This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Happy new year! And thanks to everyone who read, contributed to, and supported this blog during 2016.
2. I’ll be in Irvine, California early next week. If anyone there wants to meet, I can make the Peet’s Coffee at 4213 Campus Dr, 7:00 PM on January 4th. Don’t expect many posts during that time.
3. I’ve updated the Mistakes page with a few new mistakes and metamistakes.
4. I know that raikoth.net is down. I think I am going to let it disappear quietly. It was poorly organized and too linked to my real name. I’ll repost the non-libertarian FAQ and other interesting stuff here sometime soon. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me.
Slate did an article promoting the claim that North Carolina is not a democracy but has now put up an article by Andrew Gelman attacking that. I think that this is good and Slate is worthy of praise for putting something undermining a point they had previously been making. Not just a retraction of a factual issue, either. And they put the Gelman article at the top of their front page. I would like to see more media outlets being this good about this sort of thing.
+1 for praising media accountability.
Thinking about this, I feel a news company that made an explicit policy to try to link to critiques to its pieces, without necessarily agreeing with the critiques, would be very appealing to me. Good faith effort to find the most credible critiques would be especially appealing. I’m not sure how this would work as a business model, though.
The entire meme of “democracy is in danger” seems to have miraculously showed up once the cosmopolitans started losing elections. The cynic would say all this really means is “democracy that results in my preferred outcome is in danger”. Ever since Brexit there has been a continuous temper tantrum in the media and an alternate rephrasing would be “the ability of the “experts”/media to control democracy is in danger”. I see very little threat to democracy and articles like this are woefully short on making the case.
But your point that the media is occasionally, maybe more than in the past, is willing to walk back some of their own outlandish claims is on point.
I don’t know if they’re more willing to in general, but it was at least heartening in this one case to see a fairly major news-ish site put what amounted to a correction at the top of the front page. Less a “this is a general trend I see” and more a feel-good story of a news site doing the right thing.
I dropped Slate a while ago, but definitely props to them for publishing Gelman’s criticism, even if he had to call them out on it first.
I find that Slate is one of those sites where it’s good if you know which writers to avoid. There are a lot of sites like that.
It’s like Vox; anything of actual value will eventually filter down to me through twitter or other websites, but it’s definitely not worth checking on myself.
I gave up on Slate when Emily Yoffe left as Dear Prudence. I actually was a Slate Plus member for a while due to her writing. I really liked both her advice columns and her long-form stories, despite not usually agreeing with her (although her writing on the dangers of campus drinking was a high point for the site, and she got a *lot* of flack for it)
Now I can barely stand the bubblehead that took her place.
While Malory Ortberg isn’t as good as Yoffe was – she’s too nice, and she has a habit of missing stuff, especially stuff you would expect a young, with-it left-wing person not to miss (example – woman’s boyfriend dumps her because sex is painful for her for medical reasons, doesn’t give much more detail – Prudence doesn’t respond with request for clarification or note that there’s plenty that isn’t penetrative sex) I think she is a lot better than some people give her credit for.
Her comedy writing varies between amusing (when the topic is literature, art, history, etc) and phoned-in on-the-nose (when it’s something more “political”). She manages to restrain the latter impulse where the advice column is concerned.
That original article is so abysmally bad I’m not sure any rebuttal can really atone for it, though. I mean, it scored a whopping 98/100 on the Schilling Scale of Journalistic Pure Evil, a higher score even than Fox News, according to an analysis by the Media Integrity Project run by Dr. Schilling and widely recognized as a standard for how evil various journalists are.
Seriously: there may be more to the EIP’s work than that, but you won’t find it in Slate and you won’t find it in any of the first-order links from the Slate piece, so what’s the point? Slate claims to be all about helping people “analyze and understand and interpret the world”; does simply inventing a numerical scale with no explanation beyond an applause-light label now count as analysis or promote understanding?
I would be interested in your brochure, sir.
More seriously, while I realise you were satirising the article, I admittedly actually do think it would be nice to have a checklist or sheet to go through to grade these things. Realistically, the problem strikes me as likely too heterogeneous for this to work out, though. Alternatively it will just end up looking like a 1:1 copy of a fallacy/bias checklist, and/or various Wikipedia guidelines. Nonetheless, a widely accepted scale of likely credibility would be such a delightful addition to conversational repertoire. I can’t even see it surviving long as a useful tool if it did exist, culturally speaking, but that doesn’t stop me from daydreaming about it.
Agreed on both the desirability and the impracticality of such a thing; pursuing this past a fairly trivial level would run into a pretty clear “who watches the watchmen?” problem.
Well, there’s at the very least this, though it’s too lengthy to be of much use in a day to day basis.
I think about this media accountability issue a lot.
The obvious approach to start with is for an outlet to put Get the Whole Story as its highest priority; articles with headlines like “The Case For and Against Trump” would be the routine, rather than “Twenty Racist Things Trump Said Last Week” or “Everything You Need to Know About Clinton’s Legal Shenanigans”.
The obvious limitation to this (other than that one is pretty permanently giving up the ability to scoop) is that every venue is inherently limited. There’s only so many minutes in a TV or radio segment, so many square inches on a broadsheet, and even a website has only so many seconds to command the reader’s attention. That said, the website seems to have the best shot, so I keep wondering how it might arrange information so as to give the most complete picture – probably presenting any issue as a sub-web of documents, each giving points and counterpoints, malleable over time as new information comes in, with tools to assist readers in visualizing it all.
This is what Vox was supposed to be. Contrast with what Vox is, and that’s how this plan ends up.
I haven’t followed Vox enough to say. Coming at it cold, I would have assumed Vox was yet another outlet in the tradition of Salon, Slate, HuffPo, etc. Skimming its WP article, I note it was founded by Ezra Klein, whom I’ve always known to have a progressive lean, even if he’s thoughtful about it, and so I’d expect Vox to “explain the news” in a way that validates his progressive priors, rather than to present everyone’s side of a story.
I wonder if this a mere artifact of the people out there who are willing to contribute to blogs. Who out there, in the world, is an aspiring professional writer? Probably leans heavily towards college graduates in liberal arts majors, a group of people who lean heavily left.
So let’s say I decide to start a website to cover news (which inevitably includes politics) and my intention is for it to be neutral and representative. So I go out to the world and say, “Aspiring journalists of the world! Submit your best work to my new site!” I’m probably likely to get 10x as many “Trump is a racist” submissions as I am “Hillary is a pedophile” submissions. The left-leaning submissions are probably likely to be of higher average technical quality (if we assume left-leaning people are more likely to posses journalism degrees, which seems reasonable).
So as the new site editor, I say “I’ll publish the best writing I get from contributors” which ends up meaning I publish five pretty good anti-Trump pieces, but only one good pro-Trump piece. Then I open my site to the public and what happens? People notice the anti-Trump strongly outnumbers the pro, and the audience self-selects. Trump supporters bash me as biased and stop coming. Trump haters love the site and start sharing my links on Occupy Democrats.
And now I am Vox. Despite no intentional effort to create a left-wing opinion site, I now have one. I’ll never get the right-wingers back on my side, but if I stop running left-wing stuff my core audience abandons me.
Seems to me that one of the most obvious criteria for the newsworthiness and journalistic value of a story is, that the story do something more than just duplicate something you just said yesterday. So, yeah, you get one good and five bad “Hillary is a pedophile” submissions every week, ten good and fifty bad “Trump is a racist” submissions, and you publish one good example of each.
If you wind up publishing all ten (or sixty) redundant “Racist Trump” pieces, that only indicates that your blog/newspaper/whatever can’t create or attract enough unique content to justify its existence; any consequent bias is secondary to that general inadequacy.
If you get one good anti-Hillary piece and eight good different anti-Trump piece, say because you live in the alternate universe where Hillary’s only negative is abysmal COMSEC discipline whereas Trump is an incompetent, thin-skinned, ignorant, boorish, fraudulent, omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, each element of which merits an article in its own right, then you actually do get to say that it isn’t the media but rather reality itself that has the anti-Trump bias.
“If you get one good anti-Hillary piece and eight good different anti-Trump piece, say because you live in the alternate universe where Hillary’s only negative is abysmal COMSEC discipline whereas Trump is an incompetent, thin-skinned, ignorant, boorish, fraudulent, omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, each element of which merits an article in its own right, then you actually do get to say that it isn’t the media but rather reality itself that has the anti-Trump bias.”
And this is probably what would happen. Not in the sense that this is actual reality – but in the sense that this is reality as interpreted by the class of “aspiring journalists” who are the people that are going to submit things to a new site.
So unless the editor very explicitly says something like “No, no more anti-Trump pieces, I don’t care how good they are, until we get some quality anti-Hillary pieces up” then it’s probably going to be a long wait. Because there simply aren’t that many quality/trained anti-Hillary writers.
If you live in the actual reality where there was more than one thing wrong with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, why are you not getting at least one decent article on all of the others? The “class of aspiring journalists” is not that small or monolithic, and while ideological conservatives may be rare there are also the purely mercenary and the generically anti-authoritarian.
If you’re not publishing a full spectrum of negative articles about the Hillary Clinton candidacy as well as Trump’s, I do not believe it is because there is nobody willing to write those articles. Either you are rejecting even the good ones, or you are conspicuously signaling that it would be a waste of time to submit them to you.
The tendency in media today appears to be lying by omission rather than commission, and playing to people’s tendency to not want to notice things that are inconvenient. At least in Slate’s case they’ve brought up a correction of sorts that hurts the narrative they were pushing.
Strong agreement with the claim that lying by omission is the more common practice. I was interested also by the fact that such omissions are unavoidable even if the reporter is sincere, because the venue space is limited.
This makes lying by omission even more insidious, because to a newcomer, it’s hard to tell whether an omission was malicious or an honest mistake.
I just had a really frightening idea. I hope someone can chime in and tell me why this is ridiculous and can’t possibly be true.
If there are lots of parallel worlds, which is my current understanding of quantum physics (based on reading Eliezer’s sequence), then I suspect that an event with, say, 70% reasonable subjective probability actually just occurs in 70% of all worlds going forward, and doesn’t in 30% of them. So it would make more sense to always think “how frequently does this happen” and not “how likely is this to happen”
What if the only reason why humanity hasn’t gone extinct yet is that “humanity hasn’t gone extinct yet” is a necessary condition for a consciousness to exist right now, so of course, for all of us, humanity hasn’t gone extinct yet, and never will, but in truth it did in fact go extinct in most worlds?
This could also explain why we haven’t actually come into contact with alien life, for one of two reasons.
1. the chance for a species to not go extinct until it colonizes other planets is actually really low, so for each individual world where we haven’t gone extinct, it is unlikely that any specific alien race also hasn’t gone extinct. Perhaps so low that, in most of them, all other races have gone extinct.
2. this is simply another filter: in worlds where there is even just one other species which hasn’t gone extinct before reaching singularity, we don’t get to live
Has it really been luck that we avoided nuclear war?
Again, not a sufficient understanding of quantum physics to be confident that any of this even makes sense. If it does, I’m sure someone has said it before.
I’m not sure what’s frightening about this? Just sounds like the anthropic principle.
I think it’s different. The anthropic principle explains why exist currently, even if it seems very improbable, but it doesn’t guarantee that we will very improbably survive in the future.
This in turn would be the Doomsday argument.
Scott Aaronson mentions some similar thought experiments in his book (but ironically, with the role of quantum physics replaced by God).
I’d say the main reason not to worry about it is that, whatever your interpretation of quantum physics, it ultimately all adds up to normality. I’m also against the “naive MWI” interpretation of quantum physics, where you think of it as multiple full worlds like ours interacting – there’s a wide range of ways to imagine MWI (or other interpretations). The only reason to prefer that one is that it’s more intuitive for us, and quantum physics doesn’t have a history of being predictable by considering what would be most intuitive.
I also find this MWI somewhat reassuring – no matter what happens, humanity (and you!) lives on in some world, so you’re practically immortal, in a way.
I do find it reassuring. It solves the argument of “you can’t live forever because there is always a non-zero chance that you die in an accident so there exists a finite amount of time after which you do.” I ultimately think it would be a good thing, but it still also frightens me.
What interpretation of multiple worlds do you think of as most likely?
I imagine it as multiple planes interacting, but not in a way that’s really separable – instead of discrete worlds, Dark-Materials style, they’re linked in a way that makes asking which world you’re in meaningless most of the time.
But I’m not particularly confident in that (and I don’t know quantum physics well enough to be sure it’s technically reasonable). I’d regard quantum mechanics interpretation (to the degree that interpretation is even meaningful, since it’s hard to come up with a thought experiment to distinguish between them) as an antiprediction – you can try to guess, but you’ll probably be wrong just because there are a lot of possible answers and there’s no reason the right one would be at all intuitive to humans.
This view of the probability of an event is common, but is not really supported by MWI. Maybe with a lot more theoretical work, but it’s very possible to believe in MWI and not believe this. The main issue is that the MWI is about quantum-level events and there’s no particular reason to think that the macro-level event “the coin comes up heads” will be true in precisely half of the worlds. You can partially get around this by redefining probability to make this true by definition, but I don’t think that’s the right move because I want to say that a coin comes up heads with probability one half. It’s also unclear what intuitions and theorems about bayesian probability hold for MW probability.
Taking a measure on the set of possible worlds is complicated and highly depends on if you have a model in which there are finitely many or infinitely many possible worlds, as well as how to appropriately partially order them. Plus you have to start worrying about 0-1 laws as soon as you hit infinitely many worlds.
Tech question for security folks:
I just went through the experience of an international move, which entails switching cellular carriers and necessarily changing one’s phone number. This is quite painful if one makes an effort to secure one’s most important online identities using 2FA and with backup recovery to ensure (or make more likely) access in a wide range of compromise or factor-loss scenarios. Indeed, it’s sufficiently painful that when I originally moved abroad a year ago I was never able to configure 2FA on my account at a major American bank, since their system is apparently incompatible with internationally formatted phone numbers; I went so far as to escalate this issue to their CIO via LinkedIn stalking and although I eventually got a response, the issue was never fixed.
I want to know if there are theoretical models that should guide the construction of a secure, robust network of which identities should back up and verify which other ones. Assume anonymity is neither required nor particularly desired. Assume an average joe level of threat severity; i.e. I’m ultimately concerned about attacks from people looking to steal credentials that enable them to steal money from me, not nation state actors or industrial spies seeking to learn my secrets. Assume such a typical user will interact with online identities in roughly the following categories. This is a long list but I think it is close to comprehensive (for the level of abstraction I care about) and representative of the current landscape of possibilities:
* Primary personal computing device, which in practice for most users is associated with an Apple or Microsoft account, and for most other users with an account on a mailing list or support messageboard for their hardware or OS vendor (even if opensource).
* Primary personal communications device, which in practice for most users is associated with an Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) account, and has an additional identity layer associated with a communications service provider, which may or may not (but in practice almost always does) involve a separate online identity.
* “Primary” digital identity or identities — main personal email address, FB account, twitter address, Amazon account, etc. — which may or may not coincide with the accounts associated with computing and communications devices.
* “Trusted but contingent/uncontrolled” digital identities — mainly I mean one’s work email, work phone, etc. There may be no guarantee of reliable access to this under all circumstances (because of firing, or due to lack of access to authentication tokens generated in other identities that might become compromised; if your employer has stronger security requirements than you do as an individual, you can’t assume you’ll get an exemption and be able to access your work email if the shit hits the fan).
* OS/platform-specific password manager accounts
* Cross-platform password manager accounts
* Subsidiary computing devices (home LAN, TVs, tablets, wearables, Alexa), each associated with a hardware or OS vendor identity, not necessarily identical to the primary’s.
* Subsidary communications devices (backup phones, parent’s landline, etc.) each associated with a hardware or OS vendor identity, not necessarily identical to the primary’s.
* Subsidiary online identities — Yahoo! email accounts, online shopping accounts at random stores you don’t frequent regularly, etc. Because of OAUTH etc, these can and likely do coincide with identities from somewhere higher up on this list. Some of these identities may be particularly security sensitive — e.g. online banking — and yet NOT coincident with any identity higher on this list (e.g. because no online bank I’ve interacted with uses OAuth).
* Any service or identity above has the ability to provide a “safe deposit box” list of 1 or more backup codes (effectively one-time pads) that grant identity verification to anyone who posseses a valid, unused code.
Remember that each bullet point (except, by definition, the “primaries”) might expand into a handful — from 1 to dozens — of individual identities. If one is relatively “faithful” to a particular platform, the total set of independent “important” identities might conceivably be as small as 5, but it’s hard to imagine it much smaller, and easy to imagine it substantially bigger.
Each purely digital identity should be associated with a primary email address, a password (optionally generated by or at least tracked within a password manager), a 2FA identity (physical or digital), and a backup identity. Each password manager must have a master identity or master password. Each non-digital identity (e.g. a specific SIM card) will generally be associated with at least one primary digital identity. Each backup code must be stored either literally in a safe deposit box, carried physically on one’s person, and/or stored digitally on a personal device or cloud platform.
Each password must be remembered, recoverable from a backup device/identity, or stored in a password manager. Each master password or password for a master identity must be remembered or recoverable from a backup device/identity. Each device/identity must be upgradable, replaceable, and the cost of doing so scales roughly linearly with the number of other devices using it as a backup and the difficulty of obtaining its password (via memory, manager, or subsidiary recovery) as well as access to a second factor.
So one ends up with a very complicated set of information that I think can probably be *most simply* modeled as a weighted directed graph. Nodes are identities and/or devices. An edge from identity A to B means A verifies or backs up B, either explicitly or de facto (because the passwords or accounts are either literally identical or because the password for B is guaranteed assuming access to A, e.g. a backup code for Google stored on an iCloud account). An edge weight represents something like the “cost” of maintaining the backup relationship, reflecting factors such as the likelihood of losing control over identity A, and the time cost of updating the backup relationship if one upgrades or replaces identity A. The node weights (possibly vector valued) encode factors about each identity, such as importance (utility loss from compromise), perceived security (on the vendor side), derived value (discounted present value of the future utility earned from the node provided it remains uncompromised), etc.
This graph is very unlikely to be completely acyclic. It’s possible that it might be *directed* acyclic, if you’re careful about how you set it up.
And so finally we come to my question, which seems like it could conceivably have a mathematical answer. Assuming all of the above, can one confidently say *anything* about the relationship between the properties of this weighted directed graph and one’s “overall security / identity robustness”? For example, does directed acyclity increase security? Does it it reduce robustness? Is there a sensible way to model this tradeoff, assuming it exists?
The only relevant bullet to this problem is
All of the others are just paramter setting and instantiation, which is ignored in a theoretical framework. There is a major issue with these kinds of directed graphs though: they cannot model non-degenerate 2FA. If I have 2FA set up on two devices and no single device is able to grant access to both of them, then the fact that I need simultaneous access to both is fundamentally important. I’ll put more thought into this later, but my initial thought is that what you want is to introduce weighted threshold functions that indicate when access is achievable. There are some cool applications of things that sound like this in electronics, but I don’t know much about them.
The first thing that comes to mind is to look at the tree for each node: i.e., given that I’ve compromised this node, how many other nodes can I compromise? The accounts that give the most access need the most security. Your Gmail account can compromise everything, your forum account can compromise very little. And I can imagine someone coming up with rules like “If your account can compromise N important things, then it needs to use two-factor authentication.”
The other thing to look for is nodes with no incoming edges – they have no backup if you lose their password, except maybe the safe deposit code. Actually, it probably makes more sense to model the safe-deposit box (or wherever you keep those codes) as a separate node, since access to them can be controlled separately.
Cycles aren’t necessarily bad – they mean that you can never lose access to anything in the cycle so long as you still have control of at least one node in it, and by the same token, access to one gives you access to all of them. It might make sense to simplify these cycles by using a shared login for all of them. However, cycles will be rare unless you deliberately set one up – say, storing your computer password on your phone and storing your phone’s password on the computer.
That said, most people probably don’t have very interesting-looking graphs. Most websites allow only 1 form of backup – an email account. Or they don’t even do that, they just have a “Connect with Facebook” button. So your online identity graph consists of a couple of authentication providers – Facebook, Google, etc. – and everything else just asks them to authenticate their users.
I would go one further than saying “cycles aren’t bad” and say “cycles are necessary in a world in which you regularly utilize recovery options.”
I agree that most people’s networks will look pretty much like a few overlaid stars.
It’s worth noting that if I’m hacking you, trying to deny you access and trying to gain access will cause me to attack different nodes. Probably the same in practice, but to deny you access I want to target chokepoints of your flow network. If I wanted to gain control of your online identity, I would attack high degree nodes (-ish. I really want to attack nodes with a high shadow of the sort you describe). I don’t see any reason to assume that they are the same in general.
It’s possible to make an email address you never use, turn it into a password manager (attachments to drafts you never send) which makes the network more interesting. But I mostly think people will have superimposed stars.
Is it just me, or are their ~30 either new or very infrequent commenters on the Trump post, mostly pro-Trump?
Probably got linked by MR. SA should reach out to TC and ask him not to do that. His posts are sometimes pretty good, but his commenters as a group are awful.
A lot of MR commenters are pretty awful, but I’m not seeing much in that thread as nearly as bad as the ones I see at MR. But I may have different political views than you so YMMV.
I kind of enjoy most of the MR comments. They certainly aren’t as civil as they are here at SSC (one reason I am here more often), but not bad for an internet site.
Exhibit A: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/wont-men-take-service-sector-jobs.html#comments
Three open threads in a row without dissenting opinions was just enough to whet the appetite for more. I agree it’s a problem.
No, it’s not just you. I lean towards “new” for most of them, because I don’t remember any of the names from the Election Posts (like Scott’s endorsement) and Trump-related OTs. If they were merely infrequent posters I would’ve expected to see at least some of them in those discussions, given how aggressively some of the pro-trump supporters were posting.
The Trump posts get a lot of traction on twitter, I think that’s where they’re coming from. The latest one hasn’t been linked by MR (yet).
I saw this website advertised on my Facebook feed. It seems basically to be a site for facilitating a barter economy, albeit including the use of some kind of “credits” which presumably function sort of like money.
Isn’t this just a way to get around dealing with taxes and regulations related to real money changing hands? Because I can see no advantage to it other than that. The whole point of money is to solve the double coincidence of wants problem. This website states that “the economy isn’t working for us.” Doesn’t this really mean government regulations on the economy aren’t working for us? Because I can’t see any point to this other than their avoidance (of course, there’s probably a hipsterish notion that trading your time and energy for others’ time and energy is somehow more virtuous than trading it for dirty money). Is it kind of sad we have to revert to a quasi-paleolithic form of exchange because our government have done so much to ruin one of humanity’s greatest inventions (money)?
“(of course, there’s probably a hipsterish notion that trading your time and energy for others’ time and energy is somehow more virtuous than trading it for dirty money).”
This is almost certainly their entire value proposition. The town I grew up in developed a “credits” system that was basically this – it grew in popularity more than I expected it to, until virtually all of the “credits” ended up concentrated in the hands of a small handful of the more entrepreneurial-minded dirty hippies of the town who were able to scale their free-range egg and hemp basket businesses. So a few left-leaning business owners who were willing to accept the “credits” ended up with a crap-ton of them and virtually nothing they could spend them on.
@onyomi:
Usually the drive behind barter economies is left-wing and the objection is to the non-locality of federal money, specifically the dominance of national and international corporations. The idea is that if I spend money in the local community, much of it will eventual flow into the coffers of Walmart, but barter has to remain local.
I doubt it works very well in practice, because at some point you will get to durable goods that can be sold for currency …
My sense is these do tend to be driven by left-libertarian types who don’t like “the government” either, but mostly because the government is doing things they don’t like, like propping up Exxon or waging war, but also not somehow making so that all food comes from small, organic farming.
Yes, that makes a certain amount of sense; I certainly don’t think the creators or most of the users of this site are thinking “ah hah, a way to get around taxes and regulations!” I think their motivations are probably more like you describe–to create some notion of a “fair” economy. My point was that I feel like they are doing arguably a very right-wing thing (getting around the government) for left-wing reasons (though if you frame it in terms of “getting around big corporations” that could be considered “left wing”). That is, I don’t think they’d get the sense that “the economy isn’t working for them” if, for example, hiring someone to do something didn’t require figuring out a W2 and all that implies.
It sounds like the system Matt M describes above functioned like you describe–a way to “keep money local,” though it’s a bit odd to “keep things local” within an online community–you want to make sure benefits flow only to like-minded hipsters and not those faceless corporations (and the third-world workers they employ and the old people’s pensions who buy their stock), I guess? Though I do see how, in either case, it also works to discourage any one person from accumulating too many “credits” (and therefore from working too hard…), because at a certain point they become kind of useless.
But this again strikes me as a regression disguised as innovation: the global economy provides too many cool things you can do with your money; let’s replace it with Itchy and Scratchy money, which is only good for buying organic produce and hand-made soap, thereby forcing people either to have two jobs, or else to participate only in a severely limited economy (though to the extent you think people participating in a limited economy is an end in itself, this might be a good commitment strategy to prevent defection).
Don’t get me wrong–to the extent it’s a way to, in effect, make money off of skills without a lot of red tape, I support it; like seasteading, however, it strikes me as a good idea which is also kind of sad–because of how limited options must be for it to get to the point people would suggest it.
Eh.
I don’t think of it as much more than a marketing program for the local economy. Roto-rooter won’t take those credits but the local plumber might.
And the local plumber who will take them is the one who also happens to like fresh from the hen free-range eggs and local grass fed beef and likes to use pure copper pipes because plastic is toxic.
Left-libertarians think the government is in thrall to corporate special interests, but I don’t think that makes them conservatives.
Considering how much my local plumber charged to fix my drain last time, I wish I could have paid in eggs… unless it were $250 worth…
@onyomi
I believe that another reason is to introduce inefficiencies into the system, so the labor of the local poor becomes comparatively more valuable. As such, there is a redistribution element.
The first barter system I heard of Ithaca Hours had a rationale that people who had trouble getting paid in dollars were brought into beneficial trade. There was also a claim that circulating money locally was good for the locality, perhaps an anti-Moloch argument.
There’s a claim in the article that local currencies need someone to promote them actively, which is probably evidence that local currences are a bit more trouble than they’re worth.
If you’re doing a lot of this, it probably would not be a way to avoid taxes. I don’t know American taxes, but there are jurisdictions where barter can be taxed:
It also looks like credits on barter sites that use them can be taxed, and Bitcoin is taxable.
Oh yes, barter is definitely subject to taxation in the US. You have income for the fair market value of the object you give up (or the object you receive, if that is easier to value). But barter may be more difficult for the IRS to track, if your aim is to evade taxes.
I remember being at a tax conference where the head of the IRS spoke (for non-Americans, the IRS is the federal tax collection agency). He talked about having a plumber come to his house and ask that he be paid in cash for tax purposes (that is, so he could exclude it from his income). I kind of suspect that plumber was audited soon afterwards.
I’ve seen various libertarian circles promote the idea that you should always tip service industry personnel in cash, so that they can more easily not report it for tax purposes and keep it themselves, rather than handing it over to the government.
Doesn’t work that way for service personnel a lot of the time. Depending on state law and industry, tips often have to be turned in and counted by the employer so they can be taxed appropriately and/or for a toke share system (some places pool tips and distribute them evenly across all tipped positions).
In those situations since the employer can get slapped with tax fraud penalties for inaccuracy in tip reporting, they respond by firing anyone caught pocketing tips.
You lose in efficiency from a dollars perspective, but gain from the being part of a community perspective. It’s a kind of modern commune with the web facilitating connections at a larger distance than living in the same compound. It’s not for me, but I can see the appeal to some people.
I keep trying to respond to John Schilling’s personal account of journalism to thank him, since it’s a data point I find really valuable and encouraging, but the comment is not showing up in any variant, so I’m trying my luck with a top-level comment. Sorry about this! This is the comment:
@John Schilling:
Thanks for sharing this! I’m glad that happens. (And I hope it happens more than its opposite.)
Scott helped me out, but now all of my comments have appeared and look predictably weird and obnoxious. Sorry about this. 🙂 I can’t delete them any more since they’re from yesterday. (Apparently SSC was convinced I was a spambot for some reason, Scott was so nice to convince it otherwise.)
I got some Bragg apple and assrted fruit vinegar on a whim, and found it was very tasty.
Then I found that a lot of people using Bragg’s just plain apple cider vinegar for their health, and happy with it.
There’s at least some reason to think that vinegar is good for people.
For some reason, vinegar for health has barely shown up for me previously, so now I’m wondering what folks here think of it whether from looking at the evidence or trying it yourselves.
Honey and apple cider vinegar in hot water (with a pinch of salt) is by far the best thing to drink when you’re sick, or especially if you’re congested/coughing.
I found this headline amusing: “Leaked emails reveal Bush and Blair planned Iraq war before the invasion“. As opposed to what? The honourable and expected strategy of just making things up as they went along?
I recall during the Bush years there was once some sort of controversy when it somehow got leaked to the media that the Pentagon had “already developed plans for an invasion of Iran.”
Even as a pretty anti-war person, my response was basically, “Who cares? It’s their job to plan, isn’t it? What are we paying everyone in that building sitting around at desks for if not to make plans?”
The pentagon has a plan for a zombie apocalypse. Invading an actual country is strictly more likely than that.
That wasn’t a real plan. That was an example plan that they used as a training aid to look at how plans are developed. The other reason was to avoid the public fallout that comes when training plans featuring real places leak. Zombies are silly enough that they actually got away with it.
I don’t know. Those emails read not like “We have contingency plans for war in Iraq”, but rather “We have decided to go to war in Iraq but we need to know how to convince the MPs”. There is also the framing that “the war on terrorism” and “Iraq” are separate (when they were eventually sold as a package.)
Should they not strategize on how to build support for the policy they’ve agreed on?
Insofar as they are doing so dishonestly, fine – but the mere fact that they are planning it doesn’t seem problematic.
The storyline at the time was that things hadn’t been pre-decided. It was all based in “emerging information”. Those who were against the war Iraq tended to say this was B.S. and were essentially shouted down by the post 9/11 fervor. Hussein was blamed for being involved in 9/11, etc.
As such, I don’t see it as particularly surprising when people are finding information and publishing an argument that is essentially, “See, I told you it was pre-decided”.
I think you’re reading deeper than the OP, who I took as mostly bemused by the headline. Which is indeed bemusing: “SHOCKING NEWS: Bush Had a Plan!”
Also I’m not sure “Hussein was blamed for 9/11” is really accurate, if you’re talking about actual administration rhetoric. “9/11 proves how dangerous a man like Hussein could be, because he’s willing to sponsor terrorism”, sure. A nuance, but still a distinction.
gbdub, if you’re not really sure, maybe you should look it up.
“Hussein was responsible for 9/11” was part of the cultural memeplex that led to any criticism of the justifications for going to war with Iraq being shouted down. It wasn’t part of the official justification, I agree.
But I seem to recall it being fluffed quite a bit by various people who were quasi-official in the run up to the decision.
@gbdub
Correct, I make no judgement about the contents of the article.
OK, Bush and Cheney never said that Saddam was behind 9/11. They only said that said that he was currently supporting Al Qaeda.
An unusually balanced, unhysterical, and refreshing view of Trumpism from the New Yorker:
Intellectuals for Trump
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/intellectuals-for-trump
This is one of the few I have read that rings true.
With Vox and Reason quoting SSC, and the New Yorker reporting on this guy (and many other examples), I think it’s become the case, weirdly enough, but I think without hyperbole, that the best new political thought now comes not from polisci departments nor the traditional news media, but from frequently semi-anonymous blogs. The traditional media rarely introduces any interesting new perspectives or ideas themselves; it merely reports on them; and increasingly it’s not professor-so-and-so’s new book; it’s Scott Alexander’s new blogpost.
I do not see this as weird. Professors tend to formalism and analyzing current politics, not innovating new politics. Journalists report on events for the benefit of our analysis, and their real job is selling advertisements.
It seems like we should expect the best new thought to come from intelligent people making a good-faith effort, in context, and with a minimum of competing incentives. A quality blogger cuts right to the intersection of those qualifications.
It’s also easier than ever to find out people’s past statements and hang them by it, so the best strategy for career advancement today, in prominent positions, seems to follow the herd.
Oh, that isn’t new.
The most cogent thoughts on the role of Catholicism in the world during the 1300’s were not from the common popular preachers that had plenty of utility motives for their public words, but from some generally quiet scholar who (may) have contributed something intelligent to a town pamphlet, worded carefully.
Now those scholars have blogs.
And Vox and Reason are very…VERY different places then CNN and Fox, and those places have quoted a wide variety of sources not often heard of online.
That is an interesting way to look at it. Speaking about the Chinese tradition just because it’s the one I know best, the writers who, in retrospect, turn out to have been the most creative or long-term influential are usually not part of that period’s cathedral, or, if they are, the stuff they end up famous for isn’t all the official bureaucratic memorials they wrote. Seemingly the best thing for your output was to get all the training of an elite bureaucrat and then be exiled to somewhere with nothing to do but write and correspond. That is, blogging may be new, but the intellectual “space” it occupies isn’t. But what is the early 20th c. equivalent of a blog? 19th c.? 18th c….?
I’m obviously too old, but I really don’t understand this entire “I need to be anonymous to speak out on this subject” thing that has been going on much more frequently in the past decade.
I suppose there is great fear that they will be held accountable later for supporting a position that becomes unpalatable socially or professionally. I’m still amazed that the Internet is being used more effectively as a tool of what I view as social conformity than it is for social expression. Conscious and unconscious enforcement of group think seems to be a real problem and I guess Twitter (not a user) and Facebook (not a user) with their immediate feedback are a big issue for people who highly value social acceptance?
I believe the media would be much different, and much more interesting, if they weren’t monitoring Twitter and Facebook like hawks and getting daily ratings on every thing they write.
I think this sort of mindset changes, both depending on your age and depending on your intentions.
More and more people these days start their internet experience as young children with stern lectures from their parents on how they must NEVER give their real name or pedophiles will come rape them.
Then you become a teenager, where social media can get you mocked and ostracized from various cliques and factions in high school, or – if you’re more of a nerd, you take up trolling and appreciate the ability of anonymity to shield you from the consequences of using racial slurs or whatever.
At some point you pass into early adulthood, at which point shedding anonymity might potentially help you… if your intention is to become a journalist or develop “fame” to some particular extent. Or if your online presence is exclusively professional and uncontroversial, it could help your career prospects if say, you use your real name LinkedIn profile to comment constructively on articles and blog posts related to your industry.
BUT, if you just post online “recreationally” and you occasionally address controversial issues, it might still help to be anonymous. This category probably includes our host on this blog. While he could undoubtedly parlay this blog into a column on some website or maybe even a book deal – there’s also no question that some of the stuff here could harm his career prospects within the medical field.
Is there increased conformity?
Be careful interpreting what you see. When people say “I have to say this anonymously,” that might be a sign of increased conformity. But if the alternative is not saying it at all, it is a sign of decreased conformity. And if they didn’t used to say it at all, how would you know about the conformity?
Past telecommunications have increased many types of conformity, so that is the way to bet for the internet. I’m not sure what you mean by “social expression,” but I don’t see much conflict with conformity. Telecommunications imposes conformity on only a few attributes, leaving increased diversity on the rest. Much of the conformity is on attributes that were already subject to severe conformity, but now the capital imposes its fashion on the provinces.
The New Yorker article is quite explicit that the fear is not of a twitterstorm, but of being fired; and the fear is of being fired today, not of potential future shifts.
Man, I envy your job security.
Douglas Knight hit the nail on the head. Even leaving aside commentary on politically radioactive issues like race or gender, there are a lot of dumb mistakes which can end your career if someone decides to pass them on to your boss and/or HR.
Back in Usenet days, my wife used to worry that someone I had offended might heave a brick through our window, but it never happened.
The only time I can think of when anything undesirable happened due to the pubic nature of my posts was when I carelessly gave my true opinion about a fellow libertarian intellectual who I didn’t think was very smart, forgetting that he would see it and naturally be offended.
Just about every example on the linked reddit is about someone losing a job, probably not a career, for inappropriate social media posts explicitly about their job. Usually grossly unprofessional ones, e.g. releasing customer information.
That’s a fairly specific sort of concern that shouldn’t call for a pseudonym in one’s general social-media persona.
At least two that I saw claimed someone refused to hire them because they either didn’t have a Facebook account or didn’t post on it enough.
Also like the one about the guy getting fired after preventing some old man from abducting a kid. I bet all the good stories in that thread are made up though.
One thing that might be worth keeping in mind is that many implicit sanctions are the result of social activities online which may go unnoticed by the individual who was sanctioned, but the sanction may nevertheless be potentially important in specific contexts. This makes everything a bit more sinister; in some contexts it may be hard to tell if your online activities hurt you, because you may never know that they did. You may for example fail to get a job interview because HR googled you and found an unfortunate Facebook post which indicated that you might not be a good fit to the organization (first impressions can be very important, even if – or perhaps especially if – those impressions are wrong), a former friend/acquaintance/colleague may stop talking to you because of something you wrote unthinkingly online using your own name, but he or she may never tell you that’s why they stopped interacting with you, or people may use things you write online against you in conversations with others without your knowledge. This is hardly an exhaustive list. A somewhat serious if presumably uncommon example could also be mentioned in this context: In Denmark a far-left organization was for example a few years ago found in possession of a server including personal details (including data likely obtained through hacking such as bank account information and emails) of almost 6000 political opponents. Many of them presumably featured on the lists because of things they had written online, and most of the people on those lists naturally had no idea that they had been included in such a registry. Many of them presumably still do not. The existence of the registry is perhaps perceived as more relevant when it is kept in mind that the people charged were people who either had previous convictions of- or were simultaneously charged with violent assault, vandalism, illegal arms possession, and possession of material to be used for bomb-making. Will the ISIL sleeper cells in Germany be making lists like these in the future, to complement the indiscriminate killings they seem to prefer at the moment? Who knows? These examples are admittedly somewhat unusual and may not apply to many people, and unless you’re highly involved in a specific sphere of online activities I think it is unlikely that your activities will be important enough to ‘merit offline attention’ by your ‘opponents’ in any sort of targeted manner, but I do think it’s an important consideration that there may be a lot of dimensions which are potentially important when one engages online, and one may not be aware of all of them at the time one engages, or even afterwards. Many of the risks taken by not making it hard for others to identify you will be hard to quantify at least partly because you may not get any feedback of relevance, even when an effect is there.
I’m self employed, so of course this is one of the reasons I don’t understand it as well.
I guess I find it abhorrent that one could be fired for taking stances unrelated to work on my free time. I know there have been a few high profile firings but it seems very rare and more of a CEO public facing position that got mobbed on social media (not a fan of this either).
But a professional can’t take a pro-Trump position without going anonymous, but they can be openly hostile to Trump? Something is really broken there. Bizarre and worrisome.
Being fired for one’s non-work-related facebook postings seems to be at least a three-sigma rare event, thought not limited to CEOs.
As US points out, the real question is whether the rare events are exerting a chilling effect on what should be tolerable behavior. That’s how most heavy-handed social engineering is done, after all. When our ancestors passed laws against gay sex, it wasn’t with the expectation that every gay person would wind up in prison, but that they would all hide so far back in the closet that they could never find another gay person to have sex with. If the unforgivable offense is now refusing to bake a cake for someone’s gay wedding, or tweeting anything vaguely homophobic, same deal – it’s a big expensive hassle to arrest all those people, or sue them, fire them, drive them out of business, whatever, and it makes whoever is doing it look like bullies. The greater victory is making them all afraid to do anything but smile and claim that they agree with us about everything we care about.
Does anyone have recommendations for transhumanist fiction?
Blindsight, by Peter Watts, the best Sci-Fi novel ever written.
Blindsight seems to have gotten a bit over-hyped.
The core concept is very good but the execution was poor. In particular, it seems like setting and characterization bends to the needs of the narrative rather than the story flowing from believable interactions between the characters and their world. The best science fiction starts with an alien world and explores it while the world of Blindsight reads like it was built in reverse order.
A good example of that is pretty much everything to do with the vampires. There are clear plot and thematic reasons why they needed to be around and to have the traits that they did. But it was extremely unclear why humans would deliberately bring them back in that form, given how humanity was otherwise portrayed. It’s not an unsolvable problem but it’s one that came about IMO because the author just wasn’t interested in their backstory beyond what was needed to establish them.
I tried to read it a while back and that sort of thing was what prevented me from getting all the way through it despite otherwise liking the writing and ideas on display.
Have you tried reading Echopraxia? They address the how and why of the vampires in considerably more detail.
I would go as far as to say that any book which meets this standard has not done a good job portraying transhumans or aliens.
Normally readers are asked to accept the ridiculous nature of the characters or aliens, and to consider their actions. In this case we are asked to accept the incomprehensibility of their actions, and consider their nature.
Much better method for treating the subject, in my view.
Count me in the “Blindsight is overhyped” camp. It’s pretty good but seriously…
I second this suggestion, as well as the follow-up Echopraxia. As a bonus, the author has notes and citations for the inspiration for his concepts, and was a marine biologist before doing writing full time. It is considerably harder than the usual fare as a consequence.
I would also strongly recommend Blindsight and Echopraxia. YMMV as to whether it’s overhyped, but the first book is by far the best actual Hard SF I’ve come across or even heard of in years. The second softens the SF somewhat, and I think it is because what the author’s wanting to talk/think about in terms of philosophy and theory of mind is driving the bus more. Still a very interesting read.
Greg Egan does better Hard SF. I haven’t read Echopraxia, but I wouldn’t rate Blindsight as Hard SF at all.
I’d recommend heartily, but probably not go that far. It might be the best sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, but that would be mainly because I’ve not read that many sci-fi novels.
I second this recommendation. It is my favorite science fiction story.
I enjoyed The Nexus Trilogy.
It’s more humanist than “Transhumanist”, but I can not recommend Transmetroplitan highly enough. Consider how mad today’s society would look from the perspective of someone born in 1700, now try to imagine the kind of future that would produce a similar effect in us.
Yes it’s a comic, but the densely illustrated cityscapes and advertisements for (cloned) Irish “long-pig” hamburger patties are part of the package.
Aside from the Farsight Reservation and Foglets I agree that it’s not very Transhumanist, but yeah, it is a damn fine comic and gets my hearty endorsement.
Don’t forget the Transients and the simple fact that it’s exploring a future where things like body-modification and cloning are common enough to be considered mundane.
I really need to dig out my old trade paperbacks and see if I enjoy it as much as I did way back when. One thing I will say without reservation is that the art is great – the level of detail in backgrounds is splendid.
I re-read it about a year ago and think it holds up pretty well.
My worry is that stuff that me in my mid teens thought was cool or just ignored will come off as needlessly XTREEM to a grownup.
There were parts (especially some of Spider’s early monologues) that read that way to me, but once the main political plot-line got rolling those moments fell by the wayside while the art and characterization remained strong throughout.
Like I said, I think it holds up pretty well.
A thought just came into my head (oh-oh!).
“Let prisoners buy chainmail to lower incidences of prison murders.”
Is that nuts?
I agree it would be nice if we could make prisoners’ life a little bit safer and better, but I see a few problems:
1. I think most of the time if you’re getting killed by stabbing in prison it’s not really a fair fight, and someone may well have the opportunity to e.g. hold you down and take off your armor, target vulnerable areas (neck, face, thighs, groin)
2. You can still get killed in a lot of ways chainmail doesn’t really prevent – blunt force trauma, suffocation, poisoning/chemical attack, etc
3. Prisoners make shivs out of paper. What are they going to do with chainmail?
4. Could make things worse for the have-nots if the prisoners who can afford it become less conflict-averse
I don’t have data to back these concerns up, some may not apply.
You can’t just take somebody’s mail off, and sure someone could stab elsewhere, but it means that there are less targets they can hit. A lot of shankings are quick and it helps someone fend off strikes until the guards break it up. In the cases where people are going to be able to hold you down for extended periods of time, almost nothing would help you.
This Italian HEMA guy actually wears mail in every day life under his clothes.
I watched his vid and then later was reading an article about prisons and it made me connect the two.
True, but it closes off the common way of being killed in prison assaults, which is getting stabbed in the torso repeatedly (people are better able to defend their head and neck at the expense of their arms).
I’m not sure. They can’t actually melt it down and recast it into daggers, but I’m probably underestimating the ingenuity of prisoners here.
The ability to turn armor into a weapon is the thing that would make it not workable in the end. I guess the only way to protect prisoners while making sure they don’t create more makeshift weapons is to either have more solitary confinement, or hire more guards which is probably too expensive.
(Though lots of countries ESPECIALLY AMERICA could empty their prisons of non-violent offenders and drug offenders and cut costs enormously).
Didn’t any of you people see “The Wire”? Omar’s buddy who looks like Paul Mooney (actually played by Donnie Andrews, who was the inspiration for Omar’s character) meets up with him in prison and duct-tapes a couple phone books to his abdomen. Since it happened in “The Wire”, I confidently assume this means it actually happens in real life all the time.
I did actually read an account from a medium-security(?) prisoner that I think was posted here long ago of the one prison dispute he had to show up for, and the participants all armored themselves with magazines in a similar way (they didn’t actually end up fighting, though).
I guess I’m just questioning the assumption that this is the common means of deadly assault in prison. Certainly the few anecdotes I’ve read and much popular media lead me to believe it, but I don’t have data on the subject. Do you? I tried looking at the ncjrs website, but couldn’t find anything useful.
Yes, for some reason I was picturing just a loose hauberk over the prison jumpsuit, which could have the hem yanked up. But this concern is easily solved, I expect, especially if they get the same kind of stab vests corrections officers wear.
I’m just going off all accounts of shankings I’ve heard of. I haven’t seen any data on this.
People interested in reducing prison violence may be interested in David Skarbek’s The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System.
He never actually says that he is in favor of prison gangs, but pretty clearly he believes they have resulted in a sharp reduction in prison violence.
Well, the one obvious thing a gang would do is make a set of known people who probably won’t shank you, and who will retaliate in your favor if somebody from another gang does so, meaning that the whole gang is liable for the behavior of individuals. There’s an incentive to keep members in line.
If they reduced violence though, then that implies there was a period before prison gangs to make a comparison to. I find it hard to believe that there was a period in prisons when people weren’t bunching up into protective groups. Maybe it’s a cop out, but isn’t that just “human nature”?
Look who was mentioned in Reason!
http://reason.com/blog/2017/01/02/the-new-york-times-gets-everything-wrong
And SSC gets mentioned in the MMA community too. Clearly, SSC is approaching the ‘famous’ singularity.
It’s only a matter of time before Scott gets to run for president (getting my prediction in early, at 0.00001% likelyhood).
You are missing the special opportunities provided by Scott’s chosen profession. There is even a movie on the subject.
Expect a public announcement any week now.
Markets as a Discovery Process
One of the things I appreciate about markets is how new ideas are discovered for products and services, ways of living, and rules of interaction. An idea has to survive market tests, like how well it appeals to people, and how much it costs to acquire it. If it passes the test then people’s lives are made better off and it becomes more widely adopted. Better ways of living are found through experimentation and acquiring more and better knowledge*.
This can sometimes go wrong, when ideas I consider morally wrong or inefficient are widely embraced. When the actual consequences of a rule or way of living are not widely known, people might incorrectly prefer rules and life styles that make them worse off. And people might have preferences that are incompatible with mine, like wanting to steal from me. But by and large, private property and voluntary exchange improve the lot of human kind.
One AnCap adjacent idea is that just as markets work well as discovery process for TVs it also works well for security services and law. So, therefore, we shouldn’t have coercive monopolies for these services as it would have poorer incentives and opportunities to improve than you’d find in a market. Better security services and rules of interaction can exist, and we’ll better discover what they are when we have more market-oriented processes for them (emigration/immigration is a constraint on coercive monopolies and subjects governments to a market process, and the easier it is to exit and enter jurisdictions the more likely you are to find better government).
*It makes people that can discern truths and are good at spreading their truths very valuable. It’s one reason I love Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs are shown as they think they’ve figured out ways to make people’s lives better off. And it makes it important to have good thought leaders for ideas that will make people better off. Here’s a thought leader I look to, Balaji Srinivasan, giving an excellent talk on Voice and Exit that I highly recommend if you have 15 minutes to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
Any critiques you guys have of my ideas that can improve my knowledge is appreciated!
I agree that “markets are good” but remain a staunch and firm statist. What really distinguishes Ancap is polycentric law, and it would ultimately mean that you are encouraging a competition in deciding what counts as initiating force and what doesn’t, and disagreements would frequently lead to law agencies using force on each other. I don’t think anarcho-capitalism has sufficiently solved what I call the “illegal law problem”.
Competition in law is different from competition in other markets because you are empowering the law with the ability to shut others down. A polycentric law system would probably end up extremely bureaucratic due to law system A being paid to attack law system B based on different interpretations of the NAP in that situation. This would end up stifling peaceful market competition.
REDACTED IDEOLOGY always struck me as a more realistic version of Ancap, because instead of proposing statelessness and overlapping laws, it proposed decentralized but monocentric jurisdictions, which essentially means a load of states ruled by sovereigns. Still deeply flawed, since democracy is a pressure valve, and it was not focused enough on making Exit function by providing enough Entrance, but still a step up. Of course, then problem is that as soon as you add Voice, unfettered Entrance rights become a bad idea for existing citizens, since they are subjecting their future to the decisions of potential masses of unknown or even hostile elements, freely invited in, but that’s a different discussion.
Markets function within a scope provided by authority. Make a market in authority and you just have war. States can and should delegate powers of self-defense down to citizens, but if citizens were paying for their own
private armiesprivate law systems, historical precedent (such as Ancient Rome) suggests things would spill over into violent competition, which is something Ancap ideology has a problem with. The only case where this would not be so would be where a monocentric system delegates some security powers to subservient private entities, which may actually turn out to be more effective, but wouldn’t exactly be polycentric, since it’s still clear who the boss is, and it is a delegation of legal force rather than of law making capacity.Markets are certainly a discovery process, but that process requires failure, and feeds off of it in order to produce success. Most people don’t want society to be such a constant meat grinder, so they trade a slow down in the discovery process for some level of security, and defer failure to later. Socialists take it too far and try to completely shut down the discovery process, leading to paralysis.
There’s no right answer, however. Which area in the the trade off you want to be depends as much on emotional appeals as evidence, since history cannot be completely exposed to the scientific method. The result of this is that Ancap seems doomed to fail, because it lacks emotional resonance with the majority of people. They simply don’t want failure. Of course, it’s not the case that you can hold back failure, but you can defer it, and if people can defer it, they will.
I appreciate the response!
I think it’s possible that overlapping laws in the same jurisdiction can create difficulties, but we already have that nowadays. Where I am now, I’m subjected to local, state, and federal laws. I’m subjected to the rules of my workplace. The rules of interaction even vary from person to person, as the level of formality of conversation varies among my coworkers. I’m subjected to the rules of SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/. And if I hop onto Ebay to purchase something I’m subjected to their rules. All these rules overlap within a 100 foot radius of my current location, and chaos doesn’t ensue.
There are certainly unique challenges having different rules on what constitutes aggression within the same geographic area, but Machinery of Freedom provides a reasonable proposal for how that could be solved (subscription to rights enforcement agencies with disputes resolved through arbitration). To the extent that some types of overlapping laws within geographic areas are inefficient, I think the market could resolve that somewhat through having consistent rules determined a la your referenced ‘sovereigns’ or property developers. Wealthy people could purchase large tracts of land and attach their own set of rules to people buying into their area, just like how HOAs form in newly developed neighborhoods or condo rules in apartment buildings. Smaller polities reduce the costs of exit (it’s relatively easy to move to a different neighborhood) creating strong market incentives for good rules. Voice gets channeled through Exit instead of voting, similar to how I’ve seen David Friedman refer to his preference for competitive dictatorships: no choice on what’s on a restaurants menu, but choice on which restaurant to give your dollars to.
You say “Make a market in authority and you just have war.” But, we do have markets in authority at the international level, and it’s never been more peaceful. Interconnected markets among nations, with high costs for conflict, make diplomacy (arbitration) more highly desirable than war. It’s one reason the World Trade Organization exists, so disputes can be resolved peacefully rather than violently. It’s why international trade law Lex Mercatoria developed through voluntary bottom-up agreements among merchants: https://fee.org/articles/the-law-merchant-and-international-trade/.
You say “if citizens were paying for their own private armies private law systems, historical precedent (such as Ancient Rome) suggests things would spill over into violent competition, which is something Ancap ideology has a problem with.” Historical precedent doesn’t factor in the growth in technology, such as in communication, that reduce frictions for cooperation. Models that might have struggled to work in the past may have a better chance today. We also seem to have better morals today than we did in the past (see Steve Pinker’s talk on the decline in violence: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence), which also makes cooperation rather than violence more likely.
You say “Markets are certainly a discovery process, but that process requires failure, and feeds off of it in order to produce success. Most people don’t want society to be such a constant meat grinder, so they trade a slow down in the discovery process for some level of security, and defer failure to later. ” I agree that many people are risk averse, which is why I’d prefer to see unpopulated geographic areas carved out for AnCap experimentation, where only those comfortable with the risks emigrate. If shown to be successful, it would be easier for risk averse people to adopt more widely.
You say “The result of this is that Ancap seems doomed to fail”. I’d point to Bryan Caplan’s essay in response:
“…
Since we’ve never had anarcho-capitalism, this peaceful equilibrium sounds like wishful thinking. But it’s no more wishful thinking than stable democracy. Both systems sound crazy when first proposed. Neither can be stable as long as people expect them to be unstable. But both can be stable once people expect them to be stable.
You could object: The expectations necessary to sustain anarcho-capitalism are highly unlikely to ever arrive. But the same was true for democracy a thousand years ago. Yet somehow, expectations radically changed and stable democracy arrived. How did expectations change so dramatically? It’s complicated. But can expectations change dramatically? Absolutely.”
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/crazy_equilibri.html
Whether this is a good idea depends on how markets serve their function. The critical distinction between domains where the market is a good solution or a bad one is the acceptability of failure, because the mechanism of the market is failure: firms and products which do not appeal fail and exit the market.
So while the market could almost certainly find one or more firms that are better in terms of performance or efficiency for security and law than current government agencies, this necessarily means large groups of people will experience a total collapse of law and order as their chosen firms and products fail and exit.
The question is not whether we can find a better way via the market, but whether we can tolerate the failures the market requires. It is really unlikely that people will accept a high chance of violence and chaos in the name of a better Pinkerton or Blackwater.
As their chosen firm fails, they can instead consume services from the more successful, robust firms. Total collapse of law is not necessary.
Groceries in the U.S. are produced on a competitive market. Your argument seems to imply that we have famines due to the occasional collapse of producers.
And that places where food production and distribution was controlled by the government didn’t.
On the post about the bad NYT piece about economists and education, I saw commenters saying that the left-wing press is unreliable.
I’d like to see more detailed analysis.
Is the NYT unreliable about everything, or are there some topics where you consider it reliable?
Speaking of, my impression is that Al Jazeera is good, but I wouldn’t trust it for anything related to Jews. This might be an excessive reaction to one article about hate crimes in the US that didn’t mention anti-Semitism.
I’ve been mostly reading the Washington Post, but not as a result of careful analysis. They just seem to have more information per reading time than the NYT. They also get credit for employing Radley Balko, but by that standard I’d also be following the Huffington Post and Fox News. How do people rate WaPo? I’m also interested in people’s favorite journalists.
Even if the leftist press is unreliable, this doesn’t mean the rightist press is reliable. Recommendations for best sources?
More generally, are there issues which make it easy for you to see bias?
Here’s one of my recent ones– NPR has been reporting a lot on the risks of self-chosen painkillers, but almost never mentions lack of access to pain medication.
Recommendations for a balanced media diet?
It is common that people find the news reliable for all subjects except those that they know a lot about. There is a reason for this.
Yes, but this can be both that the news is often wrong, and that people are just more nitpicky about things they know a lot about (or have a hard time imagining how ignorant the average person is – think someone arguing that an article about the earth being a ball because he knows it’s an ellipsoid, without realizing the average reader thinks it’s flat). Anecdotally the latter seems more common.
