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 – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. Comment of the week is Stefferi on the circumstances leading to the rise of Hitler. See also idontknow: “The strongest defense against extreme right wingers is a moderate right wing party that is vigorous.”
2. Please vote for your favorite adversarial collaboration from the last week. The entries were:
a. Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students?
b. Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible?
c. Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory?
d. Should Transgender Children Transition?
After some discussion with the contestants, the winner of the popular vote will get a $500 prize, and the winner of my vote will get a second $500 prize; these may or may not be the same entry. After you’ve read all the entries, you can vote here.
3. I would like contestants to email me their experience participating in the contest. There is no particular structure or prompt I want, but here are some questions (adopted from a list sent by John Buridan) to get you started:
– What were your initial positions?
– How much did your positions shift and in what ways?
– How much debate and argument was there during the course of the work?
– How did you resolve it?
– Is the conclusion closer to one or the other person’s original position?
– What advice would you give future adversarial collaborators?
I’m trying to locate a quote. It was in a conversation about good- and bad-faith argument, maybe related to the recent adversarial collaborations, and went something like “you’re not obligated to continue to engage with someone who refuses to listen to arguments and keeps trying to hurt you.”
The phrasing isn’t right (or at least Google can’t find it), and I don’t remember who said it. It might have been here on SSC, or Less Wrong, or it might have been on one of several vaguely adjacent blogs. Compass Rose and Don’t Worry about the Vase are both in my feed, so it could have been those or anything linked from those, too.
Does it ring a bell for anyone?
I’m curious if anyone has thoughts on the quality of the Georgetown Study that estimated the number of Puerto Rican deaths due to Hurricane Maria. Death certificates seemed to attribute less than 100 deaths as due to the hurricane (though the study critiques the death certificate process), while the study used modeling to come up with an estimate of 2,975 excess deaths due to the hurricane. Were the study’s model assumptions reasonable?
It doesn’t matter. It’s harmful to the President, therefore everyone’s opinion of it must be based solely on their factional and ideological affiliations. Politics is the mind-killer, truth is irrelevant, time is a flat circle.
(Someday I should watch True Detective if I’m going to keep referencing it.)
I haven’t looked at it closely enough to have an opinion on whether it’s right, but it’s worth noting that their figure is for excess mortality, which isn’t what people usually think of as “being killed by.” U.S. death rates are substantially higher in the winter months than in the summer months, but it would seem odd to claim that cold kills nearly a million Americans a year.
I think this is one of the few cases where excess-mortality might actually be the right methodology, or at least not a priori wrong – the thesis is basically ‘we know exactly the cause [giant hurricane; it was in all the papers], but not exactly the effects [all of Puerto Rico becomes non-functional in complex and interwoven ways].’ If there just so happens to be a significant spike in all-cause mortality right after a very clear event we’d expect to produce a lot of different negative outcomes, attributing the spike to the event isn’t nuts.
That said, the reporting on this whole kerfuffle has definitely not been about the intricacies of epidemiological etiology.
Just try to say that three times fast.
“I am the very model of an epidemiologist” scans pretty well.
Per Nornagest’s comment (my phone won’t let me reply directly) – I’ve actually done something along those lines, this was written my first week of MPH courses. Copy-pasted on phone, so formatting is probably weird.
I am the very model of a scientist with evidence,
I give the facts and figures every bit of their due precedence,
I know the proper tests to run, I know to check significance
From Student’s t to old Tukey I use them all with confidence.
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters epidemical
I understand the methods both descriptive and inferential
Concerning world infections I am able to assess the news…
I’m bothered by poor research and by phrases which are overused.
I’m very good at making use of graphs to show what’s right and wrong
I’m qualified to shorten facts to make debates a bit less long
In short, when people ask me for a simple answer I’m incredulous,
For I am the very model of a scientist with evidence.
For full effect you have to come up with a parody of the third verse as well.
That’s going in my bookmarks.
Right. If you have the power go out for several months, and that leads to extra deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, I think we should count those deaths as part of the consequences of the hurricane.
Excess mortality is an interesting number, but I think there is a distinction between “killed by” and “part of the consequences of.” Would you say that a million Americans a year are killed by winter?
In both cases, much of the excess mortality is due to indirect effects. Someone in poor health dies now instead of six months later because he had to go out in the cold and wet. Traffic accident rates go up, but any particular traffic accident might have happened anyway. Someone commits a crime he might not have committed if hadn’t been stressed, or short of money, or … because of the cold or the hurricane.
I’m in London now. Any ideas of cool things to do? I’ve already visited Hyde Park and the Science Museum.
I enjoyed the Natural History museum on my last visit. I used to highly recommend the Imperial War Museum, but found that after its recent revamp that it no longer scratched the correct itch. I think the Greenwich observatory was worth the visit, and you can get to it by going up the Thames on a river taxi. My father raves about the Victoria and Albert museum, but I’ve never gone myself.
I loved the British Museum and the RAF Museum when I was there. The Tower of London (and Tower Bridge nearby) was also fun, and one of my friends raves about the Victoria and Albert Museum.
If you have a spare day, you could also go out to Windsor Castle; that was great.
The National Gallery is great. Westminster Abbey too. The British Museum is great. The Tower of London is decent.
The RAF museum is nice, although a little further away (30 mins by Tube/metro from the city center).
All the touristy things to do in London are actually really good (except for Madam Toussaud’s, which I never understood), but definitely do the British Museum
For more off the beaten trail things, if you’re a fan of brutalist architecture the Barbican Centre is good, also the location of the Museum of London. The Tate Modern is in a cool building with a nice view, a long visit if you like modern art but a quick fruitful visit even if you don’t. There’s always a large installation in the central space that’s worth seeing. If you’re jet lagged enough to be awake at odd hours, Smithfield market is a meat market serving the restaurant industry open in the very early morning.
The room in the British Museum that contains the Sutton Hoo treasure is the best collection of migration period jewelry I’ve ever seen, and it’s gorgeous stuff.
The Museum of London is fun in part because it is closer to “daily living” historical objects than most museums.
I used to enjoy the early morning London street markets, which tended to be antiques and lots of other things. But that was a long time ago and I don’t know if they are still there or, if so, would interest you.
John Soane’s Museum is interesting because he was basically a rich, educated Georgian-era hoarder. Denis Severs’ House is also a great glimpse into life across the last 300 years. The British Museum is always incredibly, exhaustingly crowded. Ditto for the National Gallery. The Tate Modern is less crowded and worth a visit.
Honestly, one of the things I enjoyed the most was downloading a Rick Steves audio walking tour and simply wandering around the recommended route taking in some of the sights and hearing a bit of historical context.
London is the home of immersive theatre. When I was there last I did a Sherlock Holmes experience which was very intense. Don’t think that one is running any more, but check these out:
Immersive Theatre London
HMS Belfast is in London. I haven’t been, but I’ve rarely seen museum ships of that prominence be bad. If it is, let me know.
From “Is California a Good Role Model?“, a recent Thomas Edsall essay in The New York Times that seems almost tailor made for my obsessions of housing prices and that the current left/right labels don’t fit their historic meanings:
and I’m curious what SSC’ers think of it.
I’ll comment only on the Generation X aspects: Generation X did not “sit politics out”, nor will Generation X be taking the reigns from the Baby Boomers. Generation X is simply too small to matter. And knows it.
Looks like there’s a new contender for the America of America. Compared to other rich countries the best of the US is really awesome but the worst of the US is some of the worst around. The same seems to be true for California with respect to the rest of the US, at least in economic terms.
It’s odd and interesting that California has taken a left-wing path to get there, though.
Since when did the right discount economic growth?
I think the right’s position vis-a-vis economic growth in California is that it has occurred in spite of, not because of, progressive policies, and that with a freer market, it would have grown even faster.
Interesting. The Edsall essay seems plausible as a free standing essay, without checking on critical reactions and other people’s opinions.
One thing missing from discussion of politics as it relates to housing costs is those older Californians who’ve retired in place, having bought houses well before prices became stratospheric, with their real estate tax burden set based on their original purchase price. I don’t know how large that group is currently, or what their class background looked like before retirement. But when I first moved into this area 20 years ago, it had a lot of retired working class people in that category.
I didn’t read the other essay. I looked at the two diagrams at the start, and decided it was probably basically wrong, and not especially new either. (It seems to equate right=religious; left=irreligious, and make that its central message. That’s been claimed for decades, generally by right wing people whose religious expression centered on punishing “bad” people, with a side order of despising critical thinking, fact checking, etc. The “Moral Majority” would be an early example.)
Going back to Edsall though – yes, that’s California. But if the other piece is remotely correct, then there’s a need to discuss the proportion of immigrants who aren’t Christian, and don’t come from cultures with a Christian default. The most rabid atheist I know comes from India, and his go-to examples of religious absurdity cite the Hindu nationalist party … unlike home-grown American atheists. In my part of California, it’s likely that somewhere around 1/3 of the techies or their parents come from non-Christian countries. That’s going to have a big influence on the kind of Christian who feels persecuted when their religious holidays aren’t primary; I suspect a lot of them have moved to other parts of the US in consequence. (Meanwhile, I happily celebrate whatever my coworkers consider to be a good excuse for a party ;-))
This would be less true in Hollywood, or in non-urban areas – but it seems all agree that the Democrats are an urban coalition. So how much of their popularity in California comes from lots of people not being Christian, and not expecting their neighbours to be Christian either?
In my immediate neighborhood only the few of us with grey hair (who mostly are of working class backgrounds) mow their own lawn, the younger homeowners (who mostly work in “Tech” or for the University) have Spanish speaking workers mow their lawns for them.
There’s a definite age and class divide.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about whether or not Muslims (both in the West, or elsewhere) differ greatly from the general population in Western countries on any key cultural issues. I seem to recall there being discussion of these issues by the likes of Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, but having looked at the data, I find myself reluctant to draw strong conclusions from this.
I’m aware of the Gallup “Coexist” poll from 2009 which supports the claim that Muslims differ from the general public on their acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and sex out of wedlock. I’m also aware of the Pew poll from 2013 regarding some troubling statistics on killing apostates (and other issues).
Yet, I cannot seem to locate any trustworthy polling data since 2013. I can imagine that the numbers on homosexuality have shifted, for example, to be more accepting; this has been the trend in the Western world in general. And I would appreciate any polling data that corroborates or contradicts the 2013 Pew results.
Does anyone have any links to relevant data? I would rather go to the source (and not read news articles about the data).
I seem to recall a methological problem with these polls is that in order to find “Muslims”, they mostly questioned people exiting mosques after prayer — which would tend to skew the population interrogated toward more conservative Muslims and not be representative of the community as a whole.
@ Machine Interface
For the Gallup poll, I don’t see evidence of this. Their methodology page states this wrt the data collection on British and German Muslims:
The French data was disappointingly vague. I will get back to the Pew data later today and see if what you claim is true.
* Undefined terminology in the survey, but appears to be an established algorithm for sampling. From Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts, by Harkness et al., page 540 (found online).
** RDD = random digital dial
Suppose that instead of comparing contemporary Americans to contemporary Muslims, you compared contemporary Americans to Americans c. 1950. I expect you would find that the two groups differed on those issues, perhaps by as much as modern Muslims differ from modern Americans. Which suggests that such attitudes may not be very stable over time.
For Americans, at least.
Do we have any particular reason to believe cultural attitudes among Muslims have also shifted significantly in the last 50 years?
Saudi Arabia doesn’t seem to have changed its opinions on homosexuality to the same extent the US has…
Saudi Arabia has a significantly different political apparatus which among other things enforces a particular conservative brand of Islam on its citizens because that philosophy is favored by the ruling family. Tunisia and Lebanon are probably better places to check, based on the discussion in the ACC entry.
“Muslims” and “citizens of [repressive Muslim-majority nation]” are not populations that you can freely generalize between.
@ DavidFriedman
Yes, attitudes on these issues may change greatly over short periods of time within a group. But comparing Americans as you propose may not be generalizable since the degree to which secularism plays a role in revising attitudes is probably significant.
There appears to be a general argument floating out there that a large majority of Muslims possess cultural values which are incompatible with American society, and that this should be a consideration in immigration policy.
In the past, I’ve found this argument plausible. But now looking into the polling data, I’m disappointed to find the supporting data (that I can locate) looks squishy.
I’d be interested in any non-partisan polling data on (1) to what extent does this argument rest on sound data? And (2) do Muslims that hold such views develop more tolerant attitudes when they immigrate to the US?*
* I used Western countries/society before. That seems too broad in an already very broad question.
What does “incompatible” mean here, and to what extent are Hasidic Judaism or Sedevacantism incompatible with American society?
You’re going to miss a lot if you don’t break this down by country. I’d predict quite a gap between Muslims in North America and Muslims in Europe, with some variation from place to place in Europe too. One sees discussions of the US where numbers are taken from European polling, or vice versa, which is deceptive.
@ dndnrsn
Yes, I’d be happy with polling data that makes such distinctions (the polling data I mentioned does break things down by country in many cases).
The main challenge is finding additional polling data that corroborates or disputes what I’ve already found. I’m puzzled as to why Gallup and Pew have not done any followup studies, or, if they have, why I can’t locate those materials easily. Hence the posting asking for help.
http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
Tide detergent is being stolen. A lot.
It gets sold back to retail stores who are low on Tide for some reason.
Article also has history of Tide detergent and why people are loyal to it.
Tide detergent, baby formula, and a few other such items form an informal black market currency set in many poorer areas of the country, as I understand it.
Are they actually currency? Are they used for trade for small transactions?
The linked article claims Tide is directly tradable for drugs at a better exchange rate than Tide -> cash -> drugs. It doesn’t say anything about other transactions.
This seems implausible as hell. Dollars can be used to buy anything for sale at normal stores and prices. What would cause a drug dealer to prefer Tide to dollars?
It must be that Tide is easier to launder.
“He was sent to prison for detergent laundering.”
“I know the perfect place for him, Robin.”
“Where’s that Batman?”
“In the Prison laundromat!”
*BIFF!*
“Well, looks like the Tides turning now!”
Tide is a durable dry good which we have no reason to expect to lose value or usefulness. It is also probably relatively easy to steal, but not so easy that the market would get flooded with it (you can’t carry much of it at a time). It isn’t tracked in a database, unlike many modern high-value items. And there aren’t laws against having a lot of it around, at least not yet, whereas money can get you in trouble.
The weight and volume to dollar ratio looks like shit to me, though.
Yeah, whiskey and cigarettes meet all the other criteria you list, while also being much better on this dimension…
Perhaps Gillette razor blades? Although stores in low-income areas tend to secure those things as if they were solid gold.
So you’re saying I can arbitrage cash -> tide -> drugs -> cash?
Maybe, but at five bucks of arbitrage per Tide bottle, you’re not going to make a good living doing it unless you can get your drug dealer to buy Tide by the truckload.
You’re also going to need to source your Tide from the people stealing it, not the stores themselves. The dealers only take the Tide because they can fence it back to the stores for a profit. So yeah, you could, and someone probably is, just not at the level necessary to bring the prices into alignment.
I’ve also heard that Tide is used as black market currency, but I suspect all such reports trace back to Nancy’s 2013 article (which is probably based on this 2012 article). Do you have some other source?
Snopes is skeptical that there is even was a crime wave, but even if we believe everything in the articles, the use as currency might be limited to just a few places, like DC and Portland.
I don’t even remember my source, it has been a few years, so I can’t say if it is different.
It wouldn’t surprise me, exactly, except that other items seem more useful as currency.
Since the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, there is a demand for foreign baby formula in China. Foreign baby formula manufacturers have opened additional production plants for this demand, but there are Chinese who do not trust the baby formula that is officially imported into China. So there are both grey market exporters who buy baby formula in German stores, even providing proof that the specific box was bought in Germany by taking a photo in the store of the box and writing the child’s name on it. There are also professional criminals that specialize in stealing baby formula, who in the store disguise as middle class couples and who plan their thefts all over Germany.
The same happens in The Netherlands.
Weird mathy physics question:
Suppose you have an infinite number of positively charged balls distributed evenly throughout an infinite plane.
Would they spread out, Hilbert’s Grand Hotel-like, pushed apart by their repulsive charges?
Or would they remain stationary, each locked in place by its neighbors?
ETA: And if they remain stationary, would a perturbation cause them to spread out instead?
Is infinity expanding or is it a stable infinity? Assuming the latter, I would say locked in place.
Also, you have a weird sex life.
I guess that is the question?
My intuitions of what happens at a system level – expansion – conflict with what happens at a specific object level – stability.
With relativity, we might be able to resolve the tension between the two intuitions by saying each object stays still, and relative to each ball everything else is moving away from it. But that sort of feels like a cop-out.
Unless you’re taking General Relativity into consideration there’s no difference. An infinite plane is an infinite plane.
If you are considering General Relativity, uh, I don’t know. There’s no gravity in 2+1D, IIRC, so I guess energy densities that tend towards infinity aren’t necessarily a problem, but I’m not at all sure whether there would be any valid solutions or not.
My intuition is that it would remain stationary. For one of the balls to start moving, it would need an imbalance of forces acting on it. But if it truly is an infinite number of balls (of equal positive charge) equally spaced, then for any given ball, it’s facing the exact same set of forces from every direction, because for every ball that’s pushing it in one direction, there’s one from the exact opposite direction pushing it with the exact same magnitude.
That is my intuition examining each ball individually.
Examining the system as a whole, it is under considerable pressure to expand. I just don’t have an intuition of what that means. We could substitute in an infinite 3d space full of pressurized gas – would that spread out? Maybe? That seems like part of the description of the big bang.
And examining the forces exerted -outward- by each ball, relativistically, everything else should be moving away.
I’m pretty sure the force balancing method with an answer of “no motion” is correct. I think your intuition clash occurs because of how unstable the whole set up seems. Poke one ball, and everything is probably going to go straight to hell.
Remove one ball and almost nothing happens (all the balls feel a force towards the center, but no ball can take that center position due to symmetry). Double the charge of one ball and it all goes BOOM… but what happens when you stop the doubling? My intuition is that it should return to the initial state (assuming there’s no momentum — I think if there’s momentum and elastic collisions, the system will oscillate).
Removing momentum is removing half the fun. Although we may just run straight into mathematical blow ups if we try to solve the system.
A periodic oscillation would be a really surprising outcome of a perturbation to me. I would expect something more like chaotic behavior. Or just some sort of never-ending run off to infinity.
Infinity is usually counter-intuitive, but what’s relevant here is not really the infinite-ness of the plane, it’s the fact that there’s no edge. So, an equivalent but more intuitive scenario would be to imagine a finite number of point charges equally distributed on the 2D surface of a sphere. (Of course you’d need to ignore forces in the radial direction, and just look at how the charges move on the two dimensions of the sphere’s surface)
In that scenario, it’s obvious that the charges will remain stationary, even when they’re under pressure to expand, because for any two charges to get further apart (relieving the pressure they feel) will push some other charges closer together. And if you change the expanding force to a contracting one, this is precisely what’s going on in an inflated balloon: each 1cm-by-1cm piece of the balloon is trying to contract, it wants to be smaller than 1 square cm, but can’t contract without further stretching some other 1cm-by-1cm part of the balloon to occupy even more than 1 square cm.
I don’t think they can stay spreading out. One aspect of the infinite Hotel is that the forces to move are always unilateral – as in it’s not like they can refuse to move if too many people complain.
However, for charges, the closer it is to other similar charges, the stronger the force – and it’s not like they have to all move outward to exert this force.
So there might be some kind of wobbling/wave like action, but unlikely an “expansion” effect.
EDIT: Actually, there could be a gradual expansion affect as the end result of greater spaced balls is lower than the initial. This though would still cause some back and forth (like a trampoline that gradually becomes more deformed). The question would be then if this converges or diverges.
Given that any expansion results in the release of potential energy as kinetic energy, if there is any expansion, I think it would become quite divergent pretty quickly.
I’m voting for stability.
The infinite plane is dotted with an infinite number of spheres, and I think they both have the same sort of infinity. There’s no extra room for expansion.
Expands, for the usual physicist definition of infinity, which is (hand-wavingly) “what happens in the limit as the system gets very large.”
If you consider a solid sphere of charges then every charge in it feels a force on it proportional to its distance from the center so the distance between adjacent charged particles expands uniformly with speed determined solely by the charge, spacing, and the mass of the particles. The rate at which these particles separate from their neighbors is independent of the size of the sphere; let the size of the sphere grow without limit and the same argument applies. (Ignoring magnetism, relativity, etc.)
You can easily make a set up that is stationary and the charges are fixed on a lattice. Each repulsive force perfectly balanced by an opposite repulsive force.
But my vague memory is that in the finite case, there are no dynamically stable electrostatic configurations. My intuition is that the same thing is probably true for the infinite case. So I think they should do… something if you perturb them.
Rather than consider an infinity of charges, you may want to consider charges living on a toroidal space. Then you could simulate something like your set up. With the potential to try taking a limit to infinity by taking the size of the space to infinity. If you’re interested, I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at simulating that.
There would be a negative pressure, e.g. increasing the total volume of the system would lower the energy. So it would expand, assuming the electrostatic force counterbalanced the gravitational force. This is very similar to the situation with dark energy (though people think the energy density of dark energy would be constant, while that of a field of charged objects would decrease with volume). Counterintuitively, this does not depend on there being space for the universe to expand into; it is possible for every point to move further away from every other point, called a metric expansion.
As to the stability, sufficiently cold lattices of like charged particles are stable, the jargon is coulomb crystal. At lower density/higher temperature/lower charge per particle they will behave as a liquid, and then a gas.
That sounds vaguely like “There is a conversion factor between space and energy”, given that the energy available decreases, while the space increases.
(My objections to this, based on vacuum energy meaning this violates conservation, falter somewhat as I reacquaint myself with zero point energy, and it appears energy conservation laws may not apply anyways. Groan. Another rabbit hole to go down.)
Energy conservation definitely doesn’t apply at cosmological scales (so many lies I’ve told to undergraduates), with the hand wavey explanation of energy conservation is equivalent to time translation invariance, and we know the universe isn’t time translation invariant. Dark energy violates energy conservation, and in more or less the same way.
I don’t think this is a fair sort of thing to say about a hypothetical problem like this. It is possible for every point in a volume of space to get farther away from each other, if that volume is expanding, but there’s no reason to assume the infinite 2D plane described in the problem can or would expand. It’s a made-up thing for a homework problem that cannot exist in the real world; it behaves however the homework problem says it behaves.
The space would expand if it were described by the physics that we know in our universe, if general relativity holds true. But if it were a classical system, then I guess it comes down to how you treat the infinities in the problem.
The analogy to the Hilbert Hotel (and the form of the question), seems to imply that expansion should be possible as long as the type of infinity doesn’t change, where the process of mapping old room numbers to new room numbers is replaced by mapping old sphere coordinates to new coordinates (which seems a lot like a metric expansion). Since such a mapping exists, and it would result in lower energy, it seems like it would happen. But the mechanics are a bit uncertain, because there’s not a well defined theory of how this space works.
I think in context we can safely assume that the OP meant either Euclidean space or Minkowski space. At least, I hope so: I don’t have a clue what exactly would happen in GR. We’d need to actually do the math.
