasonable when examining the trend above? Should that be a working assumption? No.
Read chapter 13 of IPCC AR5 report. The median at RCP8.5 is around 2 feet. Even using the median estimate at RCP8.5 it would take on the order of 500 years to get to 6 feet. RCP8.5 isn’t going to happen.
Florida coastal building codes are for 100 year hurricane storm surge levels. Any new construction or over the past few decades are typically 10 or more feet over sea level.
Insurance actuaries go on a year by year basis. They aren’t insuring a Florida home for the next 85 years, they are insuring it for the next 12 months. Florida home insurance rates are all about hurricanes, not sea level rise.
Acceleration in sea level rise is approx 0.010 mm / yr2 according to the IPCC AR5. That isn’t going to get you to 6 feet anytime soon.
Agree with the rest of your post but I don’t think it’s possible to be confident about this one way or the other. That’s the entire reason disparate RCPs exist.
There’s presumably a reason for this. If a building has to be 10 feet above sea level to survive a 100-year storm, and turns out to be only 8 feet above sea level because RCP8.5 happened after all, what is its mean survival time in the Florida hurricane environment?
If it’s 80 years, fine. If it’s 10 years, now you have depopulated a fair chunk of Florida. Probably best to look into that scaling before dismissing the risk as negligible.
Certainly storm surge will be X feet higher with higher sea levels, so if you build to today’s levels you will have increased risk with higher sea levels. How much is unknown, I have never seen any data on this. The higher surge levels have an increasingly smaller chances of occurring.
One assumes that the building codes take into account some level of projected sea level rise but I can’t confirm that.
RCP8.5 assumes we will use coal at 10x today’s current rate by 2100 along with large population increases. This would exhaust all known coal reserves by 200% before 2100.
RCP8.5 could technically occur but I find it very unlikely as CO2 use is already starting to bend the right direction. China is a major factor and they are promising to peak at 2030 (?) which is significantly ahead of RCP8.5. China is likely to limit coal use for air pollution reasons alone.
@John Schilling
Be careful; the return period isn’t equivalent to the lifetime. As a matter of fact, it’s use (“100-year storm”) is now deprecated because of the confusion it causes. A 100-year event (storm, wind event, earthquake, etc.) is the event that has a 1% chance of being exceeded in a given year. Similarly, a 50-year event is 2%, 20 year is 5%, etc. There’s no reason you can’t have multiple 100 year events back-to-back.
For the 1% exceedance event, there’s a 50% chance it will occur in a 70-year period. (P=1-(1-p)^n) I can’t find data for storm surge return periods in Florida, so it’s hard to say what losing 2 feet will do, especially since the intended design life will have a big effect on the economics.
On Corps of Engineers projects, we assume a 100-year lifespan, so our operating basis event (the earthquake where the facility should be operable in the immediate aftermath) is 144 years, since that’s the event that has a 50% chance of occurring during the lifetime.
Maximum design earthquakes, for life safety, are the ones that have only a 10% chance of exceedance in the project lifespan, or 1000 years. (It’s actually 949 years, but that usually gets rounded up)
Most civilian structures usually have a design lifetime a lot lower than 100 years, so that’s going to push the chance of occurrence down some.
(The maximum credible earthquake, or the largest that could reasonable be expected to occur, is used for certain types of high-hazard structures–dam components and the like.)
” If it’s 10 years, now you have depopulated a fair chunk of Florida”
Looking at Figure 13.11 on the latest IPCC report, SLR in ten years on RCP8.5 is about five or six inches.
@David
I think he’s asking if the increase in sea level will push the storm surges to an elevation that can be expected to damage buildings currently with a 50% chance of not seeing a storm surge in 70 years to 10 years.
I agree with this generally, although the Lovelock interview is an example of this selection bias cutting the other way. The Guardian is usually considered left-wing but here they are uncritically repeating some quotes that seem to be completely unsupported and don’t fit with how climate models work. Meanwhile here’s the Daily Mail, which is usually considered right-wing, in 2006 quoting Lovelock’s original outrageously pessimistic original predictions (he amusingly cites the IPCC for them, I assume someone swapped his copy of the TAR with the script from The Day After Tomorrow).
Science journalists on the whole like to cite outliers because they make for exciting headlines and do a rubbish job putting them in context. This especially applies in areas where the details are still unsettled. I think Zwally has changed his mind on Antarctic ice sheet balance four times in the last decade alone and every time it’s accompanied by a triumphant “HOO-AH” from the alternating info bubbles.
“What is 2.5 times higher than the worst-case scenario in Singapore specifically?”
My guess is temperature. He is saying something like (I haven’t seen the original) “Singapore’s average temperature is higher than the global average temperature by 2.5 times as much as the global average temperature is predicted to rise by 2100. Singapore is a great place. So why assume the world would be terrible if it got warmer?”
Wow. That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
My guess at what he meant or what he meant if my guess is correct?
Assume it’s the latter. The numbers are not important–the world is not all at its average temperature. But the point that AGW is expected to leave most of the world no warmer than some places where people do just fine is a legitimate point against the alarmist assumption that warming of that amount must lead to catastrophe.
Wear a small sock-like electric heating thing on your little toe, keep it at 42c or something like that for a day, I guess that’s tolerable? Then stay inside a room heated to 42c for a day and tell me what you think.
Of course, if some climate change would leave most of the world at temperatures that are absolutely inhospitable, that is worse than if climate change would leave most of the world at temperatures that are hospitable. But the case for being worried about global warming isn’t that global warming will increase global temperatures to levels that are, merely in virtue of their temperature, absolutely incompatible with flourishing human life. And the fact that Singapore is a great place is terrible evidence for the claim that it would not be catastrophic for other places to move substantially in its direction.
For one, Singapore is an extremely modern city with a strong economy, culture, and well-functioning government (and, in my opinion, is a nice place to live largely despite the temperature). If you build that kind of city on a desert or tundra, and you can, then it’ll be a decent place to live too. But it would obviously be catastrophic for a large part of the world to become desert or tundra.
To bring out how silly the relevant reasoning is, suppose we took every “nice place to live”, including New York state, Texas, Scandinavia, Singapore, and so on, and just randomly reshuffled their climates (perhaps gradually over a generation or two). Is the fact that each of these places are presently nice good evidence that this reshuffling wouldn’t be catastrophic? Of course not. And many places don’t have the economic or political infrastructure to absorb changes in climate as well as presently nice places do.
There might be catastrophic costs either to the distribution of climate or to changes in climate, neither of which are remotely addressed by pointing out that being hot doesn’t rule out being nice. And the latter, in particular, is behind a lot of concern over global warming.
Well, my days of cringing at your comments on (C)AGW are certainly coming to a middle.
Let’s first define our terms. The 2015 GMST was 14.8°C per NASA. For Singapore it was 28.3°C per their own weather service. Under your interpretation of Lovelock’s comment (worst-case = 2.5x the difference b/w Singapore and GMST by 2100), we’re discussing a hypothetical rise of about 5.4°C, which seems to accord with this IPCC figure’s RCP 8.5 projection. (This is also about the mean annual temp difference between Singapore and Shenzhen). So it’s plausible enough that perhaps this is what he meant.
The biggest problem with your comment (and his) is that the fact that people in Shenzhen wouldn’t be threatened if Shenzhen took on the climate of Singapore is that it tells us about exactly one consequence of global warming (people may be physically unable to inhabit certain places) in one place (Shenzhen, or equivalent latitutdes).
It doesn’t say anything about sea level rise, or biodiversity loss, or ocean acidification / anoxic zone expansion, or any other global-scale consequences. It doesn’t say anything about precipitation shifts, or fire risk, or fat-tail possibilities such as the clathrate gun.
It doesn’t take into account that Singapore would still exist, so if Shenzhen becomes Singapore, Singapore now becomes a hellish place where heat waves cause wet-bulb temps approaching the limits of human tolerance.
It doesn’t take into account the shifts in ecosystems, including food crops and fish stocks and freshwater supplies, that would accompany such a rise in temperature. Sure, people can migrate, cities can renovate or build new infrastructure. But the sort of massive migration and shift in supply chains and food production infrastructure that would accompany every city in the world jumping the equivalent of 20° of latitude towards the tropics entails enormous costs.
A brief note on sea levels. It is (correctly) observed that lay commenters and activists consistently overestimate the speed of the sea level feedback and make stupid comments about how Florida will be underwater by 2050 or somesuch. But I wonder if you have grasped the full implications of sea level feedback being slow; it also means that GHG-induced sea level rise gets baked in early and continues for centuries after emissions peak.
You have previously noted that you enjoy citing IPCC projections against alarmists who talk out of their ass about climate change. All of the above blockquotes are from the Technical Summary of AR5-WG2. I am beginning to suspect this is an isolated demand for rigor.
@AnonBosch:
I wrote:
“a legitimate point against the alarmist assumption that warming of that amount must lead to catastrophe.”
A legitimate point against is not the same thing as a refutation of. And “must lead to catastrophe” is not the same thing as “could possibly lead to catastrophe.”
I don’t know how much you have participated in lay arguments about AGW, but there are quite a lot of people using rhetoric if not arguments about the world burning up.
But thanks for checking that the numbers are consistent with my guess at what he meant.
@Philosophisticat
But you also have little reason to believe that it would be catastrophic. You definitely don’t have useful economic modeling on the question.
There might be benefits either to the distribution of climate or to changes in climate.
@AnonBosch
Instantly? Absolutely. Over centuries? We have very little reason to believe so. Economic/political systems operate on much faster timescales than climate systems, and we simply can’t run these timescales the wrong way round and expect to get a defensible answer. Almost everyone runs them the wrong way round intuitively, because they don’t know what else to do.
This fundamental flaw in analysis underlies nearly every danger you speak of; it’s just most obvious here.
Change happening slowly amortizes the costs, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Take everyone currently working as a fisherman in a tropical Asian city. Suppose there’s some combination of acidification, anoxic expansion, and climate-induced migration amounting to a negative effect on fish yields. It could be something as simple as reduced mass (due to Bergmann’s rule). This will lead to a misallocation in labor in the same way an improvement in technical efficiency would, but without the productivity benefits.
Might some higher latitudes of the ocean become more productive? It’s certainly possible. But then you’re looking at migration, which again, is a needless cost just to get back to equal productivity.
I can easily see my toe being constantly out-of-place and irritated by that, with the strong head differential between there and the rest of me causing horrible prickly heat. Whereas overall heat is something adaptable, even if repulsive.
You’re putting the timescales the wrong way round again. You’re assuming that the fast system stays the same for all time and that the slow system only causes a constant inefficiency. What’s worse is that every estimate I’ve seen of the cost of that inefficiency is a static estimate based on just running today’s fast system on some terminal value of the slow system.
Let’s use a non-politicized example. While my specialty is dynamics/control, my degrees were all in aerospace engineering departments, so I’m going to pick the example of an aircraft. Simplifying things, there are two timescale-separated systems: 1) Orientation/velocity and 2) Fuel/weight. (Obviously, there are some events like dumping fuel which can cross this distinction, and things like position, primarily what we’ll care about is altitude, can be dropped into either bucket depending on the maneuver in question.) In regular operation, you can make rapid changes to orientation/velocity (turn the yoke, pull the throttle), but your weight (in particular due to fuel on-board) varies slowly over the course of the flight. I see two common mistakes in thinking about dynamical systems when applied to climate change:
1) Hold the fast system constant, pick a terminal value of the slow system, think about how instantly jumping to it could have catastrophic effects. An aircraft example of this would be to think about how we’re eventually going to use up a whole lot of fuel, and that’s going to change the vehicle’s weight (and the distribution of weight unless we’ve pumped fuel around in the tanks). Imagine if this all happened immediately. I can do this on my flight simulator. I can instantly change the amount of fuel. I can even find values that make the plane go into a catastrophic situation (even theoretically unstable/uncontrollable if I can pick the distribution). That being said, this reasoning is pretty obviously fallacious when you think about it at all.
2) “Change happening slowly amortizes the costs”. This fallacious view still holds the fast system constant. It then imagines that you can just interpolate damage between now and a non-catastrophic version of (1). An aircraft example is that efficiency of flight depends greatly on altitude – as you use fuel and your weight goes down, it turns out to be more efficient to fly at higher altitudes. Now here comes the critical difference between aircraft and economic/climate systems: we know this because the aircraft is almost exactly the same at every portion of the flight – we have good models of it that are applicable at each timestep. The fallacious reasoning is to think, “Sure, right now the most efficient altitude is 22000ft, but at the end of the flight, we’ll weigh less, and the most efficient altitude will be 36000ft. So, while the danger of continuing at 22000ft isn’t realized now, it’s just amortized over the course of the flight.” Did you notice the sneaky assumption on the fast system? “…continuing at 22000ft”? In reality, as flights go on, pilots increase their altitude (usually in steps to make airspace management easier) in order to grab efficiency gains. We know this behavior of the fast system; we can model this.
The standard method of simulating timescale separated dynamical systems is to hold the slow system constant, let the fast system converge, take a small step forward in the slow system, and repeat. That means that at first we’re evaluating the fast system at the beginning of the flight, but eventually, we’ll evaluate the fast system in the middle of the flight and then later at the end of the flight… and that fast model has to be valid at all those times. For aircraft, we can model the fast system really well at all times, so we can do this. We can even include changes like increasing altitude to increase efficiency.
For economic/political systems, we can’t model the fast system well. We certainly can’t do it at all times. Organizations like CBO don’t even try beyond ten years, and you would be laughed out of any economist’s office if you proposed trying to construct a model of the world economy that was valid for 2065. The analogy is if we were incapable of even determining the most efficient altitude at the end of the flight – sure, we think it might be different, but if we didn’t have a model of the fast system that was valid near the end of the flight, epistemic honesty prevents us from saying much. The analogy of a pilot adjusting the altitude is like human adaptation – technological development, moving, etc. (things that happen on very fast timescales relative to climate change).
This is why every climate change damage paper I’ve ever read does it the wrong way round. They consider an estimate of how much damage an Xdeg change could cause today’s economy, then amortize that damage across the years. DICE said they made that damage model “dynamic”, even though it was really just an amortization based on T calibrated to hit the endpoint estimated by considering today’s economy (so, really a static estimate that was “dynamitized”, even though this is fundamentally theoretically broken). Low and behold, if they take a fallacious amortization of a damage function that is assumed to be positive definite, they get a positive amount of damage! But it’s the same fundamentally broken process as assuming that we can just amortize the costs of flying at 22000ft because the optimum endpoint is 36000ft.
Literally all of your criticisms are subject to this claim. Your final sentence gives away the fact that you’re mentally reasoning the wrong way round: “But then you’re looking at migration, which again, is a needless cost just to get back to equal productivity.” You’re holding the fast system constant and assuming that it will be identical at the final point. We have absolutely no justification for this (and a lot of economic/political history which says otherwise).
Unfortunately, the conclusion of applying basic principles of dynamical systems theory is that, right now, we have no bloody clue what the economic costs/benefits will be. We just have no theoretically defensible way of calculating them. I’m not particularly pleased by this thought… but my education and intellectual honesty obliges me to hold it.
Well said anonymous, but it’s not always that easy for the hypothetically fast human system to change rapidly in practice given entrenched human interests.
Steve Landsburg once made on his blog a similar point to yours: he pointed out that the time taken for sea level rise to inundate a city is larger than the time it would take for buildings to be replaced anyway, so the city can be moved in time without a high net cost to society.
But my response to that is that such a move would benefit landowners at the new city location at the expense of the landowners in the initial city location. So the landowners at the initial city location will lobby the city government to build dikes even at high cost, potentially approaching the full loss that those landowners might otherwise suffer and ignoring the gains to others. It could even be a higher cost than that if non-local governments subsidize the dike-building.
Your point still stands, I am just pointing out an additional complication.
This part is absolutely true… but it’s true about the fast dynamics, too! Detroit all but fell apart (very quickly, relatively) due to purely economic considerations, and lots of people lost lots of money… no matter whether they tried to lobby their government to protect their interests or not. I currently live in an area that grew substantially due to politics – a BRAC relocated a lot of people (who make good money) here. People who owned land here from before basically came into a windfall as demand rose… and I imagine those who owned land in their previous locations lost.
I don’t even go so far as to claim that all people will be pleased by the changes. I come from a farming family. While my subset of the family didn’t continue it, there is a strong contingent of cousins who have. I don’t think the desire to continue the family farm is going to just disappear on its own. Nevertheless, it’s possible that in the future, a descendant will have to think, “Farming corn here just isn’t as profitable as it once was. I really hate to give up a tradition that’s gone on for so long, but if I want to continue making a good living, I have to consider buying some land a little further north from here… or maybe consider changing up some of the crops I plant.”
It’s still really important that this is on a slow timescale. If it’s on a fast timescale, the humanitarian cost is high – see the Dust Bowl. If it’s slow, then people will gradually move; gradually change crops; gradually adjust their way of life. New generations already adopt new tech, new ideas, and new social conventions that are different from their parents… and they do so based on changes in the fast dynamics. It’s a bit ridiculous to think that people will simply stop changing as climate change occurs. Just like what happens with political/economic effects, people will lobby to protect their own interests… but again, I have no reason to believe this will cause more inefficiency than a counterfactual world where they’re still lobbying to protect their interests from economic/political change.
My final comment is that if you’re really sure about climate change and an estimate of sea level rise – buy land that is currently slightly inland! Make sure your children agree with your assessment of the future possible value so that when they inherit it, they don’t sell it immediately. This slow process will produce winners/losers, but I’m not sure it will be at a rate that beats the ROI of the stock market. If you think it will, buy buy buy. You have great knowledge, and your descendants could be big winners. (Disclaimer: investment may be subject to non-climate risks, including economic/political factors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance. Additional boilerplate as necessary.)
““Farming corn here just isn’t as profitable as it once was. I really hate to give up a tradition that’s gone on for so long, but if I want to continue making a good living, I have to consider buying some land a little further north from here… ”
The Amish have been doing this for quite a long time. Lancaster County, in particular, got very expensive, so new settlements were created in southern Illinois and other areas where agricultural land was more available.
So far as your idea about buying land inland, I’m not sure you realize just how slow the process is. SLR so far has been eight or nine inches in a century. The high end of the high emissions scenario estimate in the latest IPCC report is one meter by 2100.
The rule of thumb for the U.S. Atlantic coast is that a meter of SLR shifts the coast by a hundred meters. So on a generous estimate of SLR (not the most generous possible, of course), you are talking about a shift inland of the coastline of only a hundred meters by the end of the century.
Not much room for profits from land speculation.
