This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. The due date for Adversarial Collaboration Contest entries was last week. I now have four entries submitted: TracingWoodgrains + MichaelP, Mark + Mark, Flame7926 + AReader, JohnBuridan + ChristianFlannery. If you submitted an entry and I didn’t get it, please let me know below. If you almost have an entry done and want to beg for more time (no more than a week or so), you can do it below and I might give in. I’ll reserve the first post on this thread for contest discussion.
2. Comment of the week is a reader refining the claim (see eg here) that supposed magical immunity to bullets inspires some warriors to be braver.
3. I’ve unbanned various people whose terms of ban were up or almost up. I know I banned skef a few months ago, but I can’t find the ban in the usual place and so I cannot rescind it. Skef should check if they can comment. If not, they might want to register an alternate account since I can’t figure out how to unban them. Sorry about the inconvenience.
4. Thanks to everyone who’s arranged SSC meetups the past few weeks, including the digital meetup on Throne. As always, you can find upcoming meetups near you on the meetups page. If you hosted or attended a meetup, please comment to let me know how it went.
5. And thanks to everyone who pre-registered for the informal experiment on CO2. Do whatever you’re going to do, and I’ll have another survey up in about a month where you can record your results.
Seattle’s SSC meetup was on Sunday! I am biased, but it seemed to go well. It was useful to have a bundle of orientation materials near the entrance (nametags, map of house, welcome guide suggesting areas for various kinds of discussion).
50-60 people wandered through throughout the day — only about half of last year’s harvest, strangely. No idea what happened there.
Moscow meetup was a good idea. We had 8 people in attendance (data scientists, programmers and biologists in our bulk) some of whom have been reading the blog since it was on livejournal. We covered a broad range of topics from depression to AI development to data privacy to fiction to incentives and probably will repeat it in a month or two.
In looking through movies on Prime Video, I see that some of them have not one Spanish soundtrack but two, one for Spanish(Spain) and one for Spanish(Latin America). Are the dialects really so different? And does “Latin America” really mean “Mexico” in this case?
I don’t think I’ve ever been offered a choice between English(UK) and English(US).
The tonality of the sound in Latin American Castilian and Spanish Castilian is really different. To me, Latin American Castilian sounds really sweet (like eating sugar) and annoying. Latin Americans have told me they find Spanish Castilian really brusque.
So the main differences are: Spanish castilian distinguishes between the s and the z sound (which is equivalent to the English th in think). Andalousian Castilian also has a tendency to swallow the final s, by making an aspiring sound. The words they use are also different. For example, in Spain you can say “I boarded the bus” by saying “cogi el autobus” which at least in Venezuela would mean “I f**d the bus”.
If you know any Castilian, this video will really highlight some of the differences in Castilian words.
Also, Mexicans use a lot of anglicisms, and word calcs from English, whereas Spanish Castilian is a lot more conserved.
I can understand what Latin American say; I just may sometimes use words that may be confusing for some countries.
There are three Castilian speaking countries that dub movies; Spain, Mexico and Argentina. Latin American could refer to Mexico or Argentina, but given how many Latin Americans dislike Argentinians, my guess would be that it is Mexican Castilian.
Interestingly enough I’ve heard the opposite is true in French. Despite the French being famously conservative with their language the Québécois are apparently even more so.
I’ve heard similar things about the Korean spoken in US immigrant communities. Kids in high school have gone to Korea for the first time and been told they speak like grandparents.
Actually, it seems to mean ‘central Mexican,’ what is spoken in Mexico City:
It seems that the differences are reasonably substantive. For example, in Latin America they always use the formal second person plural ‘ustedes,’ while in Spain they also use the informal vosotros.
Interestingly, this is similar to the difference between Dutch and Flemish, where the latter tends to use the more formal second person singular ‘u’ far more often than the informal ‘jij’. ‘U’ is similar to ‘you,’ while ‘jij’ is more like ‘thou.’
Note that it is not uncommon for Flemish to be subtitled for Dutch television, as the intelligibility by Dutch people is rather low. This is the case despite Belgium and The Netherlands being members of the Dutch Language Union, which tries to preserve a common Dutch language.
Interestingly, there is a similar organisation for Spanish, the Royal Spanish Academy, which tries to create a more similar language for the hispanophone nations, including Mexico.
The Real Academia Española overstates itself. It is the language academy for Spanish… for Spain. It may sometimes try to claim it works on behalf of all Spanish speakers everywhere, but many of those people who it claims to represent… well, sometimes, on occasion, they have been known to disagree.
More realistically, each country with a significant number of speakers of Spanish each have their own language academy for Spanish. The RAE calls them “corresponding members”, but each of them would say that the RAE corresponds with them, not the other way around.
And also each of those academies in turn are members of an association of associations, the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, of which the RAE is, at best, a first of equals.
Interestingly, the US is a member of ASALE, because it has a Spanish language academy too, the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Because North American Spanish is just as real as the others, and has multiple dialects of it’s own, and started diverging some 500 years ago.
Yes, as far as I know the Latin American dub is always done in Mexico. The Spanish of the rest of Latin America is much closer to Mexico’s than Spain’s, even if each country still has some individual differences.
Kind of, yeah. The words are mostly the same, but the accent is really different. Compare the Latin and Spaniard dubs of Game of Thrones. I’ve had other Latinos tell me that they hate Spaniard dubs and refuse to watch them; I’m not quite that extreme, but I still much prefer a Mexican dub over a Spaniard one (and note that I was born in Peru, not Mexico).
Imagine if each time you bought a movie or show there was a 50% chance that, instead of the standard Midwestern accent you are used to hearing on TV, every character (whites, blacks, foreigners, ancient spirits, aliens from another galaxy, etc…) spoke with a thick Southern drawl, dropping Gs and pronouncing “I” as “Ah”, using words like “y’all” and calling every soda “coke”. Sure, you could understand every word, but that’s not the point; it would be incredibly jarring and take you out of the story. That’s how jarring it is for a Latino to watch a Spaniard dub with no warning (and, I assume, for a Spaniard to watch a Mexican dub). Which is why it’s so important to keep the dubs separated and clearly labeled, especially in this age of globalization.
JAIME I NEED YOUR LIST OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE BOOK CLUB OF YESTERYEAR
sorry for shouting I’ve just been trying to track you down for a few weeks. You probably won’t even see this post.
EDIT: After making this post, I ahd the bright idea to go check the other thread for replies. It’s mostly dead, since there were only 4 new replies, but one was yours! This was exactly what I was looking for, thank you. A friend was looking for good science fiction stories available online and your list is the best I know of. 🙂
Thank you kindly, both for gathering it and sharing it with me.
I do find a Latin dubbing annoying if it is unexpected. However, if I am watching a Mexican TV series, I find it part of the charm. Is it the same for you with Spanish Castilian?
So like how on Doctor Who everyone in the universe speaks with a British accent, even the token American? (fine, I’ll admit the new series found some more convincing actors, and after Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins we don’t have a leg to stand on when complaining about bad accents.)
> I don’t think I’ve ever been offered a choice between English(UK) and English(US).
I have. By software, mind you, in which those only cause changes in written text, which is easier to duplicate than dubbing on a film. If you want to see an example, check Firefox, such as the list of user interface localizations on “https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/” , where I currently see three dialects of English.
I was also offered American English (Webster) and British English (Longman and Oxford) dictionaries in stores, but they differ much more by their style than their dialect of English, see first paragraph in my comment “http://www.madore.org/cgi-bin/comment.pl/showcomments?href=http%3a%2f%2fwww.madore.org%2f~david%2fweblog%2f2005-08.html%23d.2005-08-07.1066#comment-24842”.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1439898.html
The importance of the Spanish Flu, the lack of major commemoration (there will be some this year, but there are no monuments), disease as an attack on the body politic, the importance of having respect for the past as well as change for the future.
Another data point on the issue of noise in polls vs. signal, i.e. when the number of respondents on a question (like have you been abducted by aliens) is so low that the answering mistakes/noise overwhelms the true number.
In their latest survey, the DOE asked schools about school shootings. Apparently 0.2% of of the 96,000 schools surveyed reported a school shooting, with the result that the error rate in the report completely overwhelmed the real rate of school shootings. Even the highest-biased-to-count-anything-remotely like a firearm discharge near a school previous estimate is less than a 1/3 of the DOE survey results.
The good news is that NPR contacted many of the schools involved and found that 2/3 never happened. The schools had no idea why the survey was marked for them as having had a shooting:
See also Lizardman’s Constant. Compared to 4% for the general public, 0.2% is pretty darn good!
There are many comments here against tips. I do think that customers deciding what wages get paid instead of the business owner is ridiculous. I would accept a system where waiters work on commision, with a clearly defined percentage of total sales (a lot of people point out that the tip % keeps going up, so the employer deciding the percentage will make it much easier for the customer, who doesn’t have to do math). It would still be a ridiculous system, and it would encourage waiters to put up with stuff they shoudn’t have to put up with. It would still be less ridiculous than the current system, though.
Some people have pointed out in a previous thread that, coming from a blue-collar family, it just feels wrong to be served food in a fancy restaurant. I kind of feel like this. I don’t see the value of the waiter. I know the waiters work really hard, I just don’t fell their work adds much value to me. The value of the restaurant as opposed to a takeaway meal for me comes in renting the table so I can be with friends and other people without having to invite them to my home. Not cleaning is also a plus. Being served food is not much of a plus for me, especially if it comes with guilt (it still feels like I have servants or something) and a 20% more expensive meal.
If there was a restaurant where half the tables were served by a waiter and the price came with a mandatory 20% service fee, and the other half had self-service tables (where each table comes with a screen on which you order food, and chimes to inform your food is ready for pick up at the counter), but no fee, which would you choose?
I would choose the self service option except in the cases when I am dealing with OPM, for business meals.
All of the confusion about tipping derives from the same misapprehension about what the service staff is there for. Their job, from the front end manager down to the bus boy, is to maximize house revenue by controlling the table turnover rate. The revenue maximizing strategy is situational and the ability to recognize the situation and effect change in table turnover is the most important skill a restaurant is looking for in their service staff. Bringing you your food is merely a pretext to achieve this end. The opportunities it presents to interact with the customers are there to allow the table turn over rate to be adjusted.
Briefly, consider the factors that actually affect tipping. IIRC, it goes something like:
1. House revenue
2. Server attractiveness
3. Customer demographic
4. Food quality
5. Service quality
It would be really weird if the purpose of tipping was to maximize the thing that has the least impact on the tips a server receives. Just saying.
ETA: In this light, a half full/self service restaurant would be unlikely. Half the dining room would be almost certainly be turning over at a substantially suboptimum rate. Making suboptimum use of your capital investments is usually not considered a winning strategy.
Which makes the customers paying their salaries even more bizarre. Their services are there not for the customer, but for the owner. Why should the customers pay for a service they don’t need? The owner should pay for a service they need.
In Spain, we have a lot of open air cafes with terraces. When I sit in a cafe terrace, the point is never the drink. I consider the extortionate amount I am paying for coffee to be a reasonable charge for renting* the table so I can sit there with friends and talk in a nice place. Waiters usually make a point to hover around the table every forty minutes or so to remove empty china and to guilt trip you into either ordering something or leave. This is not a service I need or indeed want, which is why I never tip in such cafes, and knowing that they get paid decently makes it possible. If I had to tip them, I would resent them every step of the way, because I don’t want their services.
I would be satisfied with the service if the restaurant is clean and pleasant and the food is good. Unless the waiter is outright rude, the waiter has no effect on my recollection of the meal. Which makes tipping more weird.
*Which is why I don’t understand the people who pay for the takeaway coffee in Starbucks. When you pay for the overpriced drink, you are renting a table with wifi in a nicely designed room. This makes perfect sense, because then the price becomes more reasonable. But why pay for a service you are not using?
Sorry to quibble with this, but…nicely designed how? Uncomfortable chairs (unless you’re lucky enough to snag one of the two armchairs), uneven light, sticky floors, noisy, sometimes with lots of foot traffic and always with crappy hipster music and some corporate marketing department’s idea of whatever they think hip decor is…I will tolerate meeting people at Starbucks (or Panera or whatever) if it’s important and I know we won’t be there long, but it has very little in common with what I would consider a pleasant spot to hang out.
I rarely go to Starbucks, because I don’t like coffee and I consider paying more than two dollars for a glass of hot water with 4 cents worth of plant tissue (either ground coffee beans or tea leaves), obviously excessive. Most Starbucks cafes I have seen around in Sweden or Spain are very nicely designed, but that may be because in Spain, the price of a coffee in a normal cafe is under 2 dollars (except for Madrid or Barcelona). Starbucks cafes are high end cafes here.
It may be different in the US. Kind of how Zara is a low end but not bottom of the barrel store in Spain, but is considered fancy in Russia.
If Starbucks cafes in the US are as shitty as you describe, why do people go there? The prices are ridiculous, and they add too much sugar to everything.
Beats me. Mass delusion?
I also find fondness for tipping irritating and bizarre. I hate the social anxiety that comes from not knowing who I’m supposed to tip or how much, and in the restaurant setting where 20% is standard and expected (at least in the US, other countries have their own tipping etiquette, more social anxiety yay!) it just amounts to printing a phony lower price on the menu.
In a thread here some months ago, some people expressed a preference for haggling and lamented that price tags made markets less efficient. Yes, because we should all wait in line twice as long at CVS so each and every one of us can negotiate with the cashier for a few cents off our identical bottles of detergent… sure. Liking the tipping ritual is just a less extreme version of that.
The only occasions when I am OK with tipping is when I like and specifically seek the service. The free tour movement has gained a lot of adepts around the world, and in almost every city you can find tour guides that take you around the city with no upfront cost, and expect a tip in exchange. This allows me to receive truly excellent service, and I gladly pay tips for that. This is a service I seek out and don’t get shoved down my throat as an addition to something I want (food in a restaurant). Which is why I always tip, although I would withhold the tip if the guide was bad (I would sneak away in the first thirty minutes if it was bad; this has never happened to me, though).
I’m not that old, and when I was little I definitely remember both my parents and grandparents — none of whom were particularly tight-fisted — explaining that 15% was standard. Thinking carefully, I think 20% became “standard” in maybe the last ten years, in my experience.
Also, solicitations for tipping on checks and bills for services have gotten way out of hand, especially with electronic payment on touchpads and the like. These are of course much lower-cost forms of solicitation than standing expectantly with a raised eyebrow, much less actually asking verbally for a tip.
I suspect the tipping standards have been raised by freelance “journalists” writing articles about tipping in between shifts at their day job waiting tables.
One unsaid benefit/harm is that restaurants in countries that don’t have tipping enjoy having customers/tourists from countries that do have tipping as many people will still tip even in an environment where tipping isn’t expected. And of course the reverse is also true.
I suspect however in the US, that tipping might have been “encouraged” by the same forces that pushed to hide the tax cost for item prices until the receipt.
Almost everyone I know thinks tipping should go away, but I have close to zero hope it ever will. It’s one of those path dependent hells that seems inescapable.
This matches my perception as well. Which is why I think the USA should just have a federal law outlawing tipping. Some top-down regulation could help us get out of this bad situation.
Unfortunately, building up the political will to make such top-down regulation is its own problem that seems insurmountable…
Do we actually have proof that the tip rates are going up? I suspect that’s just rumors secretly started by the people who receive tips. It’s their interest to make everyone believe that you’re supposed to give higher tips. But I don’t think average people actually give higher tips.
But I rarely go to fancy restaurants with table service, and even less rarely go their on my own initiative as opposed to my family inviting me. I sometimes tip the barman in a pub serving drinks even if there’s no table service, not for their service but for using their space as a meeting place. I regularly go to hairdressers and tip them. I sometimes tip doctors and nurses. When it’s nurses, that’s when I or someone else really is sick and so the “bed service” is essential. And in the very rare cases when I take a taxi, I tip the driver. So your arguments about the waiter and their table service is irrelevant to me.
In Spain, the only people you give tips to are the waiters. I have heard you tip concierges at fancy hotels, but that is a job that exists only in really fancy hotels.
While some people may just tell the taxi driver to keep the change, tipping is rare.
As for tipping nurses/doctors. Is it like a gift you give them as a thank you, or is it a cash payment you give them?
I know that giving nurses/doctors cash payments is fairly common in Russia, especially if you are going to a public system doctor. Private doctors are supposed to be paid decently, but state doctors are usually paid badly. So you have this informal system where patients pay doctors a certain amount, and expect more careful attention. I know the reasons why this system exists in Russia, and I consider it fair, because these gifts are the only thing that keeps decent doctors from going to the private system.
I only give cash to doctors or nurses. It’s technically not a tip, it’s absolutely forbidden for them to accept, and it is never declared for tax, but it happens anyway. Everyone knows the phenomenon exists, but doctors still have to be careful about someone snitching, so I generally give the banknotes in an opaque white envelope that they don’t open until later, and ideally when nobody else can see, so it’s easier for them to hide it if we’re not alone. I generally don’t know a doctor well enough to tell what other gift I could buy them that they’d actually like, and I don’t want just a token gift like a flower. My mother is more of a social person, so she does sometimes gives non-cash gifts to doctors. And yes, it’s for good public doctors that give me or my family extra attention, or even doctors that don’t give me any attention but I’m under their scalpel for an important surgical operation and the quality of the rest of my life depends on how careful they are during that.
Dog guarding sheep. This has to be a metaphor for something. Possibly many things.
http://story.newspets.info/doggo-supposed-guarding-sheep-work-ethic-internet-stitches.html
Looks like cheese is back on the menu, boys!
Though as a caveat, the Food for Health Ireland is funded by the dairy industry, and are explicitly involved in trying to promote cheese as healthy, so take that into account.
Cheese most definitely never left my menu
So, because the thought won’t stop nettling me, a hypothetical scenario:
It is June 2019, and the first real battle of the second American Civil War has happened – a flight of planes sent to bomb a group of unconvicted domestic terrorists were shot down by a US Navy cruiser in an act that’s officially considered a mutiny. Since then, there have been sporadic outbreaks of riots and mob violence, and attacks on random people. There is fractiousness within the military so far manifesting as mutinies and noncompliance with occasional shots fired.
The question is, how did we get there from here? I’m interested in what y’all can come up with as far as plausible or at least not-totally-outlandish scenarios.
The only flashpoint I could see leading to anything like the scenario you describe is illegal immigration. Suppose the Trump administration doubles down on deportations of illegals, to the point that citizen groups begin trying to stop ICE operations directly. And the police in liberal and high-immigrant areas are told not to interfere. The ICE kill some people who seemed threatening, and the activists reply in kind the next time around. Then right-wing counter-activists start targeting the anti-ICE activists directly.
Not a likely scenario by any means, but if anything is going to leave blood in the streets in only a year, the issue of the illegals is the best bet.
a flight of planes
Why not drones? Much easier and already in use domestically in many contexts.
Well, in the interest of full disclosure, this scenario came from a dream that has recurred multiple times over the last few years, and the bombing aircraft were A-10s. Why not drones? Best guess, most pedestrianly, is that I just didn’t think of it. Also possible: unfriendly or at least unpredictable ECM environment, terrorists holed up in some kind of bunker that drone-carried ordnance can’t reliably penetrate, possibility of makeshift air defenses sufficient to threaten drones but not larger attack planes (say, machine guns), etc. Also, could be a jurisdiction thing, where the A-10s were air national guard planes while the only available drones were federal, or possibly it’s a message thing – send manned planes to underscore “no, now you dun screwed up, we’re declaring war on you”.
But, if it’s easier to construct a plausible route from here to there if the bombers are drones, then let ’em be drones: no reason it couldn’t work, and they’re just as vulnerable to SAMs as A-10s are. (Not much out there can fly in the engagement envelope of Aegis/SM6 with impunity, anyway.)
Trump either gets DACA repeal unblocked, or decides to ignore the courts and starts rounding people up and deporting them. This leads to protests and riots, including in Portland, OR where the rioters take over the USCIS field office and kill a number of those within. The Portland police, on the orders of the mayor, refuse to assist the Feds and even provide material support to the occupiers. With no hostages inside, Trump orders the place bombed.
An assassination by someone whose social media activity shows a lot of connections to left wing movements that are already despised by the right like BLM or “anti-fa,” which leads to large-scale and widespread reprisals by right-wing groups and then continual escalation by both sides, which leads to the typically politically indifferent slice of the population starting to pick sides
But a far likelier scenario and the one that I’m hoping for is that the economy continues improving and everything remains basically fine
When I was writing a mildly post-apocalyptic RPG scenario, I had the trigger for the collapse of the US be an assassination at an already politically charged breaking point. The example I had was a contentious election where the presidency switched party in an election which both sides alleged fraud and interference leading to widespread riots, followed by the assassination of the president-elect and the lame duck president being accused of complicity in the assassination by conspiracy theory types. Basically, it was an artificial situation in which neither side could claim legitimacy. I was careful and the actual incident was far enough in the scenario’s past that it didn’t matter which side was which.
We had an election like that not all that long ago, in 2000. If one of the candidates had been assassinated before the recount fight was done, I don’t think it would have led to a civil war, but it certainly wouldn’t have made US politics any more sane for the next few years.
Was 2000 really like that? I don’t remember 2000 being a politically charged time in American history, felt very much “pre 9/11.” And I don’t remember much in the way of fraud accusations, just debates about hanging chads and recounts. But I was somewhat young.
Post 2000 election was horrific if you were plugged in to politics.
If you could care less, then it was just “whatever”.
The Supreme Court of the United States overruled the Florida Supreme Court interpreting Florida state law on how votes should be counted. They did it on a party line 5-4 vote and said that it established no precedent at all. This in a state where the Secretary of State, with the duty of overseeing the election results, also chaired George W. Bush’s campaign.
If Al Gore hadn’t conceded, I’m not sure what would have happened.
The 2000 campaign, the last one before I could vote, was the least politically charged campaign I can remember. All the talk was about “Gush and Bore”, “not a dime’s worth of difference”, etc. Of course, that was a time when all the cool kids were smugly apolitical and looked down on the naive losers who actually thought voting and politics mattered.
That post-election clusterfuck was something else, though.
Yep. Everyone basically started making official decisions based on their party affiliation and to hell with their long-term credibility. The Florida SC was majority Democrat, the US SC was majority Republican, so the Republican won the election.
People were constantly joking about Bush being the “president-select,” and there was a very strong “we was robbed” narrative among Democrats which probably didn’t do them any good at all in the 2004 elections.
Agree with BBA. 2000 was the last time that the general public seemed to recognize the clear and obvious truth – that the two parties agree on about 98% of things the government does.
If you recall, it inspired jokes like this…
I can’t wait for the sequel in 2020!
@albatross11 – The Democrat’s lost in 2004 because of 9/11, a not terrible economy, and that the Iraq War was still popular. According to the fundamentals, John Kerry actually outpreformed them and got closer than he should have.
Before 9/11, Bush was barely hitting 50% approvals, he’s just had a Senator change over to the Democrat’s and various Republican’s such as McCain were opposing his domestic programs. All signs were pointing to a big mid-term win in 2002 for the Democrat’s and a close reelection where it’s very likely Gore would get renominated and we’d have an actual rematch.
Then, some planes hit the WTC and history restarted for the Bush Presidency.
(Note – I’m not saying that the government did 9/11 in any way or Bush or Rice or Powell or even the GOP was happy about their political windfall. Cheney and Rove…well, maybe. )
Depends if those domestic terrorists are right-wing extremists or left-wing extremists.
Given the current administration’s political leanings, left-wing extremists are more likely to be targeted. In that case, I would agree with @johan_larson and @The Nybbler that immigration is the most likely issue to result in such a situation occuring. All it takes is one bout of actual violence between ICE and local authorities to cause a cascade effect, with actual military personnel split between those condemning the globalist anti-American insurgents and those praising the patriots brave enough to take a stand against a corrupt and xenophobic President.
If the domestic terrorists were right-wing extremists, then it’s harder to envision a scenario in which Trump or his successors would end up ordering an airstrike on them. One possibility is that a right-wing terrorist group – possibly white supremacists who view Trump as a puppet of the Jews, possibly Christian Dominionists who see Trump as a corrupt secular hedonist leading the Religious Right astray, possibly some conspiracy theorists who think Trump is controlled opposition – assassinates Trump himself or a high-ranking member of his administration. Another possibility is that some Sovereign Citizens or similar anti-government militia types end up getting into a major confrontation with local police that spirals out of control, something similar to the Bundy Ranch standoff but even more extreme. Yet another possibility is that Trump passes anti-gun legislation that causes a sizable portion of his base to view him as a traitor and take to the streets in opposition, with protests escalating into riots and riots escalating into overt insurrection. In any event, Trump sending fighter jets to bomb the perpetrators would make a lot of his far-right supporters in the military turn on him.
That’s also not the only axis I can imagine the military splitting along: there’s a fair contingent that considers direct use of the military against US citizens to be a bridge too far, even if they’re labeled as terrorists. I’m not sure if there are enough of them to be significant, but I can see a split forming merely because of the administration ordering strikes on US citizens on US soil. (Especially if the “terrorists” are non-Arab/non-Muslim. That’s racist, sure, but there’s a sense that terrorists who aren’t Islamic or aligned with the current Middle Eastern terrorist groups are out of scope for War On Terror tactics, regardless of how well the law bears that out.)
At a slight tangent, the most well developed US-collapse scenario I’ve read:
http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-it-could-happen-part-one-hubris.html
Hmm – let’s start with the decision to bomb unconvicted domestic terrorists. Who would make that decision? Who would object? Who would object violently? If I’m allowed bad-thriller-plot levels of plausibility, this is really easy. The US has already routinely assassinated people deemed by them to be terrorists outside of US territory, including people known to be US citizens. (There’s a particularly hilarious case, where some US clergyman’s more-or-less routine visits to whores became known [to his congregation?] in the course of some government agency investigating him for terrorist connections – he had none at the time – and the negative impact on his career prospects radicalized him…. winding up with him assassinated with Presidential authorization.)
IMNSHO, the step from drones-to-kill-the-bad-guys in e.g. Pakistan to using the same technique to kill the same-kind-of-bad-guys in e.g. Boston would be miniscule for some people – and a bridge too far for others. So all you need is a few career changes into internal law enforcement, and insufficient managerial oversight. Plus someone in the military who thinks that it can’t be law enforcement (either doesn’t ask, or doesn’t trust what they are told), and so shoots them down. Or in your scenario, someone who believes it’s rogue law enforcement, and acts to protect the potential victims – and their neighbours, children, etc. (The drone program is well known for collateral damage; planes dropping bombs would likely be worse.)
As soon as this happens, at least half of the armed supporters of the 2nd amendment are going to want to join whichever ‘side’ they favour. Probably not all the same side. Probably not all competently. (Someone will shoot a random naval officer as being pro-terrorist, in spite of being themselves theoretically pro-military. Someone else will shoot cops ar anti-miltary. Or whatever.) Add internet rumours to taste – the less plausible the better. Now group X expects random attacks on them from group Y, with the conivance of law enforcement and/or the military, and group Y expects the same thing. Both decide to take preemptive action. At least 5 random bunches of conspiracy theorists have explanations ;-( which some of them act on …
Continuing our story, some enterprising folks start blowing up major pieces of civil engineering infrastructure. (Damns, reservoirs, bridges, ec.) Martial law gets declared. 2nd amendment folks expect their guns to be confiscated, not to mention everything suitable for creating improvised explosive devices. So the preppers take to the woods, and some of the others go “proactive”. [Others decide they don’t like war games in RL, and hide under their beds ;-)] Some governor-or-the-other sides against other governors/the feds, and then there’s no clear authority…
Alternatively, the whole thing started as a false flag operation, perpetrated by the villain of your choice. (Certainly there’s a loud faction on the internet claiming this, for most possible perpetrators.) Naturally it was necessary in some minds to lynch random people vaguely associated with the alleged perpetrators. (Those who think it was Putin are going after anyone whom looks Slavic; those who think it was extra-terrestrials are ….)
Or worst of all, the whole thing started as a drill, but none of the people involved were into fact checking – and communication about there being a drill simply didn’t happen. Neither the bomber pilots nor the cruiser were supposed to actually fire on anyone, but … [This required fairly drastic levels of incompetence. But consider the public alert about a non-existent nuclear attack last year… incompetence clearly happens. And [in the hypothetical scenario] there wa a new computer system, just recently installed, linking all the original actors….]
Backing up a bit – I’m referring to the bombers as coming from “law enforcement” above, but while police in the US may have drones, I don’t think any of them have crewed bombers. So they come from some miltary subgroup – I don’t know enough about the US military to list all the possibilities. I don’t *think* that bombing would realistically be authorized except in the case of an active ongoing danger, where conventional police action isn’t expected to work. It’s got to be at least on the scale – and duration – of the 4 hijacked planes being crashed into buildings. Which truly *domestic* terrorist organization is likely to do that? I can’t think of one. (The home grown groups generally go for mass shootings, or blowing up a single building. Bombing’s not going to help deal with that.)
So either it really is “false flag” or there’s a new and extremely competent collection of loonies in the US, that goes from “random people have never heard of them” to “dug in well enough to need bombs to get them out, and dangerous enough not to simply be beseiged” within 10 months. Or some law enforcement type has taken some common-or-garden wackos, perhaps holed up in a compound somewhere, or having taken over some minor government building, and blown them up in his/her reports to be notably worse than the Branch Dravidians. Why? It’s clearly a power grab on behalf of his or her agency (or his or her self). I think this is my preferred theory – someone trying to enhance his own career prospects/power by massive exaggeration, except the wheels come off.
Anyway, here’s my jumbled 10 cents worth. Please blame it on my taste for thrillers.
As for bombing Domestic Terrorists, see the 1985 MOVE bombing: Philly police bombed a row house from a helicopter.
I’ve been thinking about scenarios where you are better off with less information. As far as I can tell, there are two categories. The first is where the knowledge is upsetting, and there is nothing to be done. Suppose you have a brain tumor that will kill you in two years, but you currently have no symptoms. If you had a CAT scan that revealed your tumor now, you would be worse off than if you hadn’t had the scan.
The second category is where knowing will cause you to take action but it is the wrong action. Suppose you live in an old house that has some asbestos insulation. The asbestos insulation is well contained and poses no realistic danger. But you’ve heard a lot about the dangers of asbestos, and therefore insist that it be removed, which actually increases the danger by exposing the asbestos.
Any other categories of scenarios where knowing less is better? Are there any legal scenarios where merely knowing something is a crime or a tort?
A mandatory reporting situation where the rules for reporting are unjust for that situation and/or if the response to that report is disproportionate and/or unjust.
I’ve just been reading the legal code of the Ming dynasty. Striking a senior relative is a serious offense. But if you didn’t know that the man you got in a fight with was an uncle you had never met, you only get the punishment for striking an unrelated person.
For a modern equivalent, consider negligence. If you knew that your brakes were going and didn’t have them fixed the resulting accident was due to your negligence so you are liable. If you didn’t know and there was no reason you should have known—the problem only started recently and you haven’t had an occasion to do anything that would reveal it—you were not negligent so may not be liable.
There are lots of other cases where tort liability or criminal guilt depends on what you knew.
That sort of qualifies, depending on how responsive one is to incentives. Presumably having the knowledge and using the knowledge of the increased penalty for negligence to motivate you to fix the brakes is the best case. Personally there’s no case where I would not want to know my brakes are going out; the problems that might arise are from incomplete information, like suspecting I had 6 months before it presented a serious risk when it was already dangerous.
I feel as if a situation where a law punishes knowing acts ought to be cheating in this case, since it’s an arbitrarily constructed scenario. However, further thought suggests the law is itself an attempt to make people better off – it was a natural consequence, so to speak – so maybe this is fine.
Then I think about it a little more, and in the context of a system that wants to discourage harmful acts with foreknowledge, laws might discourage foreknowledge rather than harm, unless they’re buttressed with yet more laws discouraging willful ignorance. Taking the brake example, it should be illegal for you to not check your brakes every so often.
In the limit, if avoidance of net harm is the terminal value, then one could view such laws as reminding individuals that some act is harmful if they do not take reasonable precautions. Again, with the brake example, it’s in everyone’s interest, at least indirectly, to check their brakes at least once every few thousand miles. It was also maybe wise to be reasonably familiar with one’s senior relatives in Ming China. Both cases seem to suggest a general benefit to knowing more, giving rise to small eddies of weirdness where knowing less is beneficial.
I could see situations involving criminal activity where you’re better off having less information when having said information would make you a threat.
Like say you’re a hostage and your captors have concealed their identity. If one of their masks slips off you’d probably want to look away and try not to see, because if they know you’ve seen their face they are more likely to eliminate you since you now have valuable information for the cops and they can’t particularly trust you won’t talk.
Similarly, if you’re a criminal it’s better for you not to know who your bosses are, because then your boss might have a reason to dispose of you. Or, if you’re captured by rival criminals, they might torture you if they think you know something useful.
While I like to ask doctors to explain to me the kind of treatments I am getting and possible side effects, I think having a law that said a doctor cannot treat patients if they don’t know all the negative side effects could bring all kinds of negative effects. Because negative side effects are frequently much worse that what you have, and people are not really good with statistics. I have been considering getting eyesight correction surgery, but even an 0.1% chance of becoming blind scares me too much. I would be better not knowing.
I think there are also scenarios where the truth’s value has an expiry date. I heard a story about a woman who had another man’s child and she didn’t tell her husband about it. And then, when she was on her deathbed, and her son was married and had kids of his own, she chose to tell her husband and son about it. What are they supposed to do with it? I think that it was too late to do anything. If she told her husband when the baby was born, he could have made the choice of leaving her, or staying with her and raising their son as his own. But what was the point of the truth when they had grandkids, her husband had raised their son all his life, was really proud of him, and really loved his grandkids? What purpose did that info serve? I think in this case the ethical thing at that point would be to carry the secret to the grave.
You should broaden the first to where any time where the additional effort to process the information is not worth the benefit gained from it.
For example, having calorie counts for all restaurants might have allowed you to drop one that was particularly loaded, but the time and stress required to make that decision costed more to your health than saved. Particularly if this was a one time deal as if you were a tourist or such.
There’s also choice paralysis which makes some people put off a decision the more choices they have/are aware off.
The whole idiom of the only thing a master fears is a complete novice – as they have no idea what they’ll do. Often case in decision making, making random choices is one of the better strategies as it means your opponent cannot outplay you.
One other scenario that’s similar to your second is where picking the bad/uninformed choice would be beneficially in the long term though possibly be bad in the short. Learning from mistakes, learning how to handle failure, meeting different people, etc.
The question is interesting, but this is probably a bad example, at least as framed.
If I knew I was going to be dead in 2 years, and much less functional in 1.5, I’d quit my job and spend my retirement money now, checking things off my bucket list.
The second category is where knowing will cause you to take action but it is the wrong action. Suppose you live in an old house that has some asbestos insulation. The asbestos insulation is well contained and poses no realistic danger. But you’ve heard a lot about the dangers of asbestos, and therefore insist that it be removed, which actually increases the danger by exposing the asbestos.
Does this category include situations where you need to conduct a blind test to avoid bias?
ETA: Also, certain games, where you deliberately destroy information for amusement purposes (shuffling cards, etc.). Which might also include enjoyment of magic tricks.
One good place to want less information is when information about your users is pure liability. If I’m running some web service, all else equal, having my users’ names, addresses, SSNs, and credit card numbers means I’m much more likely to end up with some kind of breach where I have to report it, and end up in the news as “Company X lost 45,000 users’ credit card numbers to a hacker.”
If the information is “we rob the bank tomorrow at midnight”, and the cops catch you and your associates, then having access to that information would be retroactively harmful.
Placebo/nocebo effects
Otherwise, mostly the second category. In what world is a person better off after learning that someone is wrong on the internet? What are the effects of learning a whole bunch of confirmation bias information?
And the in-between might be learning things about situations you have no power to change, causing needless anxiety and such.
The problem with the asbestos example is that you can’t know ahead of time whether this information will be beneficial or not. I mean, you might make the wrong decision when given the information, but the only way to assess how likely that is is for someone you trust to look at the information. There are cases where you have asbestos or lead paint in your house, and you should just leave it alone; there are other cases where you really need to get rid of it. By not knowing that you have it in your house, you’re better off in the cases where you shouldn’t mess with it, but worse off in the cases where you should.
Plausible deniability. You work at a shady organization and you know that some of the things you’re required to do are probably not above board in some roundabout way, but you don’t ask too many questions of your superiors because you want to be able to deny knowledge of this when the audit/investigation comes.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
This is the first I’ve heard about this. Has anyone else heard about this? Doubted USED numbers, and if so, why?
“This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.”
A shooting was defined as an incident involving the discharge of a firearm whether or not anyone was injured.
59 of the schools didn’t get back to NPR.
The amount of blur and fog when three lists were compared was remarkable.
“There is little overlap between shootings listed in the Everytown for Gun Safety database, the Civil Rights Data Collection and those confirmed by NPR. Everytown lists 29 K-12 shootings for the 2015-2016 school year. Only seven of those appear on the CRDC list. Four more incidents were not captured by Everytown, but were confirmed by NPR. In total, seven incidents appear on all three lists.”
Isn’t this just Lizardman’s Constant again? The actual percentage of schools that should answer ‘yes’ on the survey is so low that mistakes become a huge percentage of the affirmatively answers.
Is it possible there’s some kind of confusion in the reporting criteria? Like, some kid brings a gun (maybe a toy guy or BB gun) to school, and the school reports it as though it were a school shooting?
Alternatively, it’s possible someone decided to report lies as official numbers to move policy in their preferred direction. If so, that needs to be visibly bad for everyone involved in the decision, because we *need* accurate data a hell of a lot more than we need someone deciding what information we should be fed in order to come to their desired policy conclusions.
There was a whole lot of confusion:
“One item, about “Firearm Use,” was required for the first time for all schools in the most recent data collection.
Most of the school leaders NPR reached had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools.
For example, the CRDC reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California.
“I think someone pushed the wrong button,” said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, “has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn’t remember any shooting,” Davis added. “We are in this weird vortex of what’s on this screen and what reality is.”
“We got wind of it and nipped it in the bud”
In other cases, something may have happened, but not the firearm discharge the survey asked about.
The biggest discrepancy in sheer numbers was the 37 incidents listed in the CRDC for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Roseann Canfora, the district’s chief communications officer, told us that, in fact, 37 schools reported “possession of a knife or a firearm,” which is the previous question on the form.
The number 37, then, was apparently entered on the wrong line.
Similarly, the CRDC lists four shootings among the 16 schools of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District in California. Gail Pinsker, spokeswoman for the district, says that “going back 20-plus years,” no one can remember any incident involving a firearm. Their best guess, she says, is that there was some kind of mistake in coding, where an incident involving something like a pair of scissors (California Education Code 48915[c][2]), for example, got inflated into one involving a firearm (48915[c][1]).
Ray Poole, the chief of legal services for the Nassau County School District in Florida, told us that at one school where a shooting was reported, Callahan Middle School, on Nov. 21, 2015, a Saturday, a student took a picture of himself at home holding a gun and posted it to social media. “We got wind of it and nipped it in the bud.” No shooting.
The CRDC shows seven shootings in DeKalb County, Ga. Police reports provided to us by that district give a sense of more of the many, many ways the data collection may have gone wrong.
At Redan Middle School, there is a report of a toy cap gun fired on a school bus — not a shooting.
The CRDC shows a shooting at Stone Mountain Middle School, but a police report shows an incident at Stone Mountain High School instead.
And district officials provided a police report showing that there was a shooting after a McNair High School football game — in August 2016, after the time period covered in the survey.”
An extended family member recently told me there were three “credible threats” of a shooting at her child’s school last year alone.
I haven’t reviewed the details personally, but this strikes me as incredibly implausible. Either that or a “credible threat” must surely result in no actual shooting an overwhelming majority of the time.
My guess is a lot of these threats are just overblown teenage gossip put through the telephone game filter that end up finding their way to parents, administrators, or even local media sources.
It costs nothing to make threats (until the cops catch you, at least), and I think it’s pretty common for some jackass to call in a bomb/shooting threat to stir up shit, or to avoid having to take their final, or whatever.
@Well… :
I was actually going to post this story (see above) as an example of what journalists do.
This is…almost unbelievable.
I’ve seen lots of ways in which statistics can be mangled in news reports. (Especially around a subject like firearms.) But I’ve never of statistics being off so much in in official government reports. And I’m accustomed to scenarios when an advocacy group like Everytown has somewhat-inflated numbers relative to the official data…
My first thought is that the form submitted to schools might have asked a much broader question than “discharge of firearm on school property or in a bus”, and then the form data was published as if that question had been on the form.
However, I suspect that some school officials would try to tell the reporter that. I presume that the reporter would have included that detail.
My second thought is that someone in the government agency that issued this report did some data-mangling with the reports that came from the schools. If so, was it intentional, or accidental?
The reporter did include the details of how some schools explained how they misread the question. (Most schools seem to assume that they made a mistake, but aren’t sure exactly what.) You didn’t think that Nancy copied the whole article, did you?
Nothing wrong with thinking through the situation with limited data, but your use of the subjunctive implies that you think that the reporter did not include these details.
I think it’s pretty simple. You’re a busy school administrative staff member and there is this huge survey you have to fill out and do you really have time for this? You’ve got memos to write and appointments to schedule and the Superintendent wanted that one report mailed to him before the end of the day and a dozen other things that need doing. How carefully are you going to fill out that form? If you’re confused about a question, are you going to bother trying to look up the number for some federal bureau and wait on hold until a similarly busy civil servant has time to clarify things for you? Might you accidentally write the wrong thing because you were trying to answer a previous question? Could you be confused about whether there was a shooting: do you have time to go digging through official records to figure out whether that incident you vaguely remember actually happened? I mean you’ll do your best, but you have a lot on your plate today and who has the time?
That’s all that’s necessary to explain this bad data. It’s not like they hired a team of dedicated investigators, they just sent out a survey and trusted that whoever filled it out knew what they were doing and didn’t make any mistakes.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with your logic here, doesn’t this logic apply to almost all government-collected data?
Is it all this bad? What if it is, but we act as if it isn’t? I feel like it’s plausible that this one only got “caught” due to how overwhelmingly obviously wrong it is to anyone with common sense and a TV.
Just as with privately-collected data, there are big differences in care and professionalism. For example, I think the Census department is pretty serious and careful in collecting and reporting data.
This is an instance where we’re multiplying a big number (schools) by a small number (error rate on the survey) and comparing it to another small number (actual school shootings). There are about 100,000 public schools in the US, and about 30,000 private schools. Assume .1% of survey takers screw up the survey. Then ~130 of the schools falsely report a shooting or falsely fail to report a shooting. How many times a year does a for-real shooting event (i.e., kid brings gun to school and shoots up classmates / teachers) happen? I would guess ~25 times. Who knows. It seems to make the national news pretty often and I’d say I only hear about these things once every other month, so figure I’m out of the loop 75% of the time, so there’s really two a month. It could be four times that amount and still be within the ~130 margin of error.
But I’ve never of statistics being off so much in in official government reports.
I have.
I have an family member who co-owns a nail salon. You know, one of those places staffed entirely by recently immigrant Vietnamese women, who will wash your feet and will clip, shape, condition, paint, and UV bake all 20 of your nails. A few years ago I sat and read a stack of the industry trade magazine for that class of business.
It was at that time an open joke in the industry and in their industry magazine that there was an almost two order magnitude error in the official US government labor statistics in how many people work for these places, and how many actually do, and similar errors for how many shops there were, and the industry’s total gross receipts. Apparently the Labor Department and the IRS don’t cross check their numbers.
My takeaway when I learned that is that a significant number of the official economic metrics numbers are at least that badly wrong, and that a majority of the numbers are wrong enough to be meaningless.
Effective alturism/economics question:
Bit of a silly hypothetical, really. If EA became really successful in a rich country (such as the US, or somewhere in western Europe) such that, say two-thirds of the population started donating 10% of their income to effective charities, what effects would this have?
I’m not so interested in the effects felt by the charities having lots of income and being able to do good stuff, but more in the effects on the rich country that loves EA. Does it harm the economy to have so much money flowing to foreign charities?
The value of the dollar on foreign exchange markets would go down, just as it would if Americans developed a taste for foreign goods and bought lots of them. That makes U.S. goods more attractive to foreigners, since they are less expensive in the foreigners’ money. So we export more, import less–in effect our new import good is utility from helping foreigners.
Is China completely unstoppable by now ?
It seems like they managed to establish a working balance between central planning and capitalism; that is, they’ve got just enough capitalism to prevent their centrally planned economy from imploding, but not so much that it gives people ideas re: freedom of expression.
On the international stage, they are buying up small third-world countries left and right (under the auspices of their Belt and Road Initiative), thus obtaining their loyalty without any bloodshed. They are also buying up individual Western politicians, especially in Australia and Europe, but also in the US. They are also quite adept at taking over (or outright building) little islands wherever it suits them, and no other world power seems able to stop them. Naturally, they control Taiwan and Hong Kong in all but name.
On the cultural stage, they effectively have veto power over the American movie industry (arguably, the sole cultural legacy of the USA), and they are expanding control over major universities. They can also commit whatever human rights violations they want, without fear of so much as a reprimand.
On the scientific stage, they are investing enormous amounts of money and manpower into AI and genetic engineering; and have a semi-official policy to reverse-engineer anything they can’t invent locally. They are also the only remaining superpower with a real state-sponsored manned space program.
Of course, almost goes without saying that China’s consumer goods and electronics manufacturing capabilities are unmatched, to the point where most people wouldn’t even consider producing such things anywhere else.
So: is all of our bickering over political correctness, free speech, or whatever, even worth the effort ? It seems like our culture will be completely subsumed by China in 10 years, 20 on the outside, so our time would be better spent on learning Mandarin…
It is true that China is catching up to the West in many aspects. This ignores, however, that China has some internal problems that are overlooked in the current “China will be the next superpower”-narrative.
China has millions of poor workers and farmers, who will either need to be integrated in the Chinese economy or they will have to be kept under control one way or another. Think of the rust belt in the USA, or the divide between the places in the USA who profit from the digital giants, and those places who don’t. China has 1.4 billion inhabitants, who currently have very low living standards, but they are rising. There will be a time where businesses in China will have to embrace automation on a large scale or move abroad. This will give China all the problems the West has had since the West tapped into the cheap workforce in the third world countries.
Also, note that just this year China abolished the main tools that kept the Chinese government stable and balanced. The Chinese party used to have a term limit for the president to prevent getting a strongman like Mao in power. This term limit has since been abolished. They already have a new strongman candidate, Xi Jinping, who has formal or informal control over the anti-corruption agency, the Communist Party, the military and the local governments. The Chinese Government has strong ties with the big tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba, so they too are dependent on Xi Jinping.
This will be a big long term problem for the good institutions that China has, like universities, the bureaucracy and even the big companies. Look at Russia and Turkey! Both Putin and Erdogan did good reforms from 2000 to 2010, but now the institutions of their nations are filled with loyalists, and any remnants of of a political opposition may never be allowed to challenge the status quo, for this would mean death or prison for the current circle of power. Currently, Erdogan is destroying the work of his life to remain in power. If he would have stepped down in 2008, he would have been the greatest Turkish polititian since Ataturk, now he’s the Maduro of the Bosporus.
Last but not least, I believe if a nation becomes a superpower, they also get superenemies. It is not possible to be a major actor everywhere on the globe and not make a ton of enemies. Just look at the wars the USA and the Soviet Union did not win in the cold war. That eats up a lot of capacities. Or look at how complicated it is for the USA in the middle east being allied to Turkey, Saudi-Arabia and Israel. With the the Belt and Road initiative, China gets stakes in countries like Pakistan, which can bring them big troubles down the line.
Agreed, but IMO they are doing a very good (“good” as in “effective”, not as in “moral”) job of managing their poor workers and farmers, so far. Yes, living standards are rising for some percentage of the population, but the majority are more-or-less content to live in the same conditions their grandparents did.
Doesn’t this mean that China will remain stable — or rather, maintain its growth — as long as Xi Jinping is alive and in power ? Russia and Turkey are the same way, I agree (although, while I’m not sure about Erdogan, Putin’s position is not nearly as stable as Xi Jinping’s).
Having enemies is not the same thing as fearing those enemies. The US really undermined its own foreign policy over the years; from what I’ve seen, China is so far avoiding our mistakes, though I could be wrong.
I dont see China’s FP as good, just that they are the only one really playing the game. Almost all of Europe and like 40% of the US has decided that benevolent leadership is impossible, thus they have abdicated most of the important parts of FP, causing a vacuum for Russia and China to step into.
I’m not so sure people are content with measures like having their meager living charters bulldozed, because the big Chinese cities want to build more middle class neighborhoods. China is good in making them not rebel, but will it be able to find a long term solution for them? At the moment, China is still in the economic phase where they are catching up in development. A big share of the population is profiting from Chinas huge growth in GDP, which is what keeps Chinese society well oiled. But already now, there are concerns that Chinas GDP growth is depended on the loan policy the Chinese government, and that the Chinese economy is overheating at least a bit. In 2008, China did the biggest stimulus program of that year, and it is unclear what will happen if they inject as much money in their economy as they did the last time. Consider that while some Chinese companies are buying very reasonable tech companies with money they get on loans, others are buying random stuff like Deutsche Bank stock.
The Turkish economy has been running on loans at least in part for the last years, now Erdogan cannot combat the inflation of the lira while keeping his supporters happy. Xi Jinping could easily land in the same spot, and then managing both the middle class, the poor and the first wave of people that cannot enjoy economic mobility through the booming economy because there is none will be not easy.
I believe there will be a time where they will not be able to have all three of those, and it might be hard to have even two of those. Dictatorships are not that good in handling perturbations, and I believe this to be more of a problem when your Dictatorship is built on the fact that you are one of the most successful nations on the planet.
I would say that having enemies costs (or more broadly being a major power that makes many enemies) incurs you costs in many ways. That are things like not being able to be on friendly terms with India when you ally Pakistan, creating a backlash in South East Asia/Africa when you pump the wrong people their full of money, having allies that are a liability (North Korea, other nations like Pakistan or many African countries), people who play a whole different game than you (terrorists, human rights/environmental activists, meme junkies, people afraid of China for all the reasons you stated.
The West handles those problems by trying to build genuine partnerships rather than client states, not pumping money into chaotic and corrupt governments all the time, using human rights records to at least find out who REALLY NOT TO TRUST, and integrating at least the constructive type of the people mentioned above. I’m very interested how much Chinas foreign policy and Chinas handling of “middle class issues” works out over the next 10 to 20 years.
Are you old enough to remember essentially the same things being said about Japan in the 1990s?
The Gulf States in the 1970s?
The Soviet Union in the 1950s, or the 1930s?
A nice corrective to this sort of view is Orwell’s discussion of James Burnham. In fact, it’s a little uncanny how well the parent comment matches the view that Orwell discusses:
sounds a lot like “they’ve got just enough capitalism to prevent their centrally planned economy from imploding, but not so much that it gives people ideas re: freedom of expression.”.
As Orwell, John Schilling, and Bjorn point out though, merely extrapolating from current trends doesn’t have the best historical track record, and ignores latent issues lurking in China. I think it’s probably true that China will continue to rise, becoming more economically, militarily, and culturally powerful, just as Burnham wasn’t wrong to see Germany and Japan rise in importance; but prophecies like “our culture will be completely subsumed by China in 10 years, 20 on the outside” are almost certainly nuts, and probably stem from the frame of mind that Orwell characterizes as believing that “things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice.”
Ok, so assuming that China becomes the world’s largest economic, scientific, and cultural superpower in 10..20 years; when would you expect our own culture to be subsumed ? For example, how long do you expect English to remain (ironically) the Lingua Franca of the world ?
I don’t think it will be the largest economic, scientific, or especially cultural superpower in 10 to twenty years–I think China’s economic, scientific, and cultural power will continue to grow over that time, but not necessarily without interruption or at the same rate as today.
As to how long before “our culture [is] subsumed”…that depends on what you mean by subsumed. Notice that despite the conquest of a huge portion of the world by Britain, the majority of the world still doesn’t speak English, the majority of the world isn’t Anglican, etc. And Britain’s mode of dominance involved a lot more conquest and demographic replacement than China’s will for the foreseeable future.
I have no idea how much longer English will remain the world’s Lingua Franca, though I think 10 to 20 years sounds a bit short to me. But even if so, I don’t think that will mean China will have fully exported all of its culture and politics to the point that our current political issues will have become meaningless (though I don’t doubt that some of our current political issues will look meaningless for other reasons).
I’m old enough to remember the same things being said in the 80s. By the time the 90s came around, this was no longer the case. That said, why specifically do you think Japan failed to achieve world dominance, while Soviet Union had almost succeeded (after all, they were more or less tied with the US for 75 years) ?
Personally, I think this has to do with a combination of factors. Population size is the most important one, of course; but access to natural resources as well as culture also play a role. I don’t think you can make an apples-to-apples comparison between China and Japan.
No they weren’t. They were lying about being more or less tied with the US for 75 years, and got away with it for a while because a whole lot of the rest of the world was highly sympathetic to their cause.
A more likely explanation is that no one was allowed to check.
Eh, plenty of people weren’t even the least bit skeptical, and were happy to take the Soviets word for it.
This included left-wing sympathizers, as well as right-wing warmongers who used it to justify increased military spending.
But by saying that you are admitting that there is no need for sympathy. There are situations where both sides want something to be true, because it fits both their narratives (but for different reasons).
There were indirect checks for anyone who didn’t believe the government figures. G. Warren Nutter produced estimates which were much closer to what turned out to be true, although still, I think, high.
Samuelson’s textbook, through multiple editions, claimed that the USSR was catching up with the U.S., with estimates of the date at which it would happen. The date kept being pushed forward edition after edition without Samuelson ever conceding that his past estimate of the Soviet growth rate had been too high.
On the other hand, it’s at least arguable that the reason was not political bias but methodological bias.
You’ve listed a lot of strengths, but I noticed at least one thing missing: an internet censorship policy. Once that’s gone, I expect an uprising that dwarfs Tiananmen Square, and I think the Chinese government thinks the same thing.
And then there’s things like pollution, Tibet / Taiwan, etc.
Let’s see how this plays out.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution-causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals
I’m not expecting China to ever relax their Internet censorship policy. If anything, I expect them to strenghten it, and for Western nations to adopt it in whole or in part — especially since they are using Western technology (e.g. from Cisco and perhaps Google) to implement it.
(Well, “never” is a long time of course, but not within the next 20 years or so)
My sense is that a lot of elites in the US, as well as in Europe, really feel like the internet should be censored. They’re not so happy with the free flow of information, which includes terrorists and criminals communicating with one another, unacceptable political views being aired and discussed, leaked embarrassing documents showing up on the internet, upstart political movements using the internet to organize and threaten the established powers, etc.
My best guess is that we will see increasing censorship online, with arguments for free-speech rights eventually becoming part of what is considered outside the Overton window, and perhaps also being suppressed. That’s a more comfortable place for most of the powerful people in the US than our current policies, and the big powers that were formerly fighting against that sort of thing (newspapers, a big chunk of political liberals) are either disappearing or have been captured by a new set of ideas that think only acceptable speech should be permitted, and other speech should be shut down or no-platformed or criminalized.
What’s your estimation that, then, a migration will occur to an alternate technology that will eventually outcompete the internet for having less censorship?
If you would like to delve deeper into the question of China’s future, one place to look is Michael Pettis China Financial Markets on the Carnegie Endowment site.
I asked this before in a hidden open thread, but I suppose I’ll try here too.
Does anyone have any experience with fasting or in the biological science behind it’s effects?
I’m specifically interested in the effects from the Fasting Mimicking Diet which seems like it has an impressive magnitude of effect. The autophagy effects are particulary interesting. All the published research on it has the involvement of Valter Longo or USC (where Longo is a professor) so I wanted to get some 3rd party views on it.
I don’t really know how well it works but I have experience with fasting and weight cutting. My main thing is to know that if you are doing it right you won’t be hungry after a while.
Did you notice any health benefits from fasting? What kind of fasting activities did you undertake?
Yes, some historians’ myopic focus on battle maps and tactics is rather irritating to me. I get that people like these things (though I personally don’t see why), but they can’t exist in a vacuum. It is also interesting to understand the motives of various leaders in comparison with their strategies – did they support the war? What did they want to achieve? What was off limits to them? What did they think of the enemy? Did they change tactics depending on the perceived motivations of another leader? There is a huge systemic and human factor in these things that cannot be separated from the “games.”
I think I’m largely in agreement with your point, but I also kind of took for granted that most wars are probably not necessary for survival and are done for other reasons. Certainly actual invasions have happened many times, but I’d still say most wars were probably not self-defensive in a strict sense. Power and image are huge drivers, and probably make war more inevitable than actual threats of annihilation. Certain wars are both unnecessary and inevitable.
“Both unnecessary and inevitable” is how I would describe the US Civil War.
Yep, that’s the one I had in mind, and the only one I’ve studied in depth. But I figured I wouldn’t get into that can of worms. The war was could certainly have been delayed, but something was going down. It was such a slaughter that I have wondered if it would have been better to let the South go and then wage a series of smaller battles as the friction continued, but who knows what would have happened then. I certainly think it would have sapped America’s resources and attention for so long that we’d be significantly compromised now. Quick and decisive tends to be better, and freeing the slaves was such a benefit in itself that it may justify it, but boy did it come at a cost.
Harry Turtledove wrote several novels about what would have happened if the USCW had gone another way. His alternate history has flaws, depending on who you ask, but he seems to go out of his way to present historical figures based on their actual history. Consequently, his books contain a lot of food for thought on how this might have gone.
@Paul Brinkley
Thank you – I will look into it.
I’ll admit, I enjoyed the vision of Lincoln as a socialist revolutionary firebrand after losing the civil war.
OTOH, that series was about as dark and horrible as anything I can remember reading. Particularly starting with basically sympathetic (if flawed) characters like Pinkard and Featherston, and watching them turn into what they turned into by the end of the last book.
Yes, if you’re not going to read Arendt, Turtledove gives you the fictional but disturbingly convincing understanding of how basically decent people turn into genocidal monsters.
Imagine a new government has come into power in Venezuela, and the new President/Chairman/Generalissimo (pick whichever is most convenient for your answer) comes to you for advice on ending the crisis there. To be specific, the goal is to return inflation rates and out-migration to South American averages. What are your key suggestions?
(to keep this from going off the rails, please taboo Socialism, Capitalism, and related terms; focus on specific policies rather than broad ideologies).
My top piece of advice is to ditch the Bolivar. Currencies require trust, and I think that one is past the possibility of getting it back. But switching to the US dollar (like other countries in the region have done) will allow your political opponents to accuse you of selling out to imperialists. Choosing the yuan or ruble might put you in Washington’s crosshairs if they fear you’re joining the sphere of influence of a geopolitical rival. Based on these considerations, I’d suggest the yen: it’s a global currency that won’t look like picking sides between superpowers. There is a small but long-standing Japanese community in Venezuela, and Japan’s elderly population and lack of domestic oil production opens up some possibilities for mutually-beneficial trade.
Additionally, I’d recommend contracting an international oil & gas industry recruiter to administer proficiency tests to all PDVSA employees hired in the past decade. Anyone who doesn’t pass should be fired and replaced with someone competent.
Peg the Bolivar to something other than the USD, with a preannounced plan to replace it with the New Bolivar by dropping four zeros. Keep it pegged. Ask the South Koreans to send some light arms peacekeeping troops to come replace all the cops and all the military for 10 years. Work through the now forcibly retired officers and enlisted: any who had received any training from the School Of The Americas gets “renditioned” to the US. Similarly for any trained in Cuba. Ask Mexico or Saudi or Russia (or all three) to send skilled petro technologists and skilled petro workers for 10 years to replace all the useless political hires and run training classes for local workers. Ask either the Hong Kong or the Singapore banking consortium to come completely replace the banking system, with a 10 year exit plan. Shame Canada and the EU into freezing and then repatriating all the many billions of dollars of wealth that the Great Leaders’s family had stolen and stashed in EU bank accounts and Canadian real estate. Shoot everyone who stills calls themselves a communist or advocates for it. Copy the Alaska Permanent Fund template. Immediately 20% of all extraction taxes goes into it, with a linear progression so that in 10 years, 100% goes into it. Take no advice from or place into any position of authority anyone who has an MBA from a US school.
De-nationalizing the oil industry is going to be a much Harder problem. Possibly some variant of transferring ownership of it to the extraction permanent fund.
Shame Canada and the EU into freezing and then repatriating all the many billions of dollars of wealth that the Great Leaders’s family had stolen and stashed in EU bank accounts and Canadian real estate.
Why? I seem to recall from the “why doesn’t the West facilitate transfer of power in war-torn countries by guaranteeing deals with the despots about safe retirement” debates that nobody mentioned anything about taking the ill-gotten gains and repatriating them; the assumption seemed to be that if Strongman Leader for Life agreed to step down, the West would keep him from being lynched, give him a safe haven to live in luxurious retirement, and not look too closely into how that luxurious retirement was funded. Part of the appeal for Strongman was that he and his family and assorted cronies and hangers-on could fly out to New York/Paris/London and live comfortably on the loot they had stolen and stashed. Having to repay their theft was never part of the bargain.