Nitpicking definitely happens, but you also see cases where the reporting is entirely in opposition to the facts. In the same quote that coined Gell-Mann Amnesia, Michael Crichton called them “Wet Streets Cause Rain” articles.
A good example of this is anything to do with epigenetics. The media understanding of genetics is on par with X-Men comics at the best of times, but lately they have been using the (controversial) idea of heritable epialleles in humans to justify outright Lamarckism.
That’s not a small thing! The press have in many cases essentially applied Lysenko’s theories of horticulture to eugenics: expecting kids of parents with this or that lifestyle change to flourish the same way he expected the seeds of vernalized plants to. It defies common sense and more than a century of established science. Not to mention it’s not a view any serious epigenetic researcher holds.
What does it mean to say that a news source is “unreliable”? Most news sources – even ones that people have good reason to be leery of – rarely or never tell lies of commission. Lies of omission are more common. Presenting things in a way that is misleading is most common of all. Sneaky little tricks like equivocating between absolute numbers and relative numbers. Presenting a situation where there are multiple possible explanations, and taking the explanation they find most favourable as a given. Etc.
This is kind of a “do as I say, not as I do” bit of advice. I try to follow this strategy in real life but fail frequently.
Read news about things which you’re already familiar with and which have a direct effect on your day-to-day life. So, follow professional journals for your work and local news for where you (plus family and friends) live. Whenever possible, click past the news story and directly to the source literature.
Ground-shaking national and international news will find you even if you’re actively avoiding it, and it’s difficult enough to check for accuracy that it’s a suckers game. Keeping your ear to the ground makes more sense when it’s for events that impact you directly and which you can personally verify.
I don’t think the NYT — or really any general interest media entity — is reliable for any topic related to anything close to a science. Fortunately this problem was solved by Aaron Swartz when he invented RSS — just find specialist bloggers or publications on each scientific subject that interests you and follow them instead. I don’t think you’ll miss any “news” this way that you’d get from reading the Times.
The parts of the NYT that I trust most are the Sports, Dining and Crossword sections. You can probably throw in Real Estate and the local coverage about NYC events (below a certain, vaguely-defined level of global significance).
In terms of balanced media diet, I’ll focus on a single topic area that I happen to focus on. This year I found that the best way to keep what I think is an accurate perspective on foreign affairs specifically is the following strategy, which is probably overkill but I find the the subject matter intrinsically interesting ever since I started playing EU4.
* Scan the usual suspects for headlines periodically. NYT rarely breaks important foreign policy news, but it’s a good meta-source for gauging relative importance of events and their editorial stance on issues as reflected in the style of coverage. Especially recently I enjoy scanning the front page of RT, which is actually fun procrastination because they often have great viral content like meteor strikes in Siberia. (Propagandist know their business when it comes to generating traffic!) Anyhow the point is to have convenient access to the statements of so-called adversary states not filtered through either the State Department or the NYT/CNN headline writers.
* Watch the daily State Department press briefings as often as possible (they’re only on weekdays and I can absorb them pretty easily at 2x speed on youtube, by ymmv), paying particular attention to the questions not the answers. The AP correspondent is the best person to focus on, even if their written coverage usually ends up very dry (which is the remit of a wire service I suppose). I often skip past certain ritualistic questions from reporters with “pet” issues/regions and from n00bs, and you’ll quickly get a sense for who’s who and the the rhythm of how these things go after watching just a few briefings. It’s all actually good fun, especially when there is confrontation or drama (more common than you’d think).
* I find value from following certain link aggregation sources that are tuned to non-MSM sources of foreign policy news (/r/syriancivilwar is a great example).
NYT is unreliable on culture issues, but can be generally excellent on other things. It’s a bit hit or miss. Climate science is straight left dogma there but other stuff is generally fine.
Personally I look at WSJ, NYT, WP, NPR, Fox, and lately The Guardian because I strangely found it more fair on the election than all US papers. If I feel like trolling to feed my outrage addiction then Vox, Slate, and Salon. I may not like Fox that much but I think it is required because they will sometimes cover things the other media sites will ignore because it doesn’t fit a current narrative.
I also really like Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, and Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View.
CNN for major breaking news, everything else is pretty mediocre there.
I had to stop reading the WP for about 6 weeks during the election because they got a bit extreme. In a sense being a DC paper and a major media source they were ground zero for the election backlash and they were super defensive. On the good side the WP was all over the Rolling Stone rape fraud early and often.
I’ve given background interviews to NYT reporters several times, as have some of my colleagues, on the subject of North Korean strategic weapons systems. The stories they subsequently wrote, and the quotes they chose to highlight, were fair and balanced, and of particular importance to me, they didn’t misrepresent anything I had said to support someone else’s agenda.
And since you bring it up, I’ve given one interview to Al Jazeera on the same (conspicuously Jew-free) subject, with the same result.
It probably helps that this is a subject ultimately dominated by engineering facts, but some of the key facts are as difficult to verify from here and now as are e.g. climate forecasts. So that’s probably not the distinguishing factor.
I suspect the key is that North Korean strategic weapons are not a subject of anyone’s political or tribal narrativete in the United States. Everybody agrees that it’s a Bad Thing that North Korea has nuclear missiles, nobody has a real plan for what to do about it, and the obvious Bad Guy isn’t even weakly linked to any of our parties or factions.
Mostly, nobody wants to talk about this. Sometimes events require credible news sources to acknowledge that, yep, North Korea is still building nuclear missiles and we still don’t have a solution, which is the sort of thing that even left- or right-leaning journalists can handle at an unbiased and factual level. Well, usually.
Depends how weakly linked you’re willing to consider as nonzeroly linked.
Modern progressivism — Leftism — Socialism — Marxism — Communism with Chinese Characteristics — Communism with North Korean Characteristics — the North Korean state
Yes, this is kind of a shitpost.
Edited to preempt what I think is the second most likely objection: the link between the PRC and the DPRK is of course partly historical, and partly realpolitik in nature, but I don’t think the deep-rooted ideological connections should be dismissed. At this point the DPRK is a pretty big diplomatic liability for China in many ways, and I think there’s a good chance they would dissolve the alliance were it not for the ideological factors.
Obviously the most likely objection — the long and tenuous nature of this chain of connections — is perfectly valid and repudiates it completely.
How about “Khmer Rouge–>Harvard Crimson–>Dean of Columbia Journalism School?” 🙂
I’m actually more impressed they were at least reasonably accurate. No english-major-induced misunderstandings?
Fortunately, I usually deal with one of their science editors who I believe has a science-ish MA, which is at least three steps above an English major in that regard.
Also fortunately, the bit where we compare anyone in the American political spectrum to e.g. Kim Jong-Un is, like Hitler comparisons, mostly limited the seedier parts of the blogosphere and still beyond the pale for mainstream journalism.
It is indeed. Fortunately, neither the New York Times nor any other newspaper I know of seems eager to publish that sort of shit, and I’m not sure what it is supposed to accomplish here.
Right, ask anyone to name two countries you don’t want to have nuclear weapons:
1. Pakistan
2. North Korea
I worry much more about two van loads of terrorists attacking a Pakistan nuclear site more than anything, I’m sure this has crossed their mind. It’s quite unclear how hard a Pakistan nuclear weapon would be to detonate if it was stolen. They could just use it as a dirty bomb in which case the mental effect would be just as severe.
Thanks for sharing this! I’m glad that happens. (And I hope it happens more than its opposite.)
[ I posted this once before and it seems to have gotten eaten, so I hope it doesn’t end up appearing twice. ]
You’re welcome, I’m glad I was helpful, and don’t worry about your comment appearing twice. OK, thrice. Can happen to anyone.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience! I’m glad that happens. (And I hope it happens more than its opposite.)
[ Tried to post this with the quote, but it doesn’t seem to want to go through. Sorry if it ends up appearing thrice or something. ]
Whoops, sorry, looks like all of my comments have appeared now in retrospect, ironically looking super spammy now that they’re here! (The blog software thought I was a spambot for some reason, Scott fixed it.)
Sorry to pester. 🙂 I kept trying to post the comment since it’s really important for me to get out thank yous on things that tangibly make me update. Going back into lurk mode now!
NYT is generally pretty good. Op-eds are usually partisan and occasionally stupid, but are also clearly labeled. The article on education is unusually bad for them, but also actually contained the graphs used in Scott’s counterargument, so do read the content and not just the headlines on anything that seems like it’s out to convince you rather than just giving bland information.
Related question: do Americans consider the BBC to be biased, due to the UK being more left-wing than the US in general?
We consider it to be biased because it is state-sponsored, in addition to the much less liberal (in the classical sense) media landscape in the UK versus the US, when it comes to things like libel laws etc. Obvi the BBC does some great stuff and some decent reporting, but when it comes to topics important to Britain’s national interests — such as national security or Brexit — I would never even consider relying upon the BBC as my sole source of information. My confidence that MI6 (or possibly MI5) has direct or indirect control over a majority of BBC management (probably both the day-to-day folks and — for really important stuff — the Trust) is north of 75%. Replace “control” by “strong influence” and my confidence rises to 90%+.
What do Brits think about this question?
Speaking for myself, I think it is largely unbiased (at least more so than any other news source I can think of). I agree that I wouldn’t rely solely on it for subjects I think a secret service might interfere with, but that goes for pretty much any news source. I doubt that MI5’s ability to stop a British newspaper publishing something is much less than its corresponding ability on the BBC. I am fairly confident that no secret services exert day to day influence on it. What do you think that influence looks like? I.e. what are some stories you think MI6 has made the BBC present in a certain way (in comparison to other media)?
To give examples, I’m virtually certain that MI5 influenced the BBC coverage of Waterfate, Iran-Contra, 9-11, the Iraq War, and the 2011 Qadaffi intervention. And of course they are currently influencing the coverage of events in Syria.
I don’y know about Americans in general, but I mostly like the BBC. They’ve got pretty good information density and tend to choose interesting topics.
The main thing I have against it is that their reporters tend to be emotion junkies– too much of a habit of asking people who’ve been through some awful thing how they feel. I don’t know whether anyone has simply said “I hope you never find out”. I also don’t know whether the BBC would broadcast it if someone said that.
And I wish they would take an occasional break from “America’s so-called war on terror”. If you don’t think it should be called a war on terror, then say what you think it should be called. Same for “the so-called Islamic State”.
They’re also apt to end their stories with a portentuous sentence. I’ll include one later when I’ve got something handy. You’d think there’d be parodies of that habit, but I can’t say I’ve heard one.
I did notice they became less biased against Israel some years ago. It wasn’t that they stopped talking about bad treatment of Palestinians, but they started doing stories about normal life in Israel. I later heard that Al Jazeera was largely staffed with people from the BBC, so that took away anti-Israel bias. Anyone know whether this is actually true?
I find the BBC incredibly biased on Israel, but generally okay otherwise (it’s been a while since I’ve read them much, though).
Edit: According to Nancy Lebovitz, apparently this has changed since I’ve stopped reading them.
shakedown, you might still find the BBC biased on Isreal, just not incredibly biased.
I’m not American, but I just wanted to say that the BBC should be burnt with the cleansing fires of privatization.
Good documentaries though.
Print seems to be ok, but BBC radio (at least the hour-long news program that gets broadcast in America) is simply terrible, both in terms of reporting and production.
I never trust anything from a site that doesn’t have comments. Especially lately, I’m noticing more and more news sites are turning comments off after a long period where commenters were routinely blowing the author’s narrative out of the water.
Also, Unfilter is amazing. It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the news, with a new episode every week. The presenters are a couple of vaguely left-libertarian IT guys who are especially good at pointing out dilettantes who know nothing of “cybersecurity”. Warning: It will make you hate TV news.
Here’s an episode from a couple weeks ago about Russia and the US elections. I watch their shows through the Youtube mirrors since their own video streaming service skips and stutters a lot on my 10-year-old toaster of a computer.
http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/105436/russian-to-conclusions-unfilter-217/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc1z5sE32Lo
if you didn’t hate TV news already
In a twist of fate, I’m finding myself compiling a list of mysterious flashes associated to (rogue?) nuclear explosions.
So far I’ve collected:
– the Vela incident
– the flash at Banjawarn Station.
Anyone knows of any other registered event associated to a possible nuclear explosion, which are today awaiting an explanation?
There is a very good chance that the Vela incident was a South African and or Israeli nuclear test. On the other hand the idea that the “Banjawarn bang” was nuclear is nonsense, for as good overview of why check out Brian Dunning’s article here. To summarize:
– While Aum Shinrikyō was a genuinely frightening group that did try to acquire WMDs, they didn’t move into the property in Banjawarn until after the blast.
-The United states maintains the Integrated Operational Nuclear Detection System, at network of satellites that succeeded the Vela constellation, and are capable of detecting the distinctive double flash signature of a nuclear blast anywhere in the world.
-Nuclear blasts have a distinctive seismic signature that was not present in Banjawarn.
-Banjawarn station is remote but it is not inaccessible to the Australian government or it’s allies; after the Tokyo subway attacks the Australian Federal Police examined the site and found no evidence of a nuclear blast. Even after a few years there should have been detectable fission products.
-It is extremely unlikely that group like Aum could build a nuclear weapon from scratch; and if they purchased, say, an ex Soviet weapon it’s not clear what the point of the test was, as Soviet weapons used proven designs.
It was likely just a meteor exploding at high altitude.
I was very surprised to learn that the audio in most nuclear weapons video clips is either highly edited or faked entirely.
Here is an actual audio of a test from 1953. They apparently sound a lot closer to a shotgun blast than the typical long low rumbling which is commonly used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_nLNcEbIC8&feature=youtu.be
See approx 2:54
That makes sense actually, real gunfire has a very distinct sound/feel that typical audio equipment completely fails to capture, ditto for all sorts of other complex high intensity sounds (aircraft, heavy machinery, etc…). It stands to reason that this would apply to large explosions (nuclear and otherwise) as well, as there are hard signal processing limits on what sort of sounds a given microphone can capture.
As for the “low rumble” I blame movies. Needing a “foley artist” to generate the soundtrack opens the door to a track being chosen on the basis of “cinematic impact” rather than fidelity, leading to a case of reality being unrealistic.
The audio in that clip was interesting, and it definitely sounded different from the traditional “nuke sound” you hear in media.
I will say though that I heard the long rumbling sound in that clip. After the blast you could hear a noise which I’m assuming is air being sucked into that huge column of smoke after the explosion (someone light the John Shilling signal!). The guys were cheering over it but you can distinctly hear it in the background.
Maybe that’s the sound we think of? Not the actual explosion, but the sounds afterwards.
I imagine like lightning and thunder; an initial crack (probably a lot more impressive in person than on that recording; I’d expect it to have components all the way from infrasonic to ultrasonic) followed by rumbles (including an infrasonic component).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2174289/Ever-heard-sound-nuclear-bomb-going-Historian-unveils-surviving-audio-recordings-blast-1950s-Nevada-tests.html
But the sound we think of is probably just a Hollywood creation.
Aren’t you supposed to say my name three times to invoke me? And for the really tough questions, I’m inclined to start requiring a virgin sacrifice or a hefty consulting fee.
Fortunately, this isn’t one of the tough ones. To a distant observer, the acoustic experience will have three phases. First up is the shock wave itself, which as noted is going to be heard as a shotgun-like crack if you and your eardrums survive the experience long enough to register sound at all.
Next up, the pressure phase, an outward displacement of air at roughly hurricane-ish speeds.
Finally, the suction phase, as equilibrium is restored by all that air flowing back into the void. As you note, at the very center this leads to the forced-convection column that is the stem of the mushroom cloud.
Shock waves travel faster than sound, so from any significant distance any sound you hear immediately after the shock cannot have come from the detonation itself. That low rumble is the accumulated noise of the hurricane-force winds rolling across all the terrain between you and the bomb. A wall of sound somewhat compressed and accelerated by differential air movement in the pressure phase but unable to overtake the primary shock wave. There are also likely to be reflected secondary shock waves in the mix. And you’ll hear it in reverse order, the first sounds being the ones generated closest to you, anything from the actual detonation will come last.
I don’t know whether there is a distinct auditory experience associated with the suction phase, or whether it just sounds like a continuation of the pressure phase. As noted elsewhere, this isn’t the sort of thing microphones are good at even under the best of circumstances – which is a phrase not normally applied to sensitive measuring instruments that have just experienced a nuclear blast.
This begs the question: what sort of audio recording equipment has been set up at what sorts of distances from nuclear tests, and what useful information has been recovered? Granted, I’m sure this isn’t the sort of thing DoD would care to spend *much* money on, but fer chrissake you’re detonating a nuclear bomb, so it’s maybe worth blowing up some microphones and sending in some grunts in space suits to pick out the tape recordings from the rubble to see what you can learn from them.
Conclusion: it’s virtually certain that this has been done multiple times but the answer is classified.
I don’t think theater audio systems are very good at reproducing the sounds of an explosion.
Some time ago, I heard a recorded version of the 1812 Overture, which had cannons that sounded realistic to my ears at the time. The concussion-followed-by-rumble sound seemed accurate. I enjoyed the piece, and learned the rhythm and flow of the music. I liked the effect of the building tension, the cannons, and the musical climax.
This past summer, I was at an outdoor venue where the 1812 Overture was played by an orchestra. Supported by real cannons.
Each cannon shot was loud and sharp. Somewhat reminiscent of a shotgun, but much louder. No long rumble of any kind afterwards.
The punctuation of the cannons during the climax was much more shocking than I expected it to be. The loud crack of the gunpowder punched through the music, and vibrated through my body.
It was a sound effect that could not be reproduced by a speaker system, as most speakers systems can’t produce pressure-spikes as intense as that of exploding gun-powder.
I suspect the same is true of larger explosions.
This is certainly a factor, but I’ve also seen movies that manage to get pretty close.
For example, I don’t who Michael Mann’s sound designer/editor is, but the gunfire in his movies somehow manages convey a lot of the shock and complexity of the real thing even though it lacks the raw “slap in the face” of the overpressure effect.
Michael Mann is pretty famous for being a stickler for firearms believability in his movies, so his technique is deceptively simple. It’s not true for every effect (there are some cat fart suppressors and the like), but in general he just uses really good mics that are designed to be able to catch high impulse, low-duration sounds and records actual gunfire, either from range practices (he also likes to run actors through their action sequences on live fire courses if he can) or from the actual filming if blanks are being used.
You don’t get a rumble from cannons (not enough air displacement), but if fired in hilly country you do get echoes that can continue for a while. I can only imagine in a battle with multiple cannons being fired from either side you might get a continuous rumble.
I wouldn’t call it a rumble, but cannons/howitzers definitely have a “lingering” sound beyond the initial report, probably mostly echo but I guess also from powder continuing to burn quite a bit outside the tube. And while the bang isn’t a single frequency, larger-bore weapons do seem to have a generally lower-frequency report, like different sized organ pipes.
I suspect part of the reason that the cannons at your concert sounded a little disappointing is that they were blanks, the projectile exiting the muzzle and then traveling at high speed definitely adds acoustic effects to the report of any firearm.
High explosives, which produce supersonic shock waves, sound much different than the movies up close even for smaller stuff like hand grenades in addition to being literally as loud as it’s possible for you to comprehend directly. Theater speakers don’t come anywhere close to capturing the experience of the overpressure effect.
>The loud crack of the gunpowder punched through the music, and vibrated through my body.
This did not strike me as an expression of disappointment.
Relatedly, this seems like a great way to add smell to a concert experience.
I’m interested in discussing this Paul Graham essay a bit more, especially given Scott Adams’s contention that appeals to identity are the most powerful form of persuasion, which feels vaguely correct.
On the one hand, I find Graham’s idea pretty persuasive, and I think I have somewhat done it myself, consciously or unconsciously, for a long time (not much of a “joiner,” tend to resist labels, though I don’t mind admitting, even feeling proud of areas I know I identify with: man, libertarian, Southern, American, weeaboo, etc.). Having a lot of strong identities does seem to make one vulnerable to cognitive biases, as well as forms of persuasion which play upon those biases.
Suntzuanime reacted rather strongly, if cryptically to the Graham essay, stating that identities are good and humans need them. I could certainly see this: first of all, I’m not sure it is possible to not to have identities, or even to keep them “small”–there may be such a thing as “preservation of identity,” where, if you don’t invest it in one thing, you invest it in another. But then again, like I said, there does seem to be variability among people, maybe even in the same person across time, in the extent to which they create and invest in identities for themselves. Also, I can believe that identities are psychologically healthy, at least to a point, which also introduces the question of whether “strong identities,” like religious faith, might be one of these things which is literally good for you, whether or not it’s good for the pursuit of truth.
One other solution is, like rationalists, to try to invest one’s identity in avoiding the pitfalls of cognitive biases, or in “niceness and community”; but once that becomes an “identity,” I think it can also result in some weird forms of myopia itself.
I’m also not certain how chooseable/transferable they are–is it possible not to have a political identity? I think so, in theory, but it sure seems hard. The closest thing seems to just be apathy. It seems really hard to both pay attention to politics and not develop a particular slant of some kind. Then again, I’ve read a fair amount about religion and don’t have a strong identity of any kind (including atheist) in that realm. Also, even if it’s possible to invest one’s identity in e. g. a fandom, is that sort of like attempting to choose one’s fascination, i. e. not very much under one’s control?
And this also brings up the old issue of: if you want to know about x, should you ask people directly involved with x, or are those the last people you should ask? The problem is the people who spend the most time on x know the most about it, but are also the most likely to be invested in a way which makes them not objective. And if we all chose to invest our identities in unimportant things maybe that just results in everyone, well, being super knowledgeable about, and caring deeply about, unimportant things, while ignoring more important things. At which point maybe fandoms become proxy wars for real political struggles and… well, let’s just say I know which side I’m on in the Apple-Google War of 2046.
So, is it really possible to “keep one’s identity small” and/or shift one’s identity to areas where bias don’t hurt, like fandoms and hobbies? If so, is it a good idea? For the individual? For society?
Dawkins stated he thought religion was exploiting evolution’s programming to make people blindly believe things for self protection (your parents tell you not to jump off cliffs, and you never test their theory).
Identity politics in all its forms seems to exploit evolution’s programming of forming tribes for self protection. This seems to be built in, but using it to form arbitrary political tribes doesn’t seem particularity helpful. Evolution misfiring.
There clearly seems to be a need for people to do this, and I find it difficult to resist. Don’t get me started on the evil of Apple, but this is from ancient Apple/Microsoft wars, ha ha. The zealous attachment to topics seems to be much more prevalent than can be explained logically. Emotional entanglement is almost universal.
1. To have an “identity” is a modern expression. People in the 19th century or before also had many ideologies, beliefs, religions, political factions to choose from. How would you phrase an advice “keep your identity small” so that they could understand it?
2. People in the earlier ages understood the idea of the relative importance, to themselves, of some ways to think of themselves over others – what we’d call identities today. But they didn’t have (I think?) a metaphor of this tightly defined set of discrete “identities” which they “identified” with. Is there a difference between “I identify as an atheist” and “I am an atheist”? If there’s a difference, how would a 19th century person phrase these two sentences?
3. Consider three proclamations:
a) I identify as an X
b) I am an X
c) I tend to agree with what X authors are saying and usually find their ways of looking at the world more correct and virtuous than the ways of Y, Z and other belief-sets that compete in the same belief-space.
Which of the three is more dangerous in terms of leading one more easily to biases shared by many other X-believers, or to endless online flamewars about X vs. Y,Z? Graham appears to say that a) is more dangerous in that sense; but is it possible that it’s “merely” a different way of self-contemplating essentially the same attitude towards X? Maybe a person with the same attitude towards X and the same likelihood of sharing biases and conducting flamewars would use a) b) or c) depending on whether they’re a 21st century person, a 19th century person, or a pedant? And then blaming the “identity” part for the biases and the flamewars is an ex post facto rationalization that’s easy to make because the discrete set of “identities” is within easy mental reach?
4. Perhaps even going to the past isn’t necessary. My native language is Russian and I don’t know how to say “keep your identify small” in it (except by using a lexical borrowing that would only be understood by people familiar with this concept in English). When I read Graham’s advice in English, it seems to make sense and appears profound. When I try to think of it in my native language, I can rephrase it elaborately, but it seems to lack the punch and the appeal of the original exhortation. What does that mean?
I think the difference between the 20th-21st centuries and all prior times is that we’ve been made more aware of the fact that there is at least something somewhat arbitrary, contingent, chosen, or artificial about identities, where people in the past tended to see them as relatively immutable.
It wouldn’t make much sense for someone in the past to say “I identify as a man”; the response would be “you mean, you are a man” or, if speaking to someone without a Y chromosome “what are you talking about? You can’t just decide to be a man when clearly your vagina makes you a woman??” This makes it hard even to explain the idea of “identity” to the premodern, because he views it simply as “what is,” not something layered onto what is.
Related, in the past, identities seem to have been more tightly bundled, while now we have something more of an a la carte menu. For example, you could chose to renounce the religious identity of your family, but in the past, this would probably mean them renouncing you as a family member, being excommunicated, shut out of society, etc.
Interestingly though, one of the strongest and most prevalent identities today was largely absent in times past–that is, the identity as citizen of a nation-state. I personally think we were better off without that, because it lends itself so easily to rhetoric about “the government is just ‘us’ and anything it does, even bad things, ‘we’ do to ‘ourselves.'”
Unfortunately, in the absence of nation-state nationalism, there may be a tendency for ethnonationalism or other potentially worse forms of identity to fill the void, though, so I wouldn’t mind identifying as a citizen of a country which claimed to represent values I agreed with. This is sort of true of me and the theoretical values of the US in the abstract–federalism, decentralization, self-determination, multiculturalism–but often not in the tangible.
Identity is likely important to a great majority of people, to various extents and at various times, as you state.
But the extent to which persons care about anyone else appealing to said identity is another thing entirely, and probably varies depending on one’s need to relate to (affiliate with?) others.
For those of us who do not naturally, easily categorize ourselves or other people, it is very natural to not have a named political identity. Though I’m sure the natural categorizers of the world have their own boxes into which they place us.
On some issues objectivity is far less important than subjectivity. And an over concern with objectivity actually blinds one to salience. In my own favorite example, education, the student is often seen as a minority stakeholder in their own education, with two or three other groups considered more important stakeholders.
Beats me, and I don’t know that I particularly care, as in aggregate I don’t see this as all that malleable on the individual level (as you say in paragraph third-to-last).
How about areas where bias helps?
From the Graham article:
On personal experience I disagree with this. Even when things get to argument and rage, lessons can still be learned and points taken.
This also describes me pretty well. I’ve always viewed having any kind of group identity with suspicion. But I still, at times, feel the irrational yet natural human impulse towards tribalism. I think rooting for a sports team is a good harmless outlet for the tribalist impulse if you keep it in proper perspective.
I think calling it a “human” impulse is overly constricting. Given my own personal biases and knowledge of personality theory I also think it might be overly expansive if the definition of “natural” tends to mean “universal”.
Though I, too, am personally happy when my former co-worker’s son does well in tennis.
@onyomi
I think one such way is to make ‘values’ your identity, rather than a tribe.
The big advantage is that when part of a tribe is corrupted and goes against the values they claim to uphold, you are (more) resilient to this.
I think that makes a certain amount of sense, but I’m not sure it avoids the inevitable conflict between one’s “values” and the actions of those you formerly thought shared them. For example, the American government in practice largely fails to uphold the ideals on which it was founded, as I perceive them, and with which I largely agree. And American citizens, on the whole, don’t seem to think this is that big a deal. Do I stop identifying as an American?
Well, that is the part where you start worrying about your tribe and not your values, so are ‘breaking’ my rule.
Ultimately, you get to choose where you want to live, based on many variables (where your family is, where you have best prospects, where you like the culture, where you like the government, where they let you in, etc, etc). If you can find a much better place based on these criteria, does it matter that you stop being ‘American’ (which you probably won’t even, as a 1st generation immigrant). And if you think that America is the best place for you, does it matter that you don’t feel 100% at ease? Do you think it is reasonable to demand this, as a non-average person (which most people are)? You will always have to compromise, unless you isolate yourself from others or become a dictator, both of which are problematic options.
One of my values is caring about truth. Once in a while I encounter someone on the opposite side of some argument who clearly shares that value, so he is part of my tribe for the relevant purposes. Not uncommonly I encounter someone on my side of an argument who doesn’t share that value, and so is not part of my tribe.
That is a solution to the “what if your tribe becomes corrupt” problem.
This statement is why your clear right-wing tribal sympathies provoke such strong reactions from me.
It’s certainly possible. I try to make a point of doing it. Though the politicization of hobby spaces means that shifting your identity THERE doesn’t actually help and you should avoid over-investing in them as well.
Steven Novella had a post recently on his blog NeuroLogica that was sorta tangentially related to this, though it was specifically about motivated reasoning. In his Conclusion section, he mentioned his strategy:
So in terms of identity, I think he tries to put his identity as “skeptic” as dominant over whatever other identity he has with respect to politics. I think this is a good strategy, one I’ve attempted to adopt since I started listening to his podcast many years ago, and one that would benefit society quite a lot if everyone did so.
Just in case anybody forgot that Nixon was despicable; according to notes recently released by the Nixon library, during phone call on October 22 1968 Nixon ordered HR Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the Paris peace process. For those who don’t understand the context, Nixon ran in part on the idea that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam that would guarantee America “peace with honor”. As we now know that was a lie.
In collaboration with Henry Kissinger the Nixon campaign persuaded the South Vietnamese to walk away from the negotiating table under the pretense that they would get a better deal from the Nixon administration. The following transcript from august 3rd, 1973 makes clear what Nixon’s Vietnam policy actually was:
To be clear, 21,194 Americans died in Vietnam between 1969 and 1975; and people who protested the war got accused of spiting on soldiers.
The South Vietnamese were not the important partners in the talks, the North was, and the north was not willing to make peace prior to 74. And they were only willing to make peace then because they believed in the sincerity of the US security guarantees to the south, guarantees the US would abandon in less than a year. Any treaty signed in 69 would have been a short ceasefire, nothing more.
Although this is clearly still a point of disagreement between people, I would say the weight of the evidence is that some protesters did spit on some soldiers. It also seems probable that some people spit on protesters. Not that it was some sort of universal experience but that it did happen a few times, and more importantly that there was definitely a significant amount of disdain for returning troops from some segments of U.S. society. Or see some of the answers to this quora question (you can also see the disagreement), https://www.quora.com/Why-were-the-Vietnam-War-veterans-treated-so-badly-after-their-return-to-America. To claim that it never happened is to apply a standard of evidence way higher than is applied to most other claims. Or see On Killing by Lt. Dave Grossman. I don’t agree with everything Dave Grossman says, but I have little reason to believe he’s lying about hearing a lot of accounts of protesters spitting on veterans and cursing at them. And it’s not like spitting on someone is a significant event, so it’s not surprising that after a very unpopular war there weren’t news accounts all over about it.
More interestingly though, it seems pretty clear to me that the fight over the stories is largely an irrelevant struggle to control the narrative and paints one side as all good and the other as all bad. It’s interesting how much time is spent arguing about a relatively minor point in order to try to make claims about how righteous one side was and the other wasn’t. Honestly though, it’s a very minor point compared to how hard our elected leaders fucked us over, fucked the South Vietnamese over, etc. All the lying by Johnson and Nixon; Nixon sabotaging the 1968 talks, etc. Or on the other side of things, Cronkite portraying the Tet Offensive as a successful military maneuver; the weather underground engaging in a bombing campaign.
Personally, I fall on the side of believing our leaders going to war made enormous mistakes at best and were downright indefensibly immoral in their behavior at worst. But I also think the anti-war movement had both people who were honest and nonviolent, but also a much smaller but very loud and violent contigent (not talking about spitting but about bombings and riots) that only didn’t manage to do anything horrible of scale because they simply lacked the power and competence.
You quoted from the 1973 conversation, but I can’t seem to follow the link to the 1968 conversation.
From the quote, I see that Nixon would most likely call himself a hard-nosed realist. The title of “despicable” depends on a moral judgement, and one I’m not 100% confident in making.
Who was the important holdout at the talks in 1969? Was it South Vietnam, or North Vietnam? What kind of actions did Nixon propose? Were there other reasons that the peace talks failed?
I had thought that the “secret plan” was to turn the war into a war fought by Vietnam with American support, not a war primary executed by American soldiers. (American soldiers were present in Vietnam as early as 1956. Under the Johnson administration, American involvement escalated heavily in 1963.)
The alternative was immediate withdrawal, which was apparently much less popular with voters than Nixon’s then-secret plan. Do we blame Nixon, or the voters?
Per the table in Wikipedia, a total of 36958 American soldiers died in Vietnam between 1956 and 1968. Most of these were in the years 1967 and 1968 (11363 and 16899 casualties, respectively).
The same table adds to 21194 for American casualties between 1969 and 1975. Most of those (11780) were in the year 1969.
How do we assign meaning to these casualty numbers? Johnson comes off worse than Nixon. But they had different challenges, and pursued different priorities as both Head of State and Commander in Chief.
Can someone argue that most of the casualties in 1969 were during the time when Nixon was implementing his new plan, and the soldiers on the ground kept being killed while the old plans from the Johnson era were wound down and phased out?
Would the immediate withdrawal proposed by McGovern have been better for Vietnam, or worse, than the eventual peace accords? Does the 1975 attack, and fall of Saigon, alter that result?
@ hyperboloid
Nixon ran in part on the idea that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam that would guarantee America “peace with honor”.
I remember hearing Nixon say he would withdraw troops but would not tell the details of which group was leaving on which day and from where, as that would invite attacks. Ie, his schedule would be ‘secret’. Immediately the commentators came on and said he had a ‘secret plan’.
A question for Scott/anyone else who may happen to want to discuss it: do you think this blog could cover issues with Israel without all hell breaking loose in the comments?
No.
Politics is the Mind-Killer.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is the mind-killiest mindkiller of mindkillers.
I can only talk about myself, but I take a fairly grey/grey or grey/black stance on the issue and wouldn’t particularly mind having my perception of what the shades should be challenged. Similar discussions happen on Reddit fairly often and if you ignore the low-effort circlejerk, there are some fairly fruitful comment chains, sometimes involving people who actually experienced the conflict.
I’d expect the mindkilling to start when/if the conflict gets presented as black/white, triggering the “But the other side is problematic, too” cascade of reactions and counterreactions and everything goes to hell. Whether that’s likely for SSC commenters, I don’t know, I rarely check these, but I’d be cautiously optimistic.
I still think it’s probably a bad idea for PR reasons, but there goes.
I’m not quite sure what you meant by that and I’m curious. Is it a terminology I don’t understand, or am I missing some other context?
Presumably white=uniformly morally good, black=uniformly bad, grey=somewhere between. So cafemachiavelli takes either the stance that both sides are pretty bad, or both sides are pretty bad but one is really bad.
What rlms said. It’s a TVTropes term and to be more precise, the most relevant one would be Lighter Shade of Grey. Since conflict is a very popular vehicle for morality in stories, I think the terms can be quite useful to describe stances on real events as well.
In this case, Black&White morality (“if Palestine is bad, Israel is good” or “Israel does many good things, there are only two boxes, and it clearly fits the white one better”), refusing to contrast (“Both have acted cruelly, so they’re equally bad”) or contrasting to elevate one side (“Israel behaves far more responsibly than Palestine, so they’re the good guy by contrast”) come to (my) mind as the biggest hurdles to a decent discussion.
We seemed to give it a go last open thread, I don’t think it was a complete disaster. Personally, I view the Israel-Palestine conflict (presumably that is what you are talking about, rather than distinct Israeli domestic politics) very distantly and I think I could discuss it without being mindkilled. I think many people are more emotionally involved with it though.
I was unaware of this, so thanks, I’ll go have a look at that now.
And yeah, I did mean the Israel-Palestine conflict, I’m pretty sure it would be hard to have a productive conversation on Israeli domestic politics with non-Israelis.
Last paragraph: you’d be surprised! I bet we could have an interesting discussion about e.g. why Likud has been so dominant in recent elections and whether that will change any time soon (I think I know enough about Israeli domestic politics that I’d find that productive, and I think the median non-Israeli commenter probably has similar or greater levels of knowledge).
Alright, fair enough. Why has the Likud been so dominant in recent elections? I have a few different hypotheses on this, but I’d like to hear yours.
And on a different note: could you explain why you think the median non-Israeli commenter is somewhat knowledgable about Israeli domestic politics? Because I don’t see a reason why that would be the case.
We probably have more US domestic coverage of Israeli national politics than any other country, save the U.K.?
It seems like it could be explained fairly easily by some combination of demographics (post-Soviet immigration, the population explosion of settlements), increased Palestinian aggression, and a string of feckless Labor leaders.
If by “cover issues with Israel”, you mean argue about whether it’s all Israel’s fault or no, the Arabs are the bad guys, then we could probably do that here with a higher level of civility and reason than is the norm for that debate.
Anything else, will degenerate into that argument. And it’s not an argument either side will ever win.
That’s depressing, and probably also accurate with high probability, which is even more depressing. *sighs*
I suggested in the last go-around that it might be interesting and even productive to conduct such a discussion with a strict rule of absolutely no mention of anything that happened prior to 2017. I still think that would be interesting and maybe even productive, but I don’t think it is practical, alas.
And if it were done, I think it would converge on the depressing conclusion that this is an ugly problem with no realistic solutions in this generation or the next.
So, nothing that happened more that two days ago? I’m not quite sure what that would accomplish…
Forces people to think about an achievable future rather than tally up unquantifiable provocations.
It would allow people to discuss the current state of affairs and potential paths forward while, at least in principle, preventing the discussion from being derailed into accusations of whose past acts led to the current state of affairs.
I don’t think it is practical; I do think it would be useful if it were.
That would be like starting the history of Germany from scratch in February, 1945. Why are all those horrible invaders burning German cities with incendiaries and rampaging across the country in mechanized armor formations? We must stop this at once!
The allies were invading and bombing Germany in 1945 because a state of war existed between the two, because it was the policy of the allies to prosecute that war to the point of unconditional surrender, and because their belief in the generally aggressive, untrustworthy, and vengeful nature of the Nazi-type Germans then in power was sufficiently buttressed by their memory and historical records of such behavior that they would be exceedingly unlikely to adopt any lesser policy.
All of this described the present state of affairs in 1945, and this is all that really matters.
But the human tendency to want to fix the blame before they fix the problem makes it generally impractical to limit the discussion to what really matters. Even here, I am afraid.
If you’ve erased your memories of everything that happened before today, February 1, 1945, the day you are going to impose a settlement on the two parties and then go home… what is going to tell you that it’s probably not a good idea for the world to force a ceasefire and let the Nazis catch their breath? “The Allies really, really hate and mistrust the Axis” is hardly a justification all by itself to go ahead and wipe out the Axis, once you’ve erased all your knowledge of what justification either party might have had for their actions.
The same thing tells you that imposing a ceasefire from the outside is a bad idea in February 1945 that tells you that it is a bad idea just about everywhere in space and time. At the very least, the history of all those other ceasefires.
Imposing a ceasefire in 1945 Germany might be a bad idea, but the one in 1953 Korea worked out pretty well. I don’t think there’s a general rule of “Cease fires never work.”
The Korean ceasefire of 1953 merely postponed the ultimate decision on the fate of the peninsula until such time as North Korea would have a nuclear arsenal, so the jury’s still out on that one.
At the time, it seemed like a good idea, but that was for purely local reasons. The war was at that point between China and the US/UN; the Korean governments were largely irrelevant. China unambiguously controlled the territory it cared about, but lacked the logistical means to decisively end the conflict by invading the enemy homeland. The battlefield was thus defined by perpetual stalemate. The US/UN were fighting a limited war and had bigger concerns than insisting on a victory in Korea.
None of which apply to Germany 1945. So perhaps the general rule is that cease-fires in total wars never work. Or perhaps it is more complicated still, but in any event it is defined by the facts at hand at the time of the proposed cease-fire. Perhaps including the mental states of the combatants, but it hardly matters how they came to those mental states.
Also, I am pretty sure that it is never going to be helpful to the negotiation of a cease-fire for either side to come to the table with an attitude of “…and of course you lot are the Bad Guys whose actions were Never Justified, so shut up and quit it already”. For best results, focus on where things stand now and what future you hope to achieve.
The other piece is that the ceasefire in Korea wasn’t “imposed” by an outside force–both sides came to the table willingly. That’s different than what’s going on in the ME, where the UN is under the impression that they can grab both sides by the ear and make them sit at the negotiating table.
In 1945 there was no nonbelligerent force capable of attempting to impose its will on the warring parties this way, and if one had tried it probably would have broken down in short order.
No. I think people on here are generally honest enough not to play the “Any objections means you’re anti-Israel, and anti-Israel is anti-Semitism, you Nazi!” card, but there is no way to argue this out without treading on somebody’s corns.
I suspect one of the reasons Middle East-related discussions get so heated is that analytical blue-sky analyses of it tend to have a really bad habit of turning into real-world horrible ideas that lead to real-world death and destruction (cf. neoconservative war policy if you’re a leftie, or anything John Kerry has ever said in his life if you’re a rightie.) Perhaps this is because unlike, say, China vs. Taiwan or something, it’s because all of the parties involved are small and relatively easy for major powers to bully around, whether financially, diplomatically, or militarily. So terrible ideas have a genuine chance of becoming reality.
Yes: paradoxically, it is the fact that this could theoretically be solved which makes people more angry about speculation on how to solve it. Nobody’s going to invade China to resolve the China-Taiwan dispute. Is somebody going to invade Israel to impose a settlement? Well, the American ambassador to the United Nations proposed that once, and it’s been invaded lots of times before, so who knows. Or is somebody going to push all the remaining Arabs out of the West Bank? Well, there are millions of refugees in the ME right now testifying to the fact that it is possible for an army to show up out of the blue one day and chase you out of your house, so who knows! Anything is seemingly on the table, anything really could happen, so if you don’t like a proposal you are going to fight extra hard to shoot it down.
no, it’s just the moral dimension
people seem to agree that Taiwan is good and China is bad. People do not agree that Israel is one and Palestine is the other, and I refuse to tip my hand in this message as to which I believe, though my past messages might end up giving it away regardless.
I can think of a minimum of 1.4 billion people who might disagree with you on that. But quibbling aside, I’ll half-agree: you need a combination of a situation where there are fair points on both sides (something I will grant, admittedly with my teeth grinding) and where it might be possible for a sufficiently assholish external power to barge in and impose a solution. Then you’ve created the maximum possible risk that said assholes actually will barge in and impose a solution should public perceptions lean too far in one direction or the other, so ceding even an inch of argumentative territory could literally mean the end of your nation.
i do not believe that the latter aspect has anything to do with it in the slightest
maybe in the public sense, but these debates are hardly less heated among private individuals
if we discussed the issue with native Chinese regularly, then the debate might be similarly heated, though I also think that palestine v. israel is something people care about viscerally a lot more than Taiwan, probably because Taiwan isn’t undergoing the same thing, also because neither of the countries is western
I’ve gotten in trouble just for using it as an analogy based on what I considered obvious aspects of the situation (like “this could lead to a long-term ethnic conflict along the lines of Israel/Palestine”, with a bunch of Israelis and Arabs showing up in the comments to tell me that was a completely unfair description for one reason or another). So I’m guessing no.
I and two friends will be at Peet’s on Wednesday!
If this sounds like an adequate quorum for an Irvine meet-up, I shall plan to attend as well.
I’ll try to make it as well, although we do have the SSC Pathfinder game scheduled for that night, and I already postponed it last week.
Weather and health are both looking marginal for me at this point, but I’ll try to make it as well.
Does anyone have any experience with the OTRS/CP (Ongoing Traumatic Relationship Syndrome/Cassandra Phenomenon) discourse? I just stumbled on this, and it seems like it’s opposed to the usual neurodiversity discourse, i.e., “high-functioning autistic people have trouble navigating a harsh and unforgiving world, and deserve accommodation and understanding” versus “high-functioning autistic people cause damage to anyone unfortunate enough to be in a relationship with them; they are inherently poisonous”.
See also. “They are incapable of empathy. And because of their lack of empathy, their spouses, partners and children suffer extreme emotional neglect, abuse and significant trauma.”
People can be unpleasant to be around for lots of reasons, many of which are within their rights. I’m not sure there’s a coherent theory of what constitutes “abuse” once you get out of the realm of “hitting people with heavy objects”, but classifying “not giving me enough empathy” as abuse seems like an entitled person with an ax to grind. Or even an abusive mindset in itself.
I think what gets me is that you can easily draw a straight line to things like this.
People can have unsatisfying marriages for lots of reasons! Not every unsatisfying marriage is abuse! Holy shit!
You may end up permanently depressed or build a life of your own within the context of what society calls a marriage.
OF COURSE YOU BUILD A LIFE OF YOUR OWN WITHIN YOUR MARRIAGE.
You and your spouse are two individuals. There are going to be things you like they don’t and vice versa. You are not going to be some kind of conjoined being. You are not a parasite or even a commensal; you married that person because you liked them and felt you could live together, but you did not cut off a chunk of your brain and replace it with a chunk of theirs.
This is the end-result of the over-emphasis on “marriage should be all about and only for Twu Wuv” and the ideal of the soul-mate who will complete and satisfy you in every area of your life. One person is not going to be the all-in-all; that is why family, friends, people you work with, people you argue with on the Internet, are all going to be in touch with the parts of you where you don’t and can’t get the same thing from your spouse.
And thus guarantee your marriage ends in divorce; or alternatively, two people who loathe each other but don’t go through the hassle of ending the marriage.
Not sure how you of all people missed this, but “building a life of your own within the marriage” isn’t an antidote to “twu wuv”, it is in fact the logical consequence of the same; because you entered the relationship based entirely on narcissism – “this is the kind of person the person I believe I am/want others to believe I am would be with”, when they inevitably turn out not to be, you retreat further into yourself.
No, you and your spouse are not two individuals; if you cannot replace the ego ideal of “you” with the shared concept of “us” then your relationship is doomed, and shouldn’t be entered into. What one needs is a sense of sacrifice for others, the belief that what makes me “happy” (read: assuages my ego) is not what is “good.” You don’t withdraw inward, not because at the moment you don’t need to, but because what kind of message would it send to your spouse? To your kids?
Contra Suntzuanime, genuinely withholding empathy is in fact a form of abuse; the only question is whether the accusation is genuine or manipulative. If one is incapable of fully meeting the relational needs of another due to their own issues, then yes, it is bad to enter into a relationship with that person.
Seems to me both can be true: you can have a shared concept of “us” and also each cultivate separate interests/hobbies/tastes/etc.
My wife and I are “ride or die” for each other, yet we have many separate interests/hobbies/tastes/etc.—and also a few shared ones. Importantly, our children fall into the latter category.
By “building a life of your own”, I do not mean “carrying on as if you were still single and the only purpose of your spouse was to provide sex/money/housekeeping services”.
But people can be separated by death. If you are a widow or widower, you will have to live without your spouse. If both of you were so wrapped up in each other that you can’t take being apart because you don’t know how to function as an individual person, that’s not good for you.
In marriage, both spouses become one flesh. This does not mean they become a two-headed monster. If all your emotional needs are wrapped up in one person, you rely totally on them for gratification, this becomes unfair and even abusive. Taken to an extreme, it is jealousy, and the extreme of jealousy becomes violence and unreason – your spouse cannot have friends, cannot visit or speak to family without your permission, may have to give up their job because you don’t want them interacting with others, has to account for every interaction to your satisfaction (‘why did you smile at that person? were you trying to get their attention? do you want to be with them?’) and worse. Plenty of men have performed murder-suicides on the basis of “if I can’t have her, no-one can”.
You have to have a reason for being together, for being in a marriage. But you don’t merge into one blob or give up who and what you are, either.
nyccine,
In marriage, sacrifice does not mean excising parts of yourself or constricting yourself to the mere intersection of your personalities. That would make marriage into a kind of emotional suicide pact. And if we are to continue conflating things with abuse, I think it is abusive to say “If you love me you will no longer seek to be yourself.”
Sacrifice means doing what you can so that your spouse can become everything they want to be and are meant to be.
Speaking personally, I married my wife because of who she was, is, and will be, not because she was willing to concede who she was, is, and will be. That would be creepy – she’s not my emotional servant, and I have not absorbed her as an organ of my body or mind. She is my partner. I would be devastated if she excised some important part of herself in order to preserve our marriage. I’d feel like an unwitting abuser-by-proxy, and a failed husband.
At a passing glance, those sites seem kind of like the flip side of the extreme belief that neurotypicals should mostly cave into the demands of not neurotypicals. Unsure what language to use. And on further inspection, their sourcing does not inspire confidence.
Psychology is not my field, but it seems a bit extreme to me to claim that asperger’s involves the complete and utter lack of any empathy. I’m honestly a little suspicious of any psychological claim about someone’s mind that is that strong. Even among “normal” people there’s a huge range in empathetic ability and I’m definitely on the low side of it. But most people I’ve chosen to interact with closely seem to like me well enough, and I think I’m able to largely compensate for my deficit by other means.
Nice kafkatrap. I think I can stop reading there. Since I’m not a licensed medical professional, I’ll label the writer with borderline personality disorder at this point.
OK, snark aside, I read further… and it didn’t help. The website seems dedicated mostly to bashing people with Aspergers. If you believe its general thrust of “people with Aspergers are incapable of empathy and therefore intolerable to be close to”, the solution is 100% clear: don’t be in a relationship with such a person. It won’t, after all, be subtle. Yet I don’t see an explanation of how these relationships get started or why breaking them off (where’s the divorce attorney links?) isn’t the right answer.
I would go with suntzuanime’s last theory — the website is reflective of an abusive mindset in itself. I’ve found that those on the internet demanding “empathy” are actually not merely demanding that their target model their feelings accurately, but that they put the feelings of the demander in first priority strictly above their own feelings.
” I’ve found that those on the internet demanding “empathy” are actually not merely demanding that their target model their feelings accurately, but that they put the feelings of the demander in first priority strictly above their own feelings.”
Just want to reiterate that I’m finding this increasingly common. People who accuse someone of “lack of empathy” often seem to take it as a given that, if someone really understood their feelings, it would be required for them to change their behavior in such a way as to benefit them personally, even at the expense of one’s own self.
Given that I feel 100% certain you doing X would make me happy, you refusing to do X must be indicative of your inability to fully appreciate my feelings on X.
(Thinking out loud, and thus being a bit meandering here…)
“People who accuse someone of “lack of empathy” often seem to take it as a given that, if someone really understood their feelings, it would be required for them to change their behavior”
If I say “hey, you keep punching me in the face and that really hurts”, it seems like reasonably you lack empathy for my suffering, because if you had empathy you’d stop punching me in the face?
Now go to something simpler, like never doing dishes: I do dishes because them not being done *bugs* me. If you empathically felt that same sense of being-bugged, or even just understood intellectually that this is a thing that causes me suffering… presumably you’d do the dishes more often, instead of only when I spend 30 minutes of emotional labor dragging you out of whatever video game you got caught up in?
And, conversely, if *I* had empathy, presumably I’d understand why you’re prioritizing the video game over dishes in the first place – but that could just as easily be Executive Dysfunction, ADD, laziness, or that you just genuinely don’t care about my feelings and are hardly going to go out of your way to do something at your *own* expense just because I’d benefit.
(And on the third hand, maybe I’m a narcissist who expects you to always do dishes with no effort on my part, because I was raised that dishes are women’s work and why should I do it?)
I think empathy sometimes is a useful complaint, but like anything it can be misused. I’ve certainly had a lot of relationships where it felt like if I happened to have a good time, great, and if not, that was entirely on me – there was no real empathy, and thus no real relationship?
Or, at least to me, when I have a relationship, I have the sort of empathy that says “making you happy, makes me happy, so I want to make you happy” and can do that even at an expense to myself.
“Gosh, you got cancer? Well, that’s a bummer, TTYL” is perfectly reasonable on a first date, much less so from a husband of ten years who promised “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.”
“If I say “hey, you keep punching me in the face and that really hurts”, it seems like reasonably you lack empathy for my suffering, because if you had empathy you’d stop punching me in the face?”
What if the reason I’m punching you in the face is because I just caught you in bed with my wife?
I’m not punching you because I don’t understand your suffering – I’m doing it because I think you *deserve* to suffer.
My intuition is that if you feel that someone *deserves* to suffer, then the question of empathy is out the window.
My intuition is also that if you resort to physical violence in response to adultery, you’re probably a scary, violent person who I should avoid.
I also note you just said “caught in bed with your wife” and didn’t specify that I *knew* she was your wife, or even married at all…
So, because you didn’t bother to understand that your wife mislead me and didn’t mention she was married, you’re now kicking my ass.
Yes I think you lack empathy, and yes I think it’s reasonable to tell you to stop kicking my ass. The correct target of your anger is your wife, and physical violence is still not an acceptable response to adultery.
(That said: shit, dude, I think I’d be pretty empathic towards a few punches and getting being thrown out, if it turned out a woman I was dating was married and got caught. That’s the whole point of empathy – I should at least try to understand where you’re coming from, instead of swinging back in “self defense”)
“I should at least try to understand where you’re coming from, instead of swinging back in “self defense””
If proper empathy requires you to not swing back when some angry dude is repeatedly punching you, then I think the overwhelming majority of people lack empathy. And I don’t think most people would define the concept as strictly as you do.
I mean, if someone screams “WHY ARE YOU FUCKING MY WIFE?!” I feel like I have a pretty clear clue what I’ve stumbled in to and why I’m being attacked?
If you’re actually trying to hurt me (which, speaking from experience, is a VERY different thing from throwing a few angry punches in my direction), yeah, I’ll defend myself. Note, though, *defend* myself: not counterattack. The goal is to minimize the damage I take, and the damage overall; it’s not retaliatory.
I think empathy AND expedience tell me that my best bet here is to lay low, absorb a few angry blows, and get the hell out so that the dude can process what just happened.
And the usual media portrayal here is not the adultering guy attacking the husband, but instead meekly leaves… so I don’t think I’m being that unusual?
I don’t want to get hung up on the details of exactly how things are expected to play out in an adulterous encounter.
The general point here is this: Just because someone doesn’t do what you want them to do does not necessarily imply they lack empathy. They could very well understand your feelings on the matter, but choose not to comply with them for various other reasons.
Oh. Yeah. On that we agree.
Serious question: how do you know if you have empathy or not?
If we assume that most people ‘create’ empathy by imagining themselves in the place of a person and imagining how they would react; then isn’t the actual issue a mismatch between their own mental model and that of others?
If so, isn’t it more accurate to say that they merely lack empathy with neurotypicals, but not necessarily with other AS people? And similarly, that neurotypicals lack empathy with AS people?
And don’t we all have an issue where our empathy is less for people who are more different from us…
[Edit] Sorry, Anonymous, changed my post since I thought I could phrase it better this way.
Mostly by visceral feelings copied from people you witness experiencing something, even though you do not experience it yourself. Reflexively protecting your crotch when you see a man struck in the groin, becoming saddened when a friend tells you their parent died, feeling happy when surrounded by happy people, etc.
“People with AS have no idea they lack empathy. Their disorder not only prevents them from having empathy, but from knowing they don’t.”
Excuse my bluntness, but I have to mention that I think this is simply wrong (I could use stronger language than that, but see no need to do that). Most people with AS know how to read, ‘no language delay’ is/was one of the distinguishing criteria for AS. A lot of books have been written about AS and a lot of studies have been published on topics related to autism; many people with Asperger’s Syndrome are perfectly able to read those and realize that they’re not good at modelling other people’s thought processes, that the way they respond to emotional input from others may differ from the way other people respond to similar input, that they’re bad at interpreting body language and that other people are much better at that than they are, etc., etc. I should know, I have a formal AS diagnosis and I’ve read more than a few of those aforementioned books and papers. They might also obtain the information via other channels, e.g. through communication with support providers of various kinds; many of them obviously do, as social skills training is part of the repertoire of many interventions aimed at this group. Autistics at the milder end of the spectrum can be quite self-aware even if they’re not good at modelling others, and in fact anxiety disorders are quite common in people with AS (“Anxiety is considered by some to be the most common comorbid psychiatric concern in ASD”, Lubetsky et al.). They probably know more about the ways in which they differ from others than do people who claim they have no idea that they lack empathy. They might for example be aware that: “The interaction between empathy and autism is a complex and ongoing field of research.” (The coverage in that article incidentally makes it clear (see the ‘Types’ sub-section) that a distinction is made in the literature between affective- and cognitive empathy (each of which can then again be subdivided further, to account for relevant distinctions of interest); i.e. empathy is perhaps not best thought of as a unidimensional contruct, and so there may be multiple answers to Fahundo’s question, depending upon which dimension of the empathy construct in which one is interested).