As dumb as giving a country to whomever refuses to split it?
I live in Singapore. My entire life is sweat.
The sea-level rise-rate projections of this week’s (above-referenced) Fasullo, Nerem & Hamlington article “Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?” (2016) extrapolate to the following rise-scenarios (as I calculate the numbers):
• Year ~2225: Two meters of sea-level rise
• Year ~2450: Ten meters of sea-level rise
But don’t take my word for it … read Fasullo, Nerem & Hamlington’s article, and run the numbers yourself.
Are there gross uncertainties in the above rise-rate projections, uncertainties equally at the low-end and the high-end? Oh yes, most definitely, isn’t that the right answer? Or at least, the Bayesian answer?
Are there coastal areas of the world whose cities, highways, bridges, and sanitation infrastructures are more than 209 years old? More than 434 years old? Yes, plenty of them, isn’t that the right answer too?
So maybe the Pope’s not so dumb? Those Vatican folks are maybe pretty smart, to take the long view, aren’t they?
I don’t see anything in this link about 2225 or 2450. This paper is all about whether the recent bump is acceleration or El Nino.
Apparently someone else came up with those numbers by making some rather invalid assumptions. It is almost impossible to stay on that type of high emissions scenario for 400 years. There isn’t that much fossil fuel.
You do realize all estimates come in ranges, right? A minimum, median, and maximum. Quoting only the maximum range of worst case scenarios and inferring they are the likely outcome is part and parcel of propaganda. If you want to say one number, say the median or include the term “worst case” with your projection.
IPCC AR5. Year 2500
High emissions scenario (1.5m to 6.6m)
Medium emissions scenario (0.2m to 2.3m)
Low emissions scenario (0.5m to 1.0m)
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig13-13
Figure 4 of Fasullo, Nerem & Hamlington projects a long-term acceleration stabilizing at ~0.12 mm/yr^2; the above-quoted dates for two-meter sea-level rise (by 2225) and ten-meter sea-level rise (by 2450) then follow, don’t they?
That rate is “only” 10x greater than the rate estimated by the IPCC AR5:
“When a 60-year oscillation is modelled along with an acceleration term, the estimated acceleration in GMSL (twice the quadratic term) computed over 1900–2010 ranges from 0.000[–0.002 to 0.002] mm yr–2 in the Ray and Douglas (2011) record, to 0.013 [0.007 to 0.019] mm yr–2 in the Jevrejeva et al. (2008) record, and 0.012 [0.009 to 0.015] mm yr–2 in the Church and White (2011) record. For comparison, Church and White (2011) estimated the acceleration term to be 0.009 [0.004 to 0.014] mm yr–2 over the 1880–2009 time span when the 60-year cycle is not considered.”
If you want to believe sea level acceleration rates are going to magically change by a magnitude when there is zero evidence of this happening over the last 100 years of warming, be my guest. The IPCC doesn’t believe it and you will just have to ignore the scientific consensus on the subject.
I commend to you this piece reflecting on attempts by the US military to plan on even 30-50 year horizons. Probably no other institution in human history has expended as much effort and money on very long-term planning.* Their success has been modest.
*Note: possibly the ancient Egyptians were an exception.
Lol … the scientific prediction “No one will succeed at building a perpetual motion machine of the second kind” has held true for at least the last 522 years, hasn’t it?
And no one foresees that the Second Law will be overturned very soon, do they?
Gosh, perhaps these climate-scientists are onto something with their “thermodynamics”! 🙂
And yes, the prediction of anthropogenic global warming is firmly anchored in fundamental thermodynamical considerations, isn’t it?
AGW, yes. Model projections, no. CAGW, again no.
Agreed. The guy is clearly a genius, but he’s also totally totally nuts. His views swing from one extreme to the other on a range of issues, and I don’t think anyone in the actual environment movement, or within environmental science or climate science, thinks of him as a leading environmentalist. What he does do is make really wild claims that make for interesting article headlines, which I think has probably been more than partly responsible for his prominence. Brilliant, quirky and interesting, sure, but ‘leading environmentalist’, and entirely sane, no probably not.
On charter schools:
My basic hypothesis is that public schools with the lowest SES students have a whole lot of kids who hold back academic achievement of others either by being directly disruptive (bad behavior) or through being plain dimwitted. The charter schools can reject the bad apples and accept only the better students. This creates an environment in which they can achieve in accord with their academic potential.
I don’t think it’s even that the Charter Schools reject the “bad apples” (though that certainly is part of it), it’s that to get into a Charter School one’s parent must, *at minimum* value their child’s education enough to initiate a change. The “easy button” is to hand your kid off to the default school for your address and let The State do as it will. It is marginally harder to get your kid into, and make arrangements for them to get to a charter school. This immediately sorts out parents who don’t care, and parents who don’t care will (statistically) have kids who don’t care.
A culture that values education (see the comments about Denmark and Sweden neighborhoods) is going to produce (largely) kids that value education. A culture that doesn’t value education is going to produce kids that do not.
It does suck for the kids who want to learn but are stuck in traditional schools, but it was going to suck for them anyway.
If all schools were charters though, the effect of a relatively small number of invested parents is enough to drive whole markets to do better, the same way we have competitive markets in, say, soap, despite the fact that few of us pay much attention to which brand we buy.
“If all schools were charters though”
Sit back, children, and hear the tale of the Goose Who Laid Golden Eggs…
Right, because markets are totally untried system that definitely doesn’t produce better cars, computers, or cell phones every year…..
I wouldn’t die on that hill, TBH. When it comes to manufactured products of all kinds, the new version of a given thing, in today’s capitalism, might have some added functionality, improved safety and useability, reduced price and cost of production, or other objective and real improvement, or it might not, and the only thing that could be said for it is that the newer stuff is trendier. Which, by definition, it always is.
Lots of us over here still have Communist-produced leftover manufactured goods and one thing they’ve really got going for them is that they’re certainly sturdier and longer-lasting than their modern versions, from textiles to appliances.
The things that make charter schools have better outcomes will not exist if you declare that all schools must be charters.
I don’t think it’s totally accurate to say that charter schools *reject* bad or disruptive students.
They may recruit by advertising in ways which are more accessible to certain types of parents. They may create higher-than-necessary barriers to entry on the part of the parents. (Like, you have to attend some meetings to apply/enroll.) They may try to scare the parents into not applying (like, making it clear there are strict behavioral codes, or giving the kids a test which isn’t used in admissions, but the school makes clear that kids who don’t pass are going to have trouble with the curriculum.) Once difficult kids enroll, the school can expel them for behavioral issues, or threaten to make them repeat a grade if they don’t do well on the tests. (Whereas, if they transfer to their local neighborhood school, they won’t have to repeat.)
But I wouldn’t really call these “rejecting” bad students or only accepting better ones. In some cases, that would actually be much better, as with charter schools like BASIS which have very difficult curricula. Rejecting a student who almost certainly isn’t going to make it is much kinder than accepting them and then letting them fail.
I think both you and William have detailed and sensible thoughts. In my defense “yeah, uh, that’s totally what I meant.”
I don’t know the experience of charter schools elsewhere, but in my home state of Minnesota, charters seem to have almost exclusively “bad” or “disruptive” kids. I’m not sure if charter schools here even have the right to exclude certain kids, but in any case they don’t. It seems to me that the whole point of charter schools is to have an alternative to public schools for kids who don’t do well in the public system. I am curious to know if the charter experience is different elsewhere.
Unfortunately the average charter school here also has test scores well below the average public school. That makes them look unsuccessful, but it may be that those kids in the charters are doing better there than they would have if they stayed in the public schools. It would be nice to get some data on this, but it is such a political hot potato that it would be difficult to get objective information. But overall, I think charter schools are a good thing, because it provides an outlet for those failing in the public schools.
It depends, how close are they to Air Power ?
Air Power is seriously OP.
I think you meant to say that “Air power forms the apex of the first triad of victory” 😉
Air Power is seriously hamstrung by the enormous problems that come with putting pilots in charge of things other than exactly one airplane.
that is……very well put. I will definitely steal it.
I believe this is the same Lovelock whom the title character of the Orson Scott Card novel is named after.
I imagine this is not the order they did these three things in.
Dunno, Komodo dragons eat a lot of carrion. Probably does work better like that.
Looking at that largest cities throughout history link…the Late Bronze Age Collapse was legit.
And we still don’t understand why, which is more than a little bit scary.
Why so? Most people don’t work in agriculture any more.
Most people do still eat food, though.
That’s not saying much. It should be no surprise that the people who believe in the Collapse produce precise numbers compatible with their beliefs. The best case scenario is if the Collapse were a summary of these numbers, but it isn’t. The numbers were produced after the qualitative idea existed and are influenced by it. It’s hard to imagine any other way to do archaeology, but circular reasoning and echo chambers are real problems. (Not to dispute the particular example of the Collapse.)
Or maybe you just mean that you didn’t know how big the Collapse was supposed to be…that the Capital C was legit.
I don’t usually defend Kim Jong-un, but he didn’t ban sarcasm, just sarcasm aimed at his regime. Not much better, I suppose, but good evidence that all those “North Korea is comically crazy!” stories are nonsense, and it’s just ordinary crazy.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/warned-09022016160227.html
What do you mean by “real value”? I just read the abstract, but it said they found no evidence of signaling value; it said nothing about real value.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. That isn’t what the abstract says.
The conclusion (in the abstract, I didn’t read the paper) was that a high school diploma had zero value (and hence zero signaling value).
The conclusion is that a high school diploma has zero signaling value, as teenage mothers who basically completed high school but did not receive a degree have similar outcomes as teenage mothers who did receive a degree. There is still a discrepancy in outcomes between high school dropouts and people who completed high school, and Scott determined that this was a result of real value as this paper suggests that there is little signaling value.
Does the paper discuss this discrepancy? Or are you simply referring to the common knowledge that high school graduates as a group do better than dropouts? If it’s the latter, I don’t see how that has anything to say about the real value of high school; there are obvious confounding factors at play.
“I feel bad for being excited that Scandinavia will probably develop its own segregated underclass in the next few decades”
What makes you think this will happen?
Large number of uneducated immigrants * integration failure = underemployed ghetto-ized underclass.
Is there any evidence that this is actually happening? I would expect Scott to base expectations on something more than just speculation.
Yes. Visit Stockholm.
Which runs much higher in melanin than one would expect, yes, but that doesn’t stop the Social Democracy from owning their souls.
There’s a rule: If you think Sweden is pursuing a stupid government policy, check your facts and your reasoning very carefully indeed, because you’re likely wrong.
Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than about anyone not neighbouring an active warzone, but it’s also pretty effective at turning them into swedes.
I live in Stockholm. What exactly would visiting Stockholm prove about Scandinavia developing an underclass?
@ Joel
So, do you notice any difference in the character of the centre city (not the Gamla Stan, but rather, say, the Sergels torg area) over the last decade or so?
@ Thomas Jørgensen
You’ll excuse me if I don’t consider that the primary criterion for success.
@Lumifer
I haven’t noticed anything personally, but I’m sure you’re implying that there are more foreign-looking people about on the town. Although that could possibly be true, I fail to see that it conveys anything about socioeconomic demographic change, much less provides any proof whatsoever.
I’m smelling emotional vested interest on your part and I’m very tempted to back out of this discussion,unless you have some verifiable facts for me.
@ Joel
No, no vested emotional interest. An no, I don’t mean the numbers of brown people (or the number of kebab shops).
I was struck by how much dirtier this area became. Also, emptier in the evenings with aimless groups of young men here and there. I know the feeling I got there, from other places, but I did not expect to encounter it in Stockholm.
@Lumifer
Fair enough. I mistook your tone for the same rhetoric used by the uncomfortably large xenophobic minority in Swedish. I apologize.
I still don’t think a general feeling of dirtiness says anything about developing an underclass.
Is this rule based on evidence? If so, could you please summarize the evidence?
Is this rule based on a logical argument? If so, could you please summarize the logic?
Or is this rule based on wishful thinking?
Syrain Americans are 52nd on the wikipedia list of ethnic groups in the US by household income at $61,000, while Dutch Americans are all the way up at …. 58th with $59,000 in income? Followed by French and Korean identifiers.
Scandinavians are 11th at $72,000, but Danish/Swedish/Norwegian are 32/33/34 at around $66,000 so the gap between the Danes and Syrians is about the same as the gap between Scandinavians and the Danes.
I would imagine most Syrians got here (before the civil war) by having educational qualifications and being part of the flying class. Most Dutch/Scandinavian Americans have likely been here for many generations so that’s not a guarantee for them.
The Syrians Europe is getting now are a rather different demographic.
Being in a country for 3-4 generations should be an advantage for the Dutch/Scandinavians over recent Syrian immigrants, and most of those Northern European immigrants would have been selected from higher ambition/risk tolerant pools, and left behind lower ambition/risk tolerant pools in their homelands.
Ok, I should have been more precise than “many generations”; Dutch immigration to North America dates back to the 1600’s. New York City was founded by Dutch settlers as New Amsterdam. Several hundred thousand more Dutch immigrated in the 18th and 19th centuries. When a community’s ties go that far back, they tend to disassociate from that ethnic identity and assimilate into the mainstream culture, which results in fewer intracommunity support systems and networking opportunities. As a result, the demographic profile of the descendants of Dutch settlers should be very different from their ancestors in major ways, because these descendants are now culturally and socially indistinguishable from most white Americans.
Syrian immigrants who came here for economic and job-related reasons are likely to be more educated than the American median, and more likely to form connections with other Syrian communities in the United States.
But not genetically (depending on how the survey data was complied and intermarriage etc).
The counter would also be that there were major immigration waves (particularly the Swedes) in the late 19th/early 20th century ( Wikipedia has 1.3 million Swedes coming during that time frame, a pretty enormous number considering the current population)
See eg http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/assessing-immigrant-integration-sweden-after-may-2013-riots :
“On a scale between 0 and 1 (with 0 being perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality), Sweden’s Gini coefficient in 2012 was 0.24, versus the OECD average of 0.31. Between the mid-1990s and late-2000s Sweden’s Gini coefficient grew by 4.8 percentage points, representing one of the fastest growth rates in the OECD, and suggesting a likely driver of the growing discontent among the Swedish labor force—both native and migrant. In addition, the poverty rate in Sweden has more than doubled since 1995, and stood at about 9 percent in 2010, according to official estimates.
As immigrant populations have grown, Sweden has experienced a persistent level of segregation—among the highest in Western Europe. In 2008, 60 percent of native Swedes lived in areas where the majority of the population was also Swedish, and 20 percent lived in areas that were virtually 100 percent Swedish. In contrast, 20 percent of Sweden’s foreign born lived in areas where more than 40 percent of the population was also foreign born. Demographic differences among regions, and particularly between the north and the south of the country, are also important.”
As you’ve probably noticed, the debate has become quite heated on this issue in recent years. As a result I’ve become allergic to statements on the form “Sweden is doomed, and it’s the immigrants’ fault”. I know you only said the first part of that, but it still triggered my xenophobe detector.
Interestingly, you’re the first person who has responded with actual facts, not just speculation and “common sense”.
I’m still not convinced, though. The article you linked places most of the blame on labor and housing policies in the 90’s, and I’m not sure that is very relevant projecting forward. And I’m certainly not convinced that this is because of immigration, other than immigrants being the victims of this increased segregation.
But integration isn’t failing. It’s slow – it takes about a decade, but it is very complete.
Take a typical refugee ten years after arriving in Sweden and he or she is now an employed atheist (the statistics on how quickly and totally immigrants secularize are pretty eyeopening) social-democrat.
Same holds in Denmark. There’s a lot of angst about failing integration, but it’s almost entirely down to the fact that recent arrivals haven’t been assimilated by the Northren Borg yet, which makes them stand out like all hell, which fear-mongering assholes exploit for political gain and the fact that Sweden takes really very high numbers of refugees in, which makes people worry, but really, from one perspective.. a decade is less than 18 years, so..
It would be nice if we could become even more efficient assimilators, but that would require substantial breakthroughs in adult education, because teaching people a new language and then ramming them through a full remedial education is just not a very fast process regardless of how strong your national tradition for adult education and training is – and it is very strong in all the nordic countries.
“But integration isn’t failing. It’s slow – it takes about a decade, but it is very complete.
Take a typical refugee ten years after arriving in Sweden and he or she is now an employed atheist (the statistics on how quickly and totally immigrants secularize are pretty eyeopening) social-democrat.
Same holds in Denmark.”
…
“An analysis of Danish data conducted by the Rockwool Foundation found that for family-reunificated spouses/relatives etc. to fugitives, 22 % were employed after having lived in Denmark for five years (the family-reunificated individuals, that is, not the fugitives themselves). Only one in three of the family-reunificated individuals had managed to find a job after having stayed here for fifteen years. […] In Denmark, the employment rate of immigrants from non-Western countries was 47,7 % in November 2013, compared to 73,8 % for people of (…’supposedly’, see also my comments and observations here) Danish origin, according to numbers from Statistics Denmark (link). […] When you look at the economic performance of the people with fugitive status themselves, 34 % are employed after 5 years, but that number is almost unchanged a decade later – only 37 % are employed after they’ve stayed in Denmark for 15 years.” (I posted this on my blog a while back, here’s the blog link, with more data and information)
Just for you information, I’m not going to engage with you again or reply to any comments below which you might make – I frankly don’t respect people who either talk about that which they know nothing, or who say things which they know not to be true, and either one or the other applies to you. I added the comment for the benefit of others, not for the benefit of you.
The reference for your fifteen year number is very hard to find, and it conflicts with eurostat.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/578956/IPOL_STU(2016)578956_EN.pdf (page 23)
The fact that the labor participation for immigrants to Denmark is currently dropping is news to me, and depressing as hell.
You’ll want to look at Table 9, page 30 of the Rockwool Foundation publication. The numbers are right there in the report. 34.3% employment rate after 5 years, 36.8% after 15 years, 34.1 % for family reunificated individuals after 15 years.
Listen, this stuff isn’t news. I have done postgraduate work on the fiscal effects of immigration, and even ‘left-leaning, the welfare-state isn’t that bad-‘ economists like Torben Andersen agree that immigration is a problem that needs to be addressed – I should know, I’ve attended his lectures on this topic. I have not seen those Eurostat numbers before, but the very notion that *any* group of fugitives have a 75% employment rate after a decade is laughable to anyone who’ve actually studied this topic.
In case you were wondering, I only responded to your comment because you were sort-of-kind-of implicitly calling me a liar (I was considering reporting the comment, but decided against it). I state this also so that you’re aware that my preferences have not changed; I do not want to engage with you any further.