I mean, I’d like very much if this happened, but if the cynical pragmatic view is “to guarantee peace, let them keep the loot”, this is not going to work.
Tough, but fair.
Well, it really depends on how politically popular my ideas have to be. The people of that region have demonstrated good policy is politically unpopular. So lets say its a Junta of sorts that won’t really have much trouble holding power for 20 years.
Obviously you are going to want to abandon the Bolivar. I’d actually suggest the Euro as the best option, other than the Dollar (which also would work but would probably seem too “big papa” like) all other currencies don’t have the oomf of the Euro.
Second is you start repealing old laws. You are stripping this baby down to the bare bones. Anything that wasn’t a law in America in 1800 is not a law in your country. Any social program, no longer. You cleanse the ranks of unnecessary people as this goes by.
Third, send your oldest child to live with the CEO of Chevron and tell Chevron they have ownership of some % of currently operating oil wells in the country. Slowly send other family members to, essentially, be held hostage by other oil CEOs, thus ensuring you won’t nationalize the wells they develop.
“Any social program, no longer. You cleanse the ranks of unnecessary people as this goes by.”
I call this, “How to end up on the business end of a lightpost within weeks, no matter how many private contractors to you have.”
Ha, maybe. But the thing about Venezuela is that any objectively good policy will end you there sooner or later. The preferences of the people are the biggest issue.
Nah. Cutting any and all social programs will get you on the wrong end of a lamp post in any country.
That’s why you wait until a fiscal collapse blamed on the previous administration has already destroyed all the social programs, then claim credit for a limited reintroduction under your regime. And it probably is worth doing a little of that just for the PR.
3 people attended the meetup in Santa Rosa. We think we can do better and want to schedule another one. Is anyone else interested in meeting in Sonoma County, or maybe Napa? We may be able to get Sacramento people to show up if we meet them halfway.
Ideas for further open thread titles for Scott. I seem to remember that you asked for ideas about these. List in no particular order.
I am not trying to imply that “opulent” or any of the other recent thread titles were bad, I like gilding as much as anyone else. However, please credit images you use (either in the text of the post or at least with a link from the image) unless they’re entirely your own creation. In your scientific publications, you cite previous works you’re using for intellectual honesty. Citing photos created by other people is no different from that.
– C-open-hagen interpretation thread. Image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heisenbergbohr.jpg” , a photo from 1934 showing Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, two pioneers of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
– Eur-open thread. Image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Regina_Europa_from_Sebastian_M%C3%BCnster%27s_Cosmographia.jpg” , a depiction of Europa regina (“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_regina”), a personification of Europe in the form of a map of Europe and a queen at the same time.
– Tw-open-ce thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_Pence_02.jpg” .
– C-ope-r-n-ican thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolaus_Copernicus_-_Heliocentric_Solar_System.JPG” .
– Phonendoscopen thread or Stethosc-open thread, whichever term doctors in your environment prefer to use, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stetoskop.jpg” or take a photo of a phonendoscope a doctor you know owns.
– Laparoscopen or Endoscopen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bronkoskop.jpg” because there are wonderful photos available of laparoscopic surgery, but we don’t want to gross out anyone without warning.
– Jump r-open thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_030303-N-9109V-006_Steel_Beach_picnic_aboard_USS_Saipan.jpg”
– Submarine periscopen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Officer_at_periscope_of_HMS_Snapper_WWII_IWM_A_885.jpg”
– Microscopen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_rain-forest_trees,_excluding_the_species_confined_to_the_tropics_(1929)_(20162243960).jpg” random microscopic image of trees
– Open-ra house thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Die_Volksoper_am_W%C3%A4hringer_G%C3%BCrtel_-_panoramio.jpg” , photo of exterior of the Volksoper building in Wien, Austria
– Paratroopen thread, “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Defense.gov_News_Photo_000507-F-1093P-003.jpg” (open parachutes were already done in open thread 3, but “paratrooper” is technically a new pun)
– Calliopen thread, “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calliope,_Muse_of_Epic_Poetry_by_Giovanni_Baglione.jpg” , replies are not restricted to epic poetry form
– Catastropen thread, start thread after some natural disaster, use an image about that, but not a too shocking one, eg. “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kerala_Flood_2018_-_Angamaly-_IMG_20180818_084452.jpg” if this was a recent open thread
– Encycl-open-dia thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3rdBritannica.JPG”
– Envelopen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coloured_Cards_and_Envelopes_(3859554453).jpg” (photo shows envelopes before closing)
– O-pen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cattle_sale_1.JPG” (cattle in a pen)
– O-pencil thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colourful_pencils.jpg”
– Oscilloscopen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAV4_Tach_750rpm.JPG” , sadly I couldn’t find a good photo of an old electrocardiograph with an oscilloscope display
– Space telescopen thread, “telescope” was already used for an open thread in 2017, but if you use this title when the Webb space telescope is launched (or any other space telescope if the Webb is cancelled; unlike your 2016 and 2017 predictions, your 2018 predictions don’t even list a bet that SSC will still remain active this year, which I choose to interpret as you being very confident that SSC will live for a long time, I wish I could be so confident about the future of space telescopes), 2017 will be ancient history by then, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Webb_Space_Telescope_Revealed_(26764527271).jpg”
More open thread title ideas. I figured I had probably only imagined that you asked for more suggestions of these, but I can’t stop now. I’ll skip the puns connected to male ogenitalia and its oinsertion into holes.
– Telephone openrator thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_telephone_magazine_(1922)_(14755092795).jpg”
– Indopendence referendum thread or declaration of indopendence thread, use the next time something like this comes up in the news again, such as in Scotland or Catalonia or Puerto Rico or Iraqi Kurdistan, and use an image related to that.
– Openalty shootout thread, use this the next time a highly watched match in a football tournament is decided by one, such as the Russia–Croatia match on the FIFA world cup quarter-final on 2018-07-07, photo is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cupfinalen_2009_straffespark.jpg” or a photo of the penalty shootout on that recent match.
– Openalty thread, as an alternative to the above, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43455817” drawing of a pillory
– Oppendix thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anatomy-human-appendix-in-colon.png”
– Openinsula thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Location_Kamchatka_Peninsula.PNG”
– Openumbra thread, as an alternative to the above, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lunar_eclipse_of_2017_August_7_Kuwait.jpg”
– Caropentry thread, image is “https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Budapest-bazilika-jozsef-szobor.jpg” (statue of Joseph, father of the Christ, with a carpenter’s tool, and of Christ as a child)
– Susopension bridge thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Budapest,_H%C3%A1rmashat%C3%A1rhegy,_1037_Hungary_-_panoramio_(21).jpg”
– Soap disopenser thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soap_dispenser_2017_A.jpg”
– Opener thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kitchen-Modern-Can-Opener.jpg” (can opener or tin opener)
– Sharopener thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_pencil_sharpener.jpg”
– Openicillin thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nobelpristagare_Fleming_Midi.jpg” of Alexander Fleming accepting the Nobel prize in 1945 for the discovery of the first antibiotic.
– As-o-pen thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51994928”
– Foucault opendulum thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFoucault_pendulum%2C_Eotvos_Lorand_University_North_Block%2C_2016_Ujbuda.jpg”
– Openguin thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Falkland_Islands_Penguins_40.jpg”
– Opentagon thread (technically this is not a new pun, because “Opentecost” was already used), image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pentagon_satellite_image.jpg”
– Peropendicular thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katownik_stolarski_0211.jpg”
– Seropent thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31738706”
– His Noodly Oppendages thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage_HD.jpg”
– Jalopeño thread, image is “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jalape%C3%B1os1.jpg”
– Oppen-heimer thread, image “https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JROppenheimer-LosAlamos.jpg”
Image: Bob Marley. Title: Natty Thread.
Is anyone somewhat surprised by left-wing complaints that Twitter is hell/Twitter does nothing? Do they not remember what it was like not long ago, when any liberal comment would be responded to by huge brigades of the most combative/racist pre-altright types?
I understand nothing is ever good enough, and I understand as a conservative I’m not the audience they’re seeking. But the notion that Twitter has done nothing and is still at its nadir is surprising to me.
I’m not terribly surprised, no. That is the kind of thing it is necessary to complain about in order to justify increased policing of conservative opinion on the edge of the overton window, which tactically is highly useful if the relevant authorities are amenable to such.
Also, see almost every organization or movement ever that accomplishes a portion of it’s goal and does not decrease its advocacy proportionately.
Yeah. I suppose I’m not surprised, either. But because almost everyone I know IRL is a committed liberal and on Twitter tweeting about liberalism, their insistence on this is bizarre to me.
I read Twitter feeds sometimes (mostly far left and what I consider interesting alt-right like Sailer) but don’t tweet. About a year ago I wanted to respond to something Razib Kahn said, and so I signed up for an account. As soon as I tweeted at him — my first and only tweet, and it was nothing alt-righty or racist because I am the sort of #NeverTrumper the alt-right hates — Twitter banned me. They may have said I could keep tweeting if I used a phone number, I don’t remember. But I was still surprised.
No one ever believes me about it, though.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/27/642218377/in-psychology-and-other-social-sciences-many-studies-fail-the-reproducibility-te
It turns out that social scientists are pretty good at predicting which social science studies won’t reproduce, but medical researchers aren’t so good at prediction for medical research.
I suspect it’s because medical researchers are less likely to use horribly bad designs for their experiments, but this is just a guess.
Would be interesting to see that tested on science reporters and journalists generally.
Cities part 7: Dimini/Iolkos
This continues my series of effortposts on Late Bronze Age Greece that began here.
The Bay of Volos forms the southeastern extremity of classical and modern Thessaly. The overland route to the region passes from Boeotia through the sparsely-populated mountainous district of Phocis on the upper Kephisos and then north through Thermopylae in Malis. By sea, the Bay of Volos sits right at the north end of the island of Euboea.
Greek mythology records Thessaly’s original name as Aeolia and treats it as a wild region, productive for horse husbandry and populated by centaurs as well as uncivilized Hellenic tribes, but with an outpost of civilization at Iolkos (Volos). This fits the archaeological evidence: three of the few Mycenaean settlements in Thessaly are ports on the bay, Dimini, Kastro, and Pefkakia. At the beginning of this century, archaeologists turned up a Mycenaean palace at Dimini. An untouched tholos tomb (Kazanaki) with gold grave goods also turned up, and oh by the way, Iolkos really only figures in Greek mythology in the generation before the Trojan War, when Jason was sent on a suicide mission for the Golden Fleece by King Pelias, his usurping uncle.
The pottery evidence indicates that the Bay area was incorporated into Mycenaean civilization during Late Helladic IIA, or some time between ~1550 BC and the middle of Thutmose III’s sole reign. The plain of Larissa and the west only start to adopt Mycenaean material culture even selectively in LH IIIA. It’s currently understood that LH IIA economic development was driven by “Minoan” need for metals, with a string of sites radiating north from the silver mines of Lavrion (which remained famously productive in Classical times). From Lavrion, Brauron and Thorikos, ports/outposts appeared in Boeotia and on the east coast of Euboea, ending at the Bay of Volos. At the end of this period, either the colonized or parties unknown in the Peloponnese (the gold-rich elites of Mycenae are most likely, but trade with Crete is also believed to have created the Laconic and Messenian elites) overthrew not only the Cretan navy but also seized Knossos, after which Linear B tablets replace the undeciphered Linear A.
At Dimini, Linear B is only attested in a couple of inscriptions: no tablets have yet been found. This is probably only because of the lack of a fire-destruction layer. Dimini was abandoned at the end of LH IIIB with the other palaces save Kekropia (acropolis of Athens) and Tiryns, or very early in IIIC, presumably starved out by economic disruption. Curiously though, there’s also a dearth of seals and religious iconography, so the rulers were probably less sacred and controlled a smaller economy, which matches the palace being the smallest.
The pottery evidence indicates that the Bay area was incorporated into Mycenaean civilization
I laughed at this more than I should since plainly the Bay Area is not the one meant 🙂
Do not tempt me, lady. I see LBA Volos with bearded douchebags competing for unskilled labor jobs, well-paid wizards who can’t afford to rent a room, a school that teaches that Zeus is the enemy and society should be overthrown to restore primitive communism, and black people in Zeus’s sacred district of Oakland.
Zeus’s sacred district of Oakland
Oh, bravo! 🙂 (Though the black people dwelling there are surely the people of Memnon, dear to Eos?)
Thought: Time is a probability-like dimension. Entropy can be treated as a measurement of improbability, more or less. (It can be modeled as specific information about our universe). We are moving from a state of high probability to an ever-lower state of probability.
Did you mean “We are moving from a state of high improbability to an ever-lower state of improbability“?
That caught my eye, too. I’m not 100% behind any particular interpretation of thermodynamics, but the statistical approach pretty strongly makes the case that the Second Law is a steady advance to the most probable macrostate. I suppose that one could make a case like “an increase in entropy is a decrease in the likelihood of any given microstate for a particular observed macrostate”, but that starts to get a little tautological.
Depends on what you are measuring, basically.
I am going by the information description of entropy, which means we are moving into an ever-more specific, and hence less probable, region of information-space.
(Assuming that information is more than a metaphor, I wonder if compression algorithms would work on entropy?)
It’s unclear what you mean here – there are several obsolete definitions of entropy still floating around out there. It looks like you’re referring to something like my point in the comment above, but that’s more of a (imo less interesting) corollary to the statistical derivation of the Second Law.
Physical information is as much of a thing as “energy” is, pick your preferred ontology from there. But yes, entropy is compressible… sort-of. Few compression algorithms will be valid at more than a single instant; it follows that a good schema that functions in the temporal dimension as well is really just a new model of thermodynamics – this is more or less the motivation behind the quantum statistical approach. Swap out the physics for pure math, and you quickly end up with Kolmogorov Complexity.
What does this mean? Entropy is a measurement of a system, like temperature, so I don’t know what it would mean to compress it.
Are you talking about compressing information about the state of a system? That is possible in inverse proportion to the entropy of the system. The more ordered (less entropy) the system’s state is, the easier it is to describe, and hence the less bits you can use to describe it, which is equivalent to saying the less information it contains.
If that’s hard to visualize, compare a GIF of a Mondrian (low entropy) to a GIF of random pixels (maximal entropy). The fact that you can use shortcuts to describe the Mondrian (like, “Pixels (0,0) through (400,400) are all red”, instead of describing each pixel separately) is both literally the reason why the Mondrian GIF will compress better, and figuratively the reason why the Mondrian is in a state of lower entropy. Perfectly random data is incompressible, which is equivalent to saying that there are no shortcuts to describing it, and has maximal entropy,.
Entropy isn’t disorder – that is a good shorthand for entropy in some systems (particularly when examining gaseous systems), but it is trivial to design a physics such that the maximum entropy state is also the maximumally ordered state.
What does this mean? It is evocative in the sense of poetry or something that would make me say “Whoah” if I were stoned in a dorm room full of lava lamps, but in a more literal sense what does it mean for a dimension to be probability-like?
I think that’s the conventional wisdom among physicists about the “direction” of time – the future is definable as the direction in which entropy increases. Turn the Second Law on its head, and you get a more philosophically informative (IMO) statement: dt/dS > 0. In some cosmological models, such as Sean Carroll’s in From Eternity to Here, there is a time in our past when the (ancestor) universe was at its lowest entropy. On the other side of that region, entropy would be higher and time would “flow” in the opposite direction for any inhabitants of (daughter) universe(s) still-further in our past. If that sounds strange, well, it sounded strange to me when I was 5 that Australians would point (what I would call) down and call that “up”.
If there is a spacetime region in which the arrow of time flips over, is that called Arrow Dynamics?
Entropy can’t flow in the opposite direction in any meaningful sense; it is a measurement of how many irreversible changes have taken place, and that looks the same regardless of which direction time is flowing.
Entropy could have a minimum in one spacetime region, such that times a little distant in both directions from there have a higher entropy. But you’re right to say this isn’t (best described as) entropy flowing in the opposite direction. It’s best described as time flowing in the opposite direction (to whatever extent we want to keep the metaphor of “time flowing”).
Bean, you still haven’t explained why the XB-70 is more beautiful than the SR-71. Because it isn’t, that’s why!
The only remaining question…between the YF-12/A-12, the SR-71A, and the SR-71B, which is the sexiest?
(Hint: it’s the SR-71A.)
Because it’s the more radical airplane. I admit that it’s a bit strange, but it’s just amazing. It’s four times the size of the SR-71, and it doesn’t drip fuel while sitting on the tarmac.
it doesn’t drip fuel while sitting on the tarmac
Now that’s just chicken, bean! What objections have you reasonably got against a giant vehicle of fiery doom? Chariots of Fire! 😀
I have been lurking for months and enjoying the excellent articles and unique forum of debate here at SSC.
I finally had to create an account to agree with you, Well…. the SR-71 is a far more beautiful object than the XB-70, leaking fuel be damned.
It is an interesting idea you are proposing, I mostly agree. Upthread posters have responded in particulars. I think wars are driven by more basic human desires than the particulars discussed.
People rarely reflect critically on justifications for wars. Exactly why these issues are undiscussed is because the answers make us uncomfortable. To do so, you would eventually have to admit, you are hitting someone over the head and taking stuff. Even if they attack first, you still get to take something of value if you win.
I have always thought this a given. Many others I realize do not. Pre, ad and post hoc fluff/justifications are motivational, to get one’s head right for what will/is/did occur. No one wants to be the individual who dies so the group can get more stuff/money.
Atlantic first-person article about transracial adoption, with one interesting (depressing) part being that the adoptive parents get attacked by both far-left (cultural genocide!) and far-right (betraying the white race!). Though it sounds like these days, the attacks are mostly from the far-right, and that the far-left types at least didn’t wish their adoptive daughter any ill. (They also mentioned a book attacking international adoptions by evangelical Christians on ideological grounds, which sounded like pure “I can stand anything but the outgroup” stuff.)
I’m not surprised by the incredible nastiness of some online comments they’ve gotten–for a certain fraction of people, more-or-less anonymous online communications turn them into genuinely awful human beings. (Or perhaps make it costless to behave like the awful human beings they are–I don’t know how you’d distinguish those two.) But I was quite surprised that they got a fair number of rude in-person comments, as well. I would have expected that a desire not to look like an asshole in public would have prevented most of those.
Eh, I think he has it backwards. It’s not like people “found him online” because he has a black child, it’s that he was being a journalist online, and people used whatever they could find about his personal life to taunt him. Which under ordinary circumstances would be considered rude; but journalists will gleefully dig out a random prole’s old racist tweet and use it to destroy their livelihood, so their own internet stuff is fair game; or so the argument goes, from what I’ve heard.
Wow…The religiously-conservative church I grew up in had no animus against transracial adoption. There was one family which had white parents, more than one biological child of the white parents, and several Black children adopted. Another family served as a foster-care family, in a scenario which had lots of other-race children come into their home.
Admittedly, this was a mostly-white church that deliberately tried to cross the racial divide in the region. And there was some friction inside the church over that. (At least one interracial marriage happened among my generation: the kids who grew up in that church. I think this was the big sticking point among ~10% of the parents, but those problems never rose to the point of open rebellion against the church leadership.)
My understanding of both adoption and foster-care was that both the adoption agencies and the State agency that put children in foster-care really liked Black children to grow up around other Black children. Thus, all the families who did that told stories about home visits in which some investigator wanted to see Black, or mixed-race, neighborhoods.
(Another story: I’m white…but I have an Uncle and two cousins who are Black. Somehow, I didn’t realize that they were of a different race until I was a teenager. They were part of the extended family, and I never felt any racial tension when we were at family events together.
To give a sense of the timeline: Said Uncle married a my Aunt, less than 10 years after Sydney Poitier starred in a movie about interracial marriage. That Uncle said he got a few funny looks in public when he and his wife were taking any of their White nephews around. He also got some tension from older members of the extended White family. But that tension had faded by the time I was part of the family. Probably because my Uncle had most of the social habits of middle-class life, and is an easy person to get along with.
The cousins don’t often get called ugly names. One of them is an officer in a small-town police force. Every once in a while, he will cross paths with a perpetrator who will use every vulgar, foul epithet in the language against him…including a vile racial slur that begins with the letter “N”. But that’s pretty much the only time he hears that kind of language.
I guess my Uncle and cousins interact with a better section of America than the author of that article did.)
The author interacts with the internet.
I don’t think French mentions any religiously-conservative hate directed at him; more of the secular alt-right sort, I expect.
OK, at this point I think we’re going to have to ask you to pin down what constitutes a “defensive war”, and why we should care. Because you’ve shifted the goalposts away from the colloquial definition and towards something that, near as i can tell, reads:
“Defensive War: A war waged strictly to defend a nation against an actually ongoing attempt to invade and conquer that specific nation, after having pursued a policy of strict isolation to the point of appeasement because even non-violent resistance to conquerors voids any subsequent claim to defense”
With regard to World War 2:
See, by the common definition of “defensive war”, the thing where you send your army and navy out to do battle with someone who bombed one of your ports for no good reason, most people would consider that a central example of a defensive war. But by your definition, it only counts as a defensive war if Japan’s reason for bombing Pearl Harbor was to invade and conquer the United States. If Japan bombs Pearl Harbor for some other no-good reason, nope, no self-defense for you?
I don’t think any of this was any great secret from the American public; it was front-page news that FDR and his administration imposed economic sanctions on Japan in an attempt to stop Japan’s ongoing unprovoked invasion of China and future threat to world peace in general.
That’s economic sanctions. Non-violent opposition to someone else’s violent armed conquest. But by your standards, that voids any claim to defense. Only appeasement will do – if Japan wants our steel and oil to build and fuel weapons of war against China, we have to sell them what they want or else we don’t get to defend ourselves when they attack us.
Well, no, the best argument someone can formulate is that, hey, look someone just wrecked half a dozen of our battleships and killed three thousand of our people for no good reason, and then sent us a note saying “OBTW if you hadn’t noticed we’re at war”.
The US response to the long-term threat posed by the Axis powers in 1939-1941 was economic sanctions, trade embargoes, lend-lease, and other non-violent measures. When it came to actual war with the United States, they shot first.
But there’s no requirement that, to claim defensive intent or status, one has to let the other side shoot first. If the US had learned of Japan’s plans and attacked their fleet while it was crossing the Pacific, that would still have been a defensive act. And there’s no time limit on this. When one reasonably believes that an attack will occur and can be prevented only by force, one may use force in defense. At least that’s how most people see it. By your standards, apparently, it only counts if you wait until the enemy actually attacks you. As part of an invasion, following a period of appeasement.
Also, there’s no requirement that the people being defended be the same as the people doing the defending, or even that they be citizens of the same nation. If I see someone raping a woman in a dark alley, I can order him to stop and shoot him dead if he doesn’t, even if the woman is a complete stranger. Japan, by the time the US entered the war, was raping cities. Germany was doing worse.
Make no mistake, the United States would have been waging a legitimate, righteous, defensive war if we had invaded and conquered Japan in July of 1937, and then joined Britain and France in declaring war on Germany in September of 1939. We just would’t have been defending the United States against an immediate threat of invasion. We would have been defending the people of China and Poland, defending our own reputation and self-image as people who aren’t chickenshit cowards like the Swiss and the Spanish, and defending the principle of Nation Shall Not Conquer Nation as enshrined in the Kellog-Briand pact and the hope for a peaceful future that it optimistically promised. Those are all things worth defending. Those are all things that we are allowed to defend, and to say we are defending. And we did.
You’ve argued that even waging war against a nation that has launched an unprovoked attack, doesn’t count as “defense” if the attack isn’t aimed specifically at invasion and conquest.
You’ve argued that a claim to defense is voided if it is preceded by insufficient appeasement in the form of e.g. economic sanctions against nations waging unprovoked and unjust wars
You’ve argued that a nation may not defend itself against future assaults, but must let the enemy launch the first attack.
And you’ve wholly ignored the obvious fact that all of the US “aggressions” of 1939-1941 were clearly aimed at defending the victims of unjust aggression – who happened to not be Americans.
That brings us back to where we started:
“Defensive War (per Atlas): A war waged strictly to defend a nation against an actually ongoing attempt to invade and conquer that specific nation, after having pursued a policy of strict isolation to the point of appeasement because even non-violent resistance to conquerors voids any subsequent claim to defense”
If that’s the definition of “defensive war” that you are using, I’d ask that you use a different term, because I don’t think that’s how most people use the term.
And w/re World War II, I will note that Atlas-compliant defensive war had I believe a 0.0% success rate against the Nazis. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, all waited until they were themselves invaded rather than fight against “speculative, long-term” threats, and all of them were conquered. The nations which survived, and which ultimately rolled back the Forces of Darkness, were the ones which didn’t wait until their own territory was under attack. And, of course, the one that waged unprovoked wars of aggression of its own to expand its frontier and establish strategic depth. Your brand of “defensive” war, really kind of sucks at actually defending anything – and that’s not limited to WW2.
And while we’re on the subject of using non-standard definitions to support your argument:
The US acquired dominion over the Phillipines as an unintended consequence of a war waged mostly half a world away, over the issue of Cuban independence from Spain. Referring to the US as a “conqueror” on this basis, is a decidedly non-standard usage of the term, and certainly not what I had in mind when I raised the subject.
More to the point, asserting that one can use US behavior w/re the Philippines to predict Nazi behavior w/re Europe, because the US is a “conqueror” and Nazi Germany is a “conqueror” and so the US is basically just like the Nazis, is both foolish and insulting.
But only because it took the Flying Tigers longer to get into action in China than expected.
Which of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece could have realistically fought Nazi Germany more effectively if they’d attacked first? I mean, if they’d attacked early enough, before Germany started rearming, maybe, but it’s not obvious to me that there were *any* good strategies available for, say, Poland or Belgium.
Any of the Soviet Union, France, and the UK might have been able to benefit some by pre-emptively attacking Nazi Germany, but it’s hard to see that working out for a very small country next to a big, powerful, aggressive country.
The Poles would have fought Germany more effectively if they’d skipped joining Germany’s invasion of the Czechs and put everything that flew into strafing Germany’s railroads. And still lost, of course.
Poland could and should have promised her support to Czechoslovakia in 1938, no matter what Chamberlain and Daladier wanted. There’s a modest chance this would have averted WWII altogether; worst case, Poland falls a few months sooner but inflicts a much heavier cost on the Nazis in the process. Remember, the 1938 Wehrmacht vs Czechoslovakia alone was not going to be a cakewalk, and the German general staff was ambivalent about Fall Grün without a second front in Poland.
The rest of the minor and belated allies did not share a common border with Czechoslovakia, but there’s no good reason for any of them not to have joined Britain and France in their declaration of war against Germany in September 1939. Their passivity bought them nothing; the Germans invaded each of them in turn exactly as soon as it was strategically advantageous to do so, and on the flip side, did not invade openly belligerent France until the time was right. But, by insisting on neutrality until each was itself directly invaded, each of them was in turn defeated alone, by the focused might of the Third Reich and with no possibility of assistance from the other Allied powers.
Would a UBI fail because it would raise inflation, destroying the value of the UBI?
I recently read this argument on a blog, and wonder if any of you guys think it has merit: https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2018/08/alaska-living-experiment-in-guaranteed.html
And yes, I know the blog is not in any way scientific and is riddled with curse words, but please humor me.
By this reasoning, providing people with ways to get money for college would drive up the price of college until it eats up all the money.
TBF, one could argue it kind of is, if only by slight hyperbole; if nothing else, cost disease is basically this, if not necessarily to literally all the money.
To give an actual response to the top-level comment, the argument I’ve seen is that as long as you don’t just print money, it probably mostly wouldn’t?
Yes, that was my point.
Sellers are in competition with each other, so they can’t just set prices to whatever they like. Imagine walking into your standard lunch restaurant, and telling the cashier than you just got a 5% raise. They respond with “okay, then your food will cost 5% more”. Competitor restaurants will have an incentive to say “Hey pal, we’re going to offer you only a 1% increase in lunch prices instead”, and so on.
In other words, there’s no economic law that says inflation must necessarily cancel out all increases in income.
The blogposter shows he is stretching too far when he brings up Silicon Valley:
Okay yes, prices rise, but they don’t necessarily rise to the point that people in Silicon Valley would be equally as well-off as working on a pig farm in Oklahoma. Like, its actually possible for people to become better off, even after factoring in inflation.
Also:
Has the blogger never considered that the reason why people don’t have dairy farms in Alaska, is that its a barren, arctic, mountainous wasteland? Seriously, this is like complaining about the price of water parks in the Sahara.
Has the blogger never considered that the reason why people don’t have dairy farms in Alaska, is that its a barren, arctic, mountainous wasteland?
Darn it, you made me look up “dairy farming in Alaska” and the ostensible reason is a labour shortage, seemingly Alaska used to have a thriving dairy farming sector in the old days:
So I imagine “can’t get Swiss cheese” is more to do with “it’s a huge, enormous, large, barren mountainous Arctic wasteland, the transportation infrastructure just isn’t in place to get the cheese from Down There to Up Here and even when it does, the costs involved mean that the price of the cheese is too high for ordinary people to buy; ditto for the parts and other materials needed to run the farms because everything Takes Longer and Costs More so places go under easily“:
It’s hard to get agricultural employees even in Ireland; there’s a lot of Eastern European workers employed by agricultural contractors to be herdsmen and so on for exactly this reason – hard work and low pay and better jobs elsewhere.
I live in Alaska and I can attest: we have Swiss cheese up here! My local Fred Meyer has a whole fancy cheese section, you can get all the kinds of cheeses you can find down south.
I remember when I first moved up here, my mom called and asked me if they had strawberries up here. I work down the street from an IHOP, yes we have strawberries. We have everything you have down there….as long as you’re in a city or town with a population over 2,000. Out in the bush things are a bit different.
Of course most of our food (that isn’t seafood) is imported. But that’s because of simple economics: no matter how hard you try you can’t grow wheat up here for as low a cost as they can do it in Iowa, even with the cost of shipping added. Ditto for milk, eggs, and cheese. If shipping broke down, we’d do it on our own and it would cost more, but as long as the container ships keep coming it’s just not worth it to make it ourselves. Alaska has a suprisingly large amount of arable land: you can even farm on permafrost with the right techniques. It’s just not cost effective do do it at scale.
Side question: wouldn’t farming on permafrost be environmentally damaging? I seem to remember permafrost is ecologically important and stuff.
Probably? I mean, farming anywhere is environmentally damaging if you want to preserve the environment before the farm was there. Much of the great plains is now large squares of corn and wheat, I’m sure that would be bad for the buffalo if they were still around.
I think the main concern with permafrost is that it is a massive carbon sink, and if it warms up something bad might happen (source: something I read once and half remember). As far as I understand it the permafrost farming technique follows a three step process: plow up a patch of permafrost, let the top layer thaw out over a couple of years, and then plow it up again while adding soil and fertilizer (typically fish slurry). Of course permafrost is very deep: the question is, does farming on top of it cause the lower layers to thaw? If so, how deep does this thawing action go? It’s definitely an unknown: the only guy who does it has only a few acres, nothing compared to a modern commercial farming operation. On the other hand there is a TON of permafrost. It would take quite a while to put farms on top of all of it, and I’m not sure if the permafrost above the arctic circle is a good candidate for farming in any case, so we would still have that tundra.
Ayy, I should have known better before just guessing. I always forget how environmentally diverse the state is.
Of course it would cause inflation, but if the argument is “ubi would leave buying power of recipients unchanged” then no, it wouldn’t.
It’s just another redistributive tax, which has some deadweight loss. But the same can be said of all regulation and taxation, where in an economic sense it is necessarily inefficient, but it can still be a positive policy because it improves some other metric we care about (equality, QOL of the poor).
The difference between Alaska’s permanent fund and a national UBI is that Alaska doesn’t control its own currency. Inflation is driven by a mismatch between monetary policy and the economy (to oversimplify, printing money more quickly than the real economy is growing). A UBI could plausibly shrink (or slow the growth of) the real economy: by enabling people to leave the labor force, by shifting spending from investment to consumption, or by the deadweight loss of the financing mechanisms. A UBI or UBI-like program at a state level (especially a state that’s only loosely connected to the rest of the country) could hurt the economy within the state, but the Federal Reserve looks at the whole country when adjusting the money supply. But a national UBI would affect the whole country, so the Fed should be able compensate (at least on average throughout the country).
I doubt this is what’s going on with Alaska, though. The APF is very modest as a UBI (so it shouldn’t have much effect on the labor force), and it’s funded by oil drilling royalties (pretty close to a Georgist land tax, which should have little or no deadweight loss). It seems more likely to me that prices are higher in Alaska simply because Alaska fairly remote and has a small, widely-scattered population. The former makes stuff more expensive to ship in from the rest of the country, and the latter makes local production more expensive (less opportunity for specialization and economies of scale). Compare Hawaii, which is also remote, has a small and scattered population, and tends to have higher prices than the mainland, but doesn’t have anything like the APF.
The APF is funded by all extraction taxes in Alaska. Not just oil. Lumbering and mining also pay into it.
I met quite a few people in Alaska for whom the annual dividend was their *only* source of cash money.
The lived in hand-built houses, farmed up and preserved 3 crops per season out of their garden during the amazing summer growing season, hunted and fished and trapped on a subsistence license.
That license cost USD0.25 when I lived there, and granted the right to hunt and fish and trap over a much wider range over a much wider season, with the requirement that everything you harvest, you, your family, or your guests have to eat, and must never be sold.
They were universally the happiest people I’ve ever met.
Some of the very best and most thoughtful (and usually very slow) conversations I’ve had were with the people living that life.
I have to confess, I got really tempted. I’m still tempted.
I understand the sentiment. However, it sounds like it is still a great deal of work to survive in that lifestyle, so I don’t know if it is necessarily analogous to a UBI of the sort debated here, which is likely to leave many people subsisting entirely on handouts without a purpose or rhythm to their lives.
It sounds more akin to the Homestead act than welfare.
That’s actually one of the things I really do like about the APF dividend as UBI.
If you are lazy and unwise, trying to live that way will get you killed.
But for someone who is able to keep a planning horizon of over a year (winter is always coming) and has the spoons to keep to a daily physical work schedule without a boss on your ass, one can live a decently comfortable and apparently very satisfying life, with no corporate rat-race or idiotic cultural bullshit.
If for those who want a UBI so that they can have the option of living a life of living pre-prepared food, living in a house that someone else build, enjoying a ration of cannibus and xanax, and while working hard on playing videogames, in some cool city full of cultural social opportunities, no. They can starve.
I’m going to guess that this is an amazingly satsifying life if you are a healthy young to middle-age man of at least average skill and diligence, and/or you can absolutely trust that your family will be there for you when you need them, otherwise not so much. The question is, to what extent can the latter condition still be reasonably assured anywhere in the contemporary United States?
I don’t understand why people keep raising this objection. Does literally nobody understand what causes downward pressure on prices?
It would only raise the prices of things which are supply-constrained. If I sell sandwiches, and currently sandwiches cost $10 per sandwich, if everyone can now afford $20 sandwiches, and I try to raise my prices to $20 per sandwich, then my competitor can undercut me by selling $15 sandwiches, etc., until we’re back down to $10 per sandwich.
Housing prices might rise if we gave out UBI. Sandwich prices wouldn’t.
But aren’t those things (housing, healthcare, education) the things that are gobbling up increasing shares of income already?
Yhea, but that is not an argument against UBI – It is an argument against, in order: current zoning laws, the restricted supply of medical schools/ private health insurance, and education as a veblen good.
Currently those three things are sucking up most of *all* rises in general wealth, regardless of source. That means fixing those three things is a top priority, not that we should not attempt to increase general wealth.
Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply relative to GDP and has nothing to do with UBI (unless you’re making an indirect argument like, “I assume that any UBI would be so expensive that we’d have to drastically increase the money supply” kind of argument, or “I assume that any UBI would decrease productivity so much that GDP would drop”, or something else, in which case you should probably say so explicitly).
As for the article, it seems pretty bad. I would be at least open to something of the form, “I think the reason consumer prices are higher in Alaska is because of the UBI-like permanent fund and not just because of shipping costs – let’s test that by comparing the prices of things that could be produced here to things that can’t be” but he doesn’t make any attempt to support his thesis, and didn’t even mention Alaska being remote (at least not before where I stopped reading, “Leftists argue that if crack whores were given $10,000 a year in guaranteed annual income, they would stop being prostitutes and apply to Harvard”).
Not if it the cost is offset by cuts/tax increases elsewhere?
Why do colleges preferentially admit students who excel at unprofitable sports?
Background: A few months ago I taught a high-jumper who had been told by Harvard that he would be admitted if he scored a 1300 on the SAT. This astonished me because I didn’t see why Harvard would want a champion high jumper so badly that they would lower their admissions standards so much. Later, I taught a soccer player who told me she could have gone to Harvard, but she chose Bucknell primarily because Harvard was already had upperclassment playing defense so she would have been a benchwarmer—and secondarily because Harvard didn’t offer her money. I have heard some explanations for why colleges alter their admissions policies in favor of athletes, but none have fully satisfied me.
These include 1) Title IX require schools to spend equally on male and female athletics, and school’s rain down so much money on men’s basketball and men’s football, that they have to invest heavily in unprofitable women’s sports to balance things out.
This is a very satisfying explanation, but it only explains part of the phenomena: it explains why my soccer playing student might get preferred admission and scholarships, but it doesn’t explain why my high jumping student might get into Harvard with a 1300. In addition to not explaining why students who excel at unprofitable men’s sports would receive preferred admission, this explanation does not explain why colleges that do not have profitable men’s sports teams would give preferred admission to female athletes (I am assuming that this happens).
2)Schools treat sports as loss leaders, paying for the athletic programs because of the tuition dollars name recognition brings in.
This doesn’t make sense to me because colleges are recruiting for unprofitable sports that also don’t have big followings, like high jumping. I basically can see two ways that having a good athletic program can drive applications: people wanting to go to the school because they have heard of their teams, and people wanting to go to the school because they want to play for one of their teams. High jumping doesn’t really fulfill the first criteria. I expect some people to know which school has the best high jumper, but I don’t expect this to have a big enough impact to be worth diminishing admissions standards in order to secure a good high jumper. Meanwhile, if having a good high jumping team because you want to attract high jumpers seems like a losing proposition if you are paying money and reducing admissions standards to attract good high jumpers.
3) Schools are just competitive, and having good sports teams is a way they can compete.
While I might object to this argument on the grounds that it is dumb, in some sense this makes the most sense. Emotionally, I can see how competing in a few high profile sports would snowball into competing in every sport, and elite schools certainly have money to burn. Indeed, I tacked on to this argument I have read that the present situation makes total sense because the grouping of schools we call the ivy league originates from athletic competition anyway. Nonetheless, preferred admission for talented athletes extends far beyond wealthy elite universities, so I am surprised everyone would be investing in athletic teams if they are prestige projects.
4) Schools invest in athletics programs because having a successful athletics program helps them secure donations from alums and politicians.
Once again, this explanation has some traction but I don’t feel that it explains the sum of the phenomena: I can see how alums might prefer to donate to a school that succeeds in a high profile sport; I have read evidence that politicians will allocate funds to a school that succeeds in a high profile sport; and I can conceive how alums who played an obscure sport might donate more if their team is doing well; but I don’t see how investing in low profile sports would lead to more donations, unless alums who played that sport are particularly more capable and inclined to make large donations.
Hypothesis: High achievement in sport is a good but not infallible sign of who will be successful later in life. Elite colleges are basically trying to maximize their prestige, and they get prestige by having successful alumni. Running a 4-minute mile, say, is as good a sign of who will go on to be a big wheel as a perfect SAT score. The colleges understand this, and therefore don’t just admit juku nerds. They admit some of the top jocks too, provided they are not so stupid or unprepared they can’t handle the academics.
To build on this, universities are also interested in maximizing their (risk-adjusted) long-term financial prospects. Having a student population comprised of hard-working and competitive folks with diverse abilities and interests seems like a reasonable strategy to generate a pool of alumni that are wealthy in most future states of the world.
Indeed. Haven’t there been studies done indicating that both admissions in general, as well as the average SAT scores of applying students, tend to go up for a particular school the year following a football/basketball championship.
And that’s putting aside the massive cash flow generated by such programs, which can (in theory at least) be re-distributed to academic interests.
@Matt M
Yeah, but that doesn’t really fit the category. A lot of medium to small schools are giving preferred admission to athletes too. I would be interested in any studies of the long term financial performance of athletes though. That could make sense as an explanation.
Obviously a championship team is an outlier, but can we not assume/infer a relationship wherein, all else equal, superior athletic performance will tend to attract more and better applicants?
What Johan_Larson says probably covers a good chunk of it, star athletes probably preform better than their grades and test scores would indicate. A high jump champion who gets the Harvard boost is probably going to do a lot better than your typical 1300 SAT earner.
They also aren’t lowering their standards that much as they probably aren’t admitting more than a handful of people each year under such cases, the dip in quality isn’t noticeable academically, but the boost in athletic performance is.
Actually, athletics apparently outstrips legacy for how many spots are reserved. A lot of that is football teams, but soccer teams and lacrosse teams recruit too–and team rosters for those sports are big-ish even if they aren’t as big as football.
I think there’s something fundamentally crazy about one of the best institutions of learning in the world being interested in a student because he can jump high in the air.
Because being sufficiently good at jumping high in the air takes a lot of hard work and practice no matter how talented you are.
Whereas the scores to get into Harvard are achievable with almost no effort for some small percentage of the population.
They aren’t prioritizing test-taking ability, they are prioritizing students who will take advantage of the opportunities they have to offer.
I guess the thing is that I perceive college as primarily an academic task, and I don’t necessarily think that athletics is predictive of academic accomplishment. This kid was academically good, but not Harvard good. Then again, he did have to work crazy hard at high-jumping so maybe if he had more time he would perform better. Still, 1300 down from the mean of 1550 is a big adjustment. As for the 1550 being achievable with almost no effort, I think that is a very small percentage of the population. Sharing the score with that small percentage I would expect there to be a larger percentage of students who put in ~100-200 hours of labor into getting good at the test in order to get that score. My data may be biased though since I work for a tutoring company.
Another theory: All of these schools want to promote the idea that they embrace “diversity” and have a “holistic” admissions process wherein they don’t simply admit people with the best test scores.
As such, they are highly motivated to find a few students to admit with very low test scores, to give this narrative some credibility.
If you’re going to admit any low-test-scoring students at all, well, they might as well be athletes, legacy admissions, or students who can otherwise make it worth the school’s while to admit them, despite their low test scores.
This allows the school to advertise “You don’t need to have a 1550 to get into Harvard, we’ve let in students with scores as low as 1300” to encourage applications (and the accompanying application fees of course), while they innocently leave out the whole part about all of those admits going to athletes and legacies.
In other words, these schools need token low-scorers, and athletes/legacies are the perfect way for them to still get something valuable in return for it.
5) Harvard expect your high-jumper to score over 1300 but gave him a low offer to entice him to pick them.
6) High-jumpers can be easily retrained to play basketball.
This doesn’t make sense to me. If they expected this, then they are far off the mark because 1300 is a stretch score for him. More generally, I think elite universities deal with a lot of athletes who find the curriculum challenging, because I have heard of intensive programs to keep their grades up during their tenure. Granted, a lot of this is simply because being an athlete takes up a massive amount of time.
To give a sense of how much lower 1300 is than a typical admitted student’s score, the average admitted Harvard student scores a 1540, and bear in mind that that average includes a lot of hooked applicants whom we would expect to have at least a somewhat lower score than average.
I don’t think this is true. He put in over four years into his high jumping to get where he is; when Harvard wants a basketball player, they find someone who has already put years into being good at basketball.
You’re quite probably right, I don’t know much about either this high-jumper, high-jumping in general, or basketball.
Remember, our institutions of high learning did not grow up de novo, unsullied by anything other than the purpose of academic pursuit. Modern colleges and universities are rooted in the idea of an education in the liberal arts.
Engaging in physical activity and sporting competition as part of the pursuit of education flows from this, I believe.
“Engaging in physical activity and sporting competition as part of the pursuit of education flows from this, I believe.”
That’s a good reason to have sports, but it still doesn’t explain why you’d substantially lower your academic standards to get “the best” high jumper. If anything, it seems like it would be more valuable to make your nerds high jump to round out their education. The value is in training and competing, not necessarily winning medals for Harvard.
No. It explains why sports and college go hand in hand. Once you have them hand in hand, wanting to win is just normal human ape behavior.
Engaging in physical activity and sporting competition as part of the pursuit of education flows from this, I believe.
Jumping up in the air over and over (something that the prospective student already learned to do very well in high school) will somehow intersect with or benefit his studies at Harvard? What is the connection? Instead of being synergistic, won’t the activities compete with each other for his personal time?
The complete citizen was good at everything. That was the point. They were creating warrior-citizens who could out-think and outfight you.
But again, we are talking antiquity, not current day.
What is the connection?
Remember, you’re dealing with a lot of traditional hold-overs. The idea of mens sana in corpore sano, the ideal of the well-rounded individual – neither a weedy specky swot or a brainless jock – the “battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” (mis)attributed to Wellington, sports make you manly, team sports produce leaders and teach you to be a good loser, conduce to moral as well as physical health and so on.
The influence of the 19th century movement Muscular Christianity, where a proponent of this was also a highly influential educational reformer and principal of a major public school, so the emphasis on school sports carried over to university, must also be taken into account (and remember, Harvard started off as a divinity school). Though the emphasis then moved, over time, from the “Christianity” to the “muscular” part, as success in sports was seen as a gentlemanly accomplishment (though not for pay, the distinction between “Gentlemen” and “Players” was highly important). From a Raffles story of 1899, where the father makes the son stay on at school until he finally gets into the First Eleven (the leading cricket team):
I wonder how much having completed a term of military service counts for these days when applying to a place like Harvard. I would guess not much in itself, though service in a famous unit like the SEALs or bringing home a big shiny like a Silver Star might get some attention. Perhaps shooting-war veteran status would rate.
Historical, not present day.
But being a vet probably helps you, all else being equal. Decorated in various ways helps, too.
but it doesn’t explain why my high jumping student might get into Harvard with a 1300
If your high jumper is really, really good they might get picked for the Olympics, and if they’re really, really, really good they could win a medal, even gold – and having a gold medal Olympian as one of your former students adds lustre to the radiant reputation of Harvard 🙂
Yeah, that’s probably the major goal for Harvard. Having Olympians in your student body is always a big feather in the cap.
Huh. That actually makes some sense. He told me about a classmate who had been accepted by Harvard, but decided not to go to college and just pursue an athletic career instead. He was apparently Olympic level and could be expected to compete for the US Olympics within four years. If he had chosen to go to Harvard, there’s a decent chance Harvard would have had an Olympian. That being said, this particular student was not at that level. He was just really good rather than really, really good.
I don’t think that just making offers to Olympic level (or potential) athletes works though, as they are rare enough that your programs would be rather pathetic for many years in terms of results and then you would have to sell the potential Olympian on your coaches and training staff with no results to back them up.
I once interviewed for a position at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa. They had one very large room in one of their buildings entirely filled with Bruce Jenner memorabilia which they proudly showed off during the campus tour. This was before, well, you know; I don’t know the current status of that room, but I wonder.
Schulman and Bowen studied athletics at 30 selective schools over a couple of decades, I’d see if you can track down a copy of their book: The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values.
So…basically they wrote a book that answers this question? That sounds interesting. I may check it out.
Huh, as it happens I walked on to an ivy league varsity sports team and have a bit of insight about this; it was a pretty open subject of conversation, although what I’m saying is athlete chatter based on coach gossip and so probably not fully accurate. Basically each team had a “budget” of people it could get in with scores that otherwise might not pass muster, which seemed to vary according to how many athletes the team needed, how big of a deal the sport was for the school (sports where we were a contender had more pull, as I’m guessing did the traditional prestige sports), and how much the sport was a fancy prep school thing to the point that you could get top athletes without really compromising on scores.
There was some sort of “average SAT score of recruits” metric that athletes gossiped about, and which at least seemed to be accurate. The sport that was the lowest among the mens team was a national title contender and only needed like 6 people a year; I believe lightweight crew was the highest.
My assumption is that this was rich alumni-driven to a large extent, mediated through an athletic department that was interested in having top teams in whatever sports it could, not just the ones the alumni cared most about. The alumni definitely cared, though.
Thanks. This actually starts to disperse the fog ever so slightly.
Remember that Harvard and the other Ivies haven’t always been the best universities in the world. They cared a lot more about sports back when they were less meritocratic and were also not as good universities.
I have always regarded the unprofitable sports as a kind of niche interest among certain interest groups at the university.
Also, its important to note how much of it is just institutional inertia. Most athletic departments started out as a few clubs that were cheap/free for the school to support. They give some boys a bus and an interested professor “coaches” as they travel from Cambridge to Boston to Providence and they scrum with a club at another school. Like many things in Universities the current form is just a more institutionalized, professionalized, and expensive version of that. So in the 50s your whole athletic department probably had more sports and cost less (in inflation adjusted dollars) by a significant percentage.
Now they have expensive legacy programs so they need to justify their existence, and the only way to do that is to win, and to win the high jump you probably are going to have to lower your standards.
Side point: this doesn’t just happen at elite colleges. I went to a small liberal arts school that had recently qualified for DIII, and my junior year a former DI basketball player was admitted, allegedly with a full ride. I was actually close friends with some of his close friends and they told me he had been expelled following a sexual assault accusation (He told me the same thing, though he cast more doubt on the accusation’s legitimacy). He had a penchant for sharing around alcohol and xanax, and he had sex with one of my housemates which she apparently didn’t remember, so I can see where those accusations would have come from.
Posts are like this are why I’m always surprised when people get all out of sorts about affirmative action.
The truth is, it’s far more likely that Kid A didn’t get into Selective College B because the track team found a good cross country runner, they were low on their level of out-of-state kids, an alumni had a kid hit 18, a white kid with a single Mom who’d be the first one to go to college wrote a killer essay, or an international support offered to pay full freight, all with lower SAT scores than Kid A did, than a poor black kid from Chicago snuck in with his less than ideal GPA and SAT.
The other truth is, all these things make colleges much better places to learn that if we only went only by “here are top scores 1 – 450. Send out the acceptance letters.”
I do get the impression from the articles that have been written about the current Harvard lawsuit that the really big departure from merit-based admissions is the legacy students.
The lawsuit shows rather immense differences in the racial composition that Harvard decides on compared to what you’d get from a race-blind policy.
The whole suit is about discrimination against Asians. It’s pretty obvious at the college level that affirmative action or racial discrimination or whatever you’d like to call it is a significant boost for some groups and a significant penalty for others (arbitrarily choosing the plurality of whites as a baseline).
Jesse E:
Is there a good source for the numbers here? Like, how many affirmative action admissions? How many athletes? How many legacies? How many kids whose dad just endowed a new chair?
This link shows about 29% of Harvard admissions are either black or hispanic. Those groups both have much lower average test scores than whites, and so almost certainly those students are being admitted with lower test scores than you’d need as a white kid to get in. On the other hand, 22% are Asian–they have higher test scores than whites on average, and so probably are only admitted with higher test scores than white kids need. Another source I saw said that about 29% of Harvard’s incoming students are legacy admits.
So it looks like affirmative action and legacies are probably pretty comparable in terms of probability that they’ll bump your kid out of Harvard with worse test scores/grades/etc.
There are no good numbers, because of course, we don’t actually know the SAT & GPA of each individual student that gets accepted, let alone groups like “out of state vs. in state students” or “international students who might never actually take an SAT test vs. US students” and so on and so forth.
I mean, speaking anecdotally, as a high school senior, I was in the supposed situation (poor, white, male, good but not great SAT scores) that is supposed to be according to the Narrative, complete doom, but I got accepted to more than a few colleges above my SAT score, likely because of the fact I’d be the first kid in my immediate family to go to college and more importantly, more than a few of those colleges were out of state.
On the other hand, despite my white maleness being supposed Doom for my future, I got accepted to every school I did apply to where the average was around my SAT score.
The truth is, almost nobody actually sees long term harm from having to go to their fifth choice college, even if in truth, they had the scores to get into those four other colleges. Having to go to UC-David instead of UC-Berkeley isn’t the end of the world, no matter how many suburban Tiger Mom’s may be upset about it.
Your anecdote is irrelevant next to the data we can look at. There’s even access to analysis of individual application decisions at Harvard. And being a white male isn’t the biggest penalty (or smallest bonus). Whites do ok in admissions. Being Asian has a significantly larger penalty. Students for Fair Admissions statistical evidence against Harvard is pretty damning, especially next to all the other evidence. That Harvard had to bury its own internal report years ago just makes the malfeasance even more obvious. The sudden amnesia a large chunk of their staff experienced on the witness stand was probably the best move they could make, but still pretty embarrassing.
Of course, it’s not just Harvard that behaves this way, but rarely do we get so a blatantly open a look at what’s going on. The smart way to bet is that other schools that look like they’re behaving similarly from the outside (and what we can glean from what occasionally slips out about the inside) are also behaving similarly on the inside.
EDIT: And it’s not just “Suburban Tiger Moms” whose children get the shaft. It’s bad for poor Asian kids too for whom going to Harvard may be a significant gain.
And if it’s not a big deal for some Asian kid to go to a second tier university instead of a first tier one, why is it so important for some Black kid to go to a first tier university instead of a second tier one?
I’m pretty sure nobody here is arguing that being a white male dooms you to failure, or even to not being accepted by a good college, so maybe it would be better if you didn’t beat on that strawman anymore.
At a personal level, I agree that it’s probably not all that big a deal whether you go to Harvard or Duke or UCLA for your undergrad[1]. But if we all agree on that, then wouldn’t the same hold true for affirmative action admissions? I mean, it’s also not any great hardship for a smart black kid with very good grades to go to Duke or UCLA instead of Harvard or Stanford.
I think a lot of people get mad about affirmative action programs because they violate a principle we have adopted in the rest of our society, which says that we shouldn’t discriminate based on race, religion, ethnicity, etc. And in fact, courts have sort of winked and nodded at affirmative action programs at top schools while not allowing overt, explicit discrimination–you can’t just say “Asians require a 1600 to get in, whites a 1500, hispanics a 1400, and blacks a 1300.” Instead, you have to come up with some kind of complicated scheme for managing to get that outcome (with more realistic numbers) without ever explicitly saying that, say, Asians will have higher admissions requirements than whites (who will have higher requirements than hispanics and blacks).
There are also some cumulative effects of affirmative action, which may be good or bad overall. To the extent you get into a school where you’re in the bottom 10% of the class by ability and work ethic, you’re probably going to have a hard time scraping by, and you probably will be majoring in something pretty easy. The same guy who might have majored in chemical enginering at NC State may end up in sociology at Harvard. You can imagine that having a bad effect on the world overall. On the other hand, the Ivies are basically the education system for the ruling class. Since some people in power will end up being black, it’s probably good to make sure the ruling-class-educational-system is available to them, so they’re on the same page as the rest of the ruling class.
One interesting aside: If admissions requirements are the same for everyone, then students at Stanford will notice that their black, hispanic, white, and Asian classmates are all about equal in ability. If they’re heavily skewed to get the right racial mix, then students at Stanford will notice that the Asian students are extra smart, and the black students are extra dumb (or ill prepared, or whatever). That’s an inevitable consequence of letting some groups in on lower standards than other groups. Something similar applies to athletes and legacy admissions–since they got in with fewer qualifications than others, you’d expect (assuming the qualifications reflect anything meaningful) that they would generally be at the bottom of every class, scraping by with a gentleman’s C or whatever the Ivy equivalent to that is now.
[1] Though watching how people at the top of our society approach things suggests that they believe it matters a great deal whether you go to Harvard or Duke.
Non-gendered person’s B+
But I agree with your point. If someone were to theorize about how, due to admissions preferences, scholarship athletes are generally dumber and less qualified than other students, all respectable people would nod in obvious agreement.
Try saying that about the black students and see how quickly you get run off campus by a violent mob.
I’m not familiar with a narrative that says that every last poor white male with good but not great SAT scores is doomed to failure for his future or for his college admissions; could you point me towards it? Such a narrative would be incredibly out of touch with reality, since there are plenty of poor white males with good but not great SAT scores who do perfectly well and make it into good colleges. The narrative I’m familiar with is that, all else being equal, being white provides a disadvantage for getting into colleges, especially elite colleges; that is, a poor black male with good but not great SAT scores has a higher chance of getting into colleges than a poor white male with similar SAT scores. This obviously doesn’t imply that the poor white male with good but not great SAT scores is “doomed” by any stretch of the imagination, which is what leaves me wondering where you got this narrative.
@albatross11 – You’d think, but in reality, the people upset about affirmative action are people who never had a shot to go that college in the first place and most Stanford grads are super liberal having no issue with affirmative action.
I just disregard all complaints about affirmative action as racism unless the person making the complaint is also complaining louder and longer about legacy admissions. Because those take up far more slots, and outweigh a far greater gap in academic achievement. Its not close.
Thomas Jorganson:
I just disregard all complaints about affirmative action as racism unless the person making the complaint is also complaining louder and longer about legacy admissions.
In exactly the same way, I just disregard all complaints about gender discrimination against women as anti-male hatred unless the person making the complaint is also complaining louder and longer about men working more dangerous jobs.
I mean, it’s practically the national sport to infer racism in anyone who disagrees with your policy preferences, and I certainly can’t stop you. But it’s hard to see how this makes you any smarter.
Because those take up far more slots, and outweigh a far greater gap in academic achievement. Its not close.
The best stats I could come up with for Harvard suggested about the same number of admitted students eligible for affirmative action and legacy. (Though there is surely some overlap.) Do you have a link to some better numbers? Otherwise, it seems like it’s about the same size of group. Similarly, do you have a link to what the actual differences in, say, average SAT scores are between, say average Harvard admits and black/hispanic Harvard admits? And then the same for average Harvard admits and legacy Harvard admits? Because otherwise, I don’t see how you can assert this with such certainty.
One thing I’m curious about in regards to legacy admissions…
It seems to me that this would be much more problematic at the very top, elite institutions and would become exponentially less problematic the farther down you go, whereas, affirmative action would be equally problematic all along the way.
Consider a hypothetical policy wherein if anyone in your extended family was ever a student of a particular university, you are guaranteed admission. (I concede most policies don’t work this way, but it helps get through the thought experiment.) The practical result of this is, as soon as anyone in a particular family gets into Harvard, the rest of the family is guaranteed Harvard admission forever. But it never really goes down or goes away. You’re much more likely to see people using a legacy claim to gain admission to Harvard than to Middle Tennessee State, because everyone would use the legacy to pick the best school anyone in their family ever got into.
Therefore, Harvard would have a ton of legacy admits relative to student body size, but Middle Tennessee State would have very few, and over time, this proportion would do nothing but continue to increase.
Am I thinking about this right?
Re: legacy vs affirmative action
In general, we care about racial/gender/ethnic/sexual orientation discrimination where we don’t care about other kinds. So if the Masterpiece Cake Shop guy refused to bake me a cake because he and my dad had a big falling out and he’s holding a grudge against my family, I don’t think there would be a legal remedy for that[1]. You might personally think he was kind of a jerk for refusing to bake me a cake for such a reason, but he wouldn’t get hassled by the authorities for it.
I think the same issue applies w.r.t. affirmative action vs legacy vs athletic admissions.
And as I’ve said before, I’m actually okay with two paths forward from here w.r.t. school admissions and other private business/association:
a. Free association for all–use whatever criteria you like for admissions, it’s nobody’s business but your own.
b. Antidiscrimination law for all–no discrimination for or against any race/ethnicity/religion/gender/sexual orientation.
What I don’t think makes sense is a situation where antidiscrimination laws apply only to other people, but not to me or my kids. I certainly am not going to be a supporter of such a system!
[1] I am not a lawyer, so someone who knows more please pipe up!
Matt M:
Do most colleges even do legacy admissions? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of State U making a legacy admission decision, but maybe they do.
I don’t know for sure – but I don’t see why they wouldn’t.
I went to Business School (at a very large but reasonably well respected state university) with a kid who had the same last name as was on the basketball arena (and we checked, it was not a coincidence).
He seemed bright enough to me, but I have to imagine that there was no circumstance whatsoever in which the school was going to tell that family no…
@albatross11
This seems interesting and super testable.
What’s more, if an institution can be suspected of prejudice against blacks, no one demands (or should) that it be shown to be meritocratic in every other respect before anyone’s allowed to to be troubled about it.
It’s not about any particular kid. Admission to a particular college isn’t a prize to be won by doing well in a contest.
As long as you think about it that way, you are going to have many distorted downstream beliefs.
@Brad
What you think I believe doesn’t reflect my actual beliefs, and I was responding to someone else’s ridiculous claim so what would you like to argue about?
Hopefully it will be better than the last few times where your argument against a more uniform standard for admissions (by major say, we’re not crazy) for any school taking significant amounts of federal money (read: all of them) boiled down to “Universities say they each have special unique admissions criteria that are totally distinct from each other and well calibrated, so we should trust them on that”. All the evidence from court cases, admissions statistics, and Brown being where kids who don’t get into Harvard go notwithstanding.