Wouldn’t that depend on how massive the balls are? I find it hard to think about an infinite 2D plane in the first place.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the phrase “evenly distributed” is inherently ambiguous when discussing an infinite number of things on an infinite plane, in the same sense that “simultaneously” is an ambiguous thing to say in a question about relativity. For all we know, every ball is already infinitely far from its nearest neighbor…
Short version, I am trying to figure out if “metric expansion” is equivalent to Hilbert Hotel expansion. Or rather, if Hilbert Hotel expansion is something that can replace metric expansion at cosmological constant scales.
The version of my crackpot theory I had when I was 15ish involved space being constantly created and destroyed. I abandoned that as unnecessary a while back; a simple density distribution works.
But I am starting to try to formalize things at this point, and the difference might matter. My crackpot theory has no room for metric expansion (at least the unbounded sort, it has lots of bounded expansion and compression, as it is basically relativistic); I can probably fit “Space can be created and destroyed” back in under certain fringe cases of high spacial distortion, however. But it is all irrelevant if Hilbert Hotel expansion works perfectly fine, so that is my preferred solution.
I had hoped somebody would have a clever mathematical trick to say what would happen; it appears that the infinities involved break everything, and I don’t know how to correctly specify the problem framework.
It turned into a fun discussion, though, and I enjoyed the responses.
Having thought on it a little more since writing that response, I am thinking now there isn’t actually a difference between metric expansion and Hilbert Hotel expansion, as far as relativity goes. I keep making the mistake of confusing coordinates with space; relativity shouldn’t distinguish between “There is now more space between everything because new space was created” and “There is now more space between everything because everything moved apart”, I don’t think, since it doesn’t care where the space “came from”.
I don’t know what “Hilbert Hotel expansion” means. Hilbert’s Hotel is a counting trick, a way of comparing different infinite numbers to each other, it’s not a physical process that would happen.
Metric expansion definitely does happen, but it is not really related to infinity, and furthermore I don’t think it’s related to your original question. I think that what you really want to know is whether the point charges you described would drift apart just due to the electrostatic charges; metric expansion of space, if it happens, will make everything in it drift away from everything else, regardless of how they’re arranged or whether they hold a charge or whatever.
dick –
Hilbert Hotek expansion would be indistinguishable from metric expansion – after some period of time, everything would look identical, in that everything is further apart.
The difference is that Hilbert Hotel expansion only requires the particles interact with one another in order to get this result; metric expansion requires interaction with, well, the metric. It requires that the force between the particles also acts on the coordinate system.
Hilbert Hotel expansion is unbounded; the particles will continue spreading out forever in that case.
Metric expansion can be bounded or unbounded. My crackpot model assumes bounded metric expansion, and specifically assumes that the metric is (mostly) conserved. (So gravity implies the cosmological constant; denser space here requires thinner space there.). Zort’s other comment reminded me that energy and metric expansion are freely convertible, however – my crackpot model might already be doing this, I cannot figure out the math – which renders the exercise largely moot, as Hilbert Hotel expansion becomes equivalent to metric expansion.
I don’t think you’ve quite got a handle on this. Hilbert Hotel expansion is a thought experiment about the techniques you might use if you chose to move things – it’s not a mechanism by which things move. For it to take place, you would have to physically pick up ball N and put it in slot N+1 (or 2N, or N^2, or whatever). Are you using “Hilbert Hotel expansion” as shorthand for something? If so it might be instructive to try to define that thing clearly.
Metric expansion, while the balls don’t technically move, is a literal physical process by which they do get farther apart. It’s not a thought experiment, we can observe it happening to stars. But as I said, I don’t think it’s the answer you’re looking for. You asked, “Suppose you have an infinite number of positively charged balls distributed evenly throughout an infinite plane. Would they spread out, Hilbert’s Grand Hotel-like, pushed apart by their repulsive charges?” If metric expansion took place they would indeed spread out, but it wouldn’t resemble Hilbert’s Hotel and it wouldn’t be due to their charge.
Dick –
To try to explain, Hilbert’s Hotel describes a characteristic of infinities: You can “create” empty spaces in an infinite set just by moving things around, without actually creating anything. You don’t need to build new hotel rooms, just shuffle occupants away from the room you need vacated.
A metric expansion would be the equivalent of constructing new hotel rooms between existing hotel rooms.
In one sense, the two cases are equivalent, as the end result is the same. In another, however, the mechanisms of creating rooms and moving occupants require different relationships with the system, and have different implications for how you go about modeling that system. (But at this point I have concluded that the two models would end up being isomorphic with one another; it doesn’t really matter how you model it, the end result looks basically the same.)
Also, unrelated to this specific conversation: The symmetry that I suspect gives rise to metric conservation is a scalar symmetry. It is pretty much the core of my crackpot nonsense. Currently trying to formalize this enough to determine whether it is worth spending the next three years developing the skillset to finish formalizing it.
Yes, I understand, but it’s still a thing you could do, not a thing that will happen.
Consider a marble in a cereal bowl. Where will you find it? At the bottom of the bowl, because that’s the state of lowest energy. But what you’re saying is akin to, “Hey, it would be in an even lower energy state it if was on the floor.” That’s true, but just because you can imagine a state it wants to be in doesn’t mean it will necessarily reach that state; some force still has to do work on the marble to move it out of the cereal bowl.
Same thing here: you can say, “Hey, Hilbert’s thought experiment suggests that this infinite array of charges could be rearranged in such that it would be in a lower energy state.” I’m not totally convinced that’s true, but supposing for the moment it is definitely true, it still doesn’t follow that the balls will start moving to that configuration. For any ball to move there needs to be a net force acting on it, and (it seems to me) that if you calculate the net force on any ball in the scenario you described, it’ll be zero.
I don’t really know what you mean by metric conservation in this context. There’s definitely a point in discussing theoretical physics where analogies won’t take you any further and you have to switch to equations, and seems likely that you’ve reached it. How’s your DiffEQ? (Mine’s terrible, which is why I left physics for software)
Got an A in differential equations, IIRC. It has been a decade, though, and I don’t remember much of it, not having used it since – maybe thermodynamics? I don’t recall clearly if I even used it there, mostly I remember endless lookup tables from that class.
But yeah, analogies have a limited run; they are mostly useful for communicating, and pretty lossy there. Hence our conversation; I am not literally thinking of the hotel, it is just a quick way of representing the concept I am actually thinking of, which is harder to convey.
I’d use Xeno’s Paradox to describe how I think of the Big Bang, likewise. It doesn’t convey the weirdness resulting from a continual-collapse-upward-in-scale that my model probably predicts, but it might do a good job conveying what a fractal view of the universe means in terms of an “origin point”.
ETA:
Metric conservation means the sum total of spacial distortion arising from relativistic forces should be zero. My model has concentric spheres of relativistic distortion, originating from white holes (which are what a black hole ends up looking like after accumulating enough mass, in a model with concentric spheres of distortion – get enough mass and eventually the sphere outside gravity is an event horizon pushing things away, rather than in, stabilizing mass). Each sphere had a reversed polarity from its neighbors, and spacial density is just being scrunched up in bands; the total metric density is unchanged. (Except possibly within the white hole itself. Not sure there. Don’t know how to think about what goes on inside a singularity.)
They would be locked in, but any perturbation would ripple outward throughout the infinite array of charges, oscillating endlessly unless there is friction in the system somewhere. Not sure how the harmonics would work out in an infinite array of lossless particles. Couldn’t you theoretically find any harmonic within that ripple by choosing a subset of points?
First, the system is clearly unstable if the plane lives in 3D. As soon as one charge gets slightly above or below the plane it experiences a huge repulsive force in the perpendicular direction. You can get around this by imagining a 2D universe or filling 3D space with a regular lattice of charges.
Second, there are two contradictory answers depending on how you approach the problem. If you look at forces, each individual charge feels zero net force because of the symmetry of the system and so will not accelerate. If you look at energy you can argue that increasing the lattice spacing will decrease the energy and so the lattice should expand.
My current thinking is that the energy reasoning is flawed; the total energy of the system is formally infinite and so you can’t use its gradient to figure out the behavior of the system.
If you make the lattice finite the two approaches agree. The charges on the edge of the lattice experience a net force and the lattice expands, and expanding the finite lattice decreases the energy, which is now calculable.
This is often a problem with posing physics questions about infinite systems. Treating an infinite system as a limit of finite systems doesn’t always work, so you have to pose your questions carefully.
The “adding up the forces” reasoning is flawed because that only works when using the conventional boundary condition for the electromagnetic field, and in this situation you can’t.
(Even for the simplest possible problems, e.g., two charges, you need the boundary condition to rule out the possibility that there’s also an electromagnetic wave acting on the charges.)
Very good point, thank you.
Strictly speaking the question is ill-formed, because you haven’t specified boundary conditions for the electromagnetic field and the usual convention (electric field tending to zero at infinity) is incompatible with your premise.
However, I don’t think there are any solutions in which the balls remain stationary. The idea that the electric fields from the charges would all cancel out is incompatible with Gauss’s Law.
The simplest solution would have a single point at which the electric field is zero. The ball at that point would remain stationary, and all the others would accelerate away from it. The further away from the center, the more acceleration, so the distance between any two balls would always be increasing.
PS: I was assuming a 2D universe. If the balls form a 2D plane embedded in a 3D universe then I think that has a stationary solution in addition to the one I describe, though as smocc already pointed out it would only be meta-stable.
…huh. So… we set the boundary to be our perspective origin, basically?
ETA:
Incidentally, this might be exactly the sort of clever mathematical trick I was looking for. Still trying to process it.
I am a bit puzzled trying to work out how the infinite speed at infinite distance works; that looks like metric expansion, even though we don’t have metric expansion involved in the solution here.
The acceleration increases as you get further away from the center because the electric field increases as you get further away from the center. That’s part of the initial state of the system, but Gauss’s law restricts how much leeway you have when choosing that initial state.
Again, this is only true in a 2D universe. In the case of a charged 2D plane embedded in an otherwise empty 3D universe, and assuming the charges are constrained to remain on the plane, there’s a simple solution where they remain stationary. I’m not sure whether or not there is also a solution where they accelerate. I’d have to actually sit down and do the math for that one.
I gave this a bit more thought. Technically, I think you can describe a legitimate initial state where the electric field is pushing the charges apart (analogous to the 2D universe solution) but it requires a rapidly changing magnetic field, i.e., you’re basically just prefilling the universe with powerful electromagnetic radiation and letting that push the charges apart, which doesn’t really count.
It seems more sensible to assert, as John Schilling suggested, that the charges are initially being held in place, and require the electromagnetic field to be static under those conditions. That leads to a unique solution, the one in which the charges remain stationary even when released. (Though as previously mentioned, they’re only meta-stable in the dimension perpendicular to the plane.)
If you instantly create(*) a uniform finite lattice of point charges, charges in the interior of the lattice will not move until an expansion wave reaches them from the surface of the lattice. The expansion wave will move at near c (exactly c in the low-density limit), so this is significant only in very large charged structures. But if your structure is literally infinite, the expansion wave will never arrive and the charges will never move. I think.
The configuration is at best neutrally stable, and as others have pointed out is quite unstable if the lattice is planar but the charges are free to move in three dimensions.
* Or slowly assemble in a rigid framework and then instantly and simultaneously release, which leads to the same initial condition with fewer conservation-law violations.
Why college in America is so expensive:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-is-college-so-expensive-in-america/569884/
– no central control of prices
– competition for wealthy students
– poor choices by unsophisticated customers
– relatively high earnings disparity between workers with and without college
I thought this part was interesting:
Not to defend the US system, but why would you compare something to France and say “oh good, its working well”? They have an UE rate of 9%+ a decade after the great recession started and I’ve seen claims that the UE rate for recent college graduates is 11%.
I haven’t read the underlying analysis the article refers to, but I would guess that the french universities are relatively affordable compared to the US university system as a whole. I don’t think they were concerned with the quality of the schools, only their affordability. The point here is that the US public university system is reasonably affordable.
The problem is not “no central control of prices” (how that’s supposed to help I have no idea). The problem is the limitless free money pouring into the system. I’ll take the opportunity to repost an essay I wrote about the subject several years ago.
—-
I can’t blame the universities for the mess the higher education system is in. They’re just responding to market forces. Really, everybody is. It’s just that the market has been circumvented by a well-meaning government.
The problem is that unlimited money is flowing into the higher educational system and there is no negative feedback loop to limit it. It’s just one big positive feedback loop driving up attendance and cost.
1) Take as a given that “you have to go to college or else you’ll have a shitty job.” More on this later. The number of students going to college has been steadily increasing since forever. Part of this is because of the nature of our increasingly specialized and technical world, and partly due to social changes, like the progress made by women and minorities. I’m not in any way implying that’s bad, I’m just saying there are more people going to school.
2) The government first issued direct loans to poor students in 1958. This method upset congress, though, because from a budgetary standpoint it showed as a loss the year the loan was issued, even though it would be paid back later. Instead, from 1965-2010, the government guaranteed student loans made by private lenders. If the student defaulted, the government would make the lender whole. This makes the rule that student loan debt cannot be discharged by bankruptcy especially petty. The lenders were at no risk, anyway. From 1993 on the government also issued loans directly. Also, as time has gone on, loans have become increasingly easy to obtain. Originally only poor students who could show financial need qualified for government-backed loans, but those requirements were dropped in the 80s.
3) Since there is no risk to the private lender, there is no incentive not to grant any loan request. As for government loans, there’s no political will to deny students seeking money for education. So, there’s no brake on the money flowing into the system. And the lenders aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong here. There have been some scandals involving kickbacks to schools, but it’s mostly unnecessary as people are lining up for these loans. Why would the lender say no? They’d just get called out for ruining some kid’s dream of an education.
4) If the lender had to take a risk, they would be careful about issuing loans. Today a D student seeking a degree that might land him a $30k/year job (if he’s lucky) can get a loan for $40k. With risk involved, the lender would consult actuarial tables. What are the student’s chances of completing the degree? What are his chances of getting a job? What’s his expected income? What’s the chance of default? No such brake exists. (Note, I’m not saying degrees not tied to a high-paying job are worthless. More on this later).
5) Without the loan, the D student would go learn a trade, instead, or get a job that doesn’t require a degree, like say work in a call center (yes, I’m aware of the current situation in which ads for low-level jobs like call center work have starting requiring degrees. It’s part of the loop and I’ll get to it later). A student seeking a degree that costs more than what’s reasonable given their earning potential would also be turned away (this would be an incentive to keep tuition costs down. If liberal arts students can’t get loans, your school doesn’t get their money).
6) Since the number of students and amount of money they can borrow is unbounded, there’s no incentive to keep tuition costs down.
7) How are students with options deciding what school to attend? We would hope they would decide based on the quality of the education, but that’s difficult to measure objectively. Generally it just has to be “good.” Also, many students don’t know what they want to major in when they arrive, anyway, so it’s difficult to make a decision based on the quality of a program. As long as they’re reasonably confident in the quality of the education, they’re making their decision based on amenities. How nice are the dorms? The recreational facilities? How pretty is the campus?
8) College administrators need to attract students to their schools. It’s their job. Since students are making decisions based on the facilities, they improve the quality of the facilities. And they’re in competition with other schools for the $40,000 checks the students are walking in with. They’re going to spend it somewhere. Might as well be here. When I went to [university in a southern US state] in the late 90s when tuition was a quarter what it is now, we still had dorms without air conditioning. In [very hot state]. Six story walk-up buildings with concrete floors, dual-occupancy rooms the size of prison cells with metal beds, communal showers, one stove for the floor, and you’d all have to take turns scrubbing toilets. Today the new dorms look like condos, with private rooms and carpeting and bathrooms and recreation rooms and janitorial services. There have been huge expansions to the recreation centers and the student union. There’s a “wellness center” now. And since the budgets are so flush, there’s room for each department to get a little taste. There’s a nice new glass and steel building for the parking administration instead of the trailer they had when I went here.
9) Since the new facilities cost more to build and maintain, plus there are new employees to maintain and administer to these buildings, tuition must increase. But it’s no problem because the students have no trouble getting larger loans. This doesn’t happen over night, but slowly over two decades. If a liberal arts degree used to cost $10k and the college tried to bump that to $15k and lenders had to make decisions about default rates, they might balk. Enrollment would drop, and the administrators would know this, so perhaps the amenities wouldn’t be improved quite so much and the cost of that degree would stay reasonable. There’s a common refrain on the Internet that you have to get a STEM degree because liberal arts degrees are worthless. That’s crap. Liberal arts degrees are not worthless. But they’re not worth $40,000. If it weren’t for the unlimited money flowing into the system, that degree would still cost an affordable $10k. This is troubling, because we need anthropologists and art history majors and all that for a functioning society, but people pursuing these degrees may be unable to repay their loans. If they stop pursuing these degrees, who will curate our museums?
10) “But couldn’t they spend that money on improving education instead?” Why? If you double a professor’s salary, is he going to teach better? And there’s supply and demand. There is a huge glut of Ph.D.s competing for jobs. Are more students going to come to your school because you pay the teachers more? No. They come for the amenities, and now colleges have turned into “education resorts.”
11) You can’t blame students for considering amenities when choosing a school. If it’s going to cost you $40k no matter where you go, and the education will be of similar quality, why not go to the school with the nicer dorms? It’s rational.
12) And you can’t blame the college for improving facilities. If you’re the Director of Student Housing, do you want to build shitty dorms, or nice dorms? And the students will like them, and pay for them. Everybody’s happy. Why not? Multiply that incrementally across all aspects of college across decades. No one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.
13) “But these are public universities! Non-profits!” There’s a common misconception that “non-profit” means “charity.” It does not. It just means you have trustees instead of shareholders, and the “profits” go to the employees and to improvements in the organization rather than being dispersed to shareholders. If you work at a non-profit, you still absolutely want every dollar possible flowing into your organization. It pays your salaries and pays for your benefits and expands your facilities. If you work for a non-profit, do you not still want a high salary? Good benefits? A nice place to work? Would you keep around a CEO who has no interest in expanding and improving the organization? And those things take money.
14) Since no one is turned away at the start, you now have lots more people with degrees. That call center job that the D student back in step 5 should have taken now “requires” a degree. You don’t need a degree to do the job, but you need one to get the job. Why? Well, the hiring manager at the call center gets ten applicants for a job. Seven of these people have degrees. Why would you hire one of the three who doesn’t? Ideally there should be concern about an underemployed employee leaving, but in this market that’s less likely, and the hiring manager may not be a rocket scientist anyway. And if she hires one of the people without a degree and they turn out to be a screw-up, the boss wants to know why, reviews the hiring manager’s procedures and says, “Wait, you had seven people with 4-year degrees apply, and you picked the drop-out? You’re fired!” She’s got to cover her ass, so now that call center job requires a degree.
15) 18-year-olds read these horror stories. “If I don’t have a degree, I can’t even get a job at a call center! I better go to college. $45k now? Well, whatever it takes…” And we’re right back to step 1.
I don’t know how to fix it. The cost of maintaining all the new buildings and services at our resort colleges is so high now, administrators couldn’t lower tuition if they wanted to. I guess they’d have to shutter the Wellness Center? Fire the janitors at the new dorms? Close down part of the rec center and the student union? It’s not going to happen. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
And it sucks because if you just want an education but don’t care about the amenities, what can you do? You can’t opt out. “No, I’m only paying the part of my tuition that goes for education, and I just won’t use the rec center.” If you want an education, you’re stuck paying for the massive overhead of the resort and the administration.
The only thing I can think of is perhaps a philanthropic billionaire might want to endow a new university that emphasizes no-frills, high quality education. You could double teacher salaries and get the best and the brightest (it would be cheap, too, because the competition is paying them peanuts). Bring back the low-rent dorms with the communal showers. But make the education really world-class and attract the best and most serious students.
Or perhaps online universities, but there’s a host of other problems with that paradigm.
Oh and yes, I neglected to mention the deep cuts in state funding to higher education. In my state we’re down about 50% in state funding since 2008. But while cuts have increased the price of tuition, state funding doesn’t do anything to reduce the cost of college. If the state used to pay half your tuition and now it pays none, that doesn’t change the fact the college has spent millions on facilities and services. It’s the free money pouring into the system that’s created the problem. Giving colleges more free money won’t make things better, it’ll just encourage them to spend more. There is a floor to government funding, but there is no ceiling to college spending.
You gotta starve the beast. Otherwise costs will continue to soar and young people will be perpetually chained to debt. I don’t envy kids these days. I walked out of school with a Master’s debt free 12 years ago (helps I had scholarships and helpful parents). I don’t know what I’d do if I were saddled with $40k+ today. Good luck and God bless.
Perhaps this is the solution. There’s no reason why someone couldn’t design a university this way, where basic tuition covered learning-related activities exclusively, and everything else was tied to opt-in additional fees.
I mean, I grew up in a college town where their student union was open to the public, and when I was in high school, we would go there sometimes for bowling, arcade games, and fast food. They charged us cash at similar rates you’d expect to any other bowling alley, arcade, or mcdonalds. There’s no reason they couldn’t charge the students cash, too.
But perhaps that’s because kids are generally bad at finance and economics (well, so are adults, but they often are forced to learn by poor experiences). Maybe a mandatory high school class called “the economics of college” where at least 50% of the course is taught by a Caplan-inspired person making a case against going, even for the smart and capable.
If the public schools won’t do that, maybe there’s a role for private college consultants. Not in the “I help you get admitted” sense but in the “I help you do this smartly” sense. Basically, someone to play the role of the (as you say, absent in this scenario) responsible adult in the room whose job is to analyze the ROI of the proposed investment. Upper class well-educated parents can probably do this well enough, but too many of the 1st/2nd generation college going youth don’t have parents well equipped to do it. My sister was told “pick whatever school you want” and got a useless liberal arts degree from an expensive private school. Neither myself (back then) nor my parents knew enough to give her any better advice.
Perhaps a solution is an ultra-selective university (by grades or an IQ test) started by old-school lefties (like the Weinstein brothers) who actually care about the lower classes.
That’s a good idea. I wonder if the people who need it could afford it, though–seems like the service would tend to be used by umc/uc for their children to get an extra edge. If you can afford to pay money to save money, do you need to?
What are the essential pointers such a lesson should impart to an above average but not to the point of benefiting from Ivy League connections young person?
-If you don’t get scholarships, start at a community college and transfer (?)
-Take a full load of courses and be sure to graduate in four years.
-Take a major that will directly help you economically–there will be room in your schedule for an elective or two that interests you but your diploma should be a selling point, not something you have to explain away.
-Don’t let extra curricular activities jeopardize graduation (or sanity).
-Do take time to network for a variety of purposes.
-Buy books used. Get a roommate or two. Work a summer job. Put nothing on loans you don’t have to.
I (clearly) haven’t worked out the details, but I was thinking of some sort of commission-based model. Perhaps paid by the school, similar to how a home seller pays the commission of the buyer’s realtor. Maybe the consultant advertises that his fee is “10% of the money I save you.” Maybe it gets paid over time rather than all up-front. Lots of possibilities here.
Most of the ones you mention are good. I was thinking the main role of the consultant would be less personal finance in general and more helping a student understand and pick from their options in terms of majors and specific schools. Most specifically, reviewing and scenario-planning future outcomes based on school, major, and available scholarships.