You might be right about everything, but this is a terrible way to engage in an argument.
Whatever Happened to Anonymous
The fact that I didn’t outright call Thomas either an idiot or a liar in my first reply was a result of great restraint on my part. He in my opinion clearly does not know enough about this stuff to hold an opinion on this topic.
I’m autistic, so I don’t always have a good grasp of the social rules that other people play by, but the numbers speak for themselves. Also, this was not supposed to be an argument; it was supposed to be me telling people who might not otherwise know that Thomas is wrong (full of bullshit). As a general rule I don’t engage in arguments with people like Thomas, because as Brandolini aptly put it, “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
Notice how I didn’t include numbers related to the question of whether or not (muslim) immigrants in Denmark are secular in my first reply? That’s not because I haven’t looked at this stuff, it’s because it’s too much work to prove people like Thomas wrong on all counts. It’s not worth the effort. Half of Danish muslims – both first and second generation – wanted the government to punish the people who drew the Muhammed cartoons, yet this guy’s telling some fairy tale about (all of? most of?) them having jobs and being secular. I hoped to show by adding the employment figures that his opinions are worthless and that he clearly doesn’t have a clue – it’s not just that he’s ‘a bit off’ about the numbers, he clearly has no idea about the actual state of affairs. But I don’t want to talk to people like that, because it’s a waste of time – life’s too short. Openly signalling your disapproval of people who behave in this manner should in my opinion be considered a virtue on a site like this one.
@US
I agree that you should probably practice a bit bit more humility if you truly want to be taken seriously. How can you be 100% sure that Thomas is bullshitting? He clearly has numbers backing him up, and how can you be sure your numbers are more trustworthy than his numbers? The truth is not always black and white.
If you don’t want to argue, fine, but the kind of hit-and-run fact-dropping you’re doing is probably not very effective at convincing people.
@Joel:
“Take a typical refugee ten years after arriving in Sweden and he or she is now an employed atheist (the statistics on how quickly and totally immigrants secularize are pretty eyeopening) social-democrat.”
I’ll be more blunt. This is a bald-faced lie, and anybody who has ever actually looked at the data knows this. He gives zero evidence for the atheism part, which is not surprising as there is none, and a lot of evidence pointing in a very different direction, and only has one highly questionable source for the employment data, which frankly goes against pretty much everything we’ve known about these topics for decades. I know because I’ve been interested in this literature, on and off, for a long time; I read my first Rockwool Foundation publication about Danish immigrants’ employment figures, educational attainment, crime data, etc. 15 years ago, and I have, as I also mentioned, done actual academic work on these topics. I have also blogged such topics in some detail in the past.
Thomas does not respect the truth, which to me means that he argues in bad faith. I don’t want to pretend I don’t know any better than him or that he may be right, because that’s not true. It would be a bit like, say, some 2nd year physics student granting that the guy trying to sell him a perpetual motion machine might be on to something. He’s not on to something, he’s wrong about the facts. The fact that people like Thomas often get away with statements like the ones he includes in his first comment to which I replied is a big part of the reason why I don’t care for political debates.
Joel:
Just to do a bit more of the work for you, if you want more details about some of the reasons I have for assuming I know more about these topics than Thomas does, here are some links to start with:
Data on Danish immigrants (1)
Data on Danish immigrants (2)
Data on Danish immigrants (3)
Data on Danish immigrants (4)
A few crime data
Integration i Danmark omkring årtusindskiftet (book in Danish)
Random stuff (Follow the links. I’ve also read textbooks about norms, migration analysis, conflict analysis, etc., and there’s a reason why I included links to that stuff as well in that post. I also consider books like these to be important in terms of obtaining a deeper understanding of the issues at hand, especially in terms of understanding how it’s very clearly not reasonable to expect an outcome like the one Thomas implicitly outlines).
I’ve quite systematically deleted a lot of the stuff I posted on these topics on my blog in the past so there are a lot fewer links than there could have been, but the above collection should at least help clarify that I’m not some average Joe who read a newspaper article in the Economist about immigrant employment rates and therefore think that I know a lot of stuff about these things. As I point out in one of the articles I later deleted on the blog, an analysis of roughly 2000 Syrians who arrived in Denmark between 2009 and 2013 showed that only 13% of Syrians were employed after having stayed here for three years (here’s a Danish link). A report last year (Danish link) relatedly e.g. found an employment rate of Lebanese people at the age of 30-59 years living in Denmark of 30,4%, and an Iraqi employment rate of 32,8% – compared to an employment rate of 82,3% for native Danes. Try to square numbers like these with a 75% employment rate among fugitives after 10 years (Thomas’ source), even assuming other subgroups in the sample do significantly better, keeping in mind that many of those Iraqi and Lebanese people have already been here for more than a decade. Square it with the dual observation that 50 % of males and 35 % of non-Western females without a Danish education are employed, and that only one in four immigrants in Denmark had a Danish education in 2015 (Statistics Denmark, link). Square his optimistic 10-years-is-all-it-takes position with the observation, made in a recent article by two of Denmark’s leading demographers, that the difference between the native Danish employment rate and that of non-Western immigrants increased from 23.3 percentage points (77.9% for Danes, 54.6% for non-Western immigrants) in 2008, to 26.1 percentage point in 2013 (link). The idea is not worth taking seriously, and if you think such numbers are accurate you don’t know what you’re talking about.
As for refugees quickly turning into secular atheists, just a short note on this. A survey made by Capacent, Din muslimske nabo, found that 55% of muslims asked thought that it should be illegal to criticize religion, whereas 34% disagreed with this view (Danish link). Other surveys have found similar results, for example another large survey (n=2792) of Danish muslims in 2009 asked whether the participants agreed that the government should outlaw books and films criticizing religion. 50% of both muslim immigrants and descendants thought that it should, whereas only 35% of muslim immigrants, and 40% of muslim descendants, answered no to this question. A substantial proportion, bordering on a majority, not only aren’t atheists, they’re actively in favour of making criticism of their religion outright illegal.
I daresay it’s already begun. Sweden Yes and all that.
Regarding Adam Smith… I dunno, I feel like having a hiring manager so racist that they can be detected by studies has all sorts of cascading problems in a global economy. I mean, most small businesses fail anyway – passing up talent, vendors, or customers based on race or worse driving them away is probably one more mistake than most businesses can afford. As more US states become minority-majority and the entire world’s economy becomes more global most businesses are looking to go international on day one. If a car dealership doesn’t want to hire a Spanish speaking salesman well the CFPB is looking into racism in car loans and GM or Ford will pull the plug in a second if regulators ask them too. And once we get to mid to large size businesses who is going to accept a job offer from a noticeably racist hiring manager? Even if it is subconscious on the hiring manager’s part, new hires are going to meet their coworkers in the office or on the factory floor and unlike sexism or bosses being jerks the fact that everyone is white is not something that can be hidden.
Younger workers are going to be disappointed in a lack of diversity in a company, especially if the company’s make up is wildly out of alignment with local demographics. Regulators are going to be sniffing around, and businesses in cut-throat markets just aren’t going to survive against competition that excludes irrational factors. I don’t know if “twice as often” is true or not, but I would say that the more openly racist the hiring manager, the less likely survival becomes. Even most racists prefer dog whistles and subtle hints now.
I don’t understand this logic, if most small businesses fail anyway then they (by definition) can’t afford the mistakes they are making. Making fewer mistakes would make you less likely to go bust.
I think Albatross’s point was that small business can’t afford to be racist or they will go out of business. But the comments were a little scattered.
In general I agree that the market will drive racist businesses under. But one really needs to looks at the specific situations. Imagine a community where most of the population believes incorrectly that a sub-class of the community is stupid or has poor work habits. You would think that a business that hired this sub-class would have a competitive advantage and increase their profits. But if the business is retail, they may lose business if much of the community won’t patronize their store because of their workers. Even if they don’t sell directly to the community, the business owner might be ostracized and have other disadvantages for going against the community will. So I don’t think it is straight-forward that businesses will be less racist than their community.
On the other hand, a racist community probably won’t have non-discrimination laws either. So I do agree that a business has more incentives than a government to be non-racist. But I don’t think it is likely that businesses would hire in a non-racist manner in a racist community, even with no laws forced them to hire to hire racially. I believe in the case of Jim Crow, there were quite a few laws that forced racial hiring and other restrictions, so this isn’t a good test of my theory.
It’s worth pointing out that how much harm racial discrimination does to the target population depends a lot on how much of it there is. Take your example. Suppose half the businesses are in the sort of situation you describe, where hiring the members of the disadvantaged group is unprofitable. If the group makes up only a tenth of the labor force, there are still plenty of jobs with firms that are not in that situation.
So fifty percent discrimination imposes a fairly minor cost on the victims, a somewhat narrower range of employment opportunities. Ninety-five percent discrimination imposes a very large cost. The effect is highly non-linear.
Most of the CRAAAAAAZY JAPANESE GAME SHOWS LOL clips miss some important context: most all of these stunts are restricted to celebrities only. The intent behind most of these things is to pull the curtain back on their regular front, give the fans an opportunity to see their authentic self, the stuff they’re made of. On the opposite end, of course the celebrities are also working closely with the staff to maximize the entertainment value of the footage. And it’s their job to.
Western reality shows do filter for this by casting the most interesting auditionees, but those people are still actually competing for the prize. It’s still not the same thing as using people for whom it’s literally their job to do these sorts of things and make it look interesting. (although the internet has inadvertently reinvented that class in the west, with social media celebrities and streaming celebrities and such, the return of personality-driven non-narrative media) If you watch full clips, the prizes are usually trivial, from eating a single meal on camera, to some shower stuff basket, to just the screentime to shill their latest song or movie or drama. Half of the time, the prize is to just not partake in the penalty game, and so some celebs are crafty enough to lose with style, so they can be even more entertaining in the penalty game.
There’s a stark difference in behavior to when actual competition is in play, such as in the case of Run For Money.
Re: Japanese Gameshow
It’s not a gameshow – the clip was from “Sekai no hate made IteQ” – they send comedians around the world to see interesting things/ do funny challenges.
Good show.
The literal translation would be Variety Show, is the way Japanese refer to it. However, the exact show in question is actually a very interesting example. The show started as 『クイズ発見バラエティー イッテQ!』, literally Quiz Discovery Variety ItteQ. ItteQ is a pun since the English Q sounds like the Japanese sound which would end the verb “go and come back”. so it’s a play on Go and Quiz and Go and Come Back. Basically “Destination Quiz”. The discovery part is done by the production team, which goes to exotic locations to “discover” a quiz to give to the contestants.
It was only in 2007 when it was renewed that the name changed to the current 世界の果てまでイッテQ!, i.e. “To the ends of the earth! Go and Quiz/Come Back (pun)”. So its roots are still very much in quiz and games, though the content is various and would be considered a “variety show”. At the same time it’s very difficult to say a show with QUIZ (albeit via a pun) in the title is not a quiz/game show…
Interesting.
I see what you mean, but, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a stand on this one and insist that it isn’t a quiz/game show.
This is a quiz show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugMoVk0krjo
I would say, even if it is light hearted, in order to be a game-show, there has to be some element of competition, or the entertainment has to in part derive from the contest, or the format of the “contest” has to be integral to whatever it is they’re doing.
I just can’t see that with Ite Q. I mean, half the time they don’t really have any challenge at all – it’s just like – go to this interesting festival that they have in Mexico, or something.
Or do a bungee jump.
For example, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DmhQP77zNc
The sections are called “What’s the world’s best festival?” (A regular segment) and “If you ask barbers around the world to give you a haircut, what kind of haircut do you get?”
Like I said, it’s a variety show now. I’m not disagreeing, really, more just pointing out its interesting origins. There are a lot of Japanese variety shows that might have mistakenly been called Japanese gameshows about which this conversation would occur, but it happened to occur regarding a show that has “quiz” in the name and started specifically as a quiz show.
For example, here’s an older episode (2007) so you can see how it used to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbme0RAkmBg
and here’s a newer episode but it still has questions and timer ticking down and such:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x40a9fh
So it is (and is intended to be) much more Jackass than Jeopardy?
I would say the closest thing is probably Top Gear.
“Brookings Institution: “There is a deep well of rigorous, relevant research on the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts…This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.”
The natural experiment for the High Schools between lottery winners and lottery losers is a lot less clean than you would guess. They do the big test at the two year mark and the difference between in years in a charter between the winners and the losers of the lottery is only a half a year.
https://seii.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Charter-School-Demand-and-Effectiveness.pdf
Before moving to impacts on test scores, we first
confirm that the charter school eventual offer
indeed predicts the likelihood that an applicant
will attend a charter school. In the language of
the framework described above, this is the first
stage (Table 5A, column 2). Middle school
students offered a seat in the lottery attend one
more year of school at a charter than those not
offered a seat. The difference is about half a year
in high school. This satisfies the condition that
charter offers predict charter attendance.
But why is the difference in years of charter
attendance only one year in middle school and
half a year in high school? If all students who
were offered a seat at a charter enrolled in that
school and stayed for all years prior to the
MCAS, we would expect the first stage in high
school to be two years, for 9th and 10th grade.
(Middle school is a little more complicated, as
we combine multiple grades so that the expected
years of attendance will vary based on grade
level.)
There are several reasons for the difference.
Many students who are offered seats at a school
choose not to attend, as discussed in Chapter 3.
Some students leave a charter before we observe
their MCAS score.iv And a few students who
were not offered a seat in the lottery end up
attending a charter, usually through sibling
preference or application after the entry grade.
Happily, our empirical method adjusts for actual
attendance at a charter and scales the effect by
the years of attendance. This is another benefit
of using instrumental variables, in addition to
controlling for selection bias.
——————————————————————-
I mean OK, do the best with the data you have. But, pretty sure that the lottery winners who don’t choose to attend the charter or who get washed out are going to be worse students than lottery winners those who do attend until the test.
Even aside from the lottery question, in the charter schools study, does Brookings have other biases? Or is Massachusetts the only state where they are beneficial? Did they research all 50 states and then publish the date on the 1 state where they were beneficial?
The Myth of Charter Schools
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/11/myth-charter-schools/
“… a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school.”
Charter schools are an area where bias is very likely in studies. A lot of charter school corporations make a boatload of money off of them, and many have been found to be quite corrupt and/or incompetent at providing good educations to students. Those corporations are dying to find studies that show how superior charter schools supposedly are.
Yeah. I think they are hyping the Massachusetts study because it is one where the charters look good and because there is a charter initiative on the ballot in Massachusetts.
My bet is that this education reform stuff is actually generally pretty well intentioned, but since it doesn’t actually work, the scammers make their way to the top.
A follow-up on Scott’s occasional mentioning of the physiological effects of CO2 concentration.
I’m not clear how the 426ppm lifetime exposure figure was derived and the paper cites a paywalled 2001 paper from the same author. While I doubt that specific threshold is well-supported, this is one of the fat-tail scenarios that keeps me from dismissing AGW as an x-risk entirely.
Link.
Smells of cracked pots.
I agree, at least to the extent that I hadn’t heard about this until now, and that I would have expected to hear about it a lot if it were widely agreed to be a potential problem. On the other hand, the science doesn’t strike me as obviously fishy.
I’m not an expert, but I would think that if we have gone more than half way from normal levels of CO2 to toxic levels of CO2, you would notice that in nursing homes, people are dying left and right from CO2 poisoning.
Regarding the career paths reddit post, is anyone here an actuary? I’m considering moving into that field (currently a software project manager), but I have no idea if I would actually enjoy the work. I passed the Probability exam with a 9, and I’m currently studying a bit for Financial Mathematics, but I’m reluctant to commit fully without knowing much about the job experience.
Any advice or input would be appreciated.
Not an actuary, but I know a bit about the field.
My sister and her husband are both actuaries with >15 years experience each.
My brother was an actuary for a couple of years, hated it, and became an ER doctor.
All on the P&C side, not Life.
Short version, picked up from many family dinners over the years.
Pay is good.
Hours are pretty light once you’re finished with all the tests, and vacation time tends to be generous.
(Before then, expect to put in a lot of time studying on top of your full time work.)
(And even with studying, hours tend to be less than I-banking, medical residency, or biglaw.)
Easy transition path to management role, if desired.
Medium to high levels of corporate bureaucracy.
Many people find the work boring and somewhat repetitive.
When not in meetings, you spend your time working on spreadsheets estimating losses, for use in setting prices and determining the necessary level of reserves.
If you need more details, you’ll probably have to find an actual actuary.
I’m sort of an actuary, though not in America.
If you work at an insurance company, the work is kind of boring and pretty specialized, but the pay and the benefits are good. If you work as a consultant, the pay is bad and the benefits are bad until you climb up the ladder far enough, but the work is more diverse and interesting.
I was thinking that an advantage of trying to be an actuary is that you can get a job relatively quickly after passing an exam or two. That way, you can find out if the work is a fit. This is unlike law, where some folks go through three years of school and then realize the work isn’t their cup of tea.
Also, what prompted you to start thinking about actuary?
That BMJ retraction piece is a rabbit-hole of interesting things.
First, you get the studies put forth by the BMJ admonishing the low-fat dietary guidelines based, in small part, on (meta-?)meta-analyses by journalist Nina Teicholz–which all contrarian sources seem to make a special effort to remind readers she’s *just* a journalist (which is actually doubly interesting because while she studied Biology at Yale/Stanford she has a Masters from Oxford in (???) because she’s pretty purposefully vague about it). Then, you get this organization, CSPI, who wrote the retraction letter to the BMJ signed by over a hundred expert (or expert-adjacent) researchers/doctors/advocates, in part, due to the nature of the BMJs results in influencing American dietary guidelines and the DGAC.
Pretty interesting, but there’s more: many people that signed the original retraction letter are removing their names from it, seemingly in response to public records requests. Additionally: was the appeal to retract the article done in good faith, or was it an example of censorship due to Teicholz’ critical review of research spearheaded by the originator of the retraction letter, Dr. Hu. This essentially culminated in the removal of Teicholz from a National Food Policy Conference panel.
And to cap it all off: the blogger I linked above doing the research? He’s the son of the guy that invented the Heimlich maneuver.
edit:
The comments are a goldmine as well.
More from Heimlich.
Teicholz’ in-comments response to retractionwatch.
This whole thing is a mess. I’ve met with Nina a few times; I respect her work and think she is a good person.