Related to Aapje’s second paragraph, Denise Edwards put it like this in her book: “Neurotypical people (NTs) are as lacking in empathy towards people with ASD as vice versa.”
+1. Having autism doesn’t mean you’re stupid.
Oh, holy Jerusalem. I wanted to know why the heck they were using “Cassandra Phenomenon” (apart from Ye Olde School Of Freudian Mythological Naming to give their makey-uppy syndrome some borrowed credibility) and the first thing on that horribly designed webpage was this:
Listen, missus: unless your autist family member is tying you to a chair and locking you in the house, you have other family members, you have friends, you have work colleagues, you have interests of your own outside the home – what is this isolation and lack of validation? How do you “lose” friends and family? Bob your husband is high-functioning autistic, he doesn’t like get-togethers and parties, so you go on your own or with a friend to these shindigs. Maybe Aunt Mabel is insulted that Bob didn’t come to her 50th anniversary celebration, but mostly the family will understand “Well, Bob’s a bit weird, Susie is going to be on her own at these things” and they manage fine. WHAT THE HELL IS STOPPING YOU FROM “I’M GOING HOME TO MOTHER, SHE WAS RIGHT I SHOULD HAVE MARRIED WILFRID AND NOT YOU”?
I dunno. As I’ve said, no formal diagnosis but the majority of my father’s family are all somewhere on the autism (or Asperger’s as it used to be, before it all got folded back in) spectrum, and we manage somehow, even if that is “ten minutes interacting with people means I need eight hours solitude to recover”. I can recognise (not empathise, of course, since I’m one of those empathy-lacking monsters) that if you have an autistic kid you will feel disappointed that they don’t respond to you as you hoped and that they will disappoint you in some way by not being the son/daughter you expected and planned to do things with and share common interests.
Having a sibling/parent/child/spouse who is emotionally distant and doesn’t want to do the things you do or share the same interests or act in the kind of supportive manner you expect them to act is hurtful, I do see, but it’s not something intentional. Not liking crowds, loud noises, over-stimulus, and finding other people hard to read and hard to share things with is just as tough on the AS person.
By the same token, though, constantly badgering your child about “But don’t you love me? Why don’t you tell me you love me? Why don’t you act like you love me? Why do you want to hurt me?” is every bit as emotionally abusive as not getting your validation from your
petchild or spouse.Honestly, that page reads less like “families traumatised by AS members” and more like “Narcissists Anon”. They don’t validate me! I feel isolated! Nobody is telling me that I am the centre of their world and they can’t live without me!
“Oh, holy Jerusalem”
You mean Al-Quds? Stop being such a partisan! You’re chasing all the moderates away! (I kid, I kid)
I just saw a post elsewhere that clarified something: empathy, sympathy, and compassion are different things. Empathy is being able to feel what others feel, sympathy is caring about and knowing what others feel, and compassion is wanting to and trying to help (this is paraphrased). They often come together, but they don’t have to; a lot of people who don’t feel empathy, for whatever reason, do feel sympathy and compassion.
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here with the jump from lack of empathy to emotional abuse. Maybe they’re playing motte-and-bailey, using the “this condition causes lack of empathy” which is often true and then using empathy as shorthand for “empathy, sympathy, and/or compassion” which doesn’t work here. Or maybe they really are confused and think that an inability to immediately mirror someone else’s emotions implies that they don’t and can’t honestly care.
The obvious case of lacking empathy is never having been in a similar situation. There are a variety of tragedies for which I have no actual empathy, but do have sympathy and compassion: losing my family in a natural disaster, fleeing my home as a refugee from war, or sexual assault, by way of example.
@ Cadie
I just saw a post elsewhere that clarified something: empathy, sympathy, and compassion are different things. Empathy is being able to feel what others feel, sympathy is caring about and knowing what others feel, and compassion is wanting to and trying to help (this is paraphrased). They often come together, but they don’t have to; a lot of people who don=’t feel empathy, for whatever reason, do feel sympathy and compassion.
I see a (slow) treadmill here.
com = with
passion = feeling
compassion = feeling with
sym = similar, together with
pathy = feeling
sympathy = feeling with
em = with, near
pathy = feeling
empathy = feeling with
Language nitpicking here! 🙂
Compassion comes from Latin roots, “com” and “passio”, which is the same root in “passion”, meaning in whole “to suffer with” – to bear the other’s burdens, to help them in their difficulty and need.
Empathy and sympathy come from Greek – “pathos” meaning “suffering, grief; experience, feeling” – so “empathy” means “to experience with” (from “en” in, at) and sympathy is “fellow-feeling” (from “syn” with, together).
Compassion is more “a motivation to action on behalf of the suffering person”, sympathy “to acknowledge from the outside of how they feel or that the situation is bad” and empathy “to express understanding from the inside of what their emotions or pain is like”.
A superhero can empathise with a villain while disapproving of what they did (“I know what it feels like when your mother has been eaten by an alien plant, but blowing up the entire planet where those plants come from and killing all the people there is not the right response!”)
Calls for empathy can mean “I want more than verbal acknowledgement that yes, it must be difficult, I want you to feel what I am feeling”; that is, you want the other person to react as if they have an emotional connection to you and that your pain hurts them, not just that they comprehend on an intellectual basis that you are hurt but they appear unmoved. I think that is the problem there: the autistic person may not be unsympathetic or not be compassionate, but they don’t react with the emotional (rather than dispassionate) reaction the other person wants. This looks like “they don’t care”, which is not so, but the autistic person doesn’t see or feel the necessity to do the whole “oh my god, this is awful, come here and let me hug you” bursting into tears routine to go along with “Yeah, you must feel sad that your dog died, sorry to hear that”.
But calls for empathy can also be excessive if misused: “I want you to always be thinking of how I am likely to feel and to feel obliged to make me happy by doing what I want the way I want it”. Wanting to be always told “I love you, I need you, you are wonderful, I couldn’t live without you” is abusive.
Seems like these can be summarized as “Some people can tolerate the emotional demands of a relationship with a highly-functioning autistic person, and some people can not.”
Here’s the other side of that coin, if you buy the story.
Does anyone know how often medical studies publish their complete data (something like a table of the age, sex, and all relevant information for each patient)? If this happens, how does one find the data? I’ve been running into issues trying to estimate things like the probability of someone having a disease conditioned on his sex, age and symptoms.
It’s common for a case series to publish all the data in the paper, when you can fit everything into a table at most page-sized. Much less common for the kind of studies you would want to access in order to answer your particular questions.
I think a lot of researchers would be hesitant to give away large datasets, if only because their human subjects had agreed to a certain and particular use of that data which likely did not entail widespread distribution. I could be mistaken.
Why not use actuarial tables? Honest question.
Sounds like you’re practicing medicine.
They don’t contain the information I need.
I’m being practiced on. I think I’m better at statistics than the average doctor, and willing to spend more time digging up studies and data relating to my symptoms and analyzing them. I do understand that doctors have a lot more actual medical expertise than me, but this seems like a useful way to see whether it’s worth pursuing possibilities they are ignoring.
You probably are better at statistics than the average doctor. I say that as a physician! But you might also be better at fluid dynamics than the average plumber.
Good luck and be careful.
Going on my list of “Favorite things that have happened in the academic world” here is the Sokal Affair. Namely, a physics professor submitted a totally bogus analysis paper of quantum gravity, littered it with postmodernist terms and praised the political left, and had it published.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
Lovely quotes from it
” And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: “mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.”103 104 Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics”
His thoughts on it
“The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that “the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project” [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.[9]
Sokal, of course, was a leftist himself, just a member of the materialist Old Left, rather than the more modern intersectional critical theory left, or “SJWs” in cruder parlance.
I think of Sokol’s experiement as kind of disappointing– so far as I know, he didn’t choose a major journal, and he revealed his hoax fairly quickly. It was a test that showed some problems, but didn’t give people a huge chance to find out on their own whether he’d published nonsense.
I find this affair, where Sokal was brought on as a ringer, even more interesting. A widely-cited paper in positive psychology had perpetrated the most childish mathematical fraud imaginable, stealing the famous butterfly graph of the Lorenz attractor and inserting it senselessly into a paper on interpersonal dynamics. It went unchallenged for eight years before a French graduate student, Nicholas Brown, enlisted Sokal and succeeded in exposing the imposture.
I am weirdly proud to have noticed that paper was nonsense the last time I came across someone citing it, before the above paper was published.
Here’s the original paper which the above is critiquing, by the way.
Edit: also, I feel a need to point out that the paper Earthly Knight links is hilarious. It is full of sentences like
It also contains a joke made via the medium of citations.
I’ve been thinking about punditry and predictions since Scott’s predictions post and also a lot of post-US election stuff.
What matters more? Method or Results.
I ask this because in following a lot of blogs and discussion related to sports prediction, the general takeaway is that score attempts > actual scores > results of the game. When you control for extremely well defined factors (e.g. home vs away and current game score, not stuff like injuries or player strength which generally make your predictions worse), it’s pretty much always the score attempts that come out on top as the metric with the most predictive validity. Sometimes it’s scores (depending on how your sport works). In many cases you get a lot of push back from people’s who’s main criticism is that results are the only thing that matter. Which is true in a sense that if you win the final game you win the championship, but not really in that if you win game 1 and 2 of the season with bad underlying metrics you’re probably not a good team and shouldn’t behave like one.
Bringing that to the election (which has probably been done to death here so i’m sorry), I saw a few comments that people were either rubbishing people with detailed predictions methods (e.g. Nate Silver) or updating their priors on certain pundits who happened to get the result right even if the details were wrong (e.g. Scott Adams).
How do people generally approach n=1 events or n<required power events like this? I tend to very much prefer a method based approach, with the qualification that methods (and indeed final predictions) are only as good as your data. It just opens you up to such easy criticism in that in the strictest sense of things, you're just wrong.
Results over methods, always. You could contend that in the past being data driven has performed better than relying on your intuition, but then you would again be relying on (past) results to validate methods.
Also, the newer the situation, the less relevant are past results.
In the case of truly n=1 events with no prior data, it seems that the only reasonable approach is to throw up your arms in aporia. Obviously one could debate over which hypothesis fits the one event better, and sometimes there might even be a good answer, but I argue that it does not really matter at this point. Any model built on observing very few events needs to have extremely wide prediction intervals for the likelihoods of different hypothesis, so even if Model A says that Hypothesis A is 0.51 likely while Model B claims Hypothesis B is 0.51 likely, the difference is meaningless in practice, as we should look to Models if we want help predicting the future, and deciding between Model A and B makes no difference.
This is the general answer, but in the case of the election, I see no reason why we should assign much more weight to the final prediction than we do to the details leading to the prediction (even . If Scott Adams really has a mental model that is able to explain and predict the 2016 election, he should not only be able to predict the final result but also the way leading there. Trump did not win in a landslide (which Adams was pretty confident in, though my memory might be spotty), and also I am not sure that his idea of Trump as Master Persuader fits the fact that he was the most disliked candidate in the history of US elections (this is not snark, I really am not sure if this hypnosis thing includes making you more likable).
Thus, I would update on Adams knowing some stuff other people don’t, but not very drastically.
On a side note, would you mind linking the blogs you mentioned? Although I never managed to find interest in American Sports, I admire the wealth of available statistics and the data-drivenness of fans and managers.
Did Adams get the prediction right? He was predicting a Trump landslide, not just a Trump victory. In sports prediction, or at least in betting, if you go beyond “team X to win” and start betting on props (“team X will win by such-and-such a margin”), you will lose your money if team X wins, but narrowly.
On the other hand, Adams and so on got a better result than the pundits and so forth who were predicting that Hillary would squash Trump. And a lot of those people were working based on a method that seemed strong. The people who were predicting Trump would win, by a landslide or otherwise, were generally not using methods based heavily on crunching the numbers, etc. I thought Hillary was probably going to win, but by a fairly narrow margin – but I can hardly say that I had a strong method; I was just looking at all the polling aggregates and such predicting a Hillary win, and having a gut instinct that it was going to be closer than that – based in part on seeing the populist right wing option do better than expected in various European elections.
Something clearly went wrong with the data-heavy models. Is polling less reliable – is the “shy Tory” effect becoming a factor that must somehow be accounted for?
Did data driven models do poorly vs. punditry?
It seems to that the more data driven you were, the less you predicted Trump as a sure loser. I think there were far more pundit driven “Trump can’t win” statements than “Trump will win” statements. I think you are discounting those because the data driven models mostly agreed Trump was likely to lose.
Let’s assume you’re right and most pundits were saying “Trump can’t win”. In fact, Nate Silver was catching flak before the election because he was giving Trump a better chance of winning than a lot of pundits thought was realistic. On the other hand, Silver’s model was the “friendliest” to Trump, wasn’t it?
But the objection to Silver was not data-based, it was pundit-based. People weren’t accusing Silver of somehow doing the math wrong. IIRC it basically came down to “come on, it’s obvious Trump can’t win, by saying he can you’re obviously just being a partisan who is trying to help him win!”
I thought the criticism of Silver was that he was putting his thumb on the scale to make it look like a horse race, more than that he was trying to put Trump over? And, surely, accusing him of fudging the numbers is accusing him of doing the math wrong.
Yes, Silver’s model was friendlier to Trump than many (although not all, I believe). I believe 270 to win had Trump winning?
But that doesn’t tell us anything about how often pundits, absent a model, said “Trump can’t win”. No does it tell us how many pundits said “Trump will win”, or anything in between.
You need the actual numbers, and some way to evaluate who “counts”, in order to actually make the statement that straight pundits did better than models.
Are you replying to me? I didn’t say that pundits outperformed polling aggregates. The pundits who called Trump to win were mostly doing so based on reasons other than polling.
@dndnrsn:
I may have misinterpreted what you meant here “Something clearly went wrong with the data-heavy models.”
That’s why I asked whether (you thought) punditry actually outperformed data driven models.
We may just be talking past each other.
I suspect that’s what happened here.
Looking at 270towin, I can’t figure out what their “official” prediction was. Everything on their Forecast page appears to be other peoples’ predictions or aggregates, but I’m fuzzy-headed right now and may be missing something.
Models where Trump won, going by Vox(which was the first Google hit I got) were not poll-based. The model of the six they list which used ordinary polling predicted a Clinton win.
As you point out, it’s hard to qualify who is a “pundit” for the purposes of asking questions like “what % of pundits said Trump would win?” But punditry employment doesn’t really seem connected to successful and precise predictions.
The person I can think of who called it best was Michael Moore. Right-wingers predicting a Trump victory fell either into hedging mode or, for the less moderate right wingers, predicted a “Trumpslide”, which did not happen. Skimming his article on why Trump would win, Moore didn’t predict a landslide or anything.
I was wrong to say data-heavy. Polling-based is a better way of putting it. Something has been wonky about polls lately. The LA Times prediction did well, and even it failed to get the popular vote right.
“Yes, Silver’s model was friendlier to Trump than many”
Well somebody HAS to have “the model most friendly to Trump” and my proposition is that, whoever that was, would have received a ton of backlash and skepticism.
They didn’t go after Silver because of anything specific thing in his model – they went after Silver because his model was the one friendliest to Trump – and therefore “problematic”
@Matt M:
I find that comment to be essentially content free. It’s just an excuse to take a shot at people who use the word “problematic” (which, not that it matters, is not limited to SJ”W”s.)
At some point I am going to spend two weeks and call out every single instance of these kinds of posts, and then people will be very irritated with me and call me a scold.
@HeelBearCub
I don’t see how you can assume that he was referring to SJWs, rather than mere tribalism which makes people unquestionably accept outcomes that they like and find fault in things which have inconvenient outcomes.
You say yourself that ‘problematic’ is not limited to SJWs, so shouldn’t you extend good faith to Matt by assuming that he meant the most generous reading of his comment, which seems perfectly consistent with his beliefs (and common SSC beliefs about tribalism).
I’ll admit that the use of the word problematic was a snide reference at SJWs, sure.
But the overall point of the post was to advance my theory that people targeted Silver solely because his was the model most favorable to Trump, that by definition, SOME model must exist that is most favorable to Trump, and that whichever model that happened to be would be the one targeted by people looking to express outrage at some model or another.
The real reason they targeted Silver wasn’t because they didn’t like his data – it was because they didn’t like his conclusion. Even though he was the closest to being right. Had Silver given Trump a 1% chance and the NYT given him a 35% chance, people would have bashed and attacked the NYT instead.
You know who also didn’t like the idea that Trump could win? A good chunk of the conservative intelligentsia.
So who is the scary “they” in your quote, again?
It was a pointless sideswipe that confuses SJWs, anyone involved in social justice, the left and anyone who opposed Trump. You weren’t trying to make a point, you were trying to score a point.
@Aapje:
Apology accepted in advance. Yes that is slightly belligerent, but I am annoyed by both those who are promulgating the sideswipes and those who defend them unless it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“So who is the scary “they” in your quote, again?”
The “they” is whoever denounced Silver. I suspect this came mainly from the left, but if the Bill Kristol crowd was doing it too, feel free to lump him in there as well.
@MattM:
Did they all think it was “problematic”?
Seriously, just have the grace to accept that snide, pointless, remarks about SJ”W”s are contrary to meaningful discourse. If you want to have an actual discourse about the illiberal left, actually have it. Don’t inject it into analyses where it doesn’t belong.
Karl Rove spit the bit on national TV election night 2012. Confirmation bias has nothing to do with “the left” and “the left” aren’t entirely composed of SJ”W”s.
@HeelBearCub
I still believe that your assumption of bad faith didn’t improve the discussion and thus was misplaced, even if you were right.
@Matt M:
The LA Times model called a Trump win – but Silver got more flak.
@Aapje:
I know that if I was consistently throwing out the initialization “RR” (for racist right, which isn’t the whole right, just the actual racists on the right). And then was making statements like “The problem with the RR is that have no human decency. That’s why Trump is president.” And I started throwing out words like “realists” that obliquely referenced the RR…
People would call my shit right quick. I’m guessing you wouldn’t be defending me against charges I’m arguing in bad-faith when I say “realist” as a reference to the right in general.
@HBC
‘Racist right’ would be a term with a relatively unambiguous meaning, while ‘problematic’ is merely a generic English word that doesn’t necessarily refer to SJ. I used it yesterday in these comments with no intent to refer to SJ issues*. So I find your analogy not really applicable.
For your specific example, I would similarly argue for reading your comment in good faith if it was not clearly directed at the entire right. In your example, where you draw a direct link between the election of Trump and the RR, you would be smearing the entire right with the brush of racism, so I would not defend that (especially in the context of the current discourse, where claims that all Trump voters are racist are relatively common, so IMO it’s reasonable to require that you should be more specific if you didn’t intend this meaning).
* And there is a more general issue where SJ tends to repurpose established terms to give them a different (and IMHO objectionable) meaning, where there is the risk that a certain framing becomes the default through language manipulation. One may want to push back against such tendencies by ‘reclaiming’ these words, which would be in opposition to fairly common SJ discourse norms, yet would not be an attack (but rather a defensive move).
@Aapje: The fact that HBC could correctly identify “problematic” as being a snide dig at SJWs, while you remained oblivious, should give you pause here.
(Also, you are not engaging with HBC’s hypothetical. To start with, the imagined point of comparison for “problematic” is not “racist right”; it’s “realist”.)
@Aapje:
One, Iain is correct that you have incorrectly matched the relevant words in the hypothetical. The fact that you did so should also give you some pause to consider how motivated your reasoning is here.
Second, arguing about how “bad” SJ”W”s are is extraordinarily beside the point. On the one hand, I could say that racists are also bad and also use words incorrectly. But, more to the point, if your argument is “but you guys on the left deserve it” … well, that’s really not an argument at all, is it?
@HeelBearCub
I do admit that I have great trouble finding the commonality between your example and what Matt said. “Problematic” seems to be an accusation of double standards/tribalism. A good faith interpretation of this is that Matt mimicked how some SJ people might justify this tribalism.
A proper right wing analogy would be to argue that some Trump supporters would always cherry pick the poll that most favored Trump and dismiss the other polls as “liberal media bias.” In fact, this is exactly what we saw, during this election.
In neither case would I see it as a claim that everyone one that side is guilty of this, but rather, as a claim that (quite a bit of) tribalism exists on that side. Nor do I see it as a claim that this is exclusive to that side. Do you think that it is unfair to claim that there is a decent amount of tribalism on the left (and on the right too, of course), which causes people to favor the polls where their candidate does best and dismiss polls where their candidate does badly, regardless of actual quality of those polls?
IMO, this was Matt’s argument, but I see no indication in this thread that you ‘got’ that. What I see is that you got triggered by a term that you considered to be insulting, but completely missed the greater argument, which was not insulting (except to tribal thinkers, who are fair targets for scorn, IMO).
I’ll grant you that using “problematic” does imply that SJ people are especially guilty of this, rather than hardcore Clinton supporters in general, which is a little unfair, but I really think that you overreacted to this.
@Aapje:
So using terms like “problematic” and “realist” as short hands for the entire left or right is perfectly fine because it’s “just pointing that people are tribal”? I don’t think so.
As to whether I got MattM’s point let me quote myself:
If MattM wanted to make a point about either confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, he could have done that. He failed to do so because he wanted to make sure he got a dig in against the left. These things in know uniquely impact the left and they aren’t driven by the ideology of the left.
It had nothing to with whether Silver was “problematic” and everything to with the fact that people in the broad Dem coalition took solace from Silver’s prediction in 2012 and were scared by his predictions in 2016.
“Yeah, I talked about scum-sucking greedy Jews. But that isn’t all Jews, it’s just the scum-sucking, greedy, ones.”
dndnrsn,
I was unaware of that. If true it does pretty much disprove my overall thesis.
HBC,
You are not wrong to suggest that I was engaging in a subtle dig of the left. I feel like plenty of people do in fact engage in similar such digs against the right, and I’m okay with that. I dish it, and I can take it as well. If you want to take digs against the right that’s fine by me.
As an aside, I have no particular love for Karl Rove. Yes, he was an idiot in 2012 – as was everyone in 2008 who was saying “sure Obama is dominating all the polls but we all know that’s only because people are afraid of being perceived as racists by the poll givers.”
I explicitly rejected the “shy Trumpkin” theory advanced by Scott Adams and others because it had already been wrong in previous elections vis-a-vis Obama. I personally thought Hillary would outperform her polling averages. I was obviously wrong on that.
All that said, I do think it’s fair to suggest that there was a certain strain among the left (not ALL leftists surely) whose position on Trump, from day one, was “He can’t possibly win, ever, period.” This might have originated as their genuine heartfelt opinion on his odds, but I think at a certain point (after he won the GOP nomination) it shifted from “something we believe” to “something we say to discredit Trump and discourage his supporters.” I have no particular proof of this theory, it’s just something that makes sense to me given my interactions with a whole lot of virulently anti-Trump people.
@Jiro: You might want to unpack that, because right now it looks like the point has flown completely over your head.
Imagine a slightly different comment section where the SJW outgroup has been replaced by, say, HBD. Imagine that HeelBearCub finished a comment about the right-wing in general with: “So much for being ‘realists'”. Imagine that Matt M called him out on it, and HeelBearCub acknowledged that he was indeed making a thinly veiled dig at HBD.
If you would not attack Matt M for assuming bad faith in the hypothetical world, then you should think twice about making the same claim in the real world.
@Matt M: Although I disagree that your original post had no other content, I think HBC is correct to say that this particular dig was gratuitous and did not advance your argument. Insofar as SSC tries to encourage rational, civil discussion, I think it would be better without that kind of dig. (Obviously, if I ever make such a dig myself, please point it out to me.)
@Matt M:
It could be that Silver was higher-profile as a prediction guy than whoever did the LA Times’ prediction. He’s the only predictions person most people know by name – certainly the only one I know by name – and people use “Nate Silver” as shorthand for “FiveThirtyEight”. So your explanation isn’t necessarily kiboshed.
@HeelBearCub
I see no indication that Matt was referring to the entire left when he said “problematic.” It seemed to me that he was clearly referring to those who dismissed Silver due to tribalist reasons, who were the subject of his comments. He never even used the word ‘left’, so he never said that the entire left was doing this. This is what I mean when I talk about assuming (a minimum of) good faith.
IMO, Matt’s ‘problematic’ comment can be reasonably interpreted in two ways:
1. As a characterization of all people who dismissed Silver due to tribalist reasons
2. As an example of the kind of tribalist accusation that was used to dismiss Silver’s model
When I read back Matt’s comment, I still see no reason to declare that one of these interpretation was clearly intended, merely from the actual text. There is simply no clear indication.
However, you still deem to classify my interpretation (#2) as evidence for my hatred of the left, with your accusation that I suffer from motivated reasoning. IMO, an equally valid interpretation is that I don’t think ill of people. However, I can see how people with a siege mentality wouldn’t come up with that reason.
However, I fail to see how and especially why people should walk on eggshells around those who go out of their way to assume that others are mean. They can never be appeased.
@Aapje:
What tribe do you think he was talking about? Just SJ”W”s? Just SJ?
By your premise, he was talking about everyone who objected to Silver’s prediction, which was certainly not limited to those two actual groups. Seriously the vast majority on the left, and some chunk of the right, wanted Trump to lose really badly and were super anxious about it as evidence by the mass freak out when he won. How does it make sense to to think that the people who gave Silver backlash was limited to people who can be accurately characterized as using the word “problematic”?
When MattM admits he was acting in bad faith (your words for the behavior he has self-admitted), how is it then my problem for accurately calling him on it?
It seems to me what you are doing here is encouraging people to post snarky content and then deny that is what they are doing. Then you would be fully on the side of the snarker.
@HeelBearCub
He didn’t specify, so I projected my own beliefs, which is that there were/are different tribes in the Clinton camp (and the same for the Trump camp).
The best way to reason about this is probably to visualize a Venn diagram, where people tend to be part of one or more subcultures with their own tribal characteristics, which includes simplistic oppression narratives.
Let me use Trump as an example. If Nate Silver’s model had predicted that Trump had a worse chance of winning than other polls/methods, I’d expect the following:
– Anti-liberal people to dismiss him as part of the liberal MSM
– Anti-socialist/communist people to dismiss him as a communist due to his communist mother
– Stormfront people to dismiss him as part of a Jewish conspiracy as he is half-Jewish
These are three different narratives by three different tribes. However, an individual may identify with (for example) the latter two tribes and denounce Silver as a communist Jew, applying both oppression narratives.
Of course, this is my narrative, not Matt’s, but I saw nothing in his comments that was inconsistent with my beliefs on this and thus no reason for me to challenge him for stating something that I believe is incorrect.
My opinion of Matt’s initial comment is that it was pretty clearly focused on the tribalist mechanism. In hindsight I think that he got a little upset at that comment being ignored and he rewrote with a little snark to get a reaction, which is a bit childish. However, …
I still disagree that the only reasonable interpretation is that he called the entire left out on using a ‘problematic’ oppression narrative, rather than call out the left for having a tribe that uses that narrative. IMO, it is reasonable to think that his snark merely consisted of picking an example that he knew would irritate you, as it clashes with your oppression narrative (which he was quite successful at, clearly).
When someone admits to doing X, this doesn’t just mean that you can state that he admitted to Y, which is a different kind of bad. I believe that you inaccurately called him out for Y, while he did and admitted to X.
Let me be frank: I think that you are so wrapped up in your oppression narrative that you engage in simplistic pattern matching, where you eliminate possible interpretations of comments, because you have preconceived notions that people here equate the left to SJ(W). So if that interpretation is possible, you assume that it was meant, rather than apply either a proper Bayesian probability model or a good faith model, based on the specific phrasing of the comment.
Treating ‘he said X, not Y’ as a defense of X is exactly the kind of thing that Scott has spoken out against in the past.
That kind of argumentation vilifies people who favor accurateness over virtue signaling and is a major force that creates tribes/echo chambers/etc; where people stop speaking out against falsehoods because doing that is seen as evidence that they belong to the other tribe.
PS. This is exactly what irritates me about the complaints that this forum is anti-SJ or anti-left or whatever, as the complaints are often tribalist themselves.
@Aapje:
We both agree that there are many reasons and sub-tribes who all got mad at Silver for his prediction, each of whom could have their own narrative.
We also agree that MattM inserted the word problematic as a way of being harmful (you added childish and irritating, I just said snarky).
We both seem to agree that MattM didn’t actually think that Silver was being problematic nor that he was being given flack for being problematic.
We both agree that problematic was MattMs reference to SJ”W”s.
You say MattM was mocking the left for including SJ”W”s, rather than tarring the left as SJ”W”s. Frankly, that looks like a distinction without a difference to me, as the content in question had nothing to do with SJ”W”s. Randomly mentioning the outgroup when they aren’t applicable is just a means of reminding people that whole group is bad because they have the outgroup in it.
I correctly identified “problematic” (in scare quotes no less, so it’s not like it was hard) as a content free smear designed to be harmful. I didn’t hypermatch anything. You actually appear to be the one over pattern matching your idea that I am falsely accusing people, therefore you can’t admit this was an easy call.
Great. Matt M was getting a dig in at the left. Everybody in this conversation agrees. Now that Aapje has conceded the entire argument (which was, if you can remember that far back, about whether it was “bad faith” to accuse Matt M of snark), can we please lay this to rest?
A bit of a false dichotomy, but in terms of priority I say method. Without a method you cannot improve or generalize. If you never get good results, then you do not have a good method. A methodless result would be like a coin toss. A pundit is just someone who always picks heads, or always picks tails.
Nate SIlver’s results were pretty good – within the margins of error they set down. In particular, their defense of why they continued to offer better odds than everyone else was borne out by the results: when they were off on a state, they were most likely off in the same direction in similar states. The Midwest, in this case.
I agree. The question could be rephrased :
If we can iterate to any extent, then refining a method is obviously preferable.
A metaphor I like about Nate Silver: Assume you have a die. Your default is that it’s fair, but Nate Silver examines it and tells you it’s a special die – it has a 1/3 chance of being 2 and 2/3 chance of being 5.
You play a game with it where you win if you get a 4 or higher, but you get a 2 and lose. Naively, you could say “Nate silver said I had a 2/3 chance of winning, the prior said 1/2, so since I lost I should lower my confidence in him”. But actually, the result you got is more likely under Silver’s model, so you should still increase your confidence in him.
(Scott Adams, meanwhile, said “you’ll 99% get a 1, except maybe not and really it could be anything. He was right in that you ended up losing, but not in a way that inspires confidence).
I’ll mention the LA times poll here – they get credit for sticking to their method (which predicted a trump victory when no one else did), but they also predicted a popular vote of Trump+3, while Silver predicted Clinton+4 – so while they were right on the binary result, their error was actually larger.
Here’s a different question : are election forecasters truly spectators?
There is likely a feedback loop between the methods of forecasting elections and campaigning strategies. If every strategy has its weakness, and if a certain method of forecasting produces a certain strategy, then every method of forecasting will lead to its particular exploitable weaknesses.
My gut is that this is somehow the way Trump won. It would reconcile rightist narratives (“liberal media”) and leftist narratives (“politically neutral data”).
If this is true, I wonder if this system of forecasting/strategy could ever reach equilibrium.
I have a question for the SSC commentariat. Do you think you have duty to follow the law? We touched on this slightly in the discussion on whether people would turn in illegal immigrants in Europe and the US.
I believe I have zero duty to follow the law. I will follow the law if I think it is a good law, or if I think I will be caught. I guess I also follow the law as a default; I only break the law if I have thought about the issue and decide it is best not to.
When I have brought up this issue in other forums, I find that I am in a small minority (actually I don’t think anyone has ever agree with me). And there are always some folks who are aghast at my attitude. The usual response is “What if everyone did that?” To which I answer, “I wish every one would act under their own conscience and not blindly follow laws.”
I think almost everyone would agree that there are cases one should not follow the law, such as the classic case where you are a guard being told to shoot the prisoners. But I think this should also follow in more mundane cases. I will definitely go through a red light in the middle of the night if there is no traffic. I will go through a red light as a pedestrian or biker is there is no cross traffic. I won’t do this in a car simply because no one does that, and it would be too dangerous if I missed a car, which would definitely not expect me to do it. I smoked pot in my younger days, and would still do it if I wasn’t concerned about getting caught and if I still had my connections.
i feel the same way, but it’s probably bad for society that I do
this may be a function of socialization as well; in Israel, people don’t give a shit about the laws and will, as you say, go through a red light if there is no cross traffic.
My perspective is fairly similar to yours. I haven’t done anything that would get me in serious trouble, so my current “I will violate this but happily accept the consequences if there should be any” approach serves me pretty well.
On the other hand, I try to make sure I do my homework before convincing myself that I’m right and the law is wrong. Before I touched steroids for instance, I read a fair number of endocrinology papers, found a lab to get relevant health markers checked regularly and made sure I had a way to check product quality and rule out contamination.
I don’t know if Murray is right in saying that a lot of people like simple rules and adding caveats or free passes can make a legal or moral system look unfair, but it would explain a lot of behavior I encounter, and maybe your lack of agreement so far, too.
Everyone has a different idea of what their conscience tells them is good. And it is very good at rationalizing selfishness.
Because you freely chose to remain in the country after having attained your majority, you have entered into a contract with the body politic binding you to its constitution and obliging you to follow its laws. As with any contract, this obligation is only pro tanto– it can be overridden if this is the only way to satisfy other, stricter moral duties– but it extends to every law, no matter how trivial or misguided they may seem to you.
You are both mistaken. The questioner is falsely presupposing that there is some connection between whether we ought to do x and whether x-ing can be universalized, which there is not. You are wrong because you do not actually believe that someone should follow her conscience if, for instance, it urges her to murder a philandering partner or bomb an embassy.
“Because you choose to continue living with this man after he raped you, you have entered a contract where he is allowed to have sex with you as much as he pleases.”
It’s funny how the rules governing social contracts have pretty much no relation to rules governing actual contracts.
This is a bizarre analogy, because (a) the right to sexual autonomy can’t be ceded in contracts like other right can be, (b) the government doesn’t go around raping people, and (c) laws must be publicly promulgated to bind. Suppose instead that a theater owner posts a list of rules which take effect at, say, 8 PM every night. Doesn’t everyone who lingers on the property past that hour have an obligation either to abide by the rules or to leave?
Not anymore in our legal system. On the camel’s back and all that.
The main difference between most private property rules and the state is that you don’t live in a movie theater, which means that you must go out of your way to go to it.
On a fundamental level, there is a similarity between states and property in this regard. If Bill Gates decided to buy Cuba he would both be the country’s owner and ruler. In practice, it doesn’t usually work like this and most people move out of their family homes and sign explicit contracts when renting or buying.
Of course you would see the analogy as bizarre but the point I was making was that just because someone doesn’t fight back or leave doesn’t mean they consent. Lets imagine that Bill Gates bought the entire world except for Syria. He turns everyone in to slaves, stripping them of their autonomy and making them follow his arbitrary whims unless they leave. I have not left this place for war torn Syria, does this mean I consent to all of this?
Why not? Westen’s book has an entire section opening the theoretical door to prospective consent, and despite the current politicized discourse on the matter, I think it’s a good one. He uses a couple analogies of other prospective consent. The first is from classical literature – Ulysses tied to the mast. He prospectively ceded his negative bodily autonomy, that is, he gave others the right to decide at a later date what he could not do. Normally, tying someone up like that and refusing to let them go might be some form of kidnapping, but his prospective consent could provide a defense for such a charge.
The second example I recall him using was skydiving. Suppose a person had gone up in an airplane a few times, each time chickening out at the moment of the jump, and returning to the ground inside the plane. Finally, she tells the instructor, “No matter what I say when I’m up there, I want you to throw me out of the plane.” Normally, throwing someone out of plane would be some form of assault, but we are likely to accept her prospective consent, ceding her positive autonomy to perform the jump and providing a defense to such a charge for the instructor.
He gave a few factors from these examples (and others that I don’t recall offhand) that would make us more/less likely to accept prospective consent, but I see very little reason to draw a bright line around the category of sexual activities in order to make it uniquely immune. The easier case is prospective consent to cede negative sexual autonomy – “You’re my friends, girls. No matter what I say later tonight, don’t let me go home with him again.” We get closer to politicized shouting as we move toward prospective consent to cede positive autonomy.
@Controls Freak
It used to be the case in western Europe until about the middle 20th century that you did cede sexual autonomy when you got married. Adultery and fornication was illegal, and forcible intercourse with ones spouse did not count as rape.
Come to think of it, you didn’t have sexual autonomy in the first place. Just mostly whether you chose to pair-bond with someone for life, and who that was if so.
First, I think the marital rape exemption gets an unfairly bad rap. I think it’s more similar to discussions we have today about the proper scope of the term ‘rape’. It’s fairly common for people to complain that if we expand the definition too widely, it dilutes the power of the word to describe acts which uniformly have at least some threshold of ‘badness’. While the old discussion of the marital rape exemption didn’t quite follow exactly this line, I don’t think it was ever, “Forcible intercourse with one’s spouse is not wrong.” It was just that the word “rape” did not include it. There are various ways you could go down this path and not be insane. However, they’re mostly foreign if we start from one of the various modernist perspectives.
I think actual criminal laws against fornication were few and far between. Instead, laws tended to be focused on the legitimacy of children depending on marital status. I think there was less, “If you want to have sex at all, you have to get married,” and more, “One set of the State’s rules will apply to sex (and the possible results of that sex) if you are not married, and another set of the State’s rules will apply to sex (and the possible results of that sex) if you are married.” Remember, much of this law was born out of the Roman tradition, and they were very remedy-focused. There was less focus on, “The Crown v. Individual,” and more on the idea that if you bring a claim to the State, here is the list of things that we’ll intervene in. Much of it was, “Look, if you have sex outside of marriage, here is the set of rules you should expect. You’ll be very vulnerable to rape claims. If you produce children, they will be considered illegitimate (which had its own implications). And so on.” Instead, if you are married, we have a different set of rules/remedies.
Then, over time, we’ve seen struggles over the necessary formality. There is some drive to, “If we’re going to change State action based on whether or not there is a valid marriage, we need an explicit, formal procedure to make sure we don’t chase our tail trying to figure out if so-and-so’s claim that so-and-so married him to so-and-so is valid.” At the same time, the long history of common law marriage embraces the idea that maybe not everyone wants to go through those formalities, yet we should use Ruleset Two rather than Ruleset One, because it’s just more applicable to their situation. In fact, the very existence of common law marriages pretty much seals the claim that the state was (usually) less concerned about your sexual autonomy… and more just concerned about how to respond to the consequences.
In sum, while there have occasionally been some laws truly targeting positive sexual autonomy in its purest form, I don’t think they were as all-encompassing as we often imagine. A large part of Kennedy’s opinion in Lawrence was trying to show that there wasn’t such a history.
On the other hand, I think you’re right that enforcing prospective consent to ceded negative autonomy is pretty clearly illustrated in a long history of various treatments of adultery. I also don’t think this difference is insane. Like I said above, it’s generally easier for us to accept ceding negative autonomy… especially when it involves an explicit promise to a known party who might bring claims to the State… and we also throw in the aforementioned interplay between marriage and child legitimacy. Even today, a large portion of people who think that adultery shouldn’t be a legal issue think that it is a moral issue, and that there is some moral way to cede negative autonomy in this way.
@ Anonymous
We are speaking here of “rights” subscripted “moral”, which are, let’s pretend, timeless and unchanging, and exist somewhere up in Plato’s heaven.
@ Wrong Species
No, but the problem in this analogy is again that there are limitations on what rights you can cede in contracts. My own view is that contracts which are highly exploitative do not give rise to moral obligations, although obviously individuals closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum will not agree. When it comes to the social contract, this will probably require that (1) the constitution respects the individual rights of the country’s citizens, (2) the government’s charter is continually renewed through the democratic consent of the governed, and (3) the government passes and administers laws through processes which respect reasonable standards of procedural justice.
@ Controls Freak
I have this idea that when one of the parties revokes his or her consent, sexual activity must cease immediately, no matter what preceded it. Crazy, I know.
So what, exactly, would you say is doing the work to make sexual activity unique apart from other areas where we perhaps can give prospective consent? I’d prefer something other than ipse dixit this time.
EDIT: You also seem to only be taking such a strong stance on prospective consent to cede positive sexual autonomy. Would you like to take an explicit stance on prospective consent to cede negative sexual autonomy, or would you rather just argue via signalling slogans?
I think there are some categories of rights so fundamental that they cannot be forfeited prospectively and can only be waived by continual, ongoing consent. In addition to the right not to be forced to engage in sexual activity, these will include the right to life and the right not to be subjected to conditions tantamount to slavery. If you are looking for a principled explanation for what sets these rights apart from others, I have none to offer. I just I have a moral intuition that this is so, and am confident that you do as well.
@EarthlyKnight
You keep conflating “voluntary” with justice. An understandable mistake since almost everyone in contemporary society does it but these are separate concepts. Something can be good and involuntary or bad and voluntary. An obvious example would be children never giving consent to being under the rule of their parents. Another might be a doctor giving a lethal injection to a suicidal patient.
@EK
Let’s focus of the former example rather than the latter (lest the conversation devolve into determining what precisely qualifies as “conditions tantamount to slavery”). The right to life is so fundamental that they cannot be forfeited prospectively and can only be waived by continual, ongoing consent. I think this sounds pleasant, however, we already have a massive, glaring exception to it codified in law – living wills. Do you oppose these under this rationale?
The living will likely brings to mind the positive right to life. Do you think there is a corresponding negative right (as there is with sexual activity)? If so, would you also be against, say, a person’s ability to sign documentation when entering drug rehab stating that no matter how much she expresses the will to commit suicide over the next 30 days, her caretakers will attempt to intervene so as to prevent it?
@ Wrong Species
I have nowhere used the word “voluntary,” so I’m confused about what you’re saying.
@ Controls Freak
I certainly think that it would be murder to kill someone who in sound mind does not consent to being killed no matter what documents they had previously signed. If, on the other hand, someone consents to die under certain conditions at some future time and becomes totally incapacitated by dementia or brain trauma in the interim I have no objection to executing the earlier instructions. Here the individual’s directive in their last period of lucidity can be taken as a substitute for ongoing consent.
I do not think the distinction between negative and positive rights carves moral reality, such as it is, at any joints, and so I have nothing to say in response to questions formulated in those terms.
I count one acceptance of prospective consent and one question avoidance. I’ll take that as agreement. You may think that you deftly divvied it up into the cases where you wouldn’t accept prospective consent and the case where you can squint really hard and rename prospective consent, but you really just said that you sometimes accept prospective consent.
And that’s not bad. I really do think we’re in agreement. One of the factors that makes us more likely to accept prospective consent is if it is believed to apply to a time at which the individual is going to be of diminished capacity or otherwise impaired in their ability to stay true to their “real” desires. This vein runs through Ulysses (he would be driven insane by the siren song and would die if let loose), the skydiver (she is paralyzed by fear), the case of the living will, and the case of the rehabbing drug addict who wants to live. It makes no sense to imagine that we can start drawing circles around some situations of diminished capacity and then squint that into ongoing consent. It’s prospective consent… just of the type you’re alright with.
This is going to depend on how we define “ongoing consent.” Obviously, this is going to have to be something less than ceaselessly chirping “yes”. It seems to me that the following conditions together should be sufficient:
S’s consent to phi at t is ongoing at t if:
(1) She explicitly consented to phi at t some time prior to t (while of sound mind).
(2) She never subsequently revoked her consent to phi at t (while of sound mind).
(3) Were she of sound mind at t, she would still consent to phi.
Someone who consents to euthanasia in the event that she suffers catastrophic brain trauma and then goes on to suffer catastrophic brain trauma will satisfy these conditions, and so can be said to offer her ongoing consent to the procedure.
@EarthlyKnight
The two are intrinsically tied together. Do you actually believe in “involuntary consent”? What kind of bizarre abomination would that be?
Your original accusation was that I was improperly conflating voluntariness with justice. This is strange, because I do not think there is any particular connection between acting voluntarily and acting justly. You seem to have meant that I was improperly assuming that consensual contracts are automatically just, which is at least an intelligible complaint. I do believe, like most people, that consensual contracts are prima facie morally binding unless the consent is obtained under conditions of duress or exploitation. This means that the social contract, like any other contract, will have to be non-exploitative to be valid.
I outlined above three conditions that I think a non-exploitative social contract must meet: first, the constitution must protect individual rights, including the rights of minorities and dissenters; second, the government’s charter must be continually renewed by the consent of the governed through fair elections; third, the processes by which the the state passes and administers laws must abide by standard canons of procedural justice. Do you agree that this is enough to ensure that the social contract is non-exploitative, or do you think additional safeguards are needed?
Stop squinting. We already have a term that works just fine. It’s called “prospective consent”. It’s in all the academic literature and everything. Again, I highly recommend Westen’s book. It’s a fantastic introduction to current thought and terminology (and it’s far more clear than Wertheimer’s book from the year before).
Anyway, not only does your terminology run counter to the literature, it’s also misleading. For example, we’re shuffling off important aspects to a parenthetical in order to hide how misleading the term is. Consider Ulysses or the skydiver again. Both are actively non-consenting in the moment – Ulysses really wants his crew to untie him, and the skydiver really wants to sit back down and strap into her seat. Nevertheless, we let their non-contemporaneous, prospective consent override their current non-consent. Sure, you can technically say, “But that case is handled by my parenthetical,” but surely you can also see that the term “ongoing consent” is highly misleading here.
While I think “ongoing consent” may be a fine term for explaining why one doesn’t have to constantly be reciting, “Yes,” at every moment, it’s just not suitable here.
You are taking the idea of the social contract as a consensual contract for granted when that is exactly what the argument was about in the first place. For the purposes of this debate, I don’t care how exploitive or non-exploitive the government is. I’m not answering the question about what makes a good government or what standards of justice it should have. I’m only concerned with one question: does the fact that I remain in the country automatically mean I have voluntarily consented to this social contract? The answer to me is quite plainly no, which is the purpose of my rape scenario as a metaphor.
Libertarians often ask what’s the fundamental difference between a government and the mob. The answer is that one provides services we like and the other doesn’t. But what they’re really asking is what makes a social contract with the government consensual when there is no such thing with the mob. The answer is that both are involuntary. That doesn’t mean that government is inherently bad. It just mean that we don’t automatically consent to its existence by the mere act of living here. And that’s ok because like I said before, not all consensual acts are good and not all non-consensual acts are bad.
@ Controls Freak
I do not agree. Based on what you’ve said, it appears that your version of “prospective consent” conflates cases where the agent subsequently revokes her consent while of sound mind with cases where the agent does not subsequently revoke her consent while of sound mind. This elides a crucial moral distinction.
To make the problem more concrete, imagine a man with Tourette’s syndrome accompanied by a tic where he says “No no no!” every so often, regardless of what cognitive state he is in at the time. Suppose this man consents to sexual activity at 6:00, then experiences the tic at 6:01. Your proposed taxonomy of consent classifies his consent at 6:02 as prospective but not ongoing. This is clearly wrong: the man’s consent to sex is ongoing, because the tic counts for nothing.
This is not so for Odysseus. Odysseus is incapacitated by the siren’s song, which means nothing he could do could count as giving or withholding consent. Whatever words he mouths amount to nothing more than a tic or reflex with no rational agency behind it.
I don’t think the skydiving case is very helpful here, just because it’s not obvious to me that it would be permissible to push the skydiver out of the plane.
@ Wrong Species says:
But we saw earlier that your analogy was flawed. We find implicit consent to a contract which cedes the rights to one’s future sexual autonomy objectionable not because there’s a problem with the implicit consent part but because rights to one’s future sexual autonomy can’t be transferred in contracts. When this defect in the analogy is repaired, we are left with the case of the theater owner who posts a bill of rules which take effect after a certain hour of the evening. Do you have any objection to saying that theater patrons who linger on the premises after that hour implicitly consent to and become bound by the rules? If not, you have no quarrel in principle with the notion of implicit consent.
Like I said earlier:
When you go to a movie theater, that is a fairly good line to draw for implicit consent. Where is that moment when you consent to the state?
I don’t want to really get in to it but you’re point about sex being different isn’t really helping your case. It just seems to confirm that you view the idea of consent as just being an extension of what you view as just, rather than the separate concept about what people voluntarily agree to. If some women decides to sell her body for sex, then I can say that she consented to the agreement without it being just. You’re telling her that she doesn’t consent to the contract even if she knows exactly what she’s getting in to and explicitly signs up for it.
Okay, then imagine instead that the list of rules is being posted by the owner of an apartment building, or the homeowner’s association for a pod of condominiums.
The point is that the prostitute’s consent must be sustained through the duration of sexual activity or else it becomes rape, no matter what she had antecedently agreed to. This is different than in the case of property rights, for example, if I lease you a pen for the duration of an exam in exchange for $5, I do not retain the right to cancel the deal and snatch back the pen at any time, even if I agree to refund your money.
There’s the point where someone signs a contract to rent the place or buy it. Now lets say that you grew up in one house and live there all your life. At what point do you consent? We have no idea and we can’t tell just by the fact they still live there. This is the fundamental problem of the Social Contract and also, in theory, private property.
Suppose that you are orphaned at age 14 but your parents bequeath you a condominium. Until you turn 18, you are bound by the rules of the homeowner’s association because your parents, acting in their role as guardians, agreed to its terms on your behalf. Once you turn 18, you become bound to the HOA’s rules by your own agency, in virtue of continuing to occupy the condo. This is exactly parallel to the mechanism by which we implicitly consent to the social contract in our nation of birth. There is nothing, so far as I can tell, which is mysterious or vague about either case.
No, it doesn’t. There can be subdivisions. There is no, “You have to accept all prospective consent or no prospective consent.” Instead, we accept some cases of prospective consent, depending upon various factors that are involved. I mentioned this way back in my very first comment in this thread. Diminished capacity is one of those factors. Prospective consent is merely the term which describes consent that is non-contemporaneous with (in fact, before) the event (retrospective consent is the opposite; note that we accept retrospective consent even less often than we accept prospective consent).
In that case, that particular expression is not related to his factual consent, nor does it come into play for prescriptive consent, which is why
is false.
This is false by, uh, the definition of incapacitated.
You need to stop handwaving cases away. Not because you’re wrong about them being permissible/impermissible, but because they’re useful to determining our terminology and providing distinguishing features and reasons why we come to a conclusion that something is permissible/impermissible. Again, “prospective consent” is not, “You have to accept all cases of this.” Instead, it’s merely defining terminology, and then we have to go figure out which cases are permissible/impermissible and why. We have to, ya know, do philosophy of ethics.
The age of 18 is for legal purposes, not based on any objective feature. This contract never included my agreement to it. Also the government frequently changes it rules but if the homeowners association decided to enforce a completely new set of rules in this scenario, then it’s more obvious that no, I never agreed to this.
But if you wanted to go that route, if in a similar situation except it was the mob instead of a homeowners association, then you would have to admit I consent to the Mob’s extortion by the fact that I continue to live there.
@ Controls Freak
So if I consent to phi-ing two milliseconds in advance of phi-ing, this counts as prospective consent, by your lights? It’s hard to see how so broad and heterogeneous a category could be useful for anything. The important distinction, so far as I can tell, is between consent which is revoked before the act occurs and consent which is sustained through the act (what I am calling “ongoing consent”).
Why is this true of the man with Tourette’s but not of Odysseus?
Oh, well, if the dictionary says so. See instead:
An incapacitated person is defined as someone who “for reasons other than advanced age or minority, has a clinically diagnosed condition that results in an inability to receive and evaluate information or to make or communicate decisions to such an extent that the individual lacks the ability to meet essential requirements for physical health, safety, or self-care, even with appropriate technological assistance”.
Odysseus is incapacitated by the siren’s song, and hence incapable of giving or withholding consent. Consequently, his consent to being tied to the mast is never genuinely revoked, and his case should be assimilated to whichever category includes the man afflicted with Tourette’s.
@ Wrong Species
I agree that if the mob behaves exactly as if they were a homeowner’s association with respect to your condo, including being incorporated contractually into the purchase of the unit, having publicized bylaws, holding elections, and so on, that you are bound by the mob’s rules just as you would be bound by the HOA’s rules. I’m not sure why you think this is a problem, though.
But you said the mere fact that I continue to live there proves my consent. What if the mob didn’t do any of those things like hold general elections, by what you just said, I’m still consenting because I haven’t moved. If simply continued living in a place doesn’t imply consent then you are undermining your own argument.
You keep using all these other variables other than voluntary agreement to mean consent when they are simply non-sequitors. Elections don’t mean anything unless I already consent to them. If two wolves go up to a sheep and say we’re going to hold an election and decide what to eat, the sheep hasn’t consented anymore than if they simply ate it. Robert Nozick has a good elaboration on this idea.
http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/nozick_slave.html
Yes, with the caveat that your consent will be invalid if the contract is exploitative. As I noted above, elections and respect for individual rights are ways of ensuring that the social contract is not exploitative. The same holds true for condo boards.
Again, you’re failing to differentiate exploitation and non-consent, with exploitation being defined as “things I think are bad”. You can define words however you want but you should at least be honest about your nonstandard definition when talking about how we all consent to the Social Contract. Because the government may be exploitative or it may not be, but by using the term to mean that when other people think it means “voluntarily agree to” you are obfuscating the entire debate.
I think most people would agree with me that contracts entered into under conditions of duress or exploitation are not morally binding (although many libertarians would not). I am not sure what else your objection amounts to.
The claim that you implicitly consent to the terms of the social contract by virtue of continuing to reside in a country after attaining your majority turns out to be pretty strictly analogous to the claim that you implicitly consent to the rules of the homeowner’s association by virtue of continuing to reside in the condo after attaining your majority. Do you think that homeowner’s associations are by their very nature unjust? If not, by parity of reasoning, you must also perforce view the state as legitimate.
Sure. It’s unlikely that we have to consider such prospective consent, because you probably have contemporaneous consent in this case, too.
No doubt that this is often important. However, the point continues to be that sometimes we accept prospective consent.
For the man with Tourette’s, the particular utterance has literally no relation to his mental state. Odysseus’ mental state is non-consenting. We don’t have to appeal to a particular utterance (though we could; if we asked him, “Hey buddy, do you want us to untie you,” he’s probably shout, “YES! BLOODY YES! WHY DO YOU THINK I’VE BEEN BEGGING YOU AND ORDERING YOU AND THREATENING YOU TO UNTIE ME FOR THE LAST TEN MINUTES?!”). We just have reason to let his prospective consent override his contemporaneous non-consent.
If you’re really hung up on the factual/expressive distinction, we can simply state his factual non-consent as an assumption of the hypo. But just in case you’re still really confused about the distinction, let me mention Westen’s Sleeping Beauty Hypotheticals. Both Sleeping Beauty A and Sleeping Beauty B are conscious, yet unable to provide any expressions of consent/non-consent. They are different in that Sleeping Beauty A has a mental state of consenting to the prince kissing her, while Sleeping Beauty B does not. This is factual consent. Factual consent doesn’t necessarily provide prescriptive consent.
In any event, we can clearly have a hypo where Odysseus (or a variant of Odysseus) has contemporaneous factual non-consent paired with expressions of that non-consent (“BLOODY UNTIE ME, DAMNIT!”). The entire point of the hypo is that in the face of that contemporaneous non-consent, we have reason to accept his prospective consent instead.
I’m sure you can find non-standard definitions in law. Remember, the Dictionary Act says that corporations are people. 😉 Either way, let’s just taboo “incapacitated”, because we’re just about to get to what you really mean.