Harvard is over 30% legacies, and the odds of any given legacy applicant being accepted is five times that of the average applicant.
And legacy applicants almost certainly average worse qualifications than the general pool of applicants (because few mediocre applicants without a legacy advantage will even waste the postage. Not zero, but..) so that likely understates the multitude of sins having a parent who was a grad will cover for.
Sure, this is not an equivalent problem at lesser schools, but it certainly is at this end of the scale. And it matters because these schools are where the future leadership of the US make their connections – and the US is not supposed to be a hereditary aristocracy.
RE;”Student athletes” Problem is that the schools are expecting them to perform at a professional level. Which is a full time job.
Does not really matter how bright they are going in, trying to keep up with a meaningful course load and be a high end basket-ball player at the same time just does not work – and since their continued attendance depends on their athletic performance, its the studies that suffer. For american hand egg, you can add a large number of concussions per semester on top of that, which means they will leave dumber than they arrived due to out-right brain damage.
.. american hand-egg really has no place on a campus. Seriously, quit it with the barbarity.
Brad:
In living memory, the Ivy league schools put a lid on the number of Jewish students admitted per year. Basically, Jewish kids were taking up too many slots in the top schools by the unfair and biased tactic of being smarter and working harder than the other students[1]. Was there anything wrong with that policy? Because to my mind, that policy was pretty horrible–it was deeply unjust in how it treated individual students. But your comment would apply nicely as an answer to any objection to that policy–indeed, the whole reasoning for the Jewish quota was about wanting to shape the student body in a more desirable way, rather than having it become heavily populated with second-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose parents were shopkeepers in NYC.
[1] A tactic the Asian students have now cunningly copied.
Jesse E:
You mean like Thomas Sowell (Harvard, U Chicago)? Or Charles Murray (Harvard, MIT)? Or Stephen Hsu (Caltech, Yale, Harvard)?
Obviously, most people with an opinion on these issues didn’t go to an Ivy League[0] college, because that’s a pretty small set of people. But there are a fair number of Ivy Leaguers who oppose affirmative action.
And AA applies to universities all the way down the line. Harvard and Duke and UNC and NC State are all going to be applying racial preferences in their admissions[1], and someone who would rather get their kid into Duke than UNC has as much of a dog in this fight as someone who’d rather send their kid to Stanford than to Berkeley.
[0] Caltech and MIT aren’t Ivy League, but they’re absolutely elite schools that are rightly very hard to get into.
[1] Unless NC has made it illegal for state schools to do that–I don’t know.
If it isn’t this, then what is it?
A lottery of random chance?
@Thomas Jørgensen
Fully agreed. Legacies are a terrible system and American hand-egg should be paid for by the NFL instead of being a free minor league paid for by places that are supposedly school.
Which is yet another reason why we should switch to a system of standardized entrance exams (like many other civilized places in Europe or Asia have had now or in the past) with explicitly adjusted passing bars or quotas for socioeconomic status if we want to engage in some sort of societal balancing. I think it’s a rather ineffective method of adjusting the socioeconomic welfare of a group if individuals don’t matter, and it’d be better to cut checks or figure out better investments in schools lower down the pipeline then make those investments. But it’s not crazy.
EDIT: And to prevent rule by a hereditary aristocracy, we should probably ban people from running for political office if their parents, spouse, or siblings achieved political office. Some term limits would be nice too. To be really safe, maybe we should go further along the family tree and in time. Say r must be less than 1/4, or it must have been at least 50 years.
a lottery
There are those who assert and desire exactly that. For job applications and for housing rental as well.
They usually dress it up in fancier words, and hide it behind processes like “the first person to meet the pre-published qualifications”. Which is random, and so is a lottery.
Desire is one thing, but as an assertion, this seems clearly and obviously untrue.
We can prove, statistically, that higher SAT scores increase your chance to get admitted into Harvard (but do not increase your chance to win Powerball). So does being black. So does being good at football. Etc.
To the extent that admissions are a lottery, that implies the jobs of the entire admissions department at every university, as well as the entire “help you get into college” industry are completely and totally frivolous and are adding zero value. BS-jobs theory aside, that would be a huge and glaring market inefficiency…
This is just a pro-slippery-slope argument in disguise. “We have all these other exceptions, why not this one?” No, each exception needs its own justification, and racial discrimination needs an extraordinary justification.
That’s why I’m glad programs like affirmative action exist, to fight against the racial discrimination that looking at just SAT scores and GPA would create, so that people are judged on the content of their character, instead of how where they came from.
Where’s the racial discrimination on the SAT? How does the test discriminate against black people and for Asians?
You can tell the content of someone’s character by the color of his skin?
Oh look, there’s someone unironically making the literal “black people must, on average, just have really great personalities, while Asians must have really terrible ones” argument.
Actually @Matt M, I’d be all for removing SAT scores & GPA’s from college admissions totally, so Asian college students will be able to show off their great personalities instead of the 40 after school clubs and perfect 1600/2400 SAT score they had drilled into them.
What makes you so confident that barring any and all objectively measurable criteria from admissions standard will help disfavored minority groups?
Or do you agree with me that in the sense of college admissions, blacks and hispanics are actually the favored groups, while whites and asians are the disfavored ones?
@Jesse E
@Matt M
Actually, I had a Chinese student make an arguement for grade inflation that was kind of like this. Basically, she argued that if grades were all inflated nobody’s parents would be able to get mad at them. It would be extremely difficult to prevent parents from pressuring their children like hell to be able to win in the college application race no matter what adjustments you make, but anything that would structurally make it harder to pressure your kid like hell into grinding a lot of their life and wellbeing into a marginal advantage in the college admission competition might help a lot of teenagers lives.
Followup: any ideas on how this could be done?
Sidenote: I have taught three black students who were going pushing their lives into the same marginal advantage grinder so this is definitely not exclusively an asian thing (nor an asian/jewish thing, though we do have more of those groups than we do others at the center particularly when the demographics of the Scarsdale/Ardsley/White Plains/Greenburgh are are considered.
Wait, White Plains has those kind of schools now?
It used to be Yonkers North …
I’m not sure what you mean by “How this could be done?” It’s already occurring in some places. There’s no physical law preventing teachers from giving everyone who shows up an A.
However, the obvious side effect of these sorts of schemes will be to reduce any signal of intelligence, persistence, or academic ability that is currently in grades. The more you narrow the distribution of grades, the less pressure from parents about grades but the less signal there is.
At that point, why not just skip all the time and money we waste sorting people into university to supposedly learn things and just have them draw the amount of prestige and lifelong pay increase they’ll receive after four years out of a hat. We can even have people of different socioeconomic or ethnic background draw out of different hats if we want to equalize groups or increase social mobility.
Make the richness of the reward from the hats inversely related to family wealth, and I’ll be on board. That should have the side effect of also evening out racial imbalances in wealth without doing something weird like rewarding rich black people over poor Asian people.
People who want to learn can then do it for the joy of things, and those who want certain jobs can get not terribly prestigious technical certifications.
Even more seriously though (I really think the hat system has serious advantages but obviously it’s impossible), it’s not that parents have some unfailing obsession with school no matter how school works. Make school grades irrelevant and pushy parents will push their children to work hard at some other task that does help those children get ahead.
Two questions here, at least:
– why care about sports at all?
– why care about less popular sports?
40 years ago, when Harvard admitted me to their undergraduate program, they cared about having a highly varied student body, partly for the sake of the experiences that would bring to their core demographic (“1000 future leaders of America”). I imagine I got some preference for being foreign for this reason.
Some of the odd sports could be for similar reasons.
As for the rest, a lot of educational institutions really really care about sports, especially major sports. So do a lot of people. I have no empathy for the desire to watch athletes compete, and identify with one group of them because of some extremely casual, non-personal connection. (e.g. Went to the same school, grew up in the same country, hired by team currently based in the city where you live, etc.) So I can’t say whether someone with the sports-fan attribute will care about having “their” group excel in all sports, or just a subset, even if they prefer to watch only a subset. Maybe these people actually care about the performance of all Harvard teams. (My high school certainly cared more about the performance of all their athletes, than anyone’s academic performance, judging by the recognition they gave. And AFAIK, the same is true for almost all US high schools – possibly less common in other countries. So why not colleges too?)
It might also be about donations – capitalizing on alumni with the sports-fan attribute. But there I’d expect a lot more focus on football, which seems to be Harvard’s historically huge rivalry (vs Yale), and the one game few students missed watching – and perhaps crew (racing 8 seat rowed boats) as upper crust and similar.
I was talking to an expert on malaria who has worked in Asian. He told me that a public health official confessed that they don’t actually want to eliminate malaria in his country because of all the money that fighting malaria brings in, and because in his country malaria mostly afflicts minority populations. This expert also told me that China has done a fantastic job at combating malaria in China.
An Indonesian official, maybe? Nearly all of Asia has apparently been doing a decent job combating malaria:
http://www.who.int/gho/malaria/malaria_003.jpg
The “malaria reduced 50%-75% from 2000 to 2015” category is practically the worst case; most places beat 75%.
“This expert also told me that China has done a fantastic job at combating malaria in China.”
Tens of millions of cases per year in the 50s through 70s, but then nearly an order of magnitude improvement every decade thereafter? (Or even better, when you don’t count malaria cases “imported” from travelers who acquired it elsewhere) Yeah, that’s outstanding, even by comparison to everyone else’s progress.
Peter Duval?
The general rule of history is that it’s best to keep war as far away as possible from your home. The US has done a good job of that, and it’s more important than ever given how interconnected our economy is with our allies.
There are a lot of differences between the two cases. Germany wouldn’t have simply sailed a bunch of ships from London to land on Long Island. (Well, probably.) The obvious thing to do is seize forward bases for bombardment and blockade. Newfoundland would be the most likely first choice. Secure your supply lines there, then land on the mainland somewhere without heavy defenses. Note that the Atlantic Wall relied on a fairly high force/space ratio. This is not plausible in America, so the chances of throwing them back on the beaches are not that high.
Ultimately, the war will almost certainly hinge on control of the sea. While the USN will probably win that one, it isn’t certain, and I really wouldn’t want to live through a world where we had to find out.
If US foreign policy were to only respond to literal invasions, wouldn’t the obvious German move be to conquer some Caribbean islands, then Mexico, then launch a ground campaign through Texas? Or have I played too much Hearts of Iron?
The US is huge, especially Texas and the Midwest. I think New Orleans is something like 800-900 miles along major roads from Mexico, so you’re talking about an invasion that makes the logistics of Operation Barbarossa look like a trip to the gas station.
Also, if you can manage that invasion, you already assume you can fight and defeat the USN. So if you can fight and defeat the USN, you can launch an amphibious invasion somewhere along the Eastern seaboard, and therefore don’t have to go that route. If you DO try to Operation Barbarossa through Texas without defeating the USN, all your soldiers will wind up becoming POWs, really, really fast.
That’s pretty much what I was getting at, although I was assuming that even the most isolationist US wouldn’t be stupid enough to let that happen. But yes, if the US decides “no response to anything except an invasion of us, ever”, that becomes viable. I’d probably go for Canada over Mexico, because of shorter supply lines, but Mexico is a viable second option, and one that deeply worried the US in the early years of the 20th century.
@ADBG
The big difference is that you can use the enormous blue highway called the Gulf of Mexico to move stuff forward to support the troops. But I’d base in Canada and go after the Northeast/current rust belt, which is where US industrial strength was concentrated then.
Canada is the obvious starting point because, Canada having declared war on Germany in 1939, Germany can “legitimately” invade and conquer Canada without the hypothesized isolationist USA being able to do anything about it. Once Canada is in German hands, the road distance from Toronto to Washington is less than that from Warsaw to Moscow, and Winnipeg to Houston is shorter than Bucharest to Baku. Also, with a spring invasion, the Germans can stay ahead of winter as they march south.
If Barbarossa is thinkable, so is this. And nobody will be offering the United States any Lend-Lease in this hypothetical.
I’d be scared launching the initial attack. Don’t you have to get as far as Galveston before you have a port that can support an invasion?
From there, where do you go to take out the US? Up the Mississippi?
This is a huge freaking area though. NYC to Detroit is 600+ miles and you have to drive south through all of Upstate NY to get to Pennsylvania by land, and then through large chunks of Pennsylvania to get to their industrial centers. You can send bombers over the great lakes to hit a lot of the industrial centers if you get your airstrips far enough south.
The more I think about it Newfoundland isn’t a viable staging area at all. The areas physically attached to Canada have extremely low population density due to the climate conditions, and the island portion means doubling your exposure for an invasion, first hitting the island and then transporting again from the island, and you are still a thousand miles (literally) from the nearest major US city (Boston).
These calculations are putting the cart before the horse, you are going to need a massive invasion just to cut the distance to half the Warsaw to Moscow. Planning to invade the US through Canada is way crazier than Barbarossa unless you are just assuming the Canadian invasion is all peaches and cream.
@ADBG
I was thinking of using something like LSTs. You’d load into coastal craft somewhere in Mexico, then send them up to support the invasion.
I guess. I’d definitely start from Canada instead of Mexico, though.
@baconbits9 says:
That’s a feature, not a bug. I want somewhere lightly defended and far from the enemy’s centers. The fact that it’s an island makes it easy to defend while you build up your own forces. And it’s a lot easier to go from Newfoundland to Boston than it is to go from London to New York direct. And if it fails, it’s a lot easier to write off from a propaganda front than an attempt to secure New York or Boston directly.
I don’t see how any of this actually works. Yes landing in a lightly defended area is easier, but the goal isn’t to land, its to land, hold and stage. By taking this position you have made your landed troops and equipment completely immobile, painted a large target right on top of them and done no actual damage to Canada’s military condition. If you attack a strongly defended area the initial attack is more likely to fail, but given its success you will have impeded your enemies ability to resist (unless they are defending worthless areas). Controlling a waterway, oil reserves or dominating manufacturing will improve chances of further success. Additionally a strongly defended position that has been overcome is often a position that can be strongly defended by the conquerors, and you get to turn the remaining defenses to your own use.
Landing a million troops in Newfoundland in the 1940s would mean that there is no infrastructure to handle them, there won’t be the food, water or electrical capabilities to support such a mass of men, and anything less won’t be of practical use in invading the rest of Canada. You will be cramming men, weapons and important support areas into a tiny spot with limited resupply areas (I don’t know how many deep ports there are, but there won’t be enough to stop a determined Canadian air force). Virtually the entire island will be a high value, target rich environment.
That’s not the question*, the question is how hard is it to land and then stage in Newfoundland and then attack Boston, vs some other plan in its entirety.
*I also don’t know that it is actually correct given the geography, getting off the island and puttering down to Boston is easier, but it is also the obvious target, making defense easier. If you have a high seas fleet then defense has to be more spread out, and you get to focus an attack on one of several areas. Attacking from Newfoundland and going overland means every man, transport and supply has to be loaded up twice at a minimum, and you have to bring enough supplies to cross hundreds of miles of varying geography with a hard timer on, and you have to consistently push beyond your air support or hug the coast and have aircraft carriers all for the big goal of what, getting troops into Maine so you can restart the whole process again the next spring to get you to Boston?
We’re talking long-term, though: Invading Canada makes sense on its own, for at least two reasons: it’s likely the site of most revanchist Brits and maybe French, and occupying it would be a deterrent in case the U.S. ever stopped being isolationist. Then a decade or two later, when Canada is fully incorporated into the Reich, the U.S. might look pretty tasty.
Nitpick: Until 1949, Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada; it was its own British colony (as opposed to Canada, which was a mostly-technically-independent Dominion.)
That said, that doesn’t change at all the situation on the ground, and I expect it would effectively become a part of Canada or the United States in any timeline where the Nazis conquered the British Isles.
Agreed. You’d need to take Halifax to have an actual beachhead in North America.
Edit: Here is a population density map of Newfoundland. The terrain is also very favourable for an insurgency: plenty of small coves for smuggling and the overland route from the Avalon peninsula to the west coast has many points where an effective ambush could be set up.
@baconbits
What do you mean, “completely immobile”? They’re still by the sea, are they not? When I need to move them, I’ll put them back on ships.
Military operations can either improve your position, harm the enemy’s, or both. I’m pushing hard for number 1, because I don’t think that a transatlantic invasion of the sort of strategic position you are talking about is possible at all. In my plan, I just have to overcome the defenses of Argentia, or build my own base, whichever is easier. I don’t need all of Newfoundland, and I can easily isolate the battlefield to prevent the enemy from pouring in more troops. This requires a couple divisions, max. You’re going to need a couple dozen, and you can’t do shuttle runs with your transports.
I don’t need a million men all at once. I need maybe a tenth of that to start, and they build the base for everyone else. Once I have enough men there, I move them by short-range craft to somewhere more important. More than that, my turnaround for reusing the invasion craft is now a couple days, not a couple of weeks. This is basically the plan the US used against Japan.
How do you know that if you don’t know how many ports there are?
Have you actually looked at a map? Newfoundland is slightly bigger than Cuba, and in no danger of tipping over no matter how many troops you put on it.
What other plan?
What’s this about going overland? That’s a terrible plan. The whole point is that you’d launch a second amphibious assault at Boston or Halifax or Montreal, but with air support within some semblance of range, and lots of troops and material relatively close by and ready to be shuttled to the front. Seriously, this is me you’re talking to. You expected me to have the troops walk?
@Tenacious D
I don’t care about 90% of Newfoundland. I’d just carve out a section, throw everyone out, and announce that nobody was allowed back in. Small boats and airplanes should keep the Canadians from getting serious forces onto the island, and sniping at the guards just means a few more sad families back in Germany, but a lot fewer than I’d have if I tried a direct assault on a major city.
Landing site in Newfoundland has the advantage in that it’s directly controlled by the UK in this point in history (WWII). So concievably, they don’t have to be invading, so much as claiming to help their new ally “Vichy England” put down a rebellion. And this could take place well ahead of the actual invasion of Canada/US: they can do it as prep work while consolidating their hold on Eurasia, so you have a sitzkrieg situation for a while, until men are freed up to make the invasion into the mainland.
The most likely reason for the initial Nazi invasion of North America, in this hypothetical, is to stop the Free Royal Navy from being a pest in the Atlantic and e.g. harrying German trade with the still-neutral United States. That’s going to mean taking St. John’s and Halifax and holding both, but not any of the surrounding countryside.
OTOH, Halifax is (barely) on the mainland, so the Canadian (or Free Britannic) Army gets to be a pest to the Halifax garrison rather than the Free Royal Navy pestering Germany’s Atlantic trade. Given the geography, and the limited resources Canada can bring to bear without US aid, that’s probably something a stiff Luftwaffe presence can keep in check.
Until they get tired of that and decide to put an end to it by conquering or Vichifying the rest of Canada.
@Chipsa, that might fly in this hypothetical isolationist United States, but definitely not in Canada, which would probably be playing host to whatever members of the Royal Family had escaped Britain. (They’re the Canadian royal family too.)
For that matter, even if the legal reasoning is unimpeachable, I think even this United States would start to get nervous at German troops establishing themselves in the New World. It’d probably take a while to actually rebuild a US Army, though; Germany just might have some time.
@ bean
To reply to several of your posts in the same vein all together:
1. I don’t think you are improving your strategic position (ignoring the possibility that the Canadians accept the landing as a non invasion because NFL is technically park of GB and let it slide) by landing on an island off the coast of Canada. The effect of landing 100,000 troops and building the infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands if not millions more will simply make it a large target for the Canadian air force. This is a point you have not addressed, how will you manage to make the necessary preparations while being exposed to bombing raids for as long as Canada has planes, bombs and fuel left? How are you simultaneously going to hold onto that small part of the island when Canada has around half a million troops, and has to cross 1/100th the distance that your resupply lines need to?
2. When I say the troops are effectively immobile I mean that they will have to load up, be transported by one of the slowest methods available at the time and then unloaded to achieve any further gains. Until they get back on the ships they are functionally zero threat while being a huge liability between their exposure to Canadian fire and the long, slow and expensive supply line they need to survive.
Just how strong do you think the Canadian air force is likely to be? Argentia is about 300 miles from the nearest point on the mainland, in Nova Scotia, and St. John’s is even further away (Labrador is probably out for logistical reasons). That’s at the very edge of fighter range, unless the Americans start handing out Mustangs. So if you bounce the enemy early enough, the fighters have to go home before they get all the way over the target. Unescorted bombers are easy meat. And the Canadians have to retain forces to protect the other Maritimes, too. The overwhelming majority of the planes the Canadians built during the war were trainers. While those are vital and often overlooked, they’re useless against the Wehermacht in Newfoundland.
Have you heard of aircraft carriers? And please, give me numbers on how many planes you expect the Canadians to have. Because it’s going to be lower than you think.
I’m going to be praying they dispatch a substantial fraction of that force to Newfoundland. Once it’s safely on the island, I start hitting its supplies hard, then make my actual landing in Nova Scotia. Hello, self-guarding POW camp! Seriously, we’ve already established that I have sea superiority, so they can’t deploy nearly as effectively as I can, regardless of the distances. You’re not thinking like a maritime strategist here. (That said, you might be thinking like a German. Which is probably why they lost the war.)
You really haven’t thought this through, and I’ve gotten bored.
This is extremely unlikely to work as the Canadian and US focus would be to push back the invasion there. Sure, technically stopping the first landing might be tough, but stopping the building of bases and resupply lines across the entire Atlantic wouldn’t be complicated (expensive, yes) from a military point of view. Germany would have to control the Atlantic with its navy and the landing sites in Canada with its air force, or they have to commit to shipping more materials than are being destroyed by bombing raids.
The best (only?) chance for Germany to bring a war to the US would be an alliance with Mexico, where Japan controls/distracts/embargoes major Pacific ports, German does the same in the Atlantic and Mexico takes as many oil producing areas in the South as they can. You could possibly hold Texas with Mexico for long enough to starve the US of oil allowing major invasion preparation to begin.
The US focus, in this hypothetical, is to not fire a shot until a foreign army is actually invading the United States.
Are we talking literally nothing that could be construed as military aid or no engagement? If the US is willing to provide similar levels of aid to Canada that it was doing for England/France/Russia before they entered the war then the invasion should still be doomed. Air control ought to go to Canada, and Germany is going to be landing hundreds of thousands to millions of troops in an area that currently only has a population around a half million. They are going to have to build all kinds of invasion infrastructure while being completely dependent on supplies coming across the Atlantic.
If you aren’t catching Canada completely off guard then you are sitting back for 5-10 years and building a huge Navy complete with massive amounts of aircraft carriers to support and defend the initial invasion.
I guess this is plausible if you are stipulating total victory in Europe where the Germans have caused the Soviets to sue for peace and England has been invaded and subdued.
This doesn’t work any better. Mexico can’t stand against the US without extensive German support, which has to be sustained in the face of the USN trying to stop it. That’s going to be just as hard as going after Newfoundland, if not harder. And I find it hard to imagine a US isolationist enough to not take measures against a Mexico that appeared to be conspiring with Germany to invade Texas.
The political viability of isolationism is partly a function of how likely it seems to the public that the country is under threat. As the visible threat increases, the willingness of the public to support a bigger military and more aggressive foreign policy will increase.
Per the OP, the United States’ participation in World War II as it happened constitutes an unjust offensive war because of hostile American policies towards the Axis in 1939-1941. We’re exploring the “what if we didn’t do that?” counterfactual, so no lend-lease, no trade embargoes, nothing of that sort.
Which is why you need Japan casuing trouble in the Pacific, Mexico in the south and Germany in the Atlantic. Perhaps you could try a mass landing in New Jersey which would tie up a lot of the US military as they have to protect NY, Philly and Baltimore/DC around the same time as the Mexico invasion of Texas. Perhaps you could try the opposite and land in NJ and try to take a couple of the major cities nearby to convince Mexico that the US was on the brink of being broken, while also drawing the forces needed to defend the initial push up into Texas, but that is a huge gamble.
I don’t think any of these options are good, traveling thousands of miles to invade a large, prosperous, and populous nation isn’t going to go well in general, which is why my scenario included three belligerent nations causing issues in three different arenas. I doubt that I would assign as much as a 5% chance of victory is such a scenario, but this is the type of outline where you can actually define terms of how the US could be beaten (forcing difficult decisions in where to deploy resources while threatening access to a major necessary resource).
Let’s drill more into that ‘control of the seas’ question. If the invasion would hinge on control of the seas, control of the seas would presumably hinge on a naval building race. What would that look like? Would Germany’s European empire give it a shot at matching the US?
Also, are we assuming London is in German hands? Would that be due to Germany being able to devote its full attention to the Battle of the Atlantic?
Most of them are not defensive, I agree. And yet most, including the most blatantly non-defensive, have made America and/or the world much better off.
Mexican-American was a blatant land grab, and yet the inhabitants of that land today are undoubtedly better off for that grab having occurred.
The Confederacy wasn’t much of a threat to the citizens of the Union, but it sure was to the slaves inside it.
Spanish-American–we didn’t do great by the colonies we got, but ‘better than continued Spanish rule’ is a low enough bar that we probably cleared it.
WWI I don’t have a detailed case for. My gut says the conventional wisdom that Germany was Bad is substantially correct, but I don’t expect that to persuade anyone. I’d be interested in any good analysis of the counterfactual here.
WWII has been discussed enough elsewhere in the thread.
Korea is the reason that today’s South Korea isn’t part of North Korea. I consider this a very good thing.
Vietnam I’ll give you was a mistake. BUT, it was a mistake committed in the prosecution of the Cold War, which was absolutely both a defensive conflict of necessity, and an enormous net positive for the US and the world.
Later wars are a different conversation in which I have fewer strong opinions.
I think we need better statistics on how many Everett branches ended in thermonuclear fire before we can claim that the cold war was a net positive for the world.
Also how many branches without the cold war ended up with the remaining starving Americans having to learn Russian to speak to their masters.
Not that many, I think. The US out-missiled Russia for most of the Cold War, so Russia would’ve ended up at least as devastated as America.
Yes, that too. 🙂 I suspect not very many, but it’s difficult to be certain about these things.
It’s come up here before that nuclear war is much less of an existential threat than popularly imagined. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_of_complete_human_extinction:
The United States and Soviet Union/Russia nuclear stockpiles, in total number of nuclear bombs/warheads in existence throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War era.
ETA: Non-existential harm from nuclear war would of course still be severe and quite relevant to our evaluation of the Cold War.
Billions dead and most civilization in the northern hemisphere wrecked, yes. Human extinction, probably not. Even a nuclear winter would make things nastier for the survivors, but presumably the New Zealanders and Chileans and such would mostly survive.
Isn’t that also true about climate change (that the likelihood of significant damages is high, but the likelihood of actual extinction is very very low?)
Humans are so adaptive that total extinction is very unlikely. See the documentaries about Mad Max for evidence of this.
Gross or net?
The likelihood that there will be significant negative effects is high, as for almost any large change. I don’t think the likelihood that the net effect will be large and negative is large, although that’s certainly the currently orthodox claim.
Regarding whether Americans were threatened in WWII: Hawaiians are Americans.
(Also, you said “American citizens” but defending territories should maybe get partial credit? The Philippines were US territory and got straight-up conquered, and while you might be able to argue Japan would’ve left Hawaii alone if the US agreed not to intervene against them, no way they were letting the Philippines be)
And don’t forget the American citizens who died on Attu Island or in Dutch Harbor.
^
@Aevylmar, .
Are we really in a “culture war”?
About what?
I’m absolutely serious.
I’ve read and even used the term “culture war”, and I realize that I really don’t know what that means.
I have never been outside of what are now called “Blue States” for even a total of one month in my whole lifetime, so I be blinkered on this, and for most of the 21st century I seldom read things “on-line” (I was only issued a “Smart phone” a couple of years ago, and it’s only recently that I’ve thought to ask questions like this), but I only have guesses.
Different mores between rural and urban areas?
That’s not new, novels of the 1920’s and ’30’s focused on that.
Different regional “folkways”?
A few years ago I read “Albion’s Seed” (that Scott Alexander did a great review of it is one of the things that inspired me to read more of his writings) which detailed long historic cultural differences between regions of the US.A., so nothing new there.
I definitely remember a time of cultural changes that directly influenced me: the 1970’s when my and the majority of my classmates parents divorced, and that parents no longer felt social pressure stick it out “for the sake of the children” seems to me the biggest cultural change of my lifetime, but I don’t remember a “war” about it (they really should have been IMNSHO) and the things that I read about that are described as issues of a “culture war” now (who gets to use what restrooms, nonsense about pronouns) seem small ball to me.
Much mention is made of “feminism”, but that was a change of the 1970’s!
So what is this “culture war”, and what is being fought over?
Some people on the internet disagree with other people on the internet.
@rlms, That’s been a suspicion of mine, that this so-called “culture war’ is either just ink and pixels spilled over something of no consequence to most people (like Dungeons & Dragons “edition wars”), or it’s people play-acting arguments over the cultural changes of the 1970’s (that most internet users are too young to even remember!), not unlike people dressing in blue or grey uniforms for Civil War reenactments, a hobby which is also of no significant real world consequences for most people who don’t have the hobby.
Can anyone point ut some examples that show it worth it to regard “the culture war” as more worthy of notice than Renaissance Faires and the SCA?
If someone gets fired (or can’t get a job in the first place) because of the culture war, is that still just ink and pixels? Nobody gets fired because they made a remark in a public forum about how they hate 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. This does happen for the culture war.
What if he’s boycotted or sued?
Also, politics involves real-world things such as elections and political policies. The dominance of one side of the culture war in ink and pixels leads to domination in politics, and that’s definitely full of real world consequences.
@Jiro,
People getting hired and fired because of cultural and political affinities is nothing new (Hell which Union you could become an apprentice of used to depend on what county in Ireland your grandparents came from, what church and school you went to, and which politicians sign was in your window have long effected what jobs you could get.
What’s new?
Why is it worthy of being called a “culture war”?
I think “culture war” encompasses topics where a large fraction of participants are likely to be mindkilled–unable to think about the actual discussion at hand, because it’s wrapped up in bigger tribal/partisan conflicts, or questions of identity, or moral questions that encompass factual beliefs.
Also, “culture war” typically involves stuff where there’s a large loud public group who will attack the other side without any concern for consistency or logic or justice–I want my side to win and yours to lose and that’s that.
Why is it worthy of being called a “culture war”?
Because it’s a struggle for who gets to define the culture. People get hired and fired depending on what pull they have, sure, and that won’t change – but the background culture will change from “it’s acceptable to fire Joe because he’s divorced/black/gay/trans” to “it’s acceptable to fire Joe because he’s not divorced/black/gay/trans”.
Research on transgender reaps the whirlwind. The only surprising thing is that some people are actually willing to research such matters.
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/08/29/reader-outcry-prompts-brown-to-retract-press-release-on-trans-teens/
The increasing political polarization is real, though. Here is data from Pew. Things really are different than they were 20 years ago.
@Plumber
I think the whole war thing is an overblown metaphor, but I have a bone to pick with a claim you keep making
You keep saying things along these lines in thread after thread, and unless you get more specific it’s just not true. You say you’re blue collar and maybe for blue collar people there has been no shift. But it’s not true in general.
I grew up in California in the 90s, and the biggest change is that the current cultural zeitgeist is way different on gay and trans issues. Just go look at some polls on support for gay marriage. Polls for the country have shifted tens of points in the last two decades. And it’s not due to people dying or just one group becoming more supportive of gay marriage. There’s a gradual upward trend in support for gay marriage among almost every group and subgroup.
I’ve lived in pretty blue areas for over a decade now, and I’ve seen friends start somewhere to my right on racial issues and then slowly plod somewhere to my left. I haven’t seen the reverse. This shift hasn’t been very significant, but it’s notable next to the above changes which were huge and obvious.
@quanta413,
Huh.
That is a shift in national cultural attitudes, and relatively recently, not a generation ago.
I stand corrected.
Can anyone point ut some examples that show it worth it to regard “the culture war” as more worthy of notice than Renaissance Faires and the SCA?
It’s perfectly possible to be in circumstances that causes something that affects everyone else to completely miss you.
If I went and asked, for example, a farmer in the Andes in 1924 about “the World War”, it’s perfectly possible that he’d reply “what World War?” and be suspicious when I went and told him about how important this massive war that happened over in Europe, and if he asked me “how did that affect me?” I’d probably not be able to come up with anything.
The problem is, if I went and asked, for another example, a Japanese factory machinist the same question in 1924, he’d probably have the same answer. Oh, there would be some minor differences; the newspaper probably had some stories about islands changing hands and such. But (absent the omniscience of hindsight) I’d be hard pressed to explain to him how that affected his life, even as the harsh terms resulting from that war helped fuel the rise of nationalism and antisemitism in Germany, which led to a number of prominent scientists ending up in the United States, and I’d be hard pressed to explain how all that affected him right up until his factory (and much of the city) vanished in a blinding flash in 1945.
WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Sept. 5 on the social media company’s algorithms and content monitoring, the committee said on Friday.
“This committee intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content, and we look forward to Mr. Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company’s algorithms and content judgment calls,” Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement.
I mean, if you don’t care about social media, how can congress grilling the CEO of Twitter possibly affect you? Unless, of course, you would happen to live in a city in which Twitter had a major corporate office and in which the company and its employees contribute to the local economy (such as San Fransisco, where Twitter has its company headquarters).
Ultimately, though what happens in congressional testimony can cause the fortunes of companies like Twitter to temporarily go up and down (which is still on the order of billions of dollars of value, which is a lot of Renaissance Faires and SCA), the long term health of social media corporations (and a lot of other cultural producers, such as companies that produce movies, books, and video games) is going to depend on how well they read the market, and most of the culture war ends up as market signaling. The left thinks the social media market wants a space free from harassment (as they define it, often using terms derived from social justice). The right thinks the social media market wants a space where everyone is free to talk, with minimal rules applied evenly. For the social media market, the “culture war” is two fold, both convince other people that your side’s idea of the future of social media is correct, and to use those people to convince the company to implement it. Billions of dollars are at stake in reading the social media market correctly, and the same game is being played elsewhere, from movies, to sports, to video g*m*s (all also multi-billion dollar industries). And, as the congressional investigation suggests, a lot of people feel that all of this feeds back into politics, and that’s something you can’t deny affects you.
Minor nitpick: the Japanese factory machinist would probably be perfectly aware of WWI, as it produced a massive boom in Japanese industry as Japan exported war materials to its allies, and a subsequent bust when that source of demand dried up.
I think “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup“, which is one of Scott’s most popular posts, is likely the reason for the commonality of the phrase here. Scott introduces the ideas of “Blue Tribe”, “Red Tribe”, (and later “Grey Tribe”) and describes them as in conflict with each other. Because their different cultures mark each as the outgroup to the others, we see a “culture war” fought, wherein anything that seems to be from the outgroup provokes extreme hostility.
I always figured Scott’s use of it to distinguish culture war from non culture war threads was tongue in cheek.
Huh? What is the “it” here?
Use of the term “culture war”. Note that it’s never actually used in “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup,” so he at least didn’t explicitly popularize it there.
@HeelBearCub,
I read that essay by Scott Alexander, and at first I felt a bit forlorn and “tribeless”, but when I read more in depth….
…I realized that 9/10ths of the people I know have elements from both the “Red Tribe” list, and the “Blue Tribe” list, and I know of no one who fits the “Grey Tribe” list.
Near me right now is a co-worker who was born in San Francisco, California and his response to “Would you vote Republican?” is “HELL NO!”, but he fits everything else on the “Red Tribe” list.
I was born in Oakland, California and I fit five things from the “Blue Tribe” list, and five things from the “Red Tribe” list, as does my wife (different things though).
The lists look like false stereotypes to me.
Where are these “Tribes”?
Who are these “Tribes”?
First, the essay specifies that “Red Tribe” and “Republican voter” (or Blue/Democratic) aren’t synonymous. There is significant overlap, but that is all.
If you are familiar with the fable/tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, Scott isn’t doing much than recapitulating it. I have referred to it as the “urbane vs. rural” divide before. I say urbane and not urban very specifically (and rural isn’t really correct). This is an old, old divide, and it is not just an urban thing, but in some sense classist as well.
Of course this is all too simple, but in other ways it captures a certain kind of short hand that we all employ. It’s why Sarah Palin can talk about “Real America and Real Americans” and no one in her audience is in the slightest confused about what she is talking about. Nor is almost anyone else.
Gray tribe is just Scott’s name for the group of people he thinks of being a part of. It’s one little wrinkle in the “it’s actually not that simple” picture.
You probably knew one or two of these guys at some point. The guy in HS who didn’t belong to almost group of friends, was relentlessly picked on for being different, extremely bright, talked about shit that didn’t seem to make sense if you could get him to talk, didn’t care about anything “normal people” cared about. Basically the nerds (me very much included), but a little more than that.
To be clear, I don’t think of myself as “gray tribe”, but some people might want to classify me that way. I like D&D, and European board games, and non-fiction books, and conversations about things like economic theory.
Well I like playing D&I, reading non-fiction, and discussing economics, but I’m far from a libertarian.
I eat steak and arugula.
I drive a pick up truck during the week and a Prius on the weekend.
My boss has solar panels, drives an electric car, and collects guns and votes Republican.
For there to be “Tribes” at “war” there needs to be enough people who fit the descriptions, and in my experience people don’t exclusively fit the lists.
In my experience, most guys who grew up in the “flats” fit many of the “Red Tribe” list, but they vote Democratic (if they vote) and listened to R&B not Country.
Most of the girls I knew who lived in the “Hills” (I really didn’t know the guys) fit more of the “Blue Tribe” list, but were Republicans (like their parents).
Maybe it’s a generational thing (I was born in 1968), but the lists just don’t fit the people I know, and nobody says they’re “at war”, and I’ve never heard anyone use the term “culture war” out loud, I’ve only read it on-line, in The Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal.
@Plumber:
I was born in ’69, so we are similar in that regard.
This is mostly a war of words on the internet. College campuses or even some HS interactions will see some of it in real life . Occasionally that spills over into something like a CEO saying something that gets them sent packing from their current company or a media type losing a job. That’s about the extent of it. The “war” here is just the kind of heated rhetoric that makes productive conversation impossible in your average comments section on a mainstream site. Antifa vs. White Nationalists is about as “real world” as you see.
Again, the fact that you don’t “fit” in a tribe isn’t particularly surprising. Especially if you are talking about California and trying to make sense of things, but also because all stereotypes are ill-fitting.
Did you understand who Sarah Palin was talking about and to?
@HeelBearCub,
You mean her “Real Americans” comment?
As far as I can tell Sarah Palin definition was Americans who agreed with her.
Now I live in a city and while I liked McCain I didn’t vote for the ticket with Palin as vice-president (my grandmother insisted, I think she had a crush on Biden).
My great-grandparents were from Austria, Ireland, Ireland, Kansas, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Poland (but the town was part of Germany back then), but all of my grandparents were born in the U.S.A. including a born in New Jersey grandmother (with an Irish mother) who was terrified of the Klan when they burned a cross in front of her school as they hated Catholics back then, but my born in Kansas great-grandfather was descended from a man who came from Sussex, England in 1620, and multiples of his descendents have served in the United States Army, and I have ancestry that has been on this continent for nearly 400 years, just like Palin has.
Palin doesn’t get to define “Real American”.
Now I am starting to feel a bit tribal, if one side is claiming the right to decide if my family counts as “American”.
If you are familiar with the fable/tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, Scott isn’t doing much than recapitulating it. I have referred to it as the “urbane vs. rural” divide before. I say urbane and not urban very specifically (and rural isn’t really correct). This is an old, old divide, and it is not just an urban thing, but in some sense classist as well.
This is so key it’s not even funny. America is not a very rural country by global or historical standards, but ~50% of white people still have what’s called “country” culture (and Mexican culture can be pretty similar except for the language barrier). Plus since 1968, the more urban working-class culture associated with the Northeast and Rust Belt has come to be seen as more and more Red/bigoted by the urbane. In the 1970s, it was considered highly realistic for a middle-aged man from Queens to be a dumb bigot who was pro-union (All in the Family).
So almost the entire working class are treated with contempt by the urbane, except legal and illegal Latino Americans and whatever stable black working class exists between the large underclass and highly-educated middle class.
Archie wasn’t dumb and we weren’t supposed to think of him as dumb. He was a bigot. The whole point of the show was to make him human and relatable, while not pulling any punches against the world view he espoused. I’m not sure why you think his character wasn’t believable.
Honestly, of all the shows to attack, that’s not the one.
@HBC: I’m not attacking it. You misinterpreted me trying to say “He was a realistically bigoted New Yorker from outside Manhattan, and everyone recognized him as average.” Working-class people from Queens were unionized, might vote Democratic, and were urban/Yankee rather than rural/deep Red, but everyone knew they were bigots and this wasn’t considered beyond the pale until the late ’60s.
I did think the writers treated Archie as dumb despite being human and relatable (I remember seeing an episode where Michael was treated as knowing much more about how to argue with management, which you’d think would be Archie’s expertise as a union man of average intelligence).
That’s tangential, though. I was trying to allude to the (white) Democratic Party shifting from a “labor” focus with a donor class on top to an instantiation of the Blue tribe that sees both “country” and urban proles as a dangerous racist outgroup… mirrored by the changing British Labour Party.
This is also complicated by the existence of a West coast working class that combines Blue tribal emotions with the same economic conditions (or worse, with student loan debt) as archetypal protetarians in other parts of the US.
@Le Maistre Chat:
I thought you were trying to say it was a weak man for the proles of the day, put up as a figure of mockery by the urbane, but perhaps I misinterpreted.
I always thought of Archie as blinded rather than stupid. I was 10 when it went off the air, so it’s possible I missed some characterizations, but my perception was that Meathead was also frequently presented as blind in his own ways. That’s the source of the “stupidity” (very less-wrong when you think about it).
ETA: I do agree that as union power has waned, the previously central tie that binds working class industrial job white voters to the Democrats has waned. This is another way in which the electorate is becoming polarized in ways that it was not previously. I think that was what you were getting at.
I’ve mentioned this before, but as someone who grew up in a working class family in the rural Northeastern Rust Belt, it’s not like that stereotype sprang unbidden from some liberal propagandist’s brain.
My hometown and the surrounding area was racist in a way I think more urban/less working class folks have a hard time imagining is still real outside of period TV shows and movies. The N-word was a casual and frequent part of conversation, people openly talked about holding political positions because they didn’t like black people, racist jokes were completely commonplace, that kind of thing. It usually didn’t manifest in large amounts of concrete mistreatment of minorities, but that’s probably because you could count all of them who lived there on the fingers of one hand.
This has improved somewhat in recent years – a year or two ago, my mom brought a black friend and Vietnam vet to the local VFW. The bartender refused to serve him, like something out of an old timey movie.
After my mom complained, the bartender’s boss chewed out the employee and apologized, and seemed by all accounts mortified. But still – someone still thought they could get away with refusing to serve a black guy because of his race in 2016/2017. And honestly, nobody else in the place was giving her crap about it until my mom complained. The fact that the story ended with him getting a beer at all is the big news.
This isn’t saying that everybody is racist – but there is a general acceptance of racism that is just leaps and bounds beyond what I think folks around here would believe unless they saw it themselves. (This is why I had such a hard time with ‘Against Murderism.’)
At a basic level, I think the Culture War is what happens when the internet suddenly starts confronting people like some of the folks I grew up with, with people in cities who thought that kind of thing didn’t exist anymore outside of after school specials.
@MrApophenia:
Yeah, this is not a surprising story to me. My Dad grew up working class in Chicago. My grandfather ran a gas station. My great grandfather sold vegetables from a market stand. Everyone came over from Sicily. Now, all 5 of the kids in Dad’s family ended up graduating from college, and my dad was a professor, but when we went back up to Chicago and saw his friends, mostly buddies from the CYO (Catholic Youth Orchestra) the causal racism from some of them was just accepted. It was just part of the fabric. My dad didn’t accept it, but the conversation he had with me was always later on.
My wife is from a mid-sized town in the South, Her dad was from a town that merited one whole stop sign. There again, he wasn’t, she wasn’t, but there was definitely some of it around, kept at bay because my wife would not to,erase that kind of talk.
It’s also why all of the talk about “what’s the definition of racist and who would even be one and how do even know racial animus even exists” has always made no sense to me.
Agreeing that really open racial prejudice is still common in some social classes and places. But…
I worked construction for years in west Tennessee. I heard plenty of openly racial comments. I mean, come on–this is a world where “I guess I’d like a Coke” was considered an awesome joke. I heard plenty about why you don’t want to rent to _’s and why _’s have no f’ing sense and on and on.
On the other hand, there was very little racial hostility except in the context of political struggles that were perceived as zero-sum racial quarrels.
And my sister still lives there. Her husband is black, her son is black, and she’s very white. And they’ve lived there for a decade plus, and by her account she has never been hassled, had rude comments made, or anything else about a very obvious mixed-race marriage from anyone white.
Red Tribe/Blue Tribe really falls apart on issues around race, in my opinion. Working-class African-Americans are very much Red Tribe culturally, but a core part of the Democratic coalition.
@samChevre:
Yeah, I wasn’t saying “everyone is like this”or anything similar. As I said up above, stereotypes are almost always somewhat ill-fitting.
Red tribe/blue tribe doesn’t really even try and capture ethnic cultures, not really. And it was never intended to be synonymous with Republican or Democrat.
You’ve caught on to the reason that the term Red Tribe vs. Blue Tribe come up. Namely, that the relationship between political party and the cultural view doesn’t solidly line up.
But imagine hosting a party for your co-workers. Now imagine that you showed The World Cup (or Riverdance) on the television, and were serving La Croix and kale chips. How well would that go over?
Contrast that to showing The Superbowl with beer and steak?
@Garrett,
I had to do a web search to find out what “La Croix” was, some kind of soda?
Among my co-workers; the Superbowl with beer and steak would be popular, as would the world cup, kale chips and a French named soda would probably be accepted, but Riverdance might get me punched, depending on who was onscreen in tights.
I think a lot of it, in practice, is enemy-of-my-enemy. I was raised in a staunchly Democratic household, and I don’t believe in many parts of either paleo- or neo-conservatism. But I find myself rooting for the Reds anyway. Why? Because a lot of prominent Blues dislike religion, and a lot of prominent Blues dislike white people, and I’m a religious white guy.
Rod Dreher compared it to a prison gang once: when you’re on the inside, you don’t care if any given gang has beliefs or principles that align with your own, you only care if they’re willing and able to keep members of the other gangs from beating you bloody. So I’ve come to think of it as “prison gang politics.”
Similarly, Scott is a polyamorous atheist transhumanist. A surprising percentage of his regular commenters are observant religious traditionalists (I’m sort of one myself, if you’re willing to play loosely with definitions). Why is this? Partly it’s because a certain type of leftist who loathes our kind also dislikes this site. Though I don’t want to downplay the general open-mindedness that makes this place so great, or any of its other virtues. But having the right enemies helps. Or doesn’t hurt, anyhow.
I know lots of Democrats who are very religious.
When I was growing up all the old “church ladies” in my neighborhood had pictures of John and Robert Kennedy on their walls, along with pictures of either Martin Luther King Jr. (if black) or the Pope (if white).
No offense to you personally, but I find this kind of mentality more detestable than either genuinely believing in horrible racist/sexist/authoritarian ideals or cynically using those ideals as a tool to gain power and influence. On a subconscious level, that kind of tribalist thinking probably plays a major role in a lot of people’s opinions. But to consciously be aware that your team is mostly wrong from both a moral and a practical perspective, and still support them just because they’re your team – as if it’s a damned football game! – is atrocious.
I could see it as being justified if there was an actual existential threat to you and people like you. I certainly wouldn’t blame Jews, Roma, and various other “undesirables” for siding with the Stalinists against the Nazis, even if they were fully aware of just how evil Stalin was, because the only viable alternative at the time was a group that was actively trying to completely wipe them from existence. But there’s a vast gulf between that, and siding with people you know are wrong and evil just because of a vague sense that their opponents personally don’t like you that much.
how existential and threatening does it have to be then
because that’s kind of the key issue here, and I do mean that
It’s probably worth remembering that a lot of people are pretty comfortable reading/associating outside their political ingroup. I expect the SSC participants are more comfortable doing so than most people.
LadyJane –
I will dryly observe that many of my more blueish acquaintances spent most of the last couple of years working very hard to convince one another and themselves that Trump represents an existential threat.
(Likewise, a few years ago with Obama with reddish acquaintances)
I agree yours appears to be the standard everyone adheres to, given the effort they seem willing to undertake to game the measure.
I just have to ask, given that people are clearly willing to game the measure…
Is it a useful measure?
Oh, I think they’re both bad and wrong. The Blues are slightly less bad and wrong in an overall sense, but there’s not much room there for someone like me, so I guess I’m stuck in Red. I don’t think of myself as a “member” of either group, but I have to reflect that it’s better for me personally if the orcs beat the goblins rather than vice-versa.
Plumber, I think LadyJane may have knowledge of this war.
Paraphrase: No offense to you personally, followed by, your mentality is atrocious, followed by, reference to Stalinists and Nazis,
followed by, you are not as bad as them, but you still side with evil and wrong people.
^
@Registered,
You’re refering to @Lady Jane‘s comments to @theredsheep I presume?
Which was preceded by @theredsheep confessing “tribal” affiliation?
How common is this off-line?
I can only think of one example out of the hundreds of people I’ve known: I briefly had a co-worker who expressed glee at the thought of “Anti-Fa” getting beaten up to me (he had to tell me what Anti-Fa was), so there’s at least one person who expressed on-line like attitudes face-to-face with me, but I still think the vast majority of Americans are bystanders to this nonsense.
I suppose in some sense he was a victim of “the culture war” as our boss assigned him to the 9-1-1 call center where no one from the general public can hear his opinions.
He’s happy there though, it’s a longer commute, but he’s getting more overtime.
Strangely, whle he clearly seemed a fan of the “white-ethno-nationalists”, he seemed to like me despite my telling him that the mother of my sons is non-white, and I’m of part Jewish descent (I asked him to stop using “Jew” to mean “cheap”), and when asked I’m honest about my pro “New Deal” and “Great Society” economic views.
Yes you have it right about the comments I was referring to. I was seriously suggesting that LadyJane may have insight. Her comment had the tone of what I imagine culture war to be, I could be wrong.
Anyway, I too look around for this war and see nothing with my own eyes. Maybe I am sheltered
It probably is mostly an online thing at this point, at least in terms of the visceral anger. And I probably do read too much political crap online; it’s not good for me.
I get what you’re saying, but LadyJane’s post echoes my feelings pretty well.
I certainly understand watching with some glee when the red tribe gives the blue tribe a hard time about its disingenuous or ridiculous denigration of religious people. But enemy of my enemy is a dangerous game. I get that you are probably being somewhat facetious and that “rooting for” doesn’t necessarily mean much. While I enjoy the prison gang metaphor, I don’t think the plight of the white Christian fits well with the victim of the gang beating. If you were to take some stance based on your religion that was unpopular with the blue tribe, then maybe. But I think few Americans are actually in a situation where they have to suspend any concern for morals in favor of survival with whoever will defend them. Much better to work to change your preferred political party.
There’s too much abdication going on. People have to take a difficult stand and challenge the parties to accommodate them, not the other way around. There is no longterm safety in a party that is just as morally bankrupt but happens to be favoring people like you at the moment. There is little sincerity behind it. People have to start forming groups that make it clear that some people are religious and Democratic-leaning, or whatever.
A post above spoke about how the blue/red/gray tribes don’t map to people she knows. And I think that’s the norm. We need to demand better of the options available, and not keep going into this false and arbitrary dichotomy. I’m not saying do away with the two-party system, but we’ve got to take some responsibility to make politics something other than a farce and internet harassment.
It is not nearly as hard as it seems; look at history. This is not directed all at you, but it just brought these thoughts to the forefront. We can’t just write off half of America and expect to function. The culture wars are a thing, but the war mindset needs to stop. Debate the issues like you are supposed to; not everyone is going to be nice about it; that’s life. But we need to figure out a way to deal with others in a productive fashion and stop getting distracted by easy caricatures of each other and social media squabbles.
The war mindset is a prisoner’s dilemma; whoever abandons it loses, even if peace/peace would be a theoretically better option.
“Debate the issues” doesn’t work when taking the wrong side gets you fired, blacklisted, and/or otherwise ejected from polite society. When that’s the case, it’s yield, stay silent, or suffer the consequences.
I mean, it’s right there in the name.
@mtl1882
Unfortunately, I think this is the opposite of true. Ideas rarely help people maintain cohesion for multiple decades in most places. The Republican Party of 1870 is pretty different from the Republican Party of today. Same for the Democratic party. But you can trace a clear line of tribal descent in both cases.
Tribal cohesion can last a really, really long time. In the extreme limit, you get a caste system. Tribal instincts are one of the strongest social forces among humans. Because the people at the top of a tribe rely upon tribal support for their power, they are in great danger if they betray the tribe. Making a stand for an idea or a sane policy with good material benefits is really dangerous if it betrays the tribe. Even for powerful people. Like Anwar Sadat or Mahatma Gandhi.
Tribal politics is cohesive and relatively reliable. Idea based politics is more of an exception that occasionally maintains cohesion long enough to get an idea in place.
I don’t recommend participating in tribal politics though. “Mindkiller” is a good appellation. But I think it’s best to be resigned to the fact that if you think you’d prefer idea based politics, you will forever be in a tiny weird minority.
@Registered:
If this “war” consists of people on internet forums making critical statements about other people’s reasons for holding opinions, then I don’t see how it’s much of a war at all. Nor a battle, nor a fight. Hell, I wouldn’t even count it as an argument.
@mtl1882: Thanks for expanding on my point, I agree with pretty much everything you said. (Although I don’t think religious Democrats even need a group to fight for them; theredsheep’s idea that the Democratic Party is openly hostile toward religion or even Christianity in general doesn’t have much actual basis in reality. Hell, at this point, Dawkins-style New Atheism is more associated with libertarianism than mainstream Democrat-style center-left liberalism.)
Arguably this is the essence of the cultural wars – people affiliating for fear that otherwise some group is going to “beat them bloody”, metaphorically or literally.
I’m “blue tribe” because I’m more afraid of anti-immigrant and anti-non-Christian rhetoric/action/policies (among others) than I am of e.g. anti-white or anti-middle-class rhetoric/actions/policies.
At some point about a decade or so, I went from considering individual issues to picking a side – regretfully, because neither side really agrees with me, and I despise evidence-suppressing and evidence-ignoring true-believers regardless of what they believe.
And of course that latter point is probably why I hang out here – while the cultural wars threads are often weak on evidence, other posts are better, particularly Scott’s.
I think it’s not just that things are different in different places, but rather, people are unwilling to let it be different in different places.
That fits, and has long been true.
What’s changed for it to be called a “war”?
More/visible venues in which to team-bark at each other.
Yeah, pretty much. A huge portion of this is just that we are now face to face with each other and encouraged to waste our time getting appalled over things that are par for the course.
The same thing happened prior to the Civil War, which is a bit unsettling. The telegraph brought the North and South (and in some ways the West) face to face, and they couldn’t really deal with each other’s lifestyles and it became clear it was only going to get worse. And newspapers were extraordinarily popular and partisan, so we could sit and talk about it all day long. A lot of those newpapers had running columns eerily similar to Twitter, and they copied things from other papers very similarly to a “repost” or “share” function.
Related:
To what extent is the whole controversy over “trans”-this and -that just a matter of hormonal teenagers and 20-somethings now basically all having, in the internet in general* and social media in particular, a potentially powerful way to instantly broadcast their ideas to the entire world?
*Yes, the internet’s been around for a while but the tacit knowledge required to use it effectively to broadcast one’s ideas has gone WAY down in the last ten years.
BTW, is there any information out there on how frequently people who identify as transsexual before age 25 still identify as such after age 35?
Well, to me it’s about whether I have a right to be part of society despite being very slightly odd in how I think and act. Not whether I will be allowed to go where I want and talk to people if I want, you understand; I’m pretty sure no one is in a position to prevent that, or will be anytime soon. But as someone who has pathalogically low self-esteem, whether or not me inflicting my very slight weirdness on nice, normal people is a Terrible Thing or not is of crucial importance – especially since if everyone agrees that I should make myself scarce, there isn’t much point in socialising anyway, socialising being by its very nature supposed to be pleasant for all parties concerned and all. I mean, if the best I can hope for is to be that annoying uncle who no one wants to invite for Christmas but who they can’t honourably exclude, then I think I rather would seclude myself for the rest of my life.
Whether that is a reasonable thing to demand of me – that’s the Culture War, as far as I’m concerned.
But I’ll grant you that I’m not sure why everyone else seems to be so worked up about it.
I would describe the culture war like this (lots of speculation):
US politics are becoming more polarized and geographic clustering of politically likeminded people is increasing (I think the data backs this up?). This (along with efforts from the Democratic and Republican parties) has resulted in political party becoming much more a cultural signifier rather than just a cluster of positions to agree or disagree with. Social media and clickbait journalism, as well as the geographic clustering, make it really easy to be exposed to only the worst of the other side. Political disagreement then becomes a battle of our smart and good people vs those evil and dumb people, and thus becomes more vehement, dumber, less productive. The most visible result of this is the inability to discuss any “culture war” topics without it devolving into name calling at best and attempts to get people fired (or worse) at worst.
While I think all of the above is a real phenomenon, I do think it’s reach is overestimated. I think you have to be pretty steeped in social media (or at least online partisan media) or involved in activist culture to really see much of this stuff.
The major culture war items of the day aren’t trans- issues, they are abortion and gun rights. SSC focuses on the aggressive bleeding edge of the Social Justice Movement as the primary feature of the Culture War, but that’s not the case.
Social Justice is also broader than just trans-rights. Your feminism comment is a good example: feminists still believe they have a fair bit of work to do, and are concerned about issues like “yes means yes,” equal pay, woman leadership in the C-Suite, etc.
“Normal” people may or may not feel this is important. For instance, I had a co-worker out in meatspace that felt Frozen was very important because it taught girls that they don’t need a man to save them (the actual correct lesson was that being led by an emotionally insecure teenage monarch will lead to your nation being alternately conquered or plunged into economic disaster, symbolized by a permanent winter, and thus you should behead your monarch and replace it with a constitutional republic). On the other hand, my wife watched a Girl Meets World “Very Special Episode” about girls in science and said “this is preachy.”
@A Definite Beta Guy,
That….
…..is the best interpretation of Frozen I’ve ever read!
I’m reminded of Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes character.
I was a little worried if my query would do more harm than good, but that made it worthwhile!
Thanks!
Or even just make your monarch a figurehead whose actual role in the government is to formally acknowledge the head of the coalition running parliament as her new prime minister. An emotionally insecure teenage monarch should be able to handle that job pretty well.
The culture war was won by the blues a while ago, which is why you think it’s all old news. Then they moved to mop up all remaining pockets of resistance. Unfortunately, at the same time the future they created started falling apart. Because hegemonic globoliberalism is a monolith of total control, opposition to it also runs across domains; this is why, even though the most immediate issues are economic, you see old cultural battlefronts reopening.
It’s puffery. Would you rather say your hobby is hate reading and shitposting or fighting the culture war?
Everyone involved has an incentive to exaggerate the scope, scale, and importance, and boy do they!
Interesting paper about the gender pay gap suggests that a major cause may be non-linearity in pay per hour worked. More specifically, some occupations favor longer work hours, especially those where there is a long-term personal relationship between the worker and the customer. For example, lawyers (especially when the personal reputation or achievements of the lawyer matters as well). In contrast, there are other jobs like pharmacy where people just tend to care about a specific transaction going well, which have a very small gender pay gap.
This also explains why the pay gap is higher in Business and Finance than in Technology and Science, as the latter presumably have fewer jobs that are customer-facing.
(Partial) solutions for this (and also to combat the increasing disparity in earnings between well-educated people who work many hours and the rest of society) may be to:
– create a personal relationship with a group of people and/or branding that group, rather than individuals, so it doesn’t matter as much which person the customer deals with.
– Better sharing of information, perhaps by use of advanced CRM software, so people can easily pick up the work of others.
– have the customer-facing person hand off most of the work to be done by others, having that person pass off the work as their own. Then you have one sociable full-time worker with broad and shallow expertise that handles the customer and (many) others who support that person in a way that can be fairly easily be done part-time. Of course, you can still expect a pay gap between the full-time worker who manages the customers and the rest of the workers & that the former job will be more sought after by men, but there will be fewer of those jobs.
– Commoditize goods and services.
PS. Another interesting find by this researcher is that men are penalized more heavily for career interruptions, which helps to explain why men tend to be very reluctant to take advantage of parental leave when it is available to men: “The wage penalty for men, using our standardized career interruption at six years out, is 45 log points, whereas that for women is 26 log points. Taking any time out appears more harmful for men (26 log points) than for women (11 log points).“
Or just, you know, come down like a tonne of bricks on any business which routinely asks or permits its workers to put in more than 40.