The main benefit would be to push back on what I see as three major failure modes:
1. Students who opt to go for the “best school they can get into” regardless of other factors (one of which might be that said school is 100k, while the second best school they got into is offering a free ride)
2. Students who think any major at a “good school” is just as good – or, conversely, who rule out good programs for the major they are interested in because the overall school isn’t rated as highly
3. Students who pick the school they “like best” without making an effort to quantify how much that’s worth to them, exactly (as in, yes, I appreciate that you really liked your tour of Expensive Private School and found it to be a more hospitable environment than Public State, but I want you to understand that this will cost you $100k, are you sure you liked it so much better that it’s worth that?)
Basically, when it comes to evaluating college, it seems like the sensible thing to do is to have a detailed conversation regarding the pros and cons of every available option on at least four dimensions:
1. Cost (after scholarships)
2. Expected benefit (directly correlates with prestige of the school, most likely)
3. Field of study (significant input into #2)
4. Overall perception and enjoyment of the school
As far as I can tell, a whole lot of high school students consider 1-2 of these factors only. Maybe 3 if they’re really smart. Hardly anyone considers all four. Virtually no one considers how the four interact with each other to create a discrete option set.
A college degree should be some combination of cheap, prestigious, required for your career, and relevant to the work you will be doing (or relevant to whatever more advanced studies you plan to undertake.) The more of these criteria you can meet, the better. Don’t pay big money for a degree in literature to a second-tier school if you plan to become a police officer (where college is desirable, but not required).
Also, how likely are you to do well at whatever you study? If you struggled in high school, it’s not going to get better; it’s going to get worse. This is where something like the ASVAB can help, since it gives you a no-bullshit 1-100 indication of your current scholastic ability compared to others your age. If your AFQT is below 50, you almost certainly should not be going to college, and if it’s below 66 or so you’d better have a darn good reason because you are going to be one of the worst students at all but the crappiest colleges.
Whereas I am looking for ways that I can profit from the idea, as my wife is a tutor of high school students.
But also, I think a lot of people could benefit from sitting down an looking at their near and long term future with reason as well as optimism.
(Is there a word for thinking that doesn’t exclude passions but also intentionally considers trade-offs? Holistically, maybe?)
“Holistic” might have too much emotional baggage in the context of college admissions. Good luck getting any Asian clients!
Used textbooks aren’t likely to be available. A lot of textbooks are e-books with access codes that expire at the end of the semester.
A few universities insist on open-access textbooks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have other student-friendly policies as well.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-behind-the-soaring-cost-of-college-textbooks/
There are a fair number of community colleges (where you can get the first two years of your degree, though they often end up working like an extension of high school), and also commuter colleges (where most of the students are commuting from home, so a lot of amenities aren’t really all that desirable). Both of these are much more like the no-frills education you’re describing.
I made it a point to ask professors if the textbooks would just have assigned readings, or if they would have homework problems.
In the case of readings, you could almost always get away with purchasing a previous edition, often available on Amazon for $20 or less.
Perhaps this is the solution. There’s no reason why someone couldn’t design a university this way, where basic tuition covered learning-related activities exclusively, and everything else was tied to opt-in additional fees.
Isn’t this what an online degree does? You are (or are attempting at least) opting out of all the services the college offers except classes. No dorms, parking, campus, aquatic center, policing, wellness center, diversity office, etc.
It’s likely that, currently, online classes are priced artificially high to help subsidize all the frills, but if online degrees could gain cache then schools would start to compete for students on price, and this may provide one possible path away from the mess colleges are in.
Yes, but that limits you to the “no frills” market.
What I’m proposing is more of an “exactly as many frills as you are willing to pay for” model.
So the beautiful pristine campus with the climbing wall and the lazy river would still exist for those willing to pay* for them – while more budget-conscious students could attend the same classes on the same campus, but would have to pay cash to access those optional facilities.
@Matt M
I think you’re underestimating the degree to which an increase in administration, rather than amenities, has increased tuition prices.
The way this works in Canada (I think? Not an expert.) is that colleges are in principle independent, but receive a significant subsidy per student from the government. In return for this subsidy, the government gets quite a bit of control over how universities conduct themselves, and one part of the deal is a limit on how much tuition can be charged directly to students. That’s why tuition in Canada is typically quite low.
This means there is someone, namely the government, who has plenty of incentive to put a lid on the onward-and-upward tendency of who gets a college degree and how much gets paid for it. If they let colleges expand the student base too much, it hits the government budget directly, and if they let colleges charge too much tuition, they get to hear it from the voters.
There are a few truly private colleges in Canada who don’t take the government subsidies, but they are tiny deeply Christian schools that basically don’t count.
Tuition is lower in Canada, but I don’t know that there’s less of a trend of jobs that should require a high school diploma instead requiring a university degree.
Does anyone remember reading a story in which there’s a ruling class and a working class, and the two classes become so separated that they become different species, and the kicker in the end is that the working class species ends up eating the ruling class species? I could have sworn I’d read this somewhere.
The Time Machine, Morlocks and Eloi and whatnot?
Yes, thanks so much!
This is roughly how things play out with the Mogu and the Pandaren in World of Warcraft, but I’m assuming that’s not what you mean.
I’m not sure that’s enough to narrow it down, but it sounds like the Time Machine with the Eloi and Morlocks. I don’t recall the ending cannibalism, it’s been awhile.
edit: beat to the punch. Always remember, refresh before posting, then manually reset the prior comments since time and date to it’s previous setting.
Yep, it’s The Time Machine, complete with cannibalism.
Mostly unrelated, but for me The Time Machine is in that category of famous popular science fiction (along with, say, Planet of the Apes) where I’ve never actually read it, but have seen so many parodies and spoofs that I feel like I know it pretty well.
I haven’t read it in something like twenty-five years myself. I read a lot of early science fiction when I was growing up, mostly Wells and Verne.
The cannibalism stuck with me, though, along with the scene at the end on a beach under a dying star, with nothing alive on earth except squirming crab-like critters. Might have contributed to my later love for the Dying Earth subgenre.
FWIW, the original book is quite a bit more political than the spoofs/remakes give it credit for.
Yeah, best part of the book by far.
I re-read The Time Machine again last year, it’s a quick and easy read, and I recommend it.
IIRC, Wells’ later When the Sleeper Awakes fills in some of how the world became divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks, but it’s been decades since I read that book.
I only skimmed The Planet of the Apes, back in the eary 1980’s, and it didn’t leave much of an impression, and I haven’t seen the movie since the ’70’s.
Does anyone know why insulin is so expensive? I googled it and found an article on Forbes which concluded: there are multiple major manufacturers, so it’s not a monopoly. There are no shortages, and demand is pretty steady. They’re always coming up with newer and better versions, but even the old kinds have soaring prices now. So (their conclusion) … maybe Medicaid needs to negotiate harder?
Was not impressed by that conclusion. What’s the real reason? It’s pretty horrifying if you’ve ever worked in a retail pharmacy (as I have) and seen poor patients wince and shell out hundreds for a dinky little box, after insurance. Because they’d die without it. Could the can’t-say-no aspect have a distorting effect on the market, d’you think?
Medicare and Medicaid are specifically prohibited from negotiating drug prices, aren’t they?
Yes they are. So yes they do need to “negotiate harder” (or rather, we need them to) but they are legally prohibited from doing so. That would be simple to fix, but the healthcare lobby would hate it, so it hasn’t happened and probably won’t happen soon.
Medicare and Medicaid don’t really negotiate prices with anyone. They set prices by a complicated procedure then people take or leave them. That said, I do believe medicare part D is prohibited from attempting to negotiate volume discounts.
It seems weird to me that volume is the deciding factor. Caremark has 90 million people on its formularies. That’s more than every single nation in the EU. A major factor might be that if Caremark declines to carry a drug, ESI might carry it, and then ESI can say “look, we give you this great new drug!” and insurance companies and other companies migrate to that PBM.
The US is just getting reamed, pure and simple. The same drugs sell for a fifth the US price in other first world countries, and none of the manufacturers are taking a loss on those sales.
Total theorizing here, but perhaps in this specific situation, an oligarchy can get away with monopolistic pricing more easily than a true monopoly.
Because if it was just one company, you can bet some Senators would be dragging them to Washington demanding answers and concessions now!. But as it stands, they can all implicitly collude to raise prices while also having enough plausible deniability for any one of them to stay out of the spotlight.
Here’s a twitter thread on it from Vincent Rajkumar: https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1037351101798985728
Short version is 3rd party payers and pharmacy middlemen and their agreements with the manufacturers. The kind version is that they’re setup to use common drugs like insulin to subsidize the costs of other drugs to their patients/customers. The unkind version is that they’re getting kickbacks for putting higher-priced specifically patented versions of insulin on their approved drug schedules and stocking lists.
It is not true. Insulin is dirt cheap.
But it is true that many diabetics don’t know this and are rationing expensive insulin and dying when they could just buy cheap insulin. (Expensive insulin is great. It really saves lives, or at least limbs. But rationing it kills faster.)
What are expensive are genetically engineered versions of fast-acting insulin. Insulin pumps are designed to work with these new insulins. Old pumps were designed to work with old insulin, but I don’t anyone makes them anymore; I think they were always loss leaders for the insulin.
There are three brands of modern insulin. They are off patent, but no one makes generics, because genetic engineering is hard. Three is a small number of competitors and often small enough that they can collude to rise prices. The prices have been rising 10% per year for decades. Even without collusion, it makes sense that they introduced their special insulins at a low price to get people to try it out, and to try out pumps, but raise them as they become established. (Indeed, the entry of the second and third brands didn’t slow down the 10% growth rate.)
Also, there is a general trend that drug prices are becoming more opaque. Few people pay list price for these special insulins. Most insurance companies cut a deal to make a preferred brand cheap to the consumer. The few patients who have an allergy to that brand (or no insurance) pay list price.
The good insulin is expensive.. in the US, and only in the US. This is flat out just the united states being taken to the cleaners because US health care provision is dysfunctional. Exact same formulations are being sold in western europe at a fifth, a tenth or even less. And not because of better subsidies, literally just walk up to the pharmacy desk and get some cash on the barrel.
.. Uhm. One sec.. Eh.. Near as I can tell, for the average american diabetic, you would literally be better off financially getting on a plane and flying to europe every three months to reup. The price differential is large enough to more than pay for airfare. How is there not insulin smuggling happening? Or maybe there is, but the police neither notice nor care.
Alas, not getting ripped off is illegal, see subsection 381(d)(1) Title 21, since the patent evergreening process needs to be subsidized in order to be economically viable and other nations refuse to make these hard choices. The FDA currently chooses as a matter of policy not to prosecute anyone who gets a 90-day supply of their life-critical but non-emergency drug at a reasonable price, but this is a discretionary enforcement decision, not a regulatory one, and so is subject to bureaucratic caprice. And of course it is illegal to tell anyone that the option is available to them in any case.
Everything about the economics of American health care seems like what you’d get if you asked Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to describe their vision of the evils of capitalism. (The mirror image is American inner-city public schools.) The whole system is so fundamentally rotten and corrupt I can’t even begin to imagine how to fix it.
But there’s a *huge* amount of pent-up anger and fear and frustration surrounding that system, and some day, some future populist is going to exploit it to get power, and the endpoint will be a bunch of nationalized pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, and quite possibly a bunch of jailed executives of those companies. And that will be an awful mess, but it’s pretty much a predictable consequence of how the current system works.
Tragically, “more regulation” and “less regulation” are much easier goals to meet than “better regulation”.
The current system is an awful mess, and seems reasonably likely to oscillate between a variety of awful messes of varying characteristics, given the typical nuance of the “solutions” championed by various politicians. Throwing away all your hammers because they didn’t help you cut the boards will not increase the likelihood that you successfully build a house.
Yes, but.. How to put this, where are the criminals? Do diabetics not have the social networks in place for anyone to make it their livelihood to travel to Spain, buy insulin for 30 people, fly back and sell it at x2 the spanish (but one fifth the US) price? I mean, its not like the sniffer dogs are going to indicate on you.
Okay, so I’m getting “pharmaceutical companies are rat bastards.” That was, I admit, kind of my suspicion, but thanks to everybody who answered!
Another question for the time travelers: Suppose you wanted to prevent the Great Depression, which might well prevent WW2, or at least the western part. What could you do?
I’m not putting constraints on your resources. Take a team, take computers, take whatever you think might work. The only thing you’re not allowed to do is cause more damage than the Great Depression. Don’t wipe out the human race. Don’t destroy civilization.
Treat Benjamin Strong‘s tuberculosis.
That was my idea as well.
Alternatively, prevent the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.
As far as I can remember from econ class, the Great Depression happened because the US government did two very bad things, and the rest of the world followed suit. They responded to a moderate recession (rooted in agricultural problems caused by a drought) by a) raising tariffs, and b) reducing the money supply (to “purge the rot”). When the rest of the world did the same, the result was a sharp drop in trade and a world of problems.
What they should have done is exactly the opposite, and probably spent some money to help struggling farmers.
I’m guessing the time travelers either need to persuade key people in the US government to do things differently, or perhaps make sure that different people are in key roles.
I’ll stop off on the way to the Coolidge Administration and pick up Milton Friedman and Ronald Coase, and let them pick teams; I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to stop the Depression. Installing them in the appropriate points would be an issue. Perhaps the old time traveler trick of meeting oneself could work — I’ll bring an aged version of Calvin Coolidge’s Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover along. And a recording of an “Annie” production; it shouldn’t be hard for old Hoover to get young Hoover to do anything to prevent “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover” from being made.
If that doesn’t work I guess I’ll let the Keynesians have a shot.
I don’t think there is a way to seriously prevent it, given the constraints of the time. You’d have to convince existing political leaders to make BIG money drops to backstop banks, which is going to be politically controversial no matter what historical period. I don’t think there’s the political will to actually stop the Great Depression.
You can try to mitigate the Great Depression, but that relies on convincing leaders to leave the gold standard earlier and implement the bank holiday. I don’t think you can convince Hoover to do that, period, which means you are stuck waiting until 1933, for FDR. By that time the Nazis are already well on their way to victory in Germany. And even if you can start the economic recovery relatively quickly (1930 or 1931), the German policial leadership had a really bad response to the recession, so they are going to lose their legitimacy and be forced to rely on the Nazis to bolster their position anyways. They start making those mistakes in 30 and 31.
As with most problems in the 20th century, the solution is to shoot Woodrow Wilson before the monster becomes president. Even if you wave away the effect of a totally different course for WW1 absent his meddling, he remains guilty for the crazy quilt central bank plan that is the federal reserve despite his supposed expertise in public administration. The federal reserve was based largely on the aldrich plan that had died in congress shortly before his election. Rather than a sensible central bank with a clear mandate and lines of authority, he resurrected Aldrich’s and got congress to pass us, saddling with the system that would fail catastrophically once Strong died.
That or you can push FDR down some stairs after he goes off the gold standard but before he pushes the NIRA and AAA though congress.
Okay Captain Blood, why not just lock up Morgan with a harem and a wine cellar until WWI is over so he doesn’t extend credit to the Brits after they ran out of money? At the start of 1915 according to Keynes.
EDIT- I think most economists agree that FDR extended a nasty slump into The Great Depression, though D party loyalists stress Heinlein’s point that he probably also prevented food riots in Kansas City (Heinlein’s home town).
Because if the Germans didn’t run out of money in 1915 without American loans, the richer brits wouldn’t have either.
I’m not an economist. But my understanding (as a Canadian) is that this is rooted in 2 things –
– atrocious bank (and stock market) regulation in the US (but not Canada) well before the depression started
– major governments doing everything a Keynesian would have disreccommended, and nothing they would have favoured.
Since I have effectively infinite resources, I go back into the past well before this started, and basically put my people in position to heavily influence political decision making. Some of us generously fund politicians who produce the outcomes we favour. Some of us publish key papers, books etc. in economics, as well as teaching many graduate students – and of course those profs get lots of grants, funding etc., as do the universities that support them, so that by the time the drought happens, “established wisdom” recommends something that (we think) will actually work. Some of us make careers in banking. Some become politicians. You get the idea….
If we’re extra specially ambitious, we also start alternate industries in the future dust bowl states, and generally make that part of the mess a bit more disaster resistant. But it seems to have been the debt pyramid, combined with weekly capitalized banks, that really caused havoc. So that’s the important thing to prevent.
And while we’re at it – out of pure humanitarian kindness – we implement some of the suggestions from Robert Kuttner’s Debtor’s Prison with regard to personal bankruptcy.
This is false for the US- prior to FDR Hoover was the record holder for peace time spending by a US president.
Thinking on the comments about literacy…
Is literacy obsolete? Given the availability of audio and video recording, does writing fulfill any requirement of our society at this point?
You’re making a big jump. There’s no “requirement”, there’s an array of activities. Some difficulties people without literacy may have had in the past are being ameliorated, some are unchanged, etc. I’m not sure what the net is, but I can say with certainty literacy isn’t obsolete.
I’d at least rather have the option to follow roadsigns than be reliant on gps, even if gps makes is possible to navigate without literacy. And so on.
All you need for roads is numeracy, not literacy. Everything else is effectively conveyed with symbology; the words are pretty much redundant.
If someone tells you “Drive to San Diego” it’s nice to be able to know what the “Right two lanes San Diego Freeway” sign means without having to write it out.
It’s nice to know that that “55 miles (trucks only)” sign doesn’t apply to you.
Could be useful to know what “Road closed 9/22-9/26” means.
We try to make out important signs fool-proof; being literate is still a big advantage.
Can you have numeracy without literacy ?
Shopping in a grocery store in Brazil (not knowing Portuguese) made me wonder if that was what it felt like to be illiterate. I had no problem understanding the prices, but had to rely on packaging and the store layout to find items. So I’d guess at least basic numeracy (prices, times, and speed limits) is possible without literacy.
Yes, heck, literacy basically started as a way of symbolically attaching numbers to specific goods while record keeping.
Just wondering – did you dictate this message to your computer, or did you write it?
What us dinosaurs prefer doesn’t really demonstrate that we aren’t obsolete.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you didn’t know very many functionally illiterate people growing up?
There are a lot of people today who, for all practical purposes, can’t read. Unsurprisingly, they don’t tend to do well in modern society.
You can argue causality a la chicken and egg; do the cognitive or behavioral issues which prevented them from becoming literate also cause them to be worse workers, or is it more directly due to their lack of literacy? I’d argue that it’s both personally but that’s intuition and not data. Either way, this is something that actually exists for a frighteningly large chunk of the population and not a hypothetical situation.
Human visual processing is better and more detailed than human audio processing, allowing significantly more compressed signals and thus faster communication for problems we’re not naturally inclined towards solving. The audio speed penalty is sufficient to render speech inadequate as the sole processing-enhancement tool, despite the advent of audio-based memory extension. We can imagine a hypothetical species capable of handling highly compressed audio data for which sound recordings would be superior to image recordings, but for humans a visual language is necessary for significant capability extension.
I suspect that we’re on the way to literacy being obsolete for the general population, being replaced by computerized prosthetics – the device talks to you, responds to speech, and delivers audio and audio-visual media in place of text.
I don’t believe that this will be an improvement, for anyone accustomed to reading (ahem) “walls of text” – such as books. Audio is slower than reading, audio-visual only has an advantage in cases where pictures actually are worth the proverbial 1000 words – which isn’t all that common, IMNSHO.
But tl;dr has been a thing for longer than some adults have been alive – people proudly insisting on consuming no written text longer than a tweet or other soundbite. And half the apps I attempt to use remove text in favour of glyphs, which are apparantly easier for “normal people” people to learn and remember. (My go to example of this trend is Apple’s iPhone and iPad changes from 2017 – the apps they expect to be most commonly used are represented only by symbols, with no option to reenable the text. So you have to know (for example) that a picture of a compass indicates a web browser – almost as ‘obvious’ as egyptian or chinese hieroglyphics :-()
Some elites will probably also do without written text – the sort of “leaders” that deal almost entirely in elevator pitches, whom technical people basically manage by telling them whatever will produce the desired decision, since they (proudly?!) don’t have time to really understand the issues.
Technical people will continue to use written (or at least typed) text, at least until there’s a mind-computer interface available, because the bandwidth available with text is so much higher.
But we’ll be back to medieval leadership styles, with the boss (executive, politician, etc.) having specialists to handle reading and writing – except that those specialists will be computers, reading any text they need to understand out loud, and taking dictation on the rare occassions when they need to produce written text themselves.
We might even reach this point in my lifetime, if I last another 20-40 years.
I suspect glyphs are mostly “easier” because they don’t need to be internationalized and because they can be recognized in a smaller space, not for any literacy issues. And the text is arbitrary also; there’s no reason to associate “Safari”, “Chrome”, “Mozilla”, “Opera”, or “Firefox” with a web browser. Except Opera, the icons at least share the “circular” motif.
Yes, I’m reasonably certain there’s an element of easier-for-the-vendor in all this glyph mania. And there’s a level of remember-the-damn-trademark for something like safari, even with its text name. (But at least you can google an arbitrary text string, unlike some random icon.)
In the case of Apple, though, they seem to be obsessed with appearances, and always willing to trade functionality for aesthetics. And taking labels from icons in the “dock”, without removing them from other icons, doesn’t really do much for internationalization. (And as for the space issue, the work around is to drag the icons out of the “dock” into the main application area, where they become labelled, leaving a nice big empty space :-()
The designers took over Apple in 2012 or so; they’ve been trading functionality for sparkles ever since.
A particular sort of difficulty to use is to the advantage of monopolist/oligopolist producers of technology, as well. If they can lock you into their prescribed workflow by making it difficult or even just inconvenient to access any customization options, they can ensure that you learn a workflow that no other competitor supports, and increase the barrier to learning a new one. This forces the competitor to choose between not accommodating new users and spending time and effort adding whatever un-features the incumbent chose to use. Apple has enormous power as the producer of the “default” smartphone; a status which gives it the ability to warp the entire market around its design choices. Combine that with phone companies constantly fighting their obligation to give their customers control over the hardware sold to them, and you’ve got a recipe for a market of identical user interfaces that get better or worse essentially at random.
Didn’t we just have the discussion of reading speeds here? OK, that’s for the SSC audience, but even average readers seem to manage 200-250 wpm. Conversational speech is 100-150 wpm. And that’s an average for reading vs. a maximum for speech. Very intelligent or experienced readers can do much better than 250 wpm. And anyone can up their reading rate by an additional factor of 2-3 by skimming, if they don’t need full comprehension of the present material. For audio, 150 wpm is about as good as it gets outside of very specialized cases, e.g. auctioneers. Who can manage about 250 wpm. Whee.
Text is just plain better for delivering large quantities of non-image information. And even the most informative images tend to come packaged with descriptive text.
Text is also better for delivering very brief summaries of large infodumps, so as to decide what to read or listen to. A textbook can have a comprehensive index; how do you provide the equivalent for an audiobook?
So, posit all of human knowledge recorded as audio and video and free to all. The illiterate will be well entertained, but not well informed. And what information they do have, will have been curated for them by others. Literate others, who will wield great power from deciding what the illiterate should know.
I’m staring at a screen full of code right now, I can’t imagine possibly being able to write and debug any sort of complex program over an audio-only channel.
Though thinking about it, there is a bit of a trend in some industries towards things like LabVIEW and Simulink, which are much more graphical, so there is a chance things go more that direction, but I’d doubt that you could ever completely get rid of literacy for capturing complex ideas like computer code.
I have worked with code written by people with no literacy/language in common with me. Is the ability to read and write code literacy? I am not sure. The basic operation in modern code is abstraction; writing a code base is effectively writing a language to write in. Which is more like math than literacy.