You’re missing a qualifier. This is a major reason why Weston wrote his book. Notice that the subtitle is, “The Diversity and Deceptiveness of Consent as a Defense to Criminal Conduct.” People often conflate factual consent, expressions of consent, prescriptive consent, legal consent, etc. We pack a lot of different things into the word, and it’s extremely easy to deceptively hide one or the other concept in an unqualified use of the term. Here, you’re struggling with the distinction between factual consent and legal/prescriptive consent. Usually this comes up in discussing laws against sex with minors, so I’ll use that example (in part because I can copy/paste things I’ve written before…).
It’s very common for people to say, “Youth are incapable of giving or withholding consent.” At first glance, it really sounds like they have factual consent in mind. However, this is probably not true across the board. Most states have exceptions for underage sex in various forms (e.g., Romeo/Juliet laws, marital exceptions where marital age can be surprisingly young with parental approval). In these cases, the State may think that youth shouldn’t be punished for the infraction (maybe more likely in the case of Romeo/Juliet laws), but they are likely also acknowledging that it is possible for youth to factually consent to sex (this is quite evident in the marital exceptions). This is also not surprising! Teenagers have quite a bit of autonomy in many cases, and they seem to be capable of consenting to all types of things.
Nevertheless, States may think that sex involving minors is troublesome for a variety of reasons. They may be concerned about exploitation. They may think that some number of minors do not possess the requisite knowledge to factually consent. They can choose to say, “The best across-the-board rule is to make it illegal to have sex with a minor. It’s possible that some minors who are capable, willing participants will have their positive autonomy violated, but it is outweighed by protecting many other youth.”
Now, it’s important to note that there are multiple ways of structuring the law (and Westen gives examples of the various ways states actually do it). We often assume that the law is structured as follows:
1) It is illegal to have sex with another person without his/her consent.
2) For the purposes of (1), individuals under the age of 18 are not considered capable of consenting.
Here, (2) is referring to legal consent. We could put the qualifier ‘legally’ in there, and it would make sense. We could also structure a law as follows:
1) It is illegal to have sex with a person under the age of 18.
2) Consent of the individual in question shall not be considered a defense for the charge of (1).
Here, (1) doesn’t talk about consent at all. We don’t actually need to. (2) talks about factual consent, for it wouldn’t make sense to think it refers to legal consent. Both structures are capable of accounting for the idea that some minors may be capable of factually consenting (or could actually factually consent), while still rendering such consent invalid.
Bringing it back to Odysseus, we could probably structure a law either way (and cite different definitions until the cows come home), but the point is that your statement about him being incapable of withholding consent is almost certainly that of the legal (or perhaps more precisely, since we’re not actually drafting laws here, prescriptive) consent. Again, the whole point is that in this particular case, whether he factually non-consents in the moment or not, we have reason to accept his prospective consent as the relevant prescriptive consent.
I’m not making any kind of argument about justice. I still believe that states are a good thing to have. What I am arguing is that the continued residence cannot properly be called “consent” defined as “voluntary agreement not obtained under duress”, simply because there is no moment that we can point to and say that is when they agreed to the contract. The root of our disagreement can be reduced to two questions. If there is no single moment of consent to a resident, can we easily say that he consents? This is what I’m concerned about. The other is about the validity of exploitation in contracts, which is what you’re talking about. Exploitation is such a subjective concept, at what point can we say that it makes a contract void?
Lets say that you are an alcoholic who buys liquor from my liquor store. Am I exploiting you? Sure. Let’s say that you are an average guy who goes to my store to buy for a party that you’re throwing with friends. Am I exploiting you? Probably not. Now lets say you are an alcoholic but I don’t know and don’t care. Am I still exploiting you? How addicted do you have to be to alcohol before we can agree that it is exploitation? But regardless of all that, you still don’t have the right to come up to me and demand your money back because even though I exploited you, you still consented to the agreement of cash for alcohol.
This is why I’m clearly separating the question of exploitation from the concept of consent. While the notion of consent has some subjectivity to it, it is still much more objective than notions about justice. There are two main ways we can determine consent. One of these of course is an explicit contract, where we write down specifically what we can and can’t do and rely on courts for any ambiguities. There’s also the idea of revealed preferences. When I go to the movie theater, I implicitly agree to the rules there on my arrival. The problem comes when neither of these is at play. In both the situation of the homeowners association and the state(which I agree is analogous), there is the problem that someone who was raised there never has a moment of consent. This is why we can’t just look at their continued residence and claim they consent because we can never pinpoint the moment when that consent happened.
@ Controls Freak
I seriously doubt there is a meaningful distinction to be effected between a man whose brain has been hijacked by a tic and a man whose brain has been hijacked by sorcery. It is probably not the sort of distinction you want your account to hang on, in any case. Here is wikipedia on tics:
Immediately preceding tic onset, most individuals are aware of an urge[13] that is similar to the need to yawn, sneeze, blink, or scratch an itch. Individuals describe the need to tic as a buildup of tension[14] that they consciously choose to release, as if they “had to do it”.[15]
This sounds pretty damn identical to Odysseus, to me.
My view is that Odysseus is not capable of consenting sans phrase, because his rational agency has been crippled by the siren’s witchcraft. I do not see his mouthing the words “untie me” or what have you as appreciably different than a man shouting “No no no!” in the course of a tic or seizure.
@ Wrong Species
It will also be true of many sexual encounters that there will be no precise instant we can identify as the moment where consent was exchanged. Do you think that all such encounters are rape?
Your complaint here is not that exploitation is “subjective,” whatever that might mean, but that it’s vague. I agree that it is vague. Why do you think that’s a problem?
We can probably consider many examples in the spectrum (again, refer to the skydiver and the suicidal drug rehabber… or at the risk of injecting a whole ‘nother contentious bit, think about various other influences on mental states like alcohol/drugs), but I don’t find it problematic to tie factual consent to mental states and then allow external factors to influence mental states. I think we both agree that such factors can rise to the level of us not accepting some factual consent as prescriptive consent.
For Odysseus, we’ve lost the plot a bit, because it’s not enough to merely not accept his contemporaneous factual non-consent as prescriptive non-consent. It’s not even enough if you simply take the view that he doesn’t even have contemporaneous factual non-consent. Instead, in order to provide a defense for his crew keeping him tied to the mast, we have to accept his prospective consent.
In any event, I disagree with your identification between Odysseus and Tourette’s. There is nothing in the section you quoted that links the content of the tic to a relevant mental state. Everything about the tic is precisely the same whether the content of the tic is “no no no” or “yes yes yes”. Everything is precisely the same regardless of the context in which the tic is uttered. It is merely, “I felt compelled to say these words,” not, “I felt compelled to want or not want something (in accordance with how you could interpret the words ‘yes yes yes’/’no no no’ in the setting which I uttered them).” I believe the content of the tic is truly unrelated to the individual’s mental state of consent/non-consent.
And I believe that this is different from Odysseus. Odysseus didn’t just feel compelled to say some words that were disconnected from his desires. He felt compelled to actually desire being untied. Similarly, fear doesn’t compel the skydiver to merely say some words which could be interpreted as not wanting to jump; fear compels her to actually not want to jump. Withdrawal doesn’t compel the drug rehabber to merely say some words which could be interpreted as wanting to commit suicide; it compels her to actually want to commit suicide.
Finally, I’ll note that I’m not even sure if viewing these things as a total incapacitation is sufficient, anyway. I think there are multiple factors we use in evaluating whether to accept prospective consent. For example, I think one could consider foreknowledge of the nature of the future influence. Consider an instantiation of unconsciousness during sex. I think we can imagine different causes of spontaneous unconsciousness that are previously unknown to the individual… and regardless of how you come down on those cases, I think you would agree that there is a much stronger case for accepting the prospective consent of a narcoleptic who says, “I’m fully aware that I may fall asleep uncontrollably. In that event, I want you to continue.”
There is a single moment of consent to sex, it’s just subtle and varied. It could be the moment when one person invites the other person up for “coffee”, it could be the moment they start kissing, it could be the moment that one touches the private parts of the other. Of course, just because they initially consent doesn’t mean they can’t take it back. And a lot of people get in trouble because of these subtleties. Sex is still a one-off event, just like going to the movie theater. The exact moment may be ambiguous but the general time frame isn’t.
If the theater owner posts a list of rules which take place at 8 PM, the reason people have to abide by those rules is that the theater owner is an owner, and therefore can eject you from the theater for any reason or none at all unless you have an explicit contract that lets you stay. If the theater owner ejects you, it’s not for “violating the contract”, it’s for not agreeing to one.
@ Controls Freak
If you like, we can modify the case so that the electrical activity from the seizure induces a fleeting aversion to sexual activity. I do not see that this makes any difference– what transpires in an agent’s brain over the course of a tic or seizure just has no bearing on what she has or hasn’t consented to.
You’re making a couple of questionable assumptions here. First, it is not obvious to me why we should take an agent’s mental states rather than her speech acts as constituting consent. Normally, if someone wants to have sex but says “no,” we judge that they have not consented, and if someone doesn’t want to have sex but says “yes,” we judge that they have. If it is the speech acts and not the mental states that matter, Odysseus and the original tic case will indeed come out analogous. Second, and more importantly, I do not agree that Odysseus genuinely wants to follow the siren’s call and perish on the rocks. What Odysseus truly wants it to make it home to Ithaca, and Penelope. The siren’s enchantment is a sort of simplistic, alien stimulus-response mechanism grafted onto his psyche, not genuinely his and not sufficiently integrated with the rest of his cognitive states to count as a bona fide desire.
@ Wrong Species
You have done nothing to show that this is so. It is not enough to list some times when consent to sex might take place, as I could just as readily list some times when implicit consent to the social contract might be given. So, again, what reason do you have for thinking that there is always a precise instant where each of these sexual encounters is consented to which would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to the social contract?
@ Jiro
It’s not so clear to me that a paying customer at a theater could be thrown out for, say, using chapstick on the premises if this was not explicitly forbidden in a rule somewhere. Purchasing a ticket presumably gives you some protection against arbitrary treatment by the theater owner, even without a written contract.
Continued in the new open thread here.
The only relevant clause in the “social contract” is “The Sovereign may change any clause in the contract, retroactively, without notification or consent, at any time”. Calling the relationship between the State and an individual a “contract” is merely a way of painting that which is involuntary as voluntary.
The US constitution forbids both the federal government and the states to pass ex post facto laws or bills of attainder. I expect this a general requirement on valid social contracts.
The ink was barely dry on the constitution before it was decided that the prohibition on ex post facto laws didn’t apply to civil cases. Later it was decided taxes based on past income were perfectly OK. More recently the Supreme Court has ruled the State can change the law to add additional punishments (including indefinite confinement) after conviction. The provision is basically dead.
Which leaves the obvious question…
So what?
“Because you freely chose to remain in the country after having attained your majority, you have entered into a contract with the body politic binding you to its constitution and obliging you to follow its laws. ”
That argument assumes that the “body politic,” presumably meaning the government, owns the country and so can obligate you to leave if you don’t accept the contract. How did it obtain that ownership?
Well, as far as history goes, in my case it can summarized as follows: there were these guys with swords who said there was this guy called ‘king’ who now ruled over this particular stretch of land, and my ancestors decided to stay instead of moving in some other direction (not that it would have helped much in the long run). The more detailed history of how which various pieces of geographic areas and people were ruled by whom and when would take quite much time.
Let us call the sort of authority that governments exert over their territories “dominion,” and stipulate that the government having dominion over a piece of land is compatible with it also being privately owned but supersedes the private owner’s claims to the property. The US government’s assertion of dominion over all private property in the US can be found in the takings clause of the fifth amendment. This gives the federal government a number of licit paths to acquiring dominion over a parcel of land:
(1) Explicit consent at the country’s founding. Anyone who voted for a representative who participated in the ratification of the bill of rights thereby ceded dominion over their lands to the federal government in perpetuity.
(2) Explicit consent through the accession of states. Anyone who voted directly or through a representative for the state they inhabit to join the union thereby ceded dominion over their lands to the federal government in perpetuity.
(3) Explicit consent through subsequent oaths of allegiance. Anyone who has ever freely sworn allegiance to the US government and its constitution has thereby ceded dominion over their lands to the federal government in perpetuity. This will also include all naturalized citizens, all past and present members of the military, all peace officers, and so on.
(4) Acquisition by a licensed agent of the state. Naturally, any land purchased or first laid claim to by an agent of the federal or state government acting in his or her official capacity falls under the dominion of the federal government.
(5) Acquisition through just conquest. Any territory conquered by the federal government in the course of a just war falls rightfully under its dominion (I have in mind here all of the former Confederacy).
(6) Acquisition through intestacy. The land of anyone who dies heirless and intestate reverts to the dominion of the state to be disposed of as best suits the common good.
The one big hitch is that all of the country’s land was initially stolen from native americans and so could never have been legitimately ceded to the federal government by its “owners” in the first place. Ah, well. Ignoring this pretty significant complication, though, it seems to me that the federal government will by now have acquired dominion to virtually all of the country’s territory through one or more of channels (1)-(6). Consequently, native americans aside, it has every right to demand that citizens either abide by its rules or vacate the premises.
This is entirely circular. The very question at issue is whether or not “dominion” has legitimacy. There’s no question that governments assert it, but that’s might rather than right.
Do you think that property can be transferred from one party to another by the explicit consent of its current owner? If so, you should have no objection to the legitimacy of the government acquiring land through channels (1)-(3).
Do you think that property can be acquired by first discovery, purchase, or just conquest? If so, you should have no objection to the legitimacy of the government acquiring land through channels (4)-(5).
Do you think that property with no rightful owner should revert to the community, to be disposed of in accordance with just procedures in whatever way best suits the common good? If so, you should have no objection to the legitimacy of the government acquiring land through channel (6).
By that same argument, I’m also justified in going to war with the state in order to establish a positive claim of dominion over territory. Is there a particular member of the government workforce that this doesn’t apply to?
I’m sorry, I do not see why you think this.
Homesteading seems to me the most justifiable way to initially acquire ownership of land, with consensual trades transferring ownership thereafter. Homesteading requires working with and using the land, and not just proclaiming by fiat ownership over vast swaths of land.
I suspect the vast majority of land the government claims to own was claimed by fiat, not by homesteading, and therefore I don’t find its ownership claims justifiable. Unjust conquest of the other portions of the land also is not justifiable. Given its unjustifiable ownership claims, I don’t think there is any duty to obey government issued rules within its claimed property.
@ IrishDude
You seem to have two objections. The first is that the government cannot acquire dominion over a parcel of land by laying first claim to it, because land existing in a state of nature belongs by rights to whomever first mixes their labor with the soil, so just planting a flagpole is not enough. This is a reasonable objection, but it extends only to part of (4), leaving the other 5 pathways to dominion unaddressed. But the other 5 pathways alone are more than enough to give the federal government dominion over virtually all territory in the US, in most cases many times over.
The second is that the government cannot acquire dominion over a parcel of land confiscated in the course of an unjust war. This is not an objection to anything I’ve actually said, because (5) specifies that the conquest must be just, as, for instance, with the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War.
@Earthly Knight
(1) Assumes those who consented had just ownership of their property. Many property owners probably unjustly owned their land due to either unjust conquest or fiat claims without homesteading, and so couldn’t give government dominion over their lands since they didn’t justly own them.
(2) Assumes states had legitimate dominion. If they didn’t, their representatives couldn’t cede it to the federal government.
(3) If the mob takes control of a town unjustly, then newcomers to town give the mob fealty, that doesn’t make the mob’s claims to dominion over the town any more legitimate.
(4) That works if the land purchased is justly owned when it is purchased, or justly acquired. The Lousiana Purchase, as a big example, does not fit this description.
(5) As you note, land stolen from native americans was not legitimately ceded to the federal government. I don’t think the Confederacy had legitimate dominion, so there was no dominion for the federal government to gain control of.
(6) If the land was not under dominion of the state then they don’t get to lay claim to it when people die there. I don’t think very much land has ever been under the legitimate dominion of the state based on (1)-(5).
Aside from my objections above, any place where explicit consent wasn’t given in (1)-(3) means the federal government had no legitimate claims to dominion. That’s a significant amount of land.
Also, there’s discussion above about prospective consent, which you seem to be wary of, and ceding dominion to an entity in perpetuity, where consent can never be withdrawn, seems like something you’d be skeptical of as well. It’s certainly something I don’t agree with.
The idea is that individual land owners ceded control over their estates by voting directly or indirectly for the state to join the union.
I don’t think this could be right. How would you deal with intestacy in a state that’s already heavily populated? Do you think that each such death should set off a mad scramble to see who can start tilling the deceased’s soil first and so gain right to it by homesteading? As far as I can tell, the only sensible way of dividing up land under these circumstances is to treat it as a windfall for the community and have their representatives distribute it by fair and democratic procedures for the general good. But in so doing, it will pass through the dominion of the state.
This isn’t true. (3) encompasses all land belonging by rights to anyone, living or dead, who ever said the pledge of allegiance as an adult, or took an oath of enlistment, an oath of office, a law enforcement oath… This alone is going to give the government dominion over most of the country many times over.
There is no prospective consent involved in any of these, only explicit contemporaneous consent. And what is the objection to permanent transfers of land? Aren’t most sales and gifts of land effectively perpetual?
@Earthly Knight
You didn’t address the objection in (1) that most land initially owned was not gained in just manner, and therefore the owners couldn’t legitimately give dominion over it to the state. Nor did you address that large tracts of land that were purchased were never justly owned to begin with, like the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska, which combined is over 1/3 of U.S. land mass.
You instead seem to make the bold claim that any adult that ever said the pledge of allegiance gave dominion over their property in perpetuity to the state. That they ceded their right to autonomy over their property for the rest of their lives, and any new owner’s lives, by just saying the phrase: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”, a rote set of words almost exclusively said by kids in schools. Can you flesh this claim out in more detail, since it seems to be the one you’re most hinging your claim for state control over the entire country?
I never said the pledge of allegiance as an adult, so are the state’s claims over my property illegitimate?
If a state only had legitimate dominion over say 20% of the land mass of a state, based on explicit consent and original just ownership, then that is the only portion of the state’s land that can be given as dominion to the federal government at best. Even for that 20%, it depends on what type of dominion the original owners gave to the state (did they give authority to transfer dominion?), and which owners voted for or against the representatives that actually got elected, and which owners abstained from voting.
EDIT: I think it would also be helpful to more clearly define the terms. You see ownership and dominion as distinct concepts, so can you define what you mean by ownership and what you mean by dominion?
Given how strictly you’ve set the requirements for just acquisition of property, it’s doubtful you own any land in the first place, because it’s extremely likely that the first link in the chain of possession by which you acquired that land will be (by your lights) defective. And, if you do own any land, it won’t be any of the land you think you own. What’s more, if the rightful owner of a property is indeterminate or cannot be identified, it seems to me we are in the same situation as with intestacy and the property should fall to the dominion of the state. Your argumentative strategy here might succeed in blocking some of the state’s claims to dominion, but it actually turns out to be too powerful and deprives you of most of your possessions in the process.
Sure. Pledging allegiance to the republic commits you to respecting the claims made in the US constitution, the republic’s central charter. The fifth amendment to the constitution asserts dominion over all property falling within the territory of the United States. Hence, a pledge of allegiance to the republic cedes dominion over whatever property you own to the federal government.
I don’t know that there’s much more to say beyond what I set down at the start, that dominion is compatible with private ownership but supersedes it. A helpful analogy is to the authority a homeowner’s association exercises over a pod of condominiums; the owner of the condo is obliged to abide by the HOA’s rules and can be fined or dispossessed of the unit if she violates them.
Do you disagree with what I think is required? Which part?
It seems to me that in the absence of the original just owner making a claim to the property, the next best thing is to give ownership to the people currently using the property.
If a king claimed fiat ownership over 10,000 acres of unclaimed land, a claim I find unjust, and then sold 10 acre parcels to 1,000 people who then actually used and transformed the land, I think the best claim to ownership and dominion over that land are the people actually using it, not the king. The king got lucky that anyone even thought he actually owned the property, and got a windfall of cash based on his spurious claim, but the claim was never valid and the property rights are really only initially claimed in a just manner by the new occupants once they start using the land.
I think there’s a decent probability I have a less than fully just claim to my current property, given that it probably was unjustly acquired and sold through a chain on down to me. I think my claims to it are still more just than the state’s.
If a thief steals a painting from Person A and then sells it to Person B, with Person B having no knowledge of the theft, I think the order of justness for claims to the painting go Person A > Person B > thief.
I disagree. I don’t think such a contract binds as I don’t think most people saying the pledge of allegiance, school kids, actually think they’re agreeing to ceding dominion over their property to the state (I don’t buy your interpretation of the fifth amendment, anyways). In fact, they most likely don’t even own any land when they say the pledge, so they don’t have any authority over property that they can then grant to the state. The pledge is mostly mindless regurgitation based on prompting from school authorities.
If the state wants to claim dominion in a way I’d find just, they should go to all property owners with an explicit contract that states its terms clearly and get an explicit signature. It’s what HOAs actually do, but states don’t, which is one reason why I find HOAs legitimate and states not.
I reject the view that land can be justly acquired through labor-mixture but not flagpole-planting. Two reasons why. First, this seems to me to arbitrarily privilege sedentary agriculture over all other forms of life. Why should a farmer be entitled to so much more land than, say, a weaver or a cobbler, who needs only a small shop to ply her trade? (I am also suspicious that this line of thinking is designed to exonerate colonists for stealing land from tribes of native hunter-gatherers). Second, I think there are serious problems with applying this view retroactively– if early settlers of this country had known that they could only justly acquire land by homesteading, they would undoubtedly have acted differently, and it seems unfair to change the rules on them after the fact.
This can’t be right– it would mean that if I had robbed you yesterday all of the stolen possessions would today rightfully belong to me.
This is a different and more sensible proposal than the previous one: the land belongs to whomever first mixed their labor with the soil, or to whomever acquired it from them by a chain of just exchanges. Unfortunately, because this is not historically how property rights worked in the law, it will be either indeterminate or impossible to identify the owner of most of the country’s land. If we adopt my suggestion that property should, under these conditions, be disposed of by the community in accordance with fair and democratic procedures, the government will wind up with dominion over all this land in any case.
I am speaking only of adults here, but this is still enough to ensnare most teachers and a large number of high school seniors. Let’s take stock. By channel (3) alone, the state has dominion over:
(I) All property which has ever belonged to any schoolteacher at a time when they said the pledge of allegiance.
(II) All property which has ever belonged to an 18-year-old high school student at a time when they (freely) said the pledge of allegiance.
(III) All property which has ever belonged to any police officer at a time when they took the law enforcement oath.
(IV) All property which has ever belonged to any non-conscripted service member at a time when they took the oath of enlistment.
(V) All property which has ever belonged to a politician or civil servant at a time when they took their oath of office.
(VI) All property which has ever belonged to any naturalized citizen at a time when they took the oath of citizenship.
I can’t guarantee this is going to get the federal government control over all of the land in the country, but it’s going to be an awful lot of it. Note that pathway (3) is also independent of whether first acquisition goes by flagpole-planting or labor-mixture; even if everyone is confused about what property they actually own, they still cede whatever belongs to them by rights when they swear to uphold and defend the constitution.
It reads:
[P]rivate property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Surely this implies that private property can be taken for use with just compensation! How could this be possible, though, if the government did not claim dominion over all private property within the nation’s borders?
Are HOAs obligated to secure the explicit consent of owners who acquire their units by sale or bequest?
@ Earthly Knight
Before I continue arguing, I want to make sure that your claim that saying the pledge of allegiance once is sufficient to give state control over ones property in perpetuity is a sincerely held belief. I’m not interested in arguing with sophistry, and I think you have to admit that this claim is very suspicious. If you believe it deeply, I’ll continue to state further objections but I’m not interested in debating a claim not actually held by someone. So, just let me know.
Don’t people often cede property rights by signing a contract after skimming it, or by checking an “I Accept” box at the end of a list of terms and conditions that, proverbially, no one ever reads? I don’t see why swearing a solemn oath wouldn’t also suffice. It’s not as though the state is trying to conceal the terms of the social contract or something, in most places it requires high school students to study the constitution as part of compulsory civics curricula.
@Earthly Knight
You didn’t let me know if this belief is sincerely held by you. I’m aware of the superficial similarity between the pledge of allegiance and a binding contract, but am not interested in going into a more detailed rebuttal unless I know you’re arguing in good faith. So again, just let me know.
My view is that anyone who thinks we can relinquish property rights just by checking an “I Agree” box must a fortiori accept that we can relinquish property rights by swearing a solemn oath. Since you and I both sincerely believe the former, you and I must also sincerely believe the latter as well, on pain of inconsistency.
@Earthly Knight
I don’t agree with the claim that all that’s need to relinquish our property rights in a just way is to check an “I Agree” box, so your second claim doesn’t follow.
I’ll list some important ingredients I think are needed in a just contract that transfers property rights from yourself to another. Transactions can have more or less of each of these elements and can slide contracts towards something I consider consensual and binding or something I consider unjust.
Some elements of a contract that shift it toward more just:
*Not entered into under duress. If you point a gun at me and get me to check an “I agree” box I consider that a less just contract. I should have the option to walk away from the contract without any threats of aggression against me for failure to enter the contract. I should be able to say “No” to the offer and not have the contract terms imposed on me.
*No fraud. If you write in invisible ink or some intentionally misleading way on the contract a clause I’m unaware of when I check “I agree” then this is a less just contract.
*Each party has clear mutual understanding of the terms of the contract+. One reason we don’t allow minors to sign legally binding contracts is that we think they have less capability to understand what they’re agreeing to. Their cognitive function and reasoning ability is less developed. They may have less understanding of what they’re getting and what they’re giving. Similarly, people with a mentally ill state, or under the effects of drugs, are protected when they sign contracts. Contracts can also be written with obscure terms that may mean different things to each party, even when they’re competent adults, making enforcement of the contract less just.
*The terms of what should happen in the event one party breaches the contract are clearly spelled out. E.g., specifying that Arbitrators R Us will be used to handle contract disputes and agreeing to adhere to its decisions.
After writing out my above response, I found this nifty website that lists out the elements of a contract:
“The requisite elements that must be established to demonstrate the formation of a legally binding contract are (1) offer; (2) acceptance; (3) consideration; (4) mutuality of obligation; (5) competency and capacity; and, in certain circumstances, (6) a written instrument.”
The elements overlap some with what I wrote and I’d just add that giving dominion over your land in perpetuity to the state is one of those circumstances where a written instrument seems like an important requirement to me.
The vast majority if not all of the kids in school saying the pledge of allegiance (including 18 year olds) do not think that they are agreeing to give dominion over their property to the state in perpetuity, violating the competency and capacity requirement for contracts. This ‘contract’ is not written, and falls under the types of contract that I think should be in writing so as to be clear of the terms. The terms of breach of this ‘contract’ are not well-specified and understood. No members of the state that I’m aware of believe a school kid saying the pledge of allegiance is giving them dominion over that person, so there’s no other party to the contract that we can hold in breach if the terms of the ‘contract’ are violated. Kids not saying the pledge of allegiance will still have the state claiming dominion over their property, creating duress since they’re made an offer they can’t refuse.
So no, I don’t think checking an “I Agree” box necessarily creates legitimate contracts, and I definitely don’t think saying the pledge of allegiance once gives the state legitimate claim to dominion over the land and property of the ‘oath’ speaker.
+One reason the CFPB was formed was to have better informed consumers. They’ve created rules to simplify mortgages so the terms are more easily comprehended by borrowers. I actually think the CFPB performs an important role, and when I was a minarchist I thought one of the few proper roles for government was to ensure transparency and mutual understanding in contracts. As an AnCap, I’d prefer to see private competition for the role it plays instead of it having a coercive monopoly.
Here are some of the conditions you listed on valid contracts:
(A) Absence of duress
(B) Absence of fraud
(C) Comprehension of the contract
(D) Explicit penalties for non-compliance
(E) Mutuality of obligation
(F) Competence
(G) Written signature
All of these conditions are met for the various oaths I listed except for (C) and (G), which is okay, because (C) shouldn’t be on the list and (G) doesn’t strike me as terribly important. I stipulated that the oaths must be taken freely, by adults, which gets us (A) and (F). The constitution does not defraud anyone, which takes care of (B). (D) is satisfied by the criminal law code for the oath-taker, and by democratic elections and judicial review for the state. The constitution clearly outlines the government’s duties to its citizens, so there goes (E).
(C) should really require only that the parties to the contract have had ample opportunity to understand it, which will be satisfied by our compulsory civics classes and the universal availability of the constitution to anyone who wishes to read it. Ultimately, though, it is the contracting parties’ responsibility to make sure they understand the contents of the contract they are signing or the nature of the republic they are swearing allegiance to, and the state has done more than enough to discharge that duty.
(G) is almost certainly there because of the importance in law of having evidence that the agreement took place. But we are not concerned with evidence here, and it’s hard to believe there could be any real moral difference between solemn oaths and signatures.
I think, then, that according to these standards any adult who freely says the pledge of allegiance does indeed, by way of the fifth amendment, cede dominion over her property to the federal government.
@Earthly Knight
The Pledge of Allegiance ‘contract’ is missing acceptance (among other elements). Per the contract link above “Acceptance of an offer is the expression of assent to its terms. Acceptance must generally be made in the manner specified by the offer. If no manner of acceptance is specified by the offer, then acceptance may be made in a manner that is reasonable under the circumstances. An acceptance is only valid, however, if the offeree knows of the offer, the offeree manifests an intention to accept, and the acceptance is expressed as an unequivocal and unconditional agreement to the terms of the offer.”
I don’t think any high school 18 year old knows of the offer you think the state is making, and therefore can’t accept the offer. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks the pledge of allegiance is a binding contract between the state and individual where the individual gives dominion in perpetuity to their property. Perhaps you went to a unique high school where this interpretation was made explicit, but I’ve never seen the pledge described in those terms anywhere else.
I think most 18-year-old high school students either know or could reasonably be expected to know that pledging allegiance to the republic commits you to following the constitution, its central charter, and that the fifth amendment asserts that the government reserves the right to take private property in exchange for fair compensation.
If you polled 18 year olds after they said the pledge of allegiance in school, what percent of them do you think would agree that their saying the pledge gave the state dominion over their lands and property in perpetuity?
Roughly the same percentage of 18-year-olds who would be able to recite to you the contents of a passage take at random from any other lengthy contract 18-year-olds sign. This problem is not really restricted to teenagers, older adults often sign contracts without having any idea what they’re getting themselves into, too. I am more diligent and cautious than most, but lord knows I don’t read every EULA I agree to.
This means, though, that if we apply your scruples to every contract and not selectively just to political oaths, it would destroy our existing system of property, and likely lead to the demise of all commerce. There is a substantial fraction of the population who cannot be prevailed upon to carefully read and understand a contract of any length before signing it. Would you have them excluded altogether from the ownership and circulation of property?
Out of curiosity, how would one leave a country such as the US, upon obtaining their majority, without violating the immigration laws of the nation to which they are moving? And who pays for this often prohibitively expensive trip?
It’s not even JUST a matter of violating the laws of the host nation. In order to escape US law/taxation, you have to formally renounce your citizenship, which is a very long and expensive process – the FIRST (but not even close to final) step of which is “prove another country is willing to host you.” I’m pretty sure that U.S. consulates in foreign countries are the only places you can even apply for it.
I didn’t mention this since practically all you have to do is never travel back to the US again.
Though apparently the possibility of extradition for tax crimes is increasing: http://blogs.angloinfo.com/us-tax/2013/06/03/can-i-be-extradited-for-commiting-a-tax-crime/
“I didn’t mention this since practically all you have to do is never travel back to the US again.”
I mean yes, practically this is true in that they won’t extradite you just for not paying taxes. But you ARE still in open defiance of the law and they COULD theoretically extradite you.
And “sure you can leave but you can never return for any purpose even just to visit family” is pretty darn harsh and not exactly what most people probably have in mind when they say “if you don’t like it, you can just leave.” Most immigrants TO the U.S. frequently travel back to their home countries without having to worry about being thrown in jail.
That’s not quite correct. Since so many companies, particularly financial institutions, have parts operating in the US and overseas, there are plenty of sticks to make US citizens pay up. Have a look here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24135021
It isn’t just the paying up, it’s the paperwork you have to do as well. I still haven’t quite figured out if I’m supposed to be filling in tax returns even – last time I checked, it wasn’t exactly straightforward to figure out.
Rosemary,
Indeed. I also recall that a whole lot of foreign financial institutions simply refuse to do business with U.S. citizens, out of fear of running afoul of some sort of law or regulation.
FATCA.
Here are some suggestions. You will be responsible for the moving expenses; fortunately, for some possible destinations these will be trivial.
Ok.
For Candada the average 18 year old is unlikely to qualify: “Points are awarded based on your skills, education, languages you speak, and whether you have a job offer waiting for you in Canada.”
Mexico might be possible for an average 18 year old, though I can’t figure out if the FMM Tourist Card would allow you to get a job (if not, living expensive would be prohibitive, not to mention FMM renewal), or how easy it is to qualify for a permanent resident visa.
Good luck surviving in Svalbard (or Antarctica).
Sweden has it’s own hurdles (an interview only available at certain locations).
And again, for a typical 18 year old, New Zealand’s hurdles will be similar to Canada’s.
The 18 year olds who could emigrate the easiest would be those who have applied to, and been accepted by, foreign colleges. AKA the privileged.
With Mexico the only semi-feasible option for the rest, this is basically a Hobson’s choice.
I agree that you might not be able to maintain your current standard of living if you elected to immigrate to Mexico or Svalbard. I do not see how this impugns the validity of the social contract, however. Do you think it true, as a general rule, that contracts are only binding if the contracting parties have an abundance of good alternatives on offer?
As a personal ethical rule, yes.
As a categorical imperative, yes, within the bound that the other party to the contract is also similarly constrained or free. (E.g. “You have item X, I have item Y. So let’s agree to work together instead of attacking each other until we’re both free of this active volcanic island.” would be an acceptable contract, even though neither party has realistic alternatives.)
As a legal rule, obviously not in this nation.
My argument about moving to Mexico is that you have no legal way of making a living down there, and will thus be violating the social contract (of Mexico) which you speak of in your initial post.
And that Svalbard will likely leave you dead just trying to get to it.
Securing a work permit in Mexico does not seem terribly burdensome, although some facility with spanish would probably be helpful.
I had friends in college who had no trouble getting jobs teaching english in South Korea. If you’re not picky about living in a liberal democracy, China and Singapore are also possibilities. This will presumably require a college degree, however.
Svalbard can readily be reached by plane. Great place to go if you’re fond of seeds, they’re up to their ears in seeds.
At at price a typical 18 year old can afford? Maybe.
Everyone does do that. I drive on roads, most people don’t go at or under the speed limit, depending on polls close to 50% of people have admitted to smoking pot, way more people drive over the legal limit for alcohol than admit to themselves, lots of people skirt taxes- and these are just laws that almost everyone knows about. If you included laws on the books that are rarely enforced almost everyone is a habitual law breaker, they just like to keep their illusions.
Exactly. I think most people agree with me in practice. It’s just that they feel guilty about it. I think it is a better thing for folks to admit to it.
I think the explanation is more “I’m not a law breaker I’m X, the laws I break are incidental to who I am, those guys, all I know about them is they broke law X, that is who they are, lawbreakers”.
But as I note elsewhere I have been binging on TLP.
“I believe I have zero duty to follow the law. I will follow the law if I think it is a good law, or if I think I will be caught. I guess I also follow the law as a default; I only break the law if I have thought about the issue and decide it is best not to.”
This is basically my opinion as well.
I differ with you on red lights though. I will virtually never go through a red light, only because I’m worried about developing “bad habits” wherein I give the red light less “respect” than it probably deserves. If it’s the middle of the night in a deserted area, I will still come to a complete stop, look closely, and then I MIGHT proceed through the light if I’m 100% convinced that nobody is around. But I always stop first.
Of course my hesitation to go through the light has nothing to do with it being “the law” as it is being “the thing that’s designed to keep you from dying in a fiery car crash.”
Yes, it isn’t about obeying the law. I didn’t say I wouldn’t stop first, or at least slow down, because other folks don’t expect you to blandly drive through the red, you need to be careful.
I agree with your general position.
At one point in my teens, I thought there was a problem. I could see no good argument for why one was obliged to obey law qua law, but I thought that if people did not believe that the society would not work. My temporary solution was to obey laws until I adequately resolved the conflict.
Eventually I noticed that other people viewed my policy of obeying laws, for instance not offering a drink of wine to an underage friend, as weird, and I concluded that most people felt free to disobey laws they did not think were important, or morally justified, or likely to be enforced, and the society had not collapsed.
Out of curiosity, what are your standards for a collapsed society?
I believe there is a duty to follow the law as long as the law is not strongly morally objectionable or overly burdensome. So a guard shooting prisoners on just an ordinary day fills the strongly morally objectionable example. As for burdensome, I’d probably give an example of following every rule of the road exactly to the letter. Most humans can’t remember and measure by eye exactly how far away they have to stay from a school bus when children are crossing or whatever. I want people to make a good faith effort to fulfill the spirit of the law here, but I wouldn’t want the government crack down on every minor technical violation.
However, how strong the duty to follow the law is vs moraltiy etc. I’m pretty fuzzy on. I don’t know how to draw a bright line ahead of knowing the scenario at hand.
But I definitely don’t want everyone following their own conscience instead of the law. A lot of people strike me as pretty amoral if you only consider their own volition. Leaving aside people who are not merely amoral but downright malicious; a very small number of malicious people can do a lot of damage when unchecked. Also importantly, the lack of law can create huge coordination problems. Is vigilantism ok or not ok? What are the accounting rules? Torts? To some extent these things can be custom or industry/cartel practice, but I wouldn’t want to take a crack at all law being in the from of custom or agreement. I wouldn’t want all custom or agreement to be replaced by law either.
However, I certainly want people to have a higher morality than the law so to speak if that makes any sense; so I kind of get the sentiment. With what I would think of as ideal humans, law would be much more circumscribed.
How about everyone following the law when law enforcement is adequate to make it in their interest to do so or when they agree with it, and otherwise not? I think that’s a pretty good description of what I see around me.
What if the law is unethical? It’s one thing to claim that a law is merely annoying (say, a ban on recreational marijuana) if it’s something you don’t care about. What about laws banning beneficial things (like medical marijuana) or taxation where you are being deprived of your property?
In practice, I think that’s not too far off the mark. Although I think that in well functioning areas, Americans are at least a little bit more well behaved than that. For example, in a lot of cities I don’t see as much littering as their could be even though there’s an obvious benefit to the litterer and a very low chance of being caught.
Part of it may be it’s more like I think people should have an at least deontological view of following the law. Like it may benefit you to litter at a given moment and it’s often obvious you won’t get caught, but you’d be worse off if everyone littered.
I think enforcement is important for incentives. But I also think that people should still follow the law when it’s relatively neutral or they even mildly disagree. People are not going to agree on every detail of the law, but by having some respect for it outside of threat or self benefit you encourage a social norm of cooperation from others who might not agree with a law you like.
I wasn’t saying that I don’t believe in laws. I am not an An-Cap. We need to have laws about driving for example. And for things like murder, theft, fraud, etc. There are malicious people out there. I assume they are kept in check because they are concerned about the consequences of their bad acts, such as getting caught by the police. Are we being protected from malicious people because they respect laws? Perhaps sometimes, but I don’t think there is much protection there. I think there is more downside to people following laws blindly when they don’t make sense, than the rare occasion when a bad person doesn’t do a bad thing not because he thinks he’ll get caught, but simply because he feels he must respect the law.
Someone upthread mentioned Murray. Was this a reference to Charles Murray, and his book “Coming Apart?” He did have a somewhat convincing theory that the upper classes have revolted against blindly following cultural rules, but that they still do follow most of those rules, presumably because they are mostly rational. I think the cultural rules he referred to were things like don’t have children before getting married, don’t commit crimes that will get you put in jail, and study in school. The problem is that the lower classes have followed the lead of the upper classes in not following the rules blindly, but don’t have the discipline or the rationality, or something like that, to still do the right thing when it is needed. Thus the lower classes are a lot more dysfunctional than they were decades ago. There may be some truth to this, but not enough that I am willing to change my mind on this issue. For one thing, crime has decreased a lot in the last couple of decades, so it seems maybe the lower classes are as bad off as he says.
I assume respect for the law doesn’t matter for the case of thieves, etc except as avoidance of punishment. But among the more average citizen, I think respect for the law helps decrease things like littering, may encourage people to do jury duty even though it’s a pain, may be the nudge they need to at least use their phones a little less while driving etc. It’s more public goods type problems or laws/customs that exist that humans tend to ignore because they are famously bad at understanding the cost of low probability risks with huge downsides (doctors not washing hands, texting and driving, etc.) that I’m hoping some amount of respect for the law will make be a bit easier.
I’m honestly having a really hard time though thinking of a law I wish people would routinely break instead of blindly following. And my thought process in this sort of case runs more towards the side of trying to understand what the responsibility of lawmakers is, law vs. custom, complexity of law etc. so as to avoid making bad laws and knowing how to repeal them. Off the top of my head, I suppose segregation laws are an example of laws that I’m glad people made a concentrated attack on including things like ignoring them in protest, but those laws and white Southern custom were largely self-reinforcing. I don’t think that segregation laws didn’t align with what many Southerners thought of as moral. Could you give me a different example of a law you wish people would break more? Ignoring laws that most people of that society would find strongly morally objectionable as I already have a caveat for defying those. I’d appreciate it if the example was contemporary, but it doesn’t have to be.
EDIT (half baked thoughts): As for Murray, it wasn’t I who mentioned him. I don’t think that much of what Murray said had to do with law, but I see the connection between respect for law and respect for custom. I would argue that falling crime is not the thing to focus on in Murray’s case. Instead look at the stagnation of income in the lower social strata over the last several decades. There’s a strong argument to be made that having kids earlier, out of wedlock etc, is a pretty obvious factor contributing to poverty across multiple generations.
But as far as crime goes, the U.S. justice system also became much harsher in backlash to the earlier rise in violent crime in the 60s and 70s, so the drop shouldn’t be assumed to show a degradation in respect for the law (anyone have a way of showing such a drop does or doesn’t exist?) doesn’t matter. I don’t think the following causal chain is actually true, but if there really was a drop in respect for the law that caused a crime wave and we compensated by drastically ratcheting up punishments that strikes me as a pretty good argument for respecting the law.
Good question. I’ve been thinking about this. I have two answers, one concerned about people doing BAD things, and one more mundane.
1) I don’t want people to get in the habit of doing things just because they are the law. Have you heard of the Milgram experiment done in the ’60’s? In that experiment, researchers induced participants into torturing subjects with electricity based on authorities saying it was okay. I don’t have an example where people are doing this, but it can happen.
2) On a more mundane level, I want people to stop feeling guilty about walking against red lights because it is illegal. I don’t want people to say smoking pot is a bad thing because it is illegal, even though drinking is worse for you in so many ways. I tell my kids not to smoke pot because the consequences of getting caught are bad, not because breaking the law is a bad thing.
@Mark V Anderson:
History’s full of cases where people did awful things, even things they put up some resistance against, based on authority figures telling them to do that. Milgram’s experiments provided some level of lab support for what already appeared to be the case based on anecdote.
@Mark V Anderson
At the risk of being a pedantic off-topic interjector, I just want to say that I think Ancaps, at least in theory, do believe in laws, they just believe that those laws should be private and market exposed. Sometimes they behave as if they oppose law altogether, but theoretically, the issue is about what basis the law should be structured upon.
You do not wish every one would act under their own conscience and not blindly follow laws. Society has its problems on the margin but it beats the hell out of anarchy.
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
I mean, strictly speaking everyone is always acting under their own conscience. It’s just that their consciences are saying “blindly follow laws”, and that’s a good thing. And note that there are levels of blindly following laws; people who speed by 3mph will not necessarily rob convenience stores. What people blindly follow is much closer to “social norms” than “laws”, but there’s a norm to broadly follow the law.
“And note that there are levels of blindly following laws; people who speed by 3mph will not necessarily rob convenience stores. What people blindly follow is much closer to “social norms” than “laws”, but there’s a norm to broadly follow the law.”
I wonder if any studies have been done on this – I would guess that people who speed by 3mph probably are more likely to rob convenience stores than people who never, ever, speed (assuming we can find enough of these people to constitute an experimental group).
As I said from my own experience above, I think habits can be formed with stuff like this. Things like “It’s okay to speed a little because most cops don’t even care and everyone I know does it” could easily morph into “It’s okay to steal from a convenience store” if you happen to live among a peer group where stealing is glamorized. It’s easy to say “if people just follow social norms everything will be fine” if you’re looking at the social norms of your ingroup, but some other groups have strikingly different ones….
Given that people who never, ever speed are putatively more likely to be muling drugs, this seems non self evident.
My suggestion is for peer groups not to glamorize stealing.
As you pointed our there are clearly situations where not following the law seems to be the better choice (for me anyway). So while it is my default as well I don’t think anything’s wrong with breaking it per se.
That said I often see people breaking the law in what I think to be stupid and dangerous ways. A good example of this is people who want to drive faster then I’m currently going and then start getting really close to my car. So close in fact I’m confident they’d crash into me if I had to perform an emergency break. I’m sure they think they’ve got it under control. But I’m fucked as well if things go wrong. It really annoys me.
So I try not to be like that. If I’m confident I know better I’ll ignore the law and not feel bad about it. If I’m unsure I tend to err of the side of cautious, especially if I feel a desire to chose the more dangerous option.
All in all this makes me a pretty law-abiding citizen I’d say. Probably more so then average, at least on mundane topics like going over the tempo limit or crossing red lights.
I suspect I may be more law abiding than the average person also. But only when those laws make sense to me. I hate tailgaters too, but I suspect that those people that tailgate don’t think they are dis-obeying the law. They are dis-obeying common sense, and that is the rule I try to obey.
I’m interested to know what people think about this in the international law context, i.e. replace the individual perspective with the national one. Very topical given the recent brouhaha over Israel.
I tend to do a universalization-like calculation, because I think that my behavior has (maybe marginal) effects on (perhaps just the local) culture. As a matter of coincidence, I recently made an analogy to international law to my hockey team on the issue of ringers. “We should internally enforce the norms we wish to project externally.” I like to use the example of Kosovo. It was called “illegal but legitimate”. Sure enough, it came back round to be Item Number One on Russia’s list of why their activities in Crimea are justified.
I think the disconnect comes in because people feel, uh, disconnected from the process of making culture… and especially the process of making law. They view law as something that is merely imposed by others rather than a joint endeavor. Sometimes, it kind of is, which is also why I care more than others about norms and legitimacy in process. As I’ve opined here before about the structure of federalism, the point of legitimate process (if we structure it well) is to minimize this disconnect. So, while I wouldn’t commit to an absolute duty to follow the law (I don’t think anyone would; there are plenty of examples of law which is expressly written for the purpose of setting a line from which exceptions are intended to be made), I would claim that absent extremely compelling reasons (and I have a high barrier for this), we have a duty to follow laws enacted by legitimate process so as to not aid in delegitimizing that process (and possibly begin tearing down the benefits we get from a legitimate process).
All that being said, international law is an interesting realm. In many ways, it’s more like a local culture or a small hockey league than a nation of laws. For all the outside commentary involved, there are really just a relatively small number of actual State actors, norms develop fluidly over time, and it seems to be incomprehensibly difficult to agree on legitimate process beyond explicit all-party agreement to terms. For example, this is why we see noise every so often about what the ICC “wants” to do with respect to some US official or act, and the US response is always, “Lol, don’t care.”
I’m not sure “international law” is directly comparable to national law in this way. It seems that violations of international law are very inconsistently prosecuted and enforced – that often, it boils down to either military supremacy or political concerns rather than objective evidence in similar courts with similar standards.
International law is, at the end of the day, based entirely on a tangled web of various agreements that are only binding to the extent that they can be enforced, and unlike the state in the national picture, there is no one entity that has the power to enforce these things on say, the U.S., China, Russia, or various countries that one of those three chooses to maintain very close relationships with (Israel comes to mind – I’m sure there are others).
I almost feel like it’s a term that shouldn’t even be used – because it’s so different than any other form of “law” we typically recognize.
If international law was anything but a sick joke, the UN wouldn’t spend all its time attempting to enforce it upon only one nation that is not even remotely the worst offender.
Yes, per the 4th Commandment.
OTOH, legislation of late in recent decades has become so prolific and fluid in some places that I physically cannot know what the law even is. I’d have to have a full-time speed-reading lawyer advisor just to keep up, and that’s outside of the reach of all but the most rich. So I mostly default to Christian morality and ethics, because that at least has the virtue of not changing much, and any human laws contradicting God’s law are invalid anyway.
Keep the Sabbath? Obeying your parents? Are the government your metaphorical parents in this scenario?
The Princes of the Earth are God’s appointed stewards over us peasants. We ought obey so long as they do not violate their remit.
The CC puts obedience to earthly authority under the 4th Commandment:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a4.htm
I think that laws should change so that people follow them, not the other way around. Laws can be very strict and always enforced if almost everyone can agree on them. In this, the 51% kind of democracy is just a too low a standard. I would prefer a state where you’d need something like 75% support to pass a new law, but only 51% support to repeal an old one”. The result would be a country with very few laws which almost everyone would find important and would follow them. Switzerland seems to be close to that model since if you want your law to last, you have to make sure people don’t repeal it in a referendum a few months after – unlike in other countries you can get your laws repealed even during the same term you introduced them. This also makes legislation very slow, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
David’s example is a nice case – 21 is a ridiculous minimum drinking age, so almost nobody respects this law. In Germany, you can drink weaker alcohol from the age of 16 and all alcohol when you’re 18. That is something that is much easier to follow, since there’s a much bigger consensus that it makes sense. The result might as well be that you have fewer 14year olds drinking in Germany than in the US.
If there are a lot of laws a sizable minority of people disagrees with and disrespects, it reduces the respect for law in general and that’s a bad thing. Conversely, if almost everyone is on board with almost every law, people tend to follow even the laws they are not so sure about, because they believe that by and large the legal system makes sense and because everyone else seems to follow them which is a form of peer-pressure. Of course, this does not hold for laws you find completely immoral and wrong, but in the system I mentioned there should hopefully not be many of those.
I think laws shouldn’t substantially change, and fads-of-the-current-generation shouldn’t make it into law in the first place. Also, there shouldn’t be as many laws that an average intellect cannot memorize the whole thing with some effort – certainly not more than a Koran’s worth – because people will obviously not follow stuff they don’t know.
“Fads of the current generation” should be avoided by the requirement that you need significantly more than 51% support to pass a new law.
Fair enough.
Constitutional amendments are a lot harder than that, and yet…
Noteworthy in that it was one of the few fads which made it into law but was eventually successfully repealed, rather than simply sticking around forever because “It’s the law!”
I think this has come up at SSC before, and I’d say there’s no duty to follow the law just because it is the law. If the law proscribes something that is wrong in itself, then the duty follows from the duty not to do wrong. If the law sets a standard which may be arbitrary but makes things work better than without it, there is a duty to follow it (usual example here is which side of the road to drive on). But if the law is (as is so often true) just something a bunch of politicians in a room somewhere decided on with the connivance of various interest groups….well, a law set down by a king chosen by a watery tart throwing a sword has as much legitimacy.
I would say it is more of an “obligation” than a duty, as there are higher obligations and considerations that can take precedence. That said, yes I have an obligation to follow the law, and I’m actually somewhat surprised and disturbed to find so many people saying otherwise.
At the most basic level I view wider society and coexistence with those outside my in-group as an iterated prisoners dilemma where respect for the law is essentially an agreement to pick the “cooperate” option, with all the implications that follow.
I feel that a lot of people in “WEIRD Countries” take their prosperity for granted and thus fail to appreciate / ignore the social norms that make it possible.
I don’t wish this at all.
Don’t assume that everyone’s conscience says the same things as your own. There are ways in which many people’s conscience tells them to act that I would really rather not have them act.
IKR?
This is a large component of why I say that a lot of people (too many IMO) take our prosperity and social norms for granted.
Yeah, I typed (then elected not to post) “Huh. It’s not often you see somebody defending Kim Davis. Good on you.” (For the record, I actually agree with her on a personal basis. Also think that people should obey the law regardless of their feelings.)
I think the big ideas like don’t hit and don’t steal are very widely shared with rare exceptions. There’s always border cases that people have different thoughts on though.
Of course not. There is plenty of conflict in society because people do believe different things. Most interactions with other folks have nothing to do with the law.
I think other people’s consciences will match mine as often as the law does.
There’s a bit from one of the viking epics where a fellow goes out raiding at a farmstead, but gets captured and placed under guard by the farmer and his family. In the middle of the night, the guard falls asleep so the raider grabs all the loot he can and sneaks away in the darkness. Before he’s gotten too far, he thinks to himself “No, this isn’t right, I’m acting like nothing but a common thief.” So he heads back to the farmhouse, sets it on fire, and kills everyone as they flee. Then he picks up the loot again and goes home, happy that he made the right decision and acted honorably.
You are thinking of a bit in Egilsaga. You have most of the details wrong, but your essential point is correct.
Theft, secret taking, like murder, secret killing, is shameful. Robbery and killing are not. Egil, being an honorable fellow, insists on going back to the village that he and his comrades escaped from, setting the feast hall where the villagers who captured them are celebrating ablaze, standing in the door announcing who he is and that he took their stuff, and killing anyone who tries to come out.
Later in the saga Egil himself is saved when his friend Arinbjorn persuades Eric Bloodaxe to postpone killing Egil until morning because “night killing is murder.” Egil, who is a great skald as well as a great warrior, spends the night composing a poem in honor of Eric and offers it to Eric in payment for his head, thus giving Eric a reasonable excuse for not killing him.
Which Eric can use, since Arinbjorn, who is one of his chief retainers, has offered to fight on Egil’s side just to make it interesting. And Eric, having been driven out of Norway by his brothers, presumably due to Egil’s curse (although Eric may not know that), doesn’t really want to have two thirds of his retainers fighting the other third. Especially with Egil on the side of the third.
My favorite saga.
Thanks for the corrections to a foggily-remembered bit of story.
I think this is a poorly-framed question.
Imagine a spectrum: on one end, the belief that there is not the merest glimmer of an injunction to follow the law; on the other, the belief that following the law is the highest moral good in and of itself. Somewhere in the middle, the idea that ‘it’s the law!’ is an moderately strong argument for do-that or don’t-do-that on coordination grounds. A nudge.
I agree it is a spectrum. I’m at the side where “it’s the law” is a poor argument.
The answer that I was raised with is sort of a riff on the idea of a social contract.
You have a duty to obey the law and to generally be a good citizen beyond the strict letter of the law. But it’s not a one-sided obligation. Law-abiding citizens are owed good treatment, especially compared to criminals, and if society can’t hold up it’s end of the bargain then the contract is null and void. It’s like the (false) impression most people have of social security: you pay in when you’re young and you get your money back when you’re old.
As far as I’m concerned, my social contract is very much in force. Things have been moving in a troubling direction lately but staying on the straight and narrow has still left me in a fairly good position.
Basically this, although I would phrase some things differently.
I think if we look at the concept of “civil disobedience” vs. “rioting” its probably useful (although in these part I feel like I may not get a charitable hearing on this particular point.)
True civil disobedience is a willful disobeying of the law in order to make society aware of injustice. There is an assumption people engaged in the disobedience are willing to be charged under the law as a means of drawing attention to parts of the law or execution of law. Those who engaged in civil disobedience want to draw attention to themselves and frequently do so in a conspicuously non-anonymous manner.
The behavior of rioters may look in some ways similar, and sometimes they accomplish the same ends because the riot does draw attention to injustice, but they are mostly acting outside of the social compact. Civil disobedience is preferable to rioting.
People who avoided obeying the fugitive slave laws and were unwilling to be charged under the law were still acting justly, IMO, even though this wouldn’t satisfy your definition of civil disobedience. If they tried to stay inconspicuous I would still condone their actions.