There is lots of research that super-long hours are bad for actual productivity – If this is true, but it is excellent for building professional rep, which is what this research seems to be saying (That is, companies promote and payraise based on perceived loyalty, as signaled by hours, rather than merit..), then there should be substantial real benefits to the economy from putting a stop to it.
Including self-employed workers? That will hit many small businesses very hard. What about those who work multiple jobs (perhaps to avoid the law)? What about the military? What about the police? What about workers on oil platforms, ships, etc?
Taiwan actually capped hours per week to 40 in 2017, but reversed that again in 2018. So apparently it had so many downsides that they had to reverse it very quickly.
It also doesn’t change the issue that part-time workers get substantially less per hour worked than full-time workers.
Sure, hours 45-60 aren’t very productive, but if the people staying 45-60 are also more productive in 1-40 and it’s more costly for non-productive people to stay 45-60, then it makes sense to reward people who are staying for 60 hours.
I’m sure that marginal productivity does drop at some point (though I note that 12 hours a day for 6 days at hard labor used to be rather typical, and nobody realized gains by cutting hours), but I’m not so certain it’s at 40 hours. Added on top of that, net productivity at hour 1 is pretty low (because there’s a lot of overhead per employee), so getting the same amount of work by hiring more employees is far more costly.
This is wrong: History of working time laws: Back in the dawn of time, some of the larger industrial firms commissioned research into productivity. One of the results they got was that very long work weeks work fantastically well the first couple of weeks, but every consecutive week, the workers got less productive, and by week 6, they were getting less done than they had been on an 8 hour day.
(Oil rigs essentially game this. They work you 80 hours for two weeks, by which point, diminishing returns are still minor. Then they send you home to recover for two weeks. This is fairly sustainable. )
Then those firms.. and essentially only those firms … took that research to heart, and implemented the 8 hour day as a standard, and only worked overtime in short bursts to cover for planning failures. Which made them even more dominant actors in the economy than they had been, because now they were the only ones getting work done with a non-exhausted workforce.
At which point the government looked at this and went “Okay, so managers everywhere are idiots congenitally unable to learn this lesson from their competitors. Time for the legislative hammer!”
Overtime laws are not only there for labor, although, of course, the politicians enacting them took all the credit they could for the benefit to labor – they are also there to fix a market failure and protect firms from managerial stupidity.
What I am saying is that the current exemptions in those overtime laws for professional workers are almost certainly just flat out a mistake. That the hammer should have been brought down across the board.
Depressingly, modern management would likely still be idiots about this, absent the state forcing them not to as demonstrated by Japan, which has enormous work weeks, and utterly abysmal hourly productivity, despite a fantastic educational system and very advanced technological base.
Perhaps this is true on average, but I’d expect that whether 40 hours is optimal must vary a lot based on the type of work. And obviously there will be variation among individuals as well.
It is pretty obvious that things like the length of your commute and how much work is involved in keeping your household in order comes out of the same “Budget” of hours of work per week you can sustain deliver (That is, the true number is higher than 40, but the average person spends a good chunk of it on not living in a dumpster and actually getting to work), but unless you plan to be really enormously intrusive into the private life of your employees – in a “Everyone lives in the apartments on the floors above the office and uses the cleaning service we hired to keep the place clean!” way…
Then individual variation is irrelevant, you have to set policy for the overall average of your workforce.
To do otherwise means you effectively end up promoting the random subset of your employees who have the least labor-intensive personal life – that is, you promote the people who tolerate long hours best, which means you are in fact selecting for “Lives closest and has a significant other that does 100 % of the housework”… which.. how does that correlate with being a good manager?
says:
August 27, 2018 at 11:16 pm ~new~
@Thomas Jørgensen,
What?!
NO!
Men fought for and were martyred in the struggle for the 8 hour day.
It was a class war not some damn technocratic fix!
It was both. The research got commissioned because those firms wanted to know the consequences of yielding the point to labor. When the answer they got back was “.. Labor is totally right on this. So much more shit getting done. Minds blown” that made political victory on this point inevitable.
There’s a huge difference between working on your feet and humping heavy stuff and sitting at a desk. I’m like most people. I’m smoked after eight hours on my feet humping. I’m mildly neurotic after twelve hours at a desk. The fight for an eight hour work day on your feet was a heroic struggle for unions. The top-down stuff about white collar workers being a little wack after twelve was trivial by comparison, though not nonexistent.
I’ve worked weeks of 8 hours a day of mindless labor. I still occasionally do heavy labor shifts. (Building crazy art projects for a week before the Thing In The Desert, for example.)
I spent more of my career working at a desk.
I’m far more wrecked after 8 hours at desk than I am after 8 hours of physically exhausting physical labor.
Somehow, I don’t think I’m unique.
Work is work. Work is hard. Work is tiring. And the thing that you run out of, the thing that when you get short on it you start making mistakes, the part that makes you an exhausted zombie when it runs out, is in the brain. Doesn’t matter if it’s your brain driving creation and decision making, or if it’s your brain driving your muscles through the unpleasant sensation of lactic acid buildup, the limiting factor is the brain.
I’m sure average productivity drops past a relatively low point of 30-50 hours. But until marginal productivity hits 0, if you’re being paid salary (which most people working really long hours are) the business still benefits.
I’d like to claim that the trick is to get men to value their time outside of work more highly, but if pay actually scales really fast with time spent at work then it is a sign that men do value their time out of work a lot because you need to pay them a lot more to work a lot longer. Causing a disparity.
I don’t think there is any easy way around this. Most men don’t work high hours for high pay. We’re already looking at only a small subset of men.
As said above, once you get chronically exhausted (work > 40 hours for 2 weeks), your productivity for the 1st 40 hours of the week is significantly reduced.
FWIW, this is the story of my life. One way I – and most of my colleagues – cope is by spending significant at-work time not working 😉 FWIW It was hard for me to learn to do this, coming from a family background of hourly work, but personally being salaried starting with my first job out of college.
I think it varies with task and person.
For physical work? Definitely.
But depending on the mental work I’m doing, I’ve been able to maintain high productivity for a few months averaging 60 hours a week, but I’ve also had trouble at different tasks maintaining high productivity for a mere 30 hours a week.
But like I said, productivity per hour worked isn’t really the right metric from the point of view of the business when it’s paying you salary. As long as an hour they take from you doesn’t make for net negative work, they’re ahead.
Of course, the metric of how many hours did we get someone to work is also wrong, so it’s not surprising that if you optimize for getting some number of hours at work out of your workers they may just shirk for more hours at work.
I don’t know if limiting all jobs to 40 hours a week would be good or bad. But it certainly seems unrealistic for the state to mandate this. Governments are the employer who benefit the most from its employees working more than 40 hours a work, often without the overtime being compensated. There’s already a shortage of doctors and nurses and teachers and firefighters, so the government-controlled employers of them try to cover the difference by forcing those people to work more than 40 hours, with various questionably legal tricks.
The idea is to limit the hours to 40 h, and every hour on top of that gets paid as overtime work, where overtime means X% more per hour of work.
Thus, companies will not make their workers work more for an ordinary work load, and will hire an extra worker if the workload is too big for the 40 h workweek. But then they would pay the extra X% for short outbursts of extra work, such as accountants who have to change their quarterly report after a rule change in reporting. You don’t expect this change to last, so you don’t hire an extra worker. You instead pay a surplus for this necessary extra work.
If there are too many extra hours, and they happen all the time, the total labor cost increases by the per hour work *X* hours worked. Thus, this will force companies to either increase productivity by investing in capital or to hire extra workers. If too many companies prefer to pay extra, then you should increase X until you reach an equilibrium where most companies do not overwork their workers.
That’s the idea, but it doesn’t work.
For private companies, it doesn’t work, because even though those are the rules for overtime, but the private companies define the salary of the skilled workers to whatever they want, so if they want workers that work for 60 hours a week, then they set the nominal wage of workers such that they pay the right amount after adding the overtime percentage. For untrained workers where the nominal salary would fall below minimum wage that way, they just fire and blacklist the workers that complain about illegal practices of the employers too much.
For the government, it doesn’t work, because they define “overtime” such that a doctor or firefighter being on the watch for 80 hours a week in case some emergency happens doesn’t count as overtime because most of the time nothing is supposed to happen so the doctor or nurse or firefighter isn’t working, while in reality there are too few doctors and nurses and firefighters so they do work a lot during those times; and because they define a teacher’s 40 hour job as consisting of spending lots of actual hours in classes with children and very few hours preparing for those classes, while in reality no teacher can hold those classes with so little overhead; or simply because the government delays paying the salaries to teachers in time with various excuses until they start to collectively complain too loudly. Sure, I’m simplifying and biased in favor of the teachers and doctors here, so don’t believe all I’m saying without checking it.
Alternative hypothesis: in jobs like pharmacy where people just care about a specific transaction going well, it’s very easy to notice, and stop oneself from, discriminating for reasons irrelevant to job performance.
This fits well with my observation in insurance/finance–pay goes up exponentially with hours. If you want to work a predictable 40 hours a week, you’ll have a hard time getting to 6 figures. If you are willing want to make it to executive leadership, working a 60-hour week will be short–and executives can make 7 figures pretty reliably.
I would say the average executive with whom I’ve interacted has worked 80+ hours a week, every week, for at least 20 years.
I can’t believe no one has brought this up yet: a former American Nuncio has accused Pope Francis of enabling sex abuser Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
The NYT article on said topic framed it as “cultural conservative attacks pope”, and highlighted oddities in his account, as well as his disdain for homosexuality within the church (and belief that it is largely responsible for the sexual abuse scandal). Others have been more supportive of the letter, supporting his claims and applauding his bravery.
What are people’s thoughts on this, especially from people knowledgeable about Catholicism? Can we trust Vigano’s account? And even if we can’t, this seems like a huge event—a church higher-up calling for the Pope himself to resign. What does this portend?
Whispers in the Loggia is a reliable site for inside-baseball on American Catholicism with a good handle on Vatican goings-on as well, and it has a preliminary post on this.
This whole Viganò affair is hard to get a handle on; yes, he’s on the conservative side and yes, he doesn’t like Francis. He appears to have a lot of axes to grind (he got shifted around in his career and looks like he holds some grudges about that) and seems to present himself as a whistleblower, while the view of others is that he’s a loose cannon – from the quick’n’dirty reading up I’ve done that’s the impression I get, anyway.
On the other hand the
Cardinaledit: he renounced the title of cardinal and is now simply Archbishop McCarrick scandal is blowing up quite badly, and is reviving accusations of the ‘lavender mafia’ in the Curia (the supposed cabal of gay clerics who protect each other and promote one another’s causes and favourites). Ironically, in view of the favourable purring the media did over Francis’ “who am I to judge?”, if he knew or suspected McCarrick was gay, Francis might have been inclined to be more lenient rather than booting him out simply for that, and now this scandal of sexual harassment of seminarians (who tend to be young men in their late teens/early twenties) and allegations of grooming a boy where he was the family friend are bursting out, which is going to hit Francis in the way Viganò is doing – accusations that he knew or was informed and did nothing because he favoured McCarrick (who was a liberal and well-regarded by the American media).On the other other hand, Viganò himself is accused of deliberately covering-up reports of sexual misconduct during his time as Nuncio in America:
I have to say here that the Nienstedt thing is a gay sex scandal not a child sex abuse scandal, though it does involve alleged misconduct with seminarians.
So yeah – very messy all round. Viganò may indeed know where bodies are buried, but on the other hand he is vulnerable to counter-accusations of being involved in a cover-up himself and of settling grudges by making this accusation at this time – if you read his statement, you can see he has a real grudge against Cardinal Bertone (as to who he thinks was responsible for the delays before Pope Benedict sanctioned Cardinal McCarrick in 2009/10):
I would recommend reading the full statement by Viganò; there’s a definite whiff of conspiracy theory going on there (networks of conspirators, ambiguous remarks, lies and deceit, setting traps for our naive and honest hero to fall into) but again, we’re talking Italy/the Vatican and the Curia, there could well be these levels of cabals and conspirators going on, they’ve been doing it for at least five hundred years or even longer so why stop now?
I will also be very interested to see if the media refer to or acknowledge at all his accusations of the homosexual current in the Church ruining everything? EDIT: Yes, the NYT did mention it, so that may or may not work to make him more/less credible as an accuser: if he’s thought to be seeing “gays in the beds” everywhere, he may not be considered reliable.
Joke: you’re mom is big gay.
Woke: your Holy Mother Church… is big gay.
This might be playing with gasoline when it isn’t even my fire, but the sake of my understanding what’s the rough breakdown of clerical abusers that target men and boys vs those that target women and girls?
As someone that only skims these stories on rare occasion it seems to be overwhelmingly the former, but that could just have to do what’s written about.
According to the 2003 John Jay Report, 81% of victims were male; see table 4.3.1 on the page 69 (75 in the pdf). From the summary on p. 6 (12 of the pdf):
There do exist typologies of child sexual abusers. I don’t know how reliable the models are, and the report does not give an opinion either, but a summary from p. 36 (42):
Two questions arise here: one, if offenders “may be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual,” then why the enormous disparity in victims? And two, is someone going after 15 year old boys really a pedophile, or something else? For the latter question, the citation on “tend to target boys who are slightly older” goes to the DSM-IV, which on these questions says, “Some individuals prefer males, others females, and some are aroused by both males and females. Those attracted to females usually prefer 8- to 10-year-olds, whereas those attracted to males usually prefer slightly older children” (527; 556 in this pdf). It sounds like the pedophiles who prefer boys tend to target 11-13, then, since one of the requirements for pedophilia is that the victim be 13 or younger, so this really doesn’t explain the regular abuse of boys 14+ or young men like seminarians. The DSM adds that there are exclusive and non-exclusive types; that is, some pedophiles experience attraction to adults as well.
This is crying out for an analysis of whether the clerics in question were of which types and why the vast majority preferred boys. Table 3.5.4 on p. 53 (59) is a step in this direction; it’s a chart of victims grouped by gender and age. It looks like the percentages of victims by gender and age are:
Boys: 0-7: 2.4%; 8-10: 11.8%; 11-14: 51.5%; 14-17: 34.5%
Girls: 0-7: 14.8%; 8-10: 20.7%; 11-14: 38.3%; 14-17: 26.2%
The last factor here is the time the abuse occurred. There has been considerably less abuse from the nineties onward; the distribution of victims has also changed considerably. Figure 3.5.1 just below it shows an enormous increase in the number of male victims in the sixties, seventies, and eighties; male victims remain far more common than female in the nineties, but the proportion is only about 2.5-3x as many, eyeballing it (73.5% male, if the numbers are those used in the following tables). Finally, on the next page, are the age of victims by when the abuse began. Percentages of abuse of male victims in the 0-7 and 8-11 ages decreased as a proportion of total male victims over the decades, as abuse of males skyrocketed, but remained low as it plummeted in the nineties. The same happened for female victims. Yet the percentage of male victims in the 15-17 range continued to increase in the nineties, making up 55.2% of victims in that period. For female victims the pattern held steady; most victims are 11-14 even in the nineties.
The conclusion appears to be that by the nineties about 40% of all abuse was with male victims in the 15-17 age range. That doesn’t even fit the profile the DSM gave for pedophilia; it sounds more like the now-touted ephebophilia, which Wikipedia says the DSM says isn’t even a disorder. This report was commissioned in 2002, which is where their data end; since then the Catholic Church in America has taken up several reforms to combat child abuse. But if 40% of the victims (48% if we include females) just before these reforms were 15+, why are we calling it child sexual abuse?
The conclusion a lot of people came to, like Rod Dreher, is that this isn’t so much a matter of child abuse anymore. It’s predatory gays in the priesthood (which is, it goes without saying, not all gays in the priesthood) targeting sexually developed young men. Dreher connects this with the stories he’s both read about and received as a journalist of widespread gay subculture in seminaries—including invitations there to pretty young men—, and of sexually active priests, and of predation on seminarians, who are 18+ and often in their early twenties. And he connects this, finally, with some apparent prevalence of interest in the LGBT community with young men of that age.
On that last point, some anecdata: I did some googling around when I read about this to see what the LGBT community thinks of this sort of thing, since I know NAMBLA, for instance, has a very low reputation, and the reaction to Kevin Spacey was sharp and immediate condemnation. All the same, I found plenty of approval for consensual relationships between young and adult men from self-professed gays, including ones in long-term relationships with other adult men. But since it was cursory and no doubt highly self selected, I’d like to see some actual data on this, and whether there is some kind of subculture for it—I know about terms like twinks, and jailbait, and so on, but my impression was that men who prefer younger or younger-looking men have the decency to restrict themselves to actual adults and not fifteen year olds. But I guess that decency isn’t universal, even with the disapproval or condemnation of other gays.
I do think the priesthood attracted men who were confused sexually, due to the justification it gave celibacy. Some may have entered with a predatory mindset due to access and authority, though I tend to think this group was probably small. Some were trying to cover for their lack of expected relationships. And I think some were truly horribly conflicted and confused and believed that devoting themselves to god would fix them, and they would commit to being celibate.
What their sexual preferences were varied, and as the post above makes clear, these definitions are quite difficult. There are people who prefer sex with adults and usually pursue that, but may have sex with a minor in some situation, usually a teenager. There are some who are pure opportunists and go for anyone, male or female. There are some that are exclusively pedophiles, some exclusively into teens.
I think part of the issue may be that men who preferred young girls had more options and didn’t feel as driven to cover it up, especially when they were young and the age difference wasn’t as striking. And becoming a priest probably is less likely to get you access to very young girls. And in general, girls are probably more warned and questioned about this stuff. I think the seminarian stuff is probably different – I do think people struggling with homosexuality in the past thought becoming a priest might be the best choice, and then were unable to stay celibate. They may have entered into relationships with each other or young men, but not children. I don’t believe they are the real problem with the Church. I’m sure a great many priests have affairs with married parishioners (women) and there are communities in the church where that is pervasive as well.
I study American history and all day long I read references to the clergy sexual abuse problem (referring to all sorts of churches). It is a sad result of people in positions of trust and authority who are unable to control themselves. That is why I liked Francis’ emphasis on getting away from clericalism – you can’t worship the priest and hierarchy, you have to be the community yourself.
From 1922, though I sense it was written a while before and about experiences that had occurred much earlier:
“The newspaper devotee runs across a similar item every once in a while, and nearly always the “monster” is a clergyman or a teacher. . . Simply their high ethical standing, and the common fancy that they should therefore be proof against what is incorrectly regarded as the worst of vices, attract greater attention, and give news value to the occasional disclosures.” [He says incorrectly because he is talking generally about homosexual/atypical sexual behavior and kind of blending it all together – it wasn’t well-defined at the time. He is specifically complaining about fellatio, which is what they punished instead of child abuse.]
And from the same:
“It would be well for the Church authorities to question, as to their sexuality, all candidates for beginning a theological course, and in the kindest manner advise adolescents in the least bisexual to choose some other profession . . .”
In another illustration of how complicated sexual categories are, he uses bisexual to mean something close to homosexual or sexually abnormal. Homosexual is a fairly recent term. Of course, homosexuality should in no sense be equated with pedophilia. The author of the above passage has sexual preferences that are a bit hard to follow and may have involved minors, but his emphasis is on the attraction between soldiers/rough working men and “androgyns/female impersonators,” which seem to be homosexuals and people of other sexually atypical lifestyles. They wanted men who looked like ideal physical men, and soldiers tend to attract me and women alike.
Also, check out this 1909 protest of a school sexual abuse scandal:
https://archive.org/details/mrsanniebesantmo00fussrich
Nothing’s as new or shocking as people seem to think. But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing and sad.
If you want to talk about not new, we can also bring up Ancient Greece. I’ve always wondered whether men there were somehow more innately disposed to be pederasts, or whether many people who consider themselves “heterosexual” today could engage in and enjoy pederasty under the right (that is to say, wrong) set of social conditions.
@Yaleocon
Yes, definitely. I didn’t bring that up because in Greece it seems to have been accepted and unsurprising. I was responding to the idea that clergy sexual abuse was recent/highly anomalous and “no one could have foreseen” such an outrage or its coverup.
But there is a hilarious willful blindness to historical knowledge of sex. Even the most uptight New Englanders read the ancient Greek plays – they just assumed that was confined to the past. I’m writing a piece on this related to a particular issue I research, which I can’t explain right now. But I regularly see scholars argue that Whitman’s references simply can’t be to oral sex, as the vast majority of people didn’t know about that then. But it was pretty freaking clear. And a letter recently surfaced from Napoleon to Josephine expressing interest in performing the same. Apparently some people knew about it, and maybe Josephine wasn’t as appalling to Napoleon as she is to judgmental historians!
ETA: The 1922 work I quoted goes on about poor straight men with high sex drives frequently resorting to homosexual sex. I think the issue is less predisposition to things like pederasty (though it certainly is true for some), and more the lack of other options. For a long time, men were absolutely terrified of catching STDs from prostitutes, and they thought masturbation made you insane and crippled. This was probably less true in ancient Greek times, but I’m not sure – I think that was a cultural thing that developed for various reasons and got rather glorified and thus imitated. Combine that with rules about not touching women until marriage, and constant issues with pregnancy and childbirth after marriage, and highly sexual men sought other avenues. There were also ideas about the loftiness of male bonds compared to relationships with allegedly morally and intellectually inferior women (Whitman sort of touches on this).
I’m not sure if you are interested in this as a subject, but I have writer’s block and tend to be much better at writing articles when I have someone willing to read it. Would you be interested in reading my draft when I get to it? In part, it’s about what people in the 1800s knew about sexuality based on reading ancient Greek texts. No pressure at all, but let me know if you feel like looking it over!
@mtl1882 “I’m not sure if you are interested in this as a subject, but I have writer’s block and tend to be much better at writing articles when I have someone willing to read it. Would you be interested in reading my draft when I get to it?”
I am not Yaleocon but I would be delighted to read that draft when you come around to finishing it
My email (ROT13’d) is
crqeb.qsg@tznvy.pbz
@PedroS – thanks, I’ll try and finish it soon!
The Male:Female ratio among Catholic priest victims is 4:1. In the general population, most victims are female. The majority are post-pubescent.
Source, numbers are from 2004
I would think the overwhelming majority of molestation/statutory victims are post-pubescent, because humans didn’t evolve to suppress sexual attraction to 14-17-year-olds, while a true pedophile is a rare freak with a “thorn in the flesh” (of their brain).
My prior is that for a person like McCarrick to become cardinal, and such an influential one, he must have had several people covering for him at a high level. Also, the presence of corrupt people in the Curia is well-known. So I find Viganò’s allegations to be at least credible. He also mentions several witnesses and documents that can confirm key portions of his story, and says more than once that memos are available in various Church offices. It is not unlikely that he has copies of the memos, and may release them later.
Pope Francis was obviously caught off-guard, and refused to answer any questions, instead saying that the document “speaks for itself” and asking the press to investigate. This was probably the best strategy he could muster after the attack: it would be dangerous to explicitly deny facts that Viganò may be able to prove, and committing to a story too soon could allow Viganò to humiliate him further by releasing further evidence. Instead, by asking the press (which is friendly to him and his “current”) to investigate, he can wait for them to dig up dirt on Viganò and hope that he is forced to show his cards.
Ultimately, I think Francis will survive this. If he avoids getting caught into too many explicit lies, he can find a suitable way to spin the story. What really matters is his public reputation, and having the press on his side counts for a lot. As juicy as a high-level scandal may seem for the press, they perceive the situation within the church as an extension of secular politics, and there is no way they want the undermine a progressive pope and hand such a big victory to conservatives.
The child abuse scandal can be big and powerful as long as the press is behind it. Without a sustained campaign from outside the church, meh, the hierarchy can weather it.
Ultimately, if Francis does not abdicate, the conservatives will have to fall back.
Yeah, at the moment some of the papers do seem to be treating it as “conservative attacks”. It will be interesting to see if the gay sex angle is played up rather than the ‘bishops knew priests were abusing/bishops were themselves abusing’ (and it’s ignored that Vigano is saying this was priests and bishops having gay sex with younger men). And it is true that Vigano has axes to grind so his claims that ‘I sent a letter which was never acknowledged’ have to be investigated carefully; as discussed elsewhere in another context, even registered letters get mislaid or go astray, whereas a fax is hard copy proof you did send it and it went through. In his statement he does do a lot of “Francis never said anything when I said X, so this must mean he already knew about it” which is subjective interpretation on his part and not evidence that Francis was lying.
The abuse scandals are very convoluted because (a) they go back decades (b) they’re global (c) they’re slightly different in every country (d) mores have changed so much – for example, the Irish church mother and baby homes scandals, there were similar secular homes in many countries including the US and England which has similar set-ups, but the big deal is being made in Ireland over the religious involvement and the secular scandals never get brought up.
The American situation has, as someone remarked, three levels: there’s the historic child abuse (non-sexual), the historic child abuse (sexual), and the adult straight and gay sex scandals. The child abuse cases are mostly from years back and are being dealt with. Priests having sex with female parishoners/having children with them has always happened, unfortunately. The gay sex scandals involving (as with Archbishop McCarrick) allegations that he abused his position to proposition and harass seminarians are of more recent vintage (70s-90s) and are really coming to the fore now. It all gets lumped into one big overarching ‘Catholic sex abuse scandal’, though, and the assumption in the public mind is that ‘clergy accused of sex scandal’ means ‘priest with very young children, 12 or under’ and not ‘priest and 18 to 20 year old man’.
Some thoughts, since I haven’t responded to the top-level post:
This is all but guaranteed. Vigano alleges he had several allies in the Curia and names names; many of these are at least plausible. Cardinal Wuerl of Washington, meanwhile, insists he was never informed about McCarrick’s sanctions, and if Wuerl is telling the truth (never something to bet on), that actually confirms McCarrick must have allies in the Vatican—though it’s more likely Wuerl was simply complicit in the coverup.
We’re starting to see a few of these. He says the Lantheaume had a loud argument with McCarrick about sanctions on him that carried out into the hall; Lantheaume confirmed that this was true. He claims he never quashed the investigation into Archbishop Nienstedt; a document was just produced showing that Cardinal Ouellet was indeed informed by someone in the Nienstedt investigation that this wasn’t true and Vigano only asked that Nienstedt be able to give his response before the investigation continued—though no one involved ever made any effort to exonerate Vigano.
Yep; it’s quite clear that Vigano chose to release it at this precise time to embarrass Francis. Francis has a habit of doing off the cuff interviews when he gets on the airplane, and in this case the plane was the first place the press could get to him that morning. It’s all the more embarrassing given that Francis was in Ireland and spent so much time apologizing for clerical abuse and denouncing coverups.
Of course, the fact that Francis couldn’t deny the allegations that he knew and did nothing is extremely telling.
Yep, which the Times has proved it’s eager to do. I was tempted when I read the article Yaleocon linked to fisk it, but there’s no point; we know where the NYT stands on this and that it has little interest in, as you say, handing a victory to conservatives. Credit them this, though: they published Matthew Schmitz’s op-ed, too.
At the AP, meanwhile, we have this sterling reporting, h/t Dreher:
I don’t know if this is true. The Catholics I speak with, and the websites I read are furious. People want a coup, where the conservative Catholics throw out the modernists, Francis and the homosexual priests to both protect the flock and save the Church from further scandal and embarrassment. The media does not want this to happen , and will likely shill the other way, protecting Francis and ignoring the “gay priests” angle in favor of the “pedo priests / abusers” angle in accordance with my frequent observations on this blog that “don’t make gays uncomfortable” appears to be the highest moral good in current society. But the Church Militant will have none of it, and do not care what the media has to say.
I do not know how it’s going to end, but I have faith that nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light.
I’m active in my (liberal) Catholic parish, and I, my wife, and many of our friends are both heartsick and enraged about it. Our priests have tried to address this in their homilies, but they’re mostly having similar reactions to ours. And I’ve noticed the church, which is usually full during most of the Masses, is a little emptier than before. I don’t know whether that’s anything more than noise (lots of people are on summer vacation), but I have a strong suspicion that this is showing up in how many people show up to Mass and how much money comes in for the collections. I wonder how it will affect how many couples come to the Church for baptism of their children–one of the common threads I’ve heard from people coming back to the Church when they have kids is that they want to raise their kids with some values and the Church is a good place to do that. None of this suggests any kind of decent values in the hierarchy of the Church.
In some sense, this is the strong and weak point of the Catholic Church. We have a hierarchy, all the way up to the Pope. To believe that this is how things should work requires a belief that the hierarchy is trying to do the right thing–they’re human and they will screw up, but they shouldn’t be actively evil. (Or classic ass-covering bureaucrats who have no moral compass beyond keeping scandals out of the newspapers.) That hierarchy needs to have the moral authority to promulgate moral teachings that we can take seriously.
The hierarchy moves priests around, so that a parish can have a beloved priest whom everyone’s comfortable with moved away with no warning or explanation, and replaced with a new priest. And that power was used, repeatedly, to move around priests who had taken advantage of their position to have sex[2] with (mostly) adolescent boys. Quieting down the scandal was critical; keeping the abusing priests from spilling whatever dirt they had on their higher-ups[1] was nearly as important. Protecting the kids in the new parish that got that priest was way, way down the list of priorities.
[1] Apparently made easier by widespread homosexuality among the priesthood–a lot of stories have come out suggesting that there was a lot of sex between priests and seminarians, and that this was more-or-less an open secret in some places. If you spent a couple years having a gay affair with the guy who’s now the bishop, he’s going to have a hard time disciplining you meaningfully for having a gay affair with a 15-year-old altar boy.
[2] This is not a totally crazy way of handling the normal adult/adult sex scandals–move the priest far away from temptation and hope he reforms his behavior. But you’d like some memory.
As a conservative protestant with some sympathy for the argument that one should submit themselves to the one Holy church with a tradition leading directly back to the apostles… I hear Orthodox has nice trappings, too.
The trouble with “the websites [you] read” (and I read, for the record) is that they tend to be populated by traditionalist or traditionalist-sympathetic Catholics—a small percentage of the Church with little institutional power. What we have, bizarrely, is a disproportionate number of journalists, which it seems is our only path to effect change. But notice that even so rags like the National Catholic Reporter are busy running interference for the pope. I gather from reading others’ comments that some local priests, and some local bishops, are talking about it, but meanwhile, I haven’t heard a word from my parish or bishop, and so long as Winters or the NYT are crafting the narrative, it will be “Evil Conservatives Attack Pope for Preaching Peace, Love.”
(Note also that it’s not as though Tosatti, Montagna, Pentin, Dreher, Douthat, et al. are unbiased either. I have a lot of respect for Rod, but he’s a blogger right now, not a journalist. He doesn’t have the resources to investigate the alleged Nienstedt coverup (which Dawn Eden Goldstein has been proving to be more complicated than LifeSiteNews and Vigano would have us believe), much less the McCarrick coverup. And he’s understandably more interested in McCarrick than Nienstedt, but he still looks credulous when he immediately accepts Vigano’s version of the latter events.)
Furious though they may be, what avenues do the conservatives have if the Pope does not abdicate? They cannot split with the papacy or they’re hardly conservatives any more.
It’s not even clear the pope should abdicate. Anyway, I’d rather see a sacking of the curia—as thorough as it needs to be—before any resignation from the pope, or we’ll be in the same mess we were in before. Worse, given the appointments Francis has been so eagerly making.
One thing that strikes me about this whole controversy is that the central factual question should be easy to answer. Did McCarrick keep a very low profile–no traveling, no speeches–for several years before Francis became pope, then become active again under Francis?
If the answer is yes, that supports Vigano’s story pretty strongly—it’s hard to imagine that if the previous pope had put McCarrick under severe restrictions his successor wouldn’t know about it. If the answer is no then Vigano’s story is false.
Vigano’s letter gets pretty specific in naming names and documentation to the point that it literally says “All the memos, letters and other documentation mentioned here are available at the Secretariat of State of the Holy See or at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C.” That’s Vigano screaming to reporters to go follow-up on this.
But I don’t think they want to. The NY Times even went with a “Conservatives Pounce!“* headline, which I think signals pretty clearly how they intend to cover this story: with a pillow, until it stops moving.
That and the pope’s non-denial make me rate the contents as highly likely to be true.
* The print title was even better: Francis Takes High Road As Conservatives Pounce
Folks at the National Catholic Reporter were telling a story rather like this about McCarrick a few years ago: Benedict had sidelined him, but now Francis isn’t. Observe this choice quote:
Here we have the narrative I’m speaking of:
It’s quite obvious, though, that McCarrick was less active during Benedict and more active during Francis. The real question, whether there were secret sanctions on McCarrick placed by Benedict known to Wuerl and dozens of others, is harder to answer. We know McCarrick definitely did have public appearances after the alleged sanctions: he celebrated a mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York during the Benedict papacy; he went on at least one diplomatic mission; he was with the rest of the cardinals with Benedict in Rome for his birthday or something like that. However, it’s not at all hard to believe McCarrick flouted these sanctions—it, uh, wouldn’t be the first time he’s done something he shouldn’t have.
What’s more, the Register reports that a source close to Benedict has confirmed Benedict recalls placing sanctions on McCarrick, though not their specific nature; McCarrick was indeed moved out of the seminary he was staying at; Lantheaume, noted in the testimony as willing to testify that the previous nuncio, Sambi, had a stormy confrontation with McCarrick that could be heard in the hall when these sanctions were to be reported has said “Vigano said the truth”; and McFadden, the Archdiocese of Washington’s rep, has said that Wuerl did cancel the event where McCarrick was to meet seminarians, saying only that it was “at the nuncio’s request.” None of it is conclusive, but that’s a lot of puzzle pieces starting to fall into place—and surely, at some point, warrants some actual investigative reporting instead of character assassination.
One last thing: why secret sanctions? These exist; Benedict apparently used the same on Marciel Maciel until that was uncovered. This is a failing on Benedict’s part, I believe, and it shames me, because I respected Benedict, and now it seems clear that he was covering it up. Granted, what Benedict would have known about was the abuse of seminarians, not of minors; it was only when the Archdiocese of New York announced in June the credible claim by the 16 year old (followed by the New York Times breaking the story about the seminarians and then the 11 year old) that public sanctions were ever brought against McCarrick. Nonetheless, a good deal of the onus for this mess belongs on Benedict, who, if Vigano is telling the truth, imposed sanctions which were hard to even enforce and which brought, it is needless to say, no justice for his victims.
Secret sanctions sound very much like what you’d get when you were trying to address bad behavior, but were also extremely concerned about causing a scandal. Which absolutely fits the way the Church has handled these scandals over the last several decades–mission #1 was apparently protecting the Church’s reputation. This has not actually worked out very well, in the end.
Though one thing strikes me about the quoted conversation is that it could only have come from Pope Francis or Cardinal McCarrick. How else could the reporter have known what they said to each other on the phone. (Alternative possibility: the reporter is moonlighting from his full-time job at the NSA.)
The article claims that’s a story McCarrick likes to tell, so it’s likely the reporter got it from McCarrick himself or through the grapevine.
It’s creepy as shit on its own, of course, given the allegations. But it’s actually worse than that, when you give it a little more context. Do you remember the famous “Who am I to judge?” The context was a Msgr Ricca, a scandal-ridden bureaucrat at the Vatican bank who was living with his gay lover and was caught several times in compromising situations. The pope was being asked about this with Ricca’s latest situation in Venezuela—where he was shipped off to when the pressure got too high in Rome:
These remarks were made one month after Vigano claims to have informed Francis about McCarrick’s dossier.
Vigano said this is how McCarrick responded to him when he informed him of the sanctions upon becoming nuncio:
And lastly, this from Tornielli yesterday, a very Francis-friendly reporter:
What are the arguments for and against restricting foreign/non-resident purchasing of residential property?
Secondly, in NZ the new restrictions are softened by allowing foreign buyers of properties over 2.5MM. The idea with the >2.5MM exception is that those properties weren’t going to be purchased by first-home buyers or Kiwis anyway so it shouldn’t affect the market much, and that the purchases will inject foreign money into the economy. Do those ideas have merit?
The best reason I could think of in support of restricting sales to NZ residents, would be to lower demand and thus lower property values, making the property more affordable for the average NZ resident. If you goal is to provide affordable housing to the average person, the market becomes more efficient by restricting it in this way.
In this reasoning, the 2.5 million cut off is logical, since that is outside the range of your typical family dwelling, and you are probably dealing with a lot more luxury vacation homes.
Lower property values benefit people who don’t own at the expense of people who do, the only way you can make housing “more affordable” for the average person is if the majority of people aren’t homeowners. It looks like home ownership rates in NZ are around 65%, so this is unlikely to be true.
Secondly for this condition to hold in the long run you need some combination of home costs being disconnected from construction costs or construction costs decreasing or population shrinkage. If these aren’t powerful drivers then what you get is a decline in the quantity or quality of housing to compensate for the lower prices.
So basically such a scheme is only plausibly going to benefit people who currently don’t own homes at the expense of people who currently own homes and people who will want to own homes in the future.
NZ lacks property taxes, as I understand it, which means foreign investment might be a much bigger distortion than in regions with property taxes.
Which is to say – it is very plausible that construction cost and home cost are more easily disconnected in NZ than, say, the US, since foreign investment could swamp the real-estate market without the usual checks holding prices stable.
What do you mean by “investment”?
Purchasing homes and leaving them empty, purchasing homes and living in them, purchasing empty land and letting it sit.
Or purchasing land and building on it, or purchasing homes and renting them out?
These are separate categories for such a discussion.
The main issue is, as always, what is unseen. If NZ has its own currency then for housing to be bid up this way you need people demanding NZ currency, which should strengthen its purchasing power and lower the costs of other goods in proportion to the housing cost rise. In general it is hard to get a real increase in the cost of living through these mechanisms when you have currency barriers.
baconbits9 –
In the short term, sure.
In the long term, if property values are driven up by foreign investors – who have no reason to sell to New Zealanders specifically – then the nice cars and computers you imported thirty years ago in exchange for that land aren’t going to compensate your country for the fact that a lot of the real estate is now unusable and bundled up in investment portfolios.
The lack of property taxes turns property in NZ into an excellent store of value whose value becomes neatly severed from its development.
The fact that it might be worth even more, if developed, might seem an excellent reason to develop it – except that this won’t happen until the opportunity cost of the development is favorable. That is, not only do you have to be able to make money developing it, but you have to be able to make more money than any of your other investment opportunities. Given that the land is only going to get more valuable, anyways, its use as a store of value may far dominate its development potential.
I doubt this would be true on a large scale, again you have currency issues from the get go. If you are purchasing larges amounts of NZ currency to then buy land and sit on it for long periods of time attempting to liquidate exposes you to large currency risks, especially since liquidating and selling and then exchanging currency is going to weaken the currency and purchasing is going to strengthen it. Not only that you are betting that NZ won’t eventually institute a property tax as it becomes an island of renters.
Lets run though a scenario: Lots of lots of foreign investors purchase homes and apartment buildings and rent them out to New Zealanders. The expected economic outcome is to drive up the nominal price of housing, but the supply and demand for living space is the same so rents should stay roughly the same. The end result should be in the range of “home ownership is harder/more expensive but cost of living is the same or less overall”, plus all of the current homeowners (a majority of NZers according to google) get the gains associated with the higher nominal prices.
If the outside buyers are buying and developing it is almost certainly a net positive for the average NZer, which leaves only one real option for a net negative impact. Outside buyers are purchasing and preventing development that would have otherwise happened.
When would it be favorable to develop? Almost certainly when nominal home prices are rising. If NZ has a construction crisis because their government won’t allow development then this is a major issue, but then the issue is not the investors its bad housing policy or NIMBYism.
How is it a given that the land is going to get more valuable? Allowing foreign investment doesn’t guarantee foreign investment. You are baking in all kinds of assumptions, and if the land is a given to be more valuable then the largest beneficiaries would be the largest group of landowners which is going to be NZers.
“Lower property values benefit people who don’t own at the expense of people who do”
I want to push back on this. I plan to stay in my house for 10-20 years; if I did move it would almost surely be to another house that I would buy; banks already offer me far more credit than I need. A general rise in property values (which would also increase the price of the house I was moving to) would raise my taxes and raise the transaction costs of a potential move without benefit to me.
I don’t know anything about NZ politics, but it seems reasonable to me for the government to aim to make house purchase be about a way of lodging, not an investment.
Guy in TN,
Yes that seems reasonable (that it would lower house prices).
The exception for >2.5MM though, wouldn’t purchases above that also raise house prices? It would also encourage developers to build luxury homes instead of more affordable homes.
One argument for the 2.5MM exception, and against restrictions generally, is that the money that flows in from the house purchases will benefit the NZ economy. Is this true?
Well yes, having no restrictions will primarily make real estate developers wealthier, and they might spend some of that money somewhere down the line in other aspects of the NZ economy. Standard trickle-down stuff.
This is one of those cases where you can clearly see the disconnect between economic value and utility. If you want to maximize economic value, you let the developers build what they want and sell to who they want. If this results in poor New Zealanders living in cardboard boxes, well, they weren’t creating much market value in the first place, compared to the economic value in building a billionaire’s fifth vacation home.
If you want to maximize utility though, you instead have to take into consideration the fulfillment of human desires (e.g. food, shelter), regardless of how the expression of those desires manifests itself in the marketplace. In this way, you might actually fulfill more utility by allowing a first time home buyer to purchase a $50,000 family home, rather than allowing the creation of a $500,000
vacation house, despite the latter creating 10x market value.
No, real estate developers are people developing real estate, which means construction, which means jobs and productivity. You don’t have to resort to “standard trickle down stuff” to show economic benefits.
If there’s a market for the $50k people, shouldn’t there be real estate developers working to capitalize on it, regardless of the $500k people? The only way I can see for the market to fail to satisfy both demands here, is if there’s an approachable limit on the amount of land available, so that the wealthier people get to have all of it. But I don’t think there’s an approachable limit. Not in New Zealand, not even in North America.
If the fixed costs of e.g regulatory compliance for new construction is $50K/unit, there will be zero developers working to capitalize on the $50K market. Even at $25K/unit it will be marginal.
There may be units newly available at $50K, because that’s all the market will bear now that all their formerly-$100K owners have moved on to what used to be $200K units whose owners have decamped for actual new $500K construction. This sort of hand-me-down real estate market may not be as efficient as doing new construction directly targeted at the market you care about, but it’s more politically plausible than getting a hundred separate interest groups to back down on mandates that each add “only” $500 to the cost and serve some great and worthy cause.
That the market only satisfies economic demand is the problem. If I want to buy a house, and I only have $1000 dollars, the market will determine that I want to live in a cardboard box, and my “demands” will be satisfied.
The market will, of course, give people something for a $50,000 home, and this will tautologically satisfy demand in the economic sense. But whether this scenario alone is the best way to maximize human utility is doubtful. After all, we can change what the market decides by shaping the rules of it (e.g., whether foreign money is restricted), and the status-quo market outcomes are just the result of the rules that were decided beforehand.
The rationale behind restricting foreign money, and thus reducing demand, is not to just decrease home values and make them more affordable for first time buyers, but to increase the quality of house you can purchase for $50,000.
I assumed that having a “limit on the amount of land available” was a given, seeing how it is the classic example of a zero-sum good.
At the very least, you would surely agree that zoning law prohibits unlimited construction possibilities?
It’s worth being clear that foreign/non-resident means foreign AND non-resident. It’s not “hard” to become a NZ resident if you have decent demographics and skills, and then, still: live there, buy a house. There is the belief (not sure how true it is – it happens, but how much and which how much impact???) that overseas Chinese are buying and leaving vacant numbers of houses just to have an ownership foothold outside China. That belief makes this type of law popular.
On the one hand, that this is a significant effect sounds unintuitive, racist, and seems likely to be economic self-harm. On the other hand, there really is a huge flow of Chinese money trying to establish foreign assets, real estate is a big deal, and something I read recently said that of the usual suspects (e.g. California, Western Canada, etc) NZ was the fourth most popular destination in absolute, not relative, terms. Problem: NZ is tiny; China isn’t. That this would twist the property market isn’t completely nuts.
I don’t have any thoughts on the 2.5MM threshold, but it’s also relevant that foreign buyers can still build/buy brand new homes.
NZ home prices in Auckland (the major city) seem to be insane by most standards. Normalized by average income (even average regional income) are, I think (may be wrong but if so not by much) worse than Silicon Valley.
Push back about the “inject foreign money into the economy” concept (ignoring for simplicity the foreign exchange market).
It is only a net injection if the person selling the house is only going to spend that money in NZ, and all the people who get the money he spends also spend it in NZ, etc, etc, etc. If the seller goes out and buys a yacht made in a foreign country or a house in a foreign country then there is no net injection. If the seller buys a different house in NZ and THAT seller goes out and buys a house in a different country then there is no net injection. If every house seller all the way down the line buys a house in NZ that will push up prices, which should push up construction and be a net gain to the economy.
Something I haven’t seen here, is market distortions due to foreign investment buying.
In Canada, it seems that the problematic foreign buying is concentrated in a small number of cities. Properties are bought and left vacant, rather than being rented out or occuppied by their owners. The result is a reduced supply of housing, at a higher price, for both purchasers and renters. People born in one of these cities leave, and there is much political drama. And Toronto and Vancouver have housing prices way out of line with the rest of the country.
Note that I have no detailed evicence of this – I have not looked at what statistics may or may not exist – this is just the generally understood description as reported to me [= bitched about ;-)] by Canadians living in Canada. And I don’t know whether the NZ picture is the same.
In addition to Cassander’s excellent responses, I’d add WW2 materially benefited Americans by allowing them to easily take indirect control of the resources of the former empires, which they would not have done if Germany had forced a peace in Europe and Japan created its Co-prosperity Sphere.
I had an odd thought earlier today about capitalism. One of the under-rated benefits of capitalism in a democratic society is that it separates out a lot of the ruthless, competitive people who otherwise would be competing for political power directly in the state and its hierarchy, and channels them into private sector competition where they can do less damage through oligarchical competition (while people who are more civic-minded and less accumulative are more likely to go into public sector work).
That doesn’t mean that they have no influence on politics as such (very obviously not), just that it’s less direct than it would be in a system where the “public” and “private” distinction doesn’t exist. A lot of them instead spend their days racking up share value as a form of points scoring by increasing the size and value of the businesses they own – and they fight against other ambitious folks doing the same thing (elite “churn” is good as well).
For similar solutions, see Versailles, parts of the Chinese system, and other cultural attempts by governments at stopping the upper classes from burning everything down for a shiny bauble of power.
The problem, is, once you get a substantial fraction of the elite and wannabe elite competing at something it becomes a pathological status game. Capitalism (and to a lesser extent the Ivory Tower of Academia) clearly was superior as it forced the status game into something productive rather than calligraphy or frilly dresses, but now the game seems to have overcome the actual productivity almost completely.
I’ve seen it written that this was one of the points of the Light Novel/anime Saga of Tanya the Evil. In one life, he’s just a jerk boss middle manager, with ambition of climbing the corporate ladder. In another, he slaughters his enemies, as a military figure.
The musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” indirectly touches on this, as well. Being a cutthroat businessman doesn’t actually sever jugulars.
But the argument against is that the scale of suffering has broadened, with globalism. Maybe the CEO of a big investment bank involved with the housing crisis didn’t directly murder anyone, like the local crime syndicate, but the thousands of people who lost their homes, lost their jobs, perhaps got addicted to opiates, might outweigh that. Hence the shift in some ideologies to systemic impact.
What is the hivemind’s opinion on theta burst stimulation, which appears to be a new variant on transcranial brain stimulation? I’ve heard good things but it is always so hard to separate the temporary excitement around a new approach versus the long term results of an anti-depression treatment.
Fellow accounting/finance commenters (and any other interested parties), I’d love to get your opinions on the following tax policy proposal:
Situation: The current approach to corporate financial statements in the United States is to use one set for financial reporting purposes (e.g. SEC filings, raising capital) and another set for tax purposes (e.g. for the IRS). Typically, the financial reporting statements are presented in a manner that overstates the company’s financial position to increase the company’s share prices and access to capital, while tax statements are presented in a manner that understates the company’s financial position to reduce their tax liability.
Proposal: Require businesses to use the same set of statements for both financial reporting and tax reporting. This would reduce the incentive to over- or understate a company’s financial position due to the mutually opposed incentives.
Expected Results:
1. Increased transparency to financial analysts and investors as financial statements would be less optimized to create misleading impressions
2. Increased corporate tax revenue; depending on your opinion of current corporate tax rates, that can be offset with an accompanying rate cut (smaller businesses would disproportionately benefit since they are likely optimizing their statements less)
3. Significantly reduced accounting overhead
I acknowledge that there would be significant rent-seeking pushback against such a proposal, but are there are any other drawbacks (or benefits) that I’ve missed?
If public companies provide different information to the IRS and to the SEC, it’s because the IRS and SEC are asking for different information, or have different accounting standards for calculating it. They aren’t pulling some sort of moustache-twisting fast one; they save that for non-GAAP metrics.
I’m aware that the standards are different, but my proposal is to unify them.
I’m not making any accusations of impropriety here; companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder return and minimize tax burden, and the differing approaches to financial reporting and tax reporting properly reflect this.
I know next to nothing about accounting or finance, but I’ll ask you the same question that I ask of every would-be reformer: how are you going to actually implement your policy into practice ? Is there some way, politically speaking, of passing the laws that you propose ? If the answer is “no”, then debating the benefits of your policy (or lack thereof) is pointless.
To the general public, this would be a relatively boring special interest matter, so political feasibility depends most upon the three key stakeholders:
1. Businesses stand to benefit from the reduction in overhead, and can be bought off with the aforementioned rate reduction.
2. Financial analysts and investors would generally favor greater transparency, though some may currently benefit from opaqueness as a rent-seeking matter because they have a competitive advantage in dealing with reduced transparency.
3. The accounting profession would probably generally oppose this proposal for rent-seeking reasons, though the growing diversification of the Big Four professional services firms means that they aren’t quite hit as hard as they once would have been.
All things considered, I would expect that this proposal would be reasonably politically feasible if the implementation details are well thought-out. The relevant stakeholders have accepted many similar simplification pushes in the past, provided they’ve had reasonable transition times and a seat at the discussion table.
Not my expertise, but:
The only real result is #1. This is a one-way information black hole: the IRS gets to see everything the SEC/Wall Street does and more, and IRS rules require companies to explain any differences between their IRS numbers and their Wall Street numbers. So it’s not as if Uncle Sam is getting jipped on tax revenue, it’s Wall Street getting duped.
IRS disclosures are also private, so we also can’t really say the IRS is getting duped. Presumably not too badly, because the IRS hires lots of really intelligent people that have lots of time to go over lots of tax returns. Either way, there’s probably two reasons we don’t want public companies to adhere to IRS guidelines in SEC statements:
1. There is a ton of confidential information in there. My 10-K might detail that I have a factory and some stuff in there. The IRS disclosure probably requires listing out every single asset along with the depreciation schedule. And the asset list is HUGE. I have the binders for our non-taggable assets (like, the floor), and they fill an entire bookshelf. That’s like 10% of our assets, and that’s just one for factory. Our company would not want to reveal that information to the public.
2. It’s a ton of work to comply with the above, and I don’t want to duplicate work on a quarterly basis to provide “color” on this annual report.
The above gives a really big incentive to take the whole company private, which just makes the whole situation even worse.
And I’m not sure the benefit is THAT much? It seems like the big collapses (WorldCom, Enron) are the kinds of things you wouldn’t pick up on regardless.
But again, this is not my area of expertise. My inclination would be requiring the disclosure of certain high-level items (net income, gross income, gross receipts, net receipts, deprecation, taxes paid and for what years, yadda yadda) but not require the presumably-odious disclosures the IRS requires.
Also, as Nybbler says, there’s isn’t One Law of Accounting. There are different standards and different stakeholders/agencies might want different reporting according to these different standards.
I’m certainly not suggesting the IRS is getting duped. Current corporate tax rates already reflect the current levels of tax optimization.
Supplemental statements to the IRS can be separate and required only when filing your taxes. The proposed unification is concerned with differences such as taking more depreciation for tax purposes than for financial reporting.
One key advantage to unification with respect to fraudulent accounting is that you have an extra set of eyes on the same set of statements. If financial analysts, investors, and the IRS are all looking at one set of statements, fraud has a lower chance of slipping by.
I do have an accounting background, so I am well aware of the different standards. The idea here is that unification should be possible in a manner satisfactory to all relevant stakeholders (at least to my knowledge and the knowledge of various accounting professors that I have discussed this with).
Simple: You cannot charge somebody for tax evasion if correctly reporting their taxes would result in them being charged for a crime.
The fifth amendment forbids laws which require people to testify against themselves. (This is also why you can’t charge a felon for failing to register a firearm – the requirement to register, given they can’t legally own a firearm, amounts to a requirement that they testify that they are breaking the law.)
The firewall between the IRS and all other law enforcement exists to skirt the fifth amendment. As soon as you combine tax and any other legal code, your tax law becomes less effective and less enforceable.
Excellent point.
Is there any reason that this cannot be simply resolved through a supplemental IRS form allowing disclosure of illegal income, to be submitted only to the IRS in addition to the unified financial statements?
At that point, you are effectively back to having two sets of accounts.
For the legal portions of the statements (and since my proposal is directed at businesses, as opposed to individuals, there should be less illegal activity), it would still result in unified accounting of aspects like capitalization/depreciation, cash flows, compensation, etc.
I’ve been proposing this for years, so strongly in favor.
Tax paid is already a standard reported item, so investors are already aware of any major discrepancy between what is being reported to the IRS and what the company is telling them.
I don’t know anything about corporate tax, but I would expect that public disclosure at the level of detail the IRS requires would be very harmful for a company’s competitive position. Things like e.g. a detailed breakdown of rental revenue by property would be the sort of thing a company would strongly prefer that its competitors not know about.
I agree that disclosure at tax reporting levels would be problematic. My proposal is in the other direction: get rid of the tax basis for income and associated reporting altogether, and tax GAAP income. Most of the weird rules and disclosures for tax are because reducing income is a straightforward benefit for tax purposes; having GAAP, which everyone watches and tries to maximize, drive taxation would align the incentives better.
You can see some discussion of the idea here (scan down-I did mention I’ve proposed this for a long time).
Don’t the tax authorities need the granularity of the existing system for auditing purposes?
The tax authorities might need the granularity of current reporting for auditing purposes; I hadn’t considered that. But that just means that you provide additional support for your publicly-reported numbers to the IRS.
Reporting tax paid doesn’t have the same effect; taxes paid is a mixture of taxes based on current income, taxes based on past tax-income-specific items, tax offsets from past losses, etc, etc. So far as I know, current taxable income is not reported.
Safer, perhaps not, but the population of the US desires things other than safety. The mexican american war, the indian wars, even the war for independence, all brought huge amounts of land into US possession, which was something the population very much desired. On top of that, a substantial part of the reason that the US is so safe is because it’s huge. The effects of a much smaller US are, of course, impossible to predict, but it seems safe to say that the US almost certainly would have ended up more vulnerable.
On top of that, you’ve left out the largest war the US did fight, the Cold War. Communism absolutely did represent a huge threat to the US, and had it not been confronted, it almost certainly would have become a larger war. You can’t talk about korea and vietnam in isolation, as if they were random events unconnected to the larger struggle. Communism did have to be fought, and sometimes fought violently. If it hadn’t been in korea and vietnam, teh alternatives would have been somewhere else or surrender.
Responding to part 2:
Specifically on the point of ww2, You’re absolutely right that in 1939 or 41, or what have you, no one was considering invading the US, but you’re failing to consider the geopolitical outlook that would have resulted from the war.
Let’s assume that the US doesn’t get involved and the axis win. Whether or not they conquer the US, the result is an ideologically hostile empire stretching across most of the Eurasian landmass. the soviet union was able to pose an existential threat to the US and that was with Germany, the UK, france, Japan, and the smaller europeans as allies. The axis empire would have been almost as large in acreage, would have had considerably more people in it, and would likely have ended up just as ideologically hostile. I can see no possibility that we wouldn’t have gotten into a cold war with an enemy that controlled more people, more resources, and which was geographically better positioned to threaten the US than the USSR and which wasn’t wedded to a self destructive economic model, while the US would have had many fewer allies around their periphery. That’s not a good place for the US to be.
to the extent that this is true, and it’s at least debatable, that’s largely because (A) we had “monsters” at home to destroy in the shape of various land grabs, and (B) the ability of the country to go abroad was far more limited by geography, demography, and technology. the US population was smaller than the UKs through about 1860 or so. As soon as we got the ability to start hunting monsters, we did so in earnest. to say that conquers are cannon balls is indeed an oversimplification, but a country’s grasp absolutely does grows with its reach.
communism was backed with the force of tens of thousands of nuclear weapon’s. It is arguably the ONLY thing that has threatened the continental united states since the british burned the white house down.
A red dawn style invasion isn’t really the threat that was being fought. It was the threat that the communists would take western europe, then the UK, then canada, and then probably wouldn’t even have to launch a red dawn style invasion because they were such an obviously successful system that by then the US would be riddled with 5th columns.
It absolutely was. But letting it get pulled apart by its internal contradictions was only possible because (A), there was a viable alternative world for states to sign up with that (B) wasn’t allowed to be conquered be conquered out of existence.
In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis claims that a certain amount of virtue is necessary to make a really terrible villain (the examples he gives are Atilla’s courage and, uh, the fictional evil Jew Shylock’s asceticism, for some reason). This stuck with me, and really came back to me when Trump was elected, because Trump, quite simply, appears to lack all virtue in the classical sense. That is, he doesn’t possess any character trait I can determine that one should be proud of, or which would ordinarily lead to prosperity or flourishing. He isn’t honest, kind, loyal, brave, modest, temperate, prudent, generous, diligent, or anything else like that. And he seems to prove Lewis’s claim in a negative way, in that his vices undercut each other. He’s too lazy to attempt anything really ambitious and stick to it, too vain and insecure to act decisively in the face of criticism, too self-centered to dedicate himself to any kind of grand cause. He appears to be a perfectly failed human being, and content to sit around tweeting inflammatory things and calling for parades. Also a very large amount of otherwise pedestrian corruption.
Anyway, what about positive examples? What are the virtues of history’s monsters? What were Hitler’s virtues, or Mao’s, or Stalin’s? I’ve read about Hitler’s early life, and the best I’ve got is that he was legitimately idealistic in the sense of really believing that Germany was doomed and anything was justified to save her. Other than that, he was legitimately brave when necessary and could work hard within the limited sphere of touring Germany giving endless rabblerousing speeches. Then again, Trump can do that. He’s just not one tenth as good at it.
Please, praise monsters for me, or give me an example of a total monster who nevertheless did tons of damage.
Regardless of how you feel about Trump, at the very least you’ve got to admit that he was elected to the highest office in the land, in the face of overwhelming opposition and against all odds. That’s got to count for something. Moreover, he continues to enjoy a reasonably high degree of popularity, despite his enemies’ continuously sustained efforts to undermine that popularity. He has also accomplished a certain number of his stated political goals (however evil those goals might be), though the extent of his accomplishments is certainly arguable.
I’m more of a consequentialist than a virtue ethicist. If your virtue-based model predicts that Trump should utterly fail at his own goals; and observation informs us that Tump is not utterly failing; then perhaps your model is wrong and virtues don’t matter as much as you think they do.
If your virtue-based model predicts that Trump should utterly fail at his own goals; and observation informs us that Tump is not utterly failing; then perhaps your model is wrong and virtues don’t matter as much as you think they do.
That, or perhaps you’ve not properly identified the virtues. I’ve heard a lot of people cite his nativism, for example, and more specifically his protectionism.
Another factor is that he’s being graded on a curve with effectively two points. He doesn’t have to be “virtuous”, per se; just more virtuous, in the eyes of the voters, than the alternative.
Ah, the famous Six Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, courage, justice, nativism, and protectionism.
Hitler was, by all accounts far more than a rabble rouser, but a brilliant and charismatic speaker. Stalin was one of the greatest bureaucratic manipulators in history. Mao managed to win a 3 decades long multisided civil war and is widely considered one of the greatest insurgent generals in history. That they used their gifts for evil ends doesn’t mean that they didn’t have gifts. Had they not had those gifts, they never would have gotten the power to do all that evil in the first place.
As for trump, as bugmaster says, he did win an election that very few people could win against a field of people who were vastly more experienced in the political arena and against the opposition of much of his own party.
Also, wasn’t Hitler a war hero? He got the Iron Cross for bravery and was even gassed.
He was awarded both degrees of the Iron Cross, but this isn’t as impressive as some think it is – millions of the second class and hundreds of thousands of the first class got awarded in both wars. In general, in both wars, the Germans seem to have been considerably freer in handing out medals (eg, over 7k recipients of the Knight’s Cross and variants, issued only in WWII, vs 1,355 recipients of the Victoria Cross over its entire history) and far more likely to hand out the same medals out for command effectiveness as for valour (plus, this being Nazi Germany, medals got handed out for behaviour that was distinctly unheroic – eg, the guy who was in charge of putting the Warsaw uprising down was awarded the Knight’s Cross, medals were handed out to commanders of death squads, etc).