Code is more like numeracy than literacy, although it isn’t quite either one.
I’ve done coding interviews over the phone, which was an interesting experience, but I wouldn’t want to try it with anything more complicated than a short function written to a fairly clear spec.
Hypothetical: In a world where info-hazards are commonplace, there is an epidemic of people who are doing apparently bad things. When someone tries hard enough to understand why, they often start doing them as well. What would you do? Would you think that it is some sort of information hazard, and try to exterminate everyone involved? Or would you think that perhaps these things aren’t so bad after all, and that you should try to understand their point of view? The latter seems to be very risky info-hazard-wise. The former goes against the principle of charity, and would, in a less extreme situation, lead to you often being on the wrong side of scientific debates.
Comparing to the crystallized heuristics value differences model, it seems like explicit models correspond to applying charity and running the risk of getting info-hazarded, while endorsed values correspond to sticking with your current knowledge/values without trying to learn from others.
Here is a meta level crystallized heuristic which seems related to the goal alignment problem.
Explicit model: maximize reproductive fitness
Emotional experience: what it feels like to be human
Reified essence: revealed preferences
Endorsed value: let people do what they want
The endorsed value includes biases and information hazards. The explicit model just maximizes the number of humans without paying attention to their happiness.
Depends on what type of info-hazards we are talking about here. If its full memetic contagion hazards of anything approaching SCP levels, then the way to deal with them is in specially crafted pre-commitments and planning. Allowing others to fill in the gaps or figure out the “shape” of the hazard from a distance via repeated infections (and quarantining) of individuals. Something like, “I’m going to study x. If I don’t report back or show as unaffected after 2 hours, quarantine me and note the topic.” repeat.
If it is an info-hazard in the sense of just being socially dangerous knowledge, then there must be something in it that is useful or helpful to the individual or else they wouldn’t get sucked into doing it (unless it is memetically contagious as above). The way to fight this is to understand it and work to figure out a superior set of knowledge or coordination that is beneficial to individuals compared to the info-hazardous knowledge and is at least neutral to society. Basically it is really a tragedy of the commons problem.
That sounds like a sensible way of dealing with info-hazards. But the problem I was trying to get at was, how do you tell the difference between an info-hazard and a beneficial new idea? How extreme does it have to be for you to think everyone affected is insane without committing the fundamental attribution error?
That just comes down to a values question, doesn’t it? Whether the people following that idea are following your fundamental values at least as well as you are.
If they seem to have different values after following the new idea, then it is a question of your meta-values or recognizing this and treating the ideas as values modifying.
Master-Stranger protocols and compartmentalization.
(note: major Ward spoilers at the link; Ward itself necessarily has massive spoilers for its antecedent Worm and both works are quite long and involved.)
Sorry, too busy investigating my own belief system to see if the reason I think these other people are dangerous is due to an info-hazard I have accidentally incorporated. Indeed, the analysis paralysis has led me to suspect that the idea of informational hazards is itself an informational hazard, and I am considering petitioning the military to quarantine the entire department of Infosec as an Infosec threat.
ETA:
Which, thinking about it, would likely result in the quarantine/nuking of my facility, and anyone I talked to about the knowledge of informational hazards being an informational hazard, because such a thought would itself be an informational hazard in this universe.
This gives me a funny idea: if there ever were an infohazard, conspiracy theorists would totally be the first ones compromised.
while Breitbart and the Daily Stormer report exhaustively on (still relatively rare, but certainly extant) single instances of black-on-white crime, they have difficulty finding even single cases of Hispanics committing violent crimes against whites.
Yeah, sorry, but you’re incorrect here. FBI most recent breakdown of statistics of violent and property crime is from 2016; they have an annoying breakdown where “race” and “ethnicity” are different categories, which means the “Hispanic or Latino” ethnicity criminals must be folded in with the “White” race. Anyway, for 2016 as a total percentage of arrests, the “Hispanic or Latino” suspects comprise 18.4%. Matching this up with the 2016 census estimates where the “Hispanic and Latino Americans” are 17.8% of total US population, the rate of suspects (whether they’re actual offenders) matches pretty closely.
So while Hispanic/Latinos may not be more criminal than the average, neither are they less criminal, at least as far as “suspects arrested” goes; they’re about the average that should be expected as their percentage of the total population.
Now we get into the juicy stuff like “violent crimes”, and the FBI have the helpful/infuriating breakdown again of “race and ethnicity of victims” versus “race and ethnicity of offenders”, where the Hispanics must be folded in with White since I can’t make sense of the figures otherwise.
So, out of 3,499 victims whose race is given as White, the ethnicity of the corresponding offenders given as Hispanic or Latino is 789. Now, maybe most of the 789 offenders attacked other Hispanic or Latino victims (as part of the White grouping), it’s hard to say because of the FBI sorting it out on ethnicity but not saying “Hispanic but identifies as white/black/mixed race/whatever”. But the fact remains that it’s not “really difficult to find even a single case of a Hispanic committing violent crimes against whites”, and that’s just for murder, not for rapes/assaults/other violent crimes.
If you want to crunch the numbers for “arrests sorted by category of crime versus ethnicity”, here’s the table for 2016 for you and you can see that Hispanic/Latino suspects have been charged with their fair share (as a proportion of the total population) violent and other crimes.
Please do not lump Pat Buchanan in with the Daily Stormer or Steve Sailer.
Why are there regulations on having a prescription for buying glasses? I get that in first world countries, anybody who can afford glasses can afford a visit to an optometrist. But why would it be a legal requirement, especially in countries where optometrists are few and far? What are the harms of having a wrong prescription, other than headaches and seeing badly, and how is that worse than having no glasses at all?
For me, I always have a check up before I buy a set of glasses, to make sure I get the best use of my money (otherwise I could end up spending hundreds of euros on glasses that do not allow me to see well). So I don’t see the legal requirement as at all necessary. If you can afford and are able to visit an optometrist, you will do it, and if you can’t, surely it is better to have unsufficient glasses than none at all. It must also be much easier to just bring glasses to a village and let people try them and see if it helps.
Oddly, in the US you can also buy reading glasses over the counter on your own judgment. But otherwise you need a prescription, which requires an eye doctor exam. I suspect this law is some combination of make-work/job security for optometrists and a benign paternalism that wants to make sure people who develop vision problems have someone check their eyes out from time to time, to make sure they don’t have some bigger problem.
ETA: Similar issues surround what medicines are over the counter vs prescription only. One weirdly entertaining twist of the culture war a few years back was an attempt by Republicans to push for birth control pills to be over the counter, and pushback from Democrats opposed to this. That didn’t fit the usual political narrative, but made sense if you saw that there’d previously been a political battle over whether insurance should be forced to cover birth control[1]. The Republicans wanted to move that issue off the table, and the Democrats didn’t want to let them do that.
[1] I think this is entirely based on moral objections, since it takes a lot of birth control pills to equal the cost of an abortion, and a boxcar full of the wouldn’t cost as much as a pregnancy and childbirth.
You can buy reading glasses over the counter in Spain and the UK, too. And people sometimes buy them without a prescription, or go and get a prescription.
Considering the low monetary cost of getting a prescription, the biggest cost is time, because it can be really inconvenient to go to the optometrist. I just don’t see why it has to be a legal requirement. It can be quite hard to get an optometrist in some really rural areas, and not everybody is equally mobile. So I don’t really see the harm in having some people who buy glasses without a check up (most people will do a check up because this allows you to buy much better suited glasses, and prescription glasses can cost hundreds).
When you buy glasses online you have to put in the prescription information, since without that the maker wouldn’t know what glasses to make. But there is no requirement that you show that you have a prescription from someone entitled to write it.
So I don’t understand in what sense a prescription is required.
Is there something very special about your glasses? Checking my standard online source, the base price for most pairs of glasses is between $6.95 and $25.95. There is extra for special features such as glasses that darken in sunlight, but it would be very difficult to get the total anywhere close to a hundred dollars.
Also extra for having a prescription outside the usual range and for shipping. Zenni is very nice but they present their prices as lower than they are, like everyone else. I rarely pay less than $60, though I grant that includes photosensitivity.
Automotive safety.
A citizen going through a stack of reading glasses until they find some that will let them see kind of clearly is not going to have actually hit the correct prescription most of the time (because, for one thing, they may well not need the same strength for the left and right eye) and that matters for things like judging distances. So there is a public safety issue here to make sure that people who need glasses not only get them, but get it done professionally.
But don’t you have to get an eye exam every time you renew a license, anyway?
In Spain, you have to get medically examined before they renew your license, and they check whether you can see with the glasses you have, and whether you hear, and stuff like that.
Most countries have renewals of driving licenses far too rarely for that to suffice
You only need a prescription every time you buy glasses.
In Spain, you need a medical exam every 10 years until age 45 to renew your driving license, every 5 years between the ages of 45-70 and every 2 years after the age of 70.
Do you think that prescription changes in 10 years in a young person enough to endanger driving, and that person wouldn’t voluntarily check their eyesight and change glasses? I have a very low diopter near-sightedness, and let me tell you, not seeing is very unpleasant. If I start seeing blurry, I will immediately go to the doctor.
The only exception are kids, who are not always self-aware and do not realize there is a problem. But we already made sure that anybody who has a driving license has the right prescription, and once you get used to seeing well, you don’t ever wanna go back.
Spain is unusually strict here. My license has an expiry date on it some years after the date at which I expect all cars to drive themselves. Also, you do not need to be in a car for your eyesight to be a potential traffic hazard – bike will do.
Even walking without seeing properly can be dangerous, yes. But there is no law that says you have to get glasses at all. I can choose to walk around without my glasses, and nobody can force me to wear them (although I am obligated to wear them if I drive). And, once somebody is going to buy new glasses, wouldn’t they make sure they get the right prescription, anyway?
Spanish law doesn’t sound that restrictive to me. Your country is probably quite lax, then (or you assume self-driving vehicles in the next 10 years?). Anything can happen in 10 years, so re-checking every ten years before age 45 sounds quite reasonable to me.
From the US: I wear glasses and I’ve never had to get an actual eye exam as part of a license or renewal
Me neither. I got one eye exam when I got my learner’s permit in NC, and I haven’t had one ever again. Even when I moved to Washington State, they only made me bring in my old license and my lease to prove my new address.
It’s not like the Spanish medical exam is very strict. They measure your blood pressure, make you play a silly game that looks like this (You have to maintain the balls in the lanes by moving the stick in each hand). Then they give you an eye exam with your glasses on, to check you see properly with them (or without, if you see well). Then they make you sit in a cabin, and you hear recorded sounds from your left or right, and you have to raise your right or left hand to show where you heard the noise coming from.
The test is run by private accredited clinics, and costs around 30 euros (it depends on the clinic).
Everything I have heard about the US makes me think the US equivalent would cost 200$, though, so it may be a good thing you don’t have it (or am I prejudiced by the slanted version of US healthcare the media gives me?)
The nominal cash price would probably be $200, but most people with insurance would probably pay something closer to what you do.
Of course, our heavily slanted media gives the impression that every medical service imaginable is completely and totally free in every European country, so hey!
@ana53294
In the US, you have an eye exam in order to get your learner’s permit; they have a hanging sign with letters above the desks and ask you to read off the letters in a line. If you do it with glasses, they mark on your license that glasses are required for you to drive. We don’t have any of your other tests, though.
(Why blood pressure? What do they do if it’s too high/low? Don’t quite a lot of people have either somewhat high or somewhat low blood pressure?)
I agree with you on your overall point, obviously; the best needn’t be the enemy of the good. (Though I haven’t run into such regulations myself.)
@Rebecca Friedman
OK, so I wear contact lenses for the test -> no mark for me.
Or I have the mark (of the beast) and drive around with contact lenses. Is a cop going to fine me?
Seems like a completely useless bit of bureaucracy.
If you ever travel to the U.S., expect to be asked
If you intend to engage in immoral activities whilst in the United States.
If you have been implicated in spying activities, genocide, or terrorism, or if you were implicated with the German Nazi allies of the Second World War.
http://www.estaform.co.uk/esta-questionnaire-usa.html
https://www.ft.com/content/88ddba0e-4df8-11e3-8fa5-00144feabdc0
In other words, this is pointless bureaucracy until you are involved in an accident and somebody questions whether you obtained your license by fraud, which in turn may mean you drove illegally, which in turn may mean you are assigned part of the blame/cost for the accident regardless and your insurance will not cover you.
Also, cops are aware of the recent invention of the contact lens. They will in practice ask you to identify something far away if the have doubts about your visual accuracy. Again, the point of having the test and the mark is to make it unambiguously clear to even the forgetful, that they need to have adequate vision to drive. If their license needs to be revoked because of this, it’s also more helpful to be able to say ‘it’s written onto your license itself’ than to have to point to form C, subsection 13.4.2.3 that they signed 30 years prior, when they first got their license.
@brmic
The idea that people need to be warned about very obvious things like that is…very American. If people go drive a car without being able to see sufficiently, they are not forgetful, they are moronic. There is no limit to the ability of moronic people to do dumb things, so why single out one of the 3 million stupid things that drivers can do? Is there some epidemic in countries without this rule of drivers who drive without glasses? Never heard of it, despite living in such a country.
The insurance company can just write down in their policy when it reimburses people, the law can state that people need to have sufficient eye sight, etc. You can even put it under a more general rule and depend on judges to rule sensibly.
Now excuse me, I lost my glasses and have to drive to the optician.
I know a rural fire chief who is legally blind, according to a neighboring fire chief who was my instructor for an emergency vehicle operator’s course. He CANNOT get a driver’s license.
He drives his own personal vehicles, drives his departmental vehicles, and rolls code in them. I guess he’s buddies with the local police and will not stop until he kills someone.
This is why it is useful to have a medical doctor who has a lot to lose (his medical license and huge $$$ in liability) examine that the people who get a driving license are medically apt.
I know plenty of people whose driving licenses got pulled for medical reasons (mostly for hearing loss or the loss of the hand-eye coordination required to play the game; few people lose that much eyesight that it cannot be corrected by spectacles). Once you reach a certain age, it is very frequent in Spain.
@ana53294
Mandatory doctor checks after a certain age makes a lot of sense and we have that in my country.
Huh, if your prescription is +3, aren’t any glasses < 0 or > +6 worse than no glasses?
wait, is this a thing? i’ve never needed a formal prescription, in the US or the UK. Is it illegal to order glasses online in Spain? Does anyone know it it’s just one of those laws that is routinely ignored. These people seem to get away without it.
I’m pretty sure in the US, you don’t need a formal prescription, but you do need to know what your prescription is—which is generally beyond the layman’s abilities to figure out on their own—or the optician won’t know what lenses to use.
What countries have such regulations? The U.S. doesn’t seem to.
I have always assumed I needed a formal prescription, and in Maryland, I think the opticians won’t fill a prescription for glasses that’s more than two years old. But I don’t know if that’s the law or just corporate policy by people who don’t want to spend a lot of effort making you the wrong glasses, and then have you return them and demand your money back.
Do you know if Maryland has any rule against buying glasses online?
I just listened to the latest episode of Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast where he interviewed Jonathan Haidt. Previously I had heard Haidt’s name bandied about in these parts without ever forming a concept of who he is, what he does, and what his views are. Now I have a much clearer picture.
So, those of you who also listened to this podcast, what did you think of it? (Hope I’m not opening the floodgates to an endless stream of bad culture war discourse by starting this thread…)
Have not listened to that particular podcast, but I have heard him on many others and other things. Haidt is just an old school, out of style “liberal” that doesn’t fit into the modern Left-Right Democrat-Republican dichotomy very well. This means he is a social liberal with liberal views on freedom, but is economically restrictive. He wants taxes and welfare, etc.
Now, I personally see this sort of person a lot in the 25+ professional community in the city I live in. My personal theory is that these people are naturally predisposed to be libertarian/Republican, but were raised in Democratic households/cities/schools and thus are under a social pressure to not be libertarians or Republicans. Usually they kind of recoil from the campus craziness and even things like public sector unions.
For instance, when Rahm Emmanuel pulled out of the mayoral race in Chicago recently, these “Democrats” freaked out about who was going to be the next mayor, because almost all the candidates (all presumed Democratic) are unacceptable to them because they are radical black power candidates, SJWs, or the ex-police guy (who otherwise would be their obvious choice, but they have been told cops are bad for so long they cant get to that place). These people, in a vacuum, would vote for a Gary Johnson type for mayor (and be extremely happy if he won), and he would win if all the faux-Dem professionals in Chicago voted for him, but they wont, and such a person wont even run, because of the overwhelming social pressures against it.
Police departments have a tendency towards institutional scumminess that rewards loyalty over actual police work, occasionally to the point that good cops are fired to protect bad cops, and the CPD has a particularly bad case of this problem. See eg that drug dealer who decided the best way to build a successful operation was to join the CPD.
ed:
I’m trying to find a citation for that claim, but I don’t remember the names of anyone involved and I’m being swamped by more recent and more typical “cop executes random citizen in a fit of pique” corruption scandals.
ed2:
Ok, I found it. Turns out reading the comprehensive history is a better way of finding a prominent story than random googling.
@liskantope,
Does anyone have a working definition of what SSC means by “culture war”?
As far as I can tell the term probably entered use after it was used in a 1991 book on different public policy goals of religious and secular voters, and then Pat Buchanan used the term in a speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention to mean close to the same thing, but the way the term is used at SSC seems to go beyond that.
My working definition is “What would you not bring up at Thanksgiving dinner,” but YMMV.
Those topics which tend to engage the readers’ identity and tribal affiliation, rather than their brains. Alternatively, the topics most likely to lead to an angry argument with little chance of anyone changing their minds or learning anything.
Those topics *can* be discussed constructively, but they’re subject to various kinds of dysfunction, so Scott limits them on some threads.
Ron Unz has a history of falsifying data to prove his point, so I would not trust his “research” regardless of how politically correct are the conclusions.
According to FBI statistics in 2016 there have been 128 known homicide cases with non-Hispanic white victims and Hispanic offenders (and 53 cases with Hispanic victims and non-Hispanic white offenders).
Scott! Thanks for the hat tip!
Apropos of nothing, while skimming over the “Recent Posts” list, my eye blended together the two latest adversarial collaboration titles as “Should Transgender Children Be Mandatory?”
I hope we can all agree the evidence shows that no, they should not.
(Transgender children for some, but miniature American flags for others!)
Filed under: Things I Will Regret Writing
Any tennis fans around? I’m utterly baffled by the reactions to the women’s final of the US Open, in which Serena Williams was penalized one game for an extended complaint to the chair umpire regarding a previous penalty, and subsequently lost the match to Naomi Osaka.
The woke left response has been that the umpire was sexist, a male player would not have been penalized for doing the same thing, Williams is simply being attacked for being a black woman in a white man’s game, SLAY QUEEN, etc.
The response of many sources outside the US and right-wing sources domestically is that the umpire did nothing wrong and Williams deserved to be penalized for her poor sportsmanship.
And all the while I’m thinking, look, the ump was a dickweed. The rules around coaching are bullshit – it’s a very common violation that’s almost never penalized. If I were the referee, I’d have reversed the coaching call and I wouldn’t have penalized her for complaining about it. But, y’know, bad calls are a fact of life in every sport, and Williams is the most accomplished active tennis player today, certainly the best-known. I’m not seeing how this is societal oppression. Sometimes a dickweed is just a dickweed.
Am I completely nuts here?
I felt really bad for the poor girl (Osaka) who beat her. The crowd response to her magnificent win was boo’ing her after the match and at the awards ceremony. She didn’t deserve any of that. If Williams had an inkling of sportsmanship over selfishness, she’d have appealed to the crowd at the awards ceremony to respect her winning opponent. Imagine yourself having just won the US Open at a young age after beating the favorite and wanting to celebrate, but instead having everyone in the crowd boo you.
The whole thing regarding Williams seems like a tempest in a teapot, with the coach admitting afterwards that she was in fact illegally trying to coach her and that the penalty was deserved. Also, I’d note that for coaching, and for the first round of complaining about it, all Williams got was warnings, with no affect on the score nor the game. It was only after her follow-up temper tantrum smashing her racquet and calling the umpire a thief that she got an actual point and (as predicted by one of the female former-player commentators watching her display) game penalty.
But your other read is correct. If something negative happens to one group, it’s complained about, but if a similar thing happens to some other specific groups, then it’s held up as an example of how that group is treated especially badly.
Which, in fact, she did. Her poor sportsmanship was towards the umpire, not towards her opponent.
She could have taken a few seconds to think about the context of what was going down and how it would affect her opponent.
Once she threw her tantrum, there was no possible way Osaka would be able to enjoy a “clean” victory. Whether that was the intent or not, it was an inevitable consequence of Serena’s behavior, that couldn’t be remedied by a quick “oh wait I changed my mind stop booing now” at the end.
Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about professional tennis and the rules thereof. All of the below is based on what I have read from other sources.
My understanding is that the original warning regarding coaching by the umpire was correct by the rules, but often ignored. So, essentially discretionary on the part of the umpire, in the sense that we can all look away and pretend we didn’t see it happening. By itself, the original warning was nonconsequential.
However, the followup penalties for smashing the racquet and impugning the honesty of the umpire are mandatory penalties, and there is no way that the umpire could pretend it didn’t happen. Not calling penalties on these would have been manifestly unfair to Osaka.
Williams was arguing with the umpire to get him to retract his original warning on coaching. But the rules don’t allow that, and any grownup in the room will obviously realize that (for reasons of institutional authority) no umpire would do so. Williams was not acting like a grownup.
Which is not to say that Williams is a bad person. Clearly an overreaction under a high-stress situation.
However, attributing the umpire’s action to sex discrimination is nonsense. Even if Williams was penalized for something that a male tennis player would not, the beneficiary of those penalties was a woman, not a man. This would show (if true) that women’s tennis and men’s tennis are different sports (at least informally). In the same way, the fact that the WNBA and the NBA have different (formal) rules is not an indication that the WNBA is sexist: its just a different sport.
Yeah, she lost her temper and said some stuff she probably regretted an hour later. Which is standard human behavior. TV + social media will turn it into a 24-hour outrage fest, but that’s just the way they are. It has no greater significance than any other time someone blows their top at an inopportune moment, and turning it into some kind of battle in the culture war is silly.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of people don’t behave this way. If most people pulled something like this, they’d be fired instantly. Serena has done it for decades and gotten away with it, and now is basically being rewarded for it with heaps of good PR from the official arbiters of public opinion who have declared that clearly, one of the richest and most accomplished female athletes of all time is a powerless victim of racism and sexism.
This is not acceptable behavior. I have no power to impose any sort of real consequence on her for it, but the least we can do is denounce it.
Honestly I’m less annoyed by the actual day of match antics and more by the attempt to justify the behavior after the fact under the veil of feminism, which just screams entitlement.
Not to mention that this is quite literally a zero sum contest in which both participants are women.
It’s only “sexism” if you somehow believe that Osaka is somehow less of a woman than Serena.
This thread is full of great examples of how rudimentary the understanding of sexism is among a lot of the loudest anti-SJW voices here.
Philo –
Drive-by smuggery doesn’t convince anyone of anything except that you don’t have anything meaningful to say.
If you have a point or an argument, make it. If you don’t, well, this is exactly the sort of comment I would expect.
@Philosophisticat
It’s also possible that its a recognition that what current Social Justice calls “sexism” has been over-sophisticated for the sole purpose of weaponizing it as an accusation.