I would be willing to accept such things in roughly the same situations where shooting people is justified. A fugitive slave is justified in shooting someone to keep from being returned to slavery; along with this, people are of course justified in using measures short of shooting, including law violation.
Also, the Fugitive Slave Law is odd in that it probably would not have been passed if all the slaves could vote. If you are prevented from changing the law (and if this has substantial effect–for instance, I doubt that letting criminals vote would really change our jail system), the justificiation for following the law is much weaker.
If, in the US you mean the past 200 years or so, I’ll agree. The over-reach of the Commerce Clause, ignoring of the General Welfare and the violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments all seem to me to be a breach on the side of the government.
This is a false dichotomy.
The world we live in is stupendously complex, and our actions have local and distant consequences. I may have a good conscience, and I may endeavor to follow it, but if I am insufficiently-informed, my conscience might lead me into actions that have ill effects. As a single person, I have no claim on the information bandwidth required to sufficiently inform my own conscience. So, my conscience requires that I follow some laws that I do not necessarily understand or even agree with.
Even if we could possess the necessary information bandwidth, conscience alone is insufficient to solve all problems or guide all interactions, and it is hard to envision how we would organize ourselves with no freestanding agreements as to what behaviors and outcomes we each must accept from one another.
From a more ethically pragmatic standpoint, no one will follow their conscience to a degree sufficient to produce an oversight-free world that is at optimal functioning. They just won’t. Especially if a critical imperative is that we establish no rules for one another. The unscrupulous will achieve dominance – will enact laws – by violence and subterfuge. It follows that, from a legal/political standpoint, conscience-driven anarchy is a temporary destabilization that collapses immediately into tyranny and gradually re-evolves toward some centralized -archy. Thus, even if laws are tyranny, they are an inoculation against greater forms of tyranny.
If I conclude that laws are a necessary micro-tyranny necessary to prevent a macro-tyranny, this further compels my conscience. Granted, some laws are worse than others, sometimes so obviously that conscience compels disobedience. But if I do not have the information bandwidth to conclude that a given law is so very tyrannical, then the default position most in line with conscience is – as you say – blind obedience.
So I think that to follow one’s conscience is to obey the law unless one has good reason not to. This is essentially your praxis, on which we don’t seem to disagree. I only disagree with your assertion that obedience to the law and obedience to conscience would be competing or incompatible modes.
I agree that there is no duty to obey laws, we should follow our conscience, but we should also use our heads about disobeying laws we disagree with if the consequences are likely to be terrible for failure to obey.
I served in the United States Army. In this environment there are many regulations, and your duty to uphold all these regulations is explicit and far more frequently enforced than in civilian contexts.
It is also literally impossible to accomplish any given task while observing all of the regs. Usually this is because there is some conflict with two standing orders, and we are required to get the permission of the ‘X’ Officer but there is no officer of X assigned. To literally follow the regs would lead to a lot of Asimov-like failure modes.
Fortunately we had a concept referred to as “end state,” which meant that as long as the results were good no one would examine the process for getting there.
I conclude that the ethics of how you approach the law are useless without considering how you approach the aims of the law.
I’m curious for you to elaborate upon “Asimov-like failure modes”. It seems clear to me this is a reference to I, Robot conflicts among the 3 laws, of which there were a variety. But what made the stories so compelling was the creative manner in which Asimov conceived of such possible conflicts. (Reminds me that I really need to re-read I, Robot.) Is there any pattern you can discern in the types of rule-conflict failure modes that most often arose in practice, at least in the Army?
I ask mostly because I found this article a bit terrifying, even though I’m generally a Yudkowsky skeptic. (I trust the Pentagon less than Google to be wise in its deployment of autonomy, and I think it’s self-evident that DoD will be vastly more aggressive in actually developing the technologies. Optimistically, they’ll probably also be far less competent and creative.)
I don’t recall which story it was in, but the example I was thinking of was one where the robot was sent out with instructions not to return without fuel. It found a small lake of the stuff, but to try and get any would destroy it. Because it could neither disobey nor destroy itself, it just ran around the edge of the lake in circles.
It is common in the military to be told “don’t come back until you have done X,” where you do not have the resources or authority to do X. In such cases, we improvised.
Thus it is said: if you aren’t lying, cheating, and stealing you aren’t trying hard enough.
The story was “Runaround.” Speedy was a valuable experimental robot, so it was given a higher priority on self-preservation than most, in order to stop the owner from carelessly damaging it. In reality, the selenium was important enough to be worth the risk, but the robot didn’t know that, so it just stalled out.
I miss that golden-age sci fi type of story: a technology creates an easily comprehensible logical conundrum that is not so easy to solve. Asimov was the master at these, obviously.
Stories like “Runaround” baffled me a bit even when I first read them as a kid. The wording of the Three Laws indicates pretty clearly that the lower-numbered laws have lexical priority over the higher-numbered ones– not merely a higher weighting.
@ Cerebral Paul Z.
Which was why Asimov changed things a little; as @beleester points out, the robot in question had a slightly beefier Third Law, enough to override the Second unless you phrased the order particularly strongly. As I recall, to make things worse, for implementation reasons, the conflict made the robot malfunction in other ways (so they couldn’t just give it a stronger order).
Much of this depends on what is meant by ‘duty’. For example, all the commentators above who explain that “no, but one should follow it by default when I don’t have enough information” and so, could described actually agreeing, given a suitably broad definition of the word ‘duty’.
I believe that in general, yes, in the current political system where I live, there is some degree of duty. Because the legitimacy of representative democracy hinges on the idea that we have right to elect representatives and the representatives have right to craft laws and the elected government uphold them, and I believe in that legitimacy. Only coherent position that for most issues, one should follow the law, unless by following the law one commits a moral wrong.
One could argue in the spirit of the general idea of social contract that if you consider the law and the government unjust, then you’d have a duty to try to change the law and the government. But even in that case, one should take into account that it’s a good for society to have a norm of citizens who follow the norms of the society, and the most formal norms are codified as laws, so if it’s only something you disagree with and not something inherently wrong, you should probably do it nevertheless. Especially so because by observation I have noticed that most of the people don’t think this through, don’t care, and will generally act selfishly if they think they can get away with it. Establishing a social norm is something everyone can do, every day.
Of course, there is such a thing as reasonable tolerances and such. If the court would throw the case of driving 2 km/h above the speed limit out, and it will, I will take that into account. I think the traffic code even has specifies leeway for obvious situations such as crossing a zebra walk even if there’s a red light in the middle of night with no traffic.
@ nimim.k.m.
Of course, there is such a thing as reasonable tolerances and such. If the court would throw the case of driving 2 km/h above the speed limit out, and it will, I will take that into account. I think the traffic code even has specifies leeway for obvious situations such as crossing a zebra walk even if there’s a red light in the middle of night with no traffic.
Lets suppose a less obvious situation. You’re a bike/foot
medical courier with the immediate duty of delivering a life-saving medicine to a small doctor’s office. You’re at a complicated intersection. To follow all the rules would take several minutes, during which the patient would be in increasing danger. You take a quick look around, grab your moment and zoom through illegally. It works: the medicine arrives in time, and there is no glitch in traffic.
Someone filmed the incident and you are charged with violating traffic rules whose official purpose is to “Guard Public Safety”.
How severe should your punishment be?
The punishment should be severe enough that the law functions as a Schelling point on bike/foot crossing behaviors at complicated intersections.
That is the non-violent equivalent of defense of others, so the law should cover that case without explicitly mentioning medical couriers. This seems to be covered mostly by the necessity defense.
Now hold on, though. If your timeliness was essential to the life-saving-ness and you could demonstrate that in court (and you have an attentive judge instead of a bored traffic judge), you could use the defense of justification to get yourself acquitted.
Maybe some kind of “efficient breach” would be called for in that situation. The punishment should be a fine large enough that most people wouldn’t do the crime unless it was life-or-death, but they would do the crime if it is life-or-death.
IMO, a better question is how severe should the punishment to the busybody who reported you be. Freelance enforcement of malum prohibitum rules should be discouraged.
@Saint Fiasco
Efficient breach doesn’t work because the punishment lands on the courier while the benefit lands on the patient. Why should I as a courier take a significant penalty to save someone else?
I’ve heard a version of this scenario that I suspect most people would decide differently — a drunk hiker in the woods comes upon a man who has had a car accident on a forest road. He is unconscious and injured and clearly in need of a hospital, but the car is still driveable. There’s no cell phone reception and the nearest land line/ranger post/whatever is too far to walk to and bring help rescue the man in time. The hiker drives the man to the hospital without incident, he is saved… but the hiker arrested for drunk driving on arrival. Do you convict the hiker?
(I suspect the real-world answer is the hiker isn’t even permitted to introduce the necessity defense)
Oddly enough, this links to a passage I have just been writing in a chapter of my current book–the chapter deals with ideas from other legal systems that we might want to adopt.
In 18th century English law, criminal prosecution was private. One advantage of that is that crimes the government approves of can still get prosecuted. That’s also a disadvantage, since some crimes don’t get prosecuted not because they are committed on behalf of the government but because there is no good reason to prosecute them, as in some cases in this thread.
Allowing private prosecution–I was assuming as a supplement to public prosecution rather than, as in the 18th c. case, a substitute–opens the possibility of prosecuting someone because you don’t like him or in order to get paid off to drop the prosecution.
Is it on net a good or bad idea to allow a private citizen to prosecute a crime that the government has declined to prosecute?
Considerting that the Wikipedia example actually mentions drunk driving, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be allowed to introduce the necessity defense.
@DavidFriedman
Given that our legal system is so complex and open ended that pretty much everyone can be said to break the law quite often (are you going for a walk or ‘loitering?’), it opens you up for harassment if you have a neighbor who doesn’t like you for some reason, but has a lot of time to monitor you.
@Jiro
Drunk driving comes out of traffic law, which traditionally lacks protections afforded for other crimes. At one time the lack of such protections was compensated for by the relative lack of punishment (generally a small fine) for such offenses, but lobbying on drunk driving has pushed the penalties way up, and discouraged the application of any sort of legal protection.
Even if the necessity defense were to be allowed, I expect the continuing hysteria around drunk driving would result in it failing on the grounds that drunk driving is a greater danger than allowing one person to die. This seems to be the common opinion when the hypothetical is discussed.
Even if the necessity defense were to be allowed, I expect the continuing hysteria around drunk driving would result in it failing on the grounds that drunk driving is a greater danger than allowing one person to die.
Leaving aside the legal technicalities, this is the sort of thinking that I wanted to explore. Assume that the trial was ‘in the court of public opinion’ and that either the courier or the hiker would be punished, but not both.
So in effect it is a choice of which principle to support: MADD’s … or well, there isn’t a neat familiar term for the courier’s action. (It’s not a Schelling point, though I expect there are several
terms for it at TVTropes.)
@Aapje-
I’m not a big fan of private enforcement of criminal law, but a neighbor who wants to harass another neighbor by way of the courts already has plenty of ability to do that with. Some of the negligence and interference claims I’ve seen would be totally inexplicable if not for pure neighborly malice.
@Jordan
I agree, but if I understand Friedman correctly, in his system the judge would be obligated to sentence any time the law is broken and someone files a complaint. In our current system, in theory a judge can dismiss a claim if (s)he thinks that it is harassment.
The judge only sentences if he convicts, and is only supposed to convict if the defendant is guilty. But I am assuming that the judge doesn’t have the option of saying “he is guilty, but I’ll let him go anyway.”
Well, I’ll begin with the disclaimer that I took an oath to uphold the law, and I take my oath very seriously. There was even a nice ceremony, which makes it, like, double-binding. And a stamp! So I don’t consider myself to be in a position to tell people to ignore laws when they don’t like them. But I’ve interacted with a lot of people being exposed to legal processes, and I think I have a map of how they feel.
So, I haven’t developed this very far yet, but I think there are several types of laws, which I’d classify roughly as ‘Normative Mandatory’, ‘Behavior-adjusting’, ‘Regulatory’ and ‘Last Resort’. Possibly I could think of more categories, but these seem most relevant to me.
1. Normative mandatory – Laws which exist to enforce a broad societal norm. Laws against murder, or theft, or driving in the opposing lane and dodging oncoming traffic. These laws are reflective of something on which society has reached a broad consensus. I think you can say a law is normative mandatory when even legally expressing opposition to the law is outside the Overton Window.
2. Behavior-adjusting – Laws which exist to try to alter some aspect of society which the powerful element(s) of that society dislike. Laws against taking photos of farms, or against smoking weed, for example; these laws have plenty of defenders (believe it or not!) but there’s no real stigma to opposing them, and in fact some of them probably have more public support for abolition than against.
3. Regulatory – I don’t just mean agency regulations here, but any law which establishes a baseline standard of conduct for something, but only penalizes departure with mild economic sanctions. These are laws which people mostly see as “price of doing business” laws, often designed to fund some part of the government rather than actually motivate behavior in a certain way.
4. Last Resort – One of the underappreciated roles of the court system is that it will eventually render a decision, and there is a surprisingly broad segment of society which needs this. Things like laws which govern contract interpretations, or UCC sections, or property-line disputes, or custody battles. These are laws which take a private dispute which the parties are unable to settle themselves and point to the person who wins.
I think that, in general, society looks at the laws like this:
1. Normative Mandatory laws have to be followed, and those who break them are bad people.
2. Behavior-Adjusting laws probably should be followed, but failure to do so isn’t the end of the world.
3. Regulatory laws are eh, and breaking them is morally neutral unless this negatively affects me.
4. Last Resort laws, once a court has weighed in, absolutely have to be followed, and those who break them are bad people.
I think this fits the model which says that people care about breaking laws insofar as those laws hold a mirror to society. Where they fall outside of what ‘society’ cares about, people also don’t really care about them. The last one is a weird kind of exception- people can and will acceptably argue bitterly about which of two neighbors should be found to own a shared driveway, but once the last court of appeals weighs in, pretty much everyone seems to accept that the issue is decided and that it would be wrong (or at least gauche) to keep fighting about it.
Anyway, I think that’s what was happening in the famous series of cases Justice Kennedy wrote, leading up to Obergefell. At some point in the past, laws regulating sexual behavior were normative mandatory laws, and a court striking down a law against gay sex would have been seen as invalid in the same way as a court striking down a law against theft. Over time, society changed, and the law became behavior-adjusting, and it’s fair game for courts to strike down behavior-adjusting laws.
How many federal laws are there, in the United States exactly?
Mu. What is “one law” for purposes of your count? I could give you the number of Acts of Congress passed since 1789, but that’s not a very useful count. Public Law 83-591 (the Internal Revenue Code) is a single act, as is Public Law 111-50 (naming a post office in Long Island City after Geraldine Ferraro). Sections of the US Code is a little better but not much: there are many sections that have been superseded by newer law but remain on the books due to congressional sloppiness and, of course, they differ a lot in length and importance. You could also count Supreme Court decisions, documents published in the Federal Register, etc., etc., many of which straddle the boundary between law and not-law, but it’s not clear where that boundary is.
And then there are lots of important laws that aren’t federal. The law against murder is in your state’s penal code, local zoning ordinances are much more restrictive than the EPA about what you can do with your property…I could go on. Somehow lots of people have gotten it into their heads that the United States federal government is the only government that does anything significant anywhere on earth, but it isn’t so.
I said federal to simplify things a bit, and because federal law would probably apply more broadly to a larger number of posters.
Whatever counts as a law in the kind of mental checklist one might run possible future actions by. If you’re the kind of person who believes it’s your duty to follow
every law, I would imagine you’ve read every word of every relevant law passed in any jurisdictions that apply to you, then I guess converted them into some kind of mental shorthand which you reference every time you do anything. I suppose such a list would necessarily include not only Supreme Court decisions, but also a lot of decisions by lower courts.
If you follow every law without doing something similar to this, then I guess I am interested in hearing about which methods you employ.
I do not currently run a factory producing fluorine gas. I am not familiar with the laws government the operation of a factory that produces fluorine gas. However, I am aware that if I wanted to open a factory producing fluorine gas that the are laws that govern such a situation and I’d either need to familiarize myself with them or hire someone that was familiar with them.
I threw the word “relevant” in there, hoping it would cover things like that.
Here’s a more concrete example. Section 155.25 of the New York Penal Law defines petit larceny as stealing property and designates it as a misdemeanor. Section 155.30 defines grand larceny* as stealing property under one of eleven different conditions – the property is worth more than $1000, or it was a motor vehicle worth more than $100, or it was a firearm regardless of value, or it was obtained by extortion… – and then designates it as a felony. Is section 155.30 a single law describing a single crime, since these are all “serious” forms of stealing property deserving of higher punishment than petit larceny? Or is it 11 laws describing 11 crimes, since any of the 11 behaviors is separately a crime itself? Or is it not a separate law at all, since stealing property is already a crime (albeit with a lesser punishment) under section 155.25? I suspect different people will have different answers to this, and so I maintain that “how many laws?” is a question that cannot be meaningfully answered.
*in the fourth degree, but the same logic applies to the subsequent sections defining the three higher degrees.
It’s seems like this is a rhetorical move instead of a real problem. It’s easy to say “look at the size of the federal code, no one could possibly read all that. It’s impossible to follow the law!” and then turn around and do something you know damn well is against the law even if you can’t cite chapter and verse.
When I worked at legal aid, I never had a client prosecuted for something that he genuinely had no idea was forbidden.
@ BBA
thanks for giving my post more consideration than it was worth, I guess. I was just clumsily fishing for an answer the likes of “no one knows.” I guess I would consider something like stealing to be one crime though.
@ Brad
Did you ever see anyone fined for flying a kite too close to a cloud? Or imprisoned for water skiing in a clockwise circle?
Taking into account BBA’s concern on “law is a fuzzier concept than it sounds” – perhaps this could be rephrased as “how many clauses are there, in total, in US federal laws and regulations?”
Akin to “how many lines of code are there in this program?” Obviously not all lines are equally important, but it does make for a useful benchmark for estimating things like technical debt.
Something something Kolmogorov complexity applied in reverse.
It’s not even that simple. This would work well if all of the clauses involved actually mattered as law, and if the whole thing was self-contained. Neither is really true. Above, a law was mentioned which set the name of a Post Office. I don’t think that should count. It’s not really possible to violate it.
The other issue is what to do when the law calls out other documents and gives them force of law. This happens quite a lot in certain areas (the FAA uses this to legally mandate manufacturer-recommended actions on airplanes). Do the incorporated documents count as law?
Almost all building codes are done this way–they’re documents developed by private organizations that get incorporated into law by reference. And the documents often reference each other.
And you can’t legally get a copy of the building code (incorporated by reference into law) without paying hundreds of dollars to the standards organization. It’s a racket in more ways than one.
“This code references the standard C, Python, and Haskell libraries, plus this one legacy module written in Cobol. Do we count those libraries towards the total length of the program?”
It’s not an unreasonable question, and not one with an obvious answer, but it’s not obviously unanswerable either.
I’ve written my thoughts about this in a lot of other places, but never on SSC as I recall. What follows is a dump of my current high-level philosophy on law.
I see the law in a functional, amoral sense as some agent of society declaring that if it finds out you did X (which the law forbids) or didn’t do X (which the law mandates), then that agent will try to put you somewhere on the penalty treadmill (fine, incarceration, violence). The caveat here is that the agent has to spend resources finding out, and then more resources on the attempt to put you on the treadmill. If those costs are too high – it would have to spend too much on surveillance, or on collecting evidence, or the utility to society of putting you on the treadmill is in any way lower than that of letting you go – then that law will simply not be enforced, no matter how morally driven.
The utility calculation can vary a lot across nations. In the US, the law is often seen as an enforcement of morality – that is, if you break the law, then you’re seen as having done something morally wrong. “We went through a great deal of trouble to settle on this law, and for you to break it is a betrayal of our society!” In such cases, the utility of putting you on the treadmill is very high. I imagine this is an artifact of the great expense we typically go through to pass laws. In some other places where the process is a lot cheaper, abiding the law is probably seen as commensurately less moral. (One reason to limit immigration.)
Indeed, while I believe law does not correlate absolutely with moral behavior, it does so strongly enough in the US that we enjoy a high level of obedience for what I think is miraculously low cost of enforcement. Most people don’t steal in the US, even a little bit, not because it’s the law, but because they believe it makes their world worse by their own standards. Which really means this isn’t obedience of the law; the law is just expressing in writing what people already want to do.
The law also often correlates with current economic interest. If a law mandates a $10/hr minimum wage when labor is either scarce or trending that way and all employers already have to offer $12/hr, then that law is being followed for zero enforcement cost. If a law sets the tax rate to 35% and the public already sees that as probably necessary, then that law is being followed for very little cost, if any – auditors are then working only to find people who make honest mistakes.
I’ve talked about “is” so far. But I also believe this is an “ought” – the law ought to correlate strongly with public moral and economic interest. To the extent that it does not, the cost of finding and punishing non-followers rises. That cost comes out of resources otherwise expendable on other pursuits that would have made the society better off.
This necessarily carries over into the process by which law is produced. If people believe the process is designed to increase this correlation, then they will abide the product, and the cost of enforcement will drop.
The process is itself more law, to be abided by lawmakers, and so likewise ought to correlate with their moral and economic interest. If the process does not, then disobedience will go up – lawmakers will seek to avoid the process. And then the public who witness this will follow only whichever laws they already felt like following. This includes whichever laws they think will be strongly enforced, but only as long as they are strongly enforced (presumably at some expense).
If the process is seen as in step with moral and economic interest, and the lawmakers as abiding, then the public may often follow the law even if they find them counterintuitive. They may reason that such law factors in concerns they are unaware of, but probably still in their interest. Such reasoning may move them to pay taxes they do not understand, comply with regulations that seem somewhat annoying, or fight in wars in places they would otherwise never visit.
Good law is self-enforcing. If everyone’s conscience (and information) were in sync, there would be no need for law; everyone would simply follow their conscience, enforcement would be free, and society would be a streamlined anarchy. If consciences synced but information did not, laws might be seen as mnemonic shortcuts, reminding the individual of something they would do, if only they knew what the lawmaker knew. (Or, a reminder to inform the lawmaker of what the individual knows, in order to change the law.) I believe this captures the reasoning of, for example, hlynkacg; it is my personal default reasoning as well, typically threatened when I have reason to believe the process is being subverted. (I have a strong minarchist streak nowadays, but I also believe that a transition to a US minarchy would carry a great deal of current law with it, by popular acclaim.)
If consciences vary widely, as they appear to in international context, then law illustrates my first paragraph very overtly, in my opinion. Society has multiple agents, all making such declarations, and their ability to put any lawbreaker on the treadmill is an open question.
If a person (or organization, including a nation) breaks the law without remorse, their conscience clearly does not correlate with the law. Some agent of society can (try to) put that person on the treadmill. Again, I see this as amoral; it’s just many consciences vs. the one. And most lawbreakers in the US appear to be remorseful – if I get pulled over for speeding, or am shown a mistake I made in my taxes, I will probably feel bad, and pay the fine. That society will likely survive if such conflicts are consistently that lopsided – or at least, if it collapses, it won’t be due to civil disobedience. Which naturally may be a function of the design of its lawmaking process.
In all cases, moral and economic interest are basic, albeit variable across people; law is only derivative, and as I opined earlier, merely a declaration of some agent’s intent to try to prosecute it. I believe this applies to systems modern and medieval, Western or Eastern, pacifist or militaristic, poor or wealthy, threatened or stable, bureaucratized or feral, corrupt or honorable, democratic or authoritarian.
That’s never going to happen though.
Also, people don’t necessarily act their conscience. If you believe in a clean living environment and everyone around you just dumps their garbage on the street, you probably stop making an effort because it seems to have no utility. The street is full of garbage no matter what you do.
Anti-social people who dump a lot of garbage everywhere can be the beginning of a downward spiral, where more and more people flaunt these social norms.
One way that the law works is by disrupting these outliers who have a hugely disproportionate effect.
For the record, I’m well aware conscience and information would never be in sync. My purpose in stating what would happen was to explore the hypothetical, and reveal one extent to which laws end up being necessary in certain contexts.
It is certainly true that people do not always live up to their conscience. However, my point is that a law that forces them to do so, works, because that is where their conscience resides. The law reinforces what they believe to be right, and so they abide it, even when things turn punitive.
Most lawbreakers appear to be remorseful because the system encourages appearance of remorse. I think it was Heinlein who pointed out that the man who humbles himself before the judge gets a slap on the wrist, while the man who stands up for his principles gets the book thrown at him. Nevertheless, there’s no real remorse among most of these minor lawbreakers; we know this because they typically continue to commit the violations.
Don’t mistake being cowed by the might of the law, or appearing to be so to escape punishment, for actual conscience. That’s just a way the state keeps people under control and demonstrates its legitimacy. (And gives cops and judges an ego trip)
Eh. Circumstances vary.
If I get pulled for doing 79 in a 55, because I am running behind on my four hour car trip to get to the beach golfing trip and I am trying to make the tee time, I pretty much know I deserve it. My humility there isn’t fake, however beneficial it is to me.
If I get pulled for doing 64 in a 55 and I am being passed left and right, now any humility I show is merely calculated.
And of course different people react differently to authority, etc.
Quite so. If I were pulled over for speeding to a golf game, I’m not sure I’d even show humility. I’d probably show irritation. But the point is that I likely wouldn’t contest the ticket, let alone bellyache to my friends at the club and plot a rebellion.
And this is, I’m guessing, the norm for vastly many Americans, when you count all the misdemeanors, small fines, court hearings followed by a settlement, etc. Recidivists are a stark minority who command almost no popular sympathy. Can anyone recall an American Robin Hood?
Recidivists command no sympathy but they’re anything but a minority. People commit the offense, they pay the fine… then they go right out and commit the offense again, maybe trying harder not to get caught this time.
We don’t have a system of good law. We have a system where the government is so powerful that there’s so little chance of doing anything about the bad law that people just accept it as a fact of nature.
I brainstormed some thoughts about seasonal rationalist community rituals beyond Winter Solstice on my blog. The ones I think are most promising are Tarski Day in the spring (mental spring cleaning) and Prepper’s Day in November (taking old seasonal traditions of stockpiling for the winter and spinning them into preparedness for broader classes of bad). I’d like thoughts, feedback on which sound most interesting, alternate suggestions, etc.
I alike this idea, but we need stories/names/”patron saints” to go with them.
Off Topic:
I recently comprehended the idea of the garden of forking paths as it relates to P-hacking, and apparently Scott wrote a piece on it. So is the idea of the garden of forking paths basically that, by looking at a data set in several different ways, you are essentially performing several different experiments, then picking out the one that’s wrong – which should cause the P-value to go up? Assuming it is, does anyone have any objections to this notion being taken seriously?
Please preserve:
1. The WW2 is unrealistic post.
2. The nth meditation on X series.
3. The Timecube steelman.
#ENDORSED
I thought 1 and 2 were on his livejournal, which isn’t going away as far as I know.
Incidentally, the internet archive’s robots.txt policy works retroactively, so if there’s something on raikoth (or any other recently/soon-to-be dead website) that you want to archive, consider saving local copies.
Oh, I think all of these are on his livejournal. I got confused.
Mad props to Tyler Cowen for turning me on to this phenom: Alma Deutscher, a genius (I don’t say it lightly) composer, aged 11, whose first full-length opera (orchestrated on her own) just debuted in Vienna. I recommend this video interview with a famous Israeli music pedagogist, especially if you have at least the pre-K level Hebrew skills I have and can tolerate the incomplete subtitling. Right now I’d say she’s the living artist whose work I find the most interesting in the entire world. And she has only 25K youtube followers.
Bonus: her father is a linguist who performed an experiment on her, not teaching her that people say the clear sky is blue, in an effort to understand why various cultures come up with alternate conventions for this. (She spontaneously described it as white, and he wrote a 2010 book about it.) So it seems there’s a good chance not only that we have a new (at least) Schubert-level prodigy composer in the Classical tradition, but also that a good book will be written about her gifts, her musical education, etc. from a modern scientific perspective.
The fact that her name is Alma is obviously amazing. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to diagnose nominative determinism, because there are much more suitable names; but still.
The name is neither sufficiently rare nor Alma Mahler sufficiently important for it to qualify as “amazing”.
However, it does fit insofar as she seems to have some hope of developing a soul.
I was under the impression that the name is extremely rare. I may have been mistaken.
You don’t have that wide a choice if you want to be named after a woman who is known for composing. Though Cecile or Clara would obviously have been much better from the nominative determinism angle. Now, she seems mostly predestined for unhappy marriages.
Alma Mahler isn’t known for composing; she’s known for being the wife of Gustav Mahler (and, to a lesser extent, Walter Gropius etc.). She wouldn’t make the top ten female composers.
To be sure, the person to blame for this might well be Gustav.
You don’t have that wide a choice if you want to be named after a woman who is known for composing.
Fanny, then, for Fanny Mendelssohn? Though perhaps “Frances” would be a better version of it for modern ears.
I agree that Alma is interesting phenomenon, but if you think she’s the most interesting artist in the world, that’s mostly a commentary on the world, as seen by you.
She may grow up to become an important composer, but it won’t happen by default, and it certainly hasn’t happened yet. Prodigies rarely have much of an impact on the history of musical composition (and virtually never while they’re still children).
(I find it the Schubert comparison especially odd given that when I last checked, she had yet to get as far as Schubert’s chronological era in terms of assimilation of musical history as reflected in her compositions.)
None of this changes the fact that she seems to provide a good model for how to live life.
This sentence got me thinking. Prodigies of musical performance are almost a dime a dozen, it would seem. Do you know anything about how frequent composing prodigies are?
It depends on what you mean. Maybe try making the question more specific?
If it’s “what proportion of major composers in the Western art music tradition have written at least one acknowledged masterpiece in pre-adolescence?”, the answer is zero to within rounding error. (I can’t even think of a single example offhand.) Indeed, we would have to extend the range to high-school age (historical adulthood) before the matter even becomes arguable.
There are other possible interpretations of the question, but I want to emphasize this one in light of the claim people are always making to the effect that music contrasts with e.g. literature in the extent to which great achievement is possible in childhood. I think when you compare apples to apples, the asymmetry disappears.
Incidentally, having listened to a bit of the new opera, I should take back what I said above about Alma not having reached Schubert’s era in terms of musical idiom. That seems to be where she now is. (I remembered her previously as writing in a decidedly eighteenth-century style, which of course would make sense given that she was apparently trained on partimenti.)
You’re right, I should have been more specific. Let me try.
There are, in the world as a whole, quite a lot of children who perform music at a level vastly beyond what could normally be expected at their age and who are “prodigies” in this sense. This does not mean that their performances, taken by themselves and not in relation to their age, are truly masterful. (I have not researched the latter point, and you might know much better than me. My judgement is mostly based on hearing a somewhat confused psychologist’s talk about musical prodigies, which involved being shown a bunch of recordings, some by child prodigies and some by famous adult pianists, of which I guessed every single one right and thought it was pretty obvious.)
What I wonder is, how many children are there who can compose above the level of their age in the same precocious way that they perform above the level of their age?
@Creutzer
I used to know someone who was both a performing prodigy and a composing prodigy (I never heard any of his compositions, but a local (music) professor apparently liked them so they can’t have been terrible). I think it is probably unsurprising that child prodigies don’t generally sound as good as famous adult pianists, since I expect a high proportion of famous adult pianists are child prodigies (or something close) who have had a few decades to practice more.
Possibly relevant is Joey Alexander, a jazz piano prodigy. I don’t think his playing is distinguishable from an adult’s. He might also count as a composing prodigy, in the sense that improvisation is like composition without writing, and in the sense that he clearly has a fantastic understanding of harmony, melody etc.
@Creutzer:
I think rlms is right to essentially point out that “what could normally be expected at their age” is not a concept that makes sense in this context. As Charles Rosen says, virtually all pianists start when they are very young children. In that kind of domain, the age criterion can only be viewed as inverted: it is more impressive the later someone starts.
Nevertheless, one can still discuss the relationship between composition and performance in this respect. Rosen’s statement isn’t true for composers — more typically they begin in adolescence, whether early or late — so one could imagine that the concept of “prodigy” makes more sense in that case. However, this may be mostly due to the occupational separation of composition and performance that is specific to “our time” (i.e. since the Romantic period). That is, young children who both perform and compose are a relatively small subset of those who perform, because current musical culture doesn’t expect performers to be trained in composition by default.
Composition (in the high-art tradition) isn’t considered a mere skill anymore; it has become an identity. To present oneself as a composer is to claim a magical aura of destiny as a Creative Artist (TM). (This is no doubt why people become composers at the stage in life where they develop identities.) Alma Deutscher is exceptional in that she is practicing composition as a skill, like they did in the eighteenth century. She can get away with it because she is young and there is a novelty element, making her into a kind of circus act; but (regrettably) no one would care about the music she is producing if she were older. (At least, not without considerable ad-hoc culture creation — what is variously known as marketing or Assertion of Artistic Identity (TM) depending on the level of cynicism connotationally desired — on her part.)
@rlms:
I can’t resist registering an observation about this statement:
It implies, of course, that a mere performer would not be expected to have a fantastic understanding of these things, which are nevertheless (a stand-in for) the basic elements of music. This should be very disturbing to whatever extent it is true.
Alas, I think it is true to a significant extent. Each year legions of music students resent being subjected to instruction in music theory, on the grounds that they have no compositional aspirations themselves. This is the exact opposite of the reason they should be resenting those courses of instruction, which is that they provide far too little insight into composition.
(Incidentally, I think these are connected: the students expect compositional insights to be incommunicable to them, and so, not possessing them out of the box, they never consider compositional aspirations as an option for themselves in the first place. This is no doubt a very general problem across many fields. But I digress.)
I should nonetheless point out that it isn’t true at elite levels. I would expect virtually all concert pianists, for example, whether or not they identify as composers, to have an understanding of musical construction that would be considered “composer-level” by the unambitious students referred to above. You simply can’t play their repertory convincingly otherwise.
Eh, I think it’s easily possible to be a very good performer with only very little theory knowledge. I agree that elite levels, performers probably mostly know a lot of theory, but I don’t think that’s necessary to perform well. A good ear and intuitive feel go a long way, especially at levels other than the very top.
It is equally possible to be a good composer with only very little theory knowledge.
When I said “knowledge of musical construction”, I was deliberately leaving unspecified whether that knowledge was explicit (“theory knowledge”) or tacit (“good ear and intuitive feel”). It is a fallacy to suppose that composers, but not performers, require knowledge in explicit form.
I put a question on the statistics stack-exchange about how to choose the best metric to measure calibration: http://stats.stackexchange.com/q/253443/3807
Calibration is a technical term, which should know from reading Tetlock. Brier and logarithmic scoring are not measures of calibration.
Maybe you want to measure accuracy, not calibration, but I think the general advice is to become calibrated first. Calibration basically means that you know what probabilities mean. If you aren’t calibrated, there is a free lunch of improving your predictions just by translating out of your confusion.
When it’s time for accuracy, I’d choose logarithmic scoring for its good formal properties, but it doesn’t make much difference vs Brier, except that it penalizes extremes.
You can’t just focus on calibration, calibration on its own doesn’t buy you anything. “Go not to the well-calibrated for counsel, for they will say both no and yes”. Contra Socrates, knowing that you know nothing is just not all that impressive.
On questions like this, though, where the answerer gets to pick the questions, measuring calibration is just about all you can do, because obviously it’s easy to boost your accuracy by just picking easy questions.
“Brier and logarithmic scoring are not measures of calibration.”
Are you sure? Quote from Tetlock here: “Calibration is when I say there’s a 70 percent likelihood of something happening, things happen 70 percent of time… Resolution, or discrimination as it’s known in the literature, is another statistical component of the Brier score, and that refers to my skill at assigning much higher probabilities to things that happen than to things that don’t happen.” (my emphasis). He seems to be saying that Brier scores do measure calibration, in the sense that they depend on it and accuracy.
Question for homeowners/people with plumbing knowledge:
Is flushing one gallon from a water heater once a month better than, worse than, or about the same as flushing the whole thing once a year?
Not really knowledgable on this…your question inspired me to have a look at my hot-water-heater, and hot-water-based home heating system. It’s been about five years since any flush was done on either, so I’m probably overdue.
I’m not really sure…my first response would be that a complete flush once a year is better, since the idea is to remove sediment from the tank. But a partial flush ought to remove most of the sediment from the lower part of the tank, near the heating elements.
However, the work involved in flushing the tank appears to be the same, for both partial flush and complete flush.
For a complete flush: Close supply valve, turn down tank thermostat, let tank cool, open spigots in rest of house, drain water from tank, close drain valve, close spigots, let tank refill, turn tank thermostat back up…
The cool-down step may not be necessary for a partial flush, but the rest of the steps appear to be necessary.
With that amount of work being done, I don’t see the time saving in a partial flush once-a-month.
I’ve read instructions in several different places for doing a full-tank flush. The cool-down step wasn’t listed in any of them.
Presumably, draining a gallon takes a few seconds, and then maybe a minute for the tank to refill when I’m done. Draining the whole tank takes maybe upwards of 5 minutes, and I’m guessing it could take as long as a few hours to refill the tank afterwards (during which I’ll have no hot water). That could be significant.
Also, to drain a gallon I just need a bucket, which I can dump in the laundry sink when I’m done. To drain the whole tank I need to unwrap the hose from my hose reel (currently in my garage) and then snake it through my basement making sure one end is over the drain in my garage and the other end is secured to my water heater. Then when I’m done I have to reattach and rewind my hose onto the hose reel, and do so without scalding myself on any hot water still left in the hose–and not spill any out into my basement.
In fact that difference is the main reason I’m asking in the first place: the gallon-at-a-time thing sounds way easier, but I want to know if it will get me results that are as good or almost as good.
On the one hand, I’d like to say hi in person and you don’t seem to get to S California much.
On the other hand, driving across orange county at rush hour is a chore I dread.
Why is there no grand, coordinated, extravagantly-funded scientific effort to discover the reasons for and combat biological aging and death?
I know that there are some people working on it, but the number of people and amounts of money involved don’t seem commensurate with the degree to which most humans desire to prolong life and avoid aging and death. Even people who are comfortable with their own mortality tend to be quite bothered by the prospect of their loved ones dying.
Why no Manhattan Project for senescence?
There is, but the billionaires are trying to keep it on the down low because they definitely don’t want the rest of us to stick around forever; we’re disposable labor, and if they ever get the AI robot thing going they’d rather shrink the population organically rather than get involved in messy genocide.
Basically the method is that they openly fund these life extension efforts but they make them sound vaguely crackpotty, so no one is surprised when there are no publicly-visible results. Example : http://www.calicolabs.com/
(Epistemic Status: paranoid)
This makes a lot of sense. Although you write this as if tongue in cheek, I would not be surprised if there are various secret research projects going on. Because it doesn’t make sense to greatly extend everyone’s longevity — we wouldn’t have enough space on Earth to put everyone. But if just you and me get to extend our lives — no downside to that.
There is an awful lot of space on Earth.
The critical question is whether people keep having children, whether after bringing up one family you produce another and another. If they do, you get exponential growth with a pretty fierce exponent, which pushes even my optimistic view of the carrying capacity of Earth.
If not, all you get is linear growth, which I don’t expect to be a big problem.
We could have some massive wars to thin out the excess population? That’s how this stuff works, right?
It would almost certainly work out that way. Am uncertain whether it’s preferable to aging or not.
You’d also get exponential population if the average couple wanted more than two kids (Or in some other conditions, like if there was a significant divorce/remarriage rate and most new couples wanted kids even if they already had them). Of course, this is true even if people die.
OTOH, if the average couple wants fewer than two kids*, you could get a finite number of people total, which is sustainable.
*This assumes you don’t start genetically/socially selecting for families that want more kids somehow.
You don’t even end up with linear growth if couples all want one child, or if they want less than two children on average and the variance in this desire isn’t correlated from generation to generation.
(Digression: Is there any less awkward way to say “correlated from generation to generation”? The biologists seem to have appropriated “heritable” to refer solely to correlations with genetic causes.)
Socially heritable, environmentally heritable, non-genetically heritable (as the catch-all).
@ shakeddown
*This assumes you don’t start genetically/socially selecting for families that want more kids somehow.
Social selection has been going on for millenia, and GKC was predicting (and gloating about) the More Children RCs burying the rest of us. Mid-century SF authors were making the same prediction, anti-gloatingly.
if there was a significant divorce/remarriage rate and most new couples wanted kids even if they already had them
That seems to be the more likely route; with longer lives (or even the same lifespan* but no aging so that up to the age of eighty or ninety you are still in the physical state of your thirties), people are going to be breaking up and forming new partnerships even more. If “till death do us part” has already gone the way of the dodo, staying with the same partner for fifty or sixty years is also going to be increasingly rare.
If fertility is maintained with the anti-aging, then new couples = new kid seems likely, as it does appear to be the first thing that happens when a relationship breaks up – new girlfriend gets pregnant, if she’s not already pregnant (mind you, this is going by social housing client experience, so YMMV).
But it seems to me more likely that it will go along the lines of Joe had a kid with Sue then they split up after twenty years and he partnered with Jill and she wants a kid, while Sue is having a child with her new partner etc.
*That’s a point I’d like cleared up: are we assuming anti-aging means indefinitely extended lifespan, or are we saying “you still only live up to a maximum of one hundred years but you don’t get feeble and lose physical and mental capacity as you would if normal aging happened”?
@ Deiseach:
The model I’m mostly going with is one where you get to be in functional physical condition, say somewhere between twenty and fifty, for an unlimited length of time, although of course you can still get run over by a car or have a heart attack.
Ideally, if you are past that point when the technology is invented, as I already am, it lets you get physically younger again, but that’s only an issue at the beginning.
I don’t think any public figure can take much advantage of secret life extension methods. They could live to be ninety or so in spite of having bad genes, but anything interesting would be conspicuous.
Maybe they could pretend to be their own heir, but that’s going to get harder as the amount of surveilance increases.
Even popping into the world as a new person with an inconspicuous financial safety net is going to get harder.
Harder, but likely a problem money and well-connected allies who also want their life extended can’t solve.
Err… CAN solve. Why didn’t I get a chance to edit?
I’ve noticed that sometimes the edit button won’t appear immediately. When I refresh the page, it appears.
Because Aubrey de Gray won’t shave his God damned beard.
I’m kind of serious. Dude has a thoughtful and intelligent plan for approaching the issue that gets around the seeming impossibility of ending aging — break the problem into smaller ones that are more approachable, even if you don’t like his specific choices, this is a complicated issue with various parts of the body failing in different ways and there may be lots of small solutions we can quickly progress on instead of one big one — but because he looks like a crackpot, people don’t take him seriously, and because someone who looks like a crackpot is the most prominent advocate of the issue (thanks to the media loving to point their cameras at weirdos) people don’t take the issue seriously.
Elon Musk bangs on about cities on Mars and AI risk. He also combs his hair and wears a nice shirt. This is important.
Eh, more quack then anything else.
You might as well say “Nanomachines, Son” for lots of his remedies. Actually accomplishing the “live-forever” correctly in any meaningful sense implies having post-singularity technology…and who knows what our stupidly arranged atoms can be arranged for.
For non-post singularity tech, seems like most/all of his ideas are sub-sets of research already being done around the globe. Who isn’t trying to create molecular nano-tech that better interacts with cellular tech these days?
He isn’t a total quack…which is why he is successful. Another non-total quack who has too much quack for me to recommend is Tim Ferris.
I disagree that his odd appearance is hurting him. I think it makes him a distinctive media figure.
It’s not the remedies that he proposes which make sense, so much as just the very, very high level approach and how that would be introduced to the public. Most people imagine anti-aging as some kind of magical fountain of youth formula, which is hard to take seriously. But treating the various aspects of aging as individual diseases? Divide and conquer, in a calm, non-flashy manner? Now you’re talking.
It works for him, yes. But it doesn’t work for the respectability of the field.
Ok. I think the word “Quack” is unfair in his case. If he didn’t ask for donations, what he is doing could be inspiring.
Ok. If there was a budget vetted by trusted third parties of where any donations, that was verifiable as to where the money was going to, then it would no longer be quack status.
I may be a bit cynical, but a mental heuristic for a great deal of anything in medicine is “scammer/quack” status, when perhaps the word doesn’t apply.
Maybe some of the money in his organization actually *does* go into real research.
Is it? I just got through Ashlee Vance’s book, and the overwhelming theme is that Musk didn’t really get taken seriously about his non-software stuff until Tesla shipped the Roadster (really, until they shipped the Model S) and until the Falcon 1 launched (really, until the Falcon 9 delivered cargo to the ISS). And really seriously once it landed.
Results speak louder than clothing, and I think that’s the way it should be. Just speaking about Musk here, it was extremely easy to found an electric-car or aerospace startup; it was much harder to perform the feats of management and engineering required to get it to actually work.
tl;dr, talk is cheap; if de Grey did something fantastic, no one would care about his weird beard.
I don’t know, I think having a nice appearance is “necessary, but not sufficient” for being taken seriously.
Basically, nobody is going to even bother analyzing the credibility and reasonableness if you look like this. Of course some people with sharp suits will still be dismissed as quacks, but people are more likely to at least look at the evidence before doing so.
And how did Musk get to the point where he was shipping electric cars and launching rockets in the first place? Not by having a weird beard, that’s for sure.
I dare say that he would’ve still got to the same point if he’d had a weird beard when he founded a company that merged into PayPal.
Why is there no grand, coordinated, extravagantly-funded scientific effort to discover the reasons for and combat biological aging and death?
Because it’s very damn complicated and where do you even start? Also, trying to make sure people don’t die of cancers, diseases and disorders in the first place before getting into “there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just getting older, how do we stop that” takes precedence because unless you get that surgery for appendicitis when you’re thirty, you’re not going to be around to worry about “hey, now I’m ninety-five, how much longer do I got?”
Makes sense. The #1 killers are still things like cancer, heart disease, and auto accidents. Why spend a lot of time and effort on the aging process when the vast majority of people die from other things before they get to the aging process?
If we cured “cancer”, life expectancy would only rise by 3 years, as far as I’ve read. I haven’t looked too much into the research behind the exact number. (source, source)
Heart disease doesn’t kill that many more, or so a quick Google search is giving me. I think you’re overestimating the impact we’d get fixing those things.
Cancer and heart disease are also linked to aging, so if we “fix” aging we’re likely to mostly fix a ton of diseases which are “caused” by it.
Curing cancer only gains you 3.3 years extra life expectancy according to most sources I’ve read, and cancer/heart disease are often “caused” by aging. I think you’re overestimating the impact of those diseases, and underestimating how much would be helped if we understood and could deal with aging better.
(I had sources in this post but SSC hated them. Sorry about that. Don’t care to figure out which ones it hated.)
Edit: But try here: http://asserttrue.blogspot.ca/2013/02/taeubers-paradox-and-life-expectancy.html#
Curing cancer only gains you 3.3 years extra life expectancy according to most sources I’ve read, and cancer/heart disease are often “caused” by aging. I think you’re overestimating the impact of those diseases, and underestimating how much would be helped if we understood and could deal with aging better.
(I had sources in this post but SSC hated them. Sorry about that. Don’t care to figure out which ones it hated.)
Edit: Found this really nice table of life expectancy vs disease limited, but SSC hates it. Have a mangled link:
http://asserttrue dotgoeshere blog removespacehere spot.ca/2013/02/taeubers-paradox-and-life-expectancy.html#
Not sure if link mangling is against the rules. I feel uncomfortable having done it. Someone please tell me if doing this was in bad taste.
Do you think that’s true in modern developed countries? U.S. life expectancy is currently about 79. By 79 the aging process is beginning to have a significant effect, in part by making more likely the things people die from thereafter.
Cancer is chiefly caused by the accumulation of mutations over a lifetime. (Or so I was told when I went in for genetic testing.) So there’s going to be no way to handle the aging process that doesn’t tackle cancer.
One also notes that time was that senility was “you’re just getting older.” More and more of the “aging process” might be solved by slipping free of it to become first a disease and then (one hopes) a treatable one or even a curable one.
There’s a substantial genetic component to aging.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3898394/
I’ve heard that there are people who are healthy into their nineties and then die fairly quickly, which is about as good a deal as the universe generally offers at this point. They’re being studied. I hope it turns out to be something that can be bottled.
Substantial gains in longevity– even something modest like living to be 200– are a much harder problem. I believe that most medical ethicists who are alive today won’t live long enough for the question to be a practical problem.
How much do I really believe that last sentence? Fair-to-middling. I very much doubt that an eighty-year-old medical ethicist will live that long, and I find it conceivable that a thirty-year-old medical ethicist might. I don’t know the age distribution of medical ethicists.
There are some ethical/philosophical/spiritual arguments why it’s a bad idea. I’m not qualified to represent any of them myself, but good arguments should be easy to find.
There are plenty of better (personal opinion) arguments for researching medical immortality, I’m not qualified to represent any of them myself, but you could throw two stones in the rationalist community and hit ten of them.
I don’t imagine the rationalist community has any spiritual arguments in favor of medical immortality, since isn’t that community an atheistic one?
The big factors I can think of, though people seem to have already mentioned most:
* It seems weird, the people who support it seem weird. It’s not ‘cool’ to support it. Look at how people who support cryogenics are mocked. (Edit: Cryonics, not cryogenics. Woops.)
* People don’t believe it’s possible, and it is in fact very hard.
* (Note: not super confident.) If you believed death was bad and scary before modern science, you were kind of fucked and set up for a life of existential dread.
(Not that I think it’s very likely we’ll fix aging in my lifetime. The current state of scientific research in general is depressing.)
Therefore, there’s been strong incentives for belief structures to spring up which explain why death is fine/good. Said systems mean next to no one wants aging cured.
Eh. I am very negative on the current state of cryogenics. As I wrote before to another comment, all this “eternal life tech” is all post-singularity tech. Your atoms can be arranged more productively then whatever form *you* take…if it ends up that everything isn’t pointless.
Cryogenics right now is a million dollar scam for the desperate. I don’t view it more charitably then I would someone offering a million dollars for a ritual of American Indian dancers to take you to the afterlife.(though maybe the Egyptians have something to offer. The Mummy was a good movie)
The person you’re replying to made the same mistake, but…
Cryogenics is the science of cold things. Cryonics is the speculative pursuit of preserving humans and other animals for later revival. Cryogenicists will get mad at you if you mix them up.
It’s also considerably cheaper than a million dollars. As to whether it’s a scam… well, what odds would you give of it working, either in its current state (that is, such that people preserved today could eventually be revived) or in fifty years’ time? One in a thousand? A million? At what odds would it stop being a scam?
I agree – and I think most people interested in it do – that cryonics is a longshot. I wouldn’t give it more than 5-10% chances of working at most. But for the incredibly cheap cost ($80k USD for Alcor), I would certainly say it’s worth it.
Perhaps you’d disagree, and that’s fine – obviously people are going to have different thresholds for when it becomes “worth it”. 5% for $80k just happens to be in the right league for me. Mocking people, like I’ve seen in many places, goes too far in my personal opinion.
I’m not talking about it being a longshot or not being a longshot. The technology will work eventually given some rate of scientific progress that isn’t asymptotic, or some catastrophe destroys civilization.
The technology will work eventually, I believe that. I critique it on other grounds.
Namely..nobody will revive themselves just to die in another 30 years due to your body breaking down in a variety of ways. Nobody will want, given other options, to live their life as a person with damaged memory, bad knees, if tech can reverse/repair/improve that too.
The tech to really give eternal life in the way we ask for it gives super-intelligence, physical capabilities around super-power levels…and the both of those in conjunction give…a level of control of the physical world that’s unpredictable, but very very high.
If your atomic structure can’t be used in some other way better then your measly body and memories…then that’s a worst case scenario, and besides genetic forcing of survival instinct I would not want to live in a world like that.
If the atoms in your body can be used in some better way then you are now, then the super-intelligences(perhaps made from humans) will do so with them.
If that singularity tech can’t be made, its someone scamming you.
If it can be, *you*, in any meaningful sense that anyone talks about… you won’t revive.
TheBearsHaveArrived:
I dispute “If it can be, *you*, in any meaningful sense that anyone talks about… you won’t revive”, but that’s a philosophical question. Moreover, it looks like what you’re suggesting is that people will choose a better alternative, instead of merely being revived and cured of whatever killed them. If that’s the case, isn’t that better than the thing people are currently hoping for (mere revival), and so worth more, not less?
But also, those are some strong assertions about the future. How confident are you in them?
The ability to successfully accomplish all the goals of cryonics are nothing less then eternal healthy youth, and a reverse engineering of the brain in order to restore and repair those algorithms and outputs of data structures (memories) within an acceptable boundary.
With the nano-tech and absurd technology involved in doing that…all you have to do is replace the slow circuitry in the brain with electric circuits 1,000—1,000,000 times faster, with possibly 1,000,000 of those in parallel. Or 1,000,000,000 — 1,000,000,000,000 variants of the smartest human brain of all time working together. That’s not saying about finding algorithms of the same purpose that are more powerful and more efficient then evolution could find.
With technology that great, that’s when people are asking questions like
1. Will these absurdly intelligent computer *gods* use all material in the solar system for various purposes? What would they use it for? Have they found a meaning to life, a great meaning to life worthy of pursuit of planetary resources….or have they found the nihilists were right. Or even is 42 the answer?
Or a slight variation, assuming human life is (somehow) relatable to the current age(and still it would not be at all)
“Will there be a global moratorium on having babies since people can live forever. Or people now buy years of life (somehow) from those who have been unlucky in an accident or decided to end it all.”
Not
“Old jimmy is gonna wake up except now he will be in his early 20’s prime! Lets go listening to our favorite music”
You can’t really …compute probabilities of waking up normally again of the sort we typically do in real life like “X said he will go the movies. its raining today. Based on what I know about X, I think he has >50% chance of going to the movies” Or even “Country Y and Z chance of war this decade. If so, who wins(an easier question)?”.
Life in the future with those requisite technologies and capabilities from them will be so removed from life now that you might as well not plan any real decisions anyways relating to now for then. Or, not sign up for cryonics.
I do view the people involved in the industry a bit negatively. Cryonics is the thing most commonly mentioned in sci-fi to revive the dead, kindof makes sense of a surface level, and regardless of intelligence level human desperation will ensure lots of people sign up…for a hefty price.
I think that the most likely outcome for those buying into cryonics, aside from it simply not working (let’s face it, anyone selling cryonics in this day and age is unequivocally full of shit), is something akin to Warrren Ellis’ “Revivals”, and while Ellis works it into a good story it’s hardly what most people would call a desirable outcome.
Well… there are hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in the field at the moment.
Why not more?
I think the best example of something like this is probably global warming. You have some people screaming at the top of their lungs that more needs to be done or it’s the end of the world, it becomes a bit of a buzzword, gradually the idea begins to hold some sway over the minds of those in power, but inertia means that not much gets done.
Meanwhile the rest of us just kind of shrug our shoulders. We’re perfectly happy to accept that global warming is a terrible problem (at least intellectually) but it just doesn’t excite us. Sorry.
I guess most people feel the same way about ageing.
There are arguments purporting to show that global warming will eventually do bad, perhaps terrible, things. Aging is killing fifty to a hundred million people a year, including lots of rich and influential people. I don’t think those are comparable situations.
I am convinced by the “eventually” claims. It just doesn’t seem likely that the trends *this* century will be terrible.
Forgetting about the ocean acidification issue(which I can’t analyze,but everyone says its a really bad thing) my bets would be that for this century, the (slight) temperature increase and increased CO2 levels would be good for overall food production.
Aging eventually kills every person alive, or will kill every person alive if not killed by another cause. They are not really in the same ballpark of evils right now.
The Manhattan Project is a really bad way to conceptualize the problem. It was a single, convulsive effort to solve an all-or-nothing problem that had just materialized in a period of crisis.
By contrast, people have always aged and died, and the problem is currently the least it has ever been. Why would people even consider an emergency effort to combat it?
It’s worse than that. For the manhattan project, the theoretical basis of a bomb had already been worked out and proved mathematically. The engineering was difficult, but it was engineering, not raw science. Engineering problems can be solved by throwing enough money at them, science problems not so much. Manhattan would only be analogous if we already had, and knew how to make, knew how to make a longevity serum, the problem was just to mass produce it.