So, he was a war hero, but of a fairly commonplace sort: he played up his image as a common soldier far more.
IIRC he ran messages, sometimes through dangerous ground. There’s no reason to believe he was an actual coward. The beer-hall putsch, asinine as it was, probably took a certain amount of courage. He was up in the front lines when they exchanged fire with the police. Or so I recall. I read that biography months ago.
Yeah, he was a runner, which I think was a relatively dangerous job, and he was willing to get shot at in the putsch attempt. However, it’s a common misunderstanding concerning the Iron Cross – it doesn’t require suicidal bravery like one sees in VC citations or whatever.
I can’t tell if Lewis is just saying that you can’t be a really successful villain unless you’re competent, or something more profound.
Stalin, Hitler, and Trump are all competent (in different ways!) at getting power, which seems to qualify. I think Trump’s special competence is in getting and holding people’s attention, sort of a very particular type of PR. I agree that doesn’t really match well to “virtue”, but I think the competence framing is probably better than the virtue framing for just this reason.
I suspect that Lewis, given his beliefs, really meant virtue, and reframing as competence wouldn’t have worked for him.
For me, the framing as competence is somewhat a tautology. Let’s say I’m writing a thriller, or an EOTWAWKI story, and require a villain attempting to exterminate the human race. It’s not even going to be worth reading or writing if they don’t have a plausible plan, within their abilities, or close to it. And they certainly aren’t going to succeed – really life super villain – if they aren’t competent to implement whatever method they settle on.
Even the most banal of evil generally requires a lot of people doing the same not-so-good thing, to accomplish anything worse than harming a few people local to them.
He did have a further example, less explicitly defined: in Out of the Silent Planet, there are two villains. One is motivated purely by greed; the other sees himself as a hero, and wants to colonize the stars for the sake of perpetuating the human race. The latter is, in a sense, more virtuous, since he is driven by a twisted kind of love, and he ultimately winds up being more dangerous. He takes bigger risks to achieve his goal, even to the extent of being willing to die to achieve it if need be. The greedy one limps cautiously along in his wake, seeing if he can exploit interplanetary colonialism for cash but ready to snatch back his hand the moment he sees danger.
To some extent, I wonder if the same is true of Trump and Hitler; Trump wants to be big and famous just to be big and famous, he doesn’t want to do anything in particular with it. Okay, he wants to crack down on illegal immigrants, I guess that sort of counts–and that is the area where he would seem to be doing the greatest harm, in the sense of breaking up families and detaining children, etc. But Hitler genuinely loved his adopted country, saw it under threat, and wanted to defend it. That drove him to not only attain power, but use it aggressively and decisively. If he’d hated communism and seen democracy as its natural antithesis, he could have done tremendous good with his gifts for mass mobilization.
Actually, I just checked in OotSP, and the angel of Malacandra says it explicitly, that Devine (the greedy one) is so degraded as to be basically an animal, and not terribly dangerous even if he is worthless. Weston, the sick idealist, is far more dangerous, but by the same token worth saving because that danger comes from his still having one functioning moral instinct.
I’m glad everybody is so good at reading Trump’s mind.
I wonder if there is any chance at all that he genuinely loves his country and sees it under threat. Certainly a lot of the people who voted for him do.
^
@Doctor Mist,
I’ve no idea what’s in Trump’s mind, nor do I have a guess, and the man seemed an odious boss on “The Apprentice” with his “Your fired!” shtick, but I do give him credit for his commitment to protectionism, and I confess to being envious of his base because he’s actually delivering a visual crackdown on immigration that they wanted (even though I think he’s being cruel and going after the wrong people, I’d much rather see a crackdown on the “job creators” than desperate migrants).
If he also showed some commitment to the promised infrastructure projects it might take some of the stench away from the tax cuts he signed.
Since I just called Trump odious I feel I should be balanced and name a Democrat that I find odious as well, and one comes readily to mind: Gavin Newsom, and for two of the same reasons: personal life, and personal style.
It’s more like, a truly evil villain is one that has acknowledged and understood virtue, and then rejected it.
It is more of a virtue ethics based rather than utilitarian perspective of evil; a fallen hero is more tragic than a born monster.
See also Christian preference for hot or cold belief both being preferable to apathy (Revelation 3:14-22).
@theredsheep: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all displayed courage, resolve, a strong work ethic, and arguably a genuine concern for the groups they claimed to fight for (though that last one is debatable).
I would say that Trump has some virtues too, although they’re harder to clearly identity. While he may be lazy, weak-willed, and prone to changing his mind, he still displays a certain kind of stubborn resolve and can work very hard when he chooses to. His raw authenticity and emotional earnestness might also be seen as a virtue, even if he lacks any kind of moral, social, or intellectual honesty (assuming you believe he’s at least being genuine about expressing how he feels).
Someone with no virtues would be more like some random dude with anger management issues and poor impulse control who sits around the house all day doing nothing but watching TV and drinking beer, making his wife do everything for him and abusing her to make sure she stays in line. Someone completely devoid of physical or moral courage, who’d constantly insult and yell at people he knows are too timid to fight back, but who’d also suck up to anyone who posed a physical or social threat to him. I can’t imagine someone like that getting very far in life, so while he might make life worse for the people unfortunate enough to be in his immediate social circle, he wouldn’t be able to cause any real harm to the world as a whole.
Stalin had a strong work ethic, I don’t know about Mao, but Hitler by many accounts was fairly lazy.
For instance, during D-Day the generals wanted to bring an armored division in Paris up to the coast to fight off the invasion, but due to previous meddling the division could only move if Hitler ordered it to directly. That might not have been a big problem…but Hitler liked to sleep past noon, and none of his aides wanted to risk waking him up.
Both Stalin and Hitler were night owls. In the night before the invasion, Hitler went to sleep at 03:00. I don’t see how going to bed late and waking late makes someone more lazy than a person who goes to bed early and wakes early.
The D-Day story is complicated by the German belief in a diversionary pre-attack. It seems to me that the issue is not that Hitler was sleeping, but that the generals were afraid to disturb him until it was quite clear that the attack was real.
@Aapje
By most accounts, Hitler spent a lot of late nights not working, but making subordinates watch films and listen to his pontificating.
I think what Lewis overlooked was that a lazy person can nonetheless work very hard at doing the things they want to do, which allows them to be effectively diligent while still being morally slothful. Trump is lazy, but he really-really-really-REALLY wanted to become President and show that he was better than everyone else, so he worked hard at it and succeeded. And as President, he really-really-really-REALLY wants to run around and bellow at people, and somehow that’s working out pretty well for him too.
Also, I suppose that Lewis might have claimed that Trump has the virtue of Conviction? He genuinely believes in himself and in his right to do whatever he wants to, whenever he wants to – he isn’t the sort of wishy-washy small-time sinner that Lewis seems to have despised the most. And certainly I don’t think he’d get away with absolutely freaking everything the way he does, if he didn’t have that one defining virtue.
I don’t think he actually does believe in himself; he’s really quite insecure.
What I was getting at with my post was that Trump has a certain kind of bizarre integrity to him, where his sense of entitlement and outrage is genuinely real, even if his stated reasons for feeling those emotions aren’t. I don’t think he believes the things he says are true, nor do I think he believes they’re false. I think actual truth is an irrelevancy in his mind, perhaps even something that he can’t conceptualize on the same level that most people can. But when he gets angry about something he hears on Fox News or Breitbart, I do think that anger is legitimate, and that’s what allows him to be so effective at rallying his supporters. When he talks about how he worked hard to get where he is and how he deserves everything he has, I have no doubt that he’s utterly convinced himself of that sentiment, emotionally if not factually.
Lewis would probably describe his virtue of Conviction as having been so far twisted and distorted in upon itself that it’s completely swallowed up all the related virtues that surround it (like Honesty, Courage, and Rectitude), leaving nothing but a grotesque parody that’s almost but not quite indistinguishable from pure sinful egotism (what Lewis termed “animal self-love”). Yet it’s that millimeter of difference between “I should get what I want because I’m me and that’s all that matters” and “I should get what I want because I’m amazing and I deserve this,” however thin and flimsy of a pretense the latter is, that enables Trump to be so much more persuasive and successful than the abusive alcoholic husband who does nothing with his life.
I don’t know – being oversensitive to criticism isn’t the same thing as being insecure. I think, rather, that he sees himself as being so inherently wonderful that any attack against his precious self is a crime against all that is good and right.
@Baeraad
A not uncommon pattern:
Critic: “The pope doesn’t do enough against sexual abuse by priests”
Apologist: “Why do you hate Christianity?”
Critic: “These feminists favor policies that discriminate against men”
Apologist: “Why do you hate women?”
As an aside, I don’t think that Lewis despised wishy-washy small-time sinners the most. He thought they were utterly lacking in virtue, yes, but he also considered them relatively harmless. If anything, I would say he had more disdain and fear for the sinners who monomaniacally upheld a single virtue at the expense of all others, to the point where reason and empathy and morality become nothing more than sacrifices to be made at the altar of that one terminal value. Certainly he would’ve considered Hitler and Stalin to be men of virtue, on some level, and all the more diabolical for it.
He also makes the point in The Great Divorce that people who are simply weak-willed and prone to sins of impulse are more easily redeemed than those who genuinely believe themselves to be righteous. Those consumed by vice can choose to break free of their sinful nature, but those consumed by corrupted virtue will likely have degenerated into something more like a Paperclip Maximizer than a human being, a broken machine on loop forever that would pursue its insane goals for eternity if given the chance. And in Lewis’ version of Hell, that is exactly the chance they will be given (albeit in permanent isolation, without the ability to harm others in the process).
“If we must have a tyrant a robber barron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.”
We may be talking at cross-purposes here… I also have the impression that Lewis was more worried about the sort of sinners who were virtuous in a few select ways, because he figured that those were the sinners who could actually get stuff done. But to me, being worried about someone is, in itself, a form of respect; you can hate someone you fear, but you can’t properly despise them. To me, to despise someone implies a form of huffy disdain, a you’re-not-even-worth-the-effort-ness, that is impossible to cultivate against someone who might genuinely do something to harm you or the things you care about.
I need to reread some of Lewis, but I am curious now whether he would see (wrong) convictions as being virtuous. I tend to doubt it. Bravery in defending them, sure, that’s courage, but holding tight to falsehood doesn’t sound like something Lewis would admire.
But, look at Emeth in Last Battle, and how Rishda is derided for not even believing in Tash till the end.
I don’t recall the wording there, but if the goal was to show that conviction qua* conviction is laudable there were many devout priests of Tash that could have been greeted by Aslan, accepting their devout rituals and human sacrifice as pleasing to him on account of the strength of their belief, instead of the man who believed in a $God who valued honesty and duty and kindness and strove to live these virtues in spite of the priests of Tash preaching vice.
*am I using that right?
That’s a good point about Emeth. However, the protagonists denigrating (if that’s the right word – maybe “ridiculing” is better?) Rishda’s disbelief makes me think Lewis would say your hypothetical devout priests are at least marginally better than other priests who did the same things without even believing in Tash.
That could simply be because the perpetrators of the Tashlan scheme were knowingly perpetrating a lie in order to achieve power–in addition to the other abuses of that power. And intentionally leading others astray.
Conviction isn’t a good in and of itself, but at least if you are honestly convinced of an incorrect moral system, you aren’t knowingly committing and coercing others to commit evil. In a legalistic sense, it turns an immoral action into an amoral action.
But, I don’t know if Lewis would believe that such conviction is possible without some level of purposeful self-delusion. He was a believer in the universality of the self-evident moral law (not in the specifics, necessarily, but at least in the broad strokes), see his discussion of the Tao in, iirc, the Abolition of Man.
For comparison, in the Silmarillion Tolkien says that Sauron was only less evil than Morgoth because, for a time, he served someone other than himself. Now, that someone was, of course, Morgoth; nevertheless, it still counted as the faintest sliver of goodness because evil is by nature self-centered. To do the will of one other than oneself is intrinsically good in that sense, though that does not remove our obligation to serve a good master.
@theredsheep
I think that Trump’s skills are pretty much the opposite of those appreciated by most people here and certainly are not appreciated by you, evidenced by your claim that traits that lead to “prosperity or flourishing” are being “honest, kind, loyal, modest, temperate, generous, prudent, kind, diligent.” Those skills are good for merely moderate flourishing, while the truly successful tend to not have these traits.
I would argue that some of the most successful create a perception that is at odds with their actual behavior, allowing them to benefit from unearned trust. So they have an aura of honesty, kindness, loyalty, etc; but their actual behavior doesn’t comport with that.
Note that the relative difficulty that SSCers tend to have in dating may often also be attributable to a surplus in the traits you respect; and an unwillingness to cultivate a certain duplicity between signalling and behavior.
Aside from that, Trump is anti-elitist, which many see as a virtuous point of view. I also think that he is quite brave, as he has made many risky choices (like running for president). He is certainly seen as brave by many for standing up to the establishment.
—
As for Hitler: he was also a hard working dictator (although one that made bad choices how to spend his time, micromanaging things that he had no expertise in), was quite ascetic (being a vegetarian, teetotaler and non-smoker at a time where that was abnormal) and he correctly judged the communists to be a huge threat to human well-being before the most damning communist crimes against humanity happened. If he hadn’t committed horrible crimes against humanity himself, he might have been well-regarded for this.
I think I need to own up here that “flourishing” is somewhat subjective, and thus virtue can be hard to define.
Someone who is both evil and incompetent (having no positives) is likely to do a relatively small amount of damage compared to history’s greatest monsters. Getting into the position where one can kill hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people requires being good at whatever enables a person to get into such a position: Stalin did not bumble into leadership of the USSR, for example.
There are some wires crossed between virtues that are moral and those that are merely practical. Is bravery a moral virtue? People have done brave things for terrible causes. I think though that people tend to view even competence as a moral virtue: there’s a need to view one’s opponents as not merely evil or wrong, but as stupid, cowardly, weak, etc.
These posts are really confusing to me, though they are certainly common and you are articulating the thoughts of many.
I get why Trump is appalling to many people, especially since he became president.
But “He’s too lazy to attempt anything really ambitious and stick to it, too vain and insecure to act decisively in the face of criticism.” This baffles me. The guy takes on one fanatical battle after another, never backing down long after he is declared dead. He loves it. He loves acting decisively. He loves criticism. He loves ambition. It is completely bizarre to me that people argue a man lacking ambition and oversensitive to slights got himself elected president with the media and his own party against him, under a torrent of feverish criticism.
But other people have said this to me.
When Trump started running, out of curiosity, I read all his books. Yeah, they’re ghostwritten, exaggerated, whatever. Whoever’s voice and life that was, it was interesting and unexpected, and I found it at times admirable. His behavior since has largely canceled that favorable first impression, but it did make me view the campaign very differently than most. He loves conflict, and he loves projects. A ghostwriter couldn’t fake the vigor with which he speaks of construction details and zoning battles. I think even Scott acknowledged this in his review of one of Trump’s books. He’s pretty upfront with his tactics and questionable values, including his manipulation and insult techniques. I find that refreshing, even when I strongly disagree, and I think many other Americans share that stand. People are sick of politicians who allegedly personify virtue but in reality lack all substance for fear they might slip. Ideally, one can be both virtuous and a strong leader, and god knows I’d love to see one of them. But for too long, virtuous has been associated with passive condescension and pandering. And that’s not an attack on virtue itself – those people were simply never that virtuous, or didn’t have the courage to live those virtues publicly. Cheapen virtue for that long, and it looks the same as vice.
There’s more about this that I could say, but I find it falls on deaf ears. There are many reasons to hate Trump. But for the love of god, being clueless and thin-skinned aren’t options. For better or for worse, the guy has had astounding success in the midst of incredible criticism. What scares me far more than Trump is how many people can’t see that Trump is playing them – he LOVES criticism and a challenge. He relishes it. He invites it. The best thing people can do is to stop playing his distraction/insult game and get real about what skills he used to win.
I hope this doesn’t sound uncharitable – I truly don’t mean it that way. I am just truly baffled by this incongruity – Trump’s phenomenal and highly contested success, and allegations that he is a nonfunctional human being. Or even harder to understand, thin-skinned. Yes, he reacts to everything with a Twitter tantrum. That’s not being thin-skinned. That’s turning negative attention back towards the audience and manipulating them with it. And it works scarily well.
Our society has a major problem with insisting on scolding people who aren’t looking for approval, and then being shocked when those people rise up. It is an important life skill to recognize when people are not playing by your particular rules and to adjust accordingly, not yell louder what the rules are. And this is a *crucial* political skill – the lack of which Trump’s campaign exposed to a shocking degree.
The reason people say he’s not ambitious and doesn’t stick to things isn’t because he doesn’t try. It’s because he tries briefly, makes a big media splash about it, and then quietly lets it die when he discovers the actual complexities involved. And nobody notices because actual policy is boring and slow-moving so nobody checks back to see if the things he started actually got completed.
For instance, the Obamacare repeal. A whole bunch of fanfare about how he was ready to sign a replacement on day one, followed by the Republicans realizing that they couldn’t actually agree on a replacement plan, followed by quietly removing the mandate and hoping that nobody notices they went from “repeal and replace” to “kill slowly and don’t replace.”
And more recently, we had the North Korea summit. He met with Kim Jong-Un, had a nice photo-op, made some bold statements about how the nuclear threat was no more, we even got some commemorative coins. We’re just missing the part where he gets an actual treaty out of it.
Trump has tried taking on a number of big projects, but I’m going to hold off on praising his ambition and work ethic until he actually sees one of his projects through to the end.
If you look at his history of construction battles, the guy tries hard, over a period of decades. He also tried hard over a long and brutal campaign in which he was declared dead every day. Now that may not translate to his activities as president – maybe he has gotten lazy.
But I think your assessment is more accurate – yes, he does make a big splash, and lets it die when it becomes uncomplicated. While his splashes are always bigger than most people’s, is that really so different from other politicians? Big promises that fall by the wayside without a murmur. And no one ever follows up to see what happened. They usually just pick vaguer, more easily “achieved” goals, so it’s not so obvious when it falls apart. But they arguably accomplish nothing more, they are simply less obvious about it.
You could legitimately say Trump likes hype and dislikes discretion, and you’d be right there. But I don’t think he seems particularly incompetent compared with other presidents dealing with complex issues and an unhappy opposition. I’d rather him announce his intention and then drop it when it becomes clear it is not tenable. That keeps Congress accountable, instead of allowing them to kick the can down the alley. I’m relieved that we can move on from the Republican healthcare plan, instead of having Trump “stick with it” and drag it out as a hope to pacify his base. It’s not feasible, and it was nothing but a distraction. Now we know the Republicans have nothing worth offering.
I don’t consider that Trump’s fault – the Republicans didn’t take the time to put together a good plan in all the years they yelled about Obama, and a good plan may not exist. So he recognized it and moved on. I don’t want him to stick to that issue.
The Korean situation is ongoing – and you are completely right to hold off until we see what results, if any, occur. I’m not super concerned about getting a treaty ASAP, as they are easily broken or written as to be ridiculously vague. I think having a relationship with them is the most important thing, and we’ll see what comes out of it.
The thing he seems to have stuck onto is the tariff issue. Whether or not you agree with the policy, he has stayed committed to it in the face of tremendous criticism from his own party. And that was one of the things most important to him in his books. He brought it up constantly, just like he does now. I think some of the other things are just not his goals – he’s a little more systems-oriented in that he can consider multiple paths on something like healthcare or Korea. He can watch and wait. The frenetic charging at goals that worked in real estate construction just isn’t quite as effective in government. Things are in many ways more complicated. But that’s true for every politician. They just tend to be a bit more quiet or platitudinous about it. Whether he adapts his tactics to meet the situations remains to be seen. I had hoped to get a better read on this by now, but the constant investigations have really made it hard to assess, and it’s hard to see them ever ending. We have got to move away from the distractions and wait for real information to come out.
I see by the latest news that despite all the sabre-rattling over he wall, he has successfully signed a trade agreement with Mexico, and NAFTA is ended. Whether Canada signs on or not is still being debated.
So does this mean the Mexican president has given in on the wall? If he’s the outgoing guy, what will the policies of the incoming guy be? Is the wall not that big a deal after all? (I saw a lot of cheerleading for the Mexican president online when he was perceived as standing up to Trump and threatening not to sign agreements etc. but given that apparently trade agreements have been signed, the posturing was just that).
The new agreement is fairly minor. Nearly all of the NAFTA rules are still in place, the wall isn’t part of the deal, and “NAFTA is ended” only because of Trump’s obsession with branding. It’s like saying that because last year’s tax law ended the individual mandate, Obamacare is repealed and it’s Trumpcare now.
As for Canada, the USTR (who actually did the negotiating) has been in talks with them too. Trump is blathering about leaving them out, but it’s highly unlikely to happen.
Nothing has been signed
From the article:
As BBA pointed out, it’s not even that big a change.
This is more Trump puffery, but at least it is puffery with specific numbers attached and some agreement from the other side. We will see if he can actually get that small change across the finish line.
Agree with HBC that it’s mostly Trump Puffery, although I’d add that as usual, it’s significantly enabled by the TDS-suffering mainstream media.
Trump incorrectly boasts “I ended NAFTA!” to brag to his base. CNN incorrectly runs taglines of “TRUMP ENDS NAFTA” to outrage their base.
There isn’t much of a base out there interested in a reasoned discussion of the facts.
CNN is not actually saying that, at least not exclusively.
Well, the first I heard of this story was yesterday when I walked by a TV in the office and that was literally the crawl at the bottom.
If they’ve corrected themselves since, good for them I suppose.
I guess their TV coverage is probably more sensational, though maybe they just hadn’t had time yet to really review the story.
Surely you have noticed that ANY summation of anything merely points vaguely in the direction of the full story. The shorter the summary, the less reflective it is of the whole. In practice, non-lossy compression is not practicable.
Honestly, you should not read chyrons as anything more than “there is a story on a certain subject which may merit further consideration”
The fact that you think they are telling you much past this is on you, not them.
Eh, if they wanted to communicate “Trump re-negotiated a new trade deal with Mexico that isn’t called NAFTA but is virtually identical” the crawl could easily have read “LITTLE CHANGES IN NEW TRADE DEAL” or something like that.
Yes, I understand that space is limited and that’s not a great venue for nuanced discussion, but they could at least have made an attempt.
Like headlines, I think the news organizations’ editors often phrase the chyrons to create an impression that’s not at all what you’d get if you read / watched the story. Probably some of that is for ideological reasons, but most is for attracting-eyeballs reasons.
Usually the chyrons are heavily weighted towards a) eyeball catching, b) paraphrasing a quote from a source of some sort.
Trump said he was ending NAFTA, so the chyron will say something like that. It would not surprise me if the chyron you actually read said something like “Trump announces end of NAFTA”.
Mind you, I would love it if reporting had some sort of objective way of being able to tag things as “BS claims”, but this is a very hard problem to solve, journalists not actually being omniscient, etc.
@HeelBearCub
It’s hard to solve from an institutional perspective, but I don’t think the problem is that it is or would be hard for journalists to understand that many headlines are nonsense.
Having boring headlines will probably hurt sales relative to your competitors so the nonsense continue.
Kind of like how some scientists choose titles, give talks, or write grants that aren’t blatant lies but are hyperbolic to the point of being deceptive. They likely know what they are doing to some extent, but justify it as necessary to get attention and secure money that might otherwise go to a competitor.
@quanta413:
There are two different issues here. The one you bring up is not the same as the one Matt M is complaining about.
#1 – Headlines are frequently sensational, lurid, or otherwise enticing. “Click-bait” is the current term, but it’s been the same roughly forever. This isn’t going away, so long as people care about whether what the write gets read.
#2 – Headlines represent what powerful (or popular) figures choose to do or say, without the opinion of the reporting organization as to the validity/impact of said utterance or action. This is a tough one. If the president says he is “eliminating NAFTA”, you are going to need to report he said that. Not reporting it would be a kind of malpractice. Much like Trump threatening to pull out if NATO, it is news when the president says it.
I don’t think Matt would actually like it if straight reporting mostly ignored the president’s actual statements and actions to instead report what they think he might have meant. I sense he doesn’t even like it now when the editorialize about them.
@HeelBearCub
Granted, there is some distinction between the problems. But I think the choice of title or scrolling news is more the problem I am speaking about.
It’s not whether or not to report what he said. There is no malpractice in not choosing the most eyecatching title possible and putting things below the headline. Except the potential loss of money. You can report what he said in the body instead of the headline. It’s not even about reporting what he might have meant. Trade agreements don’t revolve solely around Trump. There’s no need to divine what he means or doesn’t. There are negotiators and staff and the actual text of agreements and so on and so forth. And notably, media has no problem with doing divination on whatever Trump is saying or tweeting any given day no matter how asinine. It’s not a random coincidence that they’re more likely to have a headline with quotes that are good clickbait.
A boring and less in accurate crawl or headline might be “New trade treaty about to be signed between Mexico and U.S.” or “U.S. and Mexico trade agreement soon to be amended” or whatever.
It all loops back to the monetary incentives all being towards being entertaining and eye-catching.
When someone says crazy things all the time, that’s great for the media business. But I don’t buy some story about good journalistic practice requiring making every crazy or hyperbolic thing Trump says part of the headline. Rather than page 5 a boring title with a lede “President Trump says [yet another ridiculous thing that he’ll forget about by next week]” or “Things pretty much the same but President says they’re now way YUGER”.
And my point is, given their long and established history of editorializing against Trump (including headlines that frequently read: “Trump claims X, that’s not true”), your defense of them that it’s reasonable and neutral for them to just parrot his talking point seems absurd.
They’ve never parroted his talking points before. They haven’t run crawls saying MEXCIANS ARE RAPISTS or MEDIA BIASED AGAINST TRUMP.
They ran this one, parroting his own bluster, because they believed it served their agenda of making him look bad. That’s the only reason they did it.
ETA: I’ve seen a million crawls where they make it clear they are just reporting on what was said. These start out with TRUMP: It wasn’t like that on this one. They weren’t reporting that Trump said he was ending NAFTA. They were reporting that Trump ended NAFTA. They aren’t stupid and they didn’t just forget. They did it for a reason.
Pretty much. I feel he succeeded largely by happenstance, by a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances including the Obergefell ruling (and the aftermath getting white Evangelicals in an apocalyptic mood), Hillary’s nomination (and subsequent campaigning carelessness), the general tendency of the electorate to want a change after eight years with an incumbent, growing racial polarization, the weakness of the conventional GOP “brand,” and probably a bunch of other things as well. He’d been trying to be the president for some time before 2016; did he suddenly stumble on a magic formula for success, or was it just that the time was right for us to elect a jackass by an ephemerally thin margin?
When he first got elected, I was paranoid about him becoming some sort of uncanny fascist supervillain, because it just felt abnormal for men of such abysmal character and poor qualifications to reach supreme power. Then I saw his pitiful attempts at governance, and reflected on the sheer number of inept bosses I’ve had, and recalled how, during the leadup to the Iraq War, I’d assumed that there was some secret reason why the invasion was not the abject stupidity it appeared to be, because too many apparently smart people were backing some absurd argument about fuzzy pics of trailers in the desert …
Sometimes idiocy wins. I’m just happy it was Trump this time, and not an actually effective demagogue.
Timing and political circumstances played a big role; political/communication skill is assessing and using that correctly. Trump’s skill was seizing on it – he may have “run” in the past, but he was clearly way more serious this time. And I don’t think he necessarily thought he had a good shot at winning, but he could see the giant void where authority and trust and substance should be. So he determined to exploit it and see how far he could get. His 2008 book was rather eerie.
But I don’t understand how it can be written off as *merely* a timing/cultural thing. That’s no small accomplishment – many people get that absurdly wrong. I would say most political leader and analysts read the situation completely incorrectly. They can’t get outside their preconceived notions – Trump’s talent is being able to adjust to meet the situation, and set the terms, sincerely or not. He was taken as a joke long past when he should have been. He stuck to his tactics when the whole world acted like he was committing political suicide. He played people like fiddles. He systematically eviscerated the other Republican candidates. He pulled the strings. He was able to do this because of the times – there was a certain cultural mood and pathetic leadership to take advantage of, not to mention the complete abandonment of everybody in America to outrage/sensation headlines and chatter. He insisted on setting the terms, and we let him do so, and still are. I thought his triumph would invite some rivals onto the stage, who knew how to beat him at his own game. I am incredibly disappointed that he is still so successful at dominating our mental and intellectual resources, and yet hasn’t inspired a fruitful opposition.
It might seem easy to take advantage of such a prime opportunity, but no one else was doing it, or even seeing how it was working and responding to it. It seems strange to me that we’ve so quickly forgotten how his success was looked at as an impossibility, a hilarious thing. Then he does it and it was “easy” and “lucky.” As you mentioned, what was lucky was that we didn’t get a real demagogue.
In typical action movies the villains tend to be way more competent than the heroes. Villains are typically cold-headed, intelligent, organized, and goal oriented, while the heroes are violent and emotional with severe social problems, and often even less respecting of rules and law and order than the villains. That we need to throw in some obvious vice in the form of a bit of kick-the-dog sadism, just to make sure we understand who the villains are, says a lot. I tend to root for the bad guys.
This is not an idea original to me, but it has been pointed out in stuff I have read in the past that the role of hero and villain are flipped in modern fiction, particularly superhero and action movie fiction, compared to classical literature.
The classical hero has some great task or goal they are trying to accomplish, and sets out on that quest. The villain is an obstacle to be overcome.
The modern hero is usually just trying to stop the villain. The villain is the one on the quest, and the hero is the obstacle.
Thus it is not surprising that at least in fiction, the best villains are the ones who are almost heroes.
Consider superhero fiction. Who are the best villains?
Magneto, who genuinely believes he is doing what he must to save his people from a second Holocaust.
Dr. Doom, who is a megalomaniac who wants to rule the world but also really genuinely believes the world would be better under his rule, and once he takes over, actually does his level best to be a good king.
Lex Luthor is maybe the most interesting, because he actually is motivated pretty much purely by greed and envy and ego, but needs to think he isn’t, and so has successfully convinced himself he is the lone hero protecting the Earth from being ruled by an alien god.
These guys are the ones who set out to change the world according to their heroic ideals – only to be foiled by the super-powered obstacles who always thwart them.
The only great supervillain who really is just evil for its own sake is the Joker. (Which is also interesting because Batman in a way subverts some of the above tropes too, sometimes stepping more into being the actual force moving the plot forward.)
I think this is more a question of genre than modernity. In fantasy settings, we want the hero to explore the fantasy world, so he has to go out and do things. His motives for doing so can still be reactive – there’s a reason so many heroes start their journey with their hometown getting burned down by the Evil Overlord. In superhero or modern settings, the world is familiar and the status quo is generally good, so the main reason for the hero to go out and do things is because the villains are shaking up the status quo.
Modern settings where the hero takes an active role usually need the hero to be oppressed by the status quo in some way. It could be as simple as “teenager is looking to escape their normal life” (a YA favorite), but it also includes heist movies and dystopian settings.
Another place to find active heroes is in mystery stories. The hero has a reactive motive, in that the villain has to commit the crime before they can start chasing them, but their role in the plot is active – the story won’t make progress unless he goes out and finds clues.
(Batman makes use of both of these elements – the villains tend to have secret plans that The World’s Greatest Detective can uncover, and Gotham is a terrible place where the status quo is “all the crimes, all the time”, unless a hero tries to change that.)
EDIT: The Odyssey, the original hero’s journey, has an essentially reactive hero, now that I think about it. Odysseus just wants to go home and be with his wife – in other words, he wants to restore the status quo. He only ends up in adventures because the gods keep pushing him into them.
Isn’t the Odyssey the sequel to the one where the same hero and his buddies were minding their own business in Greece until they decided to sail off anc conquer another country for no good reason?
They kind of have to be; they have the harder job. They’re trying to change the world, or at least rob it blind, against large established organizations trying to stop them. If the plan involves kidnapping the World Leader’s Beautiful Daughter (who is probably also engaged to Hero), and the Beautiful Daughter’s bodyguards stop the attempt, question the mooks, and uncover the plot in Act I, you don’t have an action movie, you have an episode from a police procedural. This means you need either really good villains, or really bad bodyguards. And really good villains are much more interesting (unless you’re going for an action-comedy).
Of course, having the Beautiful Daughter kidnapped allows for some kicking-the-dog or worse; even the most tame action movie will probably have the villain or his mooks slap her around.
Why is that the villain’s job? Are we to presume that the world is now perfect, such that any major change would be a villainous act and every large organization defending the status quo is going God’s work?
Hey, I didn’t make the tropes.
Most specific changes a hero might want to make would be opposed by a significant part of the audience, thus reducing the audience for the movie. One easy way around that is to have the villain be the one to make a change you specifically design to be unpopular.
The bad guys always seem to surround the good guys, disarm them, and hold them captive. The good guys shoot first and never ask any questions.
Scott Adams is right. We’re watching different movies.
I don’t know how you look at Trump and get that summation, but there you go. I’m glad his enemies are unable to understand him. Sun Tzu had that bit about knowing your enemies and knowing yourself and Trump’s enemies do not know him.
Which one(s) out of “honest, kind, loyal, brave, modest, temperate, prudent, generous, diligent” would you describe Trump as being?
Several of them, but only transactionally.
Which? And how?
I would say Trump manages to be audacious and self-confident and smart and willing to take big risks. He’s charismatic enough to have spent his whole life in the public eye, to have had a successful career as a reality TV star, and to have outshone a bunch of professional politicians to get elected president. I wouldn’t call him any of your adjectives except maybe diligent.
I don’t think he’s much good as president, but I also don’t feel like that opinion obliges me to assess him as having no virtues. Anyone who is successful at the level he has been successful has a lot going for him, even if he got some benefits from luck or starting position. And in general, I find the whole pattern of being unable to acknowledge any virtues in your enemies to be pretty dumb. (Hence, the guys who started a war with the most powerful nation on Earth by knowingly going to their deaths to fly planes into buildings get routinely described as “cowardly.”)
This seems like a discussion that I will regret, but I’m interested in hearing my own response.
He is perceived as honest by many, although they’d probably also agree he’s a liar. While my mom is big on the “if he lies in one thing, he lies in all” warning, if we went by that we’d have no honest people, except for a few who would not be elected due to their lack of social skills.
At times he has been refreshingly honest, but that is hard to praise in the face of his constant lies. But the reason people respond to it, in part, is because I generally get the sense that most politicians are never honest, even if they rarely (?) outright lie. They evade and virtue signal, and for a long time now most of them have come across as completely insincere no matter what the topic or occasion. People were so relieved to get a clear answer.
It was a failing of our system that led to an embrace of shameless lying – I’m not in any way justifying shameless lying, but I don’t think it is all that different from evasion and insincerity, which probably mislead people even more harmfully. All three of them are damaging and unacceptable in an effective leader.
But the fact remains that people just don’t like when they can tell someone gave you a prepared response to every issue, which comes awfully close to chronically lying – it creates a yearning for authenticity that can manifest very badly, with the embrace of an authentically bad person.
Diligent, absolutely, at least transactionally. He watches his projects and campaigns like a hawk and has unceasing energy towards his goals. He’s definitely hardworking and detail oriented – that doesn’t mean he always pursues the goals and details people want him to.
Brave, most definitely. The accusations of cowardice baffle me. Does he take on all the right fights? No. But is he afraid of a hard fight? No way – that appeals to him all the more. He’s probably not brave in the sense of physical combat, but what movie were other people watching during this election? When he stood alone at against all advice and amid withering criticism and contempt. With both parties and the media against him? Raising his hand saying he wouldn’t sign the pledge on day one. Now you can argue that is boldness, bravado, not bravery, but I didn’t see anything that looked like bravery from any other quarter of the Republican party. (Kasich and Cruz had their moments of taking strong, sincere stances). It remains to be seen whether that bravery will be used to good ends going forward.
You’ll laugh, but I consider Trump pretty temperate in many respects. He appears to have stayed away from drugs and alcohol, and I think he’s generally in control of himself. He seems to keep an incredibly strict routine and I do not think his moods wildly fluctuate. The meltdowns are calculated to throw people off, and many things mistaken for emotional outbursts are just him taking a strong stand (this does not just apply to him – the media appears to think any sort of directness indicates uncontrollable rage – look at this memo of JFK and tell me if you the appropriate adjective is “scathing” https://www.rrauction.com/Jacqueline-Kennedy-White-House-Restoration-Archive.html).
Temperate is probably not the most accurate description, but I agree with @Conrad Honcho about a lot of it being transactional, assuming he means that it depends on the nature of situation. He possesses virtues, he just doesn’t use them in a way that lends itself to a coherent image of a virtuous person.
Now, maybe that means he isn’t virtuous. But our options aren’t great. I am pretty sure that no currently reasonably electable politician is honest in any appreciable way. Pandering and evading is their whole way of life, and I say this about politicians I personally like and who I think have good intentions. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don’t raise as many red flags for me as most, but I’m sure now that I’ve singled him out people will cite a million cases of sketchy behavior. The obvious one with Warren is the whole Native American thing, but I think defining her by that is probably not the best idea.
FDR had his own litany of issues, but whether I agree with his sentiment or not, I would kill for a moment of presidential bravery and honesty on par with this:
” We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.”
That is, if he was honest about this, which I’m not 100% sure of. But I think he did welcome their hatred, even if he was pandering a bit.
Imagine someone saying that now!
But again, assessing other options: I can grant most of them are at least sometimes kind, some might be generous, most are diligent at least in some areas. Some are probably loyal, but isn’t that almost a vice in politics under current standards? If you try and stick by someone who has fallen out of favor, you will be lambasted for corruption or undue influence. But some are definitely more appreciative of those who have helped them than others. Loyalty to principles is important, but I don’t see a whole lot of that going on anywhere. None are modest, though some fake it better than others, and some at least are willing to acknowledge their limitations. Few of our presidents could be described as temperate in terms of emotions or substance use, but there are a handful. Prudent is impossible to define or assign value to, so I won’t get into that one.
I’m not trying to portray Trump as a paragon of virtue. He isn’t. But I don’t see him as an alien being among politicians just because he does things in a big way. A strange amount of people seem to think quieter = more moral. It doesn’t. He’s a creation of our own system, holding up a mirror of our values and our conceptions of leadership and virtue. There are aspects about him that are anomalous, but his predecessors and competitors weren’t exactly radiating virtue. Obama made more of an effort than our other recent presidents, and probably possessed more actual virtues. But he didn’t exercise in it such a way as to prevent the 2016 election outcome. He had an almost impossible task in many ways, and I think his temperance, prudence and loyalty outweighed some much needed bravery and honesty.
ETA: My conclusion is that the current state of things is unacceptable, but this is more the American people’s fault than Trump’s, and even if you choose to assign the fault to him, he will be gone eventually, and I doubt that things will “go back to normal.” We have to choose better politicians, and make sure they get nominated in the first place. We have to make it something people with character want to do. We deserve better, but only we can secure it. My secondary conclusion is that we have to accept that no one is perfect, and that the greatest leaders had their vices. We need to decide what balance is appropriate, but our increasing insistence on blowing up everything into an outrageous headline ensures that the only people who will have a clean record will be utterly devoid of substance, assertiveness, insight, or accomplishments. Or really good at hiding their skeletons, which is not what we want. Of course their records should be discussed, and I’m not saying people should just get over anything, but virtually everyone has at least one highly questionable or just outright bad incident in their past. The constant shock of discovering this really needs to stop.
On the claim that FDR was honest … . You do realize that, in his first election, he campaigned on the grounds that his opponent had the government spending too much?
@DavidFriedman
Circumstances change. I don’t think the issue with that is dishonesty. I think it is foolish and irresponsible to make campaign promise about most things, because it’s not the type of job where most promises are under the president’s control or where consistency is always best. All recent presidents are disingenuous on this level. That is, if FDR made such promises. If he simply criticized the other guy, he probably was being very unfair, but that’s the MO of every presidential candidate. But it is entirely possible that (in his opinion) the government was spending too much for what was happening at the time, but then things changed. I’m also not claiming that any of them were 100% honest. I’m talking relatively, and I’m also talking about how the public perceived the dishonesty. I think the public has shown a preference for boldly stating a new position that is directly contradictory to an old one, without explanation, by choosing Trump. In opposition to making vague promises all the time and then tying oneself in knots to justify how they are consistent. I suppose both are equally problematic, but I understand why the first one can work better.
Yeah, I was going to quote Scott Adams, but I figured it was overdone. He’s right about that one.
Let’s say you’re a person with a small but significant amount of influence over a large group of people, like a relatively popular YouTube/Twitch personality or… well, Scott, for example. To quantify things, let’s say you have enough influence, if you made announcements well ahead of time and showed up in person, to able to get ~1,000 random people in most major U.S. cities to show up and sorta-try at something for a few hours in the evening or from noon til’ 5 PM on a Saturday.
How much good could you do with that ability, in an EA sort of sense? Seems like if you could get a thousand people to show up and do Habitat for Humanity or something for a few days in a row… well, that would probably do no good at all due to them not being prepared for 1000 people to show up and only being able to get them to put in half an effort for a short time.
How much could you accomplish in a semi-arbitrary goals sort of sense? Not in a johan_larson mission sort of sense but more like Saul Alinsky getting a bunch of guys to fart in a theater for civil rights sort of sense.
… although, how much COULD you accomplish in a Larson mission sort of sense?
What I’m thinking here is, say I’m PewDiePie and the New York Times is telling everyone I’m a neonazi, and I’d wish they’d quit. Couldn’t I just say, “hey fellas, if you’re in the area, I’m going to be showing up at their corporate HQ with a megaphone to demand they make a public retraction and apology; come join me and hold up a sign or something.”
Or, if I want to get a little more dark-side with this; “here’s the home addresses of a couple of executive editors, if you’re with me on this I encourage you to chuck tomatoes and eggs and toilet-paper at their houses until they publicly apologize, I know this is mostly going to make me look like the asshole here but I’m really pissed and at least people will see that a lot of people think they’re doing something wrong by doing this.”
Or- what if he said “okay, I’m 100% committed to damaging this organization as much as I can and I don’t care about the long-term consequences; these people are evil and hate you and everything you like and I want you all to grab a ski mask and a sledgehammer, join up at their corporate headquarters, and we’re going to bust in and smash everything that looks valuable until SWAT shows up and tear-gasses us, and if you have an old car you’re willing to smash in to a utility pole to take out the power, or have a backhoe and a map of where to find the underground network cables that connect them to the Internet, or some other idea for how to disrupt their operations, I’d love to hear from you.”
What if Bernie Sanders did this, asking that everyone figure out where their local Fox affiliate is and see if they can’t smash up the place or ruin the utility access or something?
To be clear; I agree that this is all very silly. But still, it seems like anyone who is in a position to ask more than a couple hundred people to do something and have them actually listen has a not-insignificant amount of power, and I’m wondering if I’m wrong, and/or what it’s going to look like when they realize that. (EDIT: Or, indeed, in the alternate universe where Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Baez declared open war on each-other.)
Bonus question: what if the President did this, but also committed to presidential-pardoning all the participants? Could he do that?
*roflmao*
Fun idea. Lots of fictions could start here. Some of them would be a lot of fun to read – probably also to write.
But the specifics you got into – asking those you influence to do something seriously illegal – isn’t going to end well. Assuming your ‘friends’ aren’t sufficiently powerful/organized/connected to stage a successful revolution or coup, you’ll have the law on your back. In the presidential pardon case, this looks like the most efficient way to trigger an impeachment I’ve ever heard, short of scenarios involving the president personally commiting random assaults with lethal weapons.
It worked for Hitler et al., more or less, but this was a case where they were sufficiently powerful to take over the government.
Also, if you communicate with your friends publically, and there are a lot of them, you can expect opponents to know what you are up to in advance, and do whatever they think appropriate, such as inviting all their friends to turn up and ‘confront’ you and your friends.
Much better to e.g. encourage them to all wear emerald green garters next Tuesday, if you can’t think of anything that’s actually constructive. And as for Habitat for Humanity – letting its organizers know about it far enough in advance might actually make your collected influenceables useful.
This isn’t really relevant to your question, but I think you might be overestimating how easy this is.
Based on the meetup results, I seem to have enough “power” to make about five to ten people show up in most major American cities, for something very easy and safe that the participants want to do anyway.
Google suggests PewDiePie is about twenty to thirty times more popular than I am, but his popularity might not be as deep – eg it’s hard for me to imagine “PewDiePie meetups” going well. So I question if anyone of the level you’re talking about has the clout you’re talking about.
But maybe the closest example of something like this happening this was G*m*r*a*te, where a few people in a niche cause did go really far in advocating their agenda, sometimes in disruptive or borderline-illegal ways. Empirically, that just starts a giant immune reaction where everyone hates you, hates the entire group you belong to, and hates everybody at all associated with it for years, and you are constantly brought up as an example for why they should never be tolerated or listened to or negotiated with.
I’m sure someone working for a cause the media agreed with could do better, but if they were popular enough for borderline-illegal protests to succeed, they probably wouldn’t need borderline-illegal protests.
The largest ant-related meetup I know of was the one where
Andrew Cardpersons unknown called in bomb threats to stop it. That was about 200 people. I think teenage flash mobs do better.“Google suggests PewDiePie is about twenty to thirty times more popular than I am, but his popularity might not be as deep”
not sure precisely how you’re calculating this – maybe views? But he has, uh, around 60 million subscribers, which is probably way, way more than you do. Not sure how deep they all are though.
…also your example kind of pisses me off, insofar as it’s mostly just about politics; the group you cite was pre-determined to be hated long before they actually did any of those things (you can tell, since they never actually did any of those things !!!). So maybe it proves that the valence changes depending on political alignment, but what’s the original valence?
There’s a difference between a meetup suggested by you and to discus the kind of things you like to talk about and an event hosted by you. I got the impression toastengineer was imagining the latter.
I don’t get the comparison as what the ants mostly did in terms of organization was letter writing campaigns to advertisers and crashing twitter hashtags with no survivors. In the real world I was at an NYC meetup with maybe 150 people, but all we did was drink and play arcade games. The most borderline disruptive thing was standing in front of a particular HQ and shouting, “F***k-” I shouldn’t mention names since we’re trying to keep this off the radar.
Hogan, what is best in life?
To crush your enemies, see them bankrupted, and to hear the lamentations of their apologists!
Yeah, meetup attendance is a useful datapoint, but you’re not actually telling people to go to them. If Scott sent everyone an EMail saying “turns out Moloch is physically real and he’s crawling out of Lake Michigan next Tuesday, here’s some proof that this is happening, bring something stabby,” I know I would drop everything and show up.
Come to think of it, how many people signed up for cryonics because Scott directly told them to?
I don’t know about cryonics, but the melatonin article caused a shortage at one supplier.
There’s a framework I used to use for talking about things like this, which basically boils down to transferrable and non-transferrable power. It tends to limit the scope of what you can do with the kind of power that comes from prominence and influence, as opposed to the power that comes from formal leadership of institutions or personal wealth.
Let’s take as an example the cases of, say, Bill Gates and Bill McKibben. Both have a lot more power than the average person, but Gates’ power is much more transferrable. We could envision a specific purpose – say, turning people out for a climate change protest – for which McKibben has more power than Gates, by virtue of his number of social followers, leadership of organizations with large email lists, etc. (Gates could probably also turn out a bunch of people for a protest with enough TV ads, hired organizers, etc, but I think McKibben’s network is strong enough that he’d do better.)
McKibben’s power, though, basically only works in that one arena. If he and Bill Gates now, both seeking for some reason to curry favor with PewDiePie, compete to see who can more effectively harass the NYT, McKibben has many fewer tools at his disposal unless they’ve recently done something that angers his followers, whereas Gates could just pay a variety of professionals to make life unpleasant for the NYT, up to the bounds of legality.
What I take from this is that social power tends to be useable only in ways closely related to how it was acquired. There are exceptions to this – cult leaders, who basically acquire social power by claiming to be right about everything, can get some number of people to follow their arbitrary commands via social power – but in general I think it’s best to assume that a person with a large social following will have some potential to get people to take an action specifically related to the source of their prominence, but little ability to get people to do arbitrary things of the leader’s choosing. And for people like Scott or youtube stars, whose prominence isn’t already tied to the idea of taking action at their urging, even the closely related stuff would require a lot of work to get significant output.
Today, Naval Gazing concludes its look at underwater protection.
Also, a reminder to everyone (including non-readers) that you’re invited to the meetup at Iowa on 9/8.
Imagine a bowling ball resting on a mattress. You set a marble on the mattress, near the bowling ball. The marble is drawn toward the bowling ball.
This is a typical metaphor used to illustrate how mass distorts space-time to create gravity. For a while now I’ve been dissatisfied with this metaphor, because it’s like defining a word using the word itself. The mattress metaphor helps me understand how space-time is distorted by massive objects, but it doesn’t at all help me understand why an “attracting” force like gravity should be produced by the distortions.
Can someone explain why the metaphor is complete? Or provide another metaphor that completes the explanation?
I always had the exact same objection; the only reason the balls are falling is because the fabric got out of the way!
I don’t know if it actually works any better, and to be clear I more likely than not misunderstand what’s actually going on, but I always liked the analogy of drawing a line on some paper and then bending the paper. It’s a straight line, and remains a straight line; you didn’t alter the line at all. But it’s a straight line on bent paper, so you can make it curve in to things or even form a circle. Similarly, if you throw a ball in front of you, it ACTUALLY DOES CONTINUE IN A STRAIGHT LINE – but it continues in a straight line through a coordinate system that’s scrunched up towards the Earth’s center of mass, so it appears to curve and meet the ground. Much like Ms. What’s (I think…) skirt in A Wrinkle In Time.
If you need a visualization of 3D “bent paper,” you could use Jell-O or ideally some more flexible firm gel and somehow draw a line in that and then distort it.
But that’s the same problem. It helps explain what’s going on with the coordinate system, but it doesn’t explain why the ball always wants to travel through the coordinate system that’s scrunched toward the Earth’s center of mass.
The metaphor is necessarily incomplete because it is in 3 dimensions when you would need to be able to conceive of at least 4 to understand it.
So to make it accurate, what you would imagine is that your Marble-Bowling ball universe is a 2-D universe with no depth (which is what depresses the mattress in this case). In the 2-D universe you do not see the bowling ball sinking, you merely perceive it is an object with a certain circumference, inertia, etc. Then you notice it attracts the marble with some force. This picture illustrates what 2D “gravity” would look like in a 2D world, and thus the 3D mattress representation is solving 2-D gravity.
But what is the source of the force?
Midichlorians 🙂
Ba-dum-ching!
But I think Deiseach’s answer is about as good as we know. The goal of physicals is to reduce every fundamental force down to one grand unifying theory or equation that relates how gravity, nuclear forces, and electromagnetism are related; but even doing so doesn’t answer why any more than we have explanations for the values of fundamental constants.
In 2D world the source of the force is the depression caused on the mattress in the 3rd dimension. This is why the mattress metaphor is a solution to 2D gravity. The 2D people cannot see the 3rd dimension. We, being in a 3D world, cannot see a 4th dimension that dimension being space-time. Mass warps that dimension in a similar way that the bowling ball alters the contours of the surface of the mattress.
“that dimension being space-time” No. A dimension is not synonymous with a reality, a dimension is something that can mathematically be represented with a single line. Space-time is not a “fourth” dimension, it is a set of four dimensions, three of which are spatial and one of which is temporal. You’re right in that applying the metaphor to our reality would require a fourth spatial dimension, but that’s all it would be: a fourth line added onto a graph representation of space (or a fifth line added onto a graph representation of space-time, to-may-to to-mah-to).
Right, but I’m just kind of addressing the reason they think the metaphor is stupid. Its not stupid, and it works very well with young kids.
The only real problem with it is that by the time anyone need bother with relativity there is not really a point of them using metaphors. Newtonian gravity works just fine for everything, and calculating friction is more important.
As far as I can tell, it’s just a bad metaphor. The only thing it illustrates is the idea that massive objects curve spacetime. Past that it’s useless. The way the rubber sheet curves is not the same as the way spacetime curves. In fact, as it’s usually presented, the rubber sheet is meant to represent just space, not spacetime, so the curving of the rubber sheet doesn’t involve time at all. In actuality massive objects curve both space and time together. This is a crucial point, because curvature can imply attraction only if it’s a curvature involving both space and time. This makes the rubber sheet picture ill-suited for illustrating attraction.
Whether it involves time or not, why does it imply attraction?
There’s no answer to questions like this. Our best set of equations for describing the behavior of gravity (General Relativity) say that gravity always attracts and never repulses, but that’s only because we’ve never seen anything that has negative gravity. Someone could invent anti-gravity doohickeys tomorrow, and then the race would be on to come up with a better set of equations to replace GR.
Essentially because mass gives a positive curvature to space-time (like the curvature of a sphere) rather than a negative curvature (like the curvature of a saddle). If you think of latitude as time and longitude as space on the surface of a sphere, then two particles at rest at time 0 (on the equator) will follow meridians as they go forward in time, and move closer together. (They will also move closer together in backward time.)
That is, in positively curved space-time, two geodesics which are instantaneously parallel (i.e., represent the paths of two object at rest with respect to each other) will be forced by the local curvature of space-time to start to approach each other as they move forward (or backward) in time, which is gravitational attraction.
In order to have repulsive gravity, you’d have to have an “anti-mass” which causes local negative curvature of space-time.
My vague understanding, and I may be wrong, is that the “cosmological constant” essentially represents an inherent negative curvature of empty space-time. So then the universe could have overall positive, negative, or zero curvature depending on whether or not there is enough mass in the universe to give enough positive curvature to balance out the negative curvature of the vacuum.
The observed cosmological constant is positive (ie, positive curvature). String theorists usually use a negative cosmological constant. The geodesic convergence interpretation of curvature is for space-like paths. People often make mistakes transferring that intuition to time-like paths.
I don’t think you will find any convincing argument “from first principles” why gravity should be attractive. A universally repulsive force is what you’d get if you kept regular gravity but ran time in reverse. I don’t think a universe that was just like ours except with repulsive gravity is a crazy idea, though I imagine we have the privilege of not being in that universe for anthropic reasons.
Er, no. If you run time backwards, gravity is -still- attractive. This is one of the critical differences between gravity as a force, and gravity as a bend in space-time.
To see why this is important, consider what would happen to our planet if you ran time backwards for a couple of hours.
ETA:
Because I realize this is hugely counterintuitive, I think a concrete example is in order. So, imagine a meteor falling into earth. Lots of energy is dropped into the atmosphere, then we pause time right before it crashes, and reverse it.
Reverse-time doesn’t have the meteor falling up – that would generate even more energy as it crashes through the receding atmosphere. It involves all the energy it originally deposited randomly into the atmosphere, randomly and amazingly collecting to shove the meteor back out of the atmosphere, directly opposing gravity.
Doesn’t the rubber sheet also express the reversibility of time?
D’oh. Yeah, of course. Everything you care about is second-order, so you get two minus signs and it looks exactly the same.
Now, let me tell you about my alternate universe where everything is the same but the gravity equations are all with respect to imaginary time…
Sounds like a Greg Egan novel. Or trilogy…
Spooky action at a distance. Alternatively, math.
I think it’s a combination of a bad metaphor and a mis-told one.
First of all, it has to be a rubber sheet and not a mattress. Mattresses don’t bend in the right shape. It needs to be pointy, like this, which rubber forms by tension in the surface.
Second, it skips out the concept of “potential”, which, once understood, makes a lot of physics a lot easier. But the example of potential we’re most familiar with is gravitational potential of test masses a small height from the Earth’s surface. High up things have high potential and low down things have low potential, and it’s linear. So if you were to draw a graph of the potential around a massive body it would be the shape of the image I linked to above. This happens to be the shape a rubber sheet forms when you hold it tight and poke it. It is also the shape a rubber sheet takes when you hold it flat and tight and put a bowling ball on it. But the third dimension isn’t a spacial dimension, but “potential”.
Third, I might be wrong about this, but I don’t think it’s general-relativistic. I think it models the potential, not the curvature of spacetime, and the fact that the sheet is, in fact, curved is a confusing coincidence. (If it were modelling curvature of spacetime, then it would work equally well for the pointy wells to be going upwards, or without lab gravity, where the marble just sticks to the sheet and follows the closest things to straight lines it can.)
Unfortunately it takes far more than a two-minute analogy to gain an intuition for gravity. In my experience of teaching people physics, the rubber-sheet-analogy is more unhelpful than helpful. But I’m sure there are some people who found it useful.
OK, fine, rubber sheet. That’s not the important part. The important part is, the rubber sheet metaphor still begs the question, since it assumes gravity. The rubber sheet metaphor doesn’t work in zero-G, after all.
Calvin and Hobbes: Record player.
The outside of the record moves faster than the inside, because it has farther to go.
Likewise, gravity warps space such that the farther edge of an orbiting object has further to go, producing a curve in space itself the object follows.
For a falling, non-orbiting object, same principle, except the motion is in time rather than space. Harder to visualize, same thing.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Why does gravity exist in the first place?
We don’t know yet.
I can offer my ideas, but they are more on the crackpot end of the spectrum, and beg their own “Why?”s. As, if you reflect on it, any level of knowledge of the nature of the universe must.
Unless you are still on the rubber sheet idea, and wondering why things are pulled “down”?
This explanation doesn’t have any magic perpendicular force pulling stuff towards the bottom of a rubber sheet.
Record player, right? So, gravity is literally just “spacial coordinates get further apart, relative to an imaginary Cartesian coordinate system, as gravity gets stronger”. Which is to say – gravity is just space being bent
For an orbiting object, what this means is that it’s inner edge has to traverse slightly less space than it’s outer edge, over a given distance. This translates into a curve splitting the difference, since the inside can’t actually go slower than the outside. Translating into an orbit.
For a freefalling object, it is harder to see, because the movement is through time (more or less), but the point is that the edge farther from the planet has to travel farther in the same amount of time, creating a curvature.
There is no force – things are moving in straight lines, nothing is pulling them “down”. It is just that the straight lines aren’t straight from an outside perspective.
No, it’s not assuming gravity, it’s drawing a graph of potential as a function of position in space. It so happens that a rubber sheet in a uniform gravitational field with some heavy objects sitting in it draws a potential function that looks similar to the one caused by massive objects in space. And test masses on the rubber sheet in a uniform gravitational field behave as test masses in space would.
Unfortunately it takes far more than a two-minute analogy to gain an intuition for gravity.
It isn’t complete. It isn’t even close to correct, it just sort of feels correct, and conveys the idea of “straight line looks curved”.
Gravity moves space-time coordinates around. From an orbit perspective, you can kind of imagine it as “Car where the wheels on one side are farther apart than the other”. This doesn’t convey “straight line” as well, but does a slightly better job conveying what is happening.
For falling, both analogies fail, because both analogies require relative motion to make sense. For falling, the metaphor is more like pressure; space is squeezing one side of the object more than the other. (Still not right, mind, but close enough.)
ETA: The first analogy, of wheels, also requires the wheels to be on a curved line. The second analogy leads to the wrong understanding of how spacial coordinates are changed. Not sure there is a good analogy.
Okay, after thinking about it for a while, I remembered another metaphor that is useful in describing what is going on.
So, the other metaphor is, in relation to describing why time “passes slower” when you approach the speed of light, the idea that you have a constant total velocity of C, the speed of light. (Note: This is wrong and misleading in important ways vis a vis relativity. But it conveys an idea better than adding relativity to the description, so bear with me.). So the faster you move in space, the slower you necessarily move in time.
We can use this metaphor to describe why things “fall” when stationary: They are still in motion, just at an angle orthogonal to directions we are accustomed to thinking in. It is still caused by geodesics – caused by the fact that the space its wheels occupy is curved – but now we have a sort-of metaphor for freefalling objects, in addition to orbiting objects.
VSauce video on the subject. As usual, he meanders until he gets to the interesting parts, but is worth the watch.
Which Way Is Down?
Beautiful. Start at about 21 minutes in.
Watched the whole thing. That answered my question. Thank you.
There is no attracting force in General Relativity. The whole point of general relativity is that, if you assume spacetime is governed by Einstein’s field equations, then some of the behavior we ascribe to “gravity” is a natural consequence of that assumption and doesn’t require any further explanation. So, I think the more complete metaphor would just be Einstein’s field equations, and the bowling-ball-on-a-sheet analogy is not really an attempt to explain how gravity works, it’s more like the answer to the question, “Hey, those field equations are pretty complicated, can you explain what they predict about how objects should behave in a way that doesn’t require higher math?”
Separately from that, it sounds like you’re rankled by the idea of an analogy used to explain gravity also contains gravity. That can be “solved” by saying that the force pushing the bowling ball on to the bed is something other than gravity (like acceleration or electromagnetism or something) but I don’t know if that helps much.
As somebody said, the rubber sheet can define potential, but that is similar for both Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity. As for the effect of curvature, most texts are very misleading. However I think you can get something of the concept by first forgetting about mass and thinking only about energy. And as the exemplar of energy we will use light.
Imagine a wave (e.g. light) moving on the rubber sheet. On the side nearest the attracting mass, i.e. towards the funnel shaped hole, there is *more* rubber sheet to cover because of the way it bends down. So the wave has further to travel on that side, and therefore it bends its direction of movement towards the centre of the funnel (the attracting mass).