It doesn’t matter that the beneficiary of the penalties was a woman. I’m not saying that the complaint is justified (I think Williams behaved badly, and if it’s true that a male tennis player would likely have gotten away with it, I think refs are too easy on male tennis players), but people seem to be misrepresenting what the complaint is. Essentially, the critics are claiming that Williams was penalized for being unladylike, and that having a requirement of ladylike behavior is sexist. Who gained by it is completely beside the point (and, really, Osaka didn’t gain by it; she probably would have won anyway, so all she got was for her first major victory to be tainted by controversy).
It also seems worth mentioning that there probably wouldn’t have been such a strong reaction if the kerfuffle over the tournament policing Williams’ outfits hadn’t already gotten people stirred up.
@synecdoche
ATP and WTA have standardized officiating and share referees, so officiating should be similar. However, it seems that this specific referee is very harsh in general and has given a racket-throwing penalty to Djokovic, a top 3 male player.
The coaching call was just a warning with zero actual penalties though, right? The actual penalties were due to her behavior later on.
It was an official warning, on the sequence of warning, point game. So if it had not been given, the racquet incident would have been warning, and the arguing a point.
The Spanish media’s reaction is against Serena, mostly. Although everybody acknowledges that the coaching reprimand is slightly ridiculous, they do think that she was using feminism as an excuse to act badly. Also, this is not the first time she acts unreasonably.
I think part of the reason US media defends Serena is because of who she is. She is an African-American woman who recently gave birth, so she is a very sympathetic figure. As much as they say that the umpire would not reprimand her if she was a man, I am pretty sure the media would not defend her that much if she was a foreign white man.
I don’t follow Tennis closely, but I am a big sports fan, and Serena’s behavior here is about as despicable as I can imagine. She reminds me a lot of one of the other people I hate most in all of sports, Jim Harbaugh. There are other tennis players a lot like her in this respect, people have famously cited the past antics of John McEnroe. I don’t watch a lot but I think Djokovic is prone to this sort of thing too.
These are people who whine and complain about officiating all the time and do the best to use their status to bully the significantly lower-status officials. From what I’ve read, Serena has literally threatened physical violence at referees before. Then, in the heat of the moment, when there’s a borderline call to be made, these people, who have been absolute jerks to all officials for decades, are suddenly shocked, shocked, that the official rules against them and decides not to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Good. I’m glad the 49ers didn’t that PI call at the end of the Super Bowl, and I’m glad that Serena went down in flames here. I hope she goes into a downward spiral and never wins another major.
Harbaugh has toned it down a ton (some Michigan fans would say too much), and at this point he’s not even the most “antic-y” coach in his division of his conference (that’s probably James Franklin, though the worst antics by far in the B1G overall are from Pat Fitzgerald).
Though part of the issue with both Harbaugh and Serena is, once you’ve got a reputation for blowing your top, refs are going to be hypersensitive to it and you have to be cognizant of that.
Yeah. See also: Wallace, Rasheed, who late in his career, would get T-ed up for just looking at a ref the wrong way.
In any case, I’m a Pac-12 guy and I’ve been hating Harbaugh’s antics since his Stanford days, and I don’t plan on changing my opinion anytime soon!
See, I’m a Michigan fan, and watched Harbaugh get a PF for a fairly mild blowup in the (highly competitive) 2016 M-OSU game from a ref who turned out to be a lifelong OSU fan and best buds with one of the OSU players (he also ref’d basketball and knew the kid in high school), meanwhile Urban spent half the game out at the numbers yelling at the refs and never got a flag (and of course the game was decided on an iffy spot on an OT 4th down, grumble grumble)
The lack of pro refs in NCAA is appalling giving the money available to the conferences. Sometimes they really are bad enough to justify a tossed clipboard or two.
I’m still trying to figure out why the super racist sexist judge obviously favored the half-Japanese half-Haitian black woman over the black American woman.
Some of the spin I’ve seen is “she didn’t deserve a game for arguing with the ref, she didn’t even cuss” and completely ignore that that was her 3rd offense… had that been all she did, she would have gotten a warning and that would be the end of it. Also what she said was as important as how she said it. She basically called the umpire’s objectivity into question and threatened his job, which is frankly as bad or worse than “aww what kind of call was that, asshole?”
Breaking a racket is always a violation, man or woman. Coaching is apparently not called nearly as often as it happens, but her coach admitted the violation and at any rate the initial violation was just a warning.
Serena threw a tantrum because she was getting her ass kicked (and really, Osaka beat her soundly and would have beat her soundly regardless of the reffing, Serena was in her own head) after she already got her two “free” strikes. You can’t focus on just the final, game violation while ignoring the context that lead to it.
Tennis is a young person’s racket; Serena is getting a bit old. If you were a media-savvy minority athlete coming to the end of your run, this is probably one of the best ways to build up your personal brand and give yourself a spring-board for whatever’s next.
I mean, this happened in a Grand Slam final, she’s not exactly in any immediate danger of fading into obscurity.
Elite sportspeople can age really fast, though. Peyton Manning was the league MVP in 2013, still an absolutely great player in 2014, very bad indeed in 2015 and out of the league in 2016. And the 2015 Broncos defense aren’t going to be carrying Serena to any slams.
She’s turning 37 this month. The last female player of comparable stature, Steffi Graf, won her last singles slam at 29 (having gone nearly three years without one prior to that) and retired at 30. Martina Navratilova again had a last hurrah three years after the end of her real period of dominance, though in her case it came at 33. Father Time cannot be very far from chalking up another W, and she’d be a fool not to be thinking about what comes next.
I mean, you’re not wrong.
On the other hand, people have been predicting the eminent decline and fall of Serena (and Federer, and Nadal for that matter) for 5+ years now based on that sort of reasoning.
They’ll be right eventually, sure. But at some point maybe we update our priors?
These anecdotes can be misleading, too. A 27 year old has an off year due to bad luck or whatever, everybody takes it for a statistical anomaly and indeed they probably play a lot better the next year. A 37 year old has an off year, and everybody (including probably the athlete themselves) concludes it means they can’t play any more and we don’t get a chance to see if it’s just an off year and they’ll play better the next year because they retire.
No, not completely nuts, but your canned sports-culture reaction of going after the ref for enforcing/following the rules is exactly what gives people the tacit permission to act as she did, so you’re certainly not a neutral bystander taking an even view.
I don’t know s*** about tennis, but “the umpire was sexist” — WTH? wasn’t Ms Williams’s opponent the same sex as her too? Why would being sexist lead to disfavouring a woman against another woman?
If the officials saw their role as favoring one woman against another, they would be corrupt no matter what the rules. But assuming they were honest, what they were doing was measuring one woman’s behavior against an impersonal standard. It’s not hard to imagine how sexism could come into play there (the word “ladylike” might figure somewhere)– though I haven’t seen much evidence that it actually did.
Can I just say that it’s somewhat bizarre to characterize someone favoring a woman with more stereotypically feminine behavior over one with more stereotypically masculine behavior as somehow “anti-woman”?
But a large part of the definition of feminine behavior is just ‘how people expect women to behave’. And it makes perfect sense to enforce social hierarchies by disfavoring people who do not hew to their roles.
Feminism doesn’t seem to be terribly keen on femininity, preferring to empower females by teaching them masculine traits, believing that these are how men acquire power.
And what if the expectation of how people expect women to behave is obtained by observing how most women actually behave?
-I would say it doesn’t much matter if the prescribed behaviors are true on average. Even if most men like pepsi and most women like coke, if some guy wants a coke that shouldn’t have to cause problems.
-Determining how much of people’s behavior is due to their own preference and how much is due to social pressure is hard/impossible/borderline nonsensical. But if you observe that the average french peasant of the 1600’s spends all day farming and doesn’t seem to participate in politics, that doesn’t justify a social order that punishes peasants that try to leave farming and speak up about governance.
Agreed – if a man wants a coke, he should be able to have one and people shouldn’t hassle him about it. That said, someone who denied him a coke wouldn’t be acting in an “anti-male” manner. They’d just be a jerk in general.
I think the “Ramos is a jerk” argument has a bit of weight. But the problem is that in modern society, being a jerk is essentially considered okay, so long as you’re not a racist or a sexist (i.e. a jerk that disproportionately targets protected groups), in which case you’re the worst form of evil.
Which is precisely why Serena and her fanboys are having to make the (incredibly weak) case that Ramos is a sexist/racist. Because if she just called him a jerk, nobody would care.
zzzsort:
I think this is an important point that comes up a lot. When observe some difference between men and women (blacks and whites, gays and straights, etc.) in our society, we usually are going to have a heck of a time determining whether we’re observing some fundamental property of human nature, or whether we’re observing some quirk of our society that doesn’t really have anything to do with human nature. Looking across societies is better; looking across history is still better. But it’s really hard to determine.
There are plausible arguments that the imbalance between men and women in STEM fields in the US come down to human-nature/biology, and are immutable. Some of those arguments are pretty plausible sounding, and in fact, I’m slightly inclined toward believing them (a combination of greater average spatial/mathematical ability for men, different interests between women and men, and maybe the higher variance for men in intelligence and other mental traits).
But someone 50 years ago could have made a pretty convincing case about a bunch of differences between women and men at that time–about as convincing as the current case made by someone like Damore. And one good look at the US in 2018 would show that this case was mostly wrong. (The same person arguing that women would never be a large fraction of physicists or engineers, in 1968, would probably also have said that women would never be a large fraction of lawyers, doctors, or vets.)
This isn’t an argument for or against a side in that debate, it’s a reminder that we should approach the whole matter with some epistemic humility. It’s easy to be wrong, in either direction, because what you can easily observe is your society, not all societies.
I think they could not, because the conditions they were observing were strongly effected by formal discrimination against women. That’s not the case now, which makes the case for alternate explanations considerably stronger.
Not completely, but every time I hear the phrase ‘woke left’ I cringe and brace myself for some pretty nuts arguments.
People who have been following tennis for long enough can recall the Williams sisters’ horrific track record of poor sportsmanship and mean-spirited behaviour on and off the court. Only difference now is that Serena has the cultural zeitgeist behind her so she can accuse match officials of ‘sexism’ when things don’t go her way and no-one bats an eyelid. She’s well past her prime and she knows it, she had a child recently and the complications from that have hampered her return to the sport, and to shine a light on these two facts she got outplayed by a nobody.
As sharper13 said above – I feel sorry for Osaka, whose great effort and victory was all but taken away from her by a hysterical crowd.
Osaka seems to have been widely viewed as a rising star, someone who’d had a bit of success already and seemed to be steadily getting better (and young enough that she might have considerable room to improve), so this doesn’t seem like a very fair description.
Osaka now has a 2-0 record against Serena Williams, which even considering the circumstances (they previously met in Miami this past spring, in one of the first “rehab starts” for Williams after her pregnancy) is pretty damn impressive. She also won this year’s Indian Wells tournament, which combined with the US Open puts her at #7 in the world at the ripe old age of 20. I don’t think she’s going to be overshadowed for long.
Maybe she really is the next true great of the women’s game, but an awful lot of players have had some early success, played some great tennis, and then gone nowhere. Outside of Serena, the women’s game’s been chaos for years.
Williams:
Grand Slam W/L: 331/45; WTA Singles Titles: 72; Career prize money: ~$88M
Osaka:
Grand Slam W/L: 25/10; WTA Singles Titles: 2; Career prize money: ~$7M
I don’t see how Osaka’s potential to achieve great things in the future impacts my point vis a vis Williams’ behaviour and the public condemnation it received.
It doesn’t. I only took issue with calling Osaka a “nobody.”
At any given time, there are 10-15 tennis players (male and female) who are viewed as “rising stars.”
Over the past 15 years or so, approximately four of them (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Serena) have actually achieved something resembling real stardom.
There’s a big difference between the men and women here. In the men’s game, Murray, Wawrinka, Del Potro (when healthy) et al. have consistently been the tier behind the big three (in Murray’s case, he even briefly made it a big 4). The barrier to their success hasn’t been inconsistency or failure to reach their potential; it’s been three of the absolute greatest players of all time being better than them. The same isn’t true with the endless Central and Eastern European women who’ve won slams in the Serena era. One minute they’re lights out, the next they’re ranked no.83. The last non-Williams women to play at a consistently high level over a meaningful period were Henin and Clijsters.
And sometimes they aren’t? I feel like you could make that argument about a cop pulling someone over for doing 38 in a 35 zone or a store clerk being suspicious of shoplifting. Any individual instance could be the result of a perfectly unbiased misanthrope, but taken collectively there’s a clear story of bias. Maybe Ramos was just being a dick, but a dynamic of white guys not wanting their authority challenged by women/black people is a pattern, and it’s legitimately hard to tell what role it played here (I don’t understand why other commenters are so focused on Osaka’s identity in this; Ramos wasn’t trying to help anyone in particular win, he was trying to maintain his authority over Serena).
Personally, I think (1) Ramos was a dick, (2) Serena’s behavior was out of line, and (3) events probably would have gone at least somewhat differently if she were a white guy.
…isn’t that explicitly the role of a referee?
Also a role of police, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be abuses of that power. I think a better referee would have deescalated, even if it meant ceding come authority.
Perhaps, but demanding perfection, or even expecting consistently good judgement as a justification of bad behavior isn’t a good starting point for the discussion. Serena’s behavior is what created the situation where he could make a poor call and given that unforced errors are a part of all sports why would you consider that one error (without a history behind it) worth criticizing significantly over?
I mainly object to the analysis process that many people seem to have about these issues that runs something as follows:
-Assume a model Ramos that is a reasonable person
-Add a plausible amount of dickishness
-Check if the events are consistent with that model
-If yes, then there wasn’t any bias.
This is equivalent to having a strong prior for there not being any bias in the world, which seems like a bad prior.
Other implicit arguments include “if Serena behaved badly, then it is impossible/excusable for Ramos to have been biased” and “if Serena personally has a high status then it is impossible/excusable for Ramos to have been biased”
Examining Ramos’ history seems like a fair route to go.
Given only the information that Ramos penalized Serena, how much would you update in favor of tennis refereeing being biased? It seems to me that this is “the sound of one hand clapping”; there can be no update at all. Yet we get claims that this demonstrates bias; it cannot.
@ zzzzort
Why is the prior that this needs to be investigated though?
@zzzzort
But the other common interpretation is that it could only be bias. Given the number of hostile/unfair interactions between athletes and officials of the same gender/race there must be at least some prior of refs just being jerks. Why is assuming 100% one model better than assuming 100% the other?
Also worth noting that Serena might very well be the single most successful female tennis player of all time.
Given that, my prior is that she does not face constant bias against her from referees and officials.
If you really wanted to examine whether there’s bias against Serena in particular, or women in general, or black women in general, in tennis refereeing, then you’d need to go look at a fair bit of background information before you could have any confidence in your conclusions.
OTOH, if you really wanted to assert your prior model of the world (whether that’s racist/sexist white umpires, entitled black women demanding special treatment, or some other not-so-culture-warry model[1]), then you’d spend like three minutes reading one article or hot take on the matter and then confidently assert your conclusion.
[1] My prior is closer to “Aging champion loses temper and makes an ass of herself at inopportune time, and umpire overreacts because she’s challenging his authoriteh,” but I don’t know enough to put much weight on that picture of reality.
@Nybbler, baconbits, meh
I’m not saying that there’s overwhelming evidence from this incident, that it should lead to a strong update in priors, or that the answer should be 100% clear. If the OP’s point had been ‘maybe Ramos is just a super stickler for the rules, boy it really is hard to tell when sexism is a factor’ i would have been happy. Or even ‘maybe Ramos is a stickler for the rules, and my prior is that very few people are sexist, so Ramos probably isn’t either’, I would have disagreed on the prior, but not the logic.
What’s your take on what synechdohe says, i.e. that the ‘you’re not allowed to call me a liar and smash your racket’ is fixed?
It sounds like it might be a combination of a debateable call with a serious repercussion, but that the two were separated – you make a small decision which may be wrong (or biased???) and then you act entirely correctly in refusing to let the player respond by insulting the ref and smashing things
“My understanding is that the original warning regarding coaching by the umpire was correct by the rules, but often ignored. So, essentially discretionary on the part of the umpire, in the sense that we can all look away and pretend we didn’t see it happening. By itself, the original warning was nonconsequential.
However, the followup penalties for smashing the racquet and impugning the honesty of the umpire are mandatory penalties, and there is no way that the umpire could pretend it didn’t happen. Not calling penalties on these would have been manifestly unfair to Osaka.
Williams was arguing with the umpire to get him to retract his original warning on coaching. But the rules don’t allow that, and any grownup in the room will obviously realize that (for reasons of institutional authority) no umpire would do so. Williams was not acting like a grownup.”
The only backlash I’ve seen in my own corner of woke lefty social media has been one level up from that; it’s been anger at the outsize backlash she has gotten compared to other examples of male athletes behaving badly towards refs/umps/whatevers. The criticism I’ve seen isn’t “Serena behaved well, leave her alone,” it’s “Serena behaved no worse than many other people do, and yet the reaction to her behaviour is vastly greater and angrier than the reaction when people who aren’t black women do it.”
I make no claim as to how much cherry-picking is going on.
A lot of the reaction is also actually about that cartoon that’s pretty damn easy to read as a racist caricature.
Maybe I just live in a particularly meta bubble, though.
The insistence on bring race and gender into this seems like a deliberate attempt at misdirection to me here.
Black male tennis players do exist. We could examine their behavior and their propensity to be punished to control, and determine, whether this is supposedly a race thing (black people get punished more) or a gender thing (white people get punished more).
There are also other black female tennis players besides the Williams sisters. We could look into their behavior and history of punishment.
The fact that nobody is actually bothering to do this, and instead is just loudly insisting that “white male players are allowed to do this” while failing to provide concrete and specific examples, speaks volumes.
It’s funny, because my take was basically “even if you don’t think the call was justified, consider the above”. I’ve seen worse calls and no doubt I’ll see worse calls in the future as well. What’s disturbing to me is how Serena is actively becoming a culture warrior to pursue her own ends; witness the case where she lost her high rank and argued that, since the reason she left the sport for a year and got out of shape was pregnancy, the rankings association should give her a special exemption and let her keep her rank, and that not doing so was sexist against women. She literally asked for positive discrimination and framed it as negative discrimination if that didn’t happen.
I’ll bet you $50 she wins that argument, BTW. When I was watching Wimbledon during a period of unemployment this summer, 100% of the ESPN crew was loudly and vociferously in agreement with her on this. It was absolutely framed as “Women shouldn’t be punished for having children.”
Good luck pushing back on that one in this political environment…
Personally, as much as a lot of the rest of the objectives and rhetoric annoy me, I am actually okay with this one.
In the ideal world, having children would be like serving in the military, socially speaking. It used to be, to some extent, and still is in some of our subcultures (particularly the gender conservative ones). Women shouldn’t be punished for having children, even passively. After all, what the shit are you selecting for, with that approach?
But the flip side of that which the same people rarely talk about is that men shouldn’t be punished for participating more in having children, either. (Oh, they complain about men not participating as much, certainly. They just don’t comment on the social forces arrayed to punish men who do.) This is the double standard which makes me uninterested in having more of a stake than “I am okay with this”.
If I were more strategic, I guess I would oppose it on coordination grounds. Meh.
Framing it as a punishment is absurd to start with.
What baconbits said.
The purpose of tennis rankings is to accurately summarize who was the most accomplished tennis player over the last ~1 yr.
Someone who was at home having a baby in 2017 wasn’t the most accomplished tennis player in 2017.
This seems very simple to me.
Your body, your choice… not docking Serena’s rank is punishing the women who chose to focus on tennis.
If raising babies is so important, who cares about a meaningless number like a tennis rank?
Serena wants mommy points and tennis points without having to make any tough choices. That’s not noble, that’s entitlement.
It doesn’t matter how you choose to frame it, but by how those participating in the rankings choose to frame it.
If they see it as a punishment, it is, for all relevant incentivization purposes, a punishment. What matters is what feels normal to them.
The question is what “normal” looks like. Simply asserting your own version of “normal” and behaving as if the question is absurd doesn’t answer the question.
You could write this more accurately by using the term consequence or outcome without the connotations carried by punishment.
Sure.
Imagine, for a moment, two situations:
In both, there is a hole in a dark box.
In one situation, the box is full of spinning gears that will crush the hand of anyone who reaches inside.
In the other, there is an angry man who is possessive of his box space who will crush any hand that reaches inside.
You don’t know which is the case, only that people who reach into the box get their hands crushed.
Is it punishment? Is it just a natural consequence of reaching into the box?
What if the box was assembled to perform a function? What if it was assembled to crush the hands of idiots who reach into dark spaces? What if it has a purpose, and the people responsible for building it just didn’t care what happened to people who reached in, since they “deserve” their fate?
What does “punishment” mean, except a description of the perception of the intent of the agents responsible for a situation? And does it matter whether we call it punishment or not?
It means precisely that, but that is important. Framing it as punishing pregnancy implies that there is a beef with pregnancy, that pregnancy has been singled out somehow. If instead pregnancy is being treated normally as other, similar things would be, then saying that it’s a punishment seems stupid.
I mean, to your example – if you stick your hand in a factory’s gears and it gets broken, versus if you stick your hand in a man’s face and he breaks it, clearly these are two different things.
Anyways, as I mentioned, what annoyed me was the attempt to turn a request for positive discrimination into a request for removal of negative discrimination (i.e. give pregnant women special circumstances, that women-taking-a-break don’t get). I figured that there would be some people in favor of giving that positive discrimination, and I might even be that…but I don’t like that dishonesty.
Granting this definition (for avoiding semantic arguments sake) you still don’t get to jump to the
There isn’t a consensus opinion of every tennis player, or every female tennis player, or every female tennis pro, or every ranked female pro, or every ranked female pro above a level X. So you are down to either ‘these are the agreed upon rules’ or ‘every individual’s opinion is valid’.
Take the latter to the extreme, what if Serena had said that being pregnant prevented her from practicing and competing for a year and that allowing other top pros to practice and compete for prizes was punishing those women who chose to become pregnant and rewarding those who didn’t, and that anytime a top pro was pregnant the events should be cancelled, and prize money from that year shifted to the next year so that everyone could compete for it fairly. Given your position what is the actual argument against this?
It matters because it implies something must be done to redress the situation (or demands that the ‘punishment’ be justified). Calling it a punishment frames the discussion, it puts one party as a victim and one as a vitimizer, using neutral language doesn’t have that issue.
Given that Serena was attempting to create a new consensus view (as opposed to just capitalizing on culture war bullshit), then framing it as punishment is exactly right; it is an argument whichs amounts to “This feels like punishment”, which is a valid argument. If most of the women playing disagree – well, the consensus doesn’t agree with her. But I think you are objecting to the wrong thing.
Should a tennis player lose rank while in the military? What if they were drafted?
This is the way I am approaching the question, in the framework of other situations in which we might call the fairness of the situation into question. The answer isn’t immediately obvious to me, because it looks pretty clearly to be a situation in which how we characterize it is based entirely on our expectations.