But both sides have become ridiculous. It has even descended to name-calling, and both sides are completely convinced of their 100% right-ness on diet. I feel like that as well is a good metaphor for all things.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.html
Machine learning uncovers uncomfortable facts. Who’s at fault? Evil data scientists who focus on accuracy instead of what Cathy O’Neil feels is “right”.
Did you read her book?
I disagree with your characterization of that discussion. Her argument is that people shouldn’t have their punishment increased because of factors they can’t control, not that data scientists who find correlations are evil.
First of all I really don’t think this is what she’s saying, and second I don’t think it’s a good steelman either. What factors do people control? A principled stance that ignored all inputs out of the control of the subject would ignore pretty much everything. People have no more control over their IQ than their neighborhood. Should we ignore intelligence when making hiring decisions, or admitting people to universities?
And you still need to provide an argument that justifies why it’s wrong to use factors they can’t control.
The comment was about criminal punishment, not hiring or university admissions. This is a standard position in law, e.g. some random paper that came up in Google states,
Compare with, e.g., the insanity defense. Finding a principled stance here is indeed a difficult problem (if we live in a deterministic universe), but it is one that jurists have been discussing for centuries, and the answer is not to ignore pretty much everything.
Like O’Neil says, a law that says “if your father has been in jail, you are sentenced to one more year in prison” would seem to be unconstitutional. Yet these kind of rules are now being applied, only codified in a computer program instead of in a the criminal code.
Request phrasing this less annoyingly in the future.
This is not even close to the argument she was making.
1. She never conceded that the data scientists were uncovering causality. To the contrary, she argued people are using the results of models without much critical thought put behind the causal story. I wouldn’t really call that “focusing on accuracy”.
2. She pointed out cases where the most accurate algorithms were still inaccurate like the value added model in education. Sure, the model might be slightly better than some bureaucrat in figuring out the true skill level of a teacher. But teachers aren’t fired because of the opinions of some bureaucrat, but they are fired because of the marginally better opinions of some algorithm. Her point was that it’s fine to go after more accurate methods, but the seriousness of our actions should in some way correspond to the accuracy of the method.
3. Of course, she is going to tell us what she feels is right. What else can you expect? Apparently your feeling is that algorithms produce Truth, and it’s fine to use the criminal justice system to punish people for things they did not cause (like being born in the wrong zip code). Clearly O’Neil’s values conflict with yours, but I think her main point was that you’re still making value judgments even if you’re just using an algorithm.
Also, why are you mad bro?
She would. “The problem with recidivism scores is what we’ve done is we’ve basically given the power to a class of scientists, data scientists, who focus on accuracy only.” She’s pretty clear on this point, I think.
#2 obviously I agree with, bad models are bad models and ought to be treated as such.
For #3 see my response to qwints. But yes, obviously I value truth & knowledge over O’Neil’s feelings. Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t you or anyone else? Why wouldn’t O’Neil? I certainly value knowledge over my own feelz, and I’m not even a “data scientist”.
Her use of accuracy in that sentence meant that the actions of the algorithm reflect the past data that’s been fed into it.
Her argument is that the data used to create the algorithms is biased and so will produced biased results.
The discussion of hiring practices is a great example of this. If a company has only ever hired men then how can an algorithm even know that women COULD be hired.
Her argument is a more nuanced version of “crap in crap out”
By positioning your self as for “Truth” and O’Neil as against “Truth” you have forced others to disprove you by arguing “Truth” is not good. Thats a very cheap trick. It also ignores that “Truth” can mean different things based on the question you are asking, which is another of O’Neil’s points.
If you ask: “How likely is someone similar to Mr.X to end up back in jail?” You will use different inputs than if you ask “How likely is Mr.X to end up back in jail?”.
Answering the first question does not answer the second question. The second question is likely unknowable to any reasonable amount of accuracy.
Furthermore, the sentencing algorithm is self reinforcing. Much research points to longer sentences leading to hire recidivism rates. If the algorithm gives you a longer sentence because you were born in a certain place and then you do end up back in jail then the algo thinks it was “right”. But it is possible you only ended back in jail because you had to serve a longer sentence on the original crime. Had you served a shorter sentence then maybe you wouldn’t have committed a second crime (this is unknowable but the algorithm doesnt even consider it, apparently).
Pointing out cases where markets punish discrimination only shows that markets sometimes punish discrimination. As being screwed over only part of the time isn’t a good deal, this proves nothing useful.
Also, imagine that one business owner takes some of his profits and buys some baseball tickets and another instead buys some discrimination. If the first guy doesn’t go out of business, why should the second?
Also (also), consider cases where customers prefer discrimination. If customers will pay extra to eat in a place that is all white, discrimination could actually be profitable.
Also (also), consider cases where customers prefer discrimination. If customers will pay extra to eat in a place that is all white, discrimination could actually be profitable.
This is one of the most difficult instances I have struggled with. A business is hiring a customer service person. Person A is glum, dower, and doesn’t shower often – but is swift and precise in data entry and expert at eliciting what the customer actually needs. Person B is bright and engaging and attractive – but fat-fingers X% of the entries and has no real ability to understand the product or customer needs.
At some point, the downsides of hiring A are overcome by the upsides of hiring B. The question is *where*?
The government is far less able to id that tipping point than the market. At any rate, it is more likely to be less accurate than the moving mean of the market.
Outlawing discrimination against A only means that all the like companies have an even-ish distribution A-type customer service types, with a corresponding decrease in marginal customers who would rather not purchase than deal with an A type teller.
imagine that one business owner takes some of his profits and buys some baseball tickets and another instead buys some discrimination.
A third buys some MJ. A fourth goes to the art gallery. A fifth buys some porn.
…wait, which moral preferences are we enforcing again?
The point of the baseball ticket example is that a common argument by libertarians is that discriminating costs money, so businesses that do it won’t be able to compete. But businesses whose owners spend money in other ways still are able to compete.
businesses whose owners spend money in other ways still are able to compete.
Right. And again, if we are going to discriminate against some plays in the system, but not others, which morality are we enforcing? And why? And most importantly, at what cost?
@Jiro
Sure, but: Owner A takes some profit and spends it on baseball tickets. Owner B spends the same amount on discrimination, so he can’t afford baseball tickets. He’d better like discrimination better than baseball.
Then a lean year comes. Owner A’s demand for baseball tickets is pretty elastic, so he chooses to forgo baseball tickets this year in order to keep his business alive. How elastic is owner B’s demand for discrimination? If it’s less elastic, he goes on discriminating and his business goes under. If it’s more elastic, he grits his teeth and stops being discriminatory. If people say, “The Hell with that; he made his bed already” then he still goes out of business. If people say, “Hurray, another nondiscriminatory business I can patronize” then he stays afloat. If he gets used to being nondiscriminatory and decides next year he’d rather buy baseball tickets, then we’ve made progress. If he hates his life all year, then when things pick up he’ll go back to his old practices — until the next lean year.
Meanwhile, Owner C, who cares more about his business than he cares about either baseball or discrimination, has expanded throughout the tri-state area and eats both their lunches.
Yes. That is definitely how the theory works.
In actual real-world capitalism, companies get away with small inefficiencies all the time. When the consequence is a small loss in productivity, that’s fine. When the consequence is an impediment to the ability of racial minorities to engage in society, we start looking for other solutions.
(As an aside: some of the right-leaning people on this site have indicated concerns about what they see as increasing culture wars, in which previously apolitical spaces become polarized by racial tension. I don’t track the individual stances of posters here enough to know whether anybody simultaneously holds that position and the libertarian stance on discrimination that is the topic of this thread, but it seems worthwhile to point out how thoroughly incompatible they are. If you think there’s too much racial tension now, imagine how much more you will enjoy it when our societal mechanism for eliminating racial discrimination relies on the public naming and shaming of businesses who are perceived as being racist.)
I think this is a talking-past-each-other case.
In terms of the right amount of racial tension I think the ideal amount is zero, much like for poverty. Different political philosophies have ways of addressing the disconnect between reality and the ideal.
I suspect that the comments about “too much racial tension” are less about an argument over naturally-occurring racial tensions as opposed to racial tensions which are being flamed for political purposes.
Much like comparing deaths from a hurricane vs. a terrorist attack. The numbers might be the same, but one has agency behind it.
” If customers will pay extra to eat in a place that is all white, discrimination could actually be profitable.”
Only if those profits aren’t eaten up by the extra expense. After all, if you reject job candidates for being black, you either have to pay more to attract more candidates, or leave openings open for longer.
And how much would they be willing to pay, anyway?
>And how much would they be willing to pay, anyway?
I can’t comment on racism (I think it’s plausible that a small number of businesses could benefit, though not most), but businesses like Hooters did pretty well by focusing on the male demographic and hiring exclusively attractive, female waitstaff.
I have to imagine pandering to the market of “people with racist beliefs” would be less profitable than pandering to the market of “men who like hot busty women”. Particularly as you might pay in more than just cash — the stigma that would be attached to patronizing a business that advertises itself as “whites only” is far less than that attached to patronizing Hooters, at least at the moment.
I have to imagine pandering to the market of “people with racist beliefs” would be less profitable than pandering to the market of “men who like hot busty women”
Sandy, I think I can get you coming and going on this one 🙂
All your pretty buxom waitresses are white blue-eyed blondes? Well, that’s just plain downright racism! (Do gentlemen prefer blondes? Has there been a study done on this – surely there must have been?)
On the other hand, if you try to not be racist by hiring equally pretty buxom WOC, that’s also racist because black women have been hyper-sexualised, Asian women are regarded as demure and submissive dolls, and so forth.
So whatever you do, it’s racist, and you are profiteering off racism, you racist panderer 🙂
If the anti-discrimination laws get repealed, that would imply that at least 50% of the population is interested in patronizing a whites-only business, and you should expect there to be a market for it. Similar to how there was a market for it during the Jim Crow era.
(I suppose it’s possible that most of the people who get rid of the laws will be public-spirited libertarians who think it should be legal even if they’d never personally patronize such a business, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)
The specific case of whites-only businesses seems unlikely to make a comeback, because we’ve spent over 150 years working to stamp out that particular strain of discrimination. But that’s not a general argument. It doesn’t follow that, say, Christian-only businesses would be just as unprofitable, or that fifty years from now, nobody will be interested in cyborg-only businesses. If something is contentious enough to become “the issue of the day,” that probably means there’s a big population in favor of it.
Um. That’s the “if you want legalize drugs you are a druggie yourself” kind of argument?
Isn’t this a fully general argument against capitalism? Maybe sometimes a company makes a crappy product but is able to stay in business anyway. But the more intense the competition, the less likely this is to happen.
(agreed this doesn’t address your last point)
‘Crappy’ is rather subjective. There is a lot of evidence that people choose by other factors than quality, like virtue signalling, tribalism, emotions, etc.
I think that you merely need to look at how product are marketed, which very frequently is not by arguing their quality, that many consumers don’t optimize on quality.
Hence I find the idea that more competition will result in crappy products to lose out to be a doubtful assertion.
Unless you define crappy as the opposite of what people base their decisions on, but then you are just arguing a truism.
LOL, we’d have to look through a lot of advertisements to find one that does argue for the quality of the product.
Have you ever seen a car commercial that mentions winning a JD Power award? Here’s as many as you could care to watch.
Here’s an ad for paper towels that’s about quality. And one for toilet paper.
Of course people care about quality.
@nano
That is not a good rebuttal. Firstly, there are a huge amount of commercials, so one type of advertising can be rare compared to other types, yet still have my cases. It would have made more sense for you to have searched for ‘car commercial’ on youtube and they tally how many of the first X results mention quality (although that is still quite subjective).
For example, only about 5% of people are gay, so in a random group, you’d have to ‘look at’ 20 people before you encounter a gay person. One could somewhat reasonably say that you have to meet ‘a lot’ of people before you meet a gay person. Yet 5% of the billions of people on earth is still a huge number and it’s not hard to find them if you specifically seek them out.
Secondly, ads placed on Youtube can hardly be considered a representative sampling.
we’d have to look through a lot of advertisements to find one that does argue for the quality of the product
Radio ad of my childhood, in which the slogan was “Cheno Unction: it’s a quare name, but great stuff!”
It’s a rebuttal to an argument (inefficient things will lead to a company going out of business) which is already fully general. As a rebuttal, it is fully general in the sense that it applies regardless of which inefficient thing is mentioned, but it fails to be fully general in the sense that it does not rebut more specific arguments that are not about all inefficient things as a class.
The specific details of the inefficiency also matter. If our real-world businesses only reach 80% of the efficiency of a spherical business in a frictionless void, that’s not a big deal; it’s not like we were going to capture that remaining efficiency with another economic system. If our real-world competitive market only squeezes out 80% of the racism, then it still sucks as a racial minority when you get hit with the remaining 20%. Furthermore, we actually do have an alternative response to racist service and hiring practices, and it seems like a pretty good one to me.
@Jiro
The unstated assumption that keeps it from being fully general is that a sufficient number (for some definition) of people aren’t bigots. For discrimination to be insupportable, there have to be competing non-discriminatory businesses.
But if bigotry is that widespread, who’s going to elect the government that criminalizes it?
Obviously one can make up counter-examples. If I am a super-genius who discovers a cure for cancer that will otherwise take humanity a thousand years to find, but for reasons of my own I will sell it only to left-handed redheads, the market obviously isn’t going to strike me down. So what?
The assumption is weaker: only that a sufficient number of people value financial success more than their bigotry.
@Lumifer
Quite right.
Most businesses that stay in business either make a better product in the eyes of their customers, or are cheaper.
Related: did you know that the segregation-era South had to pass laws prohibiting companies from preferentially hiring (cheaper) black labor?
As Thomas Sowell would tell you, Prejudice is free, discrimination costs. Even passing laws doesn’t help, often. South Africa had places that were legally all white and actually majority black, because people wanted to sell their houses. Requiring the construction companies there be all white meant a white front man to deal with the government.
Every company wants cheap labor, whatever color it may be. That doesn’t mean company owners or managers are unbiased people.
If you need a Civil Rights Act, you pass a Civil Rights Act. you don’t say No, discrimination is fine and we don’t need any new laws, because… free market worship.
The question is in fact whether or not you _need_ a Civil Rights Act, or whether the absence of the opposite along with plain old human greed will get you close enough.
Sowell also points out that education and income increased steadily for blacks before and after the Civil Rights Acts — at the same rate.
So “need”? Do you?
Im glad that you live a world where the Civil Rights Act ended all forms of discrimination.
Yes, the vigorous maximization of economic output, in conjunction with minimization of labor costs, and the absence of democracy and a concrete bill of universal human rights, combined with widespread social dominance of rational-yet-unempathic cognition, has historically yielded economic optimization strategies that are morally problematic.
If you think the concentration camps were a net postive for the german war economy, you need to do a lot more reading about them. Nor was the problem specifically german, just about the first thing Beria did after Stalin died was get rid of the traditional gulags because of how appallingly wasteful of human capital they were.
What exactly determines whether a person is ‘left leaning’, ‘right leaning’, ‘radical left’, ‘radical right’ etc, etc?
The same as above, but with respect to places? What issues are the tipping points here? Gay marriage? Free trade? Free Speech?
As far as I can tell favoring the interests of corporations and the wealthy in all matters*
+
Hating SJWs
are the two issues that unite the right here.
*Being pro-gay marriage, pro-drug legalization, and pro-open borders are the issues where SSCers are able to “throw off the scent” of movement conserviatism. On these issues one is able to be creative with one’s political identity since they do not directly threaten the wealthy.
You need to be a little more explicit in your first claim, it’s a big vague.
True.
I don’t actually agree with Marx on much. But I do agree with him that economics is almost everything. The little non-economic window dressing matters don’t mean much– except as a bone for politicians to throw to voters, to act like they are actually giving them something significant, while politicians are allowing mega-corporations to rob people blind.
As I mentioned before, humans are beings capable of infinite self delusion. When humans get together into a tribe that has a lot in common, or think they do, they tend to ramp each other up to greater and greater levels of self delusion. Eventually you get tribes that don’t share much consensus reality between tribes at all. That’s what our larger society is like, and it is stressful to us all. This is a microcosm of it right here. As you can see, the Right Wing tribe is quite dominant, both here and in the larger society where it dominates the media and all major branches of federal and state government except for the presidency.
Jill, I think you’re equivocating between the right wing SSC- which is more reactionary in the old sense- and mainstream conservatism. Economics may be the most important thing to *you*, but with how little it gets discussed it seems fair to say background and social value differences are much powerful group attractors. Practically the only thing most rightwing SSC commentators share in common with the red tribe is a distrust in goverent regulations and the progressive left. Unless you were just making a metaphor.
Your description of the right-wing’s power is selective and comes across as very bravery debate-y. It goes the other way, too. I’m sure the right wingers here fancy their position more akin to that of a besieged minority than a suspicious elite.
As you can see, the Right Wing tribe is quite dominant, both here and in the larger society where it dominates the media and all major branches of federal and state government except for the presidency.
You know, I think I will sit down in my lunch hour and weep salt tears for the poor, downtrodden, oppressed American people. Right-wing bigots to the right of them, Right-wing reactionaries to the other right of them (left? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LEFT!!!), the one single solitary figurehead of goodness and progress being the President (he can be no other than a symbol of a kinder, better world because he is bound in chains and shackled by the Evil Right Wing Domination Parties Of Mass Domination of Culture, Religion, Politics, Media, Economics, And How To Roast A Chicken), the only faint ray of hope for the liberals huddled in secrecy in their homes, barely daring to dream of a world not crushed beneath the jackboots of the Right.
(I’d be a little less sarcastic if the Democrats were not every bit as happy to get into bed with rich donors and businessmen, just so long as they make the right noises about being socially liberal. All politicians are plugged into the Establishment, and those that aren’t – like Sanders, who is more old-school Labour than anything else – can be middling big fish in a smallish pond on a local level but won’t get too far above that unless they have the right connections and push the right line. And that should be encouraging us all to light a fire under our public representatives, of whatever party, to represent the interests of the public and not their own).
@Deiseach
I disagree with you a lot, but I still adore you.
I’m dubious about economics being almost everything. I believe that sometimes people gain economicly from prejudice, but a lot of the time, prejudice is a luxury that people indulge in for emotional reasons.
@Jill
You said
“economics is nearly everything”
And this interests me. Because it puts you “out of time”, so to speak – there’s a clear trend over the past little while for the left (or, at least, the mainstream left in North America) to care less and less about economic egalitarianism.
I think this explains the dysjunction that often occurs when you comment here – people who say “the left is winning” are speaking of social issues (it is hard to deny that the West has moved dramatically to the left on social issues in recent years), and people who say “the right is winning” mean economically (I think free-market policies have been doing better over the last few decades in the West).