Can you explain that? My impression would be that aging is an increasing problem, because a smaller percentage of people are dying from non-age-related causes.
That’s probably the first part of the solution: get people living long enough so that aging becomes a problem. You can only worry about “when I’m eighty I will be wracked with arthritis” if you can be sure of getting to eighty and not dying in your forties.
And secondarily, people probably are healthier now than they used to be; sixty was considered “elderly” (or at least getting there) but a lot of sixty years old people nowadays are much more active and physically able than they would have been in previous generations.
In absolute terms, I agree; a larger population that lives longer makes aging a bigger problem in absolute terms than it was previously. There is also the possibility of average lifespan technically dropping in the U.S.
I mean this rather in the sense of least worrisome to individuals. Longer lifespans are generally considered a victory. The places in the world where aging affects individuals for the longest period are also the places in the world where the most options are available to combat, treat, and reduce suffering from it. There are also a lot of independent projects that address the big concerns associated with it, like organ failure or Alzheimer’s disease.
I like the idea of solving the problem of aging, but I am much more preoccupied with the problems of pestilence, famine, and war. Aging is not an emergency, merely inconvenient.
The problem of famine has been solved, except in the special case of engineered famines, generally due to war.
The other two have not, but neither of them kills as many people per year as aging does.
I think we’ve come nearly as far as we have in solving war as we have in solving famine. Wars between major powers used to happen every couple of decades, but we’ve been 70 years without one.
If personal immortality isn’t enough of a draw, not wanting their kids to die, maybe. Most parents I know seem extremely upset by the thought of their children dying, including the ones whose children are adults. The only comfort they have right now is knowing that unless they’re unlucky they won’t be around to see it.
Any Recommendations for books (or other media) on constructing polls and surveys, or using survey data?
I’m not looking for anything too heavy. I have a stats background but have never had to get my hands dirty with actual research methods along these lines.
As a rough signpost towards what I’m looking for: I know what a Likert-type scale is, but I only know that because I stumbled across it in some psych literature, looked it up, and went “oh, yeah, I recognise that”. I would like something that introduces me to relevant terminology and best-practises. I presume there are research method handbooks that will do this, but I don’t really know what to search for.
I’d think a beginner textbook on social research would do the trick. Just use caution, because apparently they are often fraught with the political views of their authors. (The one I’m reading through is by a guy named
RubinNeuman [edit: got the name wrong].)I’m reading De Jouvenel’s On Power, and it got me thinking.
How would one design a government structure if the goal was to a) maximally reduce the frequency of law changes (so for example, a generation or two could pass without substantial changes in what is legal or illegal to do), b) have this type of government be competitive against existing real-world governments (so it could defend itself successfully, rather than be annexed by the first president to look at it funny).
My uninformed thoughts:
1) Make most laws of permanent duration, but adapting to changing circumstances (e.g. adjust for monetary and life-span inflation any laws/fines pertaining to money or incarceration time, respectively). Otherwise a period of inflation or deflation would substantially change things vis-a-vis real-world equivalencies.
2) As per the US Constitution: Up the relative percentages of aggregate groups which would have to vote in favor of a law change.
3) A) Keep this relative percentage sufficiently less than unanimity such that a significant enough proportion of the population doesn’t feel the need to revolt.
B) Allow escape mechanisms (e.g. even up to emigration) for the part of the population that truly will not tolerate unchangingness.
I think you’re on to something. I mean, the laws of physics seem to be constant, and yet they allow for variation by being functions of time (roughly). If we had a good enough understanding of the human psyche to create a formula that predicts what legislation we need and when we need it, we can use that formula to keep a single set of established rules for an indefinite period of time.
Like psychohistory, only even more implausible.
😀
I think this would require limiting the scope of law significantly. There are lots of societal changes, such as increasing acceptance of homosexuality. There are a lot of social movements with pet causes, like stopping factory farming. You would have to make these changes not require changes in law.
If each societal change requires changes in law, that’s not good. Also any group that is lobbying for a change in law will need an alternative course of action to advance its goals.
Removing the power of people to advance their pet cause of the day by putting the force of state power behind it is the point of this exercise. If these interest groups cannot make due without enforcing their will from on high, they get to take a hike.
Ergo decedo, suggested above by anonymousskimmer, seems adequate.
An EU-like confederacy of small governments, some of which are legally conservative, some of which are legally changeable. With no such governments “land-locked” by governments of the same orientation as themselves.
Have them be large enough that people can live their lives entirely within one government, without significant constraints, but small enough that they can travel to at least a couple of neighboring governments within two hours.
So something between gated communities and a small US state in size.
This would largely prevent people from being upset about constraints such as abortion and marriage laws (you’d just move to a neighboring state while retaining your job in the state whose laws you don’t like, or vice versa).
That has problems with governments that tax people at one point in their life and use it to pay benefits at another point. People will get educated in the free education states and work in the no-school-tax states.
You could force people to pay back the “benefits” before moving, but that has its own problems.
Currently, at least everywhere I’ve paid taxes in the US, you pay school taxes in the school district in which you are domiciled, and you also send you kids to school in the same district.
you’d just move to a neighboring state while retaining your job in the state whose laws you don’t like, or vice versa
Where are you taxed? State of domicile or state of employment? Unless there were a standard law, you could end up double-taxed (I can see a lot of tax lawyers becoming very busy with everyone trying to find loopholes in how much and what state they pay tax; I’m thinking of all the Irish businessmen who became citizens of Monaco for tax purposes).
You send your kids to school for approximately fifteen years of your life; you pay income and/or property taxes for about sixty years of your life. There is no requirement that you spend all sixty years living in the same district. My parents, for example, moved to the congenial suburb with the great public schools when I was about two, and left about a year after my younger brother left for college.
Right, so how are people who are advocating change going to advance their agenda? Those people aren’t going to go away. I’d love a cultural change from trying to pass laws to trying to convince people. Without that cultural change, I don’t think it could work.
I’d love to have a society with much less laws and very static ones. However, I think that a majority of the population has a cause that they like well enough to allow legal changes.
Give relatively small minorities the power to repeal laws, but not pass them. After an initial adjustment period, you’d settle into a lower change equilibrium. Probably…..
That sounds like a really bad set-up. Super majorities to pass, maybe.
Minorities can repeal is just a call for hostage taking and general bad blood.
Super majorities to pass leads to endless logrolling over basic functions like passing budgets. It also leads to stasis, because once passed, changing laws remains difficult. Minority repeal achieves the same beneficial effect (large degree of consensus needed to sustain legislation) but only if the a substantial minority can be organized around the issue, meaning many fewer opportunities for rent seeking holdouts.
This is my sense as well.
I’m not seeing how supermajority support to pass a budget is worse than minority repeal of the same budget from an “endless logrolling” perspective?
I pass a budget. You immediately repeal it. Unlike “supermajority required” we have to go through all of the logrolling for the budget before we can know whether you are going to repeal it. Its the same requirement as “supermajority to pass” but with more steps.
In addition, any sort of “I will vote for this thing if you vote for that thing” is compromised and unstable because those who are dissatisfied can take many bites at the repeal apple.
To argue against my own side, there is a small difference in acts of commission and omission, but absent norms against voting to repeal (which you probably don’t want) I’m not really seeing it making a big difference.
@ HeelBearCub.
The commission vs omission distinction is precisely why I am inclined to agree with Cassander. That said, you make a fair point about stability and taking “many bites at the repeal apple”. It may be necessary to add some sort of corollary where if a repeal vote fails, you have to wait at least X amount of time before trying again.
>I’m not seeing how supermajority support to pass a budget is worse than minority repeal of the same budget from an “endless logrolling” perspective?
So in any legislature, the value of a marginal vote rises as you get closer to the passing threshold because you become closer to making or breaking the coalition. the higher the threshold the steeper that curve rises and the higher the peak. This allows individuals to hold out more and more for whatever their parochial interest is. And since not all parochials interests are mutually compatible, the legislative process slows down as every bill requires an exponentially more complicated set of mutual approvals.
With minority repeal, you get the ability for a minority bloc to stop legislation but you don’t massively empower marginal legislatures the way supermajorities do, because the power isn’t vested in individual marginal members. You’re instead of dealing with X number of members each of whom is a potential veto point, you’re dealing with one potential veto point that requires X votes to exercise.
> I pass a budget. You immediately repeal it.
In a legislature of two, you’re right, it wouldn’t matter. In a legislature of more than two, however, it matters a lot. Say the republican pass a budget. The democrats CAN repeal it, but do they? To do that, there have to be enough democrats think they will benefit from doing so. Remember, repealing it doesn’t get them the budget they want, it just kills the existing budget.
As an example, stipulate a 55/45 senate.
Let’s say the republicans want to pass a budget that cuts off all federal funds to states that don’t impose the the death penalty for people who say happy holidays instead of merry christmas. This is obviously bad, and you want a system that prevents it.
You can mandate 66% to pass a budget. That means, in practice, that at least some minority votes will always be required to pass legislation and means the republicans have to drop the proposal, but doing so means that every budget session ends with a massive log-rolling free for all as everyone scrambles to be the last holdout. It actually encourages people to hold out longer and make the process work worse as a way of driving up the price of their vote. For proof of this, see the california legislature.
With minority repeal, you don’t have the massive logrolling session, because you only need 50 votes to pass, the price of votes is lower. Instead of having to negotiate with 45 members of the minority, each of each of which has their own desires, the majority has to negotiate with the few groups that can credibly threaten to get 34 votes on an issue. These issues, by definition, are going to have to appeal to more than one member, and are thus, by definition, less parochial and of more general concern. You still prevent laws that offend large minorities of members, but without giving them an outsized influence on the process as a whole.
Basically, minority repeal empowers minority groups of legislators, not marginal members, which is much healthier.
In practice, you will not need to add such corollaries, because the majority is not stupid. With relatively rare exceptions, they will not bring things to a vote they know will be voted down, for the same reasons they don’t currently do so.
@cassander:
At the end of the day you need to convince the same 66 senators to vote against repeal. Given a right to schedule a repeal vote, you have exactly the same problem. If you didn’t convince them to vote for the legislation, they can simply repeal the bill and say “I want X in the bill or else we will repeal it again”.
Unless of course you leave the scheduling of the repeal vote up to the majority leader. Good luck getting any repeal votes at all then (unless they have backing of the majority, which means we are repealing laws for, the last administration.)
That’s just basically the situation we have already. Except minus the super-majority currently required to pass non budget “repeal” bills in the senate. So I guess on the margin that would lead to slightly “swingier” legislation which isn’t the intent of the OP.
Why not the Belgian solution? They didn’t need the government to pass the budget.
>At the end of the day you need to convince the same 66 senators to vote against repeal. Given a right to schedule a repeal vote, you have exactly the same problem. If you didn’t convince them to vote for the legislation, they can simply repeal the bill and say “I want X in the bill or else we will repeal it again”.
If a bill just passed with 55 votes, you don’t need to convince 66 not to repeal it, 55 want it to pass. Of the 45 not in favor of the bill, you have to convince 11 not to repeal it, which is a lot easier than convincing 11 more to vote for it in the first place.
>Unless of course you leave the scheduling of the repeal vote up to the majority leader. Good luck getting any repeal votes at all then (unless they have backing of the majority, which means we are repealing laws for, the last administration.)
how you work the parliamentary procedure is actually a tricky question. Presumably it would function somewhat like a discharge petition.
@cassander:
You say this as if it is an obvious fact.
Just looking at it strictly from a game theory perspective, I see no reason why if 35 people don’t want the legislation to pass, they don’t simply immediately repeal the legislation. I would expect this vote to become de rigeur.
You haven’t given me any reason why I, as a person who does not want the legislation to pass, would not make this vote.
I’ve given several reasons. Because you, as a member of the minority, can’t repeal on your own, you need to build a coalition of 34 other members who oppose the bill, and not 34 out of the whole assembly, 34 out of the people that aren’t actively in favor of the bill. Because if there is such a coalition, it is likely to negotiate with the bill before it passes, rather than after, and the majority only needs to peel off a couple members. Because in any legislature “don’t want to pass” and “want to actively oppose” are not the same thing, for all sorts of reasons.
It’s precisely the game theory that supports me. minority repeal turns opposing a bill from an individual action to a collective one.
@cassander:
The members of the majority can’t peel you off. They have nothing to offer you. There is no bill through which they can offer something to you. You are voting to repeal a bill that did not contain the things that would have enticed you to avoid repealing it.
The arguments you are making are the same as would be made if the initial bill required a super majority. You would need to assemble a coalition of the minority members to vote against the bill, the majority would attempt to entice minority members to vote for the bill. But at least when a bill is being passed, the majority can arrange to include things you want.
I am seriosly confused as to why you think as a minority member I wouldn’t try and leverage my power to repeal.
>The members of the majority can’t peel you off. They have nothing to offer you.
It’s a legislature, the list of things they can offer you is practically infinite, everything from a nicer office to the support you need for your bills.
>There is no bill through which they can offer something to you. You are voting to repeal a bill that did not contain the things that would have enticed you to avoid repealing it.
Why not?
>The arguments you are making are the same as would be made if the initial bill required a super majority. You would need to assemble a coalition of the minority members to vote against the bill
No, you don’t, that’s precisely the point. You need members who individually don’t like the bill, for whatever reasons. You don’t need a coalition of members that all agree on a course of action.
>I am seriosly confused as to why you think as a minority member I wouldn’t try and leverage my power to repeal.
You certainly would, if you had 34 likeminded friends. That’s harder than it sounds, though.
@cassander:
What exactly do you think a minority whip does?
Or, more to the point, when the vote for a bill is 55 aye to 45 nay, and the 45 are all Ds (or Rs), when the vote to repeal is called 5 minutes later, why would those 45 not vote aye? Everything that prompted them to vote nay on the first vote still applies.
>Or, more to the point, when the vote for a bill is 55 aye to 45 nay, and the 45 are all Ds (or Rs), when the vote to repeal is called 5 minutes later, why would those 45 not vote aye? Everything that prompted them to vote nay on the first vote still applies.
Depends on the bill and why they’re voting against it. Everything might not apply.
First of all, the whole point of such a system is to prevent bills that are opposed by substantial minorities from passing. So if the republicans manage to get some bill through that 45 senators are passionately against, and it gets repealed, the system is working fine. Of course, the majority leadership knows that such is happening, so probably won’t bring up the bill in the first place.
Second, there are a whole lot of reasons to vote against a bill besides passionate objection. They include passionate objection to part, but not all, of a bill, wanting to go on record as being against something, because the whip is whipping and promised consequences if you don’t vote against it, personal animosities, and so on.
Under the current senate rules, there is often a fair bit of negotiation to secure the votes of people who are going to vote against the final bill, but who’s vote is needed for cloture. Similar negotiations would be conducted under a minority repeal system, getting votes from people who will vote against the bill but be mollified enough not to vote for immediate repeal. This will especially be the case with “must pass” bills like budgets and appropriations.
In sum, the differences between minority repeal and a supermajority system are twofold. First, supermajority rules tend to stasis, even when laws are broadly unpopular, because once passed changing them requires so many votes that minorities in favor of them can preserve them. Minority repeal inverts this.
Second, they allow more parliamentary wiggle room than strict supermajorities do. Under a supermajority rule, the 66th vote faces immense temptation to hold out against a bills he likes because of the enormous price he can extract by playing spoiler. Minority repeal prevents that, because in order to get rents from spoiling, you need 34 buddies all of whom have agreed on a single price. In case of a legislative poison pill, that’s easy. But most bills are not so simple.
The problem you are having, I think, comes from viewing legislative preferences as either support or oppose. In reality, they’re a lot more complicated than that. It’s true that at the end of the day everyone votes yay or nay, but there are complicated shades behind that vote. Minority repeal gives a way for those shades to express themselves, super majorities do the opposite.
The comments above asking about the pronunciation of Deisach’s name reminded me of a question that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while: How did everybody come by their nicks?
I used to use a stupid, rather generic teenagery nick, until I decided I needed to change it. I didn’t have any particular idea of what I wanted to move to, but when I was staring around the room I saw a little knickknack I had from a job fair: a little foam 3D puzzle in the shape of a cube from Caterpillar, with the “Cat” logo on it. Therefore, CatCube. I actually used a picture of the thing as an avatar for a long while until I realized that since I’m not affiliated with Caterpillar in any way, shape, or form, that wasn’t a good idea (especially when I began to talk politics more). So I fired up a 3D modeling program, made a cube, and slapped some cat memes on the side of it.
I was 12 and had just played through Final Fantasy IX for the first time. I thought the Trance mechanic was cool, but that it’d be even cooler if the characters turned darker instead of glowing. I’ve been using it ever since.
My two names prior to baconbacon were references to simon and garfunkle songs, after meeting people and realizing that every in person conversation would eventually start with “what does tolbiny mean?” I switched to something generic that no one would ask questions about.
I’ve been namesquatting on the Anonymous handle since registrations were implemented. 🙂
I was a big fan of My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. I bought an Energizer-rabbit-shaped mini flashlight and hung it from my car mirror as a mascot: the Devilbunny (after MLWTTKK’s song Devil Bunnies).
The name stuck.
A university I attended generated it as a logon to their computer system based on my real name, and I thought it sounded cool so it stuck around.
Reference to ancient tools for breaking copy protection (nybble copiers)
I barely ever comment, so people probably don’t recognise me as part of the regular SSC crowd, but I’m going to answer the question anyway, because it’s one of my favourite questions to answer. 😀
“Neike” is a slight variation of my real name “Meike”, which etymologically relates to “Maria”. In combination with a very Christian surname in real life, I didn’t feel it described me. As in, I wasn’t offended, I didn’t want to distance myself to make some kind of point, I just wanted something more with an overall greater descriptive (evocative?) feel. The ‘N’ in ‘Neike’ is for several things – Noko (a musician who has significantly impacted my life), Nietzsche and nihilism; none of which describe me perfectly, either, but it was an OK compromise. 🙂
The surname “Taika-Tessaro” is stolen from a character of mine for whom it was also a pseudonym (Ciaran Taika-Tessaro, born Ciaran Finn). Loosely, it’s meant to mean ‘magic weaver’.
(I’m also a/k/a pinkgothic, which relates back to Noko, whom I call Pink Goth the First. I used to be PinkGoth2, but people kept dropping the 2 because they assumed it was a meaningless number, so I turned myself into an adjective instead.)
I love hearing the stories behind people’s online names – often it tells you a bit about the person behind it. 🙂 Thanks for asking this question! Enjoying the answers!
The time I started using the internet (AOL dialup…) roughly corresponded to the time I started trying to learn Japanese. I had to pick an AOL handle, and “Onyomi” was the only vaguely interesting sounding Japanese word I could find which didn’t require I add a number or what have you. Later, when I became a Sinologist, it continued to feel vaguely appropriate, because its meaning is “sound reading,” that is, the Japanese term for Sino-Japanese pronunciations of Kanji. It is also a combination of one Sino-Japanese pronunciation (“on”=sound) and one purely Japanese pronunciation (“yomi”=reading). But mostly I just use it out of long habit.
I was making a post comparing something to barter town, and decided to make a handle based on an obscure Mad Max character.
Now, years later, I still can’t seem to get beyond thunderdome.
After the extinct noble house, which included a bishop of Paris, a Queen of France, and others of some repute.
The nickname I use elsewhere is made up from whole cloth. This one (Nyx) is actually taken from a video game, but it also means something in Greek mythology, and isn’t an overt reference, it’s more just “hey, that’s a nice name.”
Nyx nyx nyx nyx nyx.?
Connections to NC (the Tar Heel State) and Chicago make for a somewhat compelling nick that takes the form of a command.
Today is the first time I noticed it says “Cub” rather than “Club.”
I always imagined “heel” as describing the fictitious “heel bear”, not as a command.
Recently come about here. As a teenager I was a big Wheel of Time fan. In the Old Tongue (tWoT’s invented language), rahien din means “brother of dawn.”
I initially made it for a Wheel of Time message board but it stuck with me. Now I mostly think it sounds cool (while I kind of wince internally about its provenance).
ay shouts wheel of time gang
too bad Sanderson kinda ruined it at the end, still a cool name though
Thanks!
I didn’t mind Sanderson’s writing, other than there was so much crammed into each of his books that they read more like timelines than plotlines. And he had plenty of women angrily sniffing, so, it was an adequate pastiche of RJ’s writing style.
Honestly at the end of A Memory of Light I was just exhausted. I’ll probably never go back and reread them unfortunately, just too much of an undertaking.
eh, i feel like he relied too much on people getting saved at the last moment, which is kind of dumb in a world where pretty much all the most powerful characters can teleport, meaning “showing up at the last moment” is not only always possible but really flippin’ easy
also he narrowed the focus down to a few characters, especially by making Rand uber-powerful
honestly at the end of it i was exhausted in a different way – I had just read the ending of a series that I’d been reading for nearly half my life. Story endings are always kind of sad to me though
Oy!
I actually never read the last one (Didn’t want to have finished it). I thought Sanderson’s writing was a step down in quality (aside from a few scenes I loved, most of which I suspect were written by Jordan), But not by that huge a margin – aside from Mat (who he ruined), he mostly managed to keep up what made the books good.
Also, I feel bad for not remembering what rahien din means. (I vaguely remember someone named rahien, and I think din shows up in one of the Aiel warrior societies?)
I think you are thinking of Far Aldazar Din, the brothers of the eagle
I decided to use the nonsense phrase “furiously sleeping idea” as a login somewhere. Then I had to come up with a shorter name for a different site. So I took the beginning of each word, and I liked how it sounded and haven’t seen anyone else using it. So I stuck with it.
And I always assumed it was some sort of Furry term.
Oh God no. Did anyone else think I was outing myself as a furry?
Hey now, it’s ok, we won’t judge. Your secret is safe with us.
On a more serious note, Is “Oh God, Furries” really still a thing? I thought they had been displaced as the Internet’s collective whipping herms on the Geek Hierarchy by other targets these days.
Furries aren’t the top whipping boy these days, but they’re still in the top 20 AFAICT.
(To clarify, I wasn’t judging).
In some places where I have been for a long time I am stuck with the name of a character from a novel. That seemed like a good idea when I was 15. Places I joined more recently I just use part or all of my real name.
I do feel a little bad that I just took Brad before checking. I know there’s a “Brad (not that one)” and I’m not sure if he was actually here first.
US is an abbreviation of a Danish nick-name I used to go by, back when I started out my life online more than a decade ago. I’m not going to tell you what that original nick was, because one of the reasons why I eventually settled with the abbreviation was that I wanted to distance myself from the comments and remarks I had made using that nick while I was young and stupid. When I used the original nick I sometimes abbreviated the nick in my responses to others because this was convenient in some contexts, and that’s where the idea of switching nicks originally came from. I started using it, while I was unfortunately still young and stupid (well, I arguably still am both young and stupid, though I’m admittedly not as young as I used to be), and it sort of stuck. I couldn’t really come up with a great nick and decided to go with it for the time being, and I never got around to finding a better nick, though I probably should have at some point. One of the irrational justifications for not finding a better nick which has stopped me from coming up with something better is incidentally that this nick is impossible to google, which I tend to find advantageous in various contexts (I value my privacy highly and I don’t like the idea of making it too easy for other people to ‘track my online footprints’). One of the reasons I had for not switching to an entirely new nick, rather than the abbreviation, was incidentally that at the time of the switch there were a few people who I didn’t mind knew who ‘US’ was (or, to put it more accurately, knew about my other online persona); I figured the link between the two online characters would over time be completely severed (there was only a minor and transient overlap) and would only be known by ‘the people in the know’, which is pretty much what happened. As time passed, the number of ‘people in the know’ for whom the knowledge was even remotely relevant dropped to zero (making the perhaps questionable assumption that it was ever above zero…); none of the people who originally read the stuff I wrote under the original nick are even remotely interested in the sort of stuff I usually blog or comment about these days.
It’s a little joke that’s followed me around my entire life, based on my real name.
Ant biologist EO Wilson on Communism:
“Good theory, wrong species.”
Ha! I have once or twice wondered how/why you picked that nick. This explanation was not among the list of options I had considered (not that I have given it much thought)…
I’m curious what options made it on that list. It wasn’t until later that I realized my username made me sound far more misanthropic than I intended.
Heh. Some form of: ‘Humans are terrible’ statement was definitely at the top of the short ‘list’. You wanting to signal that: ‘I am different from other people’ was another related option I remember having considered (related to social adjustment problems or autism, maybe – as in: ‘I don’t understand people’. That was just me projecting, of course – I am mildly autistic myself so that seemed like a likely explanation).
There was a time, which I know about from my software engineer father, when using your TLA was considered the optimal avatar. So my first email address was sfl@ma.ultranet.com, because of the third-rate Massachusetts ISP my parents subscribed to in the mid-90s dialup era. As time passed, three letter handles became impractical for combinatorial reasons. So when I went to college I added the rest of the first syllable of my last name, and I ended up with the unpronounceable but easily-remembered handle I’ve used ever since. I’m curious to see how my kids – assuming I have some someday – pick their avatars.
I used a shakespeare quote, and still do on tumblr, but have decided that as I move away from considering myself evil-by-fiat (I wasn’t up to trying to be good, for a few years), I should move away from a handle that designates me a villain, so I’ve been abbreviating it to just PDV since I made my wordpress blog.
In college me and my roommate had talked about starting an anime fansubbing group, and the name we’d floated for it was Sun Tzu Subs, on the basis that Sun Tzu was cool and the name had good rhythm and mouthfeel. The group never got off the ground, but when I was looking for a name for my anime blog I remembered it, and still thought Sun Tzu was cool. And of course, if you have a blog, you should comment on other people’s blogs under the name of your blog, so that if people find your comments interesting they can read more on your blog; it helps discoverability.
My blog is mostly dead and I don’t go by this name anywhere but blog comments, but I’m too invested in the identity to change it now.
It is an anglicized abbreviation of my first name.
As a young man I liked to view myself as a semi-autonomous agent acting in the intellectual borderlands of the culture wars. “Lord of the Mark” seemed far cooler than “Marcher Lord”.
So you identify as an Edgelord? (What are your pronouns? 🙂 )
I go without.
My pre-login times name (pku, which is my general default) is the nickname I tried to get people to call me in elementary school (I made up nicknames that stuck for the rest of our friends group, but somehow never managed to get mine to stick).
My current nick is the one that eventually stuck to me (where “eventually” means “in grad school”), and is basically my actual name with an extra bit.
My Unsong nick (the coment king) is a terrible pun I grabbed before anyone else got to it.
This one is my initials. My previous one was a musical theatre pun based on my name.
I named myself after the greatest and most prolific lover of the 20th century, of course!
In truth, I just never saw a reason to be anonymous. For a while, when I was Very Worried about tripping afowl of my company’s policies about giving financial advice on the Internet, I didn’t, but now that I recognize that basically no one cares, I say what I like, about what I like.
Plus, having a unified online identity means I can easily code-switch between places like this and, e.g., Facebook groups.
Huh?
I’m not sure how you mean code-switching.
If it’s the phenomena of adapting different appropriate, expected mannerisms for different communities, I’m not sure how it applies.
Sorry, that was a bit of verbal brain-noise that crept in. I meant to say that because I have a unified identity across my various online services (including both the real-name and the pseudoanonymous), I don’t have issues where I might want to talk to someone across multiple services, but doing so might reveal the right conjunction of personal data to de-anonymize me.
Ah. Ok.
I looked on my birth certificate, ha ha. Try to out clever that!
After a few years of using a nick from a sci-fi novel, I switched to something simple.
Two initial letters from two parts of my meatspace name.
(At the time, I was split between something that looked like an Icelandic-style name-plus-patronym, and something that work with one of the Radio Phonetic Alphabets. But “Sierra Juliet” seemed a little off to me, and “Stefan Jeroldson” might be accurate…but felt unwieldy. So I went with a handy “SJ”. The “Stefan Jeroldson” handle still survives on a Blogspot domain somewhere, and in an email address.)
It worked, until “SJ” became part of the shorthand for talking about Social Justice Warriors.
So I added an underscore in the middle of my handle.
I haven’t read anything Icelandic or Norse in a while, but I still like the feel of those languages and stories.
I similarly used a silly preteen nick with a string of numbers after it. My current one is a reference to this famous story (in which I had no part, for the record), which I came up with when I started thinking about publishing some RPG-related stuff.
edit – Oh, and for a while I commented as (just some) “guy”, but that got *very* annoying to look for on long comment threads.
These are my actual initials. A handle I use elsewhere is an anagram of my (abbreviated) real name. This is probably not the best plan for maintaining my pseudonymity, but I’ve been using both for a while now and it’s too late to change.
Mine is really dumb, and I don’t like it. I was an Anon for a long time before, because I hate picking usernames. I had my SIGINT post all ready to go right when Scott decided to require registration, so I had to go with something rather than have a nice think. It comes from the fact that my specialty is control theory, and in school, we’d often call it “controls” instead of “control” for whatever deep-seated linguistic reasons.
We used to be able to comment anonymously here.
Then we couldn’t.
I wasn’t pleased.
But… I recall you having that nickname when we still could post anonymously. Or was it someone else with it?
Once upon a time, you could post Anonymously by simply not filling out the e-mail field, that was what I was referring to.
Then someone came up with Anonymous through coordinating on a single email, and then that go removed as well.
I like using dead scientists and philosophers as obvious pseudonyms, have a fondness for the sounds of slavic languages, and have always had an ironic regard for Trofim Lysenko as an unsung hero of the Cold War, single-handledly setting back Soviet bioscience years, if not decades…
Just a fan of Protagoras of Abdera; despite Plato’s bias against the sophists, his description makes Protagoras seem really interesting. I can’t know for sure that a more unbiased source would have made him seem even more impressive, as there are no unbiased sources still available, but it is at least possible.
I like wordplay. I’m a philosopher. I originally was going to use “philosophisticate” on a different site, but the restrictions on name length cut it short to “philosophisticat” and I realized I liked that even better.
When I was a teenager, I thought very highly of myself. See, I thought I was very clever. A MASTER mind. Then I though of myself of being even cleverer when I punned it into Mister Mind (English is not my native language), thinking that someone would catch it (no one has).
Only much, much later I discovered it was a worm-like, long-forgotten enemy of Superman…
Nit: Captain Marvel, not Superman.
(Though since his incorporation into DC’s shared universe the character has certainly fought Superman and other DC heroes.)
8 or 9 years ago, Blizzard Entertainment bestowed this name upon me, since the first two names I gave my character violated their naming policy and I guess they don’t follow the three strike rule.
When I woke up from my anarcho-capitalist coma in 2013, I needed a name for the “gradualist materialist transhumanist desocietalism in the long term versus short term classical liberal-ishness with social liberal and national liberal tendencies special snowflake wank ideology” I started moving towards when I found out that there wasn’t a pre-existing ideology that fitted what I had come to believe. So I started dubbing this techno-decentralism, similar to the REDACTED IDEOLOGY sub-ideology of techno-commercialism, but with a different emphasis. I think my first post here was arguing for that position under the name “TD”, but I stuck around to discuss different things and then switched to “Tekhno”.
I don’t use a nick here, but I’m using my name because I wasn’t inspired with a nick I liked and so I use my name (nancylebov at Livejournal and Dreamwidth).
I have a weird compulsion to (almost always) use my name online. I have no idea whether this is actually a good idea, but I’ve been going with it.
I think I remember Mike Blume posting on Tumblr a while back when he realized that he seemed to be the only person around who used his real name as his handle, but it seems that several others do the same.
I won’t call it a “weird compulsion”, just that it’s my name and I don’t see any good reason not to use it online. I’m told that if I had an obviously-female name I would be receiving hundreds of disturbing or threatening emails every day for my trouble, but that strikes me more as (yet another) reason for a good email filter, is all. And doesn’t come up in my case anyhow.
I haven’t been subject to online harassment.
It probably has something to do with where I hang out (I don’t do gaming or dating sites) and something to do with not posting misandrist material, though I might also be lucky.
I’ve been commenting elsewher that SJW’s don’t quantify. What’s worse, they discourage being public about *not* suffering from the oppressions they focus on. (Hey, could you post in an MRA forum about having a divorce that went smoothly and equitably?)
The result is that we don’t have the information I wish we did about the intensity and prevalence of various sorts of mistreatment.
@Nancy
Studies show that men get a little more harassment, although age seems a much bigger factor (so much of it seems to be adolescents messing with each other, which matches the police statistics about offline threats, which are very often from adolescents).
Of course, there are many issues with such research and how it is interpreted, so apply skepticism liberally.
Aaapje, thanks for the links.
It’s worth noting (assuming the survey is sound and generally applicable) that young women are slighlty more likely to receive severe harassment than young men, while men are more likely to have been harassed atl al.
@Nancy
If I look at the first graph on this page and this statement: “For instance, 80% of those who have experienced sexual harassment online have also been called offensive names and 63% have been purposefully embarrassed by someone online.”;
I get the impression that much of the sexual harassment that they are talking about is name calling or embarrassing a person in a sexual way, where this is rather arbitrarily treated as a separate category that is classified entirely as ‘severe.’ As a non-American, I’ve noticed that America is rather liberal about violence and puritan about sex and tends to treat the latter as ‘more severe.’ This makes me a little skeptical.
When one category is lower for one group, while that group scores higher for others, the first thing I suspect is that the perpetrators have somewhat different insults for men and women, which they consider equivalent, but which are intended to strike at the weaknesses that gender norms imprints on each gender (for example, women seem to be relatively sensitive to insults about their looks and men to insults about their penis size). So there is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison then, if you hurt men maximally by calling them losers and you hurt women maximally by calling them sluts, is there actually a difference in severity?
I even wonder if some sexual harassment of men is even counted. For example, my experience in shoot-up gaming is that many young adolescents like sexually explicit trash-talking, like calling each other gay. Is this counted merely as ‘called offensive names?’ There is definitively a sexual norm being expressed in such statements, IMO, although it may be less direct than what women tend to experience (‘slut’?).
Because of these questions I have, I prefer to draw a limited conclusion: ‘men and women have about the same level of harassment online.’ Although my confidence in the accuracy of even this limited statement is not that high.
I didn’t make it clear, but I take the sustained harassment category most seriously– my impression is that’s the one which causes the most damage.
Second look– young women are a *lot* more likely to be stalked than young men. Again, this one is more likely to be seriously frightening.
Still, I was surprised that men reported nearly as much harassment as women. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further information.
The way I prefer to sum it up is “Men are marginally more likely to be harassed online overall, but women are much more likely to be harassed online for being women.”
@Nancy
I agree that stalking can be very serious, although that seems to mostly be the case when people start taking it offline. If they just start replying to every post of yours, that seems more irritating than threatening.
@liskantope
You cannot conclude that from the data. Gendered harassment can happen because someone is angry with a person for a non-gendered reason and then tailors the abuse to their gender; or someone can seek out people of a specific gender to abuse. Only the latter group is harassed online for being male or female.
Neither of my links collected data on this specifically, nor am I aware of any other study (and I’m not even sure if there is a method to collect this data).
Being harassed as women, I think, rather than for being women.
Much of online harassment is about changing the subject. The harasser is losing an argument, or a game, and resigned to the fact that nothing they can say on-topic or do in-game is going to change that. I see a gendered insult on the internet, and my first instinct is to look for the guy who just got pwnd by a girl in a fair and non-gender-related fight. If he’d lost to another guy, he’d have just had to pick a different insult.
And then there are the women who are harassed for being women, but I don’t see any good way to distinguish them, en masse, from the more usual sort. Gendered insults are just too obvious, easy, and effective once someone has decided for whatever reason to harass someone who happens to be a woman.
“I agree that stalking can be very serious, although that seems to mostly be the case when people start taking it offline”
The difference between on and offline is blurry. If somone says “This is your home address. Behold my excellent rape and murder fantasy”, how would you classify it?
@Aapje
There’s also the rather annoying thing that often gendered insults towards men just aren’t counted as such. I’ve been in a discussion with someone talking about gendered insults towards women, who when challenged called me a “jerk” and a “dick” (the former is possibly gendered, the latter certainly so) and then got REALLY angry when I called her on it.
I would classify it as a slightly amusing confirmation that I am dealing with an online total loser, and about as correlated with future real-world outcomes as a straight-up “God Damn You to Hell”. But I understand most people don’t do quantitative risk analysis that way (or at all), and suspect there may be a gender bias in that aspect of the problem as well.
You might be interested in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. People generally don’t bounce back well from a big campaign against them.
You’re probably thinking about how you’d react to one piece of nastiness, but there’s a cumulative effect from trememdous amounts of nastiness, some of it sent to your employer, friends, and family. Also, trolls can do DDOS attacks.
Nancy,
At the risk of “victim-blaming”, I might suggest that you haven’t experienced online harassment because you conduct yourself in such a way as to not invite or encourage it.
You don’t make posts that are particularly flirtatious. You don’t draw attention to yourself or your personal life. Even your use of your (presumably) real name as an identifier implies that you’re likely an older or more mature person with little to hide/fear. I might even go so far as to suggest your first name also implies a certain age grouping (is Nancy a common first-name among millennials? i’d lean towards not).
You generally act like everyone else here acts – and the fact that you are female is incidental and of little relevance. In many online circles this is certainly not the case – and the results are somewhat predictable (which doesn’t make them appropriate or anything…)
“There’s also the rather annoying thing that often gendered insults towards men just aren’t counted as such.”
This also speaks to a broader question. For various cultural reasons, men and women might define things like “stalking” and “harassment” in different ways. Women might report higher rates of stalking simply due to having a lower threshold of what “stalking” actually is. (Personal anecdote, a young woman once accused me of “cyberstalking” her because I said hello to her on skype twice in the same day)
That’s a different class of harassment; purely online, but actually damaging. I am, generally, more concerned with people who make credible threats against me than those who make ludicrous ones.
Fortunately, most trolls still seem to lack the skills necessary for these sorts of attack. Unfortunately, it’s the lame death threats that seem to get most of the attention (and response), rather than the ones with the less common but more destructive tactics.
But, yes, I’ll second the recommendation of Ronson; he’s done a fairly good job at characterizing the whole range of threats I believe.
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant to say… my wording was bad.
@Nancy
This implies a threat to seek someone out in the real world and thus has an offline element.
I agree with Schilling that in 99.9+% of the cases, this is just a hollow threat, so there is probably little reason to be very worried. The main exception is if you are at the center of a (culture war) shit storm, where many different people direct hatred at you. At that point, the sheer quantity means that there is a non-negligible likelihood that one of those people is crazy enough to actually go after you in real life (although my impression is that it still rarely happens for most people in these kinds of situations).
@The Nybbler
My experience is that there are even a decent number of self-proclaimed feminists who use insults that are derived from gender norms against men. One would assume that this group is more aware of gender norms than the average person and is fairly aware of how gendered shaming is bad, so the understanding of this by average people is probably dreadful.
Some examples of gendered insults against men:
– You have a small penis (there is a relatively common belief/misconception that the ability for men to satisfy women is highly dependent on their penis size)
– Virgin (aka: you have failed the societal norm where sexual success with women is proof of your ability to be appropriately masculine)
– You are living in your parents’ basement (aka: you are unable to provide for yourself, let alone to provide for a woman, so are a failure as a man and you will die alone)
My observation is that many insults seek to exploit insecurities in people, which are weak spots. When people think bad things about themselves, they are often unable to dismiss it when people say those bad things about them.
IMO, it’s pretty interesting to unpack insults, as they often point to insecurities created by societal norms.
I’ve seen feminists say that insults about small penises are bad, but this does seem to be a minority of feminists.
It’s certainly fair to say that some feminists use virginity or penis size as insults. I don’t think it’s fair to ascribe this to feminism itself; plenty of non-feminists use the same insults, and my (admittedly biased) impression is that non-feminists tend to do so at a higher rate.
Flipping the question in the other direction: how many non-feminists are out there saying that insults about small penises are bad?
@Iain:
Well, for one, the non-feminists who want to hoist feminism on its own petard (seems obvious, given this conversation). They aren’t wrong, frankly.
I don’t think they would be pointing this out if it weren’t for feminism though. As much as I dislike things like, say, the term “patriarchy”, I don’t think we would see critiques about penis size as bad because it plays on harmful gender norms without feminism having noticed the harm these do and introduced the concept into the culture.
I think part of the issue is that the most frequent critique of shaming through use of male gender norms is going to come from people who are reluctant to agree that gender norms exist or can be harmful. They make the accusation not because they believe it, but because they only wish to point out hypocrisy. The feminists claim to be ironic, showing how gender norm shaming is harmful.
This leads to each side simply saying “No, I am using this to show how hypocritical you are”.
It seems to me that the most effective way to combat use of these slurs from feminists is to be in actual agreement that use of terms like “slut” and “virgin” are using societal gender norm expectations to do harm and point out that this is not OK.
I think the “small penis” insults from feminists are mostly communicating to their own in-group (other feminists) how little they value their opponent. Coming from a woman they haven’t had sex with and don’t want to, they’re not really devastating to a guy who is past high-school age.
(Yeah, Trump makes small penis cracks. It just makes him sound juvenile)
I mean, it was unprecedented, but Trump literally started a Republican debate by showing everyone how big his hands were, trying to spread them out to make them look bigger.
The Enzyte fake product ads weren’t ubiquitous for no reason.
Obviously there is something potent there, for some significant subset of the population.
@HeelBearCub: Right, yes. I meant to go back and edit my post to include the obvious caveat, but got lazy.
In many cases of feminist penis-size-shaming, accusations of hypocrisy are probably fair. That’s not an argument against feminism, though — just against one individual hypocrite. It’s not like there is a large body of feminist writing that explicitly advocates for making fun of small penises. To the extent that feminists have written about the issue, they have taken the anti-shaming side; to the extent that people have taken the anti-shaming side (in good faith), they are disproportionately feminists.
@Iain:
I’m guessing this is just poorly worded, given the rest of the post, but clearly not every feminist takes the “anti-shaming of males” side. For specifically feminist academic writings, I mostly agree, although you have hard core radicals that are, I believe, actually anti-male that I’m sure can be pointed to.
Then you have examples like prominent mainstream feminist academics who are happy to have coffee cups that say “male tears” on them. I think it’s reasonable to assume that there are plentiful examples of non-academic writing by academics that contain examples of the same kind loose use of language.
Just want to make sure you aren’t engaging in a “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
I’m specifically talking about “not living up to gender norms”-style shaming here: penis size, virginity, and so on. I acknowledge that “male tears”-style rhetoric is common among prominent popular feminists, but I think it’s a different phenomenon. If the frequency of “SJWs/feminists eat babies” posts on SSC increased, and then I showed up to a meetup wearing an ironic “Babies are Delicious” shirt, that would be a closer parallel. (Especially if it went on to become a big complicated Internet Thing and grew wildly out of control.)
To phrase my point another way: I am absolutely not claiming that feminists don’t engage in gender-norm-shaming behaviour against men. I am claiming that feminism, as an intellectual movement, is not a primary cause of that behaviour. The feminists who make jokes about small penises would be making the same sorts of jokes if they’d never been exposed to feminist thought.
I think males and crying and criticizing males for crying has a fairly long gender norm history though. Regardless of the back story, some of the power of that particular taunt is because it is about making men in particular cry, right?
@Iain
The reasonable way to put it, I think, is that most of the things that people complainabout in this regard are things that are not the fault of feminism, not in the slightest. In fact, they are the result of the patriarchal culture most feminists have set themselves against. However, there are a lot of people who consider themselves feminists who still do all the patriarchal-culture-driven things (act like men are beasts and women are agency-less perennial victims, mock men for not living up to the expectations set of men by a patriarchal culture, etc) – and the argument is that they are the ones who should know better.
(I’m going to start a thread in the new OT about this general idea, of people who have absorbed norms that they themselves state themselves to be against, but act according to those norms – please chime in – @HeelBearCub too – it is good to have people around who don’t think feminism is bad).
@HBC: Yeah, it’s a controversial issue among feminists. (See this reddit thread, for example.) The ironic “Yeah, sure, I am a misandrist who drinks male tears glug glug glug” stuff seems basically fine; “go on and cry more male tears” as a response to an actual crying man is clearly awful. Most feminists would likely agree that the line should be drawn at the point where it stops being a joke and starts actually shaming men for displaying sadness, but there’s no consensus on where the line actually is, or how frequently it is crossed. (I was gesturing at this in my previous post with “wildly out of control”.)
I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase myself.
@Iain:
The problem being that Poe’s law is active. #maletears can never be reliably taken as sarcasm, nor can someone saying it sarcastically know that everyone receiving it will perceive it as sarcasm.
And while I agree that the majority of feminists would say that there is a line. that line, for most people, has little to do with intent and much more to do with who the the target is. It comes down to basic ingroup/outgroup dynamics.
Roughly a correlary to “He can’t do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges.”
I agree that it is prone to misinterpretation. If I had to draw a bright line, it would be “this stops being satire when there is an identifiable individual target”, which cuts down slightly on the potential for confusion. Ultimately, though, it comes down to a question of the intended audience. Nobody has a duty to make sure every word that leaves their lips is carefully calculated propaganda for external consumption. For women who feel like they’ve spent their entire lives seeking male approval, sometimes it is good to spend some time openly not giving a shit what people think, or to interact with other women who do so.
As I said, I don’t use the phrase myself.
@HBC
I definitely credit feminism with creating many useful concepts for culture criticism. My objections are usually less with the base concepts, but more with the way they are applied (often selectively, to achieve the desired end conclusion, IMO).
I would argue that the progressive parts of the MRA movement are strongly derived from feminism. For example, Warren Farrell is probably the most respected MRA and the origin of many MRA concepts. He was on the Board of Directors for NOW in NY city in the 70’s. During his feminist period, he worked a lot with men’s and women’s group to discuss gender issues and he was fond of role reversals like putting men in a beauty contest, to teach them about being objectified as a sex object; and a role-play for women, where they take on men’s ‘pursuer role’ during a date and face rejections. IMO, he became a MRA because he stopped believing that women are merely the victims of gender norms.
I think that he gave the best description of where feminism went wrong, when he criticized his own actions during his feminist period:
IMO, this is the core problem with feminism: that criticism of female behavior is usually regarded as misogyny, while criticism of male behavior is considered crucial to fighting the patriarchy. The logical end result is that female privileges are not addressed and neither is ‘toxic femininity.’ When men are criticized and it’s demanded that they change for the benefit for women, while women are not similarly criticized and asked to change for the benefit of men, you get an unfair and even abusive theory.
Anyway, I thought that this might help you understand where I’m coming from and why I consider myself to be much more of a proper egalitarian.
By the way, it is interesting/sad how my point that ‘when even quite a few feminists fail to see why X is bad, it must mean that non-feminists will surely fail to understand this’; is seen as feminist-bashing, rather than criticism of non-feminists.
It is merely a claim that not all feminists have perfect understanding of gender norms, but better than most non-feminists, which seems more of a compliment than criticism of the former group and mainly criticism of non-feminists. My argument could in fact easily be used to argue for the spread of feminism (which I do not support, but not because of this issue, but despite it).
That my comment results in a debate about how bad feminists are at gendered insults is really quite exasperating for me.
So at this point I fear that feminism is pretty much mind killed on this forum, where any comment referencing the topic is immediately pattern matched as ‘blind bashing’ or ‘blind support,’ resulting in predictable and tiresome tribal behaviors.
I would prefer attempts at actual enlightenment, rather than these ritual dances.
@Aapje: Would you care to point to a comment that anybody has made that you think is a “ritual dance”?
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this entire conversation is about you. My initial comment was at least as much in response to Nancy as to you; since then, HBC and I have been having a very reasonable discussion. This is one of the least angry threads about a social-justice-adjacent issue that I can remember on the site, so it’s strange that you seem so quick to condemn it as “mind-killed”.
@Iain
I realize that part of it is disappointment at the direction of this thread and of course other people have no obligation to discuss what I want to discuss. However, it was still rather typical what part of my post triggered people to go off on a tangential discussion.
I am merely calling for some reflection. Your immediate conclusion that I was directing my comment merely at HBC and you is also a good illustration of the tribalism that I’m talking about. Apparently you can’t imagine that I would be unhappy with the behavior of people who are not on ‘your team.’
Anyway, there has been plenty of grief about the tone of this forum by some left-wing commenters who feel marginalized and now I am having my little temper tantrum. I didn’t see you complain when the tone policing was against your outgroup, so I don’t very bad feel bad about challenging you to reflect in the same way that SJ-critical people like me were asked to self-examine about how we act here.
It is exactly because this thread is not angry and that it still is such a ritual dance that makes it so mind-killed. If people have a temporary tantrum, they can sober out of it. When tribalism is the default state, people can never move past it.
At this point I feel that I have to severely self-censor around certain topics because bringing them up will inevitably result in a certain discussion. More specifically: any mention of imperfection in the SJ movement leads to defensive reactions that not all SJ people are like that, at best followed by a nuanced discussion of how many SJ people have these beliefs.
Although this is a fine discussion to have, sometimes, it always goes like this. Imagine that every discussion about flaws in libertarianism results in a discussion about how many libertarians have certain poor beliefs; every discussion about flaws in Trump’s ideology leads to a discussion about how many Trump supporters have certain beliefs; every discussion about…
It is the inability by people to assume that these mentions are not intended as an attack on all SJs, like they seem to mostly be able to do for other groups, that makes me call this topic mind-killed.
@Aapje:
Iain asked you to point at something specific that you objected to. You aren’t doing that which leaves us in the dark as to who is making comments you think are mind-killed. But given that you seem upset that we are discussing whether feminists are “bad” for using gender norm based insults, that seems to have started with me in response to Iain, with a little bit of dndnrsn thrown in and one question by Nybbler. But mostly Iain and I.
Specifically, I think you are objecting this assertion:
That was an answer to Iain’s question.
Perhaps you feel this mis-characterizes your intent and was aimed specifically at you. My apologies.
Although, in my defense, Iain was asking a question about the wide world where one might see people raising objections to those kinds of insults and I answered it with the most frequent use I am aware of. Perhaps you want MRAs mentioned as caring about these for actual harm-reduction reasons, which is a fair critique.
You said:
And I said:
Those points seem to be in broad agreement.
If you want to be able to discuss feminism or MRA critically without rancor, I’m all for that.
I understand and empathize with your concern. I really do. At the same time, I think it would be beneficial for you to step back and get a sense of perspective.
Several open threads ago, there was a post that implied that the left taught self-hatred. One reply to that post argued that Christianity also taught self-hatred. The post about the left wing got one post of pushback arguing that it was not true of the entire left wing; the post about Christianity got an entire thread with dozens of responses. Do you believe that discussion of Christianity is mind-killed on this forum?
To the contrary, I would argue that this is what happens when you have healthy representation of Christians. When people make overbroad generalizations about a group, it is good to have members of that group around to present the counterarguments. The existence of the argument means that there are enough people on either side of the issue to sustain discussion.
To the extent that I support complaints about the “tone” of this forum, it is along those lines: defending SSC as a place with sufficient leftish representation to enable meaningful discussion with the left, not just about the left. Comments that do nothing more than signal hostility to the left as a whole are counter-productive to that goal. I don’t mind defending left-wing arguments against thoughtful right-wing stances; to a first approximation, that’s the entire reason I post on SSC. I do mind wading through a swamp of unsubstantiated nonsense to find the good bits. If that means tone policing, then hand me a badge, I guess.
Bringing it back to the current issue: I respect your feeling of self-censorship. At the same time, I am struggling to think of a group that has less active representation on SSC than SJ people, relative to the number of negative things said about the group. (Maybe Islam? Arguably black people?) As I have argued before, to the extent that SSC has a single outgroup, it is social justice. There is a lot of shade thrown at SJ here without any response whatsoever, so my sympathy for your feelings of oppression only goes so far. You yourself are, very frequently, prone to making extremely broad pronouncements about “what SJ believes” while rarely pointing to any specific examples. What responses are possible to that, other than “No, that’s not what SJ believes”? Do you just expect everybody to sit around saying, “Yes, Aapje, very good! Such insightful analysis!” while nodding sagely? If you consistently get the wrong responses, consider that maybe you are asking the wrong questions.
PS: You continue to vaguely accuse me of “tribal dancing”, without being willing to put specifics to your claim. Put up or shut up.
PPS: If you hadn’t come stomping in complaining about tribalism, then your comment about Warren Farrell might have been interesting to talk about. Right now, though, I have to go to work.
@HBC
I made a conscious choice not to call out people specifically, because it was not just one person doing this and I didn’t want to get stuck in a back and forth with one person, debating about specific posts and which person is ‘guilty.’
Imagine a game of Chinese whispers. Who do you blame for distorting the message? Pointing out any individual is unfair. The real issue is that there is a cumulative error. Each individual retelling error is unintended and so small that confronting someone over it is petty. However, the cumulative error is immense and frustrating (if you care about accuracy).
My observation is that debates are often derailed/destroyed by this mechanism, where people slightly misunderstand/straw man/cherry pick/derail/etc each other, where these issues are each relatively small and unimportant, yet the end result is a derailing thread that operates along tribal lines.
Yes and no. By making that statement, you made the discussion a little more tribal, but you responded to someone who did the same, who responded to someone who did the same. And after your statement, other people came along who made the discussion more tribal step by step.
It didn’t actually escalate out of control this time, but the entire mechanism just added that final drop to my frustration bucket and it floweth over.
Again, it was not my intent to get anyone to apologize. It was not you individually. It’s not even that this thread shouldn’t have happened like this. It’s that I got frustrated that on certain topics (especially SJ), only threads like this ever seem to happen.
I mean, imagine that someone would have responded with something like: It’s important that we are all more aware of how insults enforce social norms.
Then you and I could state our agreement with this and we would feel a shared connection. You would probably feel less isolated here with your SJ beliefs. This would make me happy.
But this chance was squandered, like it usually is.
I know that I’m too blame for this too, my debating style is aggressive. I try to be better, but it is hard. When I really try and I fail, it hurts me.
@Iain
I read your comment and respect your position, but at this point I think it’s better if I don’t respond to it, as I believe that my above comment explains my position better than if I defensively respond to you.
My statement about not wanting to target people personally, also applies to you and I hope you will believe me when I say that none of my statements were intended to single you out and attack you, without giving you the ability to defend yourself.
@Aapje
For one thing, a post that amounted to “Trump supporters are all horrible racist misogynists” would result in a ton of pushback, and a ton of “what % of Trump supporters are xyz” and so forth.
For another, this is kind of the standard around here. Nitpicking, attempts to quantify things, attempts to sort groups … almost as though we’re all nerds, eh?
@Iain:
I don’t think either of those groups has a detractors-to-defenders ratio as high as SJ people do here – more a continuum from “mild cluelessness” to “shitty obliviousness”, for the most part. SJ are definitely the default outgroup here.
But Aapje, I did respond with what was essentially that.
That was the conclusion to my post.
I noted that tribal discussion around the issue occurred, gave a reason for why I thought they continued, and said that I thought the answer was that we should simply assert that engaging in gender norm based shaming wasn’t OK.
I’m really confused, because it seems to me the entirety of my post should be read as supporting your basic point, however you are saying I was making the problem worse.
At this point I think we are arguably dogpiling, so I will only say: please don’t worry about apologizing or hurting my feelings, Aapje. I wasn’t pushing you to identify examples of “tribal dancing” because I was offended. I was just leaning on a weak part of your argument, to get you to examine why you were making that claim.
@Iain:
I understand what you are saying. Clearly we are disgreeing with Aapje on this meta point of how “mind-killed” this particular conversation was.
But is it really dog piling to say “Hey, I agree with your original point and I am confused why you didn’t see it that way?”
Yeah, sorry, unclear on my part. Your comment was fine; the longer comment that I could have written (instead of the one I did write) would potentially have been excessive, particularly after Aapje acknowledged that he had read my previous post but didn’t want to respond to it directly right now.
@dndnrsn
I hedged my statement sufficiently that it cannot reasonably be read as a claim about all feminists, IMO. So your example seems incomparable to mine and as such, I don’t think you can reasonably argue that these instances of nitpicking are comparable, aside from a general claim that people here are extremely prone to nitpicking (which I agree with).