Now let’s make an approximation of matter by making a box with zero mass and perfect mirrors on the inside, inside which light bounces about. It is an odd sort of matter, but by the principle of equivalence all matter should work the same. If the light bends towards the gravitational attractor – and also if it has more momentum when it hits the blue-shifted side of the box – the box should also be attracted towards the gravitational source.
Note that this works just as well if the rubber sheet is turned upside down, as it should. There is more space nearer the attractor, or equivalently, time is slowing down. And that is why the light bends.
Who would win in a fight, Hunter S. Thompson or Joan Baez?
The masculine physique has a big advantage over the feminine one for no-tech or low-tech violence, so Thompson would probably win. He did have one heck of a drug and alcohol habit though, so Baez might win if the fight happened when Thompson was particularly intoxicated.
Who would tell better lies after the fight? Thompson. Macho blather was his thing. When he got going everyone would believe Joan Baez was ten feet tall, breathing fire and farting flame, a master of Folkie-fu who nonetheless lost to Hunter Thompson after a wild fight full of stuff too entertaining to check.
Joan Baez being actually alive would I think give her an overwhelming advantage.
If we are imagining both of them to be alive and in their prime, then which one has the most friends? I’m guessing Thompson would bring the biggest army to the fight, but it’s not a sure thing.
I was thinking that Baez was better at rounding up reliable allies.
Hunter S. Thompson liked guns; he even killed himself with one. Joan Baez is apparently a gun control advocate, which doesn’t mean she doesn’t have guns but probably is less familiar with them. So if they were both alive and were to fight, Thompson would win by bringing a gun to a gunfight.
So, Baez wins by KO in the first round?
If necessary, some of her ballads were fairly depressing and could help move things toward that conclusion.
Baez is not just a gun control advocate, but more generally a nonviolence activist, raised a Quaker pacifist. But I think she has a nonobvious definition of violence. Like Thompson, she raises Dobermans.
So the fight gets called off because they’re both too busy gushing over each other’s dogs?
That sounds sort of like the plot of chapter 21 of Jules Verne’s ”De la Terre à la Lune”. President Barbicane and Captain Nicholl are sworn enemies due to a disagreement on a matter important to both of them. Barbicane is an engineer developing better and better cannons and believes that modern technology makes cannons so powerful that no battleship can have so much armor that makes it unsinkable in a battle. Captain Nicholl develops better and better armor for battleships and believes that modern technology makes the best armor so unbreakable that no cannonball could penetrate it. Since both of them are American gentlemen, in chapter 21 they’re supposed to meet for a pistol duel (in an eerie forest at dawn) to end their rivalry once and for all. But instead of proceeding with the duel, both of them are so distracted with more peaceful issues that their friends, who don’t like the idea of the pistol duel, manage to convince them to call the duel off. For the rest of the book, Barbicane and Nicholl are reluctantly peaceful rivals who will no longer try to kill each other in a pointless duel, but will instead risk their lives together by participating in a dangerous experiment for science.
And therefore all future battleships will need to be armed with that ultimate weapon of the ironclad age, the ram.
John Schilling #comment-663743 : Good follow-up. Yes, the ram is on Captain Nemo’s submarine in a Verne novel published a few years later, ”Vingt mille lieues sous les mers”. And just like Barbicane and Nicholl, Captain Nemo is actually a person who would prefer to be peaceful rather than creating weapons, and his conscience haunts him to his death for having had to use the weapon to its fullest power, just once, and sink a ship and kill dozens of crew.
Suppose that you consistently donate $20,000 a year to the Red Cross.
I want to hire you for some project and pay you $20,000. Normally you’d have to pay taxes on this income and only get some fraction of it. But I cleverly say “Why don’t I donate $20,000 to the Red Cross in your name, and then you don’t have to donate anything this year?” It seems like I’ve successfully hired you without anyone paying taxes on your labor.
Maybe this is legal in the sense of “nobody can find out”, but if it was ever done explicitly or somebody did find out, would it be legal?
(attention IRS: I’m not actually planning to do this)
I think this covers what you are asking: https://policy.nd.edu/assets/185204/charitable_contribution_in_lieu_of_comp_or_pymt_for_services_policy_2015.pdf
Yes, that’s what I was wondering, thanks.
Relevant XKCD. (Substitute insurance/tax).
Related idea: Certificates of Impact
Here you’re basically trading the certificate of impact of your donation for their completion of the project. (Of course, you need some verifiable and non-duplicable signature of such certificates, so you can’t go pulling this trick on everyone that you’d like to hire who donates to the Red Cross.)
Where I live, this would probably get interpreted as you, the employer, having acquired services worth $20,000 for free, and therefore need to pay income tax on that.
There was a legal system for this about ten years ago in Hungary, and the employer didn’t even need to do anything about it. People who donated to charities registered in Hungary could reduce the base of their income tax so they don’t pay income tax after the part of their income that they donate. You and the employer still had to pay the taxes other than the income tax, including the social security tax, so this wasn’t as cheap as if the employer had donated directly. This was never possible for charities that were only registered in foreign countriess, so eg. the Red Cross was a target that worked but the Against Malaria Foundation wasn’t.
After a while (actually shortly before I started to earn my own money and could have started to make use of this tax reduction), the entire income tax system was reformed, and this option is no longer available. It is possible that they removed this option because there were a lot of public scandals about fake charities, so this tax reduction could have been used to help money laundering through such charities.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Ask a lawyer if you want to know for sure.
How long did it take the dinosaurs to go extinct after The Meteor hit? Does anyone know?
Not a direct answer, but relevant to the question, are the various claims of Paleocene non-avian dinosaurs, claims of dinosaur fossils dated later than the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.
Notably, a number of fragments of dinosaur fossils have been found in different places at layers dated to 40,000 years after the K-Pg boundary. However, because all those fossils are fragmentary, the majority of paleontologists are of the opinion that those are merely naturally unearthed then reburried fossils, and that dinosaurs were already extinct at that point.
A possible almost-exception is the Qinornis, whose fossil was found in a layer dating to 5 million years after the K-Pg boundary. The Qinornis is a bird (so not a non-avian dinosaur), but surprisingly, it is not a neornithine – the only group of birds that were thought to have survived the K-Pg boundary.
I remember hearing that the extinction of dinosaurs was theorized to have happened extremely fast, in most places in the span of two generations, as survival during the immediate aftermath of the Chicxulub impact was closely tied to the ability to seek shelter – apparently the dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous largely lacked the ability to burrow, swim, or dive. Those that did escape immediate extinction then suffered food deprivation, especially as warm-blooded animals.
Some interpretations of the fossil record also tend to show that dinosaur diversity had already been on the decline for the last 10 million years of the Cretaceous (although this is not a settled conclusion), and, the extinction event may then have merely terminated an already fragilized group .
This is an post about how vote-counting works in Spain. I am writing this because I was pretty confused about how voting works in the US (why did they use punch cards for paper ballots in FL?), and I would like somebody to tell me how it compares (how did vote-counting work before the electronic ballot? who counted the votes?).
Voting in Spain is by paper ballot. The ballot forms look like this, and you put them in an envelope. There are two ways to vote: by mail or in person, in the Electoral Table where you are registered (this can be an embassy). When you vote by mail, you have to fill a form in a Post Office. Then they will send you a form to your temporary address, which you take to the Post Office. You put the envelope with your ballot in a bigger envelope, and the post office employee confirms your identity, puts the form that indicates your identity in the big envelope, and sends it. This is completely free, but it can only be done up to 4 days before an election (asking for the forms has to be done 10 days or so before the election; this is approximate, and they give you the deadlines for every election).
The day of the election is usually on a Sunday, although it can be any day. It is just more convenient this way. Voting places are open between 9.00 and 20.00. There are going to be three people who are going to be manning the table, and they are selected by a random lottery among the people with an education. So, in the morning before the tables open, 3 people (the chair and two other people), have to come, as well as their substitutes. The substitutes are then released, once the table is seated.
Each party can send two representatives, and an inspector (the “apoderado” can go to different polling places). Usually, this means that, in most of Spain, two parties send their representatives (except for municipal elections, where the two party system breaks and people don’t vote for their party so faithfully). Parties with few voters in the town usually don’t bother sending representatives; exceptions are made for very contested elections, such as the last Catalan one, where nationalist from all over Spain sent their representatives to check everything is OK.
So, once all representatives and the Electoral Table members are seated, the polling places open. Each voter has to show official ID (expired ID is OK, as long as it’s the original one). Then the members of the ET check that they are on the list, and tick their name. The ballot box is covered, to avoid “pucherazos”, which is when one voter throws in several envelopes. They check that there is only one envelope, and then allow you to put it in the ballot box, which are usually transparent.
When the polling places close, the postman brings the mail vote. The ET opens the big envelope, checks that they have not voted in person, and are on the register, and then puts the vote in the ballot box. Then the ET members vote, and the counting of the votes starts. The ballot box is opened, and each envelope is opened, and votes are counted, as well as the null ones (putting more than one ballot, or none, or defacing it). The party representatives can ask to examine disputed votes during the counting. At the end of the count (there can be a re-count if it is a very disputed election) the members of the ET fill a form, and the party representatives sign it as well. This form is then given to the official government employee, who the carries it to the official government office. This documents will be re-checked within a week, and official results will be published within a week in the official government bulletin, although temporary results are released to the media the same evening.
Fraud does not happen during the voting (not now that they check you put only one envelope in the box). Fraud happens with the inscription of who is in the census*. The most corrupt elections are the municipal ones. While not technically ilegal, there are many ways an election can be skewed. One of the most common ones is to have loyal party members who have a house in the town but only come in weekends or summers while they live in the big city still vote in the small town; this is not ilegal, but can be unfair to locals. Another not illegal way is to bring EU migrants (who can vote in municipal elections) to the town. I have heard plenty of stories where some town had a sudden increase in their electoral census when lots of mostly Romanian voters come there (part of the stories may be due to racism; but I think there may be some true in them).
*In my town, they once caught a 90 year old lady with Alzheimers who had been removed from the census, but whose son still brought her to the polls.
Hi. I’m looking for help finding a therapist.
I live California, south bay area, and am suffering from what is or resembles an uncomfortable mixture of ADD, depression, and anxiety, all feeding off each other and making each other worse. My psychiatrist thinks that therapy will help, and I’m looking for recommendations.
(I have tried one therapist already. I may go back; she wasn’t catastrophic, but I did not feel that the therapeutic alliance was working out. She thought that I might be suffering from scrupulosity, as well as everything else, which seems entirely plausible given my support for EA and my hide-in-a-corner reaction to the social justice movement.)
My main problems, in terms of how they actually express themselves, are ‘not doing things’, ‘stressing’, and ‘being unhappy’. Naturally, not doing things make me stressful and unhappy, stress makes me not do things and be unhappy, and unhappiness makes me not do things and stress out, and this problem has been going on for years and doesn’t seem inclined to go away on its own.
My only preferences for therapy styles are that I prefer things that work and are not soul-destroying. I presume that anyone who is recommending a therapist finds that their therapist’s style works and is not soul-destroying, so I think in practice I have no preferences.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Very, very greatly appreciated.
Try Reflect! It’s a Bay Area service that matches you with three therapists based on a questionnaire you fill out, and the initial matching is free. One of the therapists it matched me with was actually a rationalist, so I think their matching is probably pretty good 🙂
Who is this therapist who is a rationalist and taking new patients? I know a lot of people who would be interested in this.
There is this guy with a blog…
😛
Only Bay Area? Anything similar around Seattle or Boston?
More general, but this might be relevant.
Seeking recommendations: Does anyone know of a good source for very basic nutrition information? I’m not looking for diets or edge theories, just something one step beyond the nutritional labels. For example: according to the Stanford blood center, iron is absorbed better if you consume it along with vitamin C, and worse with (calcium, I think – something in milk). The only reason I know this is that if you don’t have enough iron to donate blood, the blood center gives you a print-out on How To Get Your Iron Levels Up. But that’s fairly basic and only for iron. Anyone know where I can find more of that kind of thing, ideally in more detail and for more vitamins and minerals? Information on what the rarer ones do would also be nice. I have no idea at all what Vitamin K does, except for interfering with some medications.
Examine.com? Here’s a link to the section on their Iron page discussing vitamin C interaction.
Seconding the recommendation of Examine.com
Not really what I was looking for (I was hoping for both more information and clearer presentation), but thank you for the recommendation.
Structural Engineering
After some discussion about an energy storage device that @Nancy Lebovitz posted back in 108.5, I did a quick series of analyses on how it would behave under certain loads. After I posted those, some people expressed interest in an effortpost series on structural engineering.
The intent of this series is to give a qualitative overview of how the structures in our built environment function, and what considerations go into their design. I may give some equations from time to time, but for the most part I will avoid them whenever possible, since I want to keep this accessible to people who are not mathematically inclined.
For example, I’m not going to try to teach how to calculate forces from, say, wind, but I do want people to understand that doubling wind speed will impose about four times the force on a building, and to be able to visualize how that force is carried by the building. One critical piece of feedback that I ask for as we go is how I’m doing on that front.
For some background on me, I am a structural engineer in government service and work in major civil works–dams, navigation locks, some flood control, and bridges necessary to service these. My organization is no longer doing new start megaprojects in these areas, but there is plenty of work in inspecting and maintaining the existing infrastructure, as well as major incremental improvements, primarily for environmental purposes. I am still very junior, with about four years of true design experience.
Nothing that I say is official policy from my organization, and I am doing this on my own time. I will avoid commenting on current work or whether particular things the government is doing are “good” ideas–I want to avoid political or culture-war-type controversy directly related to my job, more or less. The biggest reason is that I have a responsibility as a member of the civil service to not undercut my superiors, both permanent employees and political leaders, nor to bring scandal. Also, though I’m publishing pseudonymously, unmasking me would be trivial.
I bring this up, however, because my intent is to give an understanding of structural engineering as a field, with as wide a view of the field as I can. However, the nature of my day-to-day work does mean that my experience is sort of oddball compared to what the “average” structural engineer does, primarily because of the economics of the projects I work on (I’ll explain what I mean by this in the overview of structural engineering). I also want people to know what lens I view the world through, so they can correct for biases that I may have. One rule of bureaucracy is “Where you stand depends on where you sit,” and I would be remiss to not let people know where I sit.
I plan on covering several topics. I’m going to start with a quick overview of “What is structural engineering?” I’m then going to cover basic statics and mechanics. These topics will probably not be interesting to engineers, but most of the rest of the series will be incomprehensible to non-engineers if I don’t cover them. I plan to then discuss building codes in general, including some topics outside of structural engineering. I’m still thinking through the order of the next topics, but they will be material-specific design (steel, concrete, maybe a little timber), and extreme load events (wind and seismic).
I don’t have a specific timeline for posting, but I want to try to stay on a once-a-week timeline to avoid losing interest and drifting off. I will generally post once I have the next topic complete, however. Today, I’ll post one more threaded under this one, since it’s already done.
What is Structural Engineering?
There are a couple of ways to define structural engineering. One way that I like to tell people when they ask is “Structural engineers design things that are big, stand up from the ground, and don’t move.” For getting people to visualize the job, this doesn’t do a bad job. Bridges, the structural elements of buildings, dams (concrete dams, specifically), towers, oil derricks, etc.
More formally, the International Building Code, used throughout the US, requires that the structural engineer provide “a complete load path capable of transferring loads from their point of origin to the load-resisting elements.”
There are a few things to unpack here. The first is “loads”. These are any forces that may be imposed on a structure. This is everything from the permanent weight of the structure (dead loads), you and the chair you’re sitting in resting on the floor (examples of live load), wind, snow, earthquakes, etc.
The other thing is “load path.” This is a continuous and identifiable collection of structural members that transfer the loads from where they are placed on the structure down to the foundation, and ultimately into the ground where they become the geotechnical engineer’s problem. These structural members must ultimately be positioned and proportioned so that they do not fail.
Note that I said the load path must be continuous and identifiable. For example, you and your chair are (probably) sitting on a floor. Your weight is placed on the floor diaphragm. That weight is transferred to one or more floor beams, the beams land on girders, the girders transfer the weight to columns, the columns down to footings, and the footings to the ground. The continuous part is pretty obvious, but the identifiable requirement can be a little more subtle. A structural engineer should be able to figure out which members will receive a particular load and how much of it.
This is rarely a problem in today’s buildings, both because of the formal requirements for a definite load path and because of the economics of the design process. However, older buildings may not meet this requirement. Structures that have been designed via traditional methods (by this I mean built using tradition, rather designed with mathematical analysis) may not have an obvious load path, especially for lateral loads. Obviously something is carrying the load, since the building hasn’t blown over yet, and we can sometimes you can make a pretty good guess as to which members are being loaded up, but there may not be enough information about the structure or its construction to determine in what proportion they’re carrying the load. This can make analysis difficult, since if you don’t know how much load an element is carrying it’s tough to say if it’s capable of carrying it.
I’ve mentioned the economics of structural engineering a few times so far. The biggest overriding economic concern is one that is shared by all civil engineers: You Get One (1) Bite At The Apple. You do not get to test your product in service and iterate on the design. While you do iterate during the design process, individual elements and products are certainly tested, and for very large projects you can conduct scale-model wind tunnel tests, the whole completed structural assembly will never be tested together (except by the people using it). Nobody has ever built a complete full-size Applebee’s and put it on a shake table.
Compare this to airplanes, where you can put it in a frame and crank on it until the wings break off, and you have a testing program using the first couple completed, or to cars where crash testing is performed. And once those are done you’re constructing many nearly-identical copies.
This means that designs need to be more conservative. It also is often more economical in total to build more conservatively, because you don’t get to amortize the design cost over a large number of products. If an engineer working for GM making $250,000 a year spends a whole year to shave $.50 off of the build cost of a car that has 1,000,000 produced per year, he’s saved GM twice his salary. If I find a way to save $.50 on one of my designs, I’ve saved the taxpayer…$.50. Hopefully I didn’t take more than twenty seconds on it, or it was a net loss. This is also why I said above that economics drives you to have easily-identifiable load paths when doing a design, because that makes the design much more tractable to analyze and requires less of the engineer’s time.
Another consideration is that labor costs have grown dramatically, so more complex designs that require more labor to build are often less economical than designs that are simpler and just use more material. It has also turned out that more complicated designs can be more prone to failure. For example, it used to be common to save steel in bridges by using the lightest steel section (call them “I-beams” until I can explain proper terms later) for a particular member, then welding reinforcing plates (cover plates) on it to strengthen it where required. Nowadays, we would just use a bigger steel section for the whole member, not only because the cost of the welder’s labor will completely blow the steel savings out of the water, but also because it turns out that cover plates are extremely prone to fatigue and severely limit the service life of the bridge.
To wrap up, I’ll list the general design process. I’ll cover individual parts in more detail in further posts, and it’s worth noting that there is some iteration between various parts.
For a design, the structural engineer has to:
1) Decide what materials and structural system will be used
2) Decide what loads will be placed on a structure and what load cases will be used.
3) Construct a mathematical model appropriate to the materials and loads (This can be as simple as hand calculations, or an extensive finite element model.)
4) Use the model to determine loads at all points.
5) Proportion members.
6) Detail reinforcing steel or steel connections, as appropriate
7) Finalize construction documents.
Next time: statics!
A poem you might enjoy–it uses your field as its metaphor.
A very good poem!
I have always enjoyed that one. However, there is a point of order I have to raise regarding the metaphor. While we do know a lot more about what a structure can withstand, there is still a lot more uncertainty about what it will be subjected to; our best guesses about what “The Big One” will be are only statistical.
Speaking of poems about structural engineering, may your efforts always be more Barlow and Arrol than Bouche and Grothe, and of course, always remember that the stronger we our houses do build, the less chance we have of being killed.
Thank you. I look forward to following this series.
A question this fascinating post inspires, which might be out of scope but would be interesting to address if in scope:
Why *aren’t* more building designs standardized like vehicle designs, so that the kind of design efforts you describe can be amortized/multiplied over many instance of a building?
Is it site specificity (lot size/shape, climate, geotechnical variation)? Customer preference for distinctness? Both? Something else?
And: are there illuminating classes of exceptions historically or presently? Prefab housing? Soviet-era standard apartment block designs?
Mostly site specificity and owner needs. There are significant prefabricated buildings available, and they do get used extensively. I don’t know the statistics, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that most buildings constructed (by raw number) are prefabricated to a single design in exactly the way you mean. These do tend to fall into two groups, though: 1) small shed-type structures like you purchase in a box at Home Depot, or 2) more extensible prefabricated designs. This second group would include things like what you can get from the Metal Building Manufacturer’s Association, or prefabricated precast concrete buildings. This would also include something like a Quonset hut, which once you pick a width, can be of any length you desire. However, even with a prefab building you may still have a fair bit of individualized effort.
I’m going to get into this in more detail in my posts on building codes and extreme loads, but one other thing that we have to contend with in structural engineering is that we don’t know for sure what we’re designing for. In many fields, the operator will be extensively trained and will have a detailed manual that tells them the maximum conditions under which the product can be operated. For a crane, there are maximum wind speeds and maximum loads that are tabulated, and if they are exceeded, the operator will simply pack up and not do that thing. Or for a plane, there are maximum airspeed and G-limits that the pilot is trained to not exceed. A building just has to take whatever God deigns to throw at it. We do have some statistical analysis tools that we can use to try to divine His wrath, but at the end of the day they do have some uncertainty.
To use an example from my job recently, we elected to use a prefabricated metal building to cover some equipment. We specified the dimensions, and the contractor selected a manufacturer. However, the dimensions of the building were an odd size, because it had to fit between a parking lot and two existing structures–I’d have to look at the drawings to be sure, but it was something like 29’×31′ C/L to C/L of the columns. It was also a pavilion-type structure, in that it didn’t require sidewalls, because we only needed to keep the rain off. Except that we needed at least two sidewalls because one of the structures it needed to fit between was a channel with water in it, and it developed waves that occasionally surged over the wall and into the space where this building was sitting. So they had to design for the regular wind in the area (to a level of uncertainty), the earthquake (ditto), and this stupid wave crashing into the top level of the structure.
And that wave is pretty uncertain. I found out about it because halfway through the design one of the people who work on site told me that occasionally a wave breaks over the wall and splashes into the area where we needed these valves, and that it had bucked a prefabricated structure already there (acting as a garage). After discussions with the hydraulic engineer, we did our best guess as to the force from this wave, and put it in the building specifications.
The building manufacturer gave us the calculations for a building design meeting these requirements, and delivered the building to the site. However, that was just a building shell. We still needed to provide platforms to reach all of the equipment inside. That was also put on the contractor, but they had to engage the services of a structural engineer to design a bespoke platform system to reach all of the equipment inside the building. The locations and heights (some as high as 10′) was all driven by the process this structure was designed for, and could not be changed. By the time structural engineers were involved, it was basically “Figure out how to reach this stuff.” The platform structural engineering firm retained by the contractor had to figure this out (though that was painful enough that I’m rethinking farming that out to a private A/E firm in my next project, and may keep it in my shop).
This is somewhat outside the norm, but not to the extent that it can be disregarded when thinking about buildings in general. Prefab structures can be great for one-story buildings that are merely keeping the rain out. But when you start getting to two-story structures, especially ones that have specific floor plan requirements, it can still require individual attention from both the building designer and the person designing the guts of the building.
I wish I could answer some of your other questions, but I haven’t done much other than specify prefab buildings here in the US. I can’t intelligently speak to requirements or construction standards in other countries, or even prefab standards within the US in other than “customer” terms.
A lot of building designs _are_ standardized like that. Tract housing, for instance; there’s reasons those little boxes are all just the same (or variants on a handful of designs), and most of those reasons come down to money. But the fact that they’re standardized means not many structural engineers are needed deal with them. I assume there’s an engineer (not sure which kind) to sign off on the buildings being suitable for the site, but everything from the roof to the foundation is already taken care of.
Depending on the jurisdiction, one- and two-family homes of less than three stories can be constructed under a different code (often called something like the Residential Code) that permits prescriptive construction. That is, you don’t need a structural engineer, you just have to follow rules about e.g., joist and stud spacing and sizes, wall sheathing thickness and spacing of nails, etc. A carpenter can do this without engaging an engineer. There are limits on heights and stud spacing beyond which design by a registered professional in accordance with the regular building code would be required.
I know a lot less about the requirements here, since the whole point is that for relatively low-risk structures with a long history of particular construction methods you don’t need to engage somebody like me.
Tract houses will usually be constructed under something like this.
Do such tract homes include, say, townhomes with two floors plus a basement, where the basement is at ground level on one side? I see a lot of those around. I’m guessing no structural engineer is required for those. Indeed, in some ways, they seem like the best of both worlds, in terms of support, insulation, and living space.
@Paul Brinkley
The administration chapter of the International Residence Code is here: https://codes.iccsafe.org/public/document/IRC2015/chapter-1-scope-and-administration, and the exact language says that it applies to one- and two-family detached houses or townhouses with “not more than three stories above grade plane”. Having a basement with a door at ground level is going to be oddball considering that it is a little odd in what counts as “grade plane”. However, the defninition of “story above grade plane” includes any story “…in which the finished surface of the floor next above is… 2. More than 12 feet above the finished ground level at any point.” That seems to indicate that if at your basement door, the first floor is more than 12 feet at that point the basement could be considered a “story above grade”! However, this one may be subject to a judgement call from the Authority Having Jurisdiction, so you’d want to consult your local building official for a determination.
However, you’re discussing a building with a basement and two stories, so even if the basement is a story above grade, you’re still only talking about a townhouse with three stories above grade so the IRC would seem to apply.
…you’re still only talking about a townhouse with three stories above grade so the IRC would seem to apply.
Er, you said “less than three stories” above, so I inferred that three stories => SE needed. Was that incorrect?
In the houses I see, it might be that the “first” floor is 11.5 feet above the ground level where the basement lets out.
At any rate, I assume the builders and bureaucrats both know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of housing like this, and I don’t see any lawsuits flying around. And the houses aren’t falling down during storms, either, so the occupants are likely satisfied, too.
@Paul Brinkley
You’re right, “less than three stories” was a typo on my part. I crossed it up with “three stories or less” and didn’t notice.
And yes, having a “first” floor low enough to permit classifying the bottommost floor as a “basement” rather than a “story above grade” will become a design constraint to allow the use of the IRC’s prescriptive design.
Here’s a document explaining this from the International Code Council, which writes the code, explaining that it’s pretty much what you’re thinking: http://media.iccsafe.org/news/eNews/2013v10n18/2012_ibc_handbook_p42-44.pdf
Civil/Geotechnical Engineer here. Enjoyed this post and looking forward to the chapter on earthquake actions!
Side question: do ‘simply supported’ beams actually exist outside of modelling software?
The short answer is “yes”, and there are a lot of them. I had a longer answer that I typed out this morning, and hit “Post” on right before heading out the door to work, but it apparently got eaten.
The vast majority of bridges are simple spans, and the bearings at the ends will often look like rollers. Also, most horizontal members in a steel frame are treated as simple spans, as well. The ones where you have a single tab or a pair of angles connected to the web only are treated as pinned connections in analysis. Obviously, they provide some rotational restraint, but if you were to measure the slope of the beam at the support, it’s going to be much closer to that described by the equations for simply-supported spans than fixed-fixed spans.
Is step 1 generally a trade study, or a lookup?
This is one area where I’m actually limited by my experience, because in my line of work there’s stuff that’s always steel, and stuff that’s always concrete, because of weight, dimensional, and service requirements. For example, an intake tower will always be concrete, because there are very few weight restrictions and building it out of steel is not safe, due to corrosion concerns. Meanwhile, the spillway gate on a dam would be extremely difficult to even design in concrete, and will blow the pick weight concerns out of the water. So this is pretty much a “by inspection” determination.
For a building, that decision may have been made by the architect or owner before retaining the structural engineering firm. You can do a basic analysis of how much both steel and concrete office buildings cost per square foot with lookups; the industry standard for this kind of cost estimating is RS Means, which publishes books of costs per unit and factors to correct for different areas of the US.
I actually don’t know how detailed the analysis is, or if it’s “In this firm, we like concrete construction,” or “Yeah, we determined a couple years ago that steel was the best for this type of construction and we pretty much just do that.”
Concerning buildings:
The owner will generally have been working with the architect well before the structural engineer is involved. Experienced architects usually have a pretty good idea of what systems work best for different building types (e.g. the classroom portion of a school works really well as cmu walls with steel joists or trusses, the gym will work well as a prefabricated metal building). If there’s some doubt, they’ll often reach out informally with questions to engineers they’ve worked with before. The amount of open space and windows/doors the owner wants can be a big driver in determining a building type.
At a little later stage, the engineer will do some preliminary analysis and write a short, maybe one to five page, design narrative for the owner and architect to approve describing the proposed structure. It’ll contain a summary of the geotechnical report, a description of foundations and slabs, and a description of support systems and floors (steel frames, concrete wall, etc.). The actual design and drafting begins after the narrative is approved.
That’s if everything goes perfectly. Sometimes we’ll have to work up a couple of options to some point (maybe 20-35%), let the general contractor price them, and then present everything to the owner for a decision. Luckily that isn’t super common.
EDIT: The above is based on limited personal experience. Different firms in different regions may have slightly different workflows.
Thanks! And I wouldn’t worry overmuch about the limitations due to personal experience, so long as you declare them. After all, this is one of those basic questions I didn’t know a whole lot about because its an area I don’t do much with. We’re all just feeling different parts of the elephant.
I want to say that I love these two posts and will be following the series. I want to know more about this topic and this looks like a good presentation. Thumbs up.
Thanks for doing this. The second post in particular had some interesting insights in what separates the construction of
targetsstructures from the stuff I’m more familiar with.It’s very easy to forget the differing economics for civil works compared to other fields. This is one reason that Elon Musk putting his name on the Hyperloop has soured me on his genius across fields–soured isn’t quite the right word, because the Hyperloop proposal is when I heard of him, but I think it captures it. Aside from the sand-poundingly stupid idea that a bridge would be cheaper than at-grade construction, the proposal seems to think that it’s proposing to build about 25,000 bridges 100 feet long, instead of what it is actually proposing, which is one bridge 350 miles long.
Now, I’m being a little hyperbolic because the real situation is somewhat between those two extremes. You’re going to have to give individual attention to each pier, because each one is going to have individualized footing and top of concrete elevations. You can’t use literally identical spans because you’ll have to dodge around existing infrastructure and poor ground conditions. However, you can get economies of scale by having similar pier concrete outlines and reinforcement details for similar-sized piers, as well as making use of precast post-tensioned sections. (I mean, even in regular buildings we generally pick standardized sections if at all possible.) It’ll probably be closer to my way of thinking than his, though.
Just remember that your stuff either flees the area or cowers inside of my stuff during a major hurricane.
Hey. We survived the typhoon without any help from your stuff.
According to your link, Typhoon Cobra had a max windspeed of 100 mph. Nowhere in the US are we allowed to design buildings for that low of a windspeed, including the West Coast that doesn’t get hurricanes.
I don’t think it was the wind which flipped those destroyers, and I’ve heard many stories of anemometers ripped off ships while showing well over 100 mph. But yes, I do acknowledge the importance of civil engineers to sustaining moving things.
Let me suggest first of all that this is great, but it would be much better if you blog it yourself (and perhaps crosspost here). Makes it more googleable and improves discovery. I’d also happily subscribe to your RSS feed, whereas unfortunately I’m likely to miss many comments that you post here.
Medium and Tumblr are easy, though I hesitate to recommend hiding things in their walled garden.
I did consider that, but I’ve got two issues: 1) I’m doing this because it seems to be interesting to people here, and I’m less concerned with a general audience and 2) I don’t think that I’ll continue this beyond the relatively straitened limits I’ve discussed covering. If I get 15 blog-level posts I’ll be surprised.
One severe limit that we have here is that equations are more or less unintelligible over a relatively low complexity, which a blog of my own would alleviate. However, the limitation will make it interesting, because I’d like to see if I can engage people without the ability to post complex equations or use anything more than very basic arithmetic to explain what I do.
This part will also help me in my job. On my last really big project, which was helping fish pass around a dam, we were working with fish biologists who will operate the final product. We sent an interim set of plans to them for comment to ensure that we aren’t doing anything that will scare fish or make it too difficult to do their jobs. After a few rounds of back-and-forth, where they asked us questions that were clearly indicated in the plan set, I realized with creeping horror, “Holy dogshit, these guys can’t read a set of construction drawings.”* I had to learn how to explain things, and help them understand what’s going on. If I can do that same thing here, that’s a victory for my day job.
I do realize that I’m trading on the goodwill of @Scott Alexander here, since I’m basically running a small time limited blog on his back, and with the audience that he developed. If those of us doing effortposts are exceeding his tolerance for this, I’ll cheerfully find another platform and link here.
One question I will ask about following the posts here: are you using Bakkot’s autocollapser found at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/09/ot73-i-lik-the-thred/#comment-486219 ? Because that makes it so much easier to follow the comments, since it’s immediately apparent what is new and it’s easy to scan through for things that interest you.
* I want to emphasize that this is not a slam against them. I would fail just as miserably at their job as they would at mine. If you had me out there handling fish at a passage facility after partway through the first day, you’d have CatCube standing in the middle of a pile of dead salmon with a “dog watching Jeopardy” look on his face and saying in a haunted voice “I don’t know what just happened.” Being able to take a set of two-dimensional drawings that include cross sections in two axes and visualize the final product in three dimensions is a skill that both requires a natural aptitude and practice to develop. People who don’t work with construction drawings on a day-to-day basis are going to be behind on that, and that’s not a poor reflection on them.
He was fine with me talking about naval stuff in every OT for about 8 months, and I left because I was tired of running a blog in wordpress comments, not because of any indication that he wanted me to stop. I don’t think he’ll have any problems with you doing this.
Effortposts like this are a sporadic tradition and I think people generally prefer them to external blogs.
Looking forward to this series! I took a few structures courses in Uni, but work in wastewater treatment process design now.
Which material is your preference?
I like working with steel better, because it’s a little more “elegant” with much more straightforward equations that flow from theory. However, I do more concrete, just due to the nature of the projects I’ve been working on for the last few years.
Thanks. This is more than a little interesting, and I’m pleased to have instigated it.
Scott recently put up another post on the subject of “effective altruism.” My knowledge of this project is limited, but I have a reservation about it based on my highly limited knowledge. I’d be interested to hear any reactions. (I’m confident, incidentally, that none of this is novel, except to the extent that it’s really dumb, so I’m not in any way claiming that all these smart EA people have missed an obvious point. I’m just not steeped in the discussion and curious how this is addressed.)
The reservation is that, if the bottom-line goal of the movement is to maximize the efficacy of charitable donations, there would seem to be much more room to improve by (a) increasing and maximizing the total sum of eleemosynary dollars given rather than (b) working to funnel existing donations to marginally more effective recipients. Yet my casual impression is that the overriding focus of the movement seems to be to work hard on (b), while (a) is relegated to a secondary consideration (or perhaps sometimes ignored altogether).
The amount of charitable giving is obviously not a fixed, zero-sum amount. And figuring out how to increase the actual amount of such giving seems to have a much higher up-side than shuffling existing donations around among beneficiaries. So why shouldn’t the focus here be on working much more on altering societal conditions in a manner that facilitates voluntary charitable giving? There are some obvious variables to work with. The biggest one is simple economic growth. I haven’t done any historical research but it would not surprise me if the quantum of charitable giving has been highly correlated with individual wealth in the society. Indeed, I would not be surprised if this applied on an individual level, i.e., that, other things being equal, wealthier individuals within a society are ceteris paribus likely to give more dollars than poorer people. If true, wouldn’t this suggest that EA should focus much more heavily on advocating policies that facilitate economic growth rather than devoting it’s limited resources to evaluating which charity offers a marginally bigger bang for your buck? There is obviously a lot of room for controversy over which economic policies are best suited to maximizing economic growth, but there’s probably little reasonable question that there was a significant relationship between the unprecedented explosion of wealth that coincided with a period of greater free markets and free trade and emphasis on individual liberty and individual responsibility (i.e., less government role in seeing to the needs of individuals). Should EA be working along these lines, to advocate market policies that aim to maximize growth, if the end goal here is to maximize the effect of charitable giving, and the welfare of the needy?
On the other side of the coin, I would expect that there are some cultures that produce more charitable donation even holding wealth constant. Why not focus hard on instilling cultural mores that are better conducive to charitable giving? I have heard, for example, that Christian societies tend to be unusually charitable. If so, then that would seem to supply a powerful argument for scaling up cultural support for Christianity and reducing a cultural attitude stigmatizing that worldview as dogmatic and ignorant.
Also, human psychology being what it is, it would not surprise me if the quantum of charitable giving increased where it was focused on “local” recipients, with locality being defined by some combination of geographic proximity and sameness of community. I have the impression, for example, that there was a lot more per capita charitable giving in the United States per dollar of wealth during a period when local communities routinely took care of the needs of those within their own groups. The local Jewish community, for example, might view itself as having primary responsibility for helping needy Jews within the local community, and similarly for other social groups. My unstudied impression is that the per capita amount of charitable giving was much higher per dollar of total wealth back when these informal institutions prevailed. Should EA become more focused on restoring this sort of “federalist” approach to charity, delegating primary roles to geographically or conceptually “local” communities in the first instance as a means to increase charitable giving?
The foregoing particular examples are obviously tentative and subject to disagreement, but I guess the basic point is just to ask whether too heavy a focus on what I would view as a casual outsider as the primary focus of EA, the allocation of moneys among charitable recipients, really ought to be made secondary, with a substantially greater focus on increasing the amount of charity.
One answer to that could be that it’s just a different project from EA, and asking EA to do that wouldn’t be to improve EA but rather to abandon it. But if the real goal here is to improve the effectiveness of charity and maximize the welfare of charity recipients, then couldn’t such an answer be subject to a meta “EEA” argument, to the effect that EA’s own premises demand that its work should be devoted to those projects that would produce the maximal amount of utility for charity recipients? If so, then it might be hard to justify continued work on an EA project if there was an alternative enterprise with a better expected payoff.
A large focus in Effective Altruism is “Earning to give.” It is strongly encouraged by 80,000 Hours, an EA charity, so EA is thinking about the general topic of increasing giving quantities, although not to the extreme that you’re advocating.
Regarding local charity: I don’t think anyone doubts that people are in general willing to give more to local communities. However, donations to poorer regions are assumed – and calculated – to be worth more than the value lost by giving locally. For example, perhaps people are willing to donate twice as much to local charities, but that same money goes ten times as far in Africa than it does in the local communities. Then it would make sense to encourage donations to African charities. I don’t have sources on hand for the actual numbers, but I have seen estimates before and they work out this way. I could definitely be persuaded this weren’t the case though.
That’s a fair point about locality, except it would seem you would want to supplement that analysis with an argument why the differential could not better be redressed by encouraging greater local charitable giving by the non-poor within those African communities rather than abandoning the locality principle altogether. But like you, I could definitely be persuaded by a contrary view on this empirical question.
Frankly, I’m doubtful that there are significant numbers of people in those African communities who are both wealthy enough to provide donations and plausibly persuaded to donate.
Things are getting better in Africa and will probably continue to do so.
There are middle class and wealthy people.
Working on promoting EA ideas in Africa strikes me as at least reasonable, but it isn’t EA because it’s new and can’t yet be evaluated for effectiveness.
I’ve often said that the hard part of getting institutions to innovate isn’t getting them to try new things, they try new things every day. the trouble is getting them to stop doing old things that don’t work anymore. United could set up Shuttle, GM could set up Saturn, but having an innovative subsidy doesn’t do them a whole lot of good if they can’t use its success to reform the other 90% of their business .
Scott wrote a post addressing a sort-of-adjacent topic, here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/
It isn’t directly about your question, but I think the answer he gives there is the same one I would give to your posts: there are already a lot of groups trying very hard to persuade people of all possible political goals; all generally-accepted methods of improving economic growth (other than, as gbear says, ‘earning to give’) are currently political. Similarly with regards to changing culture; we’re in the middle of a culture war right now. On the other hand, trying seriously to find out which charity is the most effective is something that there’s very limited resources being spent on, outside EA; they therefore have a competitive advantage at it.
Moreover, they can get support from both sides of political/cultural issues, since ‘cure malaria’ is comparatively under-politicized. If they started saying ‘the best way to improve the welfare of the poor is to encourage immigration’, then even if that was true, nobody who was strongly opposed to it would give them money.
So, in other words, I think the answer boils down to ‘they’re focusing on their competitive advantages.’
Hope this helps!
It is helpful. I actually think these are kind of hard issues. As a matter of principle I’m ordinarily sympathetic to arguments from comparative advantage. But there seems to be some degree of tension between that angle of response and the (I think) standard EA line that there is a simple hierarchy of benefit among charitable recipients. The argument that hey, we’re all doing important work here and we’re just focusing on a particular piece of the puzzle seems in tension with the idea that donations to charity shouldn’t just go to a wide variety of beneficiaries, each advancing its own parochial comparative advantage. If EA proponents were really somehow uniquely well suited to advance the allocation question relative to anyone else then maybe there would be a stronger argument. But if what’s going on is really just that this is under-evaluated then I worry that the answer may be that we should leave it under-evaluated while we devote our energies to the aspects of the problem with a larger expected payoff for the time invested. Again — I do think these questions are difficult and it’s entirely possible I’m coming at this all wrong.
The solution to the problem of ‘get more money’ is usually ‘get people to donate more’ and a wide range of charities (and other organizations) have spent decades refining their approach to doing so. The chance that some latecomers can add anything substantial here is remote.
Conversely, the question which charities are effective has received far less attention, so there is (was) room for a dedicated group of people to bring about change.
And EA proponents are uniquely suited to address the allocation question because they care deeply about getting it right, are fairly neutral and had most of the toolset already developed. Imagine, if you will, a country government setting out to do such an evaluation, getting the heads of national charities togehter in a sort of comittee …
My impression (possibly wrong) from reading your post is that you’re underestimating the differential in effectiveness that’s out there. If cost-benefit analyses revealed that Charity A is 5% more effective at getting utils per dollar than Charity B, this is very much a reasonable criticism, but the actual numbers are more like 50,000%; a middle-class effective altruist who takes the Giving What We Can pledge could easily have more impact than a multi-millionaire who gives their entire fortune away to something with a poor altruistic return on investment.
Re: local charity norms, I think this is a reasonable point, and if one were structuring a set of social norms from the ground up it might well make sense to have community members work to support their neighbors, relying on a better knowledge base of which interventions are most needed in the area. But effective altruists are currently a vanishingly small minority of almost any geographic population, so the rationale for actions taken is much less of a deontological “do that which is best universalized” and more “which actions create the most marginal good in the world, conditional on its current state?” And relative to that perspective, $100 to improve the local library’s selection of Russian literature is pretty dismal compared to keeping an entire school’s worth of children in subsaharan Africa free of schistosomiasis for the next year.
Your impression is correct. Those are bigger differentials than I would have guessed. Interesting.
EA does focus on increasing levels of donations: the Giving What We Can pledge is the big thing here but I believe there are also some other organisations like the Founders’ pledge. Increasing economic growth could also have this effect, but I think it has several problems from an EA perspective. Firstly, it’s much less tractable than increasing donations in several ways: it’s more difficult to know what would increase growth; it’s difficult to predict side effects of policies; even if we did know optimal policies it would be difficult to implement them; and there is already a lot of effort being put into this project (I assume) so EA would likely have a minimal additional impact. Secondly, I think it would be difficult to achieve increases in growth large enough to match potential increases in giving. An individual committing to the GWWC pledge could increase their charitable donations by two orders of magnitude, so even popularising the pledge in a small proportion of society would have a large effect. I don’t think increases in growth of a similar size are plausible; developed countries are all fairly tightly clustered.
As has been said, you are probably underestimating the differences in effectiveness between charities. One of the standard examples is the charity Scared Straight, which took kids into prisons in an attempt to prevent them becoming criminals. A study showed that it actually made them more likely to commit crimes; donating to them would be worse than just burning money! In comparison, donations to e.g. anti-malaria charities in Africa can be orders of magnitude more effective than spending on healthcare in developed ones.
EA definitely is focused on instilling cultural mores conducive to greater giving! But focusing on specific existing mores that have baggage (for instance performing da’wah because zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam) seems like it would alienate people.
Fair points. Thank you for responding.
The end of the US as the world’s dominant military superpower within most of our lifetimes- most likely due to budget reasons, yes? Does anyone think otherwise? Our enormous military budget is driven by projecting power & dominance far away from the continental US- military installations in South Korea, Japan, Germany, Eastern Europe, Africa, Afghanistan and who knows where else. We have a more powerful military force stationed in, say, South Korea than most countries on Earth are able to field even in defense of their homeland. (Apparently three of the wealthiest countries on Earth could barely field one battalion in between them in case of invasion.
Probably not breaking news that the US faces huge budget shortfalls over coming decades with an aging population & increasing Social Security/Medicare spending on their needs, plus declining population growth (and a homegrown nativist movement intent on preventing bringing in talented foreigners to make up for the low birth rate). The Democrat’s opposition to military over social spending is well-known- the Trump phenomena has shown the populist right sentiment among the average working person is basically the same. Political will to cut spending for the elderly is basically nonexistent. Most importantly, unrestrained deficit spending will likely spike bond financing rates soon- making servicing the debt much more expensive.
With all of these budgetary headwinds, does anyone think the US won’t start to gradually cut back on overseas bases & force projection? Given the choice between financing Social Security and, say, bases in Asia, I think only neoconservatives & the National Review crowd would choose the latter. I foresee a slow decline in American power projection over the next few decades, overseas base closings, less aircraft carriers being built & put out to sea. Less money to stay on the cutting edge of weapons tech (railguns, lasers etc.) All the while, a rising China slowly fills the gaps- it becomes their carriers patrolling the Red Sea and keeping oil shipments safe instead of us, and so on.
Am I missing something? Why wouldn’t this state of affairs come about, given US budget issues & the lack of political will to cut benefits- especially for the elderly, the main driver of entitlements?
Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it? Basically, they are free-riding on the US. And gambling that nobody will try to invade, in a post-nuclear world.
I don’t agree with Trump on many things, but one thing I do agree with is that Western Europe should contribute something to its own defense, rather than asking us to pick up (almost) the entire bill.
Democrats can be hawks too, and often are. Bill Clinton took us to war in Serbia. Obama intervened in Libya. Hillary was talking about intervening in Syria. Nearly all Democrats opposed the war in Iraq, but most were at least ambivalent about Afghanistan– including Obama.
I was just thinking about this the other day. It really does seem like the sun is setting on our empire. But maybe it’s for the better. It doesn’t seem to have brought anyone happiness in a long while. Intervene somewhere, get used as a punching bag for both right and left. Why bother?
The last intervention that really seemed to go well was the Korean war. And that was the 1950s.
Well, China has its own problems with an aging population. But they do have a pretty big population with a lot of smart people. I guess time will tell.
The EU spends about $230B on defense (at current exchange rates). China spends about $145B and Russia about $70B.
What’s the issue again?
The complete political inefficiency of those armies. For example, in Spain, soldiers are old and fat.
Greece is one of the countries that spends enough GDP. But they include pensions in that expenditure. And then they spend all their forces trying to defend themselves from their supposed NATO ally, Turkey (and thus Greece would be pretty useless against another enemy).
And then there are stories, such as the ones told by Elliot Ackerman (I couldn’t find a story in English that wasn’t behind a paywall), where US soldiers were not rescued by NATO allies because of political orders not to enter hot zones, thus leaving injured soldiers in the hot zones.
To clarify; I don’t think the problem is money. I think we already are spending too much money for the results we are getting. The ways to solve European armed forces’ inefficiencies are through political will, not by spending more money (although budgets will have to be increased, we have to make sure we don’t just spend money to duplicate what other armies have). This isn’t going to happen, though, as war is very unpopular, and most governments prefer to pretend we don’t have armies in Afghanistan.
I think you’re thinking of Italian forces in the marshland of Iraq. Rory Stewart was openly critical in his memoir.
Fair.
Why? You said it, the problem isn’t money.
It would be more correct to say that the issue isn’t JUST money. Money absolutely plays a role. And I think the part that so many people miss is that you have to look at the difference in spending, as magnified by the amount of time that difference has been going on, and how it’s been spent.
Even a “modest” 50 billion USD spending gap per year turns into over two and a half trillion dollars over five or six decades. Now think in terms of large capital projects spread over 10-20 years. This is why you get a situation where the US spends “only” 2-2.5x what the EU does per year, but has over an order of magnitude more combat power if push came to shove.
Now, yes, when it comes to things like manpower issues and training readiness, there are issues that go beyond money. But I think it’s wrong to say “the issue isn’t money”. The really bad part is that the gap is so severe that it’s not something you can simply fix by saying “Ok, we’ll spend 100B more a year.”.
I sat down once and started to work out how much it would cost the UK to acquire proportional combat power to the US (proportional in terms of both GDP and population), and ignoring issues of force projection like lots of heavy lift aircraft, carrier power, etc. I gave up part-way through because it was clear that it was simply a politically impractical task. Basically, it looked like they would need to double or triple their military budget and -hold- it there for -decades- just to close the gap. I am pretty confident that the same holds true for the EU.
A major issue is that for the most part, each country wants to have their own fully able army. So there are lots of small, inefficient, not very capable units.
However, this is understandable as unlike in the US, there is not a true EU polity. France is not going to want to be prevented from intervening by Germany, nor will Germany want to sacrifice their soldiers’ lives on a mission that they themselves don’t believe in.
@Trofim_Lysenko
Why is the US the correct place to look for a gap rather than China or Russia, or even China and Russia?
Well, maybe the solution is just for the US to spend less money on the military.
But I think America is perfectly capable to let their sick die and their old people without pensions if it means keeping the gates of Janus open.
@Brad
Sorry for the slow reply. Cellulitis sucks. The short version is that because the EU is a lot more like the US than it is like Russia or China, and thus it needs a more US-like military in terms of technological sophistication, professionalism, and lethality. Now, that said, I will agree that if we assume that the EU has no interest in geopolitics and wanted to restrain itself simply to defense of its territory, it could avoid a lot of costly items that the US military has (Carrier Battle Groups and MEUs, strategic air bases overseas, etc). But even adjusting for that reduced scope of mission, I think there’s still a gap.
The first point to consider is casualty aversion and political will. To use Russia as an example, in a hypothetical future where a Russian leader decides to carve off the Baltics and the EU goes to war to defend them, there’s no need for Russia to roll tanks down the Champs Elysees and drive the shattered remains of the old western powers across the Atlantic. All Russia has to do is hurt the EU badly enough that the EU public (and/or factions within its political organization) decide that it’s not worth fighting for and make them come to the negotiating table on Russian terms. Given rough parity in size and effectiveness between militaries, the side that runs out of political will to fight (which in a democracy means popular support) loses.
So flip that around: If we can’t be confident that the EU can defend its fringes without the coalition fracturing and/or if the public’s willingness to pay the cost in blood is relatively low, we need a military potent enough that it can stand off threats without having much of its blood spilled.
And right now, while I think the EU could fight off a concerted Russian attack on its territory without US assistance, the combination of its operational readiness issues, logistical issues, organizational issues, and most important (IMO) the deficiencies of training mean that it would be a bloody, costly, drawn out affair.
I think that an enemy looking to obtain limited goals from the EU, absent US support, might very well look at that calculation and figure that the EU would cave when push came to shove….and even if they’re -wrong-, there’s still that bloody, costly, drawn-out mess, and I think that still means that the EU’s defense doctrine would be a failure on several levels.
Thanks for the response and I hope you’re feeling better.
It seems like your post implies that a straight comparison with Russia doesn’t make much sense. Fair enough. But nor does the comparison to the US, per your first part.
I don’t think even Trump would be happy with an EU that muscled in on the US’s world police hobby, so what’s the envisioned end game here? Does anyone really think they’d increase their military budgets 2 or 3 fold and yet still agree to play sidekick?
It does if the goal is to prevent Russia from overrunning the Baltics ,or Poland, Ukraine, Aleppo, whatever(*). Whether it’s the US, Western Europe, or a true partnership of the two, someone whose home is not on the Baltic coast, has to project enough power to stop the Russian Army at a cost Western civilians and politicians will consider acceptable. That’s roughly the same problem no matter who does it.
There are some asymmetries from the fact that Western Europe is on the same continent as Russia and the Baltics, but they mostly cancel. Western Europe doesn’t need as capable a navy for that mission, just frigates and SSKs to tackle the Baltic Sea under NATO air cover. But they do need the armored divisions and air defenses to block a direct Russian attack on their own homelands, because “Pull back from Riga or we’ll take Warsaw and threaten Berlin” is a credible threat in the way that invading New York isn’t.
To the extent that Trump has an end game in mind, I suspect it’s either that Western Europe flatly refuses and Trump can keep scoring cheap “I’m calling out the selfish cowardly Europeans on not paying their fair share” points with his base, or Europe deciding that it would rather pay protection money to the US than try to raise an effective army of its own. I’m not terribly thrilled with either of those plans.
But the next US President, whoever that is, would do the world generally and the US specifically a fair bit of good if they were to make the defense of Europe and its periphery a true partnership rather than a US burden.
(*) Really, “whatever” is going to extend to e.g. the Pacific Rim where Europe is never going to be an equal partner, so we should also be talking about shared defense spending among ANZAJ, Japan, the ROK, etc.
If the faction within EU politics who dream of a “United States of Europe” get their way and the EU transitions into a single federal nation with single foreign policy, international trade policy, etc., I think that not only is “sidekick” out of the picture, “ally” is probably going to go by the wayside too, though we might well settle down on “cordial strategic rivalry”, with limited cooperation where it suits both parties and competition the rest of the time…which to be honest is where I think we are most of the time anyway. The major economic and military powers of the EU now that the UK is leaving are France and Germany, and neither have been particularly enthusiastic partners with us when it comes to geopolitical affairs in the past 50 years or so.
To be clear, Brad, when I say that the EU should have a US-like military, I want to say again that I am not saying that they should adopt the “world police” role, or invest in the sort of power projection capabilities the US has. I am saying that they should adopt US standards of operational readiness and technological sophistication. And I’m making this argument from a hypothetical EU perspective.
I think the end game for the EU military should be, on its own terms:
1) the ability to deploy 1-2 brigade strength military units with air support and 1-2 naval task forces and sustain them for up to one year within their sphere of influence (Baltic, North Sea, Med, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden for naval units. North Africa, Balkans, Crimea, Turkey, etc for Army units, Air force able to support both as needed). Maybe they could get by with less than this, but there are going to be some times the EU is going to want to deploy military force to protect its interest.
2) The ability to accomplish 1) while maintaining sufficient strength to stop the sort of threat a worst-case Russia would pose circa 2030-2040 without having to give a lot of ground or take massive casualties (10-20% casualties instead of 50+% casualties). Preferably the ability to stop any plausible threat cold at the border. The ability to stop a threat with minimum loss of territory is important because of the lack of defensive depth and increased density. The EU just doesn’t have a lot of room to fall back and regroup if it can’t initially defend its territory. I use Russia here because, well, worst case. They -are- steadily improving their military capabilities and reforming their own maintenance and personnel issues. I think a EUFOR that can stand off Russia at its borders with confidence is a sufficiently strong deterrent that A) they wouldn’t have to and B) they’d be sufficiently strong to counter any other plausible threat the EU is likely to face.
Those two capabilities, taken together, could be accomplished with a unified military no larger than the one the EU has today, in purely numerical terms. But at the very minimum, the levels of operational readiness and personnel experience and training need to be addressed. And those -are- expensive. Honestly, the readiness is probably the most expensive short term just because it’s been left to fester so long. Much like any other sort of maintenance, the longer you ignore it, the more expensive it gets.
This is probably too subtle for Trump, but there’s a reason the US doesn’t usually push on this question- yes, we wind up paying the cost of military defense.
And in return, we get a bunch of rich countries that are our potential competitors to voluntarily stop having armies that are any threat to us, and instead cede military dominance over the globe, and thank us for the trouble.
Except when they forget, and denigrate us as warmongers because why else would we need such an outside military budget?
Sure, but that’s still just salty rhetoric to keep their voters happy. At the level of actual policy, they still very much want America to continue acting as the global military hegemon.
We have managed to convince most of the rest of the world’s most powerful nations that it is actually in their best interest to not even try to contest our total military dominance, and they even chip in a bit for it!
Imagine going back in time and explaining that state of affairs to Rome, and then telling them that we have a president who wants to throw that away and get all of these countries to build up their own armies again, because they are not contributing as much as we would like to pay for our military forces stationed in their countries.
Rome would certainly expect to be paid for its military presence.
Yeah, they tended to make out like bandits.
Rome operated like a mafia crime syndicate as much as it did a nation, I wouldn’t go to them for diplomatic advice.
This is the inverse of Americans whinging that European nations aren’t paying for their own defence, so it would seem that people are terrible everywhere.
It could be. But Americans can now see that rhetoric and some have decided to respond in kind by voting in Trump.
Ostpolitik wasn’t just salty rhetoric to keep West European voters happy. It was the Good Euro Cop to our Bad Yankee Cowboy Cop in the Cold War, and the combination worked. Gorbachev called off the cold war because Russia was safe without going full Stalin, and because his generals knew they couldn’t safely roll through Europe without risk. Okay, three decades after the Wall came down, there’s no great will left in Europe to have a big expensive military that would cut into their welfare state and get in morally dubious fights.
If I had a nickel for every distinct reason I’ve seen someone confidently claim for why Trump won I could retire.
The great thing about just barely winning is that there are honestly a hundred “reasons” that explain your victory, in the sense that any little change to the world might well have changed the outcome of the election.
I agree, if likely for different reasons. And I’m sure the US’ attempts at squeezing a little more money out of the states it has bases in are nice. But on the whole? It may reek of tinfoil a little, but I think a Europe able to take care of its own defence isn’t in the US’ interest, and that one reason more bases in Europe aren’t closed is because the US benefits by Europe remaining dependent.
The reason for why it benefits the US seems rather clear: for as long as Europe doesn’t foot its own defence bill, it has to keep acting the part of the good vassal state. There’s some minor nitpicking at the margins, but the EU follows suit with the US’ foreign policy far more than I think is good for it. I’m not sure there’s any numbers to run, but the exchange rate the US gets here doesn’t seem all that bad.
[A]s long as Europe doesn’t foot its own defence bill, it has to keep acting the part of the good vassal state.
What if it stops being a good vassal state, due to its being able to spend all that extra money on other things, and then being used as example of how much better Americans would be if they adopted European systems?
My point being: people seem to lose sight of the tradeoff between defense and welfare spending. Coupled with my own curiosity about whether that’s actually enough of a thing, and wondering if anyone else on SSC has a counterargument.
As someone else noted elsewhere, the savings are so small that they have no meaningful impact on welfare spending.
I honestly don’t see how that’s the case (and I doubt I could find your reference – I didn’t see one above?). US defense spending is famously large – about half as much as SS / Medicare, IIRC. If that’s accurate, then if any EU country spent commensurately, it would mean cutting its domestic spending by a third.
Yeah, it seems that I’m wrong. Never mind what I said.
Disagree for the simple reason that the US Military does not cost that much, and on net probably buys us more GDP than it costs.
Yes the US military is huge, but we’re a large country with an overpowered GDP. Defense costs as a percentage of GDP are high compared to the post-Cold War Western World, but relatively low by global and historical averages. Even granting the World Bank’s methodology, military spending as a percent of GDP has averaged less than 4% since the end of the Cold War. That’s a lot of money, but it’s not enough to close the budget deficit, not enough to pay for Medicare-for-all, and would barely be enough to pay for Scandinavian-style free college. Any plausible gradual cuts would be a drop in the bucket.
It’s worth noting that the military is not a pure cost, a fair portion of the total is investment. Most obviously, the Defense Department funds a large portion of scientific research in the US, with huge spillover effects (i.e. GPS). The Army Corps of Engineers is included in military spending even though they mostly build civilian transportation infrastructure. The Navy led all but eliminated Somali piracy on a key shipping route, conservatively worth several billion dollars each year. Also, those foreign bases are heavily subsidized by the locals. It’s not cheaper to post a serviceman overseas, but the host governments in rich countries defray the additional cost.
There are places we could cut. Falling behind on new disruptive technology is always a risk, though if anything our spending overreacts to that risk. Reducing the stock of nuclear weapons while modernizing the warheads we keep could buy the same deterrence at lower cost. We could tweak the funding formulas and ask for a greater contribution from host governments. So there are ways to reduce spending, or at least reduce spending growth, while buying the same protection.
The US Military costs ~$700B per year. That’s about $2,000 per person. That’s meaningful, for sure, but at the end of the day it’s a manageable amount. With some foresight and planning, we can keep the growth of military spending to less than GDP growth.
I’m happy to flesh out any of these points if unclear.
Considering that having a US base in their territory is an insurance policy against their neighbour (on the premise that the US would intervene) I am pretty sure some nations would be happy to pay for the entire cost of the base.