No problem. First, find me a black lesbian tennis player…
Wait, am I missing something? Female tennis players are ranked against other female tennis players, right? And rankings are zero-sum so for every time someone falls in the rankings, others rise in the rankings to exactly offset it, right? So as long as all female players are subject to the same rules, i.e. that if they take time off to get pregnant and have a baby, they fall in the rankings due to their absence from the sport, it seems odd to frame that as sexism, since it’s not disadvantaging women relative to men. It’s not like women are competing against men in the rankings who have the advantage of not having to take (as much) time off to have a baby. The strongest case I can see here is that fertile women are being discriminated against compared to non-fertile women (i.e. transwomen, pre-pubescent girls, etc.) because non-fertile women wouldn’t have to take time off to get pregnant if they want to have a baby.
A possible explanation for that is that these critics are not actually thinking things through for every situation, but are applying a generic template. So in this case they then apply the same template that they also apply for situations where women compete with men.
Alternative: Serena’s secret plan is a eugenic program to make super-tennis-players[1]. For this to work, she needs the top womens’ players to be willing to have as many children as possible. Giving them some kind of boost in the rankings per child they have is All Part Of The Plan.
[1] I assume this all goes back to the marriage between Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.
a quick correction from my end: turns out I misremembered and Serena didn’t in fact participate in these arguments
that said, basically a lot of these situations can be at least partially dismissed under the template that it’s female V female, yeah
Thanks for correcting yourself.
Did she say that pregnant women shouldn’t lose ranking points, or just that she specifically shouldn’t? The former is a decent argument, though it would require a substantial rework of the ranking system to accommodate it. The latter is obviously nuts – she’s not the first tennis player to take maternity leave.
Well, first an apology – it seems I was wrong that Serena participated in this. Actually it was just some articles by USA Today and some other media. Unless there’s something I haven’t found, Serena seemed pretty chill about this incident.
Anyways, the argument was that pregnant women shouldn’t lose ranking points, essentially because it was discriminatory towards pregnancy. Even though that’s basically the opposite of the truth. Just asking for the exception is, I agree, a decent argument, one especially designed to work on pro-natalists (not sure if I count myself there), but asking for positive discrimination under the guise of arguing against negative discrimination very much pisses me off.
Just as a general point, I haven’t seen anyone asking for male tennis players to be held to a higher standard of courtesy rather than that women should be held to the lower standard that’s expected of men.
Are men held to a lower standard? I’ve seen the long list of examples of “man rants at umpire, doesn’t get docked” but you don’t get docked on the first offense of a match. Maybe that’s the issue – that penalties in tennis are rare enough that the casual viewer doesn’t get that the penalty is based on the number of offenses, not the severity of a particular offense. (Conversely, when someone points out that in, say, rugby, a player who yells at the ref gets expelled immediately… yeah, that doesn’t really work if there’s only one player on the “team.”)
Of course, when I try to pull out the rulebook and point this out, I’m mansplaining or whitesplaining or otherwise reinforcing the white cisheteropatriarchy. And I hear this from Serena fans who don’t even watch tennis… *bangs head against wall*
I’m not holding Ramos blameless. He did a lousy job of managing the situation and came off to the audience (most of whom are casual fans who only watch the US Open and maybe Wimbledon) as handing arbitrary penalties to Queen Serena just because he can’t take her Compton attitude.
If you want some Hot information, check this shit out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/9epjp1/2018_us_open_code_violations_men_86_women_22/
As you might guess from the title, men got 86 code violations during this US open and women got 22. Which is why you have to be careful with “double standards”. Not even because this disproves it, mind; maybe men deserved more violations than what they got!
Also, in terms of Ramos himself, let me quote a comment from that post:
So, ya know.
Someone said this on the front page of the NYT (though, perhaps siginficantly, not a professional thinkpiecer): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/martina-navratilova-serena-williams-us-open.html
Williams was a jerk with poor self control, but the umpire’s level of hardassery, while technically correct, was foolish and unnecessary. The final match of a major tournament is a bad time to start rigidly enforcing rules that are not normally strictly enforced.
That said, much of the reaction from the American media is clearly just people who are upset that their beloved celebrity didn’t win pouncing on the opportunity to have their poor sportsmanship framed as social justice.
No, you are actually a rare sane person. Welcome to hell.
If anything about this affair is surprising, you need to reread The Toxoplasma of Rage.
Who, exactly? I like tennis and 100% of the reaction I’ve seen was 100% against Serena. Is this a prominent opinion held by a lot of people that I’m just unaware of due to my media diet? Or a nontroversy built on some random tweet that has been promoted to being “the position of the woke left” by the sort of people who earn their living by bashing the woke left?
Yeah. Like the Women’s Tennis Association CEO, via ESPN:
The WTA was founded by Billie Jean King, so no surprise that she agreed too. And probably a lot of the crowd agreed to some degree or they wouldn’t have booed Naomi Osaka. In terms of articles…I tried a CNN article, and it turned out to be pretty neutral and just-the-facts, but it had an auto-playing video which started with the words “Serena was correctly talking about the sexism inherent in that now”. And I found an NBC article talking about how tennis is suffering from its patriarchal vestiges…somehow? Not to mention, tweets, plural, often by blue checkmarks with healthy follower counts.
I’ll admit that my Googling found that some of the usual suspects are being more level-headed about than I’d hoped. But I really wish that Serena herself would’ve been level-headed herself.
This is not nothing, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a consensus on the “woke left” either. After five minutes of googling, what I took away is that the most well-known and successful female athlete in the world made a clear accusation of sexism and only got tepid support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/serena-williams-tennis-usopen.html
(NYT has also run anti-Serena op-eds)
Are you American? I’ve noticed a US/rest of world divide. The Washington Post, for instance, published a piece backing the sexism narrative as its lead coverage of the match.
I came across a pro-Serena op-ed in the main Sydney paper (but it also had a pro-umpire op-ed from a former umpire who had docked a male player a game in a Grand Slam… the comments were decidedly on the “pro-umpire” side).
Trump and most of his supporters never claimed that Hispanics are a wicked race intrinsically prone to crime. They claim that illegal immigrants are prone to crime, which is factually true. Unz shows that the American Hispanics as a race aren’t more prone to crime than whites once you control for age and gender, which is interesting but doesn’t address the issue of illegal immigrants being more prone to crime.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular belief (of both the leftists and the alt-righters/dead eaters), Trump and his “mainstream” supporters (e.g. Tucker Carlson) are civic nationalists, not ethno-nationalists. Jared Taylor and Andrew Anglin are true racists and ethno-nationalists, but they represent very small minority positions.
I know a lot of people like to ignore this one minor technicality, but in a strictly technical sense, 100% of illegal immigrants commit at least one crime. It’s literally impossible to be an illegal immigrant who has never committed a crime. As far as I can tell, illegal immigration is the only crime on the books that for some reason “doesn’t count” as a crime in common discourse.
And I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to suggest that it’s not in the best interest of a country with a strong tradition of “rule of law” (or whatever you want to call it) to continuously admit people who openly flaunt said rules.
The idea that illegal immigrants are prone to crime is used to argue their unsuitability for residency. By definition their illegal immigration has already occurred and if it somehow recurred (trip to mexico and back?), it probably doesn’t result in additional harm in itself* (though smuggling things across the border, for instance, would). For comparison, if arguing that drug users are undesirable residents of the country, it doesn’t really make sense to point out 100% of users are criminals by virtue of using the drug in question. Instead, you would point to associated crimes, like theft, gang violence, dui, etc. If the people you were arguing against already accepted drug use, by virtue of being illegal, was enough to make you a bad citizen, you wouldn’t be having the argument. If arguing speeders are bad, the 100% argument would be worse than statistics on the cost of speeding in lives and money for similar reasons, and so on.
The idea that 100% are criminals slightly suggests, and your second paragraph more strongly suggests, that one can use illegal immigration to predict higher future criminality. By discounting the illegal immigration itself, your opponents are asking you if the statistics bear that implication out.
*edit: okay, I could see someone arguing that continued residence is additional harm per second, but presumably the other side of the argument doesn’t believe that and would ask for further justification.
I’d be more convinced by this kind of argument, if I knew anyone who hadn’t broken at least one law. Most people who drive violate speed limits. Many submit iffy income tax returns, fail to declare purchases when returning from foreign trips, or similar. Those who walk any distance generally routinely jaywalk when it appears safe to do so. A large portion of my generation sampled various illegal drugs at least once. Judging by those I know, less than one in ten internet shoppers pay the state sales tax due, if it’s not collected by the vendor.
That’s a fair point.
Generally speaking, I map my “concern for lawbreaking behavior” to the severity of offense. I don’t really know the exact level of offense attributable to things like speeding, jaywalking, etc. But it’s certainly lower than a misdemeanor.
I’m not sure where illegal immigration falls either, but it certainly seems to be considered a much more serious offense than things like speeding, jaywalking, etc. It’s certainly true that a lot of people think it shouldn’t be, but that’s a separate discussion.
In the meantime, there is absolutely no shortage of aspiring immigrants who don’t violate immigration law, that we routinely kick out and send home. Why not prioritize those who respect the law (even if the law is minor) over those who do not? Similarly, if I were hiring a chauffeur, and there were a lot of candidates, I’d almost certainly give preference to the ones who didn’t have a bunch of speeding tickets.
There’s also the argument (though I don’t know how justified it is) that illegal immigration supports and is associated with much more serious crime, even if the illegal immigrants are not themselves criminals – many of the people involved in smuggling immigrants are the same people smuggling drugs and other contraband, and they definitely are more likely to also be violent criminals.
Of course, immigration prohibition in the face of high demand may be as useless/counterproductive as drug prohibition (or maybe not).
Right. Illegal immigration might not be highly correlated with rape, but I’d bet a whole lot of money that it is highly correlated with say, the fraudulent usage of social security numbers.
Matt:
I’m sure that’s true. I guess the interesting question, to my mind, is whether there is any particular association between willingness to illegally immigrate to the US and willingness to commit either violent or property crime. Once they’re here, they’re surely going to continue violating laws whose purpose is to catch and deport them, but I want to know if they’re likely to rob, rape, or kill the rest of us.
From what I’ve understood of available crime statistics, they don’t seem especially inclined in that direction. Intuitively, I’d expect that–illegal immigrants really don’t want to get mixed up with the justice system, since if they commit a serious crime, they’ll be sent to prison, and then deported when they get out. Even minor crimes are likely to get them deported. It’s basically a class of people who face higher penalties for crime than the rest of us–it’s not a huge shock that they respond to those higher penalties by not committing as much crime. The price went up, so they bought less of it.
albatross,
That logic is sound and I’m not sure I disagree.
I feel like the problem here is that the two tribes are having two separate conversations with different definitions of criminality in mind.
Red tribe says: “Illegal immigrants are criminals!” which is literally true in the sense that they violated immigration law, and is almost certainly true in the sense that they are quite likely to also be violating tax laws, labor laws, basic traffic laws (driving without license, insurance, etc.).
Blue tribe says: “Not true! Studies have shown that illegal immigrants are no more likely to rape or murder than native born Americans!”
But both of these things can be true. And I think Red Tribe has every right to object to the general/minor illegalities associated with illegal immigrants even if they are no more likely to rape and murder. But rather than acknowledge this, most proponents of illegal immigration simply cite the rape and murder statistics, and jump from that to “therefore the only possible explanation is racism.”
I want to know if they’re likely to rob, rape, or kill the rest of us.
More fun with those FBI stats and Excel:
Arrests made by ethnicity/racial breakdown, from a list of 29 charges where number 1 is the most arrests by proportion of total arrests, thus highest place on the list, and number 29 is the fewest, thus lowest place on the list.
White: 29/29 – Robbery, 1/29 – Driving under influence
African American: 29/29 – Driving under influence, 1/29 – Robbery
Native American: 29/29 – Gambling, 1/29 – Drunkenness
Asian: 29/29 – Offences against family and children, 1/29 – Prostitution and commercialised vice
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 29/29 – Vagrancy, 1/29 – Gambling
Hispanic or Latino: 29/29 – Offences against family and children, 1/29 – Rape
If you want to know about murder, again where 29 is the lowest place and 1 is the highest place on the list:
African-American: Number 2
Hispanic or Latino: Number 14
Hawaiian and Pacific Islander: Number 17
Asian: Number 18
Native American: Number 21
White: Number 28
gbdub:
I think other countries manage to have pretty effective immigration enforcement (and thus, no large pool of people in the country illegally) without turning into police states or anything. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the US could, too.
The argument is about whether the willingness of someone to break immigration law by immigrating predicts his willingness to break other laws. From that standpoint, the question is how serious a crime the illegal immigrant thinks he is committing, not how serious a crime the legal system thinks he is committing.
And it also depends on the payoff for committing a crime. The fact that someone will break a law when doing so provides a very large benefit to him and his family is weak evidence that he will engage in casual law breaking–weaker evidence than the fact that someone else does engage in casual law breaking, even if the latter is committing a less serious crime than the former.
A crime that produces net benefits for the rest of us, since it means money is being paid into the system by someone who can’t use having paid it in as a basis for later getting money back.
Only if those Red Tribe members object to the minor illegalities that they and other Red Tribe members routinely commit–drinking when under 21, providing drinks to people under 21, driving over the speed limit, … . Which I don’t think they are.
And the minor illegalities the illegal immigrants commit could mostly be eliminated by letting them become legal immigrants.
There’s plenty of law-n-order “the law’s the law” Red Tribers who would object strenuously to violating the drinking age or the speed limit (whether or not they have a lead foot themselves). I don’t know if they are well represented among those objecting to immigrants as law breakers.
@The Nybbler
There’s Kent Scheidegger for “the law is the law” types I guess, but I think he’s more of an exception than a rule.
There are other mechanisms by which illegal immigration could increase the crime rate without the immigrants themselves committing crimes at above-average rates (other than illegally immigrating, that is). For example, having the law enforcement agencies and large sections of the political class openly turn a blind eye to large-scale lawbreaking is likely to decrease respect for the law across the board. Or again, more heterogenous societies tend to be lower trust societies, and lower trust societies tend to have higher crime rates.
You are wise to limit your discussion to whether or not illegal immigration is considered a serious offense, rather than to attribute seriousness as an absolute. But:
It “seems to be considered a much more serious offense” according to whom, exactly? Because if there are a lot of people who think it shouldn’t be considered a more serious offense, then to that multitude it isn’t considered a more serious offense. Your unqualified certainty that it is “considered” more serious, is misplaced in a paragraph that simultaneously notes the great many people who clearly consider it less serious.
And your criticism of illegal immigrants seems to simplify to, “these people are committing crimes that people like me consider to be serious, and that makes them much worse than people who commit crimes that other people consider to be serious”. Meanwhile, as a predictor of more generically criminal behavior, what you really need to know is whether the criminal understood the offense to be serious and went ahead and did it anyway.
My general rule of thumb is, a crime is absolutely serious if it was a felony at common law, or of it didn’t exist five centuries ago but there is nigh-unanimous agreement that it is in the same league as the common-law felonies. Otherwise, beware tribal politics and don’t expect either effective persuasion or accurate prediction to follow.
Yes, this is the nature of the disagreement.
Red tribe thinks it is a serious offense that should be severely and consistently punished. Blue tribe thinks it is completely morally neutral and should carry no punishment at all.
And in true American bipartisan fashion, the solution we’ve designed is to catch and punish some random smattering of such people severely, while ignoring others and letting them get away with it scott free.
What we need to have is an actual honest conversation wherein the right admits that they believe ALL illegal immigrants are criminals and their desired position is to have ZERO illegal immigration, and the left admits that they believe NO illegal immigrants are criminals and their desired position is to have open borders.
^
Matt M,
I’ll admit no such thing.
I’m pro minimum wage laws, Social Security Insurance, progressive income taxes, labor unions, welfare aid for the poor, and laws to curb the power of employers, all of which are “left” positions, but I’m very much against open borders.
And I’ll remind you that the U. F. W. originally opposed illegal immigration.
Going by the dictionary definitions, I’ll accept being called “conservative” or even “reactionary”, but call me “right-wing” and I’m offended.
@ David Friedman
(1) Regarding:
I would focus on motorist insurance. It’s a misdemeanor offense to drive uninsured, I believe, but then a car accident can be financially disastrous for all parties involved.
I would say that having motorist insurance is a broadly accepted norm. According to the link below, 87% of US motorists were insured in 2015 (although there variance across states, but that strikes me as being correlated with income disparity more than with political affiliation):
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsured-motorists
So, I suspect many people would/do object to this particular illegality.
(2) Regarding:
This rule seems haphazard, how does it generalize? It seems to read as: If I commit crime X which increases the likelihood I will commit future crime Y, then X should be forgiven (or perhaps not even be a crime in the first place?).
So, perhaps I have a criminal record for stealing $400 from a corner store. Given this status, I have a hard time finding a job, and so I’m more likely to resort to illegal means of generating income. Should my criminal record be expunged?
@ Matt M:
As has been pointed out to you before in these threads, your understanding of the left’s position on immigration is deeply flawed. Have some data.(PDF) Page 67 is the most directly relevant in this case, but some of the other questions might help illustrate the nuance.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Matt M paraphrase a left-wing position in a way that the person or group whose position he was paraphrasing would agree with.
Perhaps those people are lying (or are self-deluded).
Look, I’m not the one who made the comparison to speeding. I’m sorry, but if your goal is to have illegal immigration enforced with the same rigor and level of punishment as speeding, you are de facto in favor of open borders.
Maybe not in a hyper-literalistic technical sense (because after all, speeding is technically illegal), but definitely in a practical sense.
And anyone who believes that illegal immigration is morally equivalent to speeding should in fact favor such a system.
So don’t sit here and tell me, on the one hand, that half the country thinks illegal immigration is no more harmful or morally wrong than speeding, but on the other hand, throw polling data at me showing “nobody claims to be in favor of open borders.” Those positions cannot coexist.
@Matt M,
The speeding analogy helps me make sense of the polling data.
I’m anti speeding down streets that my kids play on, but I’m also pro my getting home faster, and anti my getting a ticket, so contradictory goals.
I think most Americans are pro the individual immigrants that they know personally, but anti a more crowded nation (and the resulting traffic, lower wager, and higher rents).
I want the guy ahead of me in traffic deported, but I want the guy I’m carpooling with to get to stay.
Contradictory goals.
“I think that group X behaves in a way that implies support for position Y, therefore I assert that group X supports position Y even if they say they don’t” is absolutely 100% not a legitimate thing to do. If it were, there no argument you couldn’t win with it: “I think that cutting taxes will lead to wage stagnation which will lead to children going hungry, and Matt M wants to cut taxes, therefore Matt M supports a policy of starving children. Why do you hate babies so much?!?!?!”
If you made that argument, I would explain to you why cutting taxes won’t lead to child starvation.
You gonna explain to me how treating illegal immigration like speeding won’t lead to de facto open borders? How broadcasting that 99.9% of illegal border crossings will go wholly unpunished, and that the remaining 0.1% will be given a small fine and sent on their way won’t result in a situation wherein anyone who feels like it just crosses at will?
“If you made that argument, I would explain to you why cutting taxes won’t lead to child starvation….”
@Matt M,
I’d still be against cutting taxes as in my lifetime (born in ’68) I’ve mostly seen how things worse get worse after taxes are cut, and that things get better after taxes are raised, and while that may just be because when things are getting worse the first thing tried is lowering taxes, but that doesn’t stop the trend, and it’s when things are getting better that taxes get raised at all, but I still don’t want to take the chance.
“…You gonna explain to me how treating illegal immigration like speeding won’t lead to de facto open borders? How broadcasting that 99.9% of illegal border crossings will go wholly unpunished, and that the remaining 0.1% will be given a small fine and sent on their way won’t result in a situation wherein anyone who feels like it just crosses at will?.You gonna explain to me how treating illegal immigration like speeding won’t lead to de facto open borders? How broadcasting that 99.9% of illegal border crossings will go wholly unpunished, and that the remaining 0.1% will be given a small fine and sent on their way won’t result in a situation wherein anyone who feels like it just crosses at will?”
@Matt M,
That doesn’t sound much different than the current situation to me.
It’s not my position, and it doesn’t seem to be the position of anyone else here either, but it’s plausible that it’s someone’s position, and if that person also insists that they don’t support open borders, then yeah, I imagine they could explain it. And if you think they’re wrong, that “open borders” is a fair way to characterize their position, then you guys could argue about it.
But that would be more of an argument about semantics than policy, and I think that arguing semantics over the internet is The Most Boring Thing In The World. So ideally, you could just skip the sub-argument over labels and go directly to the part about policy, and why you think theirs is bad. But being able to accurately summarize someone’s position is a prerequisite to arguing against it, let alone winning that argument.
I am accurately summarizing their position.
They want to make illegal immigration trivially easy to accomplish, virtually impossible to enforce, and punished incredibly lightly.
But they also want to be able to declare that they are totally NOT for open borders.
I refuse to participate in this obvious charade. If you don’t favor anything other than token and ineffective security measures, and you don’t favor identifying and removing those who are already here, and you don’t favor any meaningfully strict punishment for those who are somehow caught, then you don’t favor any restrictions on immigration whatsoever – no matter how much you insist otherwise.
The fact that they don’t like my summary, because it exposes a true belief that is politically unpopular, does not make it inaccurate.
Is the relevant measure taxes or government expenditure? As I pointed out earlier, you seem to think that the expenditure of state and local governments (your examples were things like schools) went down and things got worse. In fact, the expenditures of state and local governments went up, by quite a lot, over the period you were talking about.
In 1960, state and local expenditure was 9.6% of GDP. By 2010 it was up to 15.9%. (Source)
In 1960, real GDP per capita was about $18,000, by 2010 it was about $50,00. (source)
Combining those, real per capita state and local expenditure in 2010 was about 4.6 times as large as in 1960.
I gave links to my sources, so if you prefer to compare other dates you can do so.
The idea that problems you are unhappy with are due to state and local governments spending less money than they used to is inconsistent with the easily verified fact that they are spending more money than they used to–much more than they did fifty years earlier.
I think lots of people on the right would say that their desired position is zero illegal immigration, although the more thoughtful ones would add that the cost of getting all the way to zero is probably higher than it is worth–just as in the case of murder or traffic accidents.
Some people on the left are in favor of open borders, but lots are not, at least if “left” means “left of center” or “Democrats.” The trade unions, which are still a significant element in the Democratic coalition, have generally opposed increased immigration. I’m not sure what fraction would favor open borders if you limited “left” to people who would describe themselves as progressives or leftists.
Whose? A man needs a name. Who specifically would read, “They want to make illegal immigration trivially easy to accomplish, virtually impossible to enforce, and punished incredibly lightly,” and reply, “Yep, that’s pretty much my position”? Is this the same person whose goal you said was “to have illegal immigration enforced with the same rigor and level of punishment as speeding”?
@DavidFriedman,
Since you’re a college professor and I’m a plumber I’m doubtful that I’ll find any statistics that you can’t easily contradict, but how it seemed to me at the time was: after Prop 13 went into effect, the classes got more crowded and toilet paper disappeared from my schools restrooms.
After Reagan cut income taxes in 1981, there was massive unemployment in 1982, I encountered many more beggers year, after year, after year, and I heard more and more gunshots and sirens (I think I heard the most in 1985), and finding jobs was really damn hard for me in 1986.
After Bush (senior) and Clinton raised income taxes, jobs were easier to come by and I heard less gunshots and sirens, and 1999 was great!
After Bush (junior) cut income taxes, jobs became harder to find again (but thankfully the gunshots didn’t come back), and many guys I knew lost their homes 2008 to 2010.