The movement of the Democratic party to caring about equality, but primarily for people with university degrees and money, shows this: it’s a victory for the left socially, and a victory for the right economically.
Yes, and since economics is almost everything in a society, it’s overall a giant victory for the Right.
…Could we trade? I think I would rather have the Left win for a while on economics if it meant them losing on social issues.
“I don’t actually agree with Marx on much. But I do agree with him that economics is almost everything. ”
Why?
He’s been falsified in every prediction he made, so I presume you’re not basing your claim on his thinking. What are you basing it on?
Also, what does “economics is almost everything” mean.
Indeed what, in that context, does “economics” mean?
Money makes the world go round
X -D
Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need as well as greed have followed us to the stars, and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse.
Definitely feeling more “pushed” than “pulled” wrt libertarianism etc.
Being pro-gay marriage, pro-drug legalization, and pro-open borders are the issues (that do) not directly threaten the wealthy.
I’m in complete agreement with this, and often wonder that people don’t seem to realise it is perfectly possible to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You can be completely in favour of, for instance, paying for contraception on employees’ health policies and “a woman’s right to choose” not for any “reproductive justice” reasons but because it costs your business more money if you have to pay for maternity leave and your women workers are less productive if they are off having babies and leaving work at six instead of staying till ten because they have a sick kid at home. Better to encourage them to ‘lean in’ to their career and put off having offspring (for good if possible, but as late as can be) – for as long as they are of value to you.
You can even sell gay spaghetti, if that’s what will get you a larger share of the market, when the wind of customer sentiment is blowing that way.
(I’m more socially conservative, fiscally liberal in my sentiments, so I’m definitely not in favour of “corporations and the wealthy in all matters”, and I only object to SJW for the lunatic fringe – though what I would define as ‘fringe’ and others would not is where I get into trouble ).
I react somewhere between amusement and irritation when the bien-pensant fall right into line, as with that linked article above, to provide free marketing and advertising for companies that jump on the bandwagon. Some of them are apparently aware enough of the realities of life that they acknowledge the businesses and entities involved are only doing it to steal away customers (and are cynical enough to engage in tit-for-tat ‘you help normalise LGBT by showing happy gay families using your products in your media advertising, we will put your name out there as gay-friendly and to be supported’), but others genuinely seem to think that it really is all about “wooo, diversity! equality! we believe in this cause!” and not to realise that fundamentally it is all about the bottom line.
What happens when corporations or businesses have competing interests? Who do the right favor then? I think both the left and right wing have certain favored businesses: solar panels and green energy, agriculture such as corn growers, and Wall Street financial firms each have their boosters in congress.
Libertarians are for free markets but aren’t pro-
any particular business except the ones that produce high value at little cost and without infringing others.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the American political spectrum since 1933:
http://voteview.com/SENATE_SORT110.html
http://voteview.com/SENATE_SORT113.html
http://voteview.com/HOUSE_SORT110.html
http://voteview.com/HOUSE_SORT113.html
1840 Democratic platform? Largely right-wing. 1936 Democratic platform? Largely left-wing.
A far left-wing tweet: https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/783825597390782466
Of course, you can make up measurements for Right vs. Left that “prove” whatever you want to prove. But you can’t deny that both Houses of Congress, most governorships and state legislatures, and SCOTUS until Scalia died, are Right Wing dominated. And every year more and more money is spent on campaign contributions by the crony capitalist welfare queens that the Right Wing serves (And yes, to a lesser degree, parts of the DINO Left Wing serve them too), especially after Citizens United, the grand dream of the Right Wing, came into effect.
“especially after Citizens United, the grand dream of the Right Wing, came into effect.”
But not for the roughly two centuries before the campaign finance legislation that Citizens United restricted came into effect?
You seem to have bought into the story according to which the world was fine because rich people couldn’t spend much of their money on politics, then Citizens United was passed, and now the country is going to hell because rich people can buy politicians.
That’s wrong twice over. For most of U.S. history the restrictions didn’t exist. After the restrictions were passed and before Citizens United it was still legal for rich people to spend as much as they wanted, provided it wasn’t directly linked to a politician’s campaign. That is still the situation.
All the case changed was the ability of organizations to do what individuals could already do. If CU was reversed, the Koch brothers and Soros could still spend hundreds of millions of dollars on independent efforts in support of candidates and laws.
Did you know any of that?
Maybe the decapitation answers are like this 5 second film.
Interesting about James Lovelock saying that.
I had the idea that much of climate change is similar to nuclear winter*. Namely, lots of scientists don’t *really* believe things will get horrible in 30 years…but the logic is that people will never change unless the immediate danger is exaggerated.
Have you guys heard about the clown thing? Scary clown attacking children, or something? What’s up with that?
I haven’t heard about clowns attacking children, but I’ve heard of a bunch of clowns standing around menacingly in public places all over the US. At first I thought it was some kind of weird publicity campaign for the It remake, but now it’s starting to remind me of the Laughing Man in Stand Alone Complex. You have massive social networks that share common thoughts throughout society, which makes copycat behavior more frequent by feeding the same information and stimuli simultaneously to people with similar behavioral tendencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_laughter_epidemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Roy,_New_York#2011_illness_outbreak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morangos_com_A%C3%A7%C3%BAcar_Virus
Disappointing lack of conspiracy theories on the subject.
A man wearing a clown mask tried to rob a pharmacy in my area.
That’s not “creepy clown”, that “criminal using a clown mask to hide his identity.”
But I’m not well-connected to the “clown thing”, socially…
The lesson I took away from that Atlantic article is that we should stop using ballpoint pens and use fountain pens. Seems to me people who don’t have legible handwriting are still at a disadvantage going through life.
I would argue that ballpoints are, at least today, not necessarily better. They are less ergonomic, and today’s fountain pens can be pretty much completely leak-free. Inks dry reasonably fast. At this point, it’s a trade-off between wrist pain and smudgability of freshly written lines.
In general, libertarians support individual rights, but in the case of climate change, it seems as though the usual point of view is that if there’s some climate change (enough to flood out people living at the lowest altitudes, for example), this should just be viewed as an ignorable cost. Is this consistent with libertarian values?
The libertarian position is that making everything private property solves the issue.
The libertarian model is that the people seeing their homes sink bellow the waves should generate a list of every individual who’s released or caused to be released greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, take each of them to court one at a time in some private court that you and each individual agree upon for each case , in each court case you have to prove to the court to the standard of proof accepted by that specific court and judge that 1: greenhouse gasses are the reason for global warming while the defense throws every crappy denialist paper at the court, 2: prove that no other factor caused sea level rise, 3: prove that the individual in that specific case released greenhouse gasses, what they released when with proof to a standard the court will accept.
once you’ve established that they might have to pay damages along the lines of the damage to you divided by the fraction of the worlds CO2 they personally produced.
You then hope that this amount is more than a millionth the cost of the court case. You then repeat this exercise half a billion times.
If the individual is arsey and refuses to accept the juristiction of any particular private court then you’re SOL unless you can arrange for mercinaries with guns to kick their door in.
I’m not even kidding.
While yes the libertarian vision would say you should take offenders to court, you are ignoring a number of major factor and being needlessly smug about it.
The largest is the government’s (state and federal) role in creating climate change. Subsidies to gas and oil, housing, and the building of roads contribute much more to climate change than any single private enterprise (unless they are engaged in one of those activities).
Under a libertarian regime (if all policies were enacted) much of hose distorting effects would not occur and we may not be looking at such drastic impacts on the climate.
This of course does not “solve” this issue in other countries.
There are actually very little “subsidies” to gas and oil. Most of it comes in the form of tax credits and things like exploration depreciation rules that exist primarily so companies can have a predictable schedule for COGS calculations. Liberals call them “subsidies” for political purposes and because unequal tax breaks have the same macro effect, but from a libertarian perspective they’re not. Combine this with various environmental regulations and it’s very likely that under a hardcore libertarian regime there would be a lot more drilling, not less.
And it’s not like Libertopia wouldn’t have roads, they would just be private. Again, if anything, that would lead to more net emissions, not less (since the more competition, the more redundancy in infrastructure.)
“Government is the biggest polluter” is mostly a way for ancaps to dodge environmental questions. Any emissions-generating activity government engages in would likely be engaged by multiple private companies as well.
At a slight tangent.
One does not have to believe that one’s preferred political/economic system does everything right in order to prefer it, an obvious point many people seem to miss.
I spend part of a chapter in the current edition of my first book explaining why my preferred system for generating law will get some things wrong, including control of highly dispersed externalities such as air pollution. It is still my preferred system, for two reasons:
1. It isn’t clear that there is an alternative that consistently gets those things right.
2. There are lots of other things that I expect my system to get right and other systems to get wrong.
And how would libertarians solve the tragedy-of-the-commons problem with air pollution? By heavy restrictions imposed by the government? Why is that easier to do under libertarian regime than now?
I don’t think there is a good solution.
I’m glad that pure libertarianism isn’t what society has settled on, and actually has an EPA.
And how do you solve the tragedy of the commons problem, market failure more generally, for voting or controlling government more generally?
The problem arises because an individual makes decisions some of whose costs or benefit end up with other people so don’t go into his decision. That occasionally happens on the private market, as in the case of air pollution.
But it’s the normal situation on the political market. When you vote for president, the costs and benefits of your decision are shared with about three hundred million other people, a public good with a huge public. So you have almost no incentive to take care that you are voting for the right candidate.
Similarly for a congressman, a president, a judge in the decisions he makes.
Oh, I absolutely need to double check my political definitions and read the party manifestos, of current party platforms *and* the intellectual thought leaders. My language isn’t precise enough.
For that specific example I actually would prefer what society once hoped for in its electoral college system, where respected, educated members of the public were voted *to* vote for the president. And that persons vote would be silent. Its true, that one vote matters gets drowned out with 200 million other people. Choosing the best electoral representative out of 10,000 people would be preferable. I wish the older system held true.
Ignorable cost of what? Ignorable why? I’m having trouble parsing the view you’re trying to describe.
Carbon driven AGW is often viewed as an externality of carbon-generating economic activities of various kinds. This means, basically, that the cost (of the global warming effects) is paid by people so far removed from any of the transactions driving the activity that those costs can’t be effectively factored into the price (eg sea level has no or at least negligible effect on the cost of coal mining in West Virginia). It’s ignorable in the sense that a company or whatever can typically get away with ignoring it, not that it should be ignored. Saying that something “should” be viewed as an externality is a claim about useful framing, not about the morality of the thing in question.
The preferred libertarian solution to externalities is usually either (not ancap) a tax of some sort on the activity that creates the externality, in this case the generation of excess atmospheric carbon, or (ancap) a post hoc class action law suit against those entities that cause the externality.
Actually, the most libertarian solution is carbon credits, as this changes carbon output from an externality into a commodity that can be traded, so the people who create maximum value from carbon output will be the ones who can best afford to buy them; and the cheapest solutions to reduce carbon output will become cheaper than buying carbon credits. So the market should automatically make people choose to reduce carbon output in the cheapest way possible and pollute only when that provides maximum economic value.
From a theoretical free market perspective, it is a very good system and it was implemented as part of the Kyoto accords.
Of course, pretty much every time libertarians actually get into power they fail to make their solutions work. In this case, too many credits were issued, which meant that the supply was greater than the demand and there was no real pressure to limit carbon output.
My understanding was that most libertarians view the credit as a needlessly complicated solution that is fundamentally the same as the tax, which is nevertheless probably the best we’re going to get (in America) when there’s an extremely sturdy NO TAXES faction occupying a substantial part of the legislature.
That’s certainly my view, but I’m a libertarian sympathizer, not the full model.
I’d say that the libertarian position is that a carbon tax would be perfectly fine as long it was offset by a reduction in other, non-carbon taxes. It’s the left that’s uninterested in that deal, not the right.
Why? It’s about making people pay for an externality, not enhancing revenue. The proceeds should be directed towards mitigating the externality, but otherwise it seems separable from other parts of government and their budgets.
You’re absolutely wrong. There has been exactly one carbon tax proposal introduced by a Republican: Bob Inglis’ “Raise Wages Cut Carbon” bill in 2009. It went nowhere and Inglis got primaried by Trey Gowdy because ads hammered him with TAX TAX TAX AL GORE IS FAT without noting the corresponding payroll tax reductions.
As of this moment, there are multiple carbon tax bills currently languishing in committee, all from Democrats (and one from Sen. Bernie Sanders.) These range from pure fee-and-dividend to partial dividend + corporate tax cuts to dividend + tax cuts + job retraining / benefits for coal workers (probably fair enough considering an effective carbon tax would essentially end their industry).
But all of them specifically allocate the tax revenue, none of them simply adds it to the general fund in the way imagined by right-wing people attempting (and apparently failing) a left-wing Turing Test.
Just about the only example I can find of a right-wing government introducing a carbon tax is Ireland, and that’s if (a) you count Fianna Fáil as right-wing (b) ignore that they were in coalition with the Irish Green Party at the time. All carbon taxes were introduced by either left or center-left governments.
Sanity just doesn’t make the headlines these days, does it?
Republican =/= libertarian. Small “L” libertarians aren’t even a proper subset of Republicans anymore, if they ever were.
The relationship between libertarians and Libertarians is also complicated, of course.
I was responding to cassander’s claim that the left is uninterested in carbon taxes with offset revenues.
Mea culpa, then. I think I just missed the implications of cassander’s second sentence. Which has me annoyed now because we just finished a huge flame war where people kept trying to stick libertarians on one side of the US political spectrum, despite that not describing them well. And there he is undercutting my efforts to push back on that claim.
I don’t think many people think that carbon taxes will always get added to the general treasury immediately. Often they will gradually slip as one politician or another needs to raid something for a source of funds.
@AnonBosch
That the bills are languishing in committee with no one pushing them seems to demonstrate my point that the left is not particularly interested in them. More to the point though, raising taxes them spending the money on stuff democrats want is not lowering other taxes. Every single one of the proposals you linked to includes spending on some democratic constituency or creates a new entitlement. None one simply says “for every dollar this raises we’ll cut other taxes by a dollar.” Your evidence proves my point.
Fucking Congress, how does it work? Once a bill is referred to a committee any further consideration is dependent on cooperation from the majority party. It doesn’t matter how hot and bothered the Democrats are for a carbon tax as long as they don’t control the chairs.
And fee-and-dividend is not a “new entitlement” because the amount distributed is based entirely on revenues rather than some statutory obligation to distribute X amount. In the macro sense it’s entirely interchangeable with a payroll tax cut.
>Of course, pretty much every time libertarians actually get into power they fail to make their solutions work. In this case, too many credits were issued, which meant that the supply was greater than the demand and there was no real pressure to limit carbon output.
I assume you are referring to the European Carbon permit system? Because I’m pretty sure that there were precisely zero libertarians in charge of that system.
The European Carbon permit system is an implementation of the Kyoto credit system. So the former is a subset of the latter. I judge the system to be libertarian because it seems most consistent with stated libertarian goals (to allocate resources through the free market) much more than the alternatives.
The EU leadership cannot be considered libertarian in general, as their ideology is more a combination of libertarianism (very pro-free market, free movement of goods and people) with non-libertarian ideas.
Anyway, I do admit that my claim was too strong, although I do think that it is fair to judge ideologies by the performance of solutions that follow the tenets of that ideology.
>The European Carbon permit system is an implementation of the Kyoto credit system. So the former is a subset of the latter.
Neither of these had a libertarian within miles of them.
>ibertarian because it seems most consistent with stated libertarian goals (to allocate resources through the free market) much more than the alternatives.
By that logic, Hillary Clinton is a Stalinist because her goals are consistent with the Stalinist goals of reducing income inequality.
>although I do think that it is fair to judge ideologies by the performance of solutions that follow the tenets of that ideology.
I absolutely agree, and when a libertarian gets power over the EU, I’ll judge him thusly. but I will not blame libertarians for things they had absolutely nothing to do with.
I’ll assume he gets the visual/statistical evidence right and say that this XKCD is one of the better persuaders for AGW I’ve seen. My only complaint would be that even 20,000 years doesn’t seem like much on a geologic scale.
The problem is showing the (well recorded) recent upswing spike, while flattening out previous rises and falls over the last couple hundred years, which are not well recorded. Also there’s the extrapolations into the future.
While the proxy records are certainly lower resolution than the instrumental record, they’re sufficiently high-resolution that if there were a spike similar in duration and magnitude to the current instrumental record (i.e., 1°C over 100 years) we would’ve seen evidence of it. Tamino demonstrated this around the time Marcott 2013 (one of the source papers XKCD uses) came out.
Am I wrong in believing that when the hockey stick graph originally came out, the proxy numbers were replaced with the observed temperature data numbers for the recent period, possibly because the proxy line for the recent period failed to show the observed temperature increase? I thought that was what got referred to as Mike’s trick in the leaked emails, but I could easily be mistaken.
It would seem the obvious test of the sensitivity of the proxies to rapid temperature change.
In any case, the ice core data show temperature changes more rapid than the recent changes in the more distant past, I believe several times in the past million years or so.
No, you are not wrong.
One word: MWP.
Setting aside the fact it is evidently three words instead of one… What?
Mega Watt peak? Mr. World Premiere?
Medieval Warm Period
There’s no evidence that the MWP was of the same global magnitude as current warming. The south coast of Greenland was probably significantly warmer, but this is why global temperature analysis relies on data from more than one location.
Can you explain what Tamino did? I read it as saying he took the proxy temperature data, added a 0.9 °C spike to it, and showed that taking an average of time-perturbed time series shows the same spike. However, that says nothing about the relationship between the proxy and the underlying temperature.
From the XKCD comic, it looks like a 1 °C change over a century is considered “unlikely” (but not impossible) but there are 220 centuries in the graph, so assuming unlikely means p < 0.05 (and assuming independence across centuries) there should be 11 spikes. If unlikely means p < 0.01, then 2 spikes. The lack of error bars around the temperature is my main problem with the comic.
What happened to The Pause of the last 10-15 years? Is that still a thing that happened?
I don’t think they’d managed to completely adjust away the Pause before El Nino ended it.
The only context in which there was ever a “pause” was shamelessly cherry-picking start points near the 1997-1998 El Nino spike, and also cherry-picking satellite temperatures, which are more sensitive to ENSO and therefore register higher spikes. (Monckton at one point asserted his start dates weren’t cherry-picked because cherry-picking implies human selection and he had an algorithm which automatically selected the earliest start point that could maintain a zero trend, which is clearly totally different.) The 2015-2016 El Nino finally ended it in all datasets.