My issue is more that on some topics, people seemingly can no longer interact in any other way than to nitpick (and perhaps cannot even avoid derailing arguments at the mere mention of the topic as a minor element of a different discussion), which I would argue pushes out many interesting avenues of interaction.
@HeelBearCub
I agree that your comment was reaching across the aisle. I agree that you didn’t have bad intent (and that goes for everyone in this thread). We agree that the discussion was tribal.
In hindsight, I agree that I may be unfair to state that your comment was part of a chain that made it worse. Your comment can very reasonably be read as an attempt to end the nitpicking by drawing a bipartisan conclusion. That your comment didn’t have this effect wasn’t your fault and I mistakenly judged your post by the outcome (that the thread continued on a similar vein), rather than the probable intent.
But now it is all about you (and me) again, rather than the general culture (which is why I tried to avoid focusing on individuals).
Perhaps this is just an unavoidable cultural trait due to the audience of this site. Any forum will develop a dominant culture after all. There is only so much that one can do to alter this and any action to alter things will have negative consequences as well as positive consequences.
Perhaps we just have to accept that this forum is what it is. There is value in nitpicking. No forum will be everything to everyone. I may be wrong in thinking that it can be more than what it is.
@Aapje:
Our little bit of society is what we make of it.
And SSC has plenty of making that has already been done on this topic, but I don’t think we are at the seventh day just yet.
I think it’s probably unfair to expect that the culture wars won’t come up in this kind of conversation, but every mention of it does not mean that is is being actually fought in a particular comment thread.
In any case, if at some point you want to discuss issues like that, say by posting a top comment, I will endeavor to engage with the ideas, and avoid the rancor. I think there are more and less successful ways to post a top comment so as to promote discussion, and usually the most activity is around contention, but it still can be interesting.
@Nancy:
Using your real name does have some advantages, since there may be (are) people here who know you by it.
what specifically caused you to wake and what would you tell ancaps in regards to their ideology
@AnonEEmous
1: Ancap and libertarianism more broadly weren’t getting anywhere.
2: I began to feel that “anarchism” was an incoherent concept and that an absence of a state was just a vacuum.
3: The account where the state protects and defines the institution of property seems more historically accurate than one in which the state is the enemy of property. This brought me round to a sort of classical liberal minarchism.
4: I started thinking about how a lot of political issues had an inherent emotional core to them which wasn’t subject to reason, and reading about Jonathan Haidt’s research solidified this to me. I began to suspect that libertarians were a stable minority and that right vs left was strongly historically stable.
5: When becoming interested in 3D printers/additive manufacturing and automation, I developed a possible solution which would be that since libertarians are trying to sell the public a vision of society that they inherently perceive as having too high a price, what libertarians had to do was lower the price, so to speak, and that once certain thresholds had been met, such as the abolition of poverty and necessary work through automation, it would be easier to get other things in place without triggering the primal reaction of imagining starving homeless people crawling through the gutter.
In addition, things like additive manufacturing, and the use of singular elements like carbon in different allotropes, such as graphene, to work as all encompassing structural and electronic components, would lower economies of scale, and allow more economic independence, and make it easier to fulfill certain demands. If part of the problem is that people are too weak for libertarianism, and in this decadent society we lack the rugged individuals it seems to require, then radical transhumanism would allow us to “ruggedize”, and perhaps even exit by becoming something beyond human and spreading out into space.
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” – Aristotle
6: The final thing I realized is that in the near term free markets were clearly still great, but that you had to make concessions to the overwhelming majority of the populace who were primally left or right. There had to be a pressure valve, and so the left should be appeased on welfare, unions, and trust busting and the right on borders and civic values, while maintaining the core of competitive markets.
In a crisis time, you have no choice but to offer the moderate version of a policy, or the anger would be bottled up and be expressed in rage and a move towards totalitarian ideologies. I think the establishment reaction to the migrant crisis has produced a strong populist right backlash. Another example is that during the time of the Cold War, social programs and worker’s rights were a good way to stop workers going red. The angry masses must be appeased, even if you have to split the difference, because if you don’t, eventually something will go wrong, and they’ll be activated, and if you don’t do something, you’ll be voted out and the mythology that anger produces will raise someone terrifying to power. Radical centrism seems right to me.
Your comments seem to be more about what policies it makes sense to push than about what policies would be best if you could get them. Those seem to me to be different issues, both important, and worth distinguishing.
On the specific question of defining anarchy and government, you might be interested in the discussion in the third edition of Machinery of Freedom, if you haven’t seen it.
I promise to give that a read and make a more substantive reply later. I’m definitely going back and reading more anarcho-capitalist literature that I missed.
The Art of Not being Governed
Seeing Like a State (also by James Scott)
That you suggested are in my backlog to start reading in this new year.
If you can’t get them, then they aren’t the best policies! 😉
Throughout high school and college I invented a family of conlangs (at least rough sketches). One of the conlangs in the family was what I call a “push-the-envelope-lang”: I wanted to see how few phonemes I could get away with. I wound up beating Rotokas with only ten: six consonants and four vowels. This allowed me to use a ten-letter alphabet: A, E, I, K, L, N, O, P, S, and T. Just for fun, I started experimenting with coming up with words in the language which would contain all ten letters (how many languages can say they have a word that contains all the letters in their alphabet?). I distinctly remember using “known” roots in the language family and affixes to construct a word using all the letters which meant “not very ladylike” or something like that, but I’m not sure I can recover this word now. I also at that time jotted down the word “liskantope” using no roots and assigning no meaning, just because it looked natural and was an actual anagram of the alphabet. I believe at one point I thought of calling the language itself Liskantope, but around that time I decided to start a blog and decided that Liskantope would make a nice online pseudonym. That was back in 2008, and that blog turned out to be a failed attempt, but upon discovering SSC in 2014 I decided to resurrect the name and here I am today. (Note: in the conlang it would be pronounced “lis-kan-to-PEH” but nowadays in my head I pronounce it in a completely Anglicized way with stress on the first syllable… not that I’ve ever had occasion to pronounce it out loud.)
It’s my first name. I don’t want to make it easy to identify me, but I also like to remind myself that there’s no such thing as a true deniable pseudonym. Besides, it’s easy to remember and I like it.
It’s a very random and obscure mathematical reference. When I was in middle school (~age 12) I bought The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics. So it does say “57th Dimension” on the cover in the subtitle, but the actual milestone that it is mentioned under is “The Quest for Lie Group E8” (8 is a subscript, idk how to do that formatting here).
Quote from that page:
News Article in Nature about E8
I can’t for the life of me remember why exactly I chose that as my username for just about everything I do on the internet, probably because it sounded (and looked) cool and I liked the number 57, but I still use it for all accounts not connected to my real name 7 years later.
Cousin made up a name for herself, and I, fond of said cousin, decided to do the same. Had not created nearly as many game characters at this point, so creativity/practice was lacking; hence, cobbled it together out of my initials and a Latinization of my last name.
Have since found it amusing to think of it as meaning “the not-quite-naked truth”, but it was composed from utterly semantics-free processes.
The sidelong glance at Prof. Snape is a nice bonus.
Had to think for a moment before I got that reference. Also amusing, but you may be underestimating just how long I’ve had this handle.
After one or two even even more embarrassing preteen usernames I made a new one for the forums of a site dedicated to modding a certain Star Wars computer game. I picked “SMOCK!” thinking at least in part of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip.
Later when I started participating in the IRC channel for the same site I softened my handle to just “smock.” Then one day I was joking around and changed it to “Sm0cC” because l33t-speak was still funny at the time. That has stuck, though in many places I have softened it again to its current form, “smocc.”
There aren’t many places left where I go anonymous on the internet, but in most of them I use this handle. I am sometimes surprised at how long my 12-year-old self’s decision lasted.
It’s nice to have some sense of continuity with your childhood self though, isn’t it?
I was using dayzombie for a while as a shortening of zombieforaday which came about from a random hypothetical I debated with some friends in high school about the usefulness of being a zombie for a day (romero or rage zombie, but intelligently directed). Would mostly have been used on a few sites and minecraft servers years ago. I found it funny that many assumed it was a reference to retail-drone type work or something when really it was just some random hypothetical from years ago.
Got changed to anarchydice when I was trying to figure out a good handle to start blogging about philosophy and gaming stuff. Tried for a bit to create a few plays on it and the phrase “Alea iacta est” ‘The die is cast’ in latin, but nothing seems worth the hassle of changing to.
Obviously, my name here is my RL name. Long ago, I decided that if I’m going to post serious opinions and facts online, I should do it such that I won’t mind if it’s attributed to me in RL, because someone may someday link any pseudonym to my RL persona anyway, and therefore I just use my real name and keep myself in the habit. It also means I won’t say anything about anyone else unless I were willing to say it standing right next to them (in range of a left hook, as it were).
I do use some pseudonyms on certain forums, mostly out of whimsy. I use “Mehhh” on Steam – read it like a plaintive cry of ambivalence. I also sometimes use BuddyPharaoh on certain gaming sites; it’s a pun on a very short run TV show that amused me, and also contained my father’s nickname.
I also used to go by pokeyburro on LiveJournal. This dated back to a running joke I had in college where I would sign my emails with some phrase with the initials PB (in turn a riff on an even older ad campaign for PBMax). So, purple barbell, pig brawler, pickle baster, etc. I had a long list. One day, I signed it “pokey burro”, and one of my coworker friends replied and said, “Isn’t that another name for f**king ass?” I laughed so hard I ended up keeping that one a lot longer.
Stella is my real first name, which I decided to use for the same reason that Paul Brinkley uses his full name.
As a child I was obsessed with classical antiquity, and developed a strong association with Athena (what self declared “smart girl” wouldn’t). I didn’t have a great relationship with my parents and would fantasize about being her demigod daughter actually. I got an Athenean drachma to wear around my neck, which I still wear 24-7 partially because I dislike change in routine and partially because “wears a drachma” has simply become part of my identity. Still a total classics nerd… enough to have /audited/ an entire minor’s worth of courses for it in college.
I was reading Ra, by Sam Hughes, and a character showed up named Exa, which that character said was because it was “the only contraction of Alexander not already taken.” I thought it sounded cool, my name’s Alexander, and there you go.
(I also went by A Hat Filled With What Appears To Be Salsa for quite some time due to a humorous line in a fanfic, but iirc that overflowed the character limit on some website so I had to use Exa)
For those of us looking for a good attitude for the new year, Leonardo’s to-do list gives an insight into the value of curiosity and of humility:
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/leonardo-da-vincis-to-do-list-circa-1490-is-much-cooler-than-yours.html
Some of them reach pretty high. (“Draw Milan.”) There are several, though, of the form “Get someone to show me something:”
Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion.
Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner.
etc.
I’ve got an idea for a basic income / negative income tax alternative tumbling around in my head that I’d love to have someones take on. I am not all that well read on the politics/economics/philosophy of basic income really. I’ve just picked up on it from places like this one, where the subject is sometimes peripherally touched. So it may well be that some of what I’m suggesting has some standard argument against it that I’m not aware of.
I believe that increasing automation will lead to growing economic inequalities between those who benefit from the automation and those who are made redundant by it. Since automation should scale up efficiency, it should also lead to a surplus of resources that can be distributed to reduce the friction and conflicts I would otherwise expect this to cause. BI/NIT is one way to deal with that problem.
A related problem is the psychological need of people to be useful in a world of increasing automation, which with BI/NIT is basically put as the responsibility of each individual or their informal community.
So, to my suggestion: Swap some of the corporate taxes for a requirement on companies to have a certain number of employees, balanced such that basically everyone in the country would be employed.
Some nitpicky details:
* The obligation could be traded to another company.
* The government would offer to buy back the obligation for the cost of one minimum wage and distribute that to those still not employed.
* Any single person could only count for one full-time employment.
I would expect this to be balanced so that it gives a lighter total tax burden to labor intensive industries at the cost of a higher one for automation heavy industries and thereby also somewhat slow down the introduction of automation, which I consider a slightly negative effect on the whole, but probably worth it.
Since everyone is now employed and has the means to pay for themselves, other welfare costs should go down.
At one extreme–where all companies just sell the obligation back to the government–this basically collapses into the equivalent of BI/NIT again. But this scheme has the benefit of giving a lot of companies an interest in optimizing how people’s time is spent further than that. A company that doesn’t already have it’s minimum number of employees could basically have a minimum wage employee at no additional cost, or increase the pay to get a more skilled employee at a lower marginal cost than it would have been without the obligation. I could even see an increase in companies sponsoring artists, scientists or similar as one of their “employees” and left to do mostly as they wish for the PR benefits.
So, what do you think? Any exploits you can see? Any of the premises you disagree with? What consequences would you expect this to lead to? Would you like to live in a country there this was implemented?
If this is your belief then what is your explanation for 1945-2000 where automation and labor force participation grew in concert?
The grossly oversimplified version:
20th century automation replaced people doing crappy jobs, that anybody could do but nobody liked doing but which needed to be done, freeing people up for the decent jobs that anybody could do and most people liked doing. Labor force participation went up because the “…and half of you will have to do crappy jobs” part no longer applied.
21st century automation is replacing people doing decent jobs that anybody can do and most people like doing, leaving only the really good jobs that everybody likes but that most people can’t do. Labor force participation is likely to go down when the “…and you need a 125 IQ and a graduate degree or we don’t want you here” rule is more consistently applied.
Basically that until automation gets powerful enough it will need a human “manager” to perform at its best. E.g. the factories need their line-workers to produce. At that level human employment is in increasing demand since an employer gets more out of their labor than you could before.
When it gets autonomous enough that you can have factories, farms, transportation etc run entirely without any human in the loop at all, human employment will diminish in value instead, since there is need for far fewer any more.
This wouldn’t necessarily apply to all labor, but a significant enough part of it that I expect unemployment to keep rising.
(Haven’t done any reading supporting this, just my intuitive thoughts, which are prone to be swayed by more arguments or research.)
That assumes that a reduction in the demand for labor means increased unemployment. You might consider that, a century or so back, roughly half the U.S. population was in farming. Now a few percent of the population is. But we don’t have an unemployment rate of 40%+ as a result.
If demand for labor in one sector goes down that lowers the cost of labor, which results in more people being employed in those sectors where demand has not gone down. Since, in your model, automation has lowered costs, the relative loss to people in the labor intensive sectors may be more than balanced by the lower cost of what they consume.
You’re correct that 40% of the population is not unemployed. A full 63% of Americans have jobs.
@Nicholas Carter:
You are correct that 62.7% is the latest U.S. labor participation rate.
Your definition for the labor participation rate is incorrect, as it is not a measure of all Americans, but only those 16 and older.
You also incorrect that this is the inverse of unemployment. Anyone who does not have a job by choice is not unemployed, but still part of the 37.3% of “adult” Americans who are not participating in the labor pool.
Not OP, but addressing the same question: my expectation is that economic growth increased demand for workers and that displaced labor was largely absorbed by the new demand.
If I may, I will anticipate the question of “What makes this time different?” There are two reasons I believe this wave of automation will be different from the previous waves. The first reason is what precisely we are automating, and the second is how quickly it is adopted.
Early automation was task-by-task: horses that pulled stuff were replaced by tractors that pulled stuff, and teams of workers planting seed were replaced by trailer attachments that planted seed. More recent automation was job-by-job, which was a combination of machines being able to do more precise or complicated tasks and deploying a system of machines to do all the work: so auto workers were replaced by a line of stamping machines, welding machines, etc. This time we are automating skill-by-skill: driving software, language software, scheduling software. Whereas farm laborers could just move on to manual labor that hadn’t been automated, the problem we must now anticipate is that when our job is automated the same product can plausibly do every job that we can do, because it has the whole skill set.
Modern automation is also the first to be heavily software. This means that systems for distributing and maintaining the product require less workers than the heavy machinery of past waves, and also radically reduces the timescale of adoption. Production for software is always equal to demand – no need to build new factories, or put on extra shifts and buy additional raw materials. This means little lag between seeing demand and satisfying it, and very little additional labor required to maintain that satisfaction.
When a job goes, I expect all similar jobs to go soon after. The timescale may even be short enough that wages won’t have time to fall in a way that isn’t severely disruptive in its own right. I have low confidence in society’s capacity for retraining. Therefore, I find social disruption and high concentration of the profits to be plausible concerns.
A great deal of Work didn’t used to have anything to do with having a Job. A tremendous amount of labor in the fields of subsistence-only agriculture, home repair, vehicle and appliance repair, and clothing manufacture, to name a few, used to be done as not-Jobs, in an amateur fashion by the consumers of those tasks’ products. Automation reduced total Work, but it also made most of those tasks into Jobs, done by someone else and tracked for the first time in the size of the market economy. (I don’t even know how to make cotton socks, and supposedly my grandmother didn’t own any socks she didn’t make herself between the age of 9 and 15)
Everyone’s a permatemp in crappy, short-term jobs with no vertical movement potential. Corporations already enjoy outsourcing to “temp” agencies (which is basically an obligation trade which creates, at minimum, two tiers of “employees”). This will incentive that trend even more.
More transportation is needed, more energy is needed, for what?
There’s always an additional cost. People do not work in a vacuum, nor are they employed in a vacuum. At base other people have to manage them.
Wouldn’t the fact that you can quit your job and still get minimum wage counteract this?
I’m not sure what this refers to. The employee getting to a work in which he isn’t needed? If it isn’t needed at all, then there wouldn’t be any incentive for the company to offer the job instead of just paying the penalty for not filling the obligation.
Well, yes. The company always have the option of defaulting on the obligation, but the entire point of this is that it would lead them to spend some effort considering how they could get some value out of some labor if they’re forced to pay for them anyways.
And for new companies to make it their business model of getting at least some value, even if less than a minimum wage’s worth and selling relief from the obligation from other companies.
Maybe, but I want to address this point instead of justifying mine.
1) What’s the transition period for getting the new paycheck from the government? What if the company you used to work for is slow in filing the paperwork?
2) If you can get the same wage and not have the secondary costs (e.g. transportation, work appropriate clothing), why would anyone take the minimum wage job, when you could instead spend the time at home on a social network, gaming, or otherwise doing other stuff?
Even if many people would prefer the job, maybe the minimum wage plus expenses is really too expensive for them relative to minimum wage and no expenses.
Okay, assume that there would be some minor benefit the company from the jobs. But would this benefit outweigh the negative externalities everyone else pays?
I haven’t thought of details at that level, and I don’t know enough law to say what would be feasible, but the company would have to either pay your salary or the penalty for not having enough employees, so you’d get the money eventually I imagine, but yeah, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck that could be a problem.
Yes, companies would probably have to expect to always pay some premium over the actual minimum to get anyone interested.
I don’t want to get into any actual monetary amounts for what the minimum wage should be, but feel free to assume that the government payout is slightly lower than what a company has to pay if it helps.
Companies benefiting at the cost of negative externalities is a risk with anything they do, right? Maybe there is a higher risk in this case, but I’m not entirely convinced.
@JohnL
Is this a real hardcoded thing? Even if so, I doubt people are going to be rioting over not being useful. I think they can probably suck it up. I wonder to what degree this is something people say they want to cheer themselves up about having to work. In a world where they didn’t have to, would most people have a different opinion?
I’m certainly longing for the day when work is dead.
The other problem is that these people wouldn’t be useful for long, since they would need consumers who want what they produce, and in a world where everything can be automated to an indistinguishable level, those consumers might be the eccentric few. Would people for example “feel useful” today if paid to dig holes and then fill them in again? I think they’d probably rather be on welfare and “work” at what they’re actually interested in.
Besides, I suspect that as soon as people start being able to own armies of home robots, then competition will emerge to create wealth above the level provided by welfare systems. Even if everything can be automated, the one thing we don’t want automated is human control (even if it’s just “Unit H78; do this task!”), so variations in what tasks people set their robots to and what land (possibly in space) they acquire might serve to satiate the desire for comparative actualization, and allow people to generate wealth above the level of the base welfare system. At least, I think that would be the case further into automation when we’ve got through the transitory period of shuttling everyone onto the basic income.
I’m having a similar emotional reaction to this sentence to the one I imagine a Leninist must have when encountering a Social Democrat.
Maybe not. Thinking on it some more, those who feel it very strongly can probably always find something to do on their own initiative and for the rest, increased comfort certainly helps – but you’d still need a mechanism for getting them the resources to have that comfort.
Yes, me too, even if that probably didn’t come across in my post. I do believe that the expectation that everyone should work for 8 hours a day will need to die out sooner or later. I merely see my proposal as a smoother transition to that than the standard BI/NIC.
I don’t think I quite understand the comparison, feel free to expand or just drop it if that would spoil the joke.
I think smoothly expanding what counts as jobseeker’s allowance in most countries would help, and as automation and technological unemployment increase, relax job searching requirements, until you pass an arbitrary high point of unemployment, where you can just turn off the requirements, transforming the program into an unconditional basic income guarantee.
It’s going to be a little rocky whatever we do. I just don’t think make-work will help much, because people will see straight through it, spoiling the effect its supposed to have on their ego. I’m also generally not a fan of subsidizing the ego, and more a fan of subsidizing people’s daily bread.
I’m basically saying that “slow down the introduction of automation” triggered me hard, like a Leninist revolutionary hearing a Social Democrat reformist say “slow down the introduction of socialism”.
I guess I just have more faith in the market managing to make that transition in its own self-interest when it can no longer make use of labor it still has to pay for than in the government collecting the same money unconditionally and still managing to do that transformation on its own initiative.
Oh, yeah, I do have a visceral reaction against slowing down automation myself, which is why I brought it up as a negative of the proposal.
Imagine a glossy, perfect world where there are no murders and no one in dire poverty. Everything runs on clean energy, there are no more wars and all their needs can be taken care of through super abundant technology. Also, everyone hates themselves and wants to die.
I’m less worried about riots and more concerned with a suicide epidemic.
Like Marge Simpson in the “Scorpio” episode?
Why would I expect a world like that?
Surely the solution is more board games.
Work-for-hire. The company would own all productivity of this free employee.
Those companies capable of supporting the more valuable free employees would tend to be larger/richer companies.
In a nation which strongly enforces anti-competitive law, this might work. In any other nation you’re asking for oligarchy & patronage. Especially since it will be more costly for that exceptional “employee” to go out on their own (since they now have to hire a minimum number of employees before they can start their own businesses).
Fair point. I could see it playing out like that. Although it could also play out with the employee having a choice of employers offering better terms than that if he’s so exceptional.
So, to my suggestion: Swap some of the corporate taxes for a requirement on companies to have a certain number of employees, balanced such that basically everyone in the country would be employed.
Everyone? So a company that is 99% automated is going to hire a human contract cleaner to run a vacuum cleaner in the offices for an hour a day to fulfil their government-mandated “you have to employ people”? Sure, but that is going to be minimum wage or less labour, and if you’re only doing five hours a week, that is not going to give you “Since everyone is now employed and has the means to pay for themselves, other welfare costs should go down” because you will need some kind of supplementary government benefit to give you enough to live on, even in the “Ferraris now cost ten bucks” automated surplus world (if one person only counts as one employee, then having someone doing two or three part-time jobs, as nowadays, would not permit the labour surplus to be soaked up, so everyone can only have one job regardless of whether they’re actually working in a real job full-time or it’s the ‘volunteering at the old folks’ home’ type of workfare job).
It’s a great system if you’re confident you are someone with enough value to be worth hiring for a ‘real’ job (senior management, really hot-shot programmer, tech entrepreneur type etc.), or if you’re an artist doing this as patronage where you are paid for producing art works by a company as sponsor rather than selling your work on the open market. It’s not so great if you’re semi-skilled labour or even the white-collar/pink-collar workers who can be replaced by automated systems, because why hire a human to do routine work that can be done faster, cheaper and better by a machine?
This kind of thinking runs on “now everyone will be free to reach their potential!” but not everyone is an artist or inventor that can turn out masterpieces now they have free time and no worries about having to do routine work to live. A lot of us are just ordinary and won’t be creating wonderful breakthroughs, we’ll be puttering around in our garden, taking the dog for a walk, or cleaning the bathroom, none of which will be marketable job skills in the “everything is now done by automation” future.
The only good thing is that will be some time away; you will still need a human attendant to help Grandma in the nursing home get into and out of bed until the fully automated robot assistants are created. But that type of work is low-paid, private care homes do cut back on expenses by hiring unqualified staff and paring numbers of workers to the bone.
Well, no, everyone who the company can get more value from than just paying out the tax penalty instead. If the economy as a whole can’t make use of you at a premium you’re willing to accept, you are effectively on basic income instead and can putter around your garden all you want. This is an important and intended feature of the proposal, and basically what I expect the end state to be for the vast majority as well.
A final thought/objection is that current US employment rates are on the order of 60%-70% of 18 to 65 year olds.
You are asking to implement a system where every company has to increase its employee number by about 50% (adjusting for things such as Visa/foreign/etc… labor).
Even cutting their federal/state/local taxes to zero, and having all additional jobs as minimum wage jobs, I don’t know if this is doable.
Using generous assumptions you’re looking at around 50 million people times $15,000/year.
Ok… this is only about $750 billion, so I guess it might be doable.
The difficulty would be implementing it in our federalist system.
Implementing it would certainly be hard and nothing I’m in a position to be actively pursuing.
Would you make this objection against any form of basic income? If not, how is this different? If you would, I don’t have any better answer at hand than that a lot of the money would be a reshuffling of tax-expenses and welfare payouts rather than either new money taken from companies or existing government spending having to be stretched thinner.
The objection has been made by others. Your scheme seems like it would actually be cheaper than a basic income (assuming it doesn’t drive companies to cheaper countries which do not have such requirements).
The federalist/anti-socialist objections unfortunately will be the big ones. Good luck getting past those in the US. Perhaps this would work better in a social democracy.
No I don’t like this idea at all. Yes people do need to feel useful. You think that requiring corporations to give them make-work will make them feel useful? Better to just pay welfare and hope the recipients will find useful stuff to do on their own time.
I do think that eventually this will be a problem, that there simply isn’t enough work for everyone. I don’t think we’re there yet, because there are still many personal service jobs out there that need doing, which could become paying jobs if our productivity keeps increasing making society richer. At some point, it will be more efficient for robots to do even these personal service jobs, and then we’ll really have massive unemployment. But the make-work idea isn’t the answer, in my opinion, most people will see through it as NOT being useful, and be even more resentful because they’d rather do their own thing.
My vision for this certainly isn’t that it would create make-work, since if you’re not actually contributing value it would not be in any companies interest to hire you over just defaulting on their obligation.
My belief is that this would create less make-work and more actual-work than having the government in charge of making the transition to a basic income in another way.
To me, this has a feel of “everything that isn’t forbidden is compulsory.” If you want people whose productivity is low but positive to be employed, all you have to do is to abolish the minimum wage law. That’s a separate issue from what sorts of income redistribution system you want to have for the benefit of such people.
If mass technological unemployment becomes a problem and it happens before humans can significantly improve themselves , then I believe the best route is social usefulness. Try to bring back more small Dunbar sized groups of people who feel close to each other. Something like church but more palatable for the non-religious.
I once had this whole theory about how in the automated future, most peoples employment will be as some form of “professional friends” but I never quite fleshed out how it would work or what it would really look like.
I had a similar idea, except it was more of a “superstar market” where only a few people were in high demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entourage_(U.S._TV_series)
How exactly does this “minimum number of employees” thing work? Is it a flat number, like “all corporations must employ at least 100 people”? Because that just makes it impossible to start a business. Or maybe it’s relative to the companies revenue? That indeed makes it sound more like a tax, although it seems like there might be big waves of hiring and layoffs (by different companies) around tax time.
More on the NYTs article, did anyone else follow any of the links? Look how brazen they are
Links to This page that claims a completed 4 year degree that averages $102,000 has a return of 15.2%. This is obvious bullshit.
First the slight semantic point, a COMPLETED degree being worth X does not mean that the average person that goes to college is a good investment because many people go, pay some money, don’t complete their degree and end up poorer. This is misleading but whatever.
Second, $102,000 compounded over 43 years (graduate at age 22, retire at 65) implies lifetime earnings of almost $45,000,000 MORE than a guy that doesn’t go to college.*
FORTY FIVE MILLION + is what the AVERAGE 4 years student earns according to this link (and an associates degree earner has lifetime earnings of $36,000,000)
*you could mayyyyyyybbbbbbbeeeee come up with a scenario where lots of people get 4 year degrees late in life and thus the average compound interest is over a much shorter period, or people with degrees retire way earlier than 65, but even if the average span of compounded interest is only over 30 years then lifetime earnings are still $7 million + which is >$200,000 a year for the average 4 years degree.
The estimate seems fairly plausible to me. Here‘s the paper (admittedly light on the math) and here the method behind it.
Keep in mind that IRR calculation takes the timing of cash flows into account, so only the last payment (your salary before you retire) is compounded over 43 years. The one before is compounded over 42 years, then 41, 40, and so on. That would make an initial investment of $102,000 at an IRR of 15.2% result in a yearly increase in marginal wages of $15,235, which sounds roughly right.
Flaw #1 in the methodology
This vastly understates the opportunity cost of going to college, the proper cohort for this paper is not people that didn’t go to college, its people that could have gone to college (and completed it!) but chose not to. Of to a great start.
Still making the same mistake. There is also another question, is this pre tax or post tax income. It doesn’t say so far, if its pre tax then that is another substantial mistake, if I see that it is pretax I will specifically note later.
Where does this $570,000 come from? If you look at the graph titled average annual earnings by education you see that a bachelor’s degree out earns a high school degree by $30,000+ from age 34 through at least age 60 which is well over $570k on its own, let alone with the extra from
There is more to critize but don’t have the time now. Will get back to the IRR bit soon I hope.
> There is also another question, is this pre tax or post tax income.
If they followed the methodology as indicated, taxation is accounted for, check Appendix A of the Heckman paper.
> Where does this $570,000 come from?
Discounted by 5% for time preference, just like in the Barrow/Rouse paper.
The getstungbymillionsofwasps link in the sidebar doesn’t lead to a blog, but a sketchy facebook page. I suggest removing the link.
I hadn’t heard of the Crying Wolf post until it was mentioned by Sandy in the predictions post comments.
From that post:
What percentage of the population are generally misanthropes?
More importantly, to what extent would classifying/categorical questions which demand classifying/categorical answers mislead in their results? Hypothetically encouraging premature generalization / categorization (or whatever the technical terms are for the related fallacies) in respondents who wouldn’t have otherwise generalized in such a manner.
What are you asking here? The slashes are making your question really hard to parse, and your last sentence is a fragment. (if I read it correctly)
My attempt at a rephrase:
Does asking the question itself, by identifying categories of people and implying that categorization scheme is relevant, encourage respondents to form opinions about those categories as a whole instead of saying “I don’t think heterosexuals is a useful category for this purpose”? How big is this effect, if present?
Well in that case my gut response would be “Yes, absolutely”.
Edit:
Going into a bit more detail, I would say that people are instinctually tribal, but how these tribes are defined is fluid. Emphasizing differences encourages separation along those lines just as emphasizing commonality encourages unity. Granted, this is just one guy’s opinion, but this is one of the major reasons that I regard identity politics and social justice, as not just mistaken but actively malicious / dangerous.
Thank you, this was a hard question for me to phrase, but your rephrasing captures the gist of what I was going for.
Thinking about it a bit more I thought of a hypothetical way of tackling one part of the issue:
Come up with, say, 25 distinct descriptors. Randomly assign these descriptors to a person and ask the survey responder what they think about such a person. Do this 10 or 15 times, and ensure that each descriptor is used at least twice. Factor analyze.
Not only would this flesh a person out a bit, but it would highlight that this is a single person the question is asking about, not a general category of persons. Because honestly, when people answer these kinds of questions about categories of people, aren’t they often generalizing from specific persons that they’ve heard of?
I would have thought the “heterosexuals” question acted as a control question, i.e. “most people are heterosexual, most people will not have an unfavourable view of that, so this gives us a basis to check if their answers are consistent when it comes to the racial etc. questions”.
It’s not impossible but very unlikely that someone will answer “I’m straight, I think being straight is awful, I also think being black is awful”.
Could it be that the constant barrage of put-downs of “straight white males” by the cultural left is actually working? Or at least, working on 8% of the population?
I think it more likely that 8% of those polled misread “heterosexual” as “homosexual.”
It seems more likely that this is just a case of bad test comprehension.
Some percentage of people in the US have an unfavorable view of homosexuals. I can’t find a good poll without expending actual effort, but Gallop says that something like 37% of people in the US thought homosexuality was morally wrong as of May 2016. I wouldn’t bet anything on how that number pans out in real life, but it at least shows that roughly that many poll respondents will express an unfavorable opinion of homosexuals to a pollster.
So if about one fifth of those people misheard the question about heterosexuals as being about homosexuals, you’d see 7% unfavorability even if everyone polled had a positive or neutral view of heterosexuals. It makes sense too: the words sound alike, the term heterosexual is comparatively rarely used, and in context it makes more sense to be asked about homosexuals than heterosexuals.
While I find this entirely plausible, isn’t it most likely that in this poll, people were asked about homosexuals and heterosexuals in consecutive questions? Or even if it wasn’t consecutive, if both questions are asked in one survey, most people would intuitively say “wait you already asked me that” would they not?
It’s possible. I went to the list of questions on the Vox poll to check.
The heterosexual one was listed on page 1 as question VX1_1A and said:
The homosexual one was listed on page 2 as question VX1_2B and was identically worded except for the word homosexual.
N for each was roughly 1000 out of 2000 respondents: this and the way the questions are numbered make me think that each person was asked one, but not both, of those questions. I didn’t see their methodology though and I’m not a poll guy. This is amateur hour.
So on the one hand, it looks like they asked the question in a highly confusing way. But on the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s so confusing that nearly a third of the people who had an unfavorable opinion of homosexuals would get mixed up.
EDIT:
I’m dumb. They already seem to have thought of this, as VX1_1B and VX1_2A repeat those questions but with “straight” and “gay or lesbian” respectively.
Using the word straight entirely removes the three percent of people who were strongly unfavorable to heterosexuals, leaving behind the four percent who had slightly unfavorable views. The margin of error they report is 2% but it does seem like about half of the people who dislike heterosexuals didn’t realize that meant straight folks.
Thank you for your thoroughness.
4% is approximately the population of non-heterosexuals in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States
Coincidence or not?
4% is also the population of Lizardmen.
Scott, this thread is missing its “open” tag, which means it isn’t the one you get redirected to when you click “Open Thread” at the top of the page.
What do you all think about the notion of cutting expenses drastically to be able to retire early (or donate more if you’re super awesome)? I’m talking about communities like leanfire, Mr. Money Mustache, ERE, etc. Are any of you trying that? How’s it been so far?
Similarly, have any of you tried vandwelling? I live in an expensive city, so I’ve been looking into that.
I think it sounds extremely unpalatable on a personal level, since it generally involves keeping your expenses low indefinitely. I’m eager to retire, but only when that retirement is an actually comfortable life. Obviously if you are comfortable living at that low level of expense, though, your opinion won’t resemble mine.
That’s true. I’ll just note that hedonic adaptation implies that once certain basics are met that increased expenses won’t yield more happiness. Of course, what are considered “certain basics” will vary person to person.
It’s a personal interest of mine. I’m curious as well as to what other people have to think.
It strikes me that FI principles apply very well to EA – just don’t retire. Giving What We Can has you pledge to donate only 10% of your income to charity. People can donate much more than that without being much unhappier in quite a lot of cases. (Though please don’t take me as saying ‘only’ giving 10% of your income to charity is bad.)
Because of this, I’m more than a little surprise FI isn’t brought up more in rationalist sphere.
I’m only starting on my journey, but I enjoyed my experiment saving 50% of my income on a 30k/year salary. I never felt like I wanted for anything except for sushi every night.
I have a friend who reads this blog (but does not comment) very into vandwelling. I share many of the same impulses that would lead one down that road.
For example, I live in an apartment with a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom and it’s way larger than I’d like.
I also find the idea of having so few possessions that I could fit them all into a suitcase and move on a whim extremely appealing. Of course, I also have next to no desire to travel, and rather like having a desktop computer, so I’ve been unable to satisfy that particular desire.
I’m too tall and enjoy having hot showers every morning too much to live in a van. I know vandwellers often buy gym memberships, etc. to get easy access to showers, but that represents a trivial inconvenience to me and thus kills any enthusiasm I’d have at the idea. I certainly have no problems with anyone doing it, though. Perhaps I’ll be much more pro-vandwelling after I get a job somewhere with absurd rent. I’m interviewing in San Jose and the rents there ($3000+) are absurd.
I’m surprised by that as well. It may be that those Earning to Give stick to posting about FI in the FI-specific communities. It could also be that many of them think that increasing their income is a higher priority than decreasing their costs. For example, many of them work in software development. There’s a big difference in income between working at a place like Google vs at most other companies. So it initially may make more sense to focus on their careers.
I am similarly bothered by the size of my apartment. However, I appreciate having a guaranteed place to sleep at night that is quiet. A van may not provide that.
The showering inconvenience you refer to is even more trivial if you workout frequently. Then the shower could follow the workout anyway.
I don’t hate my job that much. Nor does not spending money bring me intrinsic joy the way it seems to for some. Being unemployed (“retired”) and barely scraping by seems worse than the status quo.
Normally I’d say live and let live but many MMM acolytes I’ve come across have a vegan/crossfit thing going on that makes me want to push back.
I’ve read MMM, but follow very little of his advice (specifically that is, I already did some things he advises before), and this is a misconception.
The goal of early retirement isn’t to get the bare minimum to scrape by and then scrape by, but to get to a basic point in your life where you can dictate how much effort you put into earning money. Lots of jobs that are pretty terrible full time are actually pretty fun part time, and financial independence means being able to test those waters. I’ve worked bakeries both full and part time, as a part time/summer job its pretty fun, night hours means interesting co workers and having days (especially summer days) almost totally free. Full time its a complete grind, midnight to 9 shifts really suck and put a strain on your relationships, having to work 60-70 hours a week during major holidays basically ruins them and the pay is pretty crappy ($12-15 an hour).
If you hit financial independence you could pick up a few shifts a week at a bakery, learn a lot about cooking, meet interesting people and have extra spending money. Get bored or decide you don’t like it move on to something else that interests you, decide you really like it and pick up more shifts.
To follow up on what baconbacon said,
Being FI does not necessarily mean ‘scraping by’. The goal is financial independence, ie. the freedom to work as little or as much as you please on whatever you want. If living on nothing but rice and water is your thing, that’s fine. If you want to buy a new yacht every year, by all means. It just means you have to save more. You don’t need to retire!
There’s a lot of room between vandwelling and working until you’re 70. MMM is on the more extreme side, but there’s plenty of people out there retiring at 50 and living luxuriously. A lot of FI is about spending money on things you get value out of and cutting costs by getting rid of things you don’t, not necessarily living a bare existence.
(Although I suppose the root comment was specifically talking about the more extreme side of things, and I certainly fall more into that range myself.)
To add the third way, find alternative ways to get the things you value. I like good beer, I brew decent to good beer for half the price. I like animals, I like fresh high quality food, I have chickens, they lay eggs. The spent grain from beer brewing gets eaten by the chickens.
Long story short I would probably only save $500-1,000 a year brewing my own beer and raising chickens, but I do so while enjoying myself (and my kids enjoy themselves with baby chicks once a year).
I’ve done some beer brewing. I’m skeptical that you are saving much money. Yes, certainly if you bought as much beer as you are making it would cost more than the marginal cost of brewing. Even the total cost quickly becomes a win unless you quit right away or being really obsessed with new equipment.
But IME between drinking it themselves and giving it away brewers are consuming a lot more beer than non-brewers. There’s nothing wrong with that — the additional beer is generating additional utility, but it does make apple to apple comparisons of savings tricky.
Have you actively tried to cut costs? If you brew regularly you can buy a cheap grinder and bulk base grain and drop $3-5 of each 5 gallon batch easily, you can culture your own yeast for an extra 2 mins of effort, which means another $7-8 off per batch. For a batch of beer that costs you 50-$60 you are talking 20% off right there, if you were already at 85-90% of the cost of similar commercial style beer, then you are doing pretty well at this point. There are a few other tricks but combined with spreading out the cost of your equipment over hundreds of gallons of beer these are the big savers.
It seems like you ignored the most relevant part. Were you buying hundreds of gallons of beer before your started getting into brewing?
The beer I drank prior to getting into brewing probably cost 1.25-2.00 a bottle when bought by the case (30-48 a case), at 10 beers a week (less than 1.5 a day), that is $600-$1000 a year in beer for 1 person, I’m married to a beer drinker so x1.5 (she drinks less) so $900-$1500 a year in beer at that rate, 750 12 ounce beers a year is ~70-75 gallons of beer a year, not hundreds.
This is a rough calculation, and that was 10 years ago. I don’t drink 10 a week, but I do drink more expensive beer generally now and I wouldn’t also be only paying case rates, ball park estimate seems good enough.
If you like doing it as a hobby, it seems like a double benefit, as you probably would do a different, more costly hobby instead, if you didn’t brew.
You can definitely homebrew for (at least a little) cheaper than quality craft brew without too much effort. But not really cheaper than cheap beer.
To really get significant savings, you kind of need to always be brewing, brew large batches, fully amortize the non-trivial cost of equipment, and stick to similar styles (to make re-using yeast cultures bulk grain purchases feasible).
For me, I brew occasionally, in small batches and wildly different styles (because experimentation and trying new beer is part of the fun). So I end up at a per-beer cost of just the consumables pretty similar to buying craft beer at the supermarket.
Anyway it’s all moot since beer is frankly a luxury / pleasure good, and probably one of the first things a truly frugal person would cut from the budget.
Although to be totally fair Brad is right, I overstated as my wife and I have never hit 100% of our beer consumption in home-brew, and we probably topped out around 75%, and that fell off after we had kids (though its creeping back up now).
On the other hand there are opportunities if you have a hobby like this to get value out of it. Between her brother in law and us we brewed 20 gallons of beer for our wedding, and for large family gatherings one of the 4 brewers in the family inevitably brings a 5 gallon keg of something, which is always appreciated and drunk and replaces some other obligation they would have undertaken.
While the general thrust is true, I think the word choice is a little misleading. As I posted above consumption for 2 adults in my household is ~70-75 gallons of beer a year, with a 5 gallon setup brewing once a month is ~55 gallons given some losses to bottling etc, that isn’t constantly.
If it is a long term hobby you don’t have to worry much about amortization as the most expensive parts of your set up (large pots, propane burner, glass carboy’s, kegs) have long life spans (10+ years, although the carboy’s do occasionally break). This means you can either pick up used equipment to start off or you can run thousands of gallons through the most expensive stuff over a long time period, or you can regain a solid portion of the cost by reselling it if you decide to quit in a few years. As long as you aren’t the type to obsess about a new hobby for 3-6 months and then stick the equipment in your garage (know thyself) I wouldn’t worry about having to brew constantly (additionally the equipment can be used for other things as well, making wine, deep frying turkeys etc).
In some situations grain storage is a no go, if you have an apartment in DC with no AC then its going to rot. If you have a dry basement in most places in the US you can store malted barely for a few years.
I bought my self a 7-1 crockpot last week and am experimenting with the settings to see if I can easily brew 1 gallon experiment batches in it easily.
Yeah, if we hit hard times as a family beer would go quickly, but in the vein of “living a lifestyle you find comfortable more cheaply” was what I was going for.
At a tangent, a good deal of this becomes more relevant if we solve the aging problem. One option would be to work and save until you have accumulated enough to provide you with a minimal tolerable standard of living, then only do work you enjoy to supplement that.
Seems to me retirement age has been creeping up along with life expectancy. I expect if we managed to solve the aging problem, then expenses and/or inflation would end up rising so much that most people would need to continue to work indefinitely. And employment “gaps” would continue to be looked on negatively, leaving the option of taking a year or two off then trying to come back as dangerous
Why would you expect that?
I can imagine that many people wouldn’t be willing to save enough to retire on, but why would you expect an end to aging to cause inflation?
Certainly price inflation; with fewer people dying, real estate (and anything else depending on fixed resources) becomes more expensive. Taxes also; if people were able to retire indefinitely, states would realize they weren’t getting much income from a lot of biological units and would change the tax structure accordingly.
But also I’m a pessimist; little good can come of anything, and that seems the easiest way solving aging could fail: you don’t die of old age, but you have to keep working forever just to keep your head above water.
On the other hand, old people consume a lot of of medical resources, so the demand for medical resources would go down relative to population, making them less expensive.
Furthermore, an important part of the cost of services, including medical services, is the cost of training, so if the average surgeon worked an extra decade or two the cost of his services would go down. More generally, human capital becomes less expensive because it lasts longer.
If many people follow the tactic of accumulating wealth when young then living at least in part on interest thereafter the result will be to increase the amount of capital. If most of those people live only on interest the ratio of capital to labor on the market goes up, so capital becomes less expensive. If they keep working, the amount of labor goes up.
In any case, the only part of your argument that predictably works, so far as I can see, is with regard to fixed resources, which are not a very large part of human productivity. Fly across the U.S. and look down–lots of empty land. And the location of land will become less important as VR and telecommuting and such get more important. Meanwhile there are positive effects from increasing population–more good novels, more inventions, more blogs as good as this one.
Or perhaps that last is too optimistic.
Living out of a car can be okay for a short while, but is neither safe nor practical in the long run.
If you do end up doing it for whatever reason, it will teach you the value of public libraries and how much national holidays suck.
Wait. I get the first part. Why do national holidays suck? I was van-bound here and there for poverty reasons (not as a savings plan) for a few days at a stretch a few times as a younger person… I don’t recall having any particular impression of national holidays from that experience.
Someone in my extended family lives out of his car (and is also unemployed). He likes to spend a lot of time in libraries because they are climate controlled, quiet, have internet access, interesting books, tables, and comfortable seats, and no one hassles him. Correspondingly, national holidays suck because the libraries (and many other businesses) are closed and he has to come up with something else to do/somewhere else to go.
Something I’ve wondered: How do people who live that way handle basic hygiene, e.g. showering? My first thought is “they don’t,” but I would expect facilities like libraries to complain if someone regularly showed up smelling like a dumpster.
I’m not sure exactly how he does it, but gym memberships are common for this reason.
Lots of people who really get into these things basically make cutting cots their hobby, and they enjoy the feeling of getting something cheaper or going without. It is really hard to do this voluntarily without that feeling.
The most important advice that I think you can give when starting out is that when you cut a cost you need to immediately shift that money into savings of some kind. Knocking $40 off your phone bill will feel good, but if it doesn’t actually go into savings intentionally most people will just unconsciously spend more on other consumption goods.
I actually have found the best way to save more is just to automatically save first (say $50-100 from your paycheck goes into a special account you don’t touch or increase the automatic payment for your mortgage), and then try to figure out how to live on your new budget rather than the other way around.
I endorse this comment. I used to talk a lot about how it was relatively easy to cut costs without putting a lot of work into it, just by putting all of your spending into an application like Mint.com and then doing analysis on what simple changes you can make based on your spending profile, but I did not take into account that not everyone really like data collection and optimization puzzles.
My own feeling, however, is that just like tracking your weight daily or weekly makes you more aware of the choices you’re making and can have significant effects on your health, so can making yourself account for every dollar you spend, especially the set-it-and-forget-it bills and minor everyday expenses.
—-
As for the people worrying about scraping by, well, there’s two sides to this. The first side is the recognition that you can expect to get about X yearly with 20X invested at minimal long-term risk, so if you can save 20 times your needed salary, you have Won At Finances. The second is that if you pay attention to what you’re actually spending on, you can almost certainly get X lower than you think, without actually sacrificing comfort. Part of the constant refrain of Mr. Money Mustache in particular is that he spends money all the time, but only on things that he’s convinced are really worth it.
That’s not the only problem. I look at my recurring expenses and it’s #1 taxes #2 mortgage. A variety of difficult to avoid bills (power and water) come next; the only easy one to cut would be the landscapers, and I hate yardwork. So the conclusion is that if I want to save significant money, I have to move. This does not count as “relatively easy”.
Where do you live that taxes are your highest expense? I’ve heard horror stories about Europe being nigh-impossible to reach FI in because of taxes. At least in the US/Canada, there’s plenty of ways to reduce your tax burden.
I live in the US, and until recently made a decent salary (for now I make nothing but while this reduces tax burden considerably it’s not a long term solution). There are few ways to reduce your tax burden in the US if your income is basically from wages and salaries, aside from either discarding income (i.e. giving to charity) or deferring it.
Moving itself is a pain, but the potential payoff is very large for lots of people. If living with a large yard/in your specific area doesn’t have significant benefits, then 3-4 months worth of effort moving could add several years of FI to one’s life.
@Robert Liguori
It seems like your second paragraph retreats from the hard won insight of the first paragraph. I don’t want to track my weight daily. I don’t want to think before I eat any little thing “should I be eating this”. I just want to leave it up to my system 1 and go on my merry way.
Now it may be that some people, including me at some point in my life, can’t do that without it having an unacceptable cost. If I balloon up to an obese weight or I get pre-diabetes or something like that, then I will have no choice but to keep a weight log and watch what I eat. But that’s a crappy situation that I hope doesn’t happen. It is not something I am going to run out of my way to do.
Now I know that the way I experience these things in not the same as other people do. There are people that love to play the game. More power to them! But I wish they could see that telling me all about how easy and great it is — when it is for them but isn’t for me — is just annoying and not at all helpful. I’m familiar with the benefits of dieting and budgeting but given my preferences it is entirely rational to forgo those benefits.
A 5% real return with minimal long-term risk is not something you can just assume going forward.
Like the beer brewer above, MMM has a hobby. What many others would consider work he considers play. Then he turns around and extols all the “free” benefits of his hobby.
On the specific subject of watching your weight … .
I have a very simple system. At my present normal and acceptable if not optimal weight, my belt is comfortable at the second tightest setting, uncomfortably tight at the tightest setting–both varying a little over the day according to when and how much I have recently eaten.
So when it starts being uncomfortable at the second setting I know my weight has crept up, and adjust accordingly. When it gets comfortable at the tightest setting I know I am making progress getting even lighter, which gives me some inclination, so far inadequate, to see if I can get my weight to stay there.
I think I’ll point at the world ‘relatively’ there. Relative to the goal of “Hacking the eons-old biological imperatives to eat lots of tasty food and not expend energy needlessly”, daily weigh-ins combined with the second-order effect of having to think every time you eat any old thing is an extremely small change, and one which has surprisingly large returns given its small cost.
Why not?
Or, to be more specific, when do you think that was a safe assumption over, well, a 20-year period, and when wasn’t it actually true? Historically-speaking, investing in an index fund (or just buying loads of diverse stocks and bonds) has returned well above 5% post-tax, through some very large and impactful travails, as long as you were able to actually have that 20-year cushion, and as long as you could counterbalance the lean years in which you had to dip into your principal with disciplined saving and spending in the boom years.
Now, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, of course, but it’s the best guide we have. Is there something specific you were predicting which would mess with a long-term 5% return?
Based on these two sites: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html
and
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
It looks like if you started with 20 units at the beginning of 1930 then withdraw 1 times the cumulative inflation units every year, with the remainder invested in the S&P 500 you would have run out of money by the end of 1946. If you had instead gone with 50% in S&P 500 and 50% in ten year bonds, you’d have run out of money by the end of 1940.
Yeah, those ’30 and ’31 years were indeed killers. If you do invest all of your money just before the Great Depression hits, you will be in sore shape.
Now, of the past 88 years on record, how many have that property? I would certainly agree with the statement “If you only have 20 times your normal spending invested and you can’t either cut your spending or supplement your income, don’t retire right before a Great Depression”, but historically-speaking, ‘right before a Great Depression’ (and, I’ll note, not during the Roaring 20s where you could earn a cushion of outsized returns).
I think if you followed the pattern of having 20 times your salary in the Great Depression, you’d be incredibly well-off. And when things recovered (well before 1940), you could un-retire, re-enter the work force, and earn a little money (or at least spend less of it during the boom years), and you’re back on track.
So, yes, in the specific case of retiring with the minimum recommended amount right before a 2-year period that wipes out 75% of your assets, the 20 year guideline will fail, and you’ll need to adjust things up or down by a bit. But, all things considered, not by that much.
Why would I do additional work when you’ve just so aptly demonstrated that you have no compunction about moving the goalposts?
My original question was “When is it true, and when isn’t it?” for a reason. The 20x guideline was not true in (I think) 3 of 88 of the past recorded years, and in those few years, the margin you need to adjust your spending by is not large to be able to squeak by.
If I’ve been giving the impression that I was arguing for the 20x rule being a set-in-stone truth rather than a heuristic which only works with about p = .05, then I apologize; that was not my intention.
Okay, then let’s talk about un-retiring. If X = $15,000 and then sure un-retiring looks feasible. But what about if X = $75,000? You diligently follow FI/MMM guidelines, build up a $1.5MM nest egg and quit your job as a scrummaster at 42. Unfortunately the next year the stock market crashes. Or you wife says she’s going to leave you and take the kids unless you start buying store made mayonnaise again. Anyway, five, six years later you need to un-retire to make your savings stretch.
Who is going to hire a software project manager with no experience from the last five years? They aren’t even doing kanban boards and stand up meetings anymore. There’s some entirely new fad that you missed while you were off jarring pickles and saving your feces to spread on your home garden.
Well, one issue there is that you need to un-retire at year 1, when you no longer have 20X your yearly income invested. You can still run into functionally the same problem with a really bad crash or sudden medical bills or so on later on, however, and the answer is basically the same as if you weren’t retired; get another job. Learn what you need to learn, buzzword and credential how you need to buzzword and credential, dig back into whatever professional contacts you made as a scrummaster, do side jobs as a freelance web programmer with the IT knowledge you needed to get your foot in the door as a project manager, and so on. In the case of the crash, you ruthlessly trim living expenses (and at a $75,000 yearly budget, you almost certainly have room to trim). And if the wife really wants store-bought mayo, then if that’s what you want to do, you adjust your damn budget, spend less on something that’s worth less to her than having that mayo, and buy the mayo.
It’s basically the same steps as if you’re being paid by someone else, as far as I can tell; you’d run into the exact same issues if you got fired from that scrummaster job and weren’t investing.
Then you need to buy Baconbacon’s investment newsletter just before you retire to make sure this doesn’t happen.
I am doing this. High salary country earnings via standard employment, low cost destination country to build a small real-estate business.
It’s not for everyone. If you have any sort of expensive habits, it’s probably not for you. If you’re the sort of person who can squeeze out 75% savings rate out of a median salary, it’s probably for you.
I have considered living in a vehicle, but it turned out that I cut costs on regular accommodations enough that it wouldn’t have been cheaper.
Do you mind if I ask what the destination country is? Or at least how you picked it?
My home country. I could go even lower, but those places tend to have civil wars and migrant swarms passing through.
I’m in the first half (build up money) of FI (financial independence), and what really struck was how easy most of it was. Most people make way, way more money than they need to enjoy themselves and then waste it on positional goods, manufactured crap that doesn’t actually bring them any happiness, and cars. Shucking all of that has made me happier, not less happy – the habits you cultivate try to become FI don’t involve taking on misery to be able to work less, they involve understand what actually makes you happy and cutting out everything that doesn’t that you can. “Low” expenses are relative in a first-world country. I have more than enough luxuries even though I’m saving half my take-home salary, I just spend less on crap.
This is obviously easier if you have a larger than average salary, but I’d estimate that I spend less than the average person makes in take-home salary and, if I suddenly had to take a perfectly average job, I’d still spend less than I make.
@baconbacon
My reply to your accusations of narcissism, which I didn’t see until today:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/29/book-review-mount-misery/#comment-449175
I didn’t accuse you of narcissism, I highlighted a reply of yours, which may, or may not be indicative of your general personality, as an example to discuss someone else’s thoughts on narcissism.
Here is what I quoted
and here is what I said
I called it little aggressive/not unusual, you focused on a single word.
Not a word I wrote could be taken as having hurt feelings, and I don’t have any.