After taxes were raised as part of Obamacare, jobs became plentiful (very much easier for me to find employment in 2011 to now than it was for me in 2007 to 2010 (or 1986 to 1991 for that matter).
I’m mostly in the tank for “Tax and Spend” now, but this is where is gets wonky, as while jobs are plentiful now, so is homelessness (unlike in the 1980’s when it seemed the lack of jobs and how many beggers I encountered correlated), which is puzzling and worrying.
It’s all related to what I’ve directly experience, and I know my experience isn’t universal as the guy who owns the shop I buy my overalls from says the Reagan years were great for him, while I remember them as being awful.
I imagine that different life experiences would have given me different beliefs, but they were what they were, and they are what they are.
That could be an artifact of having less money.
Or it could be an artifact of the schools deciding to spend their money poorly.
David has already given you the statistics on taxation and spending. You might also check out the statistics related to the growth of administrative non-teaching personnel relative to teachers over time.
Once again, just because they wouldn’t agree with it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
If your demand is that I characterize the views of my opponents on terms favorable to them, I politely decline.
Find me a prominent Democrat who vocally supports increased border security OR increased efforts to identify and deport illegal immigrants OR harsher punishments to increase the deterrent effect and then we’ll talk.
And not only do they not support strengthening any of those things (despite their current state being woefully inadequate in stopping illegal immigration), they actively advocate for all three to be made weaker.
“Weaker” doesn’t mean “negligible”. It’s perfectly consistent for someone to want less border security, less deportations, and lighter punishments than what we’ve currently got and yet still want to stop short of de-facto open borders.
It’s already negligible. As I said, current state is already woefully inadequate in solving the problem.
If you think we’ve got de-facto open borders, I think you might be a little confused about what open borders means.
Proves too much, I think. For example, speeding cameras are (were?) controversial in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that everybody opposed to them wanted an “open speed” policy.
Opposition to extreme copyright enforcement tactics might also be analogous, and there’s the same sort of tension: personally, I agree that it is preferable for copyright law to exist, but at the same time I don’t want the internet (metaphorically) shut down just so we can enforce it a little bit more effectively.
Besides, I could easily imagine someone arguing along similar lines but in the other direction: “They want to spend ridiculous amounts on enforcement, be allowed to routinely violate civil rights, and to harshly punish people whose only real crime is to fail to file the correct paperwork. But they also want to be able to declare that they are totally NOT against immigration, only illegal immigration. I refuse to participate, etc., etc.”
… I don’t think it’s about whether or not the laws should be enforced, so much as how far you’re willing to go to enforce them. And this sort of story doesn’t do the pro-enforcement side any favours.
Given that we seem to agree that in general, speeding is incredibly common, very rarely punished, and that punishment is essentially trivial…
It seems to me that someone who constantly advocated for less preventative measures and less ability to detect speeding and lighter punishment for speeding when detected is, in every meaningful sense, calling for it to be completely legal.
But if “legalize speeding” is generally unpopular, they’d have every reason not to say that – and to push back on anyone who accused them of it.
This doesn’t seem quite right, somehow. Status quo bias, perhaps? Anyway, as a hypothetical, suppose the government proposed the introduction of the death penalty for speeding and the installation of speed cameras every ten meters along all major roads. I would assume that you would not consider opposing that policy to be equivalent to calling for the legalization of speeding.
A year later, however, the policy is put in place, and is now the law. Does that mean that from then on any suggestion that the policy should be reversed, i.e., for less enforcement and lighter punishments, is equivalent to supporting the legalization of speeding?
Sure, and it could be true that the only reason you favor more enforcement of immigration law is that you hate Mexicans. But we have this general convention where we argue against the positions people espouse, not the ones we imagine they might secretely hold that are easier to defeat, which is known as attacking a straw man and generally looked askance upon.
To whom is this directed? We write something like 100,000 speeding tickets per day in America. Roughly one driver in five gets ticketed each year. Repeat offenders can and do get jail time. I hear people complain about how high the fines are. There are small towns where the police seem to do almost nothing but write tickets.
I wouldn’t call that “very rarely punished.” Is that because you and I disagree, or because I secretly agree with you but refuse to admit it?
“When it comes to immigration, I have actually put more money, under my administration, into border security than any other administration previously. We’ve got more security resources at the border – more National Guard, more border guards, you name it – than the previous administration. So we’ve ramped up significantly the issue of border security.” –Barack Obama
Responding to a call for less of something as if it were a call for none of something is a canonical example of a straw-man fallacy. It’s literally Wikipedia’s first example:
Oh dear, I seem to have linked the Topline version instead of the Crosstabs(PDF). Mea culpa. I do hope nobody pretended to be responding to data which was not in fact presented. I do hope nobody was caught pre-emptively declaring that the dragon in their garage is invisible.
@ Matt M:
“Would you favor or oppose a Congressional deal that gives undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents work permits and a path to citizenship in exchange for increasing merit preference over preference for relatives, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and funding barrier security on the U.S.-Mexico border?”
Democrat: 63% favor / 37% oppose
“Do you think current border security is adequate or inadequate?”
Democrat: 51% adequate / 49% inadequate
“Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders?”
Democrat: 36% open borders / 64% secure borders
“Do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S.-Mexico border?”
Democrat: 39% support / 61% oppose
“Do you think we need stricter or looser enforcement of our immigration laws?”
Democrat: 51% stricter / 49% looser
Continue on to dig into the data deeper, and there’s a reasonably consistent pattern: roughly a third of the Left is categorically against strengthening immigration control like you claim, roughly a third is in favor of strengthening controls as an end in and of itself, and the last third is on the fence and open to a wide range of policy compromises.
In declaring everyone on the Left your ideological enemy, you are sabotaging your ability to find allies.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It’s really easy to find a Democrat willing to give a full-throated endorsement of a reform bill that includes increased border security – you literally don’t have to look beyond the highest elected office in the land held by a Democrat. Go back a few years, and you’ll find the term “Deporter-in-Chief” originated in 2014.
But if you’re specifically limiting the evidence you’ll accept to national-level Democrats’ campaign rhetoric, then you’ll find that it still existed for decades… right up until the Republican presidential primary was decided in favor of the candidate who took the most extreme stance in recent memory. Wedge issues are a thing and the inevitable follows.
And quite frankly, I’m worried about what that wedge is doing to the Democratic base. This is a classic toxoplasma situation, and I’m not a fan of those who are complicit in driving out the middle with these extremist false dichotomies.
Oh dear, I seem to have linked the Topline version instead of the Crosstabs(PDF). Mea culpa….
@Dan L,
I did respond based on the old data you linked to, which showed that the majority of Americans want “secure borders”.
My assumption was that the majority would include some on the left, but thanks for the new data.
“…And quite frankly, I’m worried about what that wedge is doing to the Democratic base…”
As someone who votes for Democrats on the theory that things get worse slower when they’re in office, I’m worried as well.
I don’t want open borders, and while ultimately other issues are more important to me, I don’t like that the Democratic party seems to be changing to favor open borders just to defy Trump.
Dan L –
I don’t think anybody even looked at your data, reviewing the conversation.
I certainly never do on matters of politics. If my arguments rely on data, then we aren’t arguing over whether or not I am a prostitute, we are just haggling over price. The Efficient Politics Theorem states that all outstanding political debates that can be settled by empiricism, have been, and the remaining debates are about political principles. Empiricism is only used to try to prove the other guy’s principles are faulty.
@ Plumber:
Yeah, you did fine. My snark was weaponized self-disappointment aimed at people who shifted talking points based on an experiment that didn’t happen, with a reference to Sagan via Yudkowski.
(Disclaimer: I cite data that I think is pretty good, but opinion polls are volatile things that need frequent updates, and “Democrats on immigration” is an interesting topic because the data is becoming obsolete so fast.)
@ Thegnskald:
If someone truly does believe that, then they’ve embraced a form of Conflict Theory so extreme there is nothing to offer them but pity. I hope SSC at least can offer them the door.
@ Matt M:
You seem to be claiming that what we now have is pretty much equivalent to open borders. If that is the case, perhaps you should support explicitly open borders. The costs of enforcing immigration restrictions would disappear, along with the problems due to it being illegal–current illegal immigrants would be in the same legal situation as legal immigrants. They wouldn’t have to engage in fraud in order to work. They wouldn’t all be criminals.
The usual argument against open borders is that it would result in an enormous increase in immigration. Are you saying that isn’t true?
I think the parallel between speeding and illegal immigration is more appropriate than it looks at first glance.
In the US, we have a fair bit of casual speeding, but also a fair bit of speeding enforcement (some for revenue, some for safety). It’s easy to imagine someone who wants very strict enforcement of speed limits (maybe 10 MPH over the speed limit gets you a wreckless driving charge) feeling like the way we enforce speed limits in most of the US is practically like having no speed limit. And yet, the roads do not look like the would with no speed limit–there are a lot fewer people driving 90 MPH on the highways now than there would be with no such laws or no enforcement of them. What we have, instead, is a balance between:
a. The desire to keep the speed on our roads more-or-less reasonable.
b. The desire of local governments to raise revenue with speeding fines.
c. A desire to limit enforcement costs (both the cost of police manning speed traps, and the costs of jailing people for driving 55 MPH in a 45 MPH zone).
d. A tacit understanding that the optimal amount of speeding isn’t zero, so getting down to nobody ever driving 1 MPH above the speed limit isn’t even desirable.
I’d say that’s a decent parallel for immigration enforcement. We don’t have open borders, and the world would look radically different if we did. What we have is fairly lax enforcement of borders and immigration law, sufficient to keep the illegal immigrant population in the US pretty steady over the last few years and to keep net migration from Mexico around 0. This is from some combination of desire to keep immigration under some kind of control, desire not to have huge enforcement costs (border patrol agents and detained families and businesses shut down by huge fines for hiring illegals). And probably a widespread belief that the optimal level of illegal immigration isn’t zero–perhaps that US society benefits from some level of illegal immigration, or at least that the sum of all the effects (on US society plus on the immigrants) is positive.
It’s a fundamental error to go from “You don’t want to enforce the laws against X as strictly as I do” to “You don’t want to enforce the laws against X” or “You secretly believe X should be legal.”
Dan L –
While we are making offensive assertions about other people, my current theory is that you “fake” accidentally linked to the wrong site so you could call out people for responding to data that didn’t exist. Nobody responded to this, so you called out people in general (as opposed to calling out specific people), pretending there was a response to your nonexistent data and that anybody had fallen for your trap.
I don’t particularly care if SSC shows you the door, which isn’t even a concept which makes sense, because your games are so surface-level it is amusing.
@ Thegnskald:
Gonna stop you here for a second: between your reaction and a quick glance at google analytics, may I assume that the “Efficient Politics Theorem” is your own invention, and that you either personally believe in it or view it as a useful tool? Because if that’s the case, I genuinely have no idea what kind of constructive engagement you expect it to engender. It’s explicitly anti-empirical and this is supposedly Hard Mistake Theory Central. If you’re going to respond to data you don’t care about in a thread you aren’t invested in by proclaiming the futility of all this fact-finding nonsense… where do you go from there? How is a flat dismissal of a curiosity-stopper the wrong move?
Ah, yes. My master plan was to conceal the data that supported my point and instead publicly screw up the link while simultaneously giving more than enough information for anyone sufficiently interested to trivially find it on their own, in the case that the full data didn’t actually support my point. I decided upon this tactic (to the exclusion of actually making my point) because I have a low opinion of the SSC commentariat level of intellectual rigor (hence my choice to spend time here), and my plan was foiled only because said commentators were even less empirically-minded than I thought. Any frustration I showed was the result of my plan going to waste. You got me.
I am trying to moderate my level of snark, but you’ve ascribed to me a really paradoxical level of competence here.
You seem to be imagining that either data is so convincing that once presented everyone agrees on the conclusion or it is irrelevant. The real world isn’t that tidy. There are lots of cases where additional data can lower someone’s confidence that his view is true but not convince him that it is false.
If that is your view, then this is probably not a sensible place for you to participate in conversations about political issues–you should find someplace where people are more interested in moral philosophy, less in facts.
I assume that is the point Dan was making and you objected to. You might still find it a worthwhile place to participate in conversations on other subjects, assuming you believe there are other subjects.
But I confess that while your efficient politics theorem is not true, it is amusing.
Yeah, I assumed it was a “I think X” that really means “I haven’t thought it out very far, but let’s suppose I think X, and kick it around a bit, and I can always retract it if it turns out to have bad consequences I hadn’t thought of, since we’re all friends here” kind of thing. So it was very surprising to see Thegnskald double-down on it in such a mean way.
I found Dan L’s comment to be extraordinarily mean-spirited, and was responding to that. He got his link wrong, and then used the “opportunity” created by his own mistake to be passive aggressively rude at people.
But the point of that was to be amusing, not to be correct. Mind, I think there is a kernel of truth in it – all jokes have to reflect some kind of truth to be funny. But no, it isn’t literally true, in the sense that people can’t change their minds based on evidence; it is more true to say that it is best to assume that those who have strong opinions on subjects have already seen a lot of evidence, and evidence cherry-picked by their opposition to support their own case isn’t likely to shift their position much. And yes, I made it up, in case that wasn’t already clear.
I don’t know what this refers to. The only candidate I can find is
which did not seem rude or directed at anyone specific to me. Even if I misunderstood and it was a dig at you or Matt M or someone else, it was still part of a larger comment that included very relevant and thorough and neutrally-discussed data on the topic at hand, which qualifies as true and necessary in my book.
If you’re just scanning for emotional affect, then I can see how it comes out of the blue. But the emotion is downstream of the content, and when a data-driven argument that data is being ignored in favor of preconceptions is demonstrably ignored in favor of preconceptions, I think a flicker of undirected disappointment at the sheer anti-irony is warranted. I’ll reiterate that I’m including myself in that.
(Also, I’ll ask you pick between castigating me for getting my link wrong and accusing me of deliberately setting a trap. This is that paradox of competence again.)
Hold on to this for a second.
Hard disagree. An ideal Bayesian reasoner might work that way, sure, but it stands in stark contrast to typical human behavior. Dunning-Kruger is a better starting point, and adding nuance only fuzzes the correlation.
Alright, let’s unpack this in contrast to the earlier point:
1) You’re still doing it. You’re still deploying a fully-general counterargument against empiricism to flatten discourse into Conflict. If you want to call the data cherry-picked you have to be willing to actually engage with it beyond declaring an ignorance. I wasn’t bluffing when I told @Plumber that I would welcome better data – Harvard-Harris is probably a mediocre pollster, and we’re in crosstabs. The only reason I think this dataset is worth presenting is because it hits RVs, it’s relatively fresh for something this in-depth, and the signal isn’t so subtle that a 5-point margin of error would change the conclusion.
At best, this looks like a nasty form of epistemic learned helplessness.
2) Who am I the opposition to? In terms of this thread, I’ve been arguing for data and nuance. That doesn’t paint a flattering portrait of those who might be named my opposition, but even a level of sophistication leaves them making unusually broad declarations of bad-faith. That second might be true, but I don’t know if it’s a less-offensive assertion.
3) Who am I the opposition to? On the actual issue of immigration, I’m most comfortably located in the third of the Left that is open to object-level compromise. (And is argued to not exist. Hm.) I – and those within ideological spitting distance – could easily be incentive into supporting an increase in border security (again), but that requires a good-faith overture from the Right. If we’re giving strategic advice on how to convince others, I’ll recommend the ability to pass an ideological Turing test.
Dan L –
See, the thing is – it doesn’t actually matter to me. Not a fan of either behavior. Either way, it was unnecessarily rude.
And speaking of contradictory viewpoints, you are saying you are disappointed with people not being rational enough, but then categorically deny that they could be sufficiently rational to have a rational reason for their behavior. And my response is just… okay then.
As for positioning, it is pretty clear you have a position, regardless of your claim as a neutral party. There is data for the other side, a neutral party would be dealing in both sets of data, or going – assuming your goal is legitimately to move things in a data driven direction – presenting evidence for both sides and pointing out everybody can do better.
What you have done isn’t something that resembles that.
I’ll take this as an admission that you have no desire to substantiate your accusing me of duplicity.
As for the meat of this tu quoque, you’re being vague and not direct quoting such that it’s difficult to know what you’re responding to, but my guess is that you’re pointing at the tension between me claiming Dunning-Kruger is a good general heuristic and my belief that the SCC commentariat specifically could be convinced by statistical evidence. Put that way it’s obvious these points don’t substantially conflict, but I will say that there is enough tension there to have motivated my first comment in this thread in an effort to resolve it. I feel that effort has succeeded, somewhat.
I’ll call that bluff. I claim that there is no data of serious quality that supports Matt M’s stance that “the left [believes] NO illegal immigrants are criminals and their desired position is to have open borders”. (Note that Matt M himself chose not to argue the statistics.) I think you’re making things up entirely in an effort to prop up a Conflict narrative, but if you can produce data for the “other side” then I’ll have to update my beliefs significantly.
Probably people assume that one’s willingness to break immigration law doesn’t imply anything about one’s willingness to rob, murder, assault, or rape.
I expect there’s a very weak correlation–some people may abstain from illegal immigration out of a generalized respect or fear of law (but probably very few) and some might have committed other crimes and seek to flee to other countries by any means necessary, but in it’s probably the case that once someone has access to the US they seek economic rather than criminal opportunity.
One’s willingness to break laws on say, insider trading, probably doesn’t imply anything about one’s willingness to rob, murder, assault, or rape, either.
And yet, if Bernie Sanders were to give a press conference saying “Insider traders are criminals” politifact wouldn’t jump down his shit about how that’s totally incorrect because studies have proven that insider traders don’t commit murder any more often than non-insider traders do.
Well no kidding. “Criminal” means someone who violates the law. Not “someone who violates one of the laws on this informal and not officially defined list that we’ve decided are the important laws to determine one’s ‘suitability as a resident'”
I don’t believe we should encourage immigration from people who are willing to violate social norms, and laws are the most explicit and objective definition of social norms that exist.
What if someone said “people who break the speed limit aren’t criminals”, or “people who violate century old sodomy laws that happen to still be on the books aren’t criminals”. Vanishingly few people think that every law on the books should be enforced fully, in perpetuity until it is revoked, and basically no one thinks that any punishment is acceptable once a person has been convicted of a crime.
The “illegal immigrants are criminals” argument never boils down to a willingness to discuss penalties that don’t involve expulsion from the US, which is suspicious enough on its own, and the group that uses it never calls every US citizen who has ever broken a law a criminal unless they belong to an ethnic minority.
@Matt M:
The point of claiming that illegal immigrants are criminals is to imply that they will commit other crimes, and if that claim is false then it is dishonest rhetoric. The claim is literally true–but literally true of just about all American adults as well.
Bacon –
The set of people who are criminals for this group isn’t “Minority and has broken a law”. It is “Identifiably a member of a subculture I identify as being criminal and has broken a law”.
Trust me. There are groups of white people they hate as well. And minority groups they don’t. And specific individual members of minority groups who are no longer identifiable to them with the group.
They aren’t generally racist in a way they would be recognizable to a 1950s racist; they’ll prefer the black guy in a business suit to the white guy with a mullet in the Yankees cap and wife beater and athletic shorts.
(And if you think you are talking about the white guy with the mullet, he is fine with Mexicans, he probably hates Jews and black people. Mexicans make good beer and meth, after all.)
@ Thegnskald
So we have a mosaic of racism now? How beautiful!
There’s a second-order effect here that’s being missed, I think.
We had a case locally about 10 years ago of an illegal who killed a couple of kids in a drunk-driving accident. Happens all the time with non-illegals, right? But the fact that he was illegal actually enabled the accident:
The guy in question was fleeing the police when he slammed into the kids’ car. Maybe he was worried about getting kicked out of the country? Except…
The guy had been arrested for drunk driving previously, multiple times, in this town. Never faced any consequences until he killed people. Because he had no roots here, he got out of jail with a court date he never needed to show up for, went back to work, and no worries for him. Apparently the second and third time he was arrested for drunk driving, they didn’t even realize they had done so before, he was a ‘new catch’ every time until he killed someone and they had to do an actual investigation.
Maybe this doesn’t happen very often, but we’ve created a system where lots of people who are willing to break the law have nothing to lose by continuing to do so. If a citizen (or anyone documented or even just with roots here) skips town or tries to stay in town with multiple DUI convictions they’re going to pay a heavy price. This guy didn’t get even too terribly hassled until he killed two teenagers.
bacon –
It isn’t a mosaic of racism, it is a mosaic of hatred. Some of that hatred just happens to map onto race.
But yes, this is an improvement over racism. All the groups hate each other, but there isn’t any effective mechanism to coordinate the hatred, and we can establish anti-hatred norms even though everybody hates somebody.
Well, at this point, we’re getting into Les Miserables territory a little bit. Yes, illegal immigration is a crime; but is it a crime like smoking pot; or like shoplifting a loaf of bread to feed your starving child; or like grand embezzlement; or like murder ? Personally, I wouldn’t call someone who got caught for smoking pot in college “a criminal”, but I would definitely apply that label to Bernie Madoff.
Very nearly a hundred percent of adult citizens routinely commit a crime, as you can observe on almost any highway–given suitable conditions, traffic is usually moving at above the speed limit.
The benefit to the immigrant of immigrating is enormously greater than the benefit to a driver of driving 75 instead of 65, so I don’t think the willingness of illegal immigrants to violate immigration law is evidence that they are more willing to break laws than the rest of us.
What about what I mentioned above – that illegal immigrants are also certainly more likely to break a large number of other “things that are technically crimes but clearly aren’t as bad as murder.”
I suspect that a lot of the “no human being is illegal” crowd do think it’s pretty bad to say, commit tax fraud, which a huge percentage of illegals are actively doing.
But overall I think Bugmaster is correct – the primary source of the disagreement is over whether illegal immigration is the moral equivalent of speeding, or whether it’s say, the moral equivalent of simple assault. And it sucks that instead of having that debate, we have a debate of one side claiming they’re just like rapists and murderers while the other side claims they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and all opposition to their behavior is motivated by pure racism.
If you are referring to fake Social Security numbers then, as I already pointed out, that fraud is one that benefits the rest of us. They are paying in money that they will not get back. And they are doing it only because it is necessary to the initial crime of illegal immigration.
Do you agree that the essential claim is that illegal immigrants are more likely than others to commit crimes that hurt other people, such as murder, assault, and rape? If so, can you offer any evidence for that claim?
Illegals have more disincentive to commit crime. They risk not only the penalties for that crime, but also deportation for their family.
@noddingin:
On the flip side, immigrants in general may be more likely to commit crimes without intending to do so, due to cultural differences between their society and ours. For example, in many cultures, giving bribes to public officials is seen as a normal and even socially mandated behavior; in our culture, it’s a crime. Legal immigrants can participate more freely in social interactions, as well as obtaining various acculturation training; thus, it might be easier for them to learn how to avoid committing such crimes.
“committing such crimes”
Such culturally-determined crimes, sure. But that’s a non-central example of crimes in the discussion of this issue. The anti-immigrant side begins by talking about crimes such as theft, assault, rape, etc — physical acts that are evil per se, that are crimes in all cultures.
There’s almost a motte-bailey effect here. The bailey, ie the hard to defend meaning, is ‘Immigrants are more likely to do physical crimes such as theft of objects, assault, etc.’ When challenged, they begin talking about things that are only ‘crimes’ because some culture has written a law defining them so, such as giving a tip to some minor official — or crossing a border.