There may or may not have been a slowdown; some scientists say yes, others no, others “insufficient data for a meaningful answer.” But both 2014 and 2015 were record years and 2016 will likely be one too, so if there was a slowdown in the 20-aughts, it’s likely stopped by now.
My personal view is that the evidence shows that temperature increase is probably more stepwise and less steady than scientists previously thought (due to oceanic oscillations) but I’m certainly not a climate scientist, just a voracious reader and spectator of ClimateBall™ so that’s an extremely low-confidence opinion.
“My personal view is that the evidence shows that temperature increase is probably more stepwise and less steady than scientists previously thought (due to oceanic oscillations)”
My nonexpert guess is the sum of a rising trend due to AGW and an oscillating trend with a period of sixty or seventy years due to some mechanism shifting heat between atmosphere and ocean. That fits the general pattern of the past century plus, and there is at least one published article in support of it.
See, when I actually do the math, I find a statistically significant hiatus from roughly 2004 to the present, whether I exclude the anomalous El Nino years or not, whether I use GISS ground measurements or MSU satellite, whether I plot vs. calendar time or ln(CO2).
Not doing the math and just eyeballing the graph does risk being led astray by 1998, yes. But the post-2004 hiatus isn’t something you can just handwave away.
OK, I see what you did there. Anyone including the 1997-1998 El Nino spike is a cherry-picking innumerate denialist, but the 2016-2016 El Nino spike is proof that CAGW is for realz.
Throw out the outliers, all of them, or don’t. Either position is defensible. Including only the ones that support your interpretation, that’s the very definition of the cherrypicking that you would accuse others of.
I did a least squares fit to the data from 2002 to (I think) 2013, back when that was the most recent year the webbed NASA data were available for. I picked 2002 by eyeballing the data to see where it started to go flat.
The slope was about zero, I think very slightly but not significantly negative.
I explicitly said the pause was a false accounting based on cherry-picking the (then) most-recent major El Nino, so I thought it was fairly obvious that I was using the (now) most-recent major El Nino in the context of said false accounting. Apparently that wasn’t clear?
But it actually doesn’t matter either way, because if one does adjust for ENSO fluctuation, 2015 is still a record.
Depending on how one does the adjustment, yes. And you really don’t want to be “adjusting” data in a debate as contentious as this one. But OK, reasonable defensible adjustments make 2015 a record year for temperature.
So what? One of the competing hypotheses is a general secular rise in temperature. This model makes it likely that last year was a record high. The other competing hypothesis is that there was a secular rise in temperature from roughly 1975-2004 with temperatures generally flat with random fluctuations and maybe a weak warming trend since. By this hypothesis it is likely that the record high was some time in the last ten years, with no one year in that period more likely than any other.
You’ve got one anomalous data point that does not significantly distinguish between the two hypotheses. And you keep trying to make that data point decisive while insisting that the other side is “cherrypicking” by not throwing out one anomalous data point.
“The other competing hypothesis is that there was a secular rise in temperature from roughly 1975-2004 with temperatures generally flat with random fluctuations and maybe a weak warming trend since.”
This is a point I have tried to make over and over again in FB climate arguments and the like, with very little success. Most people don’t intuit the difference between high and rising. The fact that a recent year was a relative high is evidence that temperatures are higher than they used to be, but doesn’t tell us whether they are still rising or just varying randomly around a level that is high due to earlier increases.
Controlling for lurking variables is an incredibly basic scientific principle that is uniquely deprecated in debates over ((C)A)GW.
The other competing hypothesis isn’t a hypothesis. It’s a moving target that rolls forward as far as is needed to maintain a zero trend. I feel the need to reiterate that both my initial reply and pretty much all discussion on blogs regarding the “pause” since it was first tested out as a mindkiller by Fred Singer in 2006 have used a start date of 97-98. Now suddenly we’re not debating that, we’re debating your idiosyncratic idea of the pause as beginning in “[roughly] 2004.” The nature of temperature rise is that it will almost always be possible to draw a flat line going back some time, particularly if the rise is more stepwise than is commonly assumed. Here‘s an arbitrary pause that I found just counting back from my birth year (and I checked, both ’77 and ’86 were mild El Nino years per the ONI)
Both sides in this argument have two datapoints, a start and an end. The issue is comparing like-to-like. For a long time, the faux-skeptic crowd favored the use of 97-98 and [current year]. Due to the major positive ENSO signal, this was not a like-to-like comparison. And now that [current year] is like-to-like, such comparisons rightly appear foolish.
Meanwhile, those seeking a rigorous approach have three options: either adjust for the ENSO signal and make it like-to-like, which is reasonable but leads to spurious charges of data manipulation (usually with no deep analysis the adjustment methods or attempt at reproduction that might illustrate why it’s suspicious.) Or wait around for another El Nino year, but that’s inexact (since El Ninos are never exactly the same in duration and intensity) and makes your data kind of useless for 10-15 years at a time.
Or… just use the whole damn record because ENSO balances out and when dealing with GHGs 100 years is a better sample size than 10. Feedbacks can be slow, that’s why TCR and ECS are different values.
I love xkcd, but even Randall admits in that cartoon (around 16000BCE) that he is smoothing the data. For a view with more noise, see
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/20/josh-takes-on-xkcds-climate-timeline/
From the amount of time I was willing to spend this morning reading Japanese wikipedia, it looks like the komodo dragon clip isn’t from a game show. There’s a Japanese variety show called Sekai no Hate made ItteQ; the show has a bunch of different segments that they run. One of them is “Chinjuu Hunter” (rare animal hunter). The komodo dragon stunt was an episode of Chinjuu Hunter- no game or prizes involved, just doing crazy shit for entertainment.
So, less a game show and more “Mythbusters”. (Lizardbusters? Meatbusters?)
Test.
I can leave a comment through the in-page form now again, as before.
I tried to register a WordPress account to get in on the custom avatar action, but logging in (both through the reply button with this morning’s setting changes or through the right-sidebar link now) doesn’t seem to work. When I get to the “login through WordPress.com” the first clickthru works and I see my account, but the second clickthru to “log in” gets this error:
I’m logged in to WordPress.com right now one tab over so it sounds like something’s up with the Jetpack plugin
I had precisely the same problem.
Third person with that “Okay you do have a WordPress account, you are logged in, and yes you have followed the instructions but ha ha did you really think it would be that easy you naive simpleton?” problem.
Update: The WordPress login process seems to be working now, although this time the second clickthru required one manual retry (which I was prompted for).
I was blind but now can see
A parallel discussion I started before finding this.
For the record, I (currently logged out) still see the “recent comments” widget.
The “report comment” links appear to be gone?
Yes they do…
Yeah, that broke the blog for some reason. I’m working on sorting all this out, but for now I’m just disabling it.
> This is a metaphor for how everything works all the time.
when the government tries to “ensure fairness”. FTFY.
If I wanted to download subtitles for, say, “Stark Trek Beyond”, would take me less than 5 minutes to get them. Actually, you can get several competing versions of them, and there are people that will fix them for free if you tell them there are mistakes there.
Somehow opensubtitles.org guys have almost 4 million subtitles in dozens of languages without being threatened by Fed. No not “everything” and not “all the time”.
Is this some kind of weird Iron Man/Shatnerverse cross-over? Also, try something like Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem instead. Or just a random YouTube video.
Subtitles don’t appear out of thin air. Making them (and translating them) takes time and effort, especially when there’s no screenplay to check things against/copy things from. Subtitles for Hollywood blockbusters are readily available because they are popular (so it’s easier to find a poor English-speaking sucker who will create and upload subtitles for free), and also because often the distributor will bundle subtitles with the original release in the first place (so the production company/distributor/whatever pays the subtitler while the pirates don’t even need to put in much effort of their own). For more niche videos it’s harder to find someone capable and willing to create subtitles. (The “YouTube Heroes” program was supposed to create incentives for doing so, among other things. The response wasn’t enthusiastic.)
I think you mean this one?
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6745215/muhtesem-yuzyil-kosem-alametler-ve-mucizeler-en
There are subtitles. No idea how good or complete, but it’s there.
> Making them (and translating them) takes time and effort,
And of course this can not happen without Federal Government forcing people to do it. I mean, who except Federal Government could create such project as Wikipedia, for example? Surely not a bunch of unpaid volunteers and a non-profit supported by donations!
> Subtitles for Hollywood blockbusters are readily available because they are popular
Visit the actual site. There’s no 4 million Hollywood blockbusters. Visit Wikipedia and look how many projects it has. All supported by volunteers. It’s possible and people do it everyday. The potential of free cooperation is gigantic. The potential of Feds… well, we just saw it. They just destroyed a perfectly useful thing out of perverse sense of “fairness”.
> The response wasn’t enthusiastic.
Google has no idea how to do community. It’s a sad fact. I don’t know why but it’s just how it is.
I’m actually quite okay with Berkeley taking the videos down. It’s the sort of price you have to pay in order to have a policy that makes accessible videos. Like, negotiating with terrorists holding hostages saves lives, and there’s no way for your refusal to negotiate to go back in time and make the terrorists not take hostages, yet there’s still a very good case for not negotiating with terrorists. In the same way, there’s a very good case for supporting the accessibility requirement, even though there’s no way for it to cause Berkeley to have the funds and/or foresight to make the videos accessible.
That might apply if not allowing inaccessible content creates incentives to produce accessible content. I don’t think that’s true here; the inaccessible content was basically free for Berkeley. And bans on free inaccessible content don’t create incentives for costly accessible content.
It seems like we are trying increased inter-tribal communication here on this board more often. I think that it would be great if we could keep doing this more and more, even though it can be really stressful. Let’s have brass balls or brass ovaries or whatever it takes.
If enough of us have the courage to do this, and to strive to learn from it, and to learn how to do inter-tribal communication effectively and respectfully, then we could be a role model for our society as a whole– which desperately needs to learn these things, in order to survive and function well. It could be a matter of life or death for our democracy– or what is left of it.
The rise of Trump is but one symptom of our society’s pathological bubble-ness and the impossibility for most people of inter-tribal communication.
One thing I do agree with some Right Wing people on is that there are times when political correctness impedes or even shuts down communication. Yet that doesn’t mean that hate speech would be a good idea. I think we should strive for some kind of balanced way of dealing with that conundrum.
Can you elaborate on what you mean in the bolded sentence?
This isn’t meant as a gotcha, I’m just not sure what you’re saying. I initially read it as something like “slurs should remain taboo.” But then I reread it and now I’m not sure. Hate speech is kind of a slippery concept and I remember you subscribe to the idea of non-violent communication, which might have it’s own definitions which I’m not familiar with.
Anyway, I agree with the rest of the comment. More two-way communication, and fewer bubbles, would be good.
Yes, you are right. I meant more or less something like “slurs should remain taboo.” Your average person’s definition of a slur, not SJW definition of a slur.
Indeed. The N-word is a slur. “Burly” is not.
OK, great. Yes that’s a very sensible position which I fully endorse.
Is it important to make a distinction between “taboo” and “illegal?”
Yes.
I don’t know if SSC does inter-tribal communications very well. Pretty much everyone here is blue tribe. Deiseach is kind of like another country’s red tribe, I think, but the whole tribal model doesn’t translate very well over borders.
Jill isn’t using tribes in the way Scott did, as near as I can tell. I’m not sure if she has grokked that Scott even had a whole post wherein he heavily used the word tribe to mean “group I identify with which is different than party I vote for”.
SSC commentariat (SSCC?) tries to use tribes the Scott meant them, but Scott wasn’t actually all that clear anyway. He wasn’t really proposing an actual fully functioning theory of US tribes.
But … most people here are gray tribe, not blue tribe.
I’ve been more coming to the opinion that grey (gray?) tribe isn’t actually a useful paradigm. Mainly because it’s waaay too easy – it’s mostly the best aspects of red and blue, minus the bad ones. Considering yourself “grey” lets you just claim all the things you like about your tribe, plus all the things you like about the other tribe, while also rejecting what you don’t like about your own tribe. Plus, realistically, most people seem to eventually lean one way or the other (hence terms like “left-libertarian”). It’s just a matter of degree, plus how much tribe-self-awareness you have to be able to make fun of the stupid things your own group does and admit that they’re not perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, I really liked and self-identified with the idea of “grey tribe” when I first heard the term (in Outgroup). But realistically I’m in one of the two major ones, and I know which one it is. This took a while to figure out and admit to myself. Especially if you’re prone to (self-)awareness of tribal behavior and spend a lot of time without being exposed to your actual outgroup, people in your ingroup can become very frustrating over time, so it’s easy to start to think they’re not your ingroup. I think that’s where a lot of the grey tribe identification originates. Plus it’s very tempting in that it’s a way to claim to have transcended tribalism itself – you’re not actually even in one of the two factions, even better than admitting you’re just a slightly more self-aware and (hopefully) reasonable member of group X.
Now someone may just say, “Oh, you were never really grey tribe, but I am.” Which is possible, but I still think it’s more useful to just think of it as two tribes, and admitting to yourself which one you’re a part of can just be kind of difficult. Some people very close to the middle may have a particularly hard time. But most “grey tribe” people still probably find themselves getting more annoyed with one (out)group than the other; one is a lesser tribal evil for them. Plus having three just doesn’t fit the tribal model well. Who’s grey tribe’s outgroup? Blue and red are defined in terms of opposition to each other – their voting patterns and favorite restaurants are coincidental. Grey tribe doesn’t seem to have one, at least not in the visceral emotional sense that tribal outgrouping is supposed to work. They don’t oppose blue and red as a single outgroup, and blue and red barely seem to acknowledge them, except when treating grey members as part of their (blue/red’s) opposite.
To the extent that blue and red are meaningful, it seems more sensible to just think of basically everyone as being blue or red, but some people are particularly weird idiosyncratic members of their tribe, and some are more balanced and self-aware about their tribalness than the most glaring examples of tribalness usually are.
@Zombielicious:
There is lot of truth in that post, but, I think that using a small number of tribes to describe 330 million people doesn’t really work, especially when it’s such a heterogeneous population.
At the very least you need to look at splits like urban/sub-urban/rural. Traditional 4-year College/Other college/No college. Indistinct ethnicity vs. all the distinct ethnicities. What religion if any. High social function vs. low social function. And many more, I’m sure.
I think Scott mostly just took a collection of things I will call “urbane” (Jimmy Stewart’s aspiration in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and put that together with low-social function (we don’t understand most other people, and they think we are weird) and called it grey tribe. And that isn’t even quite accurate.
But blue/red doesn’t really accurately describe the rest of the US.
That’s true, but imo it’s just a shortcoming of the whole red tribe/blue tribe paradigm, not something that’s resolved by adding a grey tribe. Things start to feel weird when you’re putting someone like Ron Paul in the same category as Jerry Falwell, or someone like Thomas Friedman in the same category as Noam Chomsky (someone else may prefer better examples, but you get the idea). You can break things down (beyond red and blue tribes) along further demographic and ideological lines all you want, all the way down to individual people and organizations and their specific opinions and mission statements, but in the end almost everyone lines up in opposition to what they see as the greater evil, which seems to be what the red/blue idea is good at capturing.
Red tribe and blue tribe is like the result you get from factor analysis of the n-dimensional ideological space. It’s useful at predicting some things, like why do liberals hate the Koch brothers so much even though they support a lot of liberal goals (ditto for similar examples on the other side), whereas for other things you need to look at more than the one-dimensional axis. Adding grey tribe doesn’t seem to give you anything useful in between, and actually takes a lot of the explanatory power away. For instance, it’d seem fair to put both Chomsky and the Koch brothers in grey tribe, but now you have two members of the same tribe who are probably clear examples of each other’s outgroup. It breaks the model for stuff like this, whereas “red/blue tribe as coalitions of subcultures and demographics, and defined in opposition to each other” explains it perfectly.
@ Zombielicious
That is an excellent analysis.
Yes, great analysis. Thanks.
Thank you Zombielicious, beautiful. Describes perfectly what Scott meant and what’s wrong about using them as purely political labels.
To use myself as an example: I have libertarian leanings and have for some time, although I’m slowly building my way out of that. But I am still solid blue tribe, in Scott’s meaning. I think this can be demonstrated with a few good reasons:
1. I live within 15 minutes of I-95 in the North. This has stronger explanatory power than you might think. Anyone who has lived both near I-95 in the North and elsewhere in the East will understand. Anyone who hasn’t: The Boston-Washington corridor, one of the most heavily urbanized, densely settled areas of the country is defined by I-95 in this area. Even the less dense, urban areas can be very blue tribe, being usually either suburban or very close to a suburban area.
2. Blue tribe has a harder streak of gender egalitarianism than red tribe. I have four sisters (two sisters, two step-sisters): One is an efficiency expert for a major financial corporation, another is an accountant, another is a graphic designer for an industrial design company, and the final one (the one closest to red tribe of any kind) is a bank teller. All are employed, none are being asked (by their husbands or anyone else) to leave their work for child-rearing reasons (the graphic designer and the accountant have had kids so far). The efficiency expert isn’t even sure she wants kids and, although her husband does, nobody is pressuring her to do so (it wouldn’t work anyway).
3. Religion played a very peripheral role in all our lives. Even when my birth mother was dying its role was ceremonial for most of us. My one sister, the graphic designer is a straight up atheist, proud and moderately out-spoken about it. I’m not an atheist but certainly not a Christian. No one in my social sphere thinks this is weird or worthy of putting any pressure whatsoever on me for it. The most religious person in my family is, oddly enough, the sister who is an efficiency expert, the strongest female personality and the one least like any kind of stereotypical red tribe woman. Even then, her religiosity is a ‘liberal’ Catholicism. I doubt she would ever vote for an anti-abortion Republican, for example.
4. The blue tribe also tends to heavily value education. Three of my four sisters have four year degrees (the graphic design artist a five year degree from a prestigious university, actually), one of them (the efficiency expert) is working on an MBA at the cream-of-the-crop non-Ivy League schools. My father didn’t get a degree until later in life but he made a point of getting one when I was young (along with my mother, both took night classes to make sure they had a formal education), despite having no need of one whatsoever (he was doing very well for himself as a software salesman for a series of major enterprise software vendors). Purely a cultural choice on his part.
5. I actually get to see what strikes me as red tribe on a semi-regular basis, and always have. I grew up in a suburb that was somewhere near the border, where red and blue intermix pretty freely. There were still farms left in the suburb we lived in and, by the time I was old enough, there was still definitely a strong cultural current of old-county that had absorbed a lot of the off-spring of the people who moved here in the suburb boom of the last 50 years. I like a lot of these people but I can tell how different I am from a lot of them. In a way, they’re more blue tribe than a lot of their fellows further West or South and I’m probably a lot more red tribe than some of my fellows further in towards the urban core (which probably helps explain my receptivity to ideas like libertarianism), but I can still almost smell the areas where I am not on point with them.