Also, about cutting costs. If cutting costs really became a priority for Congress (although it never is) couldn’t they close some of the bases? I have heard that plenty of bases are completely unnecessary from a military standpoint and are there to provide employment in economically deprived areas. The same for plenty of military contractors.
Agreed. Qatar in particular is a touchy issue at the moment. But every 21st century president has pushed to get our allies to pick up more of the cost. Some have been gentler than others. But these discussions are constant, and productive. Note my link below on Japan increasing its contribution in 2015. I wouldn’t be surprised if South Korea offered to increase their contributions in exchange for trade concessions.
Yes. Struggling to find specific citations, but DoD has estimated about 10-20% of US bases are unnecessary and can be closed. We keep asking Congress for permission, they keep saying no.
(One example from last year)
That’s probably less true for defense contractors. It’s true that Congress has instructed the DoD to buy some items we didn’t request (notably more M1A2 Abrams), but we ended up using them. There’s also a very plausible argument for keeping production lines open as an insurance policy against future conflict. So you could get some savings from squeezing the contractors, but not nearly 20%, probably not even 10%.
There’s a good (political) reason why bases are almost impossible to close: if they are on US soil nobody in congress stands to gain much by closing them and a few particular members of congress stand to lose a lot by closing them. I live in a city that has a joint Air Force/Army base right next to it, and a couple years ago there was talk that it might be closed or at least the number of soldiers stationed there reduced significantly. At the clinic where I work about a third of our clients are from the base (easy to calculate because Tricare pays their bills), and I was fairly concerned about what would happen to our bottom line if the cuts came through. I wasn’t the only one: business leaders across the city started lobbying our congresscritters to stop any cuts from happening. They did their job nicely, calling out the cuts as being dangerous to our national security, blah blah blah, calling in favors, etc. Sure enough, no cuts. Good for my business, good for my city, bad for the Federal Budget.
I guess I’m saying that general budget belt-tightening will lead to gradual cuts over time. $700 billion becomes $650 billion, then $600 five years later etc. If you’re casting around some extra money in your budget, that base in faroff Asia looks like a good place to cut. Plus I feel like the populist right has joined the left recently in being opposed to foreign wars (another Trump phenomena that is poorly understood/discussed)- if the majority of the population feels that way, what’s the point of defending South Korea or Japan (or Montenegro, as Trump famously said recently)? It’s actually more dangerous to have the troops in harm’s way without the willingness to take casualties. Just seems like the public attitude is shifting away from willingness to fight & die overseas- we could lose 1000 soldiers overnight in a bad battle in WW2, now even one death is headline news & endlessly dissected. Public willingness to tolerate casualties is definitely a thing.
Those unnecessary domestic military bases are basically a type of social spending, whether people frame it that way or not. Their Congresspeople actively advocate and horsetrade for those unnecessary, government-subsidized local job creators, especially in poorer & rural Red states. The military has been or always contained elements of the now-popular Federal Jobs Guarantee- public sector jobs for the poor & uneducated. So, tough place to cut
Totally wrong. People dramatically underestimate how much the military has changed since ending the draft. Only a quarter or so of each year’s 18-year-old cohort even meet the current qualifications. To enlist you have to finish high school, pass an IQ test, pass a drug test, and meet pretty strict physical requirements. To get promoted past E-4 you’ll need a college degree; if you don’t get one you can’t stay longer than 8 years or so.
Even on the civilian and contract sides the qualifications are strict. The reason these bases are hard to cut is they’re by-and-large good jobs, held by intelligent, politically engaged people. Cutting welfare was easy by comparison.
There’s no requirement for a college degree to become an NCO. In the USAF, you can get promoted to MSgt (potentially) and retire without recieving a degree. It does depend on what the promotion board is looking for, but the education section is known to be masked sometimes.
Challenge. That link talks about sustaining operations in the Baltics. Expeditionary operations are an order of magnitude more challenging than defending one’s own territory. The British, French, and German armies are designed to be supplied in Germany. Supplying them in the Baltics, down a single road and rail line that would be immediately attacked, is a very different problem. The author notes that the French army is overstretched with its current internal anti-terror mission, that is a real problem. It’s a little odd that the successor to Napoleon’s army is barely able to occupy its own capital. But Britain and Germany could easily repel any plausible Russian attack on their own territory.
And note the issue of host governments defraying the cost of having US bases in their territory. We don’t make a profit from this, but they pick up the additional costs, and revise the formula when asked. See:
– Popular coverage (LA Times)
– RAND Corp study
– Popular coverage of Japan increasing its contribution in 2015
I mean, power projection is a basic function of modern militaries. The US is capable of projecting extreme force into most corners of the Earth- three of the richest countries in the world can’t go a few hundred miles to the East? I would certainly hope that they could do the bare minimum and protect their homelands, but I think this issue of mobilizing troops to go the US equivalent of a few states over is showing atrophied basic skills in the face of the superpower protecting them for decades. I say this as a guy who would like an assertive, muscular EU to protect certain core Western values (including from the US at times, such as now)
You’ve seized on the one nightmare scenario in Europe: defending the Baltic states while routing all supplies down one railroad and four lanes of road. When you assume away US support and just look at what the Europeans could do on their own, it’s not much. All granted.
To send troops to Lithuania in a conflict situation, you have to assume the land connection through the Suwalki Gap is severed. Even if it’s not, it’s one railroad (that’s on the Soviet gauge, not the German) and four lanes of road. European armies weren’t built with overseas deployment in mind, when they do travel they tend to use US airlift/sealift. Any conflict in the Baltics without US support would be a nightmare, European forces would have to spend all of their time defending their supply route. This problem goes away if NATO counter-attacks Kaliningrad and reestablishes a land connection, but the plans for countering an asymmetric “little green men” attack can’t assume that.
So there’s projecting power, and there’s projecting power. Given time, reasonable logistics, or US support, the Europeans would be fine. It is possible that you could loose all three at once, which is why people are nervous. But that’s a very different problem than “Europe could barely send three brigades anywhere.”
See:
– https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-building-up-military-base-in-kaliningrad-near-suwalki-gap-2018-7
– https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/20/this-tiny-stretch-of-countryside-is-all-that-separates-baltic-states-from-russian-envelopment/?utm_term=.17eb08cab0be
It really isn’t. there are only about a half dozen or so countries in the world that have a military capable of meaningful power projection. The vast majority of countries are organized around the principle of defending their territory against their immediate neighbors and maybe contributing a very small proportion of their to an international coalition where someone else will do the logistics.
That’s mostly accurate. The NATO campaign against Gaddafi is a good example. It was almost entirely dependent on US ISR assets. On the first day of combat, there were something like 112 tomahawk missiles launched, and IIRC, 106 of them were from US ships, which is not all that bad an assessment of the ratio of US ability to project strength to the british.
It definitely is. And not just skills, but organization, funding, manpower, everything. The British managed to deploy a full division for the invasion of iraq, doing a lot of their own logistics. They probably couldn’t do that today, and they’re ahead of almost everyone else.
I don’t doubt the first, but the second actually makes me nervous. Can Germany repel a Russian attack on their soil? I understand the Russian military has degraded in capability from 1979 days, but Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria all make me think that Russia can rather easily deploy a couple of brigades practically anywhere near its border, with enough ammunition to fight an intense hot-war for 4-6 weeks, with very little effort.
Germany….not so much?
Not my area of expertise, please share your thoughts!
Intense hot war for 4-6 weeks then what?
Germany has a buffer of US forces throughout Eastern Europe. As I see it, these US forces are playing a game of chicken, sitting astride major logistically necessary routes, staring Putin’s men down. These forces probably could not prevent an initial Russian success.
The response to significant US casualties after an initial encounter, would result in a small (because logistics) brutal, but winnable war. One backed by the political will generated by dead American Soldiers.
Probably, but that seems like a big qualifier to saying Germany can easily repel a Russian attack on its own soil, if you’re only saying it is possible because US (and Polish) forces act as speedbumps. I don’t disagree, just trying to tease out what the statement implies about the current state of German and Russian military readiness.
I am saying the forces deployed are more or less the ones needed to avoid a little war in the first place. So actual military readiness plays a backseat to perceived capability/response.
Tactical calculations are easy to make about who will win the next battle. Sometimes you know you will lose the next battle, but will win the war. So it appears to me, Germany has exactly the proper force to repel an invasion. Of course this appropriateness is a moving target so things will change based upon what everybody else does.
One thing that makes Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria different than Germany is there are Georgians, Ukrainians, and Syrians who want the Russians there.
Are there any polls on how many Germans want the Russians there? 57% of Germans in former East Germany say East Germany “had more good sides than bad sides” or that “Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany today.” I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them would welcome a hypothetical Russian invasion.
Yeah, I also wonder whether any of these groups “want the Russians there” or whether a more accurate statement might be “slightly prefer the Russians to the West/EU/US”
According to Pew, 85% of Ukrainians want Donbas to stay in Ukraine, only 2% want it to go to Russia. I think you can probably find 2% of just about any country that wants more or less anything.
For example, 34% of Americans support amnesty for illegal immigrants. I am pretty sure I have seen you object to illegal immigration on legal grounds, so if the 34% of Americans who want illegal immigrants there don’t get to override the laws or impose their view, it’s not clear why you think the 2% of Ukrainians who want Russia in their country should dictate to the rest of the country that an illegal invasion is okay.
Are the 57% of East Germans who miss the DDR nostalgic for being a Soviet satellite, or for something else? It could be that they don’t like the way they are now part of the same state as the richer West Germans, who they see as arrogant. It could be that the various quasi-mandatory-to-mandatory state-run groups created community. It could be simple nostalgia for stuff where there’s correlation but not causation, like the joke:
I’m not saying the minorities in this places should decide anything. I’m saying it’s easier to put troops in a place where there exist locals who want you there for aid and support. For example, Assad’s forces in Syria want the Russians there to aid their side in their civil war. If Russia were to simply invade Germany, in order to subjugate the Germans, they would get little material support and much sabotage.
Fair enough
I want to see age-bracket splits on the German poll. Someone who was 18 when the Berlin Wall fell would be 47 now (38 when the poll was conducted, it looks like), so an awful of those Germans in former East Germany never actually lived under the East German regime as adults.
@Eric Rall, I could see either way. Perhaps people who never saw the DDR and don’t like the present regime are idealizing it in their minds. Or, perhaps older people who might not be doing well in the present economy are remembering it with rose-colored goggles. I’d be interested in seeing what’s actually the case.
I wonder if part of it is concern with status rather than real income. East Germans ended up becoming the lower status part of the German population rather than the higher status part of the satellite population.
I could swear I have heard, from many people who claim to understand economics better than I, that the United States Government faces zero budgetary constraints and can buy literally anything that exists or can be made at any price, because it can print and/or borrow as much money as it needs with no consequences. Of course, the US Government is run by Evil Meanies and so won’t buy things like decent health care for their people even though they could totally do so at any price and without consequence, but surely Evil Meanies will recognize the need for a powerful army? Right?
OK, sarcasm off. Three percent of GDP one way or another isn’t going to break the US government or the US economy. And the US government is for a variety of reasons not going to willingly surrender its superpower status even in the threat of fiscal apocalypse. Everything else will be cut first. If you’re facing any sort of apocalypse, that’s when you especially want a strong army at your back.
So, for the US government to stop being the world’s superpower, either A: someone richer than the United States has to make a bid for that status, or B: the fiscal apocalypse has to actually happen, or C: some other sort of apocalypse or black swan event has to happen.
For A, China is the usual suspect, but such a bid would be out of character for the Middle Kingdom and is mostly a projection of American fears rather than Chinese policies. However, that’s not a sure thing and it does stay on the table.
For B, I consider fiscal apocalypse to be likely but not certain, and maybe it doesn’t happen. If it does happen, then we have to ask who goes first? Breaking this down, I see four major possibilities in no particular order:
B1. The fiscal apocalypse happens in the US first, and the US military disintegrates for lack of funding.
B2. The fiscal apocalypse happens in Europe and/or Asia first, in which case lots of wealth flees to the relative stability of the US.
B3. The fiscal apocalypse threatens the US first, whereupon the US decides to use its supremely powerful military to demand tribute to prop up its economy.
B4. The fiscal apocalypse threatens the US first, whereupon Europe and/or Asia decide that a reverse Marshall Plan is better than facing an expansionist Russia/China/whatever without US help.
For C, Reply hazy, try again later. The bit with the United States Army against the Paperclip-Maximizing Killbot Apocalypse is fun to think about, but let’s make sure it’s Lee Adama and not Zapp Brannigan in command. Either way, I want a really cool big spaceship first.
I think you’re reading too much into the report. It’s specifically looking at their ability to place armored forces in the Baltics. This is as much a matter of force design as it is of raw strength. If they were to get invaded, they could probably do somewhat better because the logistics problems are a lot easier. And if they wanted to put more armor into the Baltics at short notice, they could at the cost of some capabilities elsewhere that are probably less than you’d think.
That said, China is no more immune to the laws of economics than the Soviets were before them, and I suspect that their economy is going to implode before ours does.
I mean, the EU is supposed to be a quasi-political unit, and all of the mentioned countries are NATO members, along with the Baltics countries who would be invaded in this scenario. A Russian invasion of the Baltics is literally the single most likely threat Europe/NATO faces right now, it’s hundreds of times more likely than whatever option 2 would be. It’s a pretty damning statement about Europe’s military & frankly political weakness.
On the plus side, as US power declines hopefully this will motivate the EU (the world’s largest economy!) to grow a spine and enhance their capabilities, possibly allied with but outside of a NATO framework. Unifying commands so that they’re not 30+ separate militaries would be a huge step. I say this as an American who’s rooting for a strong Europe (I already support the direction they’re going on tech regulation, multinational corporate taxes, Iran, Israel etc.)
Not sure that’s true, I’d say a Turkish Brushfire war/chaos/NATO leaving is a far more likely flashpoint.
I think meaningful change in this direction is extremely unlikely. It’s an incredibly touchy subject popliticall, and the different perceptions of national interest in the EU are enormous. Can you imagine german politicians signing up for sending german troops to fight post colonial wars in francophone africa? Because I can’t, and france will never agree to a military unification that doesn’t offer them reasonable assurances that that is what is on offer. There will be perpetual noises made about european military cooperation, but they will be sound and fury signifying nothing.
That article says one battalion each, not altogether, and even that’s not small thing. Armored/combined arms battalions and brigades are both very expensive and generate tremendous logistical demands (volume & weight) as they move away from their support areas; these are the crown jewels of land warfare, equivalent to a capital ship at sea. One tank company costs somewhere between $50-100 million dollars, weighs about 1,000 tons, and can consume 10,000 gallons of fuel per day when attacking — about what your local gas station has in its reservoir. Anything reasonably defined as a “combined arms battalion” will be twice that, at least. Also, your armored soldiers require specific long-term training to be effective at all — you can shove a paratrooper into a truck to go fight in Lithuania or your cooks for that matter without much fuss but you can’t do that with a tank or self-propelled artillery.
The US has one armored brigade available on short notice in Europe and could probably get two more over in a month or two. According to that article Germany, France, and England combined are about the same. Perhaps they ought to be doing more, but they’re about up to par with the US in that theater and capability right now.
You miss my point. It’s a force design issue, and that design can and does change as the situation evolves. That report explicitly says “This report, based on research conducted in 2016 and information valid at that time”, which sort of suggests that this has changed. I know the British have been increasing their capabilities on that front.
To use a slightly different example, take the “So you want to build a modern navy” stuff I’ve been doing at Naval Gazing. If someone asked me as Secretary of the Navy there how quickly I could put an armored battalion in the Baltics, the answer would be “Never, because I don’t have any of those. But I can get you a medium infantry battalion anywhere there’s salt water basically as soon as I can get the ships there, and they’re already at sea. Oh, and they have a carrier group in support.” So if all you’re asking is deployment time of armor to the Baltics, I fail completely because I spent my money on other things.
The British and French militaries aren’t run by idiots, and they will react to increasing threats from Russia. Germany, maybe not. So beware of how fresh your information is.
Macron seems to agree: link
You’re right about the difference between power projection and sustainment at distance vs. fighting a defensive war closer to home, but I don’t think he’s reading too much into the report. If anything, the report doesn’t fully cover the weaknesses of the EU militaries if faced with a no-shit force-on-force war (as opposed to the occasional peacekeeping deployment in penny packets).
For one thing, most EU nations have miniscule (and in some cases no) reserve munitions stockpiles for their militaries, to include not just bombs and missiles but naval gun rounds, tank rounds, artillery rounds, and so on. The UK hasn’t had the capability to produce Challenger main gun rounds for over a decade, and what (very) few modern rounds it does have are produced by a single small factory in Belgium. Can you say single point of failure boys and girls? That sort of story is repeated again and again.
For another, because the assumption has been for a very long time that these nations will never actually need to mobilize their entire military for defense of their homeland, they haven’t worried about operational readiness levels. A good mini-portrait of Germany’s current state from a recent Financial Times article:
Indeed. There has been a lot of cutting corners on munitions and reserve components (and repairs), to preserve unit size at the cost of not actually being able to use those units.
I’m aware of the issues with European military readiness, and I’m certainly not claiming they don’t exist. I’m pointing out that the numbers produced by that study, taken in isolation, are at least somewhat misleading because they’re looking only at one specific task, and if that’s not a task the military in question is prepared for, it’s not going to do well.
That said, I really hope this spurs Europe to invest in its military once again. It’s sad to see once-mighty powers fall so far.
It’s striking to me how much this reflects our earlier discussion here about an anarchocapitalist military–the idea that rich people would sponsor some big flashy stuff, but nobody would sponsor the boring-but-critical logistics and training and maintenance that make the big flashy stuff work. In this case, I suppose it’s politicians instead of rich people doing the sponsoring, but with the same incentives and the same results.
By fall so far do you mean enjoy decades of relative peace and prosperity?
@albatross11
That’s a really interesting insight. Thank you.
@baconbits9
I’m speaking relative to the Cold War, not the bits where Europe tore itself apart every few decades.
Apart is very generous of a word. Into one another terribly seems much more appropriate.
@ bean
The Cold war had Russia in charge of large chunks of Europe under pretty terrible conditions, the French retreating from their colonies, Germany split into 2, and Britain getting the hell out of India. Outside of the Falklands what is there to be proud of militarily during that time period?
The bit where they deterred the Soviets from invading for 50 years springs to mind.
People have been saying that China is going to crash since before the last recession. Their economy is closer to the US than the Soviet Union. How long is going to take for this crash to happen?
No clue. I’m pointing out that China hasn’t solved the problems of their economy, any more than we have. And given what I’ve heard about potential structural issues there, my money is on us surviving. But not particularly strongly, as this is outside my field of expertise.
China is a market economy. The comparison to the Soviet Union just doesn’t make any sense. When people go on about the “structural problems” holding China back, it’s mostly just wishful thinking. The better comparison is to all the East Asian countries that are now developed.
Depending on your definition of “dominant” then I do agree. our lifetimes is probably a decent good minimum for the chinese military achieve anything comparable to the global reach that the US has.
“Soon” is doing a lot of work in this paragraph. there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. We have no real idea what sort of debt load the US can carry before it starts having problems. Other countries tend to run into trouble around 100% of GDP, but they aren’t the world’s reserve currency. that status gives the US a lot more room to run, and while I wouldn’t want to put out a number, “further than you think” is probably a pretty good answer in the absence of a competing currency, and it’s unlikely than any currency can come to compete in less than the timeframe above.
Not so much missing things as (A) understating the power of inertia and interest group pressure in keeping up US force projection, (B) overstating the difficulty of other countries (all of whom have similar issues with aging populations) assembling a similar level of power, and (C) understating the carrying capacity of the US government. US advantages will almost certainly diminish, but absent a very large catastrophe I don’t think they’ll be topped in the next few decades.
Because you can slash the US military budget to a truly huge degree and still be the world’s largest military. If the US halved their military budget, they’d still be first and be spending about 30% more than China.
Additionally, a lot (though certainly not all) of those overseas bases will NOT want the US troops leaving and China becoming locally dominant. And everyone other than the Chinese spends less than 50% what the Chinese do.
If the US military is smart, it will move away from big fancy (but extremely explodable) toys and lots of personnel toward a leaner but still high-tech and effective military. That said, I think pretty much every service would object to the things that would be effective but cheap actually being done. And, of course, there’s lots and lots of patronage to be concerned about. Given the US military’s historical tendency to prevail in spite of itself, I’d be worried.
Is the movement primarily intent on preventing the immigration of talented foreigners, or of foreigners that not only lack talent, but also represent a net cost?
The article you link to discusses the ability to deploy fully armored units to the baltics, not any units at all for homeland defense, and seems to think that combined them they could field a brigade (one battalion each) in reasonably short order, eventually reinforcing to a division (one brigade each) after a couple of months (though France would apparently likely have trouble keeping their brigade going for the long term). Not terribly impressive, but not “one battalion between them.”
Military defense (that is literal defense of the nation) is pretty cheap when you have good relationships with your immediate neighbors and don’t have colonies to support/defend. Who exactly should France fear in terms of invasion? If Germany, England, Spain and Italy aren’t going to invade then the only way they are fighting a battle on their home turf is if someone invades through one of those countries or if those countries act in openly hostile ways to France (ie letting armies march through their territory or completely ignoring Russia invading through a series of smaller European states to get at France). Without distant territories to defend the need for projection is low, the chances of invasion are low and nukes make up the “we are a world power” status as well as making sure you aren’t totally vulnerable.
Additionally not having fought a major conflict in 40+ years has some serious benefits. The VA budget at 80+ billion is larger than Russia’s entire defense budget by some lists. This is an area where spending begets spending, equipment requires maintenance, personnel require feeding, housing and training, and distant military bases carry all kinds of costs.
The end of the US as the world’s dominant military superpower within most of our lifetimes- most likely due to budget reasons, yes? Does anyone think otherwise?
I think by the second half of this century, China could have a stronger military than the U.S., but that will only mean that there will be two dominant superpowers instead of just one.
On Monday, August 16th I worked some emergency overtime and consequently I was still in San Francisco after 6PM, and since the SSC/Less Wrong meetup at 855 Brannan Street was only a couple of blocks from my work I decided to drop in and check it out.
Because my wife and sons were waiting for me I didn’t stay long, but I got a brief impression:
Cool seeming people, all younger and mostly better looking than me.
I only really stay in The City in the evenings anymore for overtime and Union meetings, but if I was young and single I can think of far worse places to be.
I’m told the meetups are every Monday around 6:15PM, so if your inclined it seems good to check out.
Would you mind deleting and posting as a reply to your other post? That makes it collapse both when the first gets hidden.
I went to the SSC meeting in Houston (Agora Coffeehouse). It was quite interesting. Thanks to all the folks who put this together.
The Serpent’s Chains
Once upon a time, in a valley through which a river flowed, there lived a tribe of people. They were strong and hardy and cunning; but they lived in fear and without a home, for every night a great serpent emerged from its cave in the hills and set upon the people, devouring as many as it could catch.
Now the people used swords and clubs and arrows, but no weapon could pierce the serpent’s scales, for it was old and cunning. And the people despaired, for the suffering inflicted by the beast was great.
But great also was the wisdom of the elders of the people; and so they devised a plan to end the tyranny of the serpent. They planted a pole by the river, and prepared great chains of strong wrought-iron. When evening came the men of the tribe fell upon the serpent, and though many were devoured, they seized the serpent’s body and held it to the pole. And then came the women of the tribe; and they bound the serpent with the chains, so tightly and so heavily that its form could scarcely be seen behind them.
And so the beast was defeated.
The people of the tribe rejoiced, for no longer would they be hunted; and now they could live and work and eat and bear children without moving from place to place. They cut down trees and built of them strong houses; and around the river, in the shadow of the serpent’s chains, there grew a village.
Now the men told their sons of the pole and the chains; but they did not speak of the serpent, for the sting of its fangs and the grief of its victims still haunted their minds. They said only that the pole and its chains were a monument to victory, and must never be disturbed.
(continued in post below)
(continued from post above)
Sons became fathers, and fathers became grandfathers. When five generations had passed, the village was a grand thriving city, and the people grew healthy and fat and happy upon the prosperity it brought them.
One day an illness struck the city.
The people came to the doctors and the healers and the scribes, and they complained of sores and pustules. The healers applied their medicines to no avail, but the doctors and the scribes saw that the sores grew upon the throat; and they sent out men to examine the water supply.
When the men went out to see the river, they came upon the pole and its chains; and they saw that from the chains there dripped a noxious poison which corrupted the water.
And so they went to the city chancellor and his advisors, and said: “The monument to victory, which our fathers erected in the day of the birth of our city, now drips poison upon the river, and the people fall ill from its corruption. What shall we do?”
And there ensued a great debate, for none knew why the great monument would bring destruction, until the chancellor’s chief advisor stood and said to those assembled:
“Our fathers hated us, and they built these chains as a monument to our ruin. For they knew that chains bring forth poison, and in their malice they planted the seeds of our suffering; lying to us, saying ‘do not disturb the chains, for they are a monument to victory’. Come, let us destroy the monument, and our tribulations will be ended.”
And so the smiths and the craftsmen brought hammers and chisels, and they began to strike the chains. When they had loosened the women and the children came forth and pulled upon them, saying: “Down with the chains! Down with the chains!”
When the chains fell away, the people looked; and they beheld the great and ancient serpent, with poison dripping from his jaws. And the serpent fell upon the people and devoured them.
And now the grand thriving city on the river in the valley is no more; for the serpent never dies, and his wrath is everlasting.
Chesterton’s fence.
And as with most Chesterton’s fences, the blame here lies squarely with the idiots that didn’t bother to put a note on the fence telling people what it is for.
I don’t know what point Kestrellius has with the story, but to me the clear lesson is “Don’t tell someone to not do a thing without also making clear why they shouldn’t do the thing”.
Real-life Chesterton’s Fences are generally not created by one person with a purpose and often evolved memetically. There may not be anyone who could write down why it exists (short of having an ethnographer or similar researcher do a study of the society, and that’s probablynot going to work because of politics anyway).
And as with most Chesterton’s fences, the blame here lies squarely with the idiots that didn’t bother to put a note on the fence telling people what it is for.
Because people assume that you know not to stick your hand into the fire because it will burn you. The thing that everyone knows, that is common knowledge, that is as present as air, why would you write it down? Who writes a book where every time the main character gets up to walk over and open the door, you describe in detail how walking is done?
But of course, over the years and generations, people forget. They don’t explicitly tell their kids because, well, everyone knows. And when the last granny who was there when the thing happened dies and nobody bothered to listen to her rambling anecdotes of “when I was your age”, then the real reason is forgotten and then later on people invent reasons as to why this thing is done/called that/we eat this food/we don’t eat that food.
That isn’t how things work. Sometimes things are done/not done not because people know why, but because the people who did/didn’t do the thing lived and those that went the other way died. Its like the old trials by ordeal. People are like, “wtf how could that work?” Well the key is that the priest is a well connected man who hears the confessions of the whole town and also knows all the people and the leaders and can talk to witnesses, thereby determining the guilt or innocence of a person in a vast majority of cases. Then if he thinks the guy is innocent he prepares the water in a way that it won’t burn the hand, and prepares it hot if he thinks the man is certainly guilty. Then when people see men they think are guilty scalded by the water they confess to the crime rather than go through ordeals.
Other things are similar. Say 2 bridges are built over a river and one collapses because its foundation is one weird soil. The other bridge survives. Then decades later a enterprising youth things the standing bridge is inconvenient and builds one again on the crappy soil causing several more deaths. Reality is its own warning. The fact that you are alive is why the burden of proof is on the mover.
An issue with the serpent particularly is that if you tell people what the chains are for, there will be idiots who will think a serpent would be a great weapon with which to eat their enemies, and assume that some half-baked plan to avoid getting eaten themselves will work.
That’s an entirely valid lesson to take from it — if you’re in a position to do so, you should certainly leave warnings! Unfortunately, I don’t think this happens all that often.
In most of the cases I’m talking about, the binding occurred over the course of millennia and was carried out mostly by people who had no idea what they were doing, as Jiro says. I probably should have communicated this better in the story, but I was concerned about length.
Is the reference to a “monument to victory” a reference to relatively-recent events?
I think I get the point, but geeeeenerally around these parts you’d use that story as a hook before a more grounded essay on what you were actually trying to say.
I don’t think so? I just needed a name for it other than “that thing where we tied up the snake”. I’m curious what you’re referencing — quick Googling didn’t turn anything up.
I am planning to elaborate, probably (I’m not sure I’m brave enough for politics), but first I wanted to wait a little while — I was curious to see what people would make of it without any further explanation. The point seems super obvious to me…but I came up with the thing, and that tends to skew one’s impression a bit.
I can see two points. One being Chesterton’s Fence, and two being “If you seal evil in a can, and have to leave the can lying around, for crying out loud, at least mark it clearly!”
I also see this point: “That a system has serious problems is not a reason to destroy it, when there are even bigger problems that the system solves.”
Chesterton’s Razor, Hanlon’s Fence
But also “patching is underrated, overhaul is overrated.”
@Nybbler: Apparently I’m a moron, as I never noticed the connection to Chesterton’s Fence until you pointed it out. There is a bit of a distinction: the idea is that frequently the Fence and the thing the Fence is containing are visually indistinguishable, and damage apparently being caused by the Fence is actually due to the thing the Fence opposes.
@Aapje, AG: Yeah, basically.
If they’d implemented a rule to only use water from upstream of the chains…
Any helpful tips on how to tell which chains are being used to bind serpents and which aren’t?
The ones dripping poison probably have something venomous bound therein.
So any social system which causes suffering is probably critically important, and the greater the suffering a system causes, the more important it is that we should leave it alone?
I mean… strictly speaking, there is probably an element of truth to this, in that terrible institutions wouldn’t survive if they weren’t important.
But still.
[T]he greater the suffering a system causes, the more important it is that we should leave it alone?
Sounds counter-intuitive, aye. OTOH, consider this phrasing:
The greater the suffering a stable system causes, the more dire the alternative was, even if forgotten.
Which is just another way of saying “Chesterton’s Fence”.
And you still have at least two outs – one, the alternative may have ceased to exist (turns out the snake died), or society’s preferences changed (we have ways of hiding from the snake, but no better way to get clean water).
Are you implying that the poor people who still drive old unmaintained cars that emit a lot of air pollution are evil, and their car emits the air pollution because of them?
In the spirit of those tumblr posts I saw a while ago with multiple endings to the same story with contradictory morals:
When the chains fell away, the people looked; and they beheld the great and ancient serpent, with poison dripping from his jaws. And the people summoned the great siege engines they had built, and where the swords and clubs and arrows of their fathers had failed, these mechanical wonders succeeded. The serpent perished, and the city grew ever greater. And the people said, “We should not have insulted our fathers so–they were right to build the chains. And yet we were also right to destroy them.”
Since they didn’t know that there was a serpent behind the chains, they weren’t right to destroy the chains, if by “right” you mean “engaged in an overall beneficial policy resulting from sound reasoning”. They just got lucky.
True enough, I’d have to retcon in some more sophisticated debate before the chains went down. The point is, you can bend a fable like this to support whichever moral you want.
In fact, I’ve got a better one for the ‘yay progressivism’ moral:
“..Come, let us destroy the monument, and our tribulations will be ended.”
But the chancellor himself rose next, and shouted until the crowd’s clamor ceased. “Think! Did our fathers truly hate us? Those of you who are fathers, do you hate your own sons? The city around us bears witness to their benevolence and wisdom. Let us not undo what they have done!”
And so the crowd quieted, and the chain was left intact. And the sickness worsened–soon nearly everyone bore the pustules. The very young and very old began to perish. The year’s harvest was lean–some said mere coincidence. But when spring came, the crops, irrigated from the river, would not even begin to sprout.
And when the people’s panic finally overcame the great faith the Chancellor’s words had inspired, they organized a party to bring down the chains. Yet their fathers’ chains were strong, their poisoned limbs were weak, and one by one they collapsed striking fruitlessly at the heavy links.
And above them, venom continued to leak out of the corpse of the starved serpent.
You can’t do that without ruining the metaphor. The original metaphor says that you shouldn’t change a longstanding tradition. Changing the metaphor in the way you suggest makes it “you shouldn’t change a longstanding tradition unless you correctly understand why it isn’t needed and why we’re better off without it”, which is just Chesterton’s Fence.
“If it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid and you’re lucky.”
But I think maybe I made my point too strongly — I actually agree, in broad strokes, with ADA’s alternate ending; I just didn’t have the space to make it work in the metaphor without going into far more detail than I was willing to.
The moral of the story is something like “there are things out there that are evil and powerful and ancient and want to kill you, and your ancestors have spent millennia trying to make sure they fail. Unless you fully understand this and are prepared to deal with the evil yourself, don’t fuck around.”
Of course, I think the siege engines in question would need to be quite a bit more powerful than is perhaps commonly understood. In the case of the most of the things I’m referencing with the story, we don’t have them yet irl — killing the serpent would require directly modifying our biology, because the serpent lives within us.
Oh, and also — this is outside the scope of the metaphor, but while you should always kill the serpent if able, you shouldn’t necessarily destroy the chains in the process. Again, remember that they weren’t making the poison. Sometimes the chains are nice in and of themselves, even if they’re not needed to prevent evil from escaping anymore.
>those tumblr posts I saw a while ago with multiple endings to the same story with contradictory morals
Can you provide a link? This sounds fun.
Once upon a time there was a city called Omelas…
And another post in the same vein:
There once was a woman who built her house upon the sand…
Those are the ones I had in mind, thanks for the links!
Man, “our fathers hated us” is such a great phrase, haahaha.
Great discussions, guys!
Okay, explanation time. The specific formulation I had in mind when writing goes something like this:
Serpent :: nature (ultimately, entropy)
Chains :: social structures
Poison :: injustice
More narrowly, the thing that caused me to develop the metaphor was the idea of patriarchy. Gender issues and feminism are very vexing topics to me, emotionally, so I spend a lot of time considering them. One model I had of feminism was that feminism is the patriarchy — after all, it exhibits many of the attributes ascribed to its enemy: a focus on women as passive objects to be acted upon, whose value is derived from their nature; and on men as divided into heroic ingroup men, villainous outgroup men, and contemptible deficient men, whose value or lack thereof is derived from their actions or lack thereof.
But in another sense, “patriarchy” as it actually exists often appears to be a good and necessary means of exerting human control over the excesses of our nature. Marriage and monogamy, for example, seem to me to be unambiguously positive inventions, even if they are vulnerable to subversion and abuse.
So that’s the point of this metaphor: that something like “patriarchy”, apparently a single monolithic construct, may actually be a phenomenon arising from the interactions of two opposing forces: demonic nature, and divine social technology. It’s a war, and an arms race; but it looks like a single thing from the outside, because the war is being fought by memes and not people. And if you try to destroy it, because it seems to be causing problems, then you’ll usually just end up destroying the friendly side of the war and making those problems far worse.
(If you’re wondering where I stand on gender issues and it’s not already clear, my views seem to align pretty closely with Aapje’s.)
Now, taken as axiomatic here is the idea that nature is evil. I may at some point write a post explaining this in detail and attempting to prove it. While it seems self-evident to me — the laws of the universe are inherently hostile to conscious existence, as it depends upon order and the universe destroys order — almost everyone appears to want to view nature as some sort of warm friendly mother-goddess, rather than as a monstrously evil death machine.
This sort of makes sense, because evolution is another serpent in chains. It’s a process that, given long enough, increases order; but its parameters are defined by entropy’s attempts to destroy it, and so evolution is also in a certain sense an evil process — it’s literally just genocide, on an unimaginable scale.
Actually, I suppose evolution is a morally-inverted chained-serpent, where the “snake” is good and the chains are evil — it’s a seed of self-replicating order, bound up in a billion years of scars and deformations from entropy’s attempts to murder it. I guess this might explain why the prevailing view is inverted as well — evolution is seen as good and social control as evil. It seems like (unless my impression of humanity-at-large’s opinion on these phenomena is just wrong, which is entirely likely) the view of a chained-serpent will be an accurate description of the serpent at the heart, but that the chains will be misidentified as the cause of whatever is happening.
But, well, I guess that’s the point of the story: that attempts at progress will often simply result in a return to the hellish natural order, because the people trying to achieve progress are fundamentally misunderstanding the situation.
Now, notes on the story itself:
It’s intended as explanation, not evidence. It is of course contrived to say a certain thing, and thus proves nothing. I wanted to show how such a thing could happen, not necessarily demonstrate that it was happening — that would be the task of a different kind of post, which I am probably not brave enough to write.(ADifferentAnonymous mentioned this above, and I wanted to make clear that I understood.)
I felt the story, at its current length, was already longer than it really deserved, and so elected not to add more detail even though it could have patched over certain holes (see the discussions of warning people about the serpent, or using water from upstream of the chains).
I think that’s most of what I had to say, for now. Thanks for the interesting responses, guys — this is pretty much what I was hoping for!
This is a major theme in Werner Herzog’s movies. For example:
– Aguirre, the Wrath of God; which is about an Amazonian expedition of Spanish conquistadores being ground to dust by the forces of chaos (nature, natives, etc), with the last survivors going insane.
– Fitzcarraldo; which is about an opera lover who dreams about building an opera house in Peru. To get the money for this, he tries to get a ship to an inaccessible area with rubber trees by dragging it over the mountain. After succeeding in doing the latter and thus having done the hardest part, Fitzcarraldo and his Western crew give themselves over to a drunken celebration. However, the natives wants to appease the river gods who they believe are angered by this defiance of nature and they cut the ship free, resulting in an uncontrollable journey back to where they began. Fitzcarraldo then has an opera performed on the top of his battered ship, in a useless and insane act of defiance.
– Grizzly man; a documentary about a man trying to live peacefully with grizzlies. This ends…badly, showing the folly of pretending that nature is kind and hospitable.
– Stroszek; about a street performer who is a drunk and his prostitute girlfriend migrating to the US, dreaming of opportunity, but failing to realize that the opportunity is for people who understand the system and have life skills, so they fail, ending up worse than they were before they migrated. It ends in a bank robbery where they make off with only 32 dollars and then suicide. This is Herzog’s idea of a (dark) comedy, btw.
Not that Herzog (or I) believe that progress is impossible. However, many attempts at progress are hubris and denial of truths, based on an anthropocentric view of the world that sees mankind as Gods, denying chaotic nature that is around us and within us. Herzog is fundamentally a wise romantic, who recognizes his irrationality in desiring boundless justice, love, beauty, etc.
The story of Sisyphus is false in that it portrays him as exceptional and the reason for his task to be inhuman and outside forces which torture him. In reality, most of us are Sisyphus and it is not the Gods who force us to roll the boulder up the hill, but our own hearts. To actually make progress (and to find peace) we have to repudiate our own souls, accepting imperfection that can actually be achieved over a Utopian mirage.
We can choose to not pick up that boulder, but instead to pick up a rock which we can successfully take to the top of the hill. Many such rocks can create a nice perch on top of the hill, which may not be as pretty or high as one made of boulders, but we can actually have the former.
It seems that most of these efforts were done singularly, rather than building incremental institutions along the way to sustain the change. It’s a rebuke of the Great Man Narrative.
Only Conquest fails (the first two examples), you need supported colonization to immediately occupy every inch taken and provide supplies to the frontline.
Wild animal cohabitation has to occur in a human-controlled and thus human-dominated environment. See Big Cat Rescue, for example, where they never try taming their residents.
Just watched Grease Live last night, and Stroszek’s story is like Beauty School Dropout Frenchy’s story. Frenchy is caught by the institutional safety net of returning to high school.
If Sisyphus could build wedges/scaffolds behind him, that would prevent the boulder from losing progress.
You have accepted a one-year posting to a community that is small, poor and remote, with harsh weather and no local radio, television or internet service. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to avoid going stir-crazy in this environment. How will you do this?
The old fashioned way. You see, when a man and woman love each other very much…
The advice I got from a pulp & paper engineer who had spent most of his career in small towns in the middle of big forests was to have enough kids that you had no time for anything else.
If I can bring along a library of books, some cards, a chess set, maybe some supplies for doing sketches, it shouldn’t be too hard, I lived like that for years.
How harsh are we talking? If Antarctica, bring a *lot* of books and buckle down to get better at meditation.
If anything else… it’ll be *possible* to enjoy the outdoors, and along with 3-ish TB of media and an interesting puzzle or two, that’s really all I think I’ll need.
If you’re at Amundsen Station, it’s typically because you’re doing research (or support), and you’ll be plenty occupied. If for some reason you’re just there because of the Larson project, you’re still likely to have plenty to do, courtesy of the accommodations already there, even if you deliberately avoid the internet.
By “Antarctica” I mean “somewhere where going outside is sufficiently dangerous as to be discouraged when not necessary for a good chunk of the time you’re there,” as most stations in Antarctica would seem to violate the “no radio/internet” stipulation. Alternatively, literally somewhere in the middle of Antarctica (and not a station).
This question has been answered (on the Internet) some number of times. I once saw a post by woman, who as a child was sent to N.W. Territory of Canada. Her father was a meteorologist working for the Canadian government. She mentioned that her family, were the only folks in an area the size of the American state of South Dakota. Apparently, the area had once supported a sizeable Inuit population (thousands), but they had been evacuated by the Canadian government. The family was completely isolated for six months (except by radio).
Was it hard? Yes, it was very cold outside. However, the Canadian government provided more than enough fuel to last the winter. They always had power and heat. Books, videos, music, etc. more than sufficed as diversions.
I’ll obviously have to try to befriend the few locals.
Since they’re poor, I’ll have to research what poor people look for in friendships.
As Worf said unto Q, “Die”.
Well, you’ll definitely need to make some friends while you’re there. That’s the most important part of not going stir-crazy – getting out of the house sometimes. Maybe start a board game club? Scrabble? Poker?
Also, even if you don’t have internet access, if you bring a computer with a nice big hard drive you can probably pack enough entertainment to last a year. Bring along Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress and build the Taj Mahal out of adamantine. Or start writing a novel – I have a bunch of ideas kicking around that I’ve never bothered to put in the time to expand, and now I’ve got plenty of time and no distractions.
Lastly, don’t forget to write home regularly. Your friends/family will miss you. This goes double if you have a spouse and you couldn’t persuade her to accept a job working for Johan Larson’s Weird Missions, Inc.
I don’t really understand the concept of “stir-craziness.” You adapt.
I’m still adapting to an environment where time is a precious resource and not an overabundance to be gotten rid of.
How might you make this question more challenging?
Just crank up the volume on the isolation and duration.
You have accepted a one-way trip to Mars. Alone. You will receive periodic shipments of supplies, but you will never return to Earth. After you have cataloged every red-brown rock in sight and faithfully reported same to Earth, how will you keep from going stir-crazy?
I think I could live pretty contentedly for the remainder of my life. I’m very strongly reading- and math- inclined, and given a time-delayed internet link to Earth I could:
(1) Get access to the full corpus of human knowledge, and read interesting books / blog posts for years on end
(2) Think about interesting puzzles; I have yet to encounter a state of mind in which I’m not ready to ponder some interesting question or puzzle, and there’s enough good stuff out there to keep anyone happy through the years.
(3) Engage in online human interaction on medium timescales, like commenting on SSC, engaging with people on Reddit, talking in bursts to friends, or writing effortposts to a blog. Being not particularly meatspace-oriented in the first place, I think this would more than suffice to fill my desire for other minds; I already derive something like 90% of my intellectual interaction quota from words on screens anyway.
Overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if the trip was actually a hedonic improvement; the social costs might well be offset by the lack of otherwise anxiety-provoking concerns like financial issues, drama, administrative obligations, etc. EA considerations aside, if this was actually offered to me I’d have to think about it.
That said, I could be underestimating the difficulty here? I see lots of people assuming that solitary existences for any moderately long duration of time would rapidly induce insanity if not strenuously combated, which confuses me; I’d assign at least 60% odds to the hypothesis that I could be locked in a featureless white room for a decade with no notable psychological impact upon release.
Solitary confinement has both physiological and psychological effects. The issue is difficult to study, because prisoners subjected to it often have mental health problems before being confined and studies with healthy volunteers tend to be much shorter than real terms of confinement.
Dang…so, are a cable machine and full set of dumbbells and easy-bars out of the question? I’m willing to receive them incrementally in shipments over the course of a few months. Otherwise that Martian low-G is gonna be rough on both my skeletal system and my mental health.
I find my mental health is also pretty closely tied to my ability to build things that improve the usability of my environment. For instance, I got a huge boost in happiness after I built a bunch of nice shelves in my bedroom closet and built huge industrial shelves, plus an 8′ workbench and a treadmill desk, in my garage. If I can have those kinds of projects in my Martian habitat that would be good. So can I also ask for shipments of tools, lumber, and hardware?
Finally, a few weeks with a tongue injury has confirmed my hypothesis that if I can’t enjoy eating, then life will seem to hold very little value. In this recent case, knowing that the tongue injury would eventually heal has given me a reason to strive on one day at a time. But if I’m stuck on Mars without any hope of being able to cook and enjoy quality food ever again, then putting myself out the airlock without a helmet on will start to look more appealing. So I’d also need a decently appointed kitchen, an inexhaustible source of good potable water, and quality and diverse food ingredients, oils, and spices.
(BTW this is one of the many reasons I would never sign up to go to Mars like those other freaks did, and why instead I want to go to the South Pole for a year.)
Finally, I would need some way (augmented reality, maybe?) to experience multiple grandchildren clambering for a place on my lap, since that is one of the highest and most important life-tentpoles I still am looking forward to and would not want to be deprived of.
Sounds easier to avoid going stir-crazy there than in a lot of other environments. I’m already trying to learn Japanese, so I’d just bring grammar dictionaries, the Remembering The Kanji books by Heisig, some English-Japanese and Japanese dictionaries, and loads and loads of manga. Plus, you didn’t say no electricity, so I could bring a scanner and a laptop, and dump volumes of scanlated manga on the internet when the year is up.
A known-successful pattern for this is:
— make frequent excuses for parties where you can all get together, drink, sing, play stupid games, etc
— create an informal lending library out of all books possessed by all members of the community
— have tinkering equipment on hand (of whatever mechanical/hobbyish type suits your fancy) and tinker a lot
source: my father, who spent a year at South Pole Station in the mid-sixties.
1. Build a rudimentary gym and get absolutely shredded
2. Bring several basic musical instruments and start a local ‘jam night’
3. Practice cooking with the constraints of sourcing local/cheap ingredients
4. Bring an mp3 voice recorder and interview the townsfolk, create a documentary about the community.
Bring an ereader full of a couple of hundred of the books that “I was going to get around to reading”, 20 reams of good writing paper, a couple of good pens, and about a quart of fountain pen ink.
And a full weight set and an adjustable bench.
Done.
I’ve known US military servicemen posted to very remote one year postings in Alaska who solved this exact problem exactly this way, only they had to do it with paper books instead of a Kindle. Worked pretty well for them.
Easy. Most of my hobbies can be done indoors and without other people.
I’ll need:
A violin
Seven juggling balls
Three juggling clubs
A computer with all my favourite music on it, and maybe a couple of dozen films I’ve not seen
A pull-up bar
About thirty novels
A book of crossword puzzles
Drawing pencils and paper
I’ll play, juggle, read, dance, draw, watch films, practice calisthenics… if I have time, maybe I’ll try to write some stories. Assuming the weather isn’t so harsh that you can’t go outdoors, I’ll also go for long walks/runs.
This sounds like where I grew up, except for the harsh weather–assuming you mean poor and remote by American rather than world standards. And since the Amish-Mennonite group I was part of didn’t allow radio or television or recorded music…
Books. Books are the key answer. Also board games, conversations, singing…
At last I can finally write all those epic fanfiction percolating in my brain…NaNoWriYear
bring a giant pile of books? Seems simple enough. Make sure several of them are math textbooks or some other dense subject I’m interested in mastering. Alternatively, take up cross country skiing?
I enjoy these challenges and most are really interesting like putting giant battleships on top of mountains.
Some ‘challenges’ I just don’t get. “live for a year like pretty much everyone I know did until 1990” or “manage to survive in a pleasant climate with ample fish, wildlife and fertile soil” fits this category.
Possibly it’s a generational thing or possibly the fact that I grew up on a farm, but it’s fascinating to read what people consider challenging some times.
I think this might not be one of those times. Of the 17 comments before yours, there were three people saying they’d basically already done it, four saying a well-known solution already exists, eight who seemed not to struggle very much (a few even used words like “easy/simple/Done.”), one joke I didn’t understand and one person specifically asking for a harder version.
I think all of that is consistent with this being the easiest one of these johan_larson has done.
Okay. I’m not sure what’s going on, but my comments don’t seem to be appearing properly. If this is on my end and I’ve accidentally posted the same thing three times, I sincerely apologize. Otherwise…is there a length limit? I think that might be the issue.
There’s a filter. It has a problem with some bad language, and some things seem like bad language. You are probably inadvertently triggering it.
Hmm… Damn it. I was really excited about this, too. Well, if it’s the filter, I have no idea what’s setting it off. The thing that made me think it was the length was that when I first posted it, it worked. Then I went to fix the formatting — I’d copy-pasted it from OpenOffice with standard formatting, meaning indents rather than extra lines between paragraphs — and when I did that it disappeared.
Well, if you guys aren’t seeing tons of accidental multiposts then I guess I’ll keep trying to figure it out.
Okay, splitting it worked. I think it was the length. Welp. Hope you guys enjoy it!
I saw a comment of yours a few minutes ago. It was the second comment and seemed to be a long story involving a serpent, although I didn’t read it yet. It’s now disappeared and I didn’t delete it. Did you delete it?
I’d split the story into two parts, and posted them both as top-level comments. Somebody asked me to put the second part into a reply so that collapsing the first would collapse both — whereupon I realized I should have done that in the first place for organizational reasons, and I wanted to comply with the request too. So it’s in a reply now.
I’ve seen lots of comments about illegal immigration in the last few open threads, and something that I wonder is:
If reduced illegal immigration is the goal, wouldn’t it be easier to reduce the demand rather than the supply?
What I mean is; reward illegal immigrants for turning themselves in (so the reward would have to be great enough to entice), and then jail their American employers.
This would create fear among “job creators”, reducing them hiring illegal immigrants, and without the chance for paid work less would overstay their Visas/cross the border in the first place.
Why wouldn’t this work?
The problem with this is that you’d have to prove the employers knowingly hired illegals.
So you catch an illegal immigrant working somewhere. You go to arrest the employer. Employer says “Hey, he said he was here legally, he even showed me a (perhaps fraudulent) driver’s license and had a social security number. You’re gonna throw me in jail for this?”
If you don’t care about that sort of thing and say “Zero tolerance, it’s your job, employer, to be absolutely sure about these things” then employers will probably simply stop hiring Hispanics at all.
If he’s got the I-9 and you can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he didn’t see a drivers license and social security number, then sure you can’t throw him in jail.
But the USG rarely tries to bring these kind of cases in the first place. Do you think that’s because there are only a tiny number of winnable cases out there?
Basically.
The fact that most business owners are respectable citizens with some amount of local clout, and that they are more likely to be well off and able to afford good lawyers probably dissuades any prosecutors from taking any cases that aren’t airtight.
You would not believe how shitty and fraudulant I-9 verification was for a long time at most companies.
I personally have had my I-9 verification done by having some not-employee contractor working for a “onboarding specialist” contracting firm take a black and white photocopy of my DL and my passport, and then send a low-rez 200dpi B&W actual fax, to a yet a different subcontractor, who turned out to be a boilerroom full of H1B contractors from India who would look at the shitty mess of black and white smears in front of them, and “verify” that the DL and the PP were “valid”, and then fax back the the “verification”.
There are at first glance, at least 5 ways that was illegal. And this was at major tech firms!
If it was up to me, I would retroactively go back ten years, do a 100% compliance audit of every I-9 verification performed since 2008, and extract the full fine for I-9 compliance fraud, per hire, out of every every single last one of every US firm that did that shit.
It seems to have been mostly cleaned up since 2016. (Funny that, right?)
So require businesses to register their contractors with the IRS, and do tax withholding as is done with regular employees. The IRS has a pretty good database and a strong incentive to investigate and correct things that are wrong.
IIRC the IRS has a pretty strong policy of not going after people for any non-tax-related issues. As long as you pay your taxes they’ll leave you alone, which makes people less motivated to try to evade paying when there’s other shadiness involved.
That’s a fair point. However, at the end of the day the government can change IRS policy if there is a compelling reason to do so.
But then the opposition to your plan would consist not only of all the people who want some level of illegal immigration, but also all the people who don’t want to see a more powerful and more intrusive Internal Revenue Service. That’s going to push it over into the realm of political infeasibility.
If you don’t care about political infeasibility and collateral damage, meh, there’s lots of solutions that are mechanically workable, but they’re mostly irrelevant and boring.
I don’t think mainstream voters really care about how powerful and intrusive the IRS is any more.
Look at how little outrage there was over FATCA, the 10 year expatriation tax, form 8854, and the ever growing number of things you have to register with the IRS (internet sales tax, etc.)
Voters care a lot about how much tax they pay in relation to other people, but only a tiny number of libertarians are opposed to growing the bureaucracy in principle. And under Trump, the libertarians have even less voice in the Republican party than they did under the neocons.
I’m not an American and understand that there is no national ID. But doesn’t an employer has to register their employees somewhere to pay income tax?
From what I gather, the three common workarounds for this are:
1. Employers pay cash “under the table” and nobody tells the IRS about it. This is illegal, and the IRS and state tax agencies are actively looking for this. If an employer gets caught, they have to pay back-taxes, interest, and penalty charges and they might face criminal charges for tax fraud. It’s hard to catch, though, since both sides of the transaction want to keep the IRS from finding out.
2. Employers pay the employees as contractors, not as regular employees. There are restrictions on who can be classified as a contractor, but the rules are fuzzy and there’s plenty of room for employers to fudge them without being blatantly illegal. For a contractor, the employer files a form with the IRS saying “I paid $X to [name]”. The employer is supposed to supply the contractor’s TIN (taxpayer ID number — same as a social security number for an individual as opposed to a corporation or partnership), but employers can leave this blank if they certify that the contractor refused to provide a TIN and withhold estimated taxes (28% of the total) from any payments to the contractor.
3. The employee provides the employer with forged documents (usually a driver’s license and a social security card) with a made-up social security number, and the employer withholds taxes and reports wages based on the forged documents. The IRS’s policy when they get tax withholdings for an invalid social security number is to cash the check, shrug, and move on.
Regarding number 3, not that I don’t believe you, but do you have some further reading where I can verify this? It sounds almost, only almost, too outrageous to be true.
Here’s a discussion.
Here’s some estimates (a few years old):
https://news.vice.com/article/unauthorized-immigrants-paid-100-billion-into-social-security-over-last-decade
About 7 million illegal immigrants in the US, of which 3.1 million are paying taxes using fake or expired social security numbers.
The contribute about $12 billion in social security taxes annually.
With some exceptions for the those who later legalize their status, the immigrants who pay these taxes will not be allowed to collect social security benefits.
I tried to post a link to an official doc from the Social Security Administration, but the spam filter seems to have eaten it. If you want to search for it yourself, the title is “Status of the Social Security Administration’s Earnings Suspense File”. The Earnings Suspense File being the SSA’s records of income and payroll tax withholdings that came with a missing, invalid, or mismatched Social Security Number.
From the federal government’s perspective, it makes a lot of sense. On the margins, immigration enforcement conflicts a bit with tax enforcement: cutting off (or at least rigorously investigating) #3 would make it harder for unauthorized immigrants to work in the US, but it would also lead to more of #1. Taking the federal government as a whole, immigration enforcement has generally been a lower priority than tax enforcement for the last several decades. And looking at the IRS and SSA in particular, they have specific mandates to make sure taxes get collected, but immigration law enforcement belongs to a separate agency that reports into a different cabinet-level department: IRS and SSA are part of the Treasury Department, while ICE is part of Homeland Security, and its precursor INS was part of the Justice Department. And the Earnings Suspense File had already existed since the 1930s, so allowing the proliferation of #3 required only inaction, not an active policy to undercut immigration enforcement for the sake of collecting more taxes.
Eric Rall –
As noted below, there is also a valid reason not to use IRS data to enforce other laws: It makes the relevant tax law unenforceable.
There are tax codes for all manner of illegal activities, which apparently people do claim. Because the IRS can only enforce tax law insofar as tax law doesn’t get used to violate the fifth amendment – as soon as you start using information from taxes to go after illegal immigrants, you open up the entire tax code to people refusing to file or pay taxes on fifth amendment grounds, and they would probably win in court.
How do sectors that hire a lot of illegal immigrants look now? Are they fully dominated by illegal immigrants? Because if they are, suddenly escalating the attacks on their employers could collapse the sector, and in practice punish random business owners who just do what everyone does (which is less politically palatable than punishing random immigrants in the same way, since they don’t vote anyway).
You had me at “punish business owners” (my memories of my private industry jobs are not pleasant).
It appears to be politically impossible to enforce, even in states where nativist sentiment is strong.
Alternative- illegal immigration & legal refugees seeking asylum (two frequently conflated issues) are not even in the top 100 or 200 most pressing problems facing the US right now, and the extreme focus on it is absurd and mostly motivated by nativism (and other bad isms). What problem are we solving here, exactly?
Some double-digit percentage of people disagree with you. You may or may not think they’re right to, but the idea that immigration is at the least somewhere in the top 100 is very, very popular.
Alternatively, you can tell me where in your top 100 is the problem of people getting upset about immigration and wanting to deal with it somehow, if that’s more your jam.
I have been waiting for months for some discussion about the real world implications of E-Verify, so thank you.
This seems like such a no-brainer, that I’m forced to conclude that it’s not really about reducing illegal immigration after all. Kind of reminds me of refusing to teach safe sex despite the fact that doing so would pretty clearly reduce abortions.
Similarly, in the last thread I alluded to the fact that no one–Democratic or Republican–seems to want to enforce affidavits of support.
“Kind of reminds me of refusing to teach safe sex despite the fact that doing so would pretty clearly reduce abortions.”
It might, but “pretty clearly” is an overstatement. One result of teaching safe sex is that a woman who would have sex anyway uses contraception and doesn’t get pregnant. Another is that a woman who wouldn’t have sex anyway because she feared pregnancy decides it is safe, has sex, and gets pregnant due to contraceptive failure or misunderstanding.
Suppose for the sake of argument that there was great factual uncertainty over whether it would work, you’d still expect to see a significant faction that supported it among those that consider abortion the great moral evil of our time.
Consider nuclear power and global climate change. It may be true that the majority of people concerned about the latter oppose the former but there is a significant and vocal minority that disagrees. Where’s the equivalent for pro-life and sex ed?
Data point—I am pro life and pro teaching people about contraception and “safe” sex.
Genuinely appreciate the data point.
I’m in the “contraception is good enough and abortion is close enough to morally bad even though I’m not 100% sure it is, that I want contraception taught and am mostly okay restricting abortion (or at least discouraging / reducing its use)” camp.
FWIW, I’m also pro-life and pro-sex-ed[1]. I suspect this combination of views doesn’t show up much in media reporting, because it doesn’t fit well with any existing side of the culture war.
This 2012 polling report showed a big difference in fraction of people who opposed abortion vs birth control–the only way these results can be correct is if there is a substantial number of people who oppose abortion but think birth control is morally acceptable. That’s not quite the same thing as thinking sex ed is a good idea, but it’s at least somewhat connected.
[1] Both of these statements probably need long qualifiers about exactly what I mean. But I’m definitely in favor of sex ed programs that ensure that kids know exactly how babies are made and how they’re prevented, as well as giving them some familiarity with homosexuality and transgenderism and such, since a fraction of those kids will badly need that information and the rest won’t be harmed by it.
I would not be entirely certain of this; though it’s scandalous to speculate about, rapid-onset gender dysphoria could be a thing. But transgender rights is floating around the public discussion so much lately that I doubt anyone in public middle or high school is unaware of the concept, so the point is moot either way.
Indeed. I think it’s also relevant that a whole lot of people who oppose illegal immigration do so because they believe illegal immigrants mostly don’t work productive jobs. Contra South Park, I literally don’t know anyone whose objection to illegal immigrants is “they took our jobs.” Rather, the objections are always either “they collect welfare and don’t pay taxes” or “they’re more prone to be criminals.”
You can object and say these things aren’t true, but until you’ve adequately convinced people they aren’t true, saying your solution is “make it harder for them to work” won’t get any interest at all, for obvious reasons.
You appear to have a social circle of people with jobs less likely to be taken by illegal immigrants. Try the construction and agriculture sectors, where pay in some areas has necessarily increased because Trump’s enforcement policies has decreased the competition in the labor pool. (I am not opposed to this.)
There was also that article going around recently about blue collar white people who are now alienated in the workplace because their co-workers are majority immigrant, so replacement evidently has occurred.
The issue this brings up, of course, is that it’s the “job creators” who oppose immigration reform, and they’re the ones with that sweet sweet donor money.