“They claim that illegal immigrants are prone to crime, which is factually true.”
Got some data for me read about? Since it’s “factually true” and all.
“They claim that illegal immigrants are prone to crime, which is factually true.”
It seems that this is true for Europe (for immigrants in general, but also for illegal vs. legal according to Wikipedia) but not for the US (with the caveat that illegal immigrants do commit more crimes than legal immigrants, but less than native-born citizens). I stand corrected unless somebody can refute this.
I probably can. I don’t want to. But I will give a vector to look into for anybody who actually cares about this subject.
Are immigrants being compared to high-crime groups, low-crime groups, or the average of everybody? If legal immigrants look more like low-crime groups, and illegal immigrants look more like high-crime groups, the distinction can get lost in the average.
Are immigrants being compared to high-crime groups, low-crime groups, or the average of everybody?
Don’t know if I can answer this, but kludging together the US census 2017 estimates that “Asians” = 5.8% of the population, and “Hispanic” = 18.1%, then comparing that with the 2016 FBI stats, we see arrests (this is just arrests, not convictions, so some of the arrested may not have been found guilty) for Asians = 1.2% and for Hispanic or Latino = 18.4%.
So brute forcing both these results together means that Asians under offend (or at least are not charged as much), with respect to the demographic, and the Hispanic/Latino proportion is about what you’d expect (or just very slightly higher).
So comparing them with “low-crime” group for Asians, it looks like the Hispanic/Latino are just as criminal as other demographics – out of 2016 arrests, Whites are 69.6% versus share of population at 76.6% (so somewhat under represented for their demographic) and Black/African Americans are 26.9% of arrests versus share of population at 13.4% (a figure that surprises me, to be honest, I was sure percentage of population was higher but then again, I have read that it’s declining due to increased immigration from other ethnic groups and no overall growth in African American population making their relative proportion decline).
That means that on the raw face of it, Asians are low-crime group, African-Americans are high-crime group, Whites are slightly on the lower side of what you’d expect, and Hispanics are about what you’d expect from demographics.
Now, there’s no knowing how much of that is native-born versus legal immigrant versus illegal immigrant, maybe that data is out there but someone needs to chomp it to answer the question. I agree that we really need to break down how much of that is Jose who hopped over the border versus Santiago who legally immigrated from Chile versus Manny who’s third generation Cuban-American in order to answer “are illegal immigrants more/less/average criminal”?
Note that conviction rates don’t have much value over arrest rates, since they’re only “conviction at trial” something like 5% of the time, and defendants pleading to crimes not committed in order to receive probation instead of months of imprisonment with an unpayable bail (or just months to years of disruption and expense for the sake of a trial that’s not remarkably likely to be fair) is a pervasive and well-documented problem.
(a) Props to vV_Vv for standing corrected in public. That’s a virtue and should be given points!
(b) If you want to be taken seriously, re: immigrants and crime, say _in advance_ what your hypothesis is, and then look for a trial that gives evidence. If evidence isn’t matching pre-conception, don’t just keep moving goalposts / conditioning on things until you get what you want, that’s a recipe for getting garbage, and also a recipe for people (correctly) ignoring you.
(c) Read this (in the context of public health, but relevant), on the dangers of stratifying until an answer pops out:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4273867/
(d) Conviction and arrest rates are both highly suspect as reasonable outcomes to measure here, for lots of reasons having to do with the way the justice system works in the US.
Since this thread isn’t as active now, this seems pretty obvious to me.
Some good people might not want to illegally immigrate because morality.
I can’t imagine a rapist or murderer is going to draw the moral line at violating an imaginary line, however.
Which means we should expect bad people to be over represented in illegal immigrants.
No data, but any other result should be surprising.
As is discussed elsewhere in the thread, we have no reason to believe this is a sizable group so that this:
can be expected to be swamped by other factors. Economic status is an obvious confound, to name one.
I think a lot of people feel a moral obligation to follow the laws of their own society, but probably far fewer feel such an obligation toward some other country’s laws. In much the same way that, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I probably wouldn’t feel a great moral compulsion to follow their laws, even though as a matter of prudence I’d probably be pretty careful not to break any laws that could lead to serious consequences. (Those guys aren’t gentle about enforcing their laws.)
I don’t think so. As best I can tell, almost nobody feels an obligation to never drive over the speed limit or feels guilty for doing so. Most people seem to have no problem with drinking when they are twenty. No doubt some seventeen year olds in California feel that having sex is immoral, but I doubt there are very many who feel it is immoral because the age of consent is eighteen.
Many people feel badly about breaking some laws, but not laws in general.
@David Friedman
A lot of people feel that other people have an obligation to follow the laws because they are the law, even if they’d break every one of them themselves. These people are hypocritical and in general I’ve not found them to be the most intelligent people around either, but they’re not uncommon.
[Waves my hand] Hi. I had so much of a problem with drinking underage that (outside Communion wine) I never tasted alcohol till my twenty-first birthday. I feel mildly guilty when I speed, and used to feel a lot more guilty about it. We exist.
Most people don’t feel morally obliged to never do 56 in a 55, but most people do feel morally obliged to never do 140 in a school zone over little one speedbumps. It’s not like we’re talking about one or two people overstaying their visa by a day. Over a tenth of the 2018 US population is immigrants, imported to lower US wages by a half-century establishment consensus.
It looks like that would still be true even if all illegal immigrants were removed, or very nearly so. I’m not sure your analogy holds up.
Is Vitamin D deficiency common in people who spend most time indoor? Are supplements useful?
I just found this article that says that actual Vitamin D deficiency is rare and for healthy people there are no benefits from Vitamin D supplementation. Is it correct?
Very difficult to answer currently. And you’re probably not going to find a definitive one.
There’s a lot of problems, some of which that article points out. They include:
-No one really being sure what level is a deficiency, so no good data on who and when supplementation should occur
-Conflation of data of easily recognisable deficiencies – ie. third world countries, specific regions and populations with populations who may only be mildly deficient for some periods
-A highly profitable supplement industry and a new fad status with some high profile people making lots of money
-So many meta-analysis and reviews it is serious work to slog through them all.
Some good starting points might be the cochrane database which suggests maybe a slight mortality benefit for older people: https://www.cochrane.org/CD007470/ENDOC_vitamin-d-supplementation-for-prevention-of-mortality-in-adults
More recent meta-meta analysis suggest maybe not, although maybe hint at a minor role in immune function (seems quite specific though not generalised): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24690624 & https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213858717303571
Like most popular supplements, the answer is probably not useful unless you don’t eat a reasonably varied diet (remember diet is also a major source of vitamin D) or you are a literal hermit/cover yourself up all the time. The occasional hyperbole about sun cancer messaging making us all horribly deficient and unhealthy is most likely just hyperbole – a lot of it depends on your local conditions as well (UV index, etc). Recommendations for sufficient sun exposure range from literally 5 minutes of forearm exposure for a white person in summer to an hour or two for dark skinned people (again just arms) in winter. Too much is probably also bad for you, so if one was to supplement then as suggested by the reviews then there appears to be more evidence for lower doses. My personal opinion is: just eat food, occasionally get sun.
It might not be a bad idea to get tested and/or take small supplements. The amount lost is pretty small, and the potential gain, while unlikely, is large.
I suffered from chronic fatigue for almost a year, and I went to my doctor several times about it. We checked for diabetes, hyperthyroidism, Lyme disease and various deficiencies. It turned out I had 5 nmol/litre of Vitamin D. Your article says 50-80 nmol/l is a fairly arbitrary “normal” range. I was prescribed 90 micrograms a day for six weeks and then down to 25 micrograms a day for the rest of my life.
It should also be noted that you wouldn’t expect me to be deficient from my lifestyle. I’m very outdoorsy, and at the time I still ate fish (as well as all the other foods your article says are good for it).
Personal anecdote: I complained of fatigue to my doctor, got tested, had very low Vitamin D, got prescribed supplements, and felt somewhat better. Not blinded, obviously, and N=1, but the test results were certainly extremely low compared to most people who get tested (according to my doctor), leaving aside recommendations. I am not a hermit, spend some time outdoors (although not a lot, maybe 3-8 hours/week), am theoretically white though I almost never sunburn, and eat a fairly varied diet, including quite a lot of milk supplemented with Vitamin D. So yeah, it’s apparently perfectly possible to get Vitamin D deficiency by just staying indoors a lot. I would check it out if you’re concerned, especially if you’re noticing fatigue, depression, or bones breaking too easily (but hopefully not that last one). But N=1, I am not an expert.
I think that outdoor time went down drastically during the industrial revolution and that we evolved for an outdoor life, not working in an office or factory. So I think that many people can benefit from vitamin D supplements, especially those at risk (dark-skinned, older, indoorsy and/or living in cold places).
Note that some people have trouble absorbing vitamin D supplements, so given that you already drank quite a lot of milk supplemented with Vitamin D, that may be an issue for you. I would suggest getting tested again to see if you are not still too low. If so, you can try sublingual supplements, upping your sun exposure or taking higher doses of supplements.
I’ve been tested multiple times since, and the supplements solved it – but thank you. (I confess I also tried to up sun exposure, but that will vary test to test and all of them have shown me above deficiency, so I think it’s the supplements handling it.) My supplement is a pretty high prescription one, so that may be why it’s working.
I very strongly suspect you are right about outdoor time.
Thanks to all for the answers.
Coming a bit late here, but as another piece of n=1 anecdata, I’ve recently drank the cool-aid on vitamin D. In addition to attributing to it (provisionally, I leave lots of room for doubt) a significant improvement w.r.t. procrastination, I’m also interested in Vitamin D’s potential benefits for people on the autistic spectrum. There’s a clutch of papers in recent years that find low levels of D in people with ASD, and even one impressive-looking RCT (but only one!). I’d still say that overall the data is not convincing, much less conclusive. But vitamin D has the benefit of being very cheap and very, very safe, even in doses x10 higher than what’s usually prescribed. I continue taking it and started my family on it as well. If you end up trying, mind a recent article claiming that a statistical error led to commonly prescribing doses being much too low. I suspect that taking daily 500-800 IU would give little to no effect because the blood levels will hardly go up (which will be easy to test in any individual case, but you have to test).
I think the stronger hypothesis is that racism is rooted in perceived criminality or other negative traits.
This doesn’t have to be related to the actual criminality of hispanic immigrants (or whoever), just the criminality of hispanics the person in question knows of, and also that it doesn’t require a pre-existing racist news source. Suppose the average person does not encounter many actual criminals in their life, and further suppose that the media prefers to report negative events (petty crime, natural disasters, war, whatever) over positive events (technical successes, improvements in the state of the economy, excellent beach weather, …). Then selectively hearing about distant criminals more than non-distant criminals of a random subgroup provides (untrustworthy) evidence that members of that subgroup are inclined to criminality in rough proportion to their local population, because most of the members of that subgroup that you can call to mind are in fact criminals, regardless of what’s going on with the actual population.
This is really, really obvious with homophobia. If the only gay man you know of is Promiscuous Georg, who has unprotected gay sex five times a day, “gays are licentious degenerates” may start to look like a reasonable proposition. But if you hear of Promiscuous Georg and also know Bob and Frank down the street, and that a Capella group, and cousin Burt, and Jamie at the pizza place, then it starts to look like Promiscuous Georg is an outlier and shoudl not have been counted.
I have significant technical objections to the claims of the AI safety movement and am attempting to formalize them, but am having some difficulty developing my ideas into proper proofs. My thinking is based mostly on the fundamental mathematical limits that embedded agents are subject to when they model and act on the world in which they are embedded, and on the ways in which agents can benefit from interacting and cooperating with other agents. I have a summary of the ideas and arguments on github. There’s some preliminary work on the formal writeup in the results directory, but it’s just a bunch of definitions and claims, and I’m not even sure I’ve got those into the form I want.
Is anyone here interested in working with me on this? I’m not looking for an adversarial collaboration specifically, just someone who’s interested in this stuff, willing to help me out, and able to do so. I’m coming at this stuff from a physics/CS background, but much of the later stuff will need to be built on formal economics and game theory work. This isn’t my job, and I’m not looking for a huge commitment. A work session every one or two weeks is all I have in mind, and I can be flexible.
I’m not nearly smart enough to contribute anything of value, but still, here are some random monkey-noises:
AFAICT, one thing you might be missing is some discussion of what an agent can actually accomplish in its “Universe”, as opposed to what it can compute or predict. For example, let’s say that an agent wants to move a 100kg chunk of lead 100m to the right (for some reason). The agent can predict the outcome of this action with nearly perfect accuracy (assuming it’s about as intelligent as your average high-school student). It can devise the most efficient means of doing so. However, if it actually wants to move the actual block (which is external to the agent), it’s going to need some effectors, not just sensors and predictive capabilities. What’s worse, the laws of physics may prevent the agent from accomplishing what it wants in principle; for example, accelerating the lead block faster than a certain limit might be impossible (unless you want to end up with a lead pancake or a molten puddle).
Somewhat related to this is a problem of scaling (I think you allude to this in your section of locality). It is not necessarily the case that processing power scales linearly (or faster than linearly !) with the number of nodes, due to the fact that communication between nodes is not instantaneous (plus other engineering concerns such as power delivery and heat dissipation).
Engineering problems (at least, some of them) can be solved through cleverness and science; unfortunately, as you point out, there may be a limit to what an agent can learn through sheer computation. To use a trivial example, if the agent has no cameras of any kind, it won’t be able to figure out the spectrum of Sirius (nor, arguably, the existence of Sirius) from first principles, no matter how smart it is.
The proponents of AI safety movements usually answer these objections by stating that a sufficiently smart agent can essentially break the laws of physics through sheer intelligence. To put it more charitably, they believe that a). our current understanding of the laws of physics, as well as engineering techniques, is woefully lacking; b). most of the experimental data we’d need to solve (a) has either already been collected or is easily accessible; and (c) thus, the only remaining barrier to solving all these issues is our inability to correlate and process all that data — which won’t be an issue for an agent who somehow achieves superintelligence.
Admittedly, one may also bypass these objections by asserting that we do in fact live in a simulation, and if the underlying machinery of this simulation can, in principle, become fully accessible to the agent.
Did I not mention actuators in the summary? If so that’s a mistake on my part; actuators are part of my definition of an agent, and the problem of restricted actuators are central to the argument against foom-by-AI-unboxing. The processing and prediction stuff is mostly about rebutting the claim that “intelligence” could plausibly have an upper bound high enough to overcome actuator restrictions in a short period of time.
After a certain point, it’s hard to be charitable to “but what if you’re wrong?” as a counterargument. And the simulation hypothesis is pretty easily dismissed; to answer the original trilemma, option two (no simulations in the future) is required by the fact that the universe cannot contain a full simulation of itself.
You do mention actuators, but AFAICT only in this context: “An LBA with sufficiently powerful sensors and actuators can give itself arbitrary additional sensors and actuators…” My point is that arbitrarily powerful sensors and actuators are unlikely to exist; and, in fact, the very real limits on sensors and especially actuators in our current Universe will very likely prevent the agent from achieving quasi-godlike omnipotence.
EDIT: what is the proper term, “actuator” or “effector” ? What’s the difference between the two ? I r t3h n00bc4k3…
There isn’t a proper term; I like “actuator” better, possibly because it’s the one I came up with when I was writing that stuff and therefore the one I use in my own head. That said, I do think there’s merit to the claim that derivative : fluxions :: actuator : effector.
As to your actual point, I think I was a little unclear. A sufficiently powerful LBA can construct actuators and sensors with enough power to acquire additional memory, bringing it to the level of a full Turing machine. From there, it can exploit any oracle that the embedding universe has by expressing a problem needing the oracle and actually getting an answer, thus achieving “arbitrary power” within the scope of the embedding universe. Actually predicting the universe to the degree generally suggested by FAI advocates – to the degree needed to confidently produce a solution to an arbitrary problem while still having the opportunity to implement that solution, ie to get to quasi-godlike omniscience and the consequent omniscience – requires infinite, not merely arbitrary, computing power.
I’ve got to confess that I don’t understand what “oracle” means in this context. You say “it can exploit any oracle that the embedding universe has”, but I always thought that Turing oracles were impossible to instantiate pretty much by definition (though I could be wrong). Furthermore, given a finite and limited universe, even having access to an oracle (somehow) may not help you. For example, in our current Universe, the answer to the question “how can I move faster than light ?” is “you can’t” (assuming our understanding of the laws of physics is correct, of course). It doesn’t matter how smart you get, the answer is still going to be the same.
A machine more powerful than a Turing machine (eg one able to decide the halting problem over Turing machines) is generally described as a Turing machine (or whatever) which can access an oracle that answers a certain class of question, or answers them with specified resource constraints. An agent embedded in a machine of greater power than a Turing machine will be able to exploit the extra power of the embedding machine in order to access the oracle or use the embedding machine as one, in fundamentally the same way that it can extend its memory in order to escape the limits of its own processing power.
An agent can always achieve exactly the power of its embedding universe, as long as it is initially powerful enough to begin the bootstrapping process, because it can always express a problem in the universe’s physics and watch the universe generate a solution.
That sounds good in theory, but potentially useless in practice, since the whole point of predicting things is to do so faster than the universe can generate a solution.
I think you’re blending notions of power a little bit (which is probably my fault, since I wasn’t exactly clear). LBAs are limited in the kinds of problems they can solve because they have limited memory (unlike TMs, which have arbitrary/unlimited but still finite memory). TMs and TM-class machines in general are also limited in what operations they can perform; the classic example is of course the halting problem. An LBA with the right actuators and sensors can bootstrap itself to the problem-solving level of its containing universe, so it can in principle get an answer to any question the universe can answer. Often the most efficient way to do so will be to instantiate the question in the environment and watch what the universe does, but that’s not in principle necessary.
Predictions of the state of the universe, though, are subject to a different set of limitations that relate to speed, precision, scope, and accuracy. My fundamental point with regard to prediction is that any useful prediction must make nontrivial tradeoffs among those qualities, which limits how strong an effect agents of a particular physical size can have on the world around them.
Isn’t the best argument against the “super-ai” stuff to show in how many ways computational power is bounded?
Single core CPU performance is bounded by the size of the circuits and the generated heat., so the future lies in parallelization, but parallelization gives you the additional non-trivial overhead of adapting your program so that it can use the parallel computing power. The neuronal network successes from 2016 are based on the fact that you can apply Newton’s method to some neuronal networks, which can be parallelised easily and makes it possible to use a shitton of parallel computing power. But this makes your electricity bill skyrocket, and you get the additional problems that no one can guarantee the neuronal network generalizes to any case, and adapting the neuronal network for similar things is hard unless you sink even more electricity and hardware into the project.
Then you have the more mathematical borders like NP-hardness and the fact that understanding (proofing) mathematical theorems is Turing complete. The aforementioned borders make the computational power expansion linear or less in the long term, which is a problem if any “intelligence explosion” needs to have exponential growth in computational power.
I see no use in mixing concepts of computational theory with more philosophical discussions what this or that agent can do. A universal Turing machine already is the most sophisticated computational thing in computational theory. If you assume that you can run something like that in reality really fast, things get wonky. This is just what the “Ai-safety” people are doing when they say that a super-AI will generate endless amounts of energy while using the energy super efficient. If you take the fantasy energy and the fantasy algorithms away, you get a pocket calculator in a high school.
I think you overestimate the computational power, and the electrical power, required. The brain consumes about 20 watts. Even granting that it is highly specialized hardware using techniques we can’t replicate, getting basic human intelligence in under 200 watts should be doable. The question then becomes how intelligence scales; is ten times the capacity twice the intelligence? Ten times? Ten thousand times? If 200 watts looks like a human, what would 20,000 watts of intelligence look like?
And how useful is that intelligence? Personally, I find intelligence to be moderately useful. I “do” intelligence for a living. I could make a living doing other things, though, and in my daily life, intelligence is like a small flat efficiency bonus rather than a huge multiplier. It is hard to see what benefit more intelligence would net me; I am already two or three standard deviations above normal, and it just doesn’t make that much of a difference. I mean, I think I have a unified field theory, but that could just be delusion – lots of people think that – and it doesn’t have much to do with my intelligence anyways, but rather just the fact that I ask weird questions. Even if it were my intelligence, it is still more likely delusion than fact, so what did my intelligence net me there? An elaborate fantasy in which I understand the universe in a way nobody else does yet? Great job breaking it, intelligence, that is useless.
So yeah. Not impressed with the idea of an AI apocalypse, just for different reasons than everyone else. Also, the first good AI will look like a superstitious paranoid schizophrenic, which means that people will probably abandon the correct path because it looks like a dead end.
The energy demands lie not in running a neural network, the energy demands lie in training the neural network. You can see that even in people, if you ask yourself how much brain power has been spent to make Magnus Carlsen the chess player he is. He has been playing chess for more than 20 years, but he was also trained by other great chess players, and he has learnt all the chess theory there is, which took hundreds of years and many people to develop. This is the energy demand that matters, not how much calories are burnt during a tournament.
2.62 megawatt-hours.
But we could just run it on 200 watts for 30 years, and copy whatever we get out however many times we need to, instead.
Assuming we do find a good algorithm for general intelligence, we don’t need to train it over the course of an hour and melt all our hardware. We can take our time.
Without a definition for “intelligence”, these questions are ill-formed. Given a decent definition of intelligence, it becomes clear that “watts” (energy/time) are the wrong unit. What you want is something like agent ticks / universe ticks, or maybe bits processed / processing time, and you also need to account for the minimum size of the agent (and/or external resources needed), the reliability and longevity of its results, and as Bjorn said the generality of the problems it can handle.
Agreed on all counts, but if your energy demands become larger than all the energy available in the Universe; or if your training time becomes longer than the age of the Universe; then it doesn’t matter how superintelligent you could’ve potentially become.
When you are asking whether the hardware can support superintelligence, watts are exactly the unit that matter.
The poor definition of intelligence is addressed in the question; if 200 watts is what it takes to simulate a human intelligence, does equivalent hardware and software running greater wattage result in a logarithmic growth in IQ, or a linear, or an exponential growth? Assuming that everything scales at all, which it isn’t immediately obvious will be the case.
ETA: We have some conception of what IQ means, sort of; is a standard deviation equivalent to a doubling or halving of capacity? If my brainpower were doubled – if I could think twice as fast and keep twice as many concepts in play simultaneously – what impact would that have on my operational intelligence?
There is a big difference between the world in which a 400w intelligence has an IQ of 115 versus a world in which a 400w intelligence has an IQ of 9,000, to pick a suitably ridiculous number.
Me neither. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a potentially-interesting philosophical proposition that didn’t rest on a bad or nonexistent definition; FAI advocates’ unwillingness to define the meaning of “agent” beyond “an unspecified subset of optimization processes” is extremely annoying. That’s why I’m focusing on defining mathematically the meaning of “agent”, and then determining the limits of that kind of thing in particular.
Another issue I see with FAI proponents is that most of their arguments start with the assumption that a superintelligent agent already exists. So, it gets a bit Biblical at that point: a superintelligent agent can become even more superintelligent exponentially, because it’s already superintelligent, see ? There’s very little discussion on whether “superintelligence” — that is, quasi-omnipotence — is even possible in the first place.
I see that as part of the same issue. If “agent” is ill-defined, “intelligence” is ill-defined, so a superintelligent