6. My girlfriend is a black-native-white, mixed race aspiring scientist who isn’t sure about ever having kids. She wants to be a geneticist, which means a career that is NEVER going to let her be a house-wife and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She was born in Portland and her family is from New York. There isn’t a lick of red-tribe on her and I’m head over heels for this girl, have been for years. Unless you want to look at it as a John Smith-Pocahontas thing (she sometimes does. My suburban upbringing means I have more marks of red-tribe than she or most of the people she’s known do, which she finds attractive sometimes), this is probably a good reason.
I don’t know how good of an explanation I make, but I do think it highlights some of the key points that make the blue tribe blue instead of red. Breaking them down further can be useful, but having the model is very important because it helps understand politics and society in the US (which has almost always had some form of another of majoritarianism) much, much better than any other model.
Sub-groups of the red tribe and blue tribe are just that: sub-groups. The red and blue tribes are social coalitions, amalgamations of related groups that have some common vision of the future that they unite to achieve. They’re kept together by politics, but their achievements have non-political implications so they can have non-political properties. They can ultimately have individual members who disagree with most other members of the tribe on every single one of a laundry list of political points (I’d be willing to bet that a surprising number of They-Who-Shalt-Not-Be-Named spring from blue tribe backgrounds), but they do so from within rather than without (still surrounding themselves with tribal fellows and engaging in non-political but still tribal behaviors).
They’re attitudes, they’re cultural mores, they’re beliefs and they’re instincts. Not all people come to the same political conclusions based on the same attitudes, cultural mores, beliefs, or instincts, so you have variance within the tribes. All you can see as far as definitive outcomes for each tribe are statistical. Not every red-triber is a reliable Republican voter but many of them are. Not every blue-triber is pro-choice, but many are. Political leanings are just one test of tribal membership, something that can give an indication but aren’t themselves firm support for a conclusion.
@Zombielicious:
Agree with that, but most especially about it being a product of the political system, especial a FPTP political system.
I think comparing modern day sports loyalties with the ancient green vs. blue rivalry is instructive (although certainly not original).
Deiseach is kind of like another country’s red tribe, I think
Definitely. As HeelBearCub points out, Scott’s Tribes were meant to apply to more than merely political views (it’s entirely possible to be Blue Tribe Republican and Red Tribe Democrat, for instance) and encompass an entire cultural way of thinking, behaving and worldview: education, religion, who you interact with, social/ethnic diversity or homogeneity in where you come from, where you went to school, where you work, etc.
Naturally we then glommed onto them as labels for political discussion 🙁
The Trump link is from May. (I’d thought I read that somewhere before.) I’m curious if Chinese opinion has shifted much since then, as his anti-China rhetoric has only grown.
The sentiment that comes across in Chinese opinion of Trump is somewhere between the least empathetic stance and most empathetic (as expressed in the notion of “pathological altruism”). Whereas the modal reaction around the world to a foreign leader bashing one’s homeland is simple animosity, the Chinese reaction may be one of “well yea, if I were him I’d say the same thing about us.” Meanwhile Clinton’s opinion is post-nationalist, as she, relative to Trump, believes China is worth criticizing not because it’s the “other team,” but because it runs afoul of idealistic humanitarianism. The fact that it’s a nation-on-nation squabble is only incidental, but it’s nonetheless anti-Chinese. This may feel to the Chinese like something akin to the way domestic conservatives feel, in their disdain for progressives’ leap-frogging loyalties. Dishonest and all about moral grandstanding.
So the Chinese hate Her more, despite Trump’s rhetoric. They may also recognize hot air when they see it, so discount Trump’s mostly hinted-at militaristic belligerence as compared to Clinton’s actual record.
Please stop this, person who is definitely not E. Harding. It’s every bit as annoying as liberals using Dr*mpf (which is apparently sufficiently annoying that Scott has a filter for it).
Ok. I was using the word “her” anyway, and that added flair. Is it even an insult? I mean “Obamacare” isn’t an insult, not anymore, apparently.
What is “Dr*mpf”? First I’ve seen it.
Drumph. It’s Trump’s old family name, and John Oliver tried to make a great joke of it. Fortunately, it hasn’t gotten much traction.
It’s sadly gotten traction in certain internet circles, including some leftists who really should know better than to make such ethnicity jokes.
My very strong general impression is that, relative to Americans, citizens of the PRC are conservative, right wing, and authoritarian as understood in terms of American political standards, albeit also more secular and much more positively disposed toward communism as a lip-service ideal. Trump is a better match to the beliefs they already have.
I’d assumed Chinese opinion leaned toward Clinton because her pantsuits look Mao-ish.
Possibly a better approach to political discourse.
Eh, suppose Mister Plumbean’s extravagant ad-hoc property mods severely diminished the value of neighbouring properties. Suppose Plumbean also took to playing loud Caribbean-Techno-Hymns with jungle sound effects 24/7, 365. Suppose Plumbean wasn’t a competent property modifier and caused damages, wild animal rampages and invasive species issues. I wouldn’t say it’s unlibertarian to ask him to think of the neighbourhood.
Is The Guardian a rag, or is climate science significantly less sciencey than I thought?
…so is this one of those Tesla type cases where he manages to invent useful stuff while still going batshit, or…?
This is not the dumbest thing I’ve heard all month, but only barely.
Well, it is if you base it around “Gaia”.
“His Gaia hypothesis, which contends that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism, is now accepted as the founding principle of most climate science,”
???
Pretty sure “Gaia Hypothesis” was what the bad guy from the movie Kingsman believed in. Sounded like the kind of thing that, uh, you would expect a movie writer to make up.
@anon and @David Friedman
The guardian has a pretty good science section but that article was not written by one of it’s science writers.
It also has few nutty new-agey authors who wouldn’t know a hypothesis from a pointy stick.
hence the fluffy garbage.
http://www.nature.com/news/james-lovelock-reflects-on-gaia-s-legacy-1.15017
that article was not written by one of it’s science writers.
I was wondering why James Lovelock was being treated as Serious Climate Scientist, given the scepticism that his Gaia Hypothesis evoked back in the day. It was odd to see him being quoted as mainstream, not as, um, a visionary thinker.
Did the Pope wear a silly hat until the present one eschewed it as a vanity in the eyes of Christ?
This is the same paper that boosted Stalinism far into the Sixties and still gives Polly Toynbee a column. It’s had worse Brexit coverage than the Daily Mail.
It’s nicknamed Teh Grauniad for a reason. Tied with the Daily Mail for worst non-red-top newspaper in Britain.
Publishing the News hacking scandal and PRISM program makes quite interesting history for a newspaper “tied with Daily Mail” in terms of being terrible. Just take the Israel – Palestine coverage with a grain of salt.
Ok is no one else absolutely terrified of the whole “robots will take over by the end of the century” thing? I mean, I can’t be the only one wetting their pants at the thought of this right? Also, and I acknowledge this is largely rhetorical, what idiot thought letting computers design other computers was a good idea?
Is anyone else considering a campaign for a new dark age?
I’ll be dead by the end of the century, so there’s not much point wetting my pants at the thought of it.
So will I hopefully. How sad that our fallback position for catastrophe is now just being dead.
Not necessarily. Peter Thiel plans to live forever, and I have the utmost confidence that he’ll think of something around 2070.
Maybe they should elect Trump then if only because the nuclear holocaust will cauterize the wound. But I guess such cynicism is cheap and unproductive.
Butlerian Jihad when?
New Early Medieval Period. Historians abolished the old Dark Age some decades ago.
Historians abolished the old Dark Age some decades ago.
I wish the pop culture would catch up with this; the amount of times I see “Dark Ages” thrown around, in some cases not alone meaning “Mediaeval Period” but even up to before the Enlightenment! Because pfft, what were a bunch of Italians doing in the 16th century before a bunch of French and English gentry in the 18th century suddenly all grew big brains and discovered the use of reason?
I’m very sore about the Mediaevals, though: fight me on the 12th-13th centuries, go on I dare you 🙂
The 12-13th centuries were great, which is exactly why I call “the Renaissance” a Dark Age. The people using reason in the 15th century weren’t Italian.
It does tend to remind me of the 60s and the later “New Age” revival: all that Western logic and science is so boring and materialistic, man, let’s go for Esoteric Eastern Wisdom! So they fall over themselves reviving Neoplatonism and one-upping each other on who can manage the most obscure reference to Classical mythology, as well as astrology and magia getting major upsurge in interest and coolness factor 🙂
Somewhere there is a quote about the commercial revolution having now been pushed back to the eleventh century.
I’m particularly fond of barbarian art such as the Sutton Hoo treasure and the Tara Brooch (even if the latter has sacrificed function on the alter of form).
Things in the 12th century might have been relatively okay, but the British Isles in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries were pretty grim.
Compared to when and on what data? All of the past save the very recent is pretty grim by modern standards.
Checking my handy Atlas of World Population History, it shows British Isles population growing from 600 to 800 A.D.
Compared to the prior Romano-British period. The entire concept of a dark age is that thing have gone backwards. I don’t think anyone calls the iron age a dark age just because it was grim as compared to the present.
the British Isles in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries were pretty grim
Hey! The 8th to 10th centuries were the high point of our Golden Age in Ireland! Is the Book of Kells something you would expect out of “pretty grim” circumstances? Occupied England “the Romans pulled out and left us hanging in the wind as the Romano-British are gettng their backsides kicked by vengeful tribesmen and our economy and society has collapsed along with Rome” may have been “pretty grim”, but the rest of us were doing okay.
Viking incursions became a real problem towards the end of the period, and the Norman invasion invited over and decided to stay during the 11th century kicked off a long period of strife, but early Christian Ireland was a land of (relative) peace and prosperity; the monastic foundations were famous educational centres, we were sending missionaries to continental Europe who were founding monasteries all over the place and becoming bishops, royal advisers, and teachers, power was being centralised (whether you think that was a good or a bad thing, but it cut down on minor feuding and raiding), even English kings came as international students to get free education from us 🙂
I’ll leave you with the joke about John Eriugena* and the Emperor Charles the Bald (though modern spoil-sports are throwing doubt if it ever happened):
*9th century Irish scholar:
Also, note that bit about Alcuin of York: born in the early 8th century, highly educated to the standards of the place and time, invited over by Charlemagne himself to run his school:
This is the fruit of establishments in the 7th century, part of the period you are describing as “pretty grim” and “things have gone backward” “compared to the prior Romano-British period”. There certainly was collapse post-Roman withdrawal, but that effected everywhere, and it is not true that the “Dark Ages” were solely a period of subsistence peasants grubbing in the mud and gazing in slack-jawed bewilderment at the ruins of the glorious Roman past; some of them were literate, educated and in touch with the Continent (thanks to the Church).
I think the Venerable Bede would like a word with you about the period of ignorance, poverty, and stagnation you are attributing to the place:
Poverty-stricken misery post-Roman good times meant those who considered themselves “well-off” only had the likes of these paltry items to adorn themselves with, because naturally the natives were too ignorant to have any traditional skills of their own not learned from the Romans.
“The entire concept of a dark age is that thing have gone backwards.”
I’m not certain, but I think the term originally referred to the shortage of surviving textual sources, making the period dark to historians. It then got commonly interpreted in your sense.
But what is the evidence that things went backwards? I’ve cited the population estimates for Europe, which suggest that the late Roman period was “dark” (declining population), the early medieval period “light” (rising population).
For the British isles, the estimates show population trending up until 400, a slight dip at 600, and from 800 up pretty rapid rise.
Deiseach has, of course, cited the Book of Kells. The Sutton Hoo treasure, equally impressive in a different medium, is 7th century. None of that tells us how well off the average Briton was–but decent data don’t exist.
What is the evidence that things were terrible relative to the situation a few centuries earlier?
Interesting stuff about Alcuin of York.
When I describe the nature of America, “Mainland Europe, with a system of governance devised by the British” usually works for the white portion of the populace. I think there’s a parralel with Charlie Hammer and his friend Alcuin in here.
Deiseach has, of course, cited the Book of Kells. The Sutton Hoo treasure, equally impressive in a different medium, is 7th century. None of that tells us how well off the average Briton was–but decent data don’t exist.
In general, things like that only get made in periods of relative peace and prosperity. When you’re fleeing for your life from Viking raiders who want to rip off the jewelled covers of your holy books and reliquaries, you don’t have the luxury of spending time on those kinds of endeavours (until the Vikings settle down in your territory to build ports and trading cities).
“Dark Ages” in the popular sense is remnants of polemic and propaganda from Enlightenment times/early 19th century solid ‘feet on the ground scientific thinking material progress’ types who liked to think of themselves as the heirs of the idealised Classical world and looked down their noses at the perceived Church-dominated periods post-collapse of the Empire, when all was darkness and superstition until the faint glimmerings of revived Classical thought during the Renaissance which led, inevitably, to the wonderful modern people they were now.
I think there’s a parralel with Charlie Hammer and his friend Alcuin in here.
It is interesting because it shows the “barbarians” were interested in learning and scholarship, did want to take on the mantle of Rome not merely as “leading power in war and trade and rule” but in other matters, weren’t merely leaving it as “those clerical types need to read so they can read their Bible but kings and warriors only need a good sword and a strong arm to use it” but did try to be patrons of the arts and sciences. They very much wanted to legitimise themselves as the heirs of Rome but they also had a genuine interest in knowledge – Alfred the Great comes later, but after a lifetime of fighting the Danes and finally re-establishing his kingdom, he too wanted to civilise his people by introducing learning – including translating into the vernacular Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy” himself – not a past time you would expect of a ruler who had to claw his way back into power, who lived on the edge of the former Empire, and who lived well before the Renaissance and the “re-discovery” of Classical learning.
Actually it was the other way around: the term first got used by Petrarch in the 14th century to cover the period between the fall of Rome and Petrarch’s own time, when people were ignorantly doing backward things like creating beautiful illuminated manuscripts and inventing Gothic architecture, instead of cosplaying ancient Romans like all the enlightened people were. Later the term came to refer specifically to the early Middle Ages (approximately 500-1000), because, as you said, there was a dearth of written sources so we didn’t know much about it.
(Although it is worth mentioning that in some respects the period does seem to have been genuinely dark-in-the-sense-of-bad compared to the old Roman days: throughout the west, population levels, long-distance trade, urbanisation and literacy all seem to have fallen. In Britain, the population fell during the fifth century from around 4 million to around 1-2.5 million, and didn’t recover until the Tudors a full thousand years later.)
” I think there’s a parralel with Charlie Hammer and his friend Alcuin in here.”
I think you are confusing Charles Magnus with his grandfather Charles Martel.
“In Britain, the population fell during the fifth century from around 4 million to around 1-2.5 million, and didn’t recover until the Tudors a full thousand years later.)”
What’s your source for those numbers? My Atlas of World Population History shows a high of one million about 400 A.D., declining to .9 million in 600, back to 1 million by 800 and passing 4 million sometime in the 13th century.
And it shows European population levels starting back up about 600 A.D. and passing their Roman high about 800 A.D.
Are there newer estimates that are very different?
I was mostly going off the figures on Wikipedia, although they were in line with all the stuff I’d previously read on the matter. FWIW the Oxford DNB mentions that “In the past, historians tended to underestimate the importance of Roman Britain partly because it was seen as a relatively thinly settled country, with perhaps only a million inhabitants. That view has been overturned by archaeology since the Second World War. It is now clear that in general terms Britain (and specifically England) had a population and a density of settlement comparable with those of the high middle ages,” so I think your source might be out of date.
*quick wiki check*
My god, you’re right. I’ve been making that error for a while now, too.
That Bede was venerated is the canonical example of how far intellectual standards fell. But he did make real contributions to the rebound.
“Canonical” for whom, exactly? I’ve never heard anyone say such a thing. Certainly I don’t think a historian of the early middle ages would express such an opinion, given that scholarship in that area has been trending away from the “dark ages” view for a while now.
That Bede was venerated is the canonical example of how far intellectual standards fell.
Mr Knight, you are perhaps unaware that Bede is now St Bede? Or that “Venerable” is one of the three stages towards canonisation, and the reason he is called “Bede the Venerable” is that for so long, this is the stage he was classed as? And post-Reformation, this has tended to be forgotten as a religious status and treated as all one name.
To quote a handy definition:
No, I did not know that “venerable” was a technical term, let alone that it meant “not venerable.” But I did know that he was (eventually) a Doctor of the Church, venerated for his learning, not just his faith, hope, and charity.
Why are we talking about Bede? Because you venerated his learning. People arguing against the “Dark Ages” always point to Bede because he’s the best. He just isn’t very good, which is why people arguing for the “Dark Ages” also point to him.
Where do you get the idea that Bede “just wasn’t very good”? He spoke English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which is two more than most Classical Romans did, three more than most Classical Greeks (who, as a rule, didn’t bother learning Latin), three more than most Late Imperial Western Romans (Greek having dropped off the Western curriculum sometime during the third or fourth centuries) and three more than the Romans of his day (if you count the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire as Roman, which some historians do). Not really seeing the evidence of intellectual decline here.
What, did English intellectual life peak with Burton and it has all been downhill since? Do you get extra points for making up a new language?
Most people praise Bede for his actual contributions and not mere tools. Deiseach praised Bede for his promotion of the Anno Domini system. Most people (as measured by googling “bede dark ages”) praise him for calculating the date of Easter. As far as I know, these really improved the state of the world. But they would not have impressed the Romans, let alone the Greeks.
He also wrote histories, commentaries on the Bible, books about education, translations of the Bible into English, poetry, hymns, and various other types of work. As for the language issue, sure, knowing lots of languages isn’t the be all and end all of education, but it’s still pretty impressive, and the fact that an ordinary monk in some distant and relatively unimportant part of Christendom knew more languages than a Roman aristocrat at the height of the Empire is surely a point against the idea that the “Dark Ages” were a period of ignorance and backwardness.
We can still have the Greek Dark Ages, though, right?
thing is, getting computers to do most things, including design computers is an extremely good idea when it’s simply automation. The CPU’s in your computer long ago passed the point where a human could design them unaided.
Like Sandy, I’ll be bones by the time you young’uns are fleeing in terror for your lives from the God-Emperor AI’s army of killbots. Have fun! 🙂
(One of the unexpected advantages to being a fossil: all the gloomy prognostications won’t matter a straw to me because I won’t be around to see if they come true or not).