It may objectively (obviously if there is an objective standard than any change to an imperfect work “may” make it objectively better) make it better. But unpleasant is a subjective matter, there is no universal code that is agreed on. Some people dislike having their nipples pinched during sex, some people like it, some people don’t care much either way and I am sure for some people it is conditional on what else is going on. Saying “I don’t like having my nipples pinched” is one thing, saying “I think sex is objectively better not having your nipples pinched” is an incorrect use of the term objectively. Either you have not considered that people who like pinched nipples exist OR you are stating that your preferences should be weighted higher than theirs”, either of those could/would be classified as a narcissistic response by TLP (to my understanding of his view on the subject).
Unless your tastes are held up as a standard they can never be objective. This is literally the definition of subjective, dictionary.com
This is the definition of objective
Subjective is what you think, objective is the characteristics of the object.
I am sorry that I assumed you knew the difference between subjective and objective, I thought that was basic generosity.
Once again, this isn’t specifically about you and me, but about an example of how I understand someone else’s thinking, but since you asked the original quote follows, and a similar quote which represents what I think TLP would not consider a narcissistic statement follows that.
What is funny is that I didn’t accuse you of narcissism, and I directly stated as such before you posted this reply
Then you accused me of not being able to parse basic language, exhibit basic generosity, or take what you wrote literally.
1. Posts don’t just spring mysteriously out of the ether. If my post was narcissistic, it’s because it was a product of narcissistic thinking. Defend your insult or take it back, don’t try to twist and worm your way out of the unfortunate fact that you’ve made it. (and definitely don’t try to do both in the same post)
2. You didn’t go that step further and explicitly accuse me of being a narcissist the rest of the time, too, but your phrasing was clearly tilted towards pithy rudeness rather than polite clarity.
3. Your post was was not part of a discussion of TLP’s thoughts on narcissism, it was a standalone assertion that ‘this is what TLP is talking about when it comes to narcissism’. That’s just a lie. And you’re a dishonest person for writing it.
4. My post’s physical embodiment on slatestarcodex’s server can’t be a narcissist, because it’s a post, not a person. For that reason, apart from all the others, the ‘this’ quoted above cannot refer only to the post and not to me.
And yes I had read your ‘direct statement’ that you hadn’t accused me of narcicism. I just didn’t want to waste my time with such petty, obvious bullshit. I was hoping your lying about that was just you backpedalling, rather than the rather than culpable, malicious dishonesty, characteristic of your personality more generally. Sadly this was a vain hope.
Ignoring ‘unusual’, because why would that be relevant? And the fact that I focused on three words, not one, (just can’t help yourself, can you?), what else was aggressive about it? The fact that I said ‘serious question’, to indicate that I was being serious and genuine, rather than sarcastic?
Or was it, (by a process of elimination) the fact that I said ‘sick bizarre shit’ a second time rather than something less direct like ‘the actual sick bizarre shit itself’?
Taking you at your word that it wasn’t the delineation that you considered aggressive (nominally- based on your consistent profile you’re probably lying, or dishonestly deluded), the most likely candidate seems to be the fact that I said ‘sick bizarre shit’ a second time rather than mix it up with some other way of saying the same thing.
Assuming that’s it, though I really can’t be sure- just fuck off with such hypersensitivity. That isn’t aggressive. You can read it that way if you want, but you’re just superimposing your own tone on it.
Also there’s not really such a thing as ‘a little aggressive’, when it comes to a polite conversation. Introducing any aggression into a formerly 100% polite and non acrimonious discussion is a serious thing, not to be brushed off.
You also claimed that I was upset by reading this, which is a very forward assumption to make. It happens to be wrong*, but even if it was correct it would still be rude.
*I found it irritating for a moment, before I remembered that Scott was a doctor and they’re exposed to sick bizarre shit all the time. (which is the reason, and the only reason, that I bought up that other people might not be.)
You also said that ‘no one made him read your writing’, which is a really defensive thing to say, (not that defensiveness is a bad thing when justified), so I don’t believe you when you say you weren’t upset. Though I suppose it’s also possible that you’re just really stupid.
As for your essay on objectivity, *yawn*. Obviously I wasn’t using the word in the generally useless ‘we can’t say the nazis were objectively bad because good and bad are subjective’ sense.
But actually even in that sense, it makes plenty of sense. You just have to take your head out of your ass and realise Scott isn’t writing to cater to people with peculiar, particular, fetishes, but with a wide audience in mind. (Not to mention the fact that we know Scott often goes out of his way not to upset people.)
So yes, if your goal is to make useful and enjoyable essays, which I’m assuming is an aim of Scott’s, based on his continuous track record, then it does objectively improve one, if you can make the same point, in a less unpleasant way.
(less unpleasant to a predictable section of the audience, not less unpleasant objectively, because there’s literally no such fucking thing, you retard.)
To go over it once more: making the same point in a way which is less (duh, subjectively) unpleasant for a portion of your audience, is, -if your goal is to write enjoyable and valuable essays, which Scott’s seems to be, objectively better.
I hope that was slow enough for you?
(of course that doesn’t mean it’s possible to do so, or if it is possible, that it’s worth it. This should go without saying)
There’s also a huge difference nipple pinching and sucking your dad’s dick. You using that as your example-comparison is one more case of your constant dishonest twisting. (PSA, If you’re generally like this, -which you may not be, -but if you are, you should either improve, or kill yourself, because a family environment with the-you-I’ve-seen in it is not going to be healthy. Hopefully you’re not, or hopefully you can stop.)
As for your ridiculous and telling attempt to find a better way to say what I said, didn’t you notice that your one has an ultimatum? (LMAO) Yours is like a hundred times worse than mine is in your feverish imagination at its worst.
Also, jesus christ what disgusting touchy feely crap. ‘I like reading your blog’. Really? Trying to insinuate yourself in there first thing, huh? I guess I had you all wrong.
Okay I take back what I said about your character. You’re clearly just a touchy feely person who has never had a literal propositional thought in their life.
Man, I would edit the post to reflect that newfound understanding, but you did insult me and then lie about and then keep lying about it, so I won’t bother. But I had assumed that you were able to speak english, and not just socialese. My bad.
‘bring up some sick, bizarre, and shitty images in my mind’
BRING UP? IT IS A BIZARRE TWISTED IMAGE. THAT’S LITERALLY THE POINT.
holy shit.
Man I’m sorry I really thought you were an asshole. Just turns out we speak a different language.
_
And boy did I underestimate you. *wipes tear of laughter from eye*
I have not been following this discussion, but I would respectfully submit that you would both be better off if you took a step back and spent some time away from the computer. This is not an argument that will go anywhere useful.
No, this isn’t true. First your reply could have been something like “obviously I just meant subjectively not objectively (ps you seem like kind of a dick)” or “I meant objectively from a web traffic standpoint, since I won’t link such pieces to other people” or “dude I’ve got 30 years experience as a editor, I know a crap load more than you about editing”, or any number of other responses that could give context to a statement in isolation.
Secondly it wasn’t about you. This is what it was about. A. I spend the past 3 weeks obsessively reading TLP’s archive, B. The three people I spend the most time with and talk the most with are either working 60 hour weeks recently, or are under 4 years old, C. Whatever specific stuff was happening during the day that day. D. Someone mentioned TLP on a blog I read, whose comments I participate in when I was bursting to talk about what I thought about his writing. E. Someone wrote a short reply that when I read made me go “ah, this is what he means ….”
Thirdly having some thoughts that stem from a narcissistic viewpoint is closer to the human condition than it is to an insult. Its only a condition or an insult if it is a pervasive part of your personality, which I have no reason to assume.
————————–
You are of course free to take me at my word, or not, assume I was directly insulting you, or not, but I will be taking Iain’s advice above and not responding further.
I am still itching to talk about TLP’s ideas if anyone else is game, I promise anything I say isn’t a personal attack.
Late reply. I swore off SSC for a bit after I sincerely advised someone to kill themselves, just because they were, to my eyes, being maliciously dishonest, then doubling down on it again and again -which is after all a common human condition.
And it turns out they were less malicious and more tired. Now in my book that makes little difference to how I should reply, because a person is culpable for what comes out of their mouth, seeing as no one can see their heart. And because sometimes when a person is tired and weak what comes out of their heart doesn’t just look like malice it, it is -for whatever reason. But now that I know, I am reassured. I mean if nothing else it gives me hope that this isn’t a regular habit of yours.
Anyway, I still feel obligated to reply to your last post here, but this time I don’t mean it personally when I point out what’s false and what’s -to all appearances- dishonest. If there’s something false in front of me, I go after it. That’s the ideal, anyway. I don’t think it’s good to let lies and rudeness stand. What’s maybe less clear cut is that I believe in engaging people at their own level, too. If necessary in a language they can understand. I guess sometimes that means I talk to someone like they’re worse than they are if they act worse than they are.
___
___
I meant objectively, and I explained that for you in my last post, lets be clear, in enough detail for a child to follow.
-And you just talk on like I’ve conceded the point?
Seriously, be a better person. That’s all I can say. There’s no point in getting angry again. I’m sure the habits you have with your kids are different than with people you’ve thoughtlessly (lets say unintentionally) insulted and got mad as fuck at you, but even now you should be a lot more honest than that.
Dishonesty is a bad habit. It won’t bite you immediately, usually, but somebody always has to pay the piper.
My first post did do exactly that. Again, honesty is paramount.
First of all, very funny. With that out of the way, no, if you insult someone, it involves them. It’s not about one person or another. Interactions with multiple people in them… involve all of those people.
Clearly I have a temper, and what’s worse a short fuse, at least when it comes to (perceived) glib mischarecterisations and dishonesty, but that’s isn’t thinking things are about me. It’s being angered by harmful and potentially evil things. I don’t know if that’s even a flaw, but if it is a flaw, it’s a completely different one than narcissism.
In this case what’s narcissistic is talking like mitigating circumstances entitle you to be thoughtless (taking malicious off the table, for the sake of argument). “Not to put too fine a point on it”, but: Everyone has mitigating circumstances, not just you.
But still, don’t worry about it. Like I said in my last post, I thought you were a more literal minded and thoughtful person than you seem to be at the moment, with a 4 year old and 60 hour work weeks to deal with. So I do take you at your word. From the start of this all you had to do was stop digging. This last post wasn’t that, but the volume and aggression of distortions has died down.
I addressed that in my previous post, which was quite comprehensive, as you may have noticed. See above.
So yeah,
Yes, it is true
You’ve seen your way to denying that that’s so (unless I’m misunderstanding you), so I’m off the hook anyway, but here’s my first word again, hopefully as my last:
My post wasn’t narcissistic, and the reason it wasn’t narcissistic is because zero (or traces amounts) of narcissism, or narcissistic thinking, went into it. It was made primarily out of concern for others. I’ve never spoken up on behalf of my preferences. I’ve never said ‘this makes me uncomfortable’, or so much as challenged Scott’s attitudes /casual, approving references, to polyamorous relationships, homosexuality, BDSM, (partially because I know he’s attached to the whole ‘sex positivity’ thing), -or anything, ever, that made me personally uncomfortable.
So if posting out of (unstatably) extremely strong personal dislikes means narcissism (which it CLEARLY doesn’t, but whatever, running with the premise), then I’m not just not-a-narcissist, I’m the opposite of a narcissist, and you’ve called a spade a diamond. Water, dry. And self-abnegating, self-obsessed. Self skeptical, self worshipping.
And that wasn’t (even) what made me ad. It was the bulverism of it. Taking it for granted when you’d never established it. I KNOW we don’t live in a civilised society, but there should be a fucking death penalty for that.
As far as I can tell, my initial post’s phrasing was not quite perfect, but if it comes to it, I don’t think it was even that far off, either.
If someone wants to show me I’m wrong, on any front, please go ahead. I’m open to being convinced I’m wrong about any of this, if anyone would like to make a first attempt. In the meantime, I don’t expect to be labelled without first being accused.
France has passed a law giving employees the right to ignore work-related emails after hours.
My knee-jerk libertarian response was “clearly this makes French labor less competitive, but hey, if they’re ok with that who am I to judge?”
Thinking about it a bit more though, I wonder if this policy might fail even under its own terms. The justification seems to be that the constant requirement to be at least available (if not explicitly on-call) to ones employer 24/7 is increasing stress and is likely harming worker health and/or productivity. But I wonder…
From my own experience in an industry famous for working long hours/weekends, my experience with our phone app that allows us to check out e-mails on our phones (along with the expectation that we will do so) has been universally positive. This sort of thing enables the ability to work remotely (which is also something “workers rights” advocates seemingly want more of) and time-shift certain non urgent functions to promote flexibility. I’ve had days at the office where after six hours, the boss sent everyone home because “We’re waiting to hear back from the client, might not be for a few hours, I’ll send out an e-mail with stuff for us to do once I get word.” So instead of sitting in the office with nothing to do, we can go do other things, and the manager has the confidence in letting us leave because he knows he can contact us and re-start the work process whenever it needs to be re-started.
I feel that a policy like this might just increase the amount of time someone has to sit around the office doing nothing productive at all. Maybe employees don’t care that much (because hey, in most offices you can at least check your Facebook account and argue about economics in blog comments). But I’ve personally never minded being “on-call to do work when work needs to be done” as opposed to “sit here for this arbitrarily defined period even though we know work demands are highly variable and do not fit nicely into a repeatable and predictable schedule.”
There’s also the question of busy-work. If you have employees who must sit at their desks 8 hours a day M-F no matter what, and the workload is highly variable, you inevitably end up with employees who, at any given time, have no legitimate work to do. What happens in those situations? The boss intuitively resents paying you to be on Facebook, so he creates work for you to do. Everyone generally resents this practice, but there isn’t much to be done about it, and you can’t exactly argue with the boss and say “No, I insist on being able to do nothing right now even though you’re paying me to do work.”
I’ve rambled on enough about this though. Anyone have any thoughts?
“France has passed a law giving employees the right to ignore work-related emails after hours.”
Misleading headline, given:
(my bold)
An obligation is not a right. As an obligation, it should only apply to paid-hourly labor (at most).
I understand the rationale behind making it a mandate though. It would be hard to show retaliation for those exercising it as a right.
I don’t understand the “50 employee” limit. How arbitrary is this (has anyone done studies on company sizes with respect to this topic)?
Does this law apply to all communications, or only literal emails? Is a text or discussion thread an email?
France has a lot of onerous regulations that only apply to businesses with 50 or more employees. The natural effect is that the country has a disproportionate number of businesses with exactly 49 employees.
The old joke about the French economy is that it works in practice but nobody’s been able to make it work in theory.
The U.S. has plenty of these too.
As far as I can tell, it comes down to “small businesses are really popular and politicians don’t want to be on the hook for doing anything that might harm them somehow”
Whereas large corporations are outright disliked by about half the electorate and grudgingly tolerated by the other half, so nobody is particularly worried about a negative campaign ad where the CEO of Wal-Mart complains about how your new regulation was bad for his business.
There’s also the matter of economies of scale such that a big company might survive a regulation that will drag a small one under.
Tekno:
Mary:
Between the two of you, you’re circling an important point that you’ll never reach because of the simplistic insistence on treating all businesses as “large” or “small”.
Aside from retail chains, large businesses rarely face direct competition from small businesses. In order for there to be competition at the top levels, in order to break up the “ologopoly”, you need to get new large businesses into play. And those are rarely created ex nihilo; they have to grow. Which includes a stage where they are neither large nor small.
In the name of protecting The People from the horrors of The Oligopoly, you all are finding arguments to support regulations that will strangle potential new entrants and competitors before they can enter the game.
This started as a reply to John Schilling, but turned into a broad tangent, but I’m leaving it here anyway.
The trouble with these conversations is that they tend to take on a narrow focus, while the economy is broad and extremely varied and complex. You will rarely, if ever, hear an economist discussing competition in the auto industry mention building regulations, but an apartment building is a competitor for the auto industry. Denser living allows more people the option of going without cars, and it is the with/without competition that is probably the main driver (no pun intended) of economic growth in modern societies.
@Matt M
Harsher (RELATIVELY speaking) regulations on larger businesses also makes sense. Libertarian rhetoric about the market applies most to markets with many buyers and sellers, and low barriers to entry and exit, which describes most small business. Large business is more governed by what is usually called “oligopolistic competition” where there are fewer suppliers and high barriers to entry and exit (sunk costs).
The main reason to hate big business is similar to the reasons to hate government or nationalized business. Larger businesses with less competitors and high barriers to new competitors are much more isolated from market competition, and so arguments of the form “but this will cause market distortions” tend to have less weight in the debate, since the megacorps are subject to less pressure to begin with, so there is a lot more room to even things out and give smaller businesses some growth room. A regulation that hurts a big business might actually be helpful for the economy in the long term.
Of course, the reason to like big business is that economies of scale are a thing, so big business can often supply things at a lower price than small business. However, there are downsides to giving any organization so much power and higher prices and less convenience may actually be worth it. I personally think it’s a good trade if done moderately, since you are reducing the influence of single economic organs. It’s also the case that diseconomies of scale exist, and its likely that many megacorps are highly bloated at this point, especially with special favors, and that smaller competitors could replace them if they just had the room.
In any case, like government, large corporations should bear more responsibility than small corporations that exist in great numbers and are thus far more subject to market pressure from people easily being able to choose alternatives, and so having limited price setting ability. It’s difficult to know exactly where to draw the line, but it’s right to be lenient with those on one end of the scale and suspicious of those on the other end of the scale. If anything, I’d say that we aren’t lenient enough on small businesses, and that the market could be far freer if a lot of occupational licensing could be reduced.
Market power depends on relative size not absolute size. A firm can be quite large and still part of a highly competitive market. The only general store in a small town has more market power than one of the several supermarkets within easy driving distance of my house.
Every time you add a business regulation, you make it slightly harder to do business. And the more complicated the regulation, the more difficult you make it to do business. Having an employee threshold is one of the more complicated rules, because defining how many employees a particular business has is rarely simple. How do you treat partial year employees, contractors, part-time employees, etc.? And a firm which has 60 employees certainly isn’t large enough to have the specialists to decipher these rules.
Also, it doesn’t make sense to add onerous regulations to big business just because they have other advantages. It still adds costs to everyone in the economy. Bottom line: the French are doing their best to be become non-competitive amongst the advanced economies. Although based on my experience in an anti-business US city — we are trying our best to keep up with France.
It does mean that you can have all the fun of ladling on the onerous regulations without driving all the businesses out of business and dying of hunger.
It seems like the issue is high marginal cost to adding the 50th employee. Ideally, the regulations for big businesses should be phased in as your business grows. Of course, having more complicated regulations like that also has its costs, by making it harder for people to understand and comply.
“An obligation is not a right. As an obligation, it should only apply to paid-hourly labor (at most).”
Fair enough. I saw another headline calling it a “right to ignore” on a different article and thought that was simply easier to understand and went with it.
As far as I can tell, it applies to everyone (but please correct me if I’m wrong). Paid hourly labor are the ones least in need of something like this, are they not. Are fry cooks at McDonalds really getting grief from their managers about not checking their work email when they’re at home?
I wasn’t calling you out about the headline, because your interpretation really seems to be the gist of the two headlines on this topic that I’ve seen. I was calling out the editors who wrote those headlines.
I was an hourly Research Technician in a sci/tech company (technically a permatemp, but equivalent). There are many other skilled blue-collar workers (e.g. manufacturing) who are also hourly.
In your capacity as a research technician, was it common that you would get after-hours e-mails where immediate action was expected?
Is this true of “skilled blue-collar workers” either? Most of my friends are skilled blue-collar and seem to have an incredibly predictable 8-hour schedule where once they’re off the clock, they are entirely off the clock. It tends to be WHY they remain blue collar (at least for my friends). One of my cousins was offered a management position and turned it down explicitly because he didn’t want to become a “slave to the company”
Not at that place. I’d occasionally have to send one out since I couldn’t badge back into the building after 6 PM or on the weekends, and needed someone who was there to do something.
The contractor technician at my current place does come in on the weekends to check the emails he’s been too busy to address during the week.
Laws don’t need to exist for common events. They can also exist for uncommon exploitations. How many unpaid interns are expected to be on call for emails?
No, this is absolutely wrong. Laws are a blunt instrument. They only work for common situations. We have many thousands of laws and regulations out there already, most of which nobody’s heard of, because legislators try to cover every situation. Laws don’t work when nobody has heard of them. And you can never catch every bad situation in the law, because that would require constantly changing the laws, because new and unusual situations keep happening.
Murder is very uncommon. Treason even less so.
Pollution on the scale of a burning river even less so.
Yeah, it’s nice to have sufficiently few laws so that everyone can remember those which are pertinent to them, but this is one of the reasons job specialization exists.
I’m sure that everyone in France has heard of the recent law change. And I’m even doubly sure that HR specialists will have heard of it, and all of the rest of the laws pertinent to HR.
@Matt M- I certainly know research technicians that is true of. Often the email is an automated one saying “the temperature in the cryostorage tank is dangerously high” or something of that sort.
I don’t think they’re hourly though.
” I certainly know research technicians that is true of. Often the email is an automated one saying “the temperature in the cryostorage tank is dangerously high” or something of that sort.”
I can’t imagine the law would make THIS sort of thing illegal – unless France is fine with having zero medical research take place in the entire country.
So, what happens if an employee sends an email at 7:00 on a Sunday? Does he get punished? Does his company get punished? Can he sue his company for sending it?
I can’t see any good way to enforce this.
I assume (based on no evidence) that the employee could sue if they had evidence that they’d been forced to respond to emails (and would likely only do so as part of a general complaint about the way their company was treating them).
That’s exactly the problem. Someone who wants to sue their company can send emails and create the cause for their own lawsuit. To prevent this, the company must be able to prevent being sued even if the worker sends emails. This means having an official policy against out of hours emails. There’s no way to stop a company from having an official policy against out of hours emails while preferentially treating those dedicated workers who ignore it.
Ug. Time for me to pop out the bertrand russell essays.
The virtue of idleness
Real efficiency won’t reduce, in the meaningful sense. The people who truly *have* to work emergency on-call (surgeons, fire fighters) this rule doesn’t apply.
If the GDP declines by 2 percent, but people live their lives with less stress, more pleasure, with no threats of starvation and just as much food to pass around, who cares.
This is not my question.
The question is – can we simply assume that employer/employee after-hours communication inherently causes more stress than it prevents? I know they have a study about people checking their emails – but that’s only considering one effect. I’m thinking of all of the various other things that are enabled by after-hours communication (such as time and location shifting).
Edit: Also, I don’t think the proponents of this policy would be as charitable as you are. I’m pretty sure they are insisting that GDP won’t decline, because less stress leads to more productive workers and that will make up any difference of lost efficiency.
What’s with this insistence on GDP maximization?(not directing that at you) Sure, it correlates with a bunch of other nice figures well…but its just a correlation.
If I were ruler of a country, I would mandate everyone should buy 100,000$ worth of rubber and steel and just throw it away to make the GDP great for a few years and everyone who mostly looks at that figure would wonder why my country is doing so well.
Your inflation rate would be horrendous, you would have to institute price controls etc. Maybe you could fool Krugman for a few years though.
Didn’t the Soviet Union famously do a lot of this and succeed in fooling a whole lot of people internationally for a few decades?
What if I commandeer the natural resources of some third world countries? That could be several decades of doing this without price countrols.
And much of the inefficincey of the Soviet Union was supposedly the improper usage of sticks and carrots, with so much other stuff thrown in (expansionism of countries that won’t assimilate easily, not actually following the meritocracy principles of “Each man according to his ability” properly…etc) that as a raw economic question, this is effectively unanswered
For example, the Soviet Union had pretty good GDP growth for a while. GDP doesn’t tell you how it was produced and what else was going on.
Did they actually have pretty good GDP growth, or only appear to in their statistics? My understanding is that, after the fall of communism, it turned out that their growth had been considerably less than generally believed.
David — I think the USSR GDP had both problems. As you say, there was a lot of fictitious production, since the production managers didn’t want to admit to deficient levels of production. But there was also wasted production. For example, if you grow 1 million tons of potatoes, but 90% of them rot in warehouses, you still include 1 million in GDP. If you produce 2 million left handed screwdrivers, but there are only 100,000 people who want them, you still include 2 million in GDP.
@Mark:
I’m not sure you are correct. In order to measure GDP you need a measure of the value of output. How do you get that without market prices?
The closest I can think of is to use shadow prices, what the goods would sell for on a market. If you are producing ten times as many left handed screwdrivers as there are people who want them (what, by the way, is a left handed screwdriver?) then the market price ought to be about zero.
Similarly, if you produce lots of potatoes and most of them rot, only the ones that reach the consumers belong in the GDP calculation.
A joke, I believe. Standard screws are often annoying to lefties (the left hand exerts less torque in the unscrewing direction), but a special screw driver (perhaps with some strange gearing to reverse the rotation?) would probably not be worth its manufacturing cost.
Yes, a left handed screwdriver is a joke — about places that make things not needed. I know the USSR often made things is very large batches because it was more efficient and looked good on production reports, even though no one needed them. But I couldn’t remember any specifics — hence left handed screw drivers.
In order to calculate GDP, you have to use prices. And in the US, a product doesn’t become part of the GDP until you sell it. But this isn’t true for government services — the cost is used as the price of the service. I’m not sure how the Soviets calculated GDP, but somehow I figure they would use conventions that maximized it. I bet they got those 2 million left handed screw drivers into GDP even though no one actually bought them. And they probably priced them at the price of normal screw drivers.
@Mark V
>I bet they got those 2 million left handed screw drivers into GDP even though no one actually bought them. And they probably priced them at the price of normal screw drivers.
You are precisely correct
“I know the USSR often made things is very large batches because it was more efficient and looked good on production reports, even though no one needed them.”
I remember hearing a story (have no idea if it’s true) that in the USSR, output was measured in gross tonnage, so nail factories were instructed to build “10 tons of nails” or some such thing, so as a result they made a bunch of giant nails (because it was easier) even though nobody needed them, rather than constructing small nails that would actually be useful in construction.
I have just worked out the nature of a left handed screwdriver.
The first step is to recognize that there really are right handed and left handed screws. Suppose you want a screw driver that will only turn the screw in one direction. To do that, you make the tip of screw driver of the normal shape on half of one side, slanted on the other half, reversed on the other side, so that if you try to turn a screw the wrong way the screwdriver will slip. Now you have a screwdriver that will screw in a right handed screw but not a left handed screw–a right handed screw driver. Make another that’s the mirror image of that one and you have a left handed screwdriver.
Of course, this assumes you only want to screw screws in, not out.
Why would you need such a device? Imagine that you have a million monkeys left over from the unsuccessful attempt to get them to write Hamlet (best sentence so far was “to be or not to be, that is the grglflx”). You need a lot of screws screwed in. Monkeys like imitating humans, but are not too strong on details such as which direction to turn a screw. Provide them with only right handed screw drivers and right handed screws (or the reverse) and set them to work, and eventually your screws will all be screwed in.
Should I apply for a patent?
Though Friedman’s screwdriver would be pretty useless, the same (presumably already patented) principle can be used to make screws and bolts that can only be turned one way, and there are plenty of uses for those. You often see them used to bolt together cubicle walls in public lavatories.
I wonder whether they consulted the people who this law is intended to benefit first.
My dad, until this year, worked as an HVAC operating engineer (misleading title: it’s maintenance, not engineering) for an office park. He got an hourly wage and worked regular hours, but was also expected to be on call more-or-less 24/7/365 in case of emergencies.
A significant chunk of the money he ever made at that job was from those off-hours calls. Overtime pay, plus a minimum of four hours overtime whenever he was called in, meant that thirty minutes on the phone or three hours babysitting contractors would pay as much as a full day of work. Even if his bosses weren’t thrilled paying him for it, they would rather do that than lose million dollar pieces of equipment if something went wrong on at 2am on a Saturday.
I’m 99% sure that most people who get work calls on the weekends are in worse positions, and it might be that this law benefits the French overall. But it also closes the door on deals like that and I wonder whether the policymakers realized that fact.
but that’s a call, and the other is an e-mail
that distinction does matter. Work e-mails are given, almost always, to people on a salary. They present them with some extra at-home work, not an urgent call to go somewhere. I think many people might be OK with work e-mails if it wasn’t for the fact that they basically function as an extension of your job, rather than you acting as a self-employed contractor in your off hours
now granted, e-mails could be used for that function, but being much less immediate no one expects them to. Similarly phones could be used for office employees, but usually the e-mail contains information they need in order to do the work; also phone calls are too intrusive and a lot of people might not stand for them.
@Dr Dealgood
I assume that this laws distinguishes between being ‘on call’ and uncompensated messages.
If it’s a flexible system of “we’re not doing anything, go home rather than sit round the office and then if we have news, you get emails at home to work on” that’s fine.
The thing is that people are supposed to put in eight hour (minimum) work days and still be available even on what is supposed to be time off; after-work hours aren’t and weekends are now treated as workdays as well. There’s never a time when you’re not contactable, and if you do switch off you may get in trouble because even if it’s three in the morning on Sunday you should be contactable.
I know it does happen that you need to be available because crap, the alarm system has gone off and I’m the keyholder or hey, the production line is stalled, how do we re-set the process again? But for some people it’s constantly on on on when there is no real reason to be, and if you’re constantly in the mind-frame of work work work, when do you turn off?
And as you say, since work bleeds over into personal life, personal life bleeds into work so people are checking Facebook, sending personal emails, playing games and commenting online when at work “I don’t have anything to do right now, I can’t leave my desk because I’m supposed to be here until six o’clock, and if the office called me at home at seven last night then feck ’em, I’m going to use this idle time to do the personal stuff I got interrupted in doing”.
Maybe if we’re all going to be contactable 24/7, workplaces will have to accept that people are blending personal and work lives and will be doing their online shopping, emailing their sister in Australia, watching cute cat videos and levelling up during work hours.
So there’s been some interesting discussion here, but I feel like we’ve drifted from my core question.
Is it possible (and can anyone share examples), that this policy fails at its stated goal of reducing the total amount of “worker stress” or, that it will decrease a worker’s quality of life (independent from compensation and firm performance) in general.
Anecdotally, I’ve left a company which required me to answer work email out of hours. The stressful thing was not answering email, which I’m happy to do on a best-effort basis, it was the requirement to always answer all email. This meant I couldn’t do anything that took me away from my phone or caused me to leave phone coverage on a weekend, which was a gigantic burden. There are also a lot of studies on interrupted sleep and stress, and if you’re required to answer all email outside work hours within a short time then interrupted sleep could be inevitable.
The average effect is hard to guess at, but it seems very likely that it will reduce stress by a large amount in at least some workers.
This is your periodic reminder of various features of the comment system here.
These all require JavaScript. If you have JavaScript disabled, you’re missing out.
• You can click “hide” at the bottom of any comment to collapse that subthread.
• Comments posted since the last time you visited a post are outlined in green.
• They also have the text “~ new ~” added, without the spaces. You can search for this text to cycle through comments in page order.
• In theory, posting a comment or logging in shouldn’t reset the comments marked as new. Let me know if this isn’t working.
• The box in the upper right shows the date after which comments are marked as new. You can edit it to change what’s marked.
• If you click the [+] next to the box, it will expand into a chronological list of new comments. You can click on items in this list to scroll to that comment.
• There is an arrow at the bottom of child comments which can be clicked to go to its parent comment. This is useful if you get halfway through a thread and then decide you don’t want to read it anymore.
• When posting a comment, there are formatting buttons below the input.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome here or as replies to this thread, although I’m very conservative about changes to the UI.
Has any thought been given to tying “new” comment tags to a user account, rather than a cookie on a specific device?
First-world problem I know, but I often browse from both home and work computers which makes it difficult to find truly “new” comments.
Under the old system this was obvious impractical, but now that I’m logging in with a username/PW…
Thing is, it’s currently all done in your browser. Tying it to your account would require getting the server to remember everyone’s last visit instead of just having your browser do it, which would be way more work and kinda impractical with WordPress.
I think your best bet is remembering when you last logged on and putting that into the box at the top right.
Also, here’s a few extensions which add optional features.
• This will let you block (= collapse by default the subthreads of) users. (Userscript for Firefox.)
• This will add an arrow on child comments to go to the top-level comment in the the thread.
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Thank you again for doing this– I don’t think ssc would be usable for me if it weren’t for your reading management tools.
The thing I’d like wuld be email notifications to chosen comments and/or threads. I would probably like being able to get email notifications of all replies to my comments with one request.
Repost from tail end of prior open thread:
Can an economist (amateur or otherwise) recommend a good introductory text for general equilibrium theory, or some background to help build up to it? Also, what work has been done on game theory outside of turn-based or two player contexts?
This isn’t really what you are asking for–general equilibrium theory isn’t my field–but you might find David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy interesting. It is, so far as I know, the first worked out general equilibrium theory ever, done with no mathematics beyond arithmetic, which is obviously impossible. He does it by the combination of simplifying assumptions, whose consequences he discusses, and extraordinarily good mathematical intuition.
If you want to try reading it, you might find the lecture notes from my old history of thought class helpful.
I’ll recommend this: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/ – Even though I haven’t used it.
First, because it was recommended by the Lesswrong “Best Textbook” thread – http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/ , which is a good list generally, second, because it’s free, and third becasue I have met Mcaffee, and his explabnatinos are very clear – and from glancing through the book, it seems the same.
Edit: Fourth, because it has a section on game theory which covers a bit of multi-player and continuous games.
OTOH, if you want THE graduate intro textbook, Mas-Collel is fantastic, if dense and expensive. (Varian’s book is also canonical, if even denser.)
I’m finding myself more and more intrigued by the idea of nootropics, to the point of approaching Happy-Death-Spiral. I don’t believe I have enough pharmacology knowledge to accurately assess the possible detriments and/or risks of nootropics in general, or of any particular nootropic (modafinil being the one I’m currently most interested in). Help would be helpful.
One textbook that I would definitely recommend is Michael Coleman’s Human Drug Metabolism. There’s a lot of biochemistry in that book and it’s perhaps somewhat technical for an introductory text, but in my opinion you really need to know the sort of stuff included in that book to even be considering experimenting with drugs on your own. People who experiment with nootropics and do not know the kind of stuff that book covers are almost certainly taking a lot of health risks the existence of which they’re unaware of, which seems sub-optimal. Any introductory pharmacology text will probably do, but I’ve read Coleman’s book and it’s pretty good. Reading the book will both enable you to lower some types of risks (e.g. by helping you understand how important it is to inform your doctor about which drugs you are taking, as any pharmacologically active compound can cause drug interactions and side effects, regardless of whether it’s prescribed by a physician or not – this may help you avoid an unpleasant drug interaction), as well as making you more aware of the risks which you cannot avoid (making you better informed and thus better able to correctly assess the costs and benefits of the potential nootropic regime contemplated).
(I don’t know if this is at all relevant, but I am incidentally not taking nootropics.)
Thanks, I’ll definitely add that to my reading list!
On reflection, I pretty much agree with the value of gaining a base level of technical knowledge before highly specialized research, it provides valuable context and seems like a good way of avoiding the failure mode I currently find myself in.
Heh. I don’t know why this wasn’t included in EY’s original article on Happy Death Spirals, but encouraging someone to read a book on a subject before trying it might actually be a good technique for avoiding death spirals. I know I always procrastinate when I need a book to further my studies!
> by helping you understand how important it is to inform your doctor about which drugs you are taking
This is really, really important. Don’t be too embarrassed to talk about it with your doctor. Preferably discuss it before you start taking them. Drug interactions can be very dangerous. For example, did you know that grapefruit can block metabolism of a wide class of drugs, with a single grapefruit potentially turning a normal dose into a lethal overdose?
When you say “talk to your doctor about what drugs you are taking” do most people think that the category of “drugs” includes grapefruit?
No, but it should include those that could potentially have bad interactions with grapefruit or other diet, and your doctor can tell you to, e.g., avoid those things.
You can more or less assume anything besides a nutritional deficiency (vitamins, minerals, protein, omega fats) is a scam.
Anything not diet-exercise-sleep related, that isn’t a *temporary* stimulant like caffiene, nicotine exists in the “Land of studies that are rarely replicated, or do nothing for creatures that are not rats with brain damage”
[Intention: genuine curiosity and a desire for inquiry, not quibbling in any way.]
Can I get a source on that?
This is an area of interest for me as well, and I tend to roughly categorize any drug or supplement as 1) having a history of human use either traditionally or in clinical trials, or 2) as a novel compound.
It is possible to make relatively informed choices about substances in category 1, even without extensive knowledge of pharmacology. With modafinil for example, you can simply read the monograph, see what the likely problems and side effects are, and evaluate if it is an acceptable risk. There are also websites that track reported side effects for approved drugs after the fact, in case something was missed in the trials. The longer the history of use for a substance, the more you are likely to know about its risk profile. We have about 20 years of data now on Modafinil, so I would be much more comfortable taking it than something that was just approved.
I believe novel substances with no history of human use and no clinical trials present a very real danger, and I think that danger is routinely underestimated by the nootropics community. Two examples:
JDtic: This compound is a long acting antagonist at the k-opioid receptor, and was under investigation for the treatment of depression, anxiety, and addiction. Early results were quite promising, so the folks over at Longecity had a batch cooked up and were taking it before trials were completed. Those trials ultimately revealed that it causes ventricular tachycardia, a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia, and development was stopped. Fortunately no one died.
C60 Olive Oil: There was an interesting study some time ago in which a combination of C60 and olive oil seemingly extended the lifespan of rats. Extending the lifespan of mammals is not an easy thing to do, so on the strength of this single, small, unreplicated study, a whole C60 olive oil cottage industry sprung up, and people have been taking the combination for years now. A recent attempt at replication however showed not prolonged life but massively increased tumor growth, possibly due to contaminants in commercially available C60 (the same C60 used by said cottage industry). So now we have a group of people who have maybe been taking a strong carcinogen for years.
Did they have a possible explanation in the form of a metabolic pathway for the C60? I guess Buckyballs could possibly work as a very weak antioxidant, but I don’t see how vitamin C wouldn’t be better? I’m sceptical of dietary studies that does not have both an observable effect and a technical explanation for said effect…
Olive oil is a healthy source of fat that I guess rats don’t get a lot of naturally, so my first guess would be that this would explain the life extension in this particular species, much the same way margarine made from whale oil vs olive oil explains the different prevalence of Alzheimer’s in Norway and Greece.
This is the original study.
I am deeply skeptical as well and am withholding judgement until it has been replicated on a larger scale. That said, there are a few reasons why this generated more excitement then the typical nutritional study might. I believe the study was not originally intended to investigate life extension – it was a toxicity study on C60, with olive oil being used as a presumably neutral carrier (current theory is that the olive oil is not neutral but forms an adduct w the C60). This perhaps means there is less danger of motivated analysis like you might see in e.g. a drug trial. Also, the rats lifespans were nearly doubled, which is very dramatic, almost shocking, if it is a real effect. IIRC the study had a control group with olive oil only, which also showed some life extension, but not as much as the C60 olive oil group.
As far as I know there isn’t any solid evidence how this might work, if it does work. There has been a lot of speculation about antioxidant effects, as you mention. One theory is that C60 acts as a sort of catalytic antioxidant that is not consumed, and that it also tends to localize in the mitochondria.
Question(s) for Deiseach:
How is your handle intended to be pronounced? For a while I parsed it as DEZ-EE-ACK, but then I looked more closely and that didn’t seem right. For reference, I’m a monolingual mid-atlantic US English speaker with some vague memories of Latin and Spanish and 2-3 words of Japanese.
(Also, does it mean anything?)
I have been wondering this too. I have been pronouncing it in my head as something like “Day-shack.”
Silverlock is right, it’s pronounced something like “Day-shock” and it does have a meaning; it’s not a family surname at all but it does link to where I come from 🙂
What kind of people are we? We eat babies:
You don’t eat babies. You just feed babies to your fosterlings.
Very kind of you to appreciate the difference, not everyone would! 🙂
I am trying to spend my free (and partly even working) time more efficiently. One (and pretty much the only) huge waste of my time is either playing computer games or perhaps even worse, mindlessly browsing the web. Both can be easily solved outside of work – I just leave the computer in the office. While the office is only something like 10 minutes of walking away from my flat, it is enough for my laziness and my long-term utility maximizing selfs to join forces and do something else instead of coming for the computer. If I need to look up something online, I can usually use my phone, a device awkard enough to use (as is any phone) that I don’t tend to waste too much time using it.
So this works fairly well. But I don’t like it for two reasons. First, I sometimes actually do need the computer for something. When I bring it home, I usually end up wasting a lot of time as well, sometimes even without accomplishing what I wanted to do. Second, I would prefer to have a strong enough willpower to just leave the computer at home and use it only when I actually decide to do it (in the sense of planning to do it, not deciding at a weak moment when I feel bored and too lazy to do something more demanding).
Any suggestions on how to build a willpower to do that? For the moment, I can treat myself like an addict and keep leaving the computer in my office. Even there, I prefer to keep the computer turned off whenever it is possible – while I am able to control myself enough not to play games at work, I sometimes browse the web and spend an hour or two (without realizing it) doing nothing. Turning it off at work is usually enough for me not to turn it on just to check out the SSC or some other stuff, but sometimes I need to have it turned on either to look something up, to run some simulations (less often) or to write things in LaTeX and them my productivity suffers.
I’ve gotten into the habit of setting loose alarms for when I decide I should do some particular task. When the alarm goes off, I either snooze it or switch to the task, and don’t worry too much about which. Partially this is just about giving myself a better sense of time (I was recently diagnosed with ADD, my experience of which has been “I do not feel the difference between 5 minutes and 20 minutes”), but snoozing the alarm means that after the alarm has started going off, it’s more annoying to do whatever I was doing before (which is usually goofing off on my computer) than it otherwise would have been.
i’ve recently implemented a system where I have a morning alarm and an evening alarm, at which time I must do certain things (brush teeth, shower, hair regrowth medicine). I think you need a routine more than willpower because willpower is tough.
I guess so. Willpower is something that you can exercise on a short-time basis, but you cannot just go on willpower forever. But a routine is easy to get used to – for better or worse.
I always think of “lack of willpower” as a psychological/subconscious “check” on how much you really want something.
I wonder – why specifically do you consider computer games and web-surfing to be “inefficient?” With what will you fill the void of free time that you expect to receive? Why is the substitute clearly superior? How is this exercise expected to improve your quality of life in general?
If you don’t have really good and thoughtful answers to these questions, it could be that you don’t really want to change at all, you are fooling yourself into thinking a change is required for reasons that might not be sound (e.g. peer pressure, unreasonably high standards for efficiency, etc.)
It definitely doesn’t have to get as complicated as that. I don’t want to web browse excessively for the same reason I don’t want to do heroin. It’s just my easy way of quickly stimulating pleasure centers instead of any activity that includes real connection or long term self-improvement.
There is a clear difference between games and web browsing and say practicing Portuguese (which I classify as leisure since I don’t really get to use it professionally) or learning a new song on a guitar. The first two are much easier to start, because they require very little effort and provide instant gratification. The latter two require more effort, but are fun too. But the main difference is that the latter provide me with a long term satisfaction whereas the former don’t.
I think one can take clues from how games work though. One reason I stick to practicing languages every day is that I use Duolingo – it’s a free language learning app which is made in a very “gamey” way, giving you a lot of minor goals to “check” and thus providing you with instant rewards. And one reason why I manage to work out reasonably regularly (even though I usually don’t really enjoy such exercise, save for the endorphin wave you receive as a reward afterwards :)) is that I use another app (“YAGOG” – you are your own gym) which is also structured a bit like that. So maybe a good idea would be to give other things I want to do a more “game-like” structure too. It is easier with some things than with others. But still, the main thing is that the things I want to reduce or avoid require very little effort, so if you’re lazy like me, you are more likely to do them than other things. That does not mean that I want to do them more.
I tend to imagine you have two personalities – a short term pleasure maximizer and a long-term utility maximizer. It’s probably healthy to listen to the first one sometimes you need to just relax (although at least web browsing is rarely very relaxing) but he should be kept at bay 🙂
Yeah, I do Duolingo for Spanish too. It’s fairly enjoyable, but starting up again is usually something I avoid if I haven’t been on the ball in a while. I like the idea of bundling education and game elements, but often feel like the game-y aspects in many cases is half-assed.
Look at those fort building cell phone games that people spend 100s of dollars on that don’t involve much actual gameplay at all. They use all manner of Limbic-system exploits to keep players coming back (social cooperation and competition, daily rewards, penalties for failing to harvest whatever, constant accumulation of different visceral resources). There’s a lot of overlap with memorization techniques like spaced repetition, and I’d like to see some company really try to bridge that Fun Gap. It’s kind of Dark Arts, but if kids (especially bored game-obsessed boys) get addicted and learn a ton by doing so, is that really so bad?
I also started with Spanish in Duolingo. Learned more Spanish that way in a year than German in four years at the high school. It helps that I know a lot of native Spanish speakers and I only write them in Spanish now…I finished the Spanish Duolingo tree and there was not much more to learn in Spanish that way. But it definitely helped a lot in the beginning. I never even had to take any course or buy any books on Spanish. It is still far from perfect, but now I am improving pretty much without putting any effort into it. Duolingo is definitely enough like a game for me to grab my attention 🙂
They keep sending you the reminder e-mails every day, which also helps. The only thing I miss is that you cannot really have a week-long pause or something – I lose my progress every time I go on a longer hiking trip (the one day streak-freeze is not enough if you don’t have any internet connection for a couple of days). But I guess it doesn’t matter that much.
My account’s talkshower, add me!
Do you still keep up the spanish? I also finished my tree a while ago, and it’s the keep up that I’ve struggled to motivate myself to do. I can read and write a lot of Spanish now, but I struggle a lot with understanding native spanish speakers and don’t have a fantastic vocabulary. At this point, I almost feel it would be a better use to learn with other methods to get more vocab, but I’m still locked in due to beeminder.
If we’re talking about duolingo, can I get some opinions on their speech recognition? Back when I used it I didn’t have a microphone and so I don’t know if it’s a good teaching tool or not.
I’ve heard that a good follow-up to the “Spanish for English speakers” Duolingo course is, oddly enough, “English for Spanish speakers.” Haven’t tried it myself because I’m still stubbornly trying to make my entire tree gold before moving it, but it seems like it’d work, aside from those questions where you listen to a phrase in the “foreign” language and type it out as is.
I turned off the speaking exercises, because the speech recognition is terrible (or was a year ago at least). Basically anything you say is accepted – I tested it by saying random nonsense. And luckily, with Spanish this is not a problem, it is a very phonetic language. Rolling r might be a problem for some English native speakers (although you can hear it in a very posh received pronunciation English…also Scottish 🙂 ), but speech recognition is light years away from being able to teach you the right accent.
I have more problems with the Portuguese suffix -ão, I always think I say it right but native speakers tell me it’s not. I think I can get it right now after several attempts if I concentrate a lot, but it is difficult.
You could also check out Beeminder if you haven’t already. It tries to bridge that gap in a low maintenance way and it’s helped me stay on top of Flashcards, my Duolingo, and running in med school. It’s quite flexible, but I’m not sure how one would set it up to help with your particular problem though.
Is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bodyweight-training-you-are/id416981420?mt=8 the app you’re talking about? Apologies, I can’t figure out the link formatting.
Yes, it is. It’s very good. I prefer bodyweight exercises to using equipment and working out at home to going to the gym. It is both cheaper (the app costs something like 3 USD and that’s all you ever pay this way…well,there’s also a book with the same name but you don’t strictly need it) and saves you the time you need to travel to the gym and back. I am also more likely to make myself work out when I don’t have to go anywhere first.
Of course, if you have a personal trainer who checks you’re doing the exercises right, it’s probably even better, but also much dearer.
I used to feel bad about playing video games or watching TV because I wasn’t being maximally productive – I could be studying, or working, or learning a new skill, or whatever. But every time I tried cutting those out entirely I started feeling burnt out and would end up being even less productive. So now I try to split my time into work (things I have to do), rest (things I need to do so that I continue to do my work well) and leisure (everything else). I found that video games and TV are, for me, pretty useful components of my rest time, and if I’m using them to destress and relax then I don’t feel bad about it. Where I did cut them out is of my leisure time, which I try and use to practice my cooking, or read some new books, or other things that are more personally productive. That meant changing the way I play video games quite a lot – I used to lead a raid guild in Warcraft, for example, which was not only not relaxing, it was actively stressful. Instead if I need some downtime, I’ll play a couple days of Stardew Valley or work on a castle in Minecraft or something.
If your mindless browsing is on websites you don’t need to visit for productive reasons, I recommend the Timewarp extension for Chrome. On a couple of websites (reddit and this one, mostly), I have it set up to show a little timer in the upper left corner of how much time I’ve spent there today. When it gets too high, I quit.
My daughter’s old solution was to carry a netbook, a very small computer adequate for word processing, taking notes in classes, and the like, but inadequate for playing WoW or serious web browsing. I don’t know if anything along similar lines would work for you.
It looks pretty much like what I’m doing already, except that my solution is even more low-tech. Thankfully, I’m not a programmer and mostly I can work with just a pen and a piece of paper while printing out everything I want to use for reference or getting it from the library in our institute, so I can keep the computer off unless I put things to LaTeX afterwards. I don’t have so many problems with web browsing at work (although it still eats maybe 30 minutes of my workday on average, so ideally, I’d like to get rid of that too) and I never play games in the office. My issue is that I come home and sometimes waste the whole evening like this even though I wanted to do other things.
Increasing the cost of doing that by leaving the computer at the office works well but I’d prefer not to have to do that by learning to be more disciplined at home as well (and slightly more even at work).
Keep a visual chart where you mark off every day you succeed in taming your passions. If you succeed in a day, mark in green. If you fail, mark it red. The point is to build your confidence that your resolution is effective, that you’re making progress, until you form new habits and can stop keeping track.
You could also get a computer that’s incapable of running games much, it will help with staying off games. Also with the web somewhat, since it’ll probably be modem-grade slow rendering stuff.
This actually reminded me of these old Czech books by Jaroslav Foglar, who basically wrote about the boy scouts and even more about his own version of boy scouts (which actually used to exist, mostly when Scout was forbidden by the Nazis and then again by the communists) where he has this concept of a “blue life” – where you do pretty much exactly the thing you suggest, except that you mark it in blue. I’ve never tried it, maybe it could work. Duolingo (a language learning app) shows you your streak of successive days you met your daily learning goal (for me it is about 5 five minute lectures) and that definitely helps me to keep practicing languages every day, so it might work.
How come when I take my dog for a walk and it’s cold enough that I can see my breath, I can’t see my dog’s breath?
Two possibilities come to mind:
1) You just aren’t close enough to your dog’s mouth to see it.
2) Your dog’s mouth opens on three sides, allowing warm, moist air to spread out so much that it will essentially never fog up the way air from a human’s mouth would. You might be able to see a bit of fog coming from your dog’s throat and then rapidly dispersing if you looked very closely and it had its mouth open for a long time, but even then maybe not.
I just made both of these up right now, so it could be something entirely different.
I can see humans’ breath at that distance. Though my dog’s a lot smaller than I am, so there’s presumably less breath coming out total.
The shape of his nose might be a factor. A Bulldog would let out breath warmer than a Siberian(!) Wolfhound.
I’ve seen a crow’s breath. So it stands to reason that one could see a dog’s breath in the right cirucmstances.
Yes, I’ve seen photos of huskies with freezing breath. But that’s in much colder situations than the one I’m in.
The dog’s breath must not have as much water vapor in it. That would make sense in view of the fact that panting is a dog’s main way of dumping excess heat, which would only work properly if its body is able to modulate the amount of water it evaporates into the air on its way out.
I had the opposite experience today. Driving past a dog and two humans at a street corner, the dog’s breath was visible, the humans’ was not. I suspect that there are a number of factors to consider: dogs’ internal temperature is (I think) hotter than people, and (most important, and as mentioned by Cerebral Paul) the dog’s breath’s moisture content is potentially an important part of how the dog regulates its temperature.
I’m almost certain that this is not true (though their mouth temperature could be). According to a biology teacher I once had, all warm-blooded animals maintain exactly the same internal temperature as each other. The thing is, it’s a local extremum; if you change your internal body temperature, you change the way all your internal chemical reactions work, so once your species gets locked in to a specific temperature range it’s very difficult to change it. And I guess all warm-blooded animals share an ancestor.
It’s a fairly tight range, but it is a range, and dogs and cats run a few degrees hotter than people.
I don’t remember the exact value of a dog’s core temperature, but I *do* recall it’s a little over 100°F.
They have some greater difficulty thermoregulating in hot temperatures, which sort of makes sense, because fur. (I was assigned to a military working dog unit for a while.)
They don’t sweat, which is the big reason they don’t thermoregulate as well. Their primary means of dumping excess heat comes from panting.
Well, yeah, they use a less-efficient method of thermoregulation (panting) because of their fur.
@CatCube:
I’m not sure that is correct. According to this Quora post only primates have a great number of the sweat glands that produce human sweat. Primates can be quite furry.
Cows, sheep (maybe) and horses (defintely) all sweat for thermoregulation using a different kind of sweat gland.
With a brief glance around, it seems like sweating for thermoregulation is essentially a primate thing. So, in that sense, dogs don’t sweat because most animals don’t. It’s not a “because fur” thing.
But maybe I am misinterpreting.
There is a huge difference between breeds. Extremes would be the samoyed and the pharaoh hound or Ibizan hound. The former has extremely good insulation, tiny ears and a relatively short snout. The latter has huge cooling fins on top of its head and very little fur.
The samoyed depends almost purely on panting for evaporative cooling, the Ibizan hound not so much (it uses the snout as a heat exchanger in order to retain heat when cold and relies a lot on the ears for cooling). I have one of each and the samoyed will have visible breath in relatively warm temperatures, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the breath of the Ibizan.
your dog is a robot
Okay, the three Open Threads for left posters are done so I can give up my self-imposed non-commenting and annoy even more people!
Happy New Year to everyone. I have long since given up making resolutions because I never stuck to them and events eventuated anyway in such a manner that “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”, so I’m not going to make any predictions or claims. May it all go well with us all, and if it cannot go well, at least no worse than need be.
I’m giving up my self-imposed exile too, though I was posting in the non-OTs. I think we might be the only two who behaved so honorably and gallantly.
Not quite.
We three musketeers.
hey don’t forget me
all i did was complain about primogeniture and kurt eichenwald, hopefully that counts
🙂
four, five?
I’m definitely Athos (not that I’ve hanged any spouses but, y’know, I can see the reasoning behind it) 🙂
As to how it worked, I think it would be interesting to try it again later if we could get a firm commitment or plan that only the left-leaning commented and took the discussion wherever they wanted, to see how it would go. I think it was interesting, but more from my position of voluntary exile where I was restraining myself from jumping in for a couple of places where I badly wanted to go “That is not it, that is not it at all!”
I sympathies. It took a lot of will-power to keep from jumping on the “women in combat” thread.
“Sympathize” I was on my phone and auto-correct/complete seems to have jumped the gun. The edit button also appears to be non-functional.
I was gone so long I don’t know what you’re referring to.
I suggested non-left wing posters withdraw for a bit.
I am making a resolution to be earnest on the Internet in 2017.
I have seen quite a lot of arguments and discussion turn sour when one party turns on the snark and makes the discussion about performing for their in-group. So, I am resolving to proceed from the assumption that I am having a good-faith conversation with everyone I’m interacting with.
My real goal here is that when I get to the point in a conversation when I’d feel like it was worth it to turn to snark and debate gotchas, I will instead ask myself “Wait, if I don’t feel like I can continue conversation with this person in good faith, why am I doing this at all?” and seek greener and more rational pastures.
Given that it is often really, really hard to spot sarcasm on the internet anyway, I’d like to encourage other people to embrace this more, albeit temporarily.
Oh, a sarcasm detector-commentor, that’s a real useful invention.
(Just kidding, sounds like an awesome idea!)
That’s a good resolution; I may have to steal it for myself.
I find it helpful to see if the snark at issue can be reduced to some non-snarky core disagreement, maybe a simple error of fact on the other person’s part (or mine). How would I discuss the same thing with a person who hadn’t pissed me off?
How would I work through the same question with my teenage kids?