In an episode from the popular TV show Roseanne, Dan hired union labor to do simple construction work, but he couldn’t compete with people who hired non-union illegal aliens to do the work. A former neighbor of mine used to hire people to do construction work in Florida, and he told me it was extremely hard to stay in business unless you were willing to hire illegal aliens who, he said, were extremely reliable workers.
To add an anecdote to James Miller’s I have a friend who owns a landscaping business. He refused to hire illegals and was constantly being undercut by competitors who did hire illegals.
Just because illegals aren’t going to take your job or mess up your industry doesn’t mean they’re not taking anyone’s job or messing up any industries.
Okay, but that doesn’t really address my point – which is that large numbers of people who vocally oppose illegal immigration do not believe that illegals are mainly working above-board jobs that would otherwise be available to, or desired by, Americans.
And to whatever extent that is true, any measures designed to “punish the employers” would have zero effect.
Do they? I vocally oppose illegal immigration and believe there are a variety of illegal aliens, some of whom are welfare leeches and others of whom are hard workers but are displacing or reducing wages for other hardworking Americans. All of them should be deported.
Basically, “why not both?”
I’m not sure what the name for this…rhetoric or error mode is but it seems like the same sort as what started the comment thread. Plumber seems to think opponents of illegal immigration are not interested in or have no plans to reduce demand. In fact, “nationwide E-verify” and attempts to go after employers have always been part of the general mish-mash for proposals for reducing illegal immigration. Trump’s initial immigration whitepaper on his website had, in addition to the wall and increased border patrol, “nationwide E-verify” as one of the bullet points. But nobody talks about that. It’s all wall and “mexican rapists” and then “if you really wanted to stop illegal immigration, you’d go after employers but you don’t so it means you’re racists!” or something. No. We want to go after employers. It’s right there on the list. In addition to the wall and the border patrol and ICE and all that stuff. People just aren’t paying attention.
I’m not sure if it’s an honest cognitive bias or deliberately misleading rhetoric, but it goes like:
Politician: “X is a problem. I propose solutions A and B.”
Opponent: “Haha, Politician doesn’t really care about X or else they’d advocate B instead of just A! Therefore they are clearly motivated by [-ism|-phobia]!”
No. They advocated A and B. They care about X. Opponent is either not listening or lying.
@Conrad Honcho;
It’s also important to point out that it’s *not* as if the alternatives proposed aren’t also subjected to the same congressional resistance. There’s resistance to proposals that would work, but also ones that in of themselves would not be terribly successful only because completing a campaign promise even if it doesn’t have the long-term desired effect is still a short term political defeat [for restrictionist opponents]
@Conrad: But then you get into the issue where politicians are burning all of their political capital on the culture war efforts (shooting down budgets or more moderate reforms if wall funding isn’t present, for example), and not making E-verify the core target of their efforts. Which brings up if it’s really a priority for them, and not just a fig leaf. Like a war hawk politician that, of course, wants world peace.
They advocated A and B. But when B is the one that might actually get passed, but B is the one never getting pushed for a vote, maybe B is just a motte to retreat to.
I’m fine with saying both are necessary. But I’m sick of people like Brad who keep loudly insisting that “punish the employers” is the obvious correct answer that will quickly and effectively eliminate 100% of illegal immigration with no negative side effects, and that the lack of enthusiasm for such a solution must be indicative of the fact that the opponents of illegal immigration are either unrepentant racists or suckers who are in the pocket of big-business.
To the extent that people who oppose illegal immigration don’t care about punishing employers, it’s because they don’t believe that will work. That’s all.
What do you think are the chances of Brad reading this and thinking, “Yup, that’s a fair way to paraphrase what I said”?
I propose “Ignoring the Motte”.
^
@Conrad Honcho,
I’m mostly of the impression that no real efforts have been made to reduce demand because I haven’t read of any owners or bosses being jailed.
@Plumber
Companies are typically fined for law violations. Very serious violations typically result in very big fines, not jail time.
Statistically, does this hypothetical women exist? It seems to me we are positing an individual who is both a) smart enough to know they have no information, and should therefore abstain due to unforseeable bad circumstances and b) stupid enough to be unable to absorb any of the taught information beyond “safe sex is possible” and through this grand misunderstanding, gets pregnant.
My bet is that the majority of people fall into the category of those who would have sex anyway (regardless of the dangers of getting pregnant) in the first place. The second largest group is most likely people smart enough to understand the dangers of pregancy, stds, etc. and also be able to absorb and implement information about safe sex. In both of these situations, sex education can only be an improvement.
I’m sceptical that this third hypothetical group even exists on an actual level, much less a statisitcally significant one.
I don’t know. My point was that she could exist, hence the supposedly clear conclusion wasn’t clear.
Part of that is the past experience with regard to policies wrt sexual behavior that were supposed to have an obvious good consequence. Sex education, legal abortion, and legal contraception were supposed to reduce the number of children born to unmarried mothers–that was regarded as a clear and obvious consequence of those changes. The changes occurred and the number of children born to unmarried mothers went sharply up instead of down.
stupid enough to be unable to absorb any of the taught information beyond “safe sex is possible” and through this grand misunderstanding, gets pregnant
There is no 100% perfect contraceptive measure, and you don’t even have to be stupid for this to go wrong. To quote the WebMD site, “Women take the pill by mouth to prevent pregnancy, and, when taken correctly, it is up to 99.9% effective.” That still leaves 0.1% chance of pregnancy even when taking the pill correctly, and spread that over 43 million women of reproductive age (according to the Guttmacher Institute), you have a theoretical possibility of 43,000 unintended pregnancies. In fact, by the Guttmacher figures, those women using the pill correctly still had 170,000 unintended pregnancies (5% of 3.4 million unintended pregnancies in 2008).
And it’s easy to not take the pill correctly – vomiting and/or diarrhoea due to gastric infection/some other reason? on antibiotics? missed a day by accident? and of particular interest to people on here, taking modafinil? Congratulations, you are now at risk of getting pregnant!
Sex ed is helpful but is not going to be the be-all and end-all, and even intelligent capable college-educated women who use contraception sensibly and correctly can get pregnant. I resent your strawman (straw woman?) of the stupid bitch who can’t even figure out how to not get knocked up, because that is not what DavidFriedman and others meant.
Brad’s claim wasn’t “pretty clearly” reduce pregnancies, it was reduce abortions.
More relevantly, Brad’s claim is based on studies that have already shown that safe sex ed is more effective than abstinence ed. Notably, that the “tantalizing forbidden fruit” aspect goes away when they’re taught clinically about sex, whereas hookup culture arguably was partially driven by a backlash against the repression before they had freedom from parental surveillance, shown by how kids raised by more sex positive parents are more sexually conservative.
So long as the “not 100% perfect” is outweighed by the reduction in the mean/median vs. the counterfactual of the all of the people not using contraception in the absence of sex ed, then “pretty clearly reduce abortions” part has been met.
I recall reading some studies in college that said that sex ed wasn’t particularly effective in decreasing unwanted pregnancies. More recently I’ve read some stuff that says that it is effective. Does anyone know whether there’s strong evidence either way? I don’t know enough about this area to have a strong opinion either way, but it’s obviously relevant–if sex ed doesn’t have any effect on teen pregnancies or new STD cases, then it’s hard to justify having it as a requirement.
Brad’s claim wasn’t “pretty clearly” reduce pregnancies, it was reduce abortions.
Point out to me how these are not connected; in the context of “more sex ed and more encouragement of contraception used correctly”, the reduction in abortion is linked to the reduction in pregnancy – you don’t want an abortion if you don’t get pregnant in the first place. Therefore to reduce abortions you must reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancies, and if you reduce the number of pregnancies you will also reduce the number of abortions: say that out of every hundred women who get pregnant, ten want an abortion. If two hundred women get pregnant, that’s twenty abortions. If sixty women get pregnant, that’s six abortions. If you reduce the number of pregnancies – which is the whole purpose of contraception – then you reduce the number (but not proportion) of abortions even without doing anything else.
Other methods are non-contraceptive linked – adoption, keeping the child (whichever parent wants to take on the child rearing), foster care, etc. But we weren’t talking about those, we were talking about sex ed and contraception.
Consider two groups: group A of n women who would’ve had sex even without sex ed, and group B of m women who wouldn’t have. To get the number of reduced pregnancies from A, we multiply n by the success rate of contraception, whereas to get the number of additional pregnancies from B we multiply by the failure rate. Because the success rate is much greater than the failure rate, for sex ed to increase the number of pregnancies we must have m being greater than n by a factor of several. That seems unlikely — as False points out below it seems more plausible that the opposite is true. An arbitrary study on the issue confirms the intuitive view: page 6 shows sex ed halving the frequency of voluntary interruptions to pregnancy.
I think the argument is more that ‘permissive’ or ‘value neutral’ sex ed loosens the taboos around pre-marital sex, so that the increased numbers of people (not just women, men too!) who would otherwise not have had sex outside of marriage offset the gains in people learning how not to get pregnant/catch an STI. The more people having sex, the greater the likelihood of pregnancies, and unless you get people to delay first sexual encounters and reduce number of sexual encounters as well as using contraception correctly, you may have trouble decreasing the rate (teenage pregnancy is the problematic one here, it has been successfully tackled but the reasons for that success are more than ‘here’s how to fit your diaphragm correctly’).
And with unintended pregnancy, the ‘solution’ there is abortion. Before widespread availabilty of contraception, if you got pregnant even outside of marriage, well, that was about it – you were more likely to have the baby (due to few reliable and safe methods of terminating the pregnancy). But if you are using contraception, you are signalling quite strongly your intent to avoid pregnancy. If you get pregnant anyway, the old attitude of “well, looks like I’m going to be a mother” is gone by the wayside, and you want the implicit bargain of “we guarantee safe sex means no baby” to be upheld, so abortion has to solve that problem (adoption as a means seems to be very disfavoured, because that is seen as forcing women to continue pregnancies they don’t want and as violating right to choose).
So more sex, even using contraception, means the likelihood of more babies, and contraception means the attitude towards pregnancy changes – now it is seen as an avoidable burden. If contraception fails, the feeling is having been cheated, and abortion as the back-up solution to “but I never wanted to get pregnant, I can’t have a baby, I was using contraception” is the next logical step, and hence liberalising abortion; nobody agitating for more contraception has ever made the bargain “you let us teach sex ed including how to use contraception and we’ll re-criminalise abortion because now it won’t be needed once people know how to use birth control correctly”, since they know this is not going to fly and people who get pregnant while using contraception are not going to agree to ‘no abortion’.
I often see the argument “why not agree to contraception, religious people, since more contraception means fewer abortions?” but they, while expecting religious to give in on principles, never put their money where their mouth is and say “we are so confident more sex ed and more contraception will solve the problem that we will confine abortion to rape, incest or physical danger to life of mother, no more abortion on demand”. Because they know they couldn’t get away with that.
The argument that teaching adolescents about contraception makes them more likely to have sex could make sense if you are part of a religious community that has strict social enforcement of social mores.
So sure, don’t go talking about contraception to the Amish or the Mormons or the Opus Dei (the Catholic version of the monogamous Mormons). But the thing is, most of those social mores are already broken. When you go to poor neighbourhoods where there is a higher tendency for teenage sex (statistics show that women who go to college usually have sex later than the proletariat), though, there is no social pressure, or it doesn’t work anymore. So you get behaviour like this, and they don’t even do it safely.
I would be OK with a policy of only having sex ed in communities where the rate of abortions/teenage pregnancies is high, and to leave the communities where they actually manage to enforce abstinence alone. And that would be the most effective way to reduce abortions, also.
You can think of sex ed as the charming class they give in my University, where they teach students with tendencies to self-harm how to do it safely (disinfect, etc.).
No-one’s saying that sex ed reduces numbers of abortions to zero, merely that it reduces them (and pretty significantly according to that study).
My point is that even if sex ed causes 100 people who would’ve had sex anyway choose to use contraception but also 100 additional people having sex (with contraception), that doesn’t cancel out to 0 additional unwanted pregnancies. What actually happens is that 70-99 people in the first group avoid pregnancy, while contraception fails for 1-30 members of the second, leading to a net reduction of 40-98 unwanted pregnancies. So for sex ed to not be effective, the second group must have a lot more people than the first.
But that does not seem plausible. In fact (see my reply to Baeraad below), not only is the first group actually bigger than the second, the second seems to have a negative number of people in it! According to the study I linked, sex ed in fact strengthens the taboos around pre-marital sex (or at least, increases age of first sexual encounter in teenagers and decreases amount of casual sex).
I agree that increased use of contraception could lead to increased acceptance of abortion, but in practice any effect from that does not seem to outweigh the benefits of sex ed and it overall reduces frequency of abortions.
A more likely result would be that teaching about safe sex would not affect anyone’s behavior. One of Scott’s themes is to beware social science interventions that claim large results.
https://www.institute-research.com/CSEReport/
The IRE seems to be an advocate for abstinence-based education, and therefore may give a biased perspective on the effective of other kinds of sex education.
I can’t believe I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but… I don’t see that that’s such an invalid position? If you want there to be less abortions and also less premarital sex, you’re going to be very reluctant to accept the notion that you can have only one of the two. Especially since you can just as easily point out that if we could somehow put a stop to premarital sex, that would definitely reduce the number of abortions, and then you’d have two things you wanted instead of having one thing you want and one thing you hate slightly less than the alternative.
It’s kind of like when people tell me that I can have either a mercyless capitalist dog-eat-dog world that is murder on the weakest people or complete economic collapse that’s murder on absolutely everyone. Yes, if I accepted that those were my only options, the former is clearly the better one, but I don’t think there’s anything that could convince me to stop looking for a third option, because to me both of those are absolutely awful.
But does teaching safe sex even increase premarital sex? This study claims that students who have had sex education are less likely to have sex “with occasional partners”.
I wonder if things are finally changing post-Sexual Revolution? The explosion in “okay, now we don’t have to be married to have sex and even better, we don’t have to have babies!” that resulted may finally be changing now the Millennials are the generation that is growing/grown up.
Having lived in a liberated society, they don’t have the same pressures around sex (they have their own pressures, but “trapped by marriage when all you want is a fuck” isn’t one of them). So the delay in teenagers having sex/reduction in number of partners may be a result of that, and not so much of better sex education/access to contraception.
It certainly seems plausible that that is an effect, but not that it is the cause of the result in the study which compared people in the same age range.
That would seem to be a good study to show to pro-lifers you’re trying to convince, then.
But, again putting myself in their position, I would point out that for any given claim, there is at least one study out there that supposedly proves it. Beware The Man Of One Study, and all that. So it might take more than just one study to change any minds on the subject.
This. Many of the loudest voices against abortion are also morally opposed to premarital sex and contraception, for moral reasons. “Contraception is the lesser evil” is not going to be compelling to them.
rlms, why are you surprised that deontologists aren’t finding your utilitarian arguments convincing?
Many of the loudest voices against abortion are also morally opposed to premarital sex and contraception, for moral reasons.
Yeah, particularly when giving in on contraception means accepting some number of abortions (as someone commented above, they never said more sex ed/contraception would reduce abortions to zero, merely that it would reduce the number).
Because if you’ve given in on “okay, it’s permissible to have sex without procreation, so contraception is okay” then it’s harder to stand up to “so why do you object to abortion, after all this woman was using contraception because she didn’t want a baby and you were okay with that”. And I think some people do see it as a sneaky way to get that resistance to abortion overcome or downgraded, that contraception is the Trojan* Horse for abortion if you will.
(*NO THAT WAS NOT A DELIBERATE PUN).
The reason to accept abortions will never be zero is because it’s already been shown that puritanical cultural dominance didn’t have that, either. At that point, you have to find the approach that approaches the minimum, and the empirical evidence is against abstinence education.
You yourself noted that “Having lived in a liberated society, they don’t have the same pressures around sex” appears to be effective. Why the confidence that returning to an era of sexual repression would do any better than Prohibition?
The actual solution should be putting things in the water that decrease libido in everyone, and then fully fund research into science babies. Procreation without sex, no abortions, no premarital sex, win-win-win!
They seemed to have managed that it Japan. Without any weird chemicals. Except for the procreation part, of course. Sex is a big motivation for procreation.
Somehow I doubt anti-abortionists would be happy with a society where people choose virtual sex, or no sex at all, over real sex, and where few babies are born.
I find it interesting that in a society that is so liberal about sex, where all kind of kink is accepted and celebrated, so many people are celibate, whereas in societies where virginity is important, there is an increase in hymen reconstruction surgery.
No chance of that backfiring in a manner that wiped out human civilization.
@ana53294
It seems to me that Japanese taboos are different, which makes them seem less prudish than they are*. For example, it is extremely taboo to explicitly talk about genitalia and instead it is common to use oblique references, like asoko (“there”). Their porn also pixelates the genitalia.
I think that many reasons for the decrease in intercourse in Japan are the same as for the increase in the West: individualism, improved alternatives, less pressure to find a partner and the loss of broadly accepted courting rituals.
* This is a very common ‘grass is greener’ mistake: comparing the downsides of one’s own situation with the alternative, while ignoring the downsides of the alternative, because one does not know how to look for the latter.
If you go after employers, news articles start appearing (well, probably web articles nowadays) about how we’re just caused hard-working people to lose their jobs and how their family will be starving and we’re forcing them into a life of misery and crime.
Halting the present flow of migrant labor into the US is trivial.
You just declare that legal or not, anyone working in the US is covered by the full panoply of labor rights, and has the right to sue for back wages and compensation for damages if their pay was below the minimum wage and their working conditions not up to legal minimums. There, done.
This is not done because there is no real political will to stop the flow – US agriculture depends very much on large underclass of exploited labor to function.
Yes, exactly this.
You probably also want government prosecutors to bring a bunch of cases on their own as well, at first. A lot of illegal immigrants don’t know the law and would never think to sue on their own. Once you prime the pump a bit, you can probably get some ambulance chaser lawyers to get in on the action. And then, bingo, you have a free market solution that neither right nor left can object to.
Well, except business owners. Which is where the plan falls down in practice.
This seems like one of those ‘great ideas in theory’ but horrific in Bastiat unseen terms.
The basic theory seems to be assume criminality on the part of fraud victim.
The actual illegal immigrant employment paradigm involves identity theft, where an illegal immigrant uses the social security number of an actual citizen.
They may take out loans, rent property, etc in someones name. The victim has her credit ruined with no plausible way to correct the record.
The obvious solution is national ID cards, which specify citizen or legal resident. Only way to get an ID card is to pay taxes and pay a fee to have identity verified. Fee waived for under 50k household income.
ID determines voter eligibility, kill two birds with one stone.
For a long time, the American public has had a superstitious fear of a national database of citizens. Of course, databases are necessary, but we can’t call them that or link them together. So the IRS has one database, OPM has another, the various DMVs have another 52 or so, social security has one, each of the 3 big credit bureaus has another, voter registrations are a separate thing handled locally, and so forth.
So we’re in this weird position where the average middle class drone is tracked more closely than ever, but it’s trivially easy for the bad guys to commit identity fraud. And there’s a lot of “Brazil” (the movie)-like situations where having the same first name, last name as a bad actor can get you in a lot of grief. For example, if you’re trying to fly on a plane. But hey, at least we didn’t cross-correlate the databases. Only the three-letter agencies are allowed to do that.
And obviously we can’t use drivers licenses or social security numbers to validate that people don’t vote more than once. You would be an extra double Hitler for even suggesting the idea.
If the “fraud victim” is a business that is treating its employees illegally badly I can’t muster too much sympathy for it, and tend to be dubious about whether it is actually a victim of fraud, since breaking the law in your treatment of employees is much more appealing if you know they can’t fight back.
Wait, are you giving these people green cards when they file their cases?
If not, then they won’t be suing their employers, because even crap jobs in the US are better than what they’d have after you deport them. And if you do offer them green cards, that’s a very valuable consideration in exchange for their accusing someone else of wrongdoing, which has problems discussed crossthread and not really improved by the accusation being made in civil rather than criminal court.
In theory, you only have to find one guy who is disgruntled and thinks “I want a big bonus and a trip back home to see my family.” Being paid a legal rate would probably at least triple the income of most of those guys.
The bigger obstacle is probably the language barrier and skepticism that we would hold up our end of the deal. But if we publicly did so a few times, I think the floodgates would open.
One guy wins one lawsuit for his back pay, etc, which isn’t going to break the average employer’s bank. You aren’t going to get a class-action suit out of it because the class wants to keep a low profile and keep their jobs. And you aren’t going to get bignum punitive damages out of it because trial by jury.
If you sic your state’s labor department on your employer for things like failure to pay overtime, if the department decides there is a case there they will dig through every thing and make the employer pay it to everyone. No class-action or even individual lawsuit necessary.
I’m not sure this is a good plan, but this isn’t a good objection to it. We already have labor-enforcement arms that work pretty well (in most states).
Now I wonder if the departments of labor would even care if you weren’t here legally.
If that’s what you’re counting on, then your enforcement mechanism isn’t illegal immigrants suing for back wages etc. That’s what you initially proposed and what I responded to.
If the proposal is actually to task and empower a bureaucracy to go after all the illegal employers whether their workers complain or not, that’s a different proposal with different problems. The two that come to mind are the difficulty of achieving decisive results in a presumption-of-innocence rule-of-law society (and consequent risk that we weaken that part), and the Iron Law of Bureaucracy as applied to a bureaucrats that you are basically charging with eliminating the thing that justifies their existence.
I didn’t intend to suggest that each individual illegal immigrant would file a separate case. I just meant that if someone alerted the authorities, they could take action on behalf of however many illegals they could find.
In general, I would expect it to go down kind of like a drug bust. The feds hear that someone is employing lots of illegals at a farm or whatever. They scout it out. Then they get one of their agents in there to get hired without the proper paperwork, while the cops are watching from a distance. Then take a bunch of people into a custody and verify that they are, in fact, illegals.
This isn’t someone’s brother’s sister’s cousin saying that maybe her friend said that you hired an illegal. This is you, hiring an illegal while a car full of cops watches. And then they find that all 1000 workers are illegal, or whatever. At that point, they’ve got an open an shut case. You don’t have to catch everyone– just enough people that farmers decide that following the law is cheaper. And damages don’t have to be limited to just back wages.
There are arguments against doing this but I don’t think “it wouldn’t work” is one. And I think it would be a lot less brutal and costly than what ICE is doing now.
This is my third comment on the whole page, so I didn’t make some different prior claim that I since changed my mind on.
This honest question remained unanswered that I wanted anyone to provide feedback on: Now I wonder if the departments of labor would even care if you weren’t here legally. What happens when someone says “I was working for Joe Farmer illegally, I’m heading for the border anyway, where’s my money?” Does this never happen?
I found this legal advocate’s page which sites actual court rulings that illegal immigrants are still protected by FSLA laws: https://warshawskylawfirm.com/lawyer/2013/02/04/Employment-Law/Are-Illegal-Immigrants-Protected-By-Labor-And-Employment-Laws_bl6663.htm
So we already have the tools for illegal immigrants, if they are going to return home anyway, to pursue wage claims against their employers. Maybe this just needs signal-boosted so more illegal immigrants are aware of their rights.
But that’s already the case. Minimum-wage laws, etc, already apply to illegals. If someone alerts the relevant authorities, today, that someone is hiring a bunch of illegals and paying them less than minimum wage, they can take action on behalf of however many illegals they can find.
Yet somehow illegal immigration persists. Why is that, and how does your proposal differ from the status quo?
That is a really good question. Why don’t we hear about illegal immigrants suing for back wages?
It might be a legal question– as non-citizens, do they have standing to sue? I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe a lawyer could chime in here?
It also might be our weak to nonexistent enforcement of immigration law. If the government doesn’t send anyone to investigate reports that someone is hiring illegals, then it just comes down to hearsay and rumors. Maybe there’s not enough there to make a case that will stand up in court.
as non-citizens, do they have standing to sue? I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe a lawyer could chime in here?
Can you read back two comments? They absolutely have standing. They aren’t exempt from deportation, but if they wanted to leave anyway, they can definitely have their state’s labor department do the hard work as they return to their home country.
anyone working in the US is covered by the full panoply of labor rights
Good luck with that, remember the discussion over tipping if waiting staff are getting paid the minimum wage? Now you’re going to extend health insurance and dental plans and the rest of it to burger flippers, even if they are legal native-born citizens never mind being immigrants? Prepare to be argued into oblivion about how this is totally unworkable and would ruin the economy because low-wage workers simply are not worth that outlay by an employer as by definition low-wage work is not productive enough to be valuable.
Not would ruin the economy, would ruin the lives of low skilled workers who were no longer able to get a job because they had been priced out of the market.
Eh.. paying waitstaff a living wage changes nothing. People currently eat at restaurants with an expectation of tipping twenty percent. Thus, a restaurant with a sign at the entrance saying “No Tipping.” and twenty percent higher prices would be precisely equivalent as a consumer choice, and could obviously afford to pay their waitstaff enough to live on. Thus it is pretty irrelevant to this proposal, which does intent to price at least some workers out of the market.
Insisting migrant labor get paid as if they were citizens would do that to a large extent, yes. That is rather the point. If a job is only worth 2 dollars an hour, it should either not be done, or at least, be done by a robot. If it cannot be automated, and must be done, well, then it is pretty much by definition worth the minimum wage, and hippies can darn well pay a few cents more for their hand picked fruit.
1. If illegal immigrants were not being paid enough to live on they would not be alive. They are.
2. Average per capita real income in the developed world at present is twenty to thirty times what the global average was through most of history. U.S. per capita income at present is about $50,000/year, so the income at which most people in the past lived was about $2,000/year, corresponding to an hourly wage, for someone who works forty hours a week, of about a dollar an hour.
… You did not get my point about the wait staff at all.
The US currently pays wait staff quite a decent wage. There is simply a social pretense that they are tipped.
If you dine out and do not pay the 20 percent “Waitstaff surcharge”, you are overtly an asshole. Given that eating out is mostly about making a good impression, hardly anyone ever does this.
So the actual price of eating out is the menu price, +20 %. Restaurants get all the custom they need at this actual price point. So you might as well end the practice of tipping, and roll the cost of actually paying your workers the going rate into the menu price. This then alleviates diners from having to do math just after eating themselves silly.
Except that the diners have less agency, and the waitstaff has less incentive to provide good service, so not precisely equivalent after all.
There has to be accompanying deregulation to allow employers to fire workers more easily, such that they can get rid of workers not offering good service and thus not adequately doing their job. There is no stereotype of waitstaff in non-tipping locations like Europe or Asia not providing good service, and that’s because they’re doing their core job responsibility.
This is just as how any client-interfacing employees at any company can get fired if a customer complains to their superiors, despite there being no tip service. The cooks in a restaurant don’t get tips (though in some restaurants they switched to a tip pool so they do), but they evidently have incentive to provide good cooking service.
Technically, you wouldn’t need to raise prices 20% to make up for tips.
First, 20% isn’t universally recognized as the standard tip; many people use 10% or 15% or 18% as the baseline.
Second, not everybody tips.
Actually, the interesting thing is that if a sufficient percentage of restaurants shifted away from tips, you might drive the no-tippers to the tipped restaurants, which will then be cheaper for them. This would rapidly break tipping.
“Good service” is not a binary, and treating it as such would I think diminish the dining experience. Also, positive reinforcement is definitely a thing.
positive reinforcement is definitely a thing
I agree, although I’m concerned it might not be enough. There’s at least one study that suggests it’s not enough to drive quality. (BTMOOS, of course, but I didn’t look that long, and there might be others.) One possible causal factor is that it’s swamped by other factors, such as the customer’s ethics – some customers tip consistently low or high for other reasons. Likewise, some servers might be consistently courteous, or not. Another is that customers might not care enough about service level, because they don’t pay that much attention. (Which seems a bit odd to me, given how much of an incentive money is in most situations.)
I see definite cases where I tip high and am immediately answered with a great deal more courtesy from drivers and servers, but this might be anecdotal and subject to confirmation bias.
Just curious, when did 20% become the norm?
I remember 10% as being for average service, and 15% for above average.
When was the change?
Again, the empirical evidence (entire other nations where there is no tipping) seems to indicate that the incentive structure of tipping has a much lower effect than you think. Or rather, that other non-tipping incentive structures are much more effective.
For example, paying a higher wage results in the job having higher status, so that workers take pride in doing their jobs correctly as a demonstration of their status. This especially seems to be the case in Japan, where some get offended at tipping, which then implies that they don’t retain the same level of quality for all customers.
I still fail to see why, if tipping as positive reinforcement is so powerful, it isn’t used for all service jobs. What about waitstaffing is so unique?
I’ve seen quite a few Americans complain about European waiters, although cultural differences are a huge confounder here. Americans seem to typically enjoy a high level of superficial niceness (not just from waiters), while also being used to being ushered out of restaurants so more sittings can be accommodated. In Europe, the superficial niceness is often considered offensive and people tend to like more inconspicuous service. They also tend to want to be able to stay as long as they desire, rather than be pressured to leave.
But we don’t know that that cultural difference is related to the lack of tipping. For example, would tipping make a maid-cafe or host/ess setup better, vs. the “commissions on luxury purchases” model?
Citation needed.
I thought the stereotype of snooty European waiters not providing good service was a very old one amongst American travellers.
And in Asia, waitstaff service is generally very bad. It’s a cultural thing, I guess. In China they don’t even heat the restaurants very well. They want you to get in and out, not linger there.
What kind of reward are we talking about? Cash? People make a lot more money in the US than whatever country they are from, so it would have to be a substantial sum. Multiply that by the 10 million illegal immigrants and add in the terrible incentives you are setting up, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
By the same token, why can’t we end the war on drugs by rewarding drug purchasers for turning themselves in and then jailing their dealers?
If you offer people a reward for accusing other people of committing crimes, you will get lots of false accusations. At minimum, this is noise clogging your judicial system. And every false positive is an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned. And unlike most victims of mass incarceration, a generally sympathetic innocent man, so what’s the motive for a prosecutor to bring this sort of case again?
If this nonetheless does lead to a significant number of prosecutions, the obvious response is that legitimate businessmen stop hiring anyone that might turn out to be an illegal immigrant. Which leaves the other sort of businessmen. The legitimate businesses still need e.g. janitors, and those are now more expensive and troublesome than they used to be. But look, here’s a service that advertises cheap janitorial services – looks like they get people to work minimum wage, tack on 20%, and do all the paperwork! Our lawyers have talked to their lawyers, and everything checks out!
The janitorial service pays 40% of minimum wage, and takes a 200% markup. Nobody ever complains or rats them out, because 40% of minimum wage is still better than they’d get in Guatemala, and because if they do complain their family in Guatemala will be tortured to death. The service’s paperwork checks out because some of that 200% markup goes to unethical lawyers and some of it goes to bribes. And if the Feds ever do manage to make a case against them, the managers disappear and retire in style someplace with no extradition while some of their younger colleagues start over under a new name (but with the same network including the Guatemalan torturers).
The legitimate businesses don’t even have the option of hiring legal janitors because, hey, nice business you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it, like a dozen illegal immigrants swearing that you hired them as janitors without even checking their papers. The illegal immigrants no longer have the option of doing mostly-honest work, and even some of the legal immigrants and first-generation citizens find themselves being frozen out of opportunities.
But if you persevere, and if you don’t mind the collateral damage, you could substantially reduce illegal immigration by this strategy. Let’s not.
There are lots of cases where the government offers people a reward for accusing other people of committing crimes. Any kind of medical malpractice suit. Accusations about breach of contract. Any kind of OSHA complaint. And so on. Are you in favor of dismantling these systems? If not, why is immigration any different?
Yes, obviously we don’t want to make companies responsible for cases where someone had a fake ID that looked real. But we can make them responsible for at least scanning the ID and verifying that it comes up in some government database. Then the government can take it from there.
A shell company isn’t a magic cloak of invincibility that will protect you from all prosecution. Even in Chicago. So the government brings a RICO case and takes down your crime scheme, same as it took down the Mafia.
The government can and should dismiss cases where there is no hard evidence. This is no different than any other crime. In fact, it’s much easier than most other crimes. Unlike selling drugs or illegal gambling, or whatever, agriculture takes place out in the open. It should be easy for the feds to get detailed pictures of employers hiring illegals.
“Your policy could be subverted by a large, well-organized and ruthless international criminal conspiracy” is going to be true of pretty much any set of laws that create a black market, including the immigration policy we have now.
Also, this is a Fully General argument against any kind of law. If laws against rape exist, then at least one person will be falsely accused of rape at some point. But we cannot therefore conclude from that that laws against rape should not exist.
In the case of illegal immigration, the government doesn’t have to go after every possible perpetrator. Only the ones that they can catch red-handed. In that case the chance that it is all an innocent misunderstanding is pretty much zero.
“Could be” and “will be”, are two different things. Prohibition of lawn darts did not in fact result in a large, well-organized and ruthless international criminal conspiracy taking over the lawn dart industry, prohibition of alcohol very much did. And this was easily predictable, in both cases.
You’re proposing to ban a broadly popular commodity – cheap labor – for which there are great profits and in most cases no good substitutes. The people using that commodity are already accustomed to operating on the shady edge of the law. The commodity itself is provided by an oppressed minority group that cannot count on police protection in the US and has family members vulnerable to retaliation in their homelands. There already exist coethnic criminal organizations optimized for exploiting this population in other ways. And those organizations necessarily have a fair chunk of their power base in kleptocratic third-world countries beyond the reach of US police.
That ticks pretty much every box on the checklist of “will this industry be taken over by a large, well-organized criminal gang?” If you go ahead and do this thing because, well, any industry could be taken over by a criminal gang, then you’re being foolish and I’m going to try and stop you before you hurt anyone.
I didn’t propose anything, Plumber did. And he didn’t propose to ban anything, as I think you’ll find that illegal immigration is already illegal. He proposed a different tactic in enforcing it. Is it your position that the Aramark-as-run-by-Gus-Fring scenario you’re describing would be the result of Plumber’s “go after the employers” idea specifically, or just any method of enforcing immigration policy that is more effective than what we do now? Or are we already on the path to a worldwide janitorial mafia that makes the drug cartels look like small potatoes, and we just haven’t gotten there yet?
Eh. If something is nominally illegal but said law is completely unenforced, I would think it entirely fair to characterize a proposal to start enforcing it as “banning” it.
Granted that for illegal immigration the before and after are not quite so stark. It still strikes me that you’re quibbling. As am I, I suppose.
What makes you think agriculture is “wildly profitable”? It certainly isn’t for the workers– even legal ones. The median salary is about 66k. This is not Walter White territory. It’s about 1/3 less than an entry-level software engineer would make in the Bay Area.
Maybe the owners of the huge farms make a lot of money. But it’s not clear to me that they make more than, say, a typical fortune 500 CEO. Especially in relation to the risks they have to take and amount of work they have to do.
Also, there are a lot of substitutes for the labor of illegal immigrants. Like the labor of legal citizens, which is maybe 2x or 3x more expensive. Or automation.
Again, this is a Fully General argument that I could apply to any sector of the economy. Clearly McDonald’s employees will soon all be illegal slaves from Guatemala because of the super secret mafia.
Except, they aren’t, and they won’t be. This is not like drugs where people will pay any price for their fix. Nobody really demands illegally picked fruit or illegally sold happy meals. They just want cheap fruit or cheap happy meals. So all the authorities have to do is make it marginally more expensive to use illegal labor than legal labor. This is easy to do with basic law enforcement.
My theory is that there’s no real political will to reduce illegal immigratiion.
Demonize and harass immigrants, especially those either illegal or non-white or both – sure.
Stage lots and lots of political theater to show leaders at work addressing the voters’ concerns – sure.
But actually finding Americans willing to do the jobs currently done by illegals? Or dealing with not being able to find anyone to do those jobs? Or paying a whole lot more to make Americans willing? Not so much. If the work can be outsourced elsewhere, that’s not a problem. But much of what illegals are reputed to do in the US needs to be done in locations where it’s wanted.
You can leave out the casual “Americans are racist” there.
Americans had tons of anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1800s and early 1900s against European immigrants too.
New arrivals are disruptive culturally and the people whose wages are suppressed by them always resent them. It’s not a skin color thing.
I would argue that the skin color thing *results from* cultural disruption and wage suppression. Not the other way around. People used to think *very* highly of Hispanics back before 1990 because they were a fargroup that *became* an outgroup. Hispanic-ness is now just a cheap proxy for that outgroup.
Operation Wetback started in 1954.
This is not to say that “those guys don’t seem to match my in-group” isn’t the root source of the problem, though.
There were also forcible “repatriations” of Mexicans in the 1930s.
Prior to the 1965 immigration act, the US had close to “open borders” with the rest of the Western Hemisphere. As I understand the law at the time, starting during WW1 immigrants had to get visas before entering the US, and starting during WW2 a green card to remain here, but there were few restrictions and no numerical limitations on visas/green cards issued to Mexicans (and Canadians, Salvadorans, etc.). As long as you weren’t a communist and you didn’t have any infectious diseases, you were in.
Most of the people deported in the ’30s were here legally. Many of them had been born north of the border and were therefore US citizens. It had nothing to do with “enforcing the law” and everything to do with ethnicity.
The idea that there’s some racist out there who wasn’t xenophobic, they just intrinsically hated certain colors, is really weird. The formula for racism has always been Xenophobia + “You can recognize them by their facial features”. That’s why many people will describe anti-Muslim sentiment as racist. Muslims obviously aren’t a “race”, what they mean to say is that anti-Muslim sentiment is xenophobic and that most people identify Muslims at least in part by looking for people of Arabic or North African descent. (Leave aside for a moment whether those two characterizations are accurate)
@mdet
It’s weird, but look up ‘colorism’.
I’m aware of colorism. But still, good catch, since colorism is sort of the opposite of xenophobia — it creates division within an existing demographic.
I guess I’ll say that traditional Jim Crow style racism is xenophobia first & foremost, with the stuff about skin color just being a post hoc rationalization. And colorism between black Americans is what happens when you’ve internalized bits of the rationalization, but are too close to someone to really be xenophobic. So you get the classic example of the black guy refusing to date darkskinned women, despite his own mother looking like Viola Davis.
@mdet:
I’d argue colorism is likely just in-group social hierarchy stuff.
In my experience as a white immigrant to the US, I’ve never personally been harassed. Indian immigrant colleagues – working similar jobs with similar life styles – have.
Likewise, while the US has had a presidential candidate claiming all Mexicans are rapists, I haven’t heard one making similar scaled claims about people from Canada, Australia, or any European nation.
I agree that if you go back far enough, other large groups of immigrants (Irish, Italians, …) were also treated badly. Currently, however, being non-white is a liability, though less so for Asians than most other groups.
I haven’t heard anyone making that claim about Chinese or Japanese either.
Illegal white immigrants have been getting rounded up by ICE, though. There was a NPR feature on it, focusing on Irish examples.
Japan makes no sense in this context, as they have been fully developed and industrialized for the entirety of our life times. Japanese scares have been entirely around their industry beating ours (and their moneyed class displacing ours, see high end real estate and art sales).
China has been, I think, too firmly in control of it’s populace to let mass outflows occur (I’m not solid on this claim, and I’d welcome being proven wrong).
There was plenty of kerfuffle around the various Indochinese boat peoples, though.
Where’s the actual political will on the other side to legalize the illegal immigrants?
Illegal immigration is a handy wedge issue for both sides, but the antis don’t actually have a good plan or the desire to round up 10 million otherwise mostly law abiding people, and the pros don’t actually want to wave a blanket amnesty wand and permanently open the border.
You severely underestimate the political will of conservatives to deport illegal immigrants. They would be ecstatic if the government was able to deport them unimpeded by state and city sanctuary laws.
Then what’s stopping them? Republicans control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and could probably get what they needed through the current Supreme Court. The border states apart from CA are Red.
I mean, I don’t doubt that there are hardliners who want to do it. And I don’t doubt there are some liberals who want open borders in all but name. But I’m talking “mainstream GOP”, i.e. the people who tried real hard to get Jeb or Rubio elected, here.
Filibustering is still an option for Democrats. And while the Supreme Court is conservative leaning, Trump has run in to problems with lower courts. And Democrat states and cities are also running their own campaign to impede deportation as much as possible. It’s not just about border states but any city that houses illegal immigration in significant numbers.
I’m sure that the guys who make up the GOP offices doesn’t particularly care but if Trump was pushing for a bill and didn’t have any of the obstacles I mentioned, they would go along with it.
You also originally said “antis” don’t have the will to do it but are now saying that you only meant the specific minority that wanted people like Jeb.
Well, I’ve got the “non-Trump GOP” in my minority, who are your conservatives with the political will to do a mass deportation of all, or nearly all, of the current illegal population. Show me a serious proposal to deport 5 million+. You say I severely underestimated it, show me the evidence.
I mean, heck, this was all riffing on arlie’s original post which took the stronger stance that there is no political will to even “reduce” illegal immigration – why are you selectively coming down on me here?
So you originally make a very strong claim(those against illegal immigrants don’t have the desire to reduce illegal immigrants) and then say the burden is on me to disprove your claim?
This is what I’ll agree with: there are a small but non-trivial number of Republican congressmen, especially in the Senate, who are uncomfortable with mass deportations and it’s possible they wouldn’t sign that kind of bill. But that’s a far cry from what you said, where illegal immigration rhetoric is just a “wedge issue” that none of th actually plan on doing anything about.
Honestly, this whole thread is filled with what I see as a nonsensical claim but you made the strongest one.
arlie is the one who said they don’t want to “reduce” immigration at all. I don’t make that claim, and never did. My claim was there are no serious plans to actually deport all 10 million (or whatever the number is) illegal immigrants, nor is there a serious plan for a blanket amnesty. I think the latter is much more likely than the former, but if amnesty does happen it’s basically just going to reset the clock on the status quo.
Actual political movement, not pundits on the internet but actual politicians with the power to do it, towards “deport everybody” or “amnesty and permanent major increase in legal immigration” seems nonexistent right now. If I’m underestimating that, show me.
Hello!
The Republican voters want the illegals gone. Some Republican leaders want the illegals gone and are attempting to make it so, but they are stymied by Democrats and neocon Republicans, some of whom mouth support for deporting illegals but have no actual desire to do so.
Watch a Trump rally and listen to the “Build the wall!” chants. They are serious about wanting to build the wall.
You can’t go by chants. They chanted “Lock her up”, too, but nobody seems all that upset that Trump made no attempt to do so.
I think a stronger argument of this form is that some people who support the idea of massive deportations and etc. in the abstract, turn out not to be willing to pay the costs in practice.
There are probably lots of people who chanted “build the wall”, but whose support is partly conditioned on Mexico paying for it, on not having to make any political trade-offs to get funding from Congress, or not having to shut the government down to obtain funding, etc.
It doesn’t mean they didn’t mean it when they chanted, but it might mean that they failed to see the difficulties standing in its way, and having seen those difficulties, now don’t think it’s worth it.
This is probably especially common among politicians, who actually have to make the compromises and pay the costs.
@gbdub @wrongspecies
Nope, I didn’t claim they didn’t want to reduce illegal immigration. I claimed lack of political will [to do anything meaningful].
I want peace on earth, justice for all, and a chicken in every pot 😉 The most I actually do in support of this is once in a while give a bit of money to a relevant charity.
Same deal – I don’t want it enough to get practical.
A shortage of workers can be solved by allowing wages to rise–the long-term result is that labor costs go up, but that some additional Americans get jobs. We may still be worse off overall (the illegal immigrants did the work better for less money), but the crops won’t go un-picked in the fields for long.
I’m doing an extremely broad self-improvement project in which I’m trying to become more effective and motivated, less mentally ill, and just overall happier. A lot of it has involved reading books that gave me an explanation of good mental habits I could then implement. (Getting me to the top quintile of conscientiousness and the bottom decile of neuroticism! It’s been going v v well so far.)
Examples include Modern Man In Search of a Soul by C G Jung, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, and Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B Burger and Michael Starbird. Knowingless and The Unit of Caring have also been good blogs for this, but in extremely different ways.
I’m interested in any further recommendations for books or blogs that are useful for mental habits, improved attitudes, instrumental rationality, etc. Audiobooks especially appreciated.
Has this project actually been substantially altering your conscientiousness/neuroticism? If so, that’s an amazing result!
Unprecedented, even. C rises slowly with age, and N similarly decreases in females (but not males). AFAIK, substantial alterations via conscious intervention aren’t known to be possible.
I’m slowly working my way through bewelltuned.com and have found it pretty powerful.
I would be very interested in hearing testimony from anyone who feels that they have mastered one of (or all of) the top-level skills.
Oh man, I’m really enjoying the format of this one so far. Thanks for the link!
have you tried drugs? I don’t mena recreational, but it might be worth trying some variety of adderall if you can get your hands on it.
Can vouch for psilocybin for decreasing neuroticism and increasing openness, through personal experience and that of others in my extended social circles.
You’re probably already aware of this thread from old LW, but I’d like to second the rec for pjeby’s Monoidealism.
It’s not something immediately usable per se, but like nazgulnarsil it dramatically clarified a lot of self-help ideas for me. Nowadays, I can see how The New Trick in this week’s bestseller is just another way of chasing the monoideal state, and this has enabled me to invent my own techniques to do just that.
It’s kinda old, a little on the basic/cliche side and by no means perfect, but the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey might be the kind of thing you’d find helpful as part of a larger mental toolbox, if you haven’t already tried it.
Ever thought about doing a 10-day meditation retreat? I highly recommend it.
Congrats 🙂 I have a similar ongoing internal project which is also seeing results. As far as reading material goes:
– The subtle art of not giving a fuck: Nothing revolutionary but a lot of quality paragraphs to start you thinking about some really core things like actively assessing whether or not you can cull down the list of things you currently care about, personal responsibility, an awareness of death etc
– Gödel Escher Bach, an eternal golden braid: I’m only a quarter of the way through this book but it’s already given me more *pops* of important intuitions shifting on the nature of information and systems than any other book I’ve read. Highly recommend
– https://meaningness.com: Also highly recommended, it’s a stripped down back to basics assessment of that is meaning, in the sense of “what is the meaning of life”. Like a lot of things once you get the right words and deep definitions it makes things so much easier.
– Lastly is a book I haven’t read yet but could still recommend checking out from what I know of the content matter: The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa. If you’re serious about sharpening your mind and increasing self-awareness I can’t recommend meditation enough.
Good luck on your project!
Second comment for discussing meetups!
We had a Meetup in Tuebingen, Germany on August 15 and it went great. A lot more people than I expected showed up (8 people in total). We’ll be meeting again this week and I’m optimistic that there could be a real Rationalist Community here in the future, additional to the already existing EA group.
Same thing! Got an x-rat meetup group started in Manila (yes, that city) and I have 5 people so far. Optimistic about the unique comparative advantages we have here on the kinds of problems we can solve.
Hi! The Phoenix Meetup went well. We got new folks who weren’t aware of the existing LW community. Private home seemed to work for everyone who showed up. Decided on a quarterly meetup schedule. Planning on a Rationalist Halloween! Any additional data fields desired, @Scott?
Edmonton, Alberta: Group was smaller this time than when we started one last year (three people – two returning including me, one new guy), but I heard from more who were interested, and possibly available if longer notice had been given.
In any case, had a fun conversation and learned some things. We penciled in the 22nd of September as a date for a follow-up.
We met in the upper floor of a local cafe (Garneau Remedy), which is where we had met before as well. Good location with not too much ambient noise up top, we will most likely use it again unless an obviously better suggestion comes up. However I didn’t realize until it was too late that I hadn’t specified the upper floor, so I apologize if anyone tried to attend, wandered the main floor and eventually gave up and left.
Yesterday’s meetup in DC went well! 37 total attendees, including 10 or so newcomers who hadn’t been to one before. Someone traveled >100 miles from Charlottesville and a few came from Baltimore. I also met Garrett Jones, whose book Hive Mind was reviewed on SSC two years ago. There was a lot of food and the weather was great, so we had a nice view of the Washington skyline.
We’re doing a couple more events in September. I think the newcomers all had fun yesterday and will probably be coming back!
We had a great meetup in Durham North Carolina (research triangle region of NC). We had about 15 people attend (up from the 4-7 usual suspects) and had a great conversation. Lots of friendly folks!
Was at the Durham meetup. It was a lot of fun!
We enjoyed our meetup in Tel Aviv, hosted by David Katz. 26 people showed up, about 9 of whom I knew from LessWrong. We had some lightning talks and conversion. Good energies, lots of fun.
Kyiv meetup on August 11th went ok, so yesterday we had another one, and it was fine, too… I rather suspect we shall have a third one, in two weeks. These meetup things just keep happening.
This time we discussed “The Selfish Gene” (in the most general terms), which swalllowed 2.5 hours to everybody’s surprise. Then five Fermi Questions with tea (next time we shall have a competition, but yesterday we were just too tired.) People brought candy and chocolate and apple juice. There were seven of us again, but two people were new (and I was the mod and failed to have them introduce themselves beyond “My name is”.) Next time, I will speak about the very basics of genetics (I hope someday to reach MADS-box genes) and there is interest in having a talk by a real, imported biotechnologist / bioinformaticist / … later on.
My secret plan on having them buy at least one book (which would endear us to my boss, who is neutral to the meetings but might wake up one day) failed again. People are just unused to reading from paper. Still, one of them picked Wilson’s “Letters to a young scientist” from our communal library of several volumes; I will add more old-ish children’s novels, which they would have harder time of looking for on-line.
We’re a kind of undifferentiated LW/SSC crowd, so I don’t know where we will go from here, with 1 translator, 1 botanist and 5 or more programmers, and my aim so far is to keep them want to meet at all.
Our first digital meetup on Throne went nicely with about 13 people discussing interesting topics like our backgrounds, the EA movement, popular web frameworks, Elon Musk, dating, and, because this is an internet meetup, memes and random videos.
The time flew by since everyone was engaged and posting, with lots of upvotes to go around, and our real-time threading supported multiple concurrent conversations. It was a lot of fun! Thanks to everyone who attended, and thanks to Scott for linking to us!
If you’re interested in the next digital meetup (we are considering having another), check the link above.
I went to the Wien (Vienna, Austria) rationalist and effective altruism (EA) group meetup on 2018-08-18. It was great.
I traveled by railway from Budapest (a convenient connection). I combined the journey with a full day in the Kunsthistorisches Museum the next day, sleeping the night in a hotel in Wien. I was planning to return to the museum anyway, and this combination pushed me over the edge to do it now. In retrospect, this was the ideal weekend for this, because it’s probably the last hot weekend of the summer, and the museum is cool.
The meeting itself was mostly outdoors, walking around Wien half of the time. There were about 18 people at the start of the meeting and about 9 at the end. The group waited at the announced starting place for first 40 minutes for late arrivals (such as me). There wasn’t much chance for anyone arriving after that to find us, because there was no announced contact phone number, so only one person joined us after we left the starting point. We first sat in a nice park for a while (most of our group tried the long slide on the children’s playground, some ate snacks). That park was the scene for the only talk scheduled for this meeting: a talk about possible social dangers on the rationalist community. Apparently the Wien rationalist group has been active for about six years, and had much more talks earlier, some based on Eliezer Yudkowski’s “Sequences”, but the topics sort of ran dry now.
We walked a lot and settled for more than an hour in a restaurant to eat dinner. This was the part I was a bit afraid in advance, since Moses mentioned a “vegan restaurant” in the email, and I hate vegan main courses, but it turned out to be a completely ordinary chinese restaurant with some vegan options on the menu. I ate the special chicken and rice, which was quite popular: IIRC 5 out of the 11 of us ordered that meal. We then walked some more in the inner city, and only stopped at two ice cream places: a vegan one and a non-vegan one. I bought ice cream in the vegan shop, which was a mistake, because the balls were full of air because of the lack of dairy. I tried to follow where we walked, but I’m not familiar enough with Wien, and it’s hard to tell directions after sundown, so I was very surprised when we didn’t end up at Westbanhof. I asked how this was possible, given that we walked most of the way through Mariahilfer Straße (a main avenue of Wien) and started from the East of the Donaukanal, but it turns out we went around the length of Mariahilfer Straße, completely avoiding it (IIRC from the south) until somewhere close to Westbanhof, and we traversed Mariahilfer Straße towards the east. I left the group around 21:00 near Stephansplatz, which means I spent over 5.5 hours with the group.
Besides the talk, we chatted about various topics, usually in smaller discussion groups. Most of these discussions were in English language, but some were in German, which only half of the group spoke. A few topics I recall are: the practical experience from raising two kids told by one person; the practical plans of starting a new school for kids by another person; politics and how it is apparently less polarized in current Austria; what Slate Star Codex was (explained to one or two EA people who hadn’t seen it); why Windows sucks and specific software recommendations to work that around. There was a lot more but I can’t recall them. I was the only one wearing a nametag, but at least one person gave away printed business cards.
San Antonio meetup had 0 attendees.
One person emailed me to say that they were interested in attending but weren’t able to that weekend. They were also busy this weekend (as am I) due to an anime festival. I’ll probably try to pick things back up next weekend and also invite all the old LW meetup crowd to fill the place up.
Boston meetup went well. There was a bit of logistic trouble — the person who originally set up the meetup and the most common organizer were both out of town, so another person and I jointly took it over. The outside meeting location had to be moved at the last minute because of rain, I think it would have been helpful to have a facebook event as a central place to announce such changes. The actual meetup went super smoothly, and I think everyone even showed up at the right place on their first try. I’d guess 30 people in attendance, though I am not confident about the number.
Ottawa
We had 4 meetups that were publicized on SSC last month, and they were all awesome!
We’ve been holding weekly meetups since January with a rotating membership and expected attendance of 6.
Our first SSC meetup had 12 attendees. About 4 new attendees have come to followup events. The meetup was held in a cafe that has since asked up to book their rooms in future, as they have maximum occupancy of ~30. Our pre-arranged discussion topic was modus ponens.
Second event was a co-opting of the other Ottawa group that said they were going to run an SSC meetup. 3 Ottawa regulars, 2 new members from the first SSC event, and 1 additional new SSC reader attended. Good discussion about teaching from a top-down or bottom-up style and mentorship in the context of the Eternal September.
Third event was the day after the second event, and was in the park across the street from the first event’s cafe. Attendance was 8 with 2 new SSC readers attending. I tried to centre the discussion on activities we might do other than discussion. People had ideas for how to vary the meetup format. 🙂
Fourth event was a going away party for two of our members held in a private residence. Attendance was 10, with one new face. Initial discussion was around national identity and the value of international travel. We decided that the quintessential Canadian experience is beer and bbq. We also had a good time with the Wits and Wagers board game. Discussion went late into the night.
If you’re in Ottawa, check the Facebook group for future events. We’re going to try to be weekly on Friday evenings for the foreseeable future.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1756221964428105/
PS. Big thanks to Claire for all of the reminders to actually do the thing. 🙂
Report from Prague:
13 people met. Only 4 of them attended some event in the local rationalist/ea community before. We spent about 4 hours together. After 2 hours we split into two groups of 6 and then regrouped after while. Compared to usual rationality meetups here:
1) discussion was often about politics
2) about 75% of participants were psychonauts (without knowing each other previously).
3) I think the quality of the discussion was better than usual. People were more considerate to quiet people.
4) everybody was male (usually there is about 25% of girls).
Future meetups will be under name rationality meetups. Ie together with LW an EA people.
I made it to the Edinburgh meetup, as I happened to be visiting there for the first time on that weekend. I was quite enthusiastic about going but worried that not many people would show up. I was pleasantly surprised at the result — we had around 8 people and lively discussion that continued for a few hours. There was no particular structure to the event beyond meeting in a bar (no nametags or introductions, for instance), but overall it exceeded my expectations and I was sorry to have to tell everyone I wouldn’t be attending another one since I don’t live in Scotland.
I went to two meetups: Tübingen (Germany), and Cambridge (England).
I enjoyed both. For some reason the Tübingen one was mostly in English, with everybody’s English being better than my German. There was pretty much no culture war discussion present in either meetup, which was also a bit of a surprise for me (although perhaps I spend too much time in the subreddit).
The level of “Let me show you how smart I am” was also pleasantly low for the most part. I mostly felt comfortable about asking questions about topics which I was ignorant in but which had been presented as common knowledge.
One guy in Cambridge was clearly inserting himself into conversations too much, but I put that down to neuroatypicality; he was friendly and intelligent, just probably wasn’t reading the social cues very well. I’m sure someone will provide a more accurate estimate later; I think there were about 15 or so people at the Cambridge meetup.
Considering how many people turned up in Tübingen, I should have organised something in Stuttgart, where I live. Perhaps next year.
SSC/LW in Miami, FL
-First meetup was in April 2017.
-Monthly meetups began in August 2017. It’s been normal for us to have 3-4 people show up. There are 3 people who consistently come out each month.
-After the recent SSC blog post about local meetups, the number of members in our Facebook group increased a lot (we’re now up to 23 people). Here’s a quick breakdown:
April 2017 – May 2017: 8 people joined through this period
December 2017: 1 new member
April 2018: 2 new members
May 2018: 1 new member
Within the last month: 11 new members
-Occasionally advertising local meetups through SSC blog posts seems to be incredibly helpful.
-Most recent meetup was on August 11th and 5 people were there. Meetup was (as usual) unstructured and discussion topics varied based on what people wanted to talk about. The whole thing lasted about 2.5 hours.
-Next meetup is scheduled for September 8th.
I participated in a Meetup in Zurich and enjoyed it a lot. Due to bad weather we met in a cafe and we were around 10 people. We had some interesting and very varied discussions (about the local EA community, functional programming, fish, etc) and have agreed to try establishing a schedule of one meetup every 3 months.
London UK: we had ~30 people, with a big loud room and a small quiet room. Perhaps roughly evenly split between “people I knew”, “people I vaguely knew” and “people I didn’t know”. I think I spent most of my time in the quiet room, so I don’t really know what was happening in the loud room, but I get the impression that a lot of people enjoyed themselves immensely. At least three of the first-time attendees came back to our regular meetup two weeks later.
Helsinki went well, peak attendance was 19+-2, or triple the normal.
Being a bar, it was a bit noisy, but taking over two tables instead of the regular one was very helpful for some conversation options.
Madison meetup went well. 15-20 people showed up, which was something of a surprise since only about 10 even seemed to express interest beforehand. Enough people seemed interested in more regular meetups that I’m trying to plan another for September.
Event link
We just had the Pittsburgh meetup today (9/15) and it went well! 10 people attended for part or all of it; I’ll probably be willing to host future ones every couple months.
First comment for discussing adversarial collaboration contest.
So the 4 finished adversarial collaborations are:
JohnBuridan + ChristianFlannery: about Islam and liberal democracy
TracingWoodgrains + MichaelP: about K12 education
flame7926 + a reader: “Should transgender children transition?”
Mark + Mark (don’t know their subject)
I was lucky to have a good adversary-collaborator like flame7926 – it seems the probability to be abandoned by one’s adversary is really big (it happened also to me, the first time).
Off topic, of course I feel honored to be mentioned for the first time at “comment of the week with my comment about the magic “dawa” that made the Congolese rebels [feel] invulnerable (but unfortunately only before the battle).
Mark + Mark = Vaccine policy
I thought it was a good exercise. In addition to forcing me to review the best arguments of the other side, it also forced me to defend my own side much more strongly than I think I otherwise might among those who a priori agree with me.
I suspect the people who dropped out fall into one of two categories:
1. One side overwhelmingly had all of the peer-reviewed scientific literature behind it, such that the other side had to either rely on fact-free arguments or concede publicly (such that early withdrawal to save face was the preferred response)
2. After a contentious back-and-forth neither side could agree on common language; likely reflecting significant uncertainty in the scientific literature about the subject.
I’d be interested to know, from those who collaborated adversarially but did not successfully produce a finished product, what stopped you? 1. Sudden drop-off of communication after sending out a bunch of articles? 2. You gave up because the ‘collaboration’ element just wasn’t there? 3. Deadline issues, such that you didn’t get close enough to turn it in?
I suspect both of those categories exist, but are relatively small in size compared to the inevitable “flaked for non-subject-matter-related reasons when they got busy/lazy/distracted and it was just a random thing on the internet” demographic.
I agree that this was probably the reason many people dropped out, though I thought the potential prize money would be an additional incentive to a fair number of people.
Unless the sample size is too small, I assume all of the above were motivations behind completion or not of the collaborations. My interest is in two questions:
1. What are the proportions in each category? (Perhaps “I got too busy” was the majority issue, but was it majority to the tune of 40%, or was it majority to the tune of 80%?) This could give a better understanding of how to better design such a contest in the future. It could also answer the question about how successful this enterprise was. If most people just didn’t finish because of logistical concerns, then future contests might consider ways to boost participant involvement. If many collaborations were abandoned due to an ultimate realization of one-sided support these could be counted in the ‘success’ column – or at least future collaborations could safeguard against generation of one-sided collaborations that will ultimately go nowhere. (No “math is always useless – no it isn’t” collaborations.)
2. Which specific collaborations were abandoned unilaterally, with suspicions about strength of the counter argument? This could tell us something about which collaborations were too difficult or which ones were so one-sided that the counterpoint was unsustainable.
I dropped out because of pressing family matters.
I´m really looking forward to reading the results of the K12 one, which was the one I suddenly left.