I imagine you have children o at least younger relatives you care about, so I doubt that’s really true.
I’ll be sorry for my nephews, but hey – what can my mouldering bones do to help them?
This claimed danger seems implausible.
Not really. All the stuff’s going to run out before then, there’ll be nothing to build robots out of or run them on, and we’ll be permanently fixed in a post-abundance society which will probably end up neofeudal and highly local forever. It’ll be nice, we’ll be safe from social reformers for the rest of time. The human urge to invent will be able to exhaust itself happily on microimprovements to standard of living, without constantly running the risk of constructing world-threatening horrors simply because the materials are available.
> Someone who delivers a child a month after graduating high school is probably the same sort of person as someone who delivers a child a month before graduating high school
I kept staring at this sentence for a full minute wondering how it would be meaningful for someone to deliver a child a month.
Hobby midwife?
Part-time doula 🙂
Overlapping pregnancies
You just pick up the month and carry it over. It’s not hard.
Talking as we were about AI risk, this is the kind of thing I see as much more likely to cause problems than AI re-writing its code and deciding to turn us all into paperclips – ultimately down to humans making particular choices which the machine then carries out as instructed, without having to be smart enough to think about it for itself, and the tendency we are exhibiting to turn everything over to automation more and more in order to get faster and faster results to achieve a sliver of advantage to get more money money money than our rivals:
A “flash crash”, in which algorithms offer stupid trades and thereby impoverish the people who created them in favor of people who were less stupid, isn’t much of a risk at all, much less an existential risk. I didn’t even die of despair after stock exchanges retroactively cancelled such trades on the Heads I Win Tails You Lose principle, and that principle seems to be weakening. As the rules slowly improve, perhaps we’ll all die of schadenfreude after a crash-instigating firm loses their shirts?
Having sailed into the mouth of the Tyne in the dark, I was wondering why I hadn’t done this. Turns out (bottom of the article) that the lights are now switched off. The towers are still useful marks in daylight, but at night you use the sectored light which appears white if you’re on the right course and red or green depending on which direction you’re off it in.
I have no idea how they derived that conclusion from the before-after paper. We agree and accept that teenage mothers are pretty similar in character regardless of the when-minutae, yet a high school degree makes one so much more employable? That would indicate that two similar people’s success is dictated by an arbitrary bit of paper, which is easier to attain when not caring for a newborn and so rewards by sheer chances those lucky enough to enter labour after their exam dates. In other words, pure signalling value.
I should note that the signalling value of a degree does have inherent value, namely that the bearer was that bit more able to tolerate the time and expense/debt needed to get a degree – and whether that was an indicator of skill, native character/motive/attitude etc. or fortunate circumstances/wealth/sheer luck is irrelevent to employers, as the number one thing they want in their company is reliability no matter the origin. I accept that signalling does serve a use, and this doesn’t contradict the fact that education increases no skills or abilities.
No wait, hang on, the study is saying the degree had no effect on employment success. This changes everything – Scott, why didn’t you say this? Pretty pertinent.
That’s the whole point. Someone who completes all of high school except one month has essentially the same education as someone who completes all of high school. They differ only in whether they have the signal, e.g. the diploma. So if there’s no difference in employment success then the signal has no value, and the value of high school therefore comes from the education (broadly defined).
Note the existence, magnitude, and sign of this latter value is not identified by the research design
That’s MY point, that Scott’s wording in the article impled that the data said the opposite.
@LPSP:
No, he said it correctly, I believe. At least I understood what he meant.
Edit:
“Based on this methodology, a paper finds that a high school degree has real value and not signaling value.”
I think the confusion is the meaning of “degree” in that sentence. The degree is not merely the piece of paper, but the educational work which was completed in order to qualify for the piece of paper.
Part of the confusion is that he used the word degree in the previous sentence (“the former will probably get a degree and the latter probably won’t”) with a different meaning. In one case it means “diploma” and in the other it means “education”. Unintentional ambiguity!
That’s pretty much it, guys.
Dear America, go home, your entire nation is drunk.
First Hillary’s campaign reveals the awful truth about Pepe, and now this? The Creepy Clown Threat? Not alone is there a Creepy Clown Threat but someone thought it’d be appropriate to bring it up at a White House press briefing?
Your article is a bit old, it missed some of the newer incidents. Last night we had some nut on the 6 train in a clown mask chasing teens around with a knife.
This whole thing is a bit bewildering if it’s an actual pattern, but I’m pretty sure it’s just that more attention is being paid to the normal background-level of clown attacks. With 325 million people you have to imagine some number of nuts in clown costumes commit assault on a given day.
the normal background-level of clown attacks
When a sentence like that can be written with a straight face, I throw my hands up and figure it’s the weekend, may as well start drinkin’ 🙂
2016 – started strange, kept getting progressively weirder. Perhaps I should not be surprised Trump turned out to be one of the two left standing to contest the presidency, even though everyone thought he was the absolute no-hoper joke.
The Clown Candidate, one might say?
France had a clown panic back in 2014. Maybe clown scares are just one of the mysterious constants of the universe, like Swedish meatballs.
@ Deiseach,
I don’t know how to properly express how much I enjoyed this comment
As I’ve said before The Onion made the transition from satirical newspaper to sober and restrained journalism so slowly that most people still haven’t noticed.
I think the real problem is that the statistics are combining attacks by clowns and attacks by jesters. Completely different.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right 🙂
It’s all a giant distraction, ensuring that the true Harlequin menace goes unchallenged and unnoticed.
Has anybody checked on what the Mimes are up to? Their silence is suspicious.
The physicist “publish or die” problem stems from the fact that the only two ways (recognised) to measure the real progress of physicists are paper output and tenure. The former is awarded even if the papers are innaccurate or unenlightening junk, and the latter can be awarded simply for friendliness with the right people and seniority alone. Neither directly rewards research, or correctness for that matter. I propose a solution: data debt.
a) Scientists are loaned money for every body of data they produce, either from direct research or from processing that or existing data. It doesn’t matter what it is, the scientist just inputs the numbers and charts and an algorithm awards a loan proportional to the volume.
b) Other scientists are paid to test these findings via the exact same method. This is repeated for several iterations, so the attempted replication is itself tested and so on.
c) If a body data fails to replicate, the scientists in question are indebted to the vendor. If it replicates soundly, no debt – the body of work is good enough. In mixed cases (ie the vast majority) the scientists owe a fractional amount.
The specific rates of pay and calibration I couldn’t answer. This system is far from perfect and will obviously prove unfair or exploitable in one or more ways; however I feel it is a step up from the current model in terms of incentives, elegance and efficacy.
– Scientists are motivated to not only put out papers but to create findings that stick; the scientists paid to test other’s studies are rewarded only if their attempt also replicates (ie if one group of scientists willingly flubbs the evidence for partisan reasons but all the others replicate, they owe the loan vendor and ditto if their’s is the only one that does replicate);
– It becomes harder for corrupt or collusive forces to coordination and mass-flub results;
– And publish-or-perish is alleviated as a steady flow of data and/or verification work – disconnected from any single study – is enough to earn money for, provided it replicates.
I am not involved in any way in the scientific community, so I may be full of bunk. But my first reaction to this is that it would disincentivize risky research. I don’t think that is a good result.
I could see that if you could find a correlation between risky research and research unlikerly to replicate. I can’t envisage that at the minute. Risky research is already compensated in any case.
Trump is attacking China, but Hillary is attacking China’s character and attitude. Guess which one is more tolerable? The physical body is transient, but the inner motive and value, that never changes.
(I considered editting this onto another of my posts – is it irritating to have lots of mini posts like this? It’s easy for me to make them but if it bothers folks I’m considerate)
I’m glad to know someone else wondered that
That “Nwabudike Morgan” reference just turned me from occasional reader to die-hard fan of this blog. Well done.
So E Harding claims to have been banned. Is there a public record of this, like one of those comments from Scott with bright red text?
Check the comment link at the top of the page.
Yes.
Thanks. I’m not here often enough. Don’t know the ins n’ outs.
I see Scott has banned himself. Pretty cool.
The epitome of “firm but fair”.
I was initially confused by the lack of a red-text “banned” message… but I guess if he’s banned, he can’t actually post one.
[EDIT] – It also occurs to me that if that’s the standard of comment that he thinks justifies a banning, there should be a whole lot more bans happening.
It’s only a one week ban. I think temp bans are supposed to be exemplary, rather than punitive? [edit] So people are advised to avoid comments like that, but they won’t necessarily earn the banhammer unless it becomes a habit.
All I will say is that I was “brought up short” when Scott posted what he gave himself the temp ban for.
If people, including Scott, think that posting ban-worthy material is worth the ban, then the ban has failed and the penalty should be raised until posting ban-worthy material is not considered worth it by anyone.
Penalties are not supposed to work as fees.
Um, I just noticed and feel at least somewhat guilty for my part in it. I hope the self-ban doesn’t extend to posting new content.
To be honest I might have overreacted in saying I’d refrain from posting, but I’d just gotten another warning from the mods on HN (an undeserved one, imo), and it seemed like two in one week was a sign to take a break. Plus you take things more seriously when they’re coming from certain people versus Random Commenter #4617. Plus I need to procrastinate less anyway.
Anyway, I don’t know what his exact reasoning was for a temp-self-ban, but just to reiterate, certainly no hard feelings on my part or anything (if Scott happens to be reading this).
I wrote over a year ago that SSC gave off a right-wing vibe, albeit inadvertently. It seems my impression then is buttressed by this comment thread. By even abiding the claims and arguments of the right in an above-the-fray manner, the blog risked losing lefty cred and garnering charges of being crypto-conservatve. This isn’t helped by certain demographic facts of its readership. It’s all quite unfair, but it is what it is.
http://bit.ly/2dSz54I
Reds under the bed!
I love that the symbolism of who the “reds” are has changed over the years keeping the phrase fitting…
If he’d published his stuff a few decades back he’d have had “kindly” people warning him that his talk of basic income might get him branded a red and-we-know-what-happens-to-people-like-that despite all his posts about how hilariously bad communism is at running things.
“You need to use all of these shoddily made, Chinese government approved, replacement apps instead. The preferred app for messaging is an app called WeChat, a bizarre Slack / Venmo / Tinder hybrid that 800 million people use to communicate every day. ”
The Ethereum guy doesn’t know what WeChat is. The Venmo comparison is apt. Tinder and Slack, way off. The Tinder of China is 探探 (tantan), which is pretty much a clone. This is display of ignorance is in the first paragraph, too. Not confidence inspiring at all.
This blog has previously discussed the Taiping Rebellion, in which over 20 million Chinese died over the course of a civil war where one side was led by a guy who believed he was the long-lost brother of Christ. In continuing to read up on Asian history, I only just learned today that there was also an Islamic rebellion shortly after the Taiping Rebellion, the Dungan Revolt, in which a further 20 million Chinese died.
Wikipedia cites the oddest instigating factor for a civil war I’ve ever seen:
Does China have really great historical reasons for religious persecution or what?
They’d be quite justified in that, alright, but in fact modern Han Chinese are some of the most religiously tolerant people you’ll meet. Anti-Islamic sentiment has been on the rise since the 2008 riots, though.
This friend of mine works at the US Census. I’m trying to get him to tell all of his coworkers about Lizardman’s Constant.
The right-wing bubble thing: here are my opinions on it.
I think that the bourgeoisie have adapted a form of leftism in the same way Christianity was adopted by them in the past. It still has part of the essence, but a lot of the various controversial or paradoxical aspects are muted or chopped off to reconcile them with bourgeoisie life.
However, in the same way the social Christianity was attacked by people outside of the bourgeoisie, that social leftism sees some attack now too. Like Christianity, it gets attacked from a smaller number of fundamentalists on the same side, matched by people who dislike it on the opposite. People who oppose the status quo now oppose the social leftism in the same way they opposed the social Christianity of the past, and its the leftists who are shocked at the outré people. Isn’t the whole “silent majority” shtick of liberal commenters the same language conservatives used back in the day?
The language may differ, but the bourgeoisie’s outrage in being challenged still stays the same, and so places that shock their leftist sensibilities become right wing bubbles, despite the whole definition of the grey tribe Scott put out, the discussion of drug use and legalization, the lifestyle leftism, and the anti-authoritarian bent.
I kind of agree with this, but I don’t think it’s related to economic class (except to the extent that certain classes might need to be more up to date with social fashions).
Does anyone else here remember prudes? There used to be these people who’d go around getting offended by things, and it wasn’t really based on any sort of consideration of the facts, it was just that they were hyper-sensitve to the general mores of society. So, there was general agreement that running around with your wang out, or talking about sex in mixed company was unacceptable, and these people took it to the most extreme edge. Always tut-tutting.
Anyway, I think you can kind of tell the zeitgeist (perhaps with a slight delay) by looking at which way the prude-likes are swinging.
Up until recently, (90s-00s) my sense was that the prudes had swung over to full-on liberalism – you were more likely to be castigated for suggesting that there should be rules of personal conduct than for doing anything in particular.
Now, it looks like we’re kind of segueing into some weird combination of theoretical hyper-liberalism and good old-fashioned prudery with respect to sex.
And loads of stuff about racism, which is *really* annoying.
Anyway, as I say, it’s not really social class itself, more a question of whether your cultural-sensitivity-windmill is pointing in vaguely the right direction, and is in sufficiently good order to be driven by the bullshit-winds of fashion.
Adoption of the bourgeoisie was a thought that ran through my head in a major way I’d say two years ago (as in for about year). I don’t think it’s the prima-facto now, but it’s certainly part of why the ultimate battle is always over grounds other than right or left.
My pet theory, a variation on this, is that right and left are conveniant, polite company labels that society can use – sock puppets we willing pile ourselves into so that we can debate on issues without blood being shed. If we used our true alignments, we wouldn’t be able to have conversations in politics because there’s no compromise over principles so fundamental – the two sides would see each other as Just Plain Evil, and there’d be war. The current state of politics is the closest to these we’ve seen in a long way – the closest to the safe sockpuppets being overthrown.
I am dubious of the Merv and Dobrovody claims. The implicit assumption is that if there was a larger city at the time somewhere else we would know about it. Do archaeologists really believe they have made that complete a study of all plausible ancient city sites?
I am pretty that they mean “largest that we know of“, would be quite silly otherwise.
The claims about Merv and Dobrovody are very, very different. The claim about Merv is that it was big in 1150 AD, while the claim about Dobrovody is that it was the largest city in the world in 3800 BC. It’s a lot easier to know about the world of a thousand years ago than the world of six thousand years ago. It’s a lot easier to know about cities of 100k than cities of 10k. It is very easy to believe that there are unknown regions that had 10k cities in 3800. It is even easier to believe that there are unknown cities in Mesopotamia. It is also easy to believe that known cities in Mesopotamia were bigger earlier than thought, the evidence destroyed by later expansion. But there probably weren’t cities of 200k in 1200 AD that we don’t know about.
Actually, it’s not clear that anyone serious believes that Merv was ever the biggest city in the world. Wikipedia makes the claim, but its source doesn’t mention Merv at all. The page Scott linked to on Wikipedia compiling 4 lists has Modelski (2003) mentioning Merv, but claiming that it was never near number one. I guess Chandler (1987) does claim that it was tied with Constantinople, Fez, and Hangzhou at about 200k after the fall of Kaifeng, but before Hangzhou exploded as the new capital. I’m confused that he omits Baghdad. In any event, the point is that the Silk Road had a top 10 city and that this has been lost to the popular imagination.
I think that this is Chandler’s data from about 1987. He has Merv tied with Constantinople at 200k, ahead of Fez and Haifeng (and Cairo ahead of Fez, too). More recently he has upped his estimate of the population of Constantinople.
The Dobrovody claim seems insane. 5000 years ago, before there were any crops adapted to more northern areas, and in an area not on the sea? The biggest city in the world?
About careers, 80,000 Hours thinks actuary is less promising as a career path, compared with web designer, along every dimension except salary. They also imply that actuary competition is tougher than software engineering at large tech firms. But I think working for Microsoft, Amazon, and so forth is clearly tougher than being an actuary.
About making it a norm for the board not to comment on the percentage of SSC commenters who are Right or Left Wing, I am very much against that. One reason is that some folks say they’d like more Left Wing commenters. If they get their wish, and more Left Wing commenters show up, then it would seem not very inviting to have them here and then to forbid them from commenting on the fact that they are a minority, while they are. Whereas, if they can comment on it, and others might too, and might also say they want more Left of Center commenters, they might invite their friends. It seems unlikely that the board can solve a problem (lack of Left of Center commenters) if there is a norm against admitting that said issue exists.
The other reason I’m against that kind of norm is that I think the country is really bubbled– with people in Blue or Red bubbles where never the twain shall meet. And that’s one reason we got Trump as the the GOP nominee. And part of the bubble problem is denial of it happening. People sincerely believe that this isn’t happening– that the groups aren’t so separate that there is not only no consensus in the U.S. on opinions, but there is no agreement on what the real facts are, about what is going on in our government. But we’d be better off if we admitted such problems and faced them, rather than running away from them.
I really think we in the U.S. have a rather huge problem with denial of political realities. Trump is the best recent illustration of this. People think that if they are against the political establishment policies, that they should vote for someone who hasn’t “dirtied his hands” with politics. They think that some narcissist who has a history of cheating people and of never helping anyone but himself, is going to be their great savior, riding in on the white horse to save the day. Politics is “dirty” so politically experienced people are untrustworthy, in their book. But sexual assault, bigotry, stiffing your creditors, employees, stockholders etc., and various kinds of business fraud are just fine, by comparison, in their eyes.
They hate all the politicians that they themselves elected. But the very next politician who says something they enjoy hearing, gets their full faith and loyalty– no questions asked– as long as he is a narcissistic tough guy billionaire bully whose self worship is contagious, and who has no political experience whatsoever.
Long time reader, first time commenter 🙂 Someone else may have mentioned this but there is a really interesting chapter of labor history where unions and groups committed to “raising wages for workers” were also flat-out racist – e.g. some of the original arguments for a minimum wage were all about making sure that women, immigrants, and minorities couldn’t undercut white people with their labor prices. Weird stuff.
Thanks for writing such great posts!
I’m not even remotely worried about AI.
Global warming is going to cause problems. It is just not going to be the end of the world. It is going to be an expensive problem, though, in the long term, but expense in any given year will be fairly low.
Also, the study you cited about pregnant girls and high school diplomas seems to suggest the opposite of what you said; there doesn’t appear to be a long-term earning difference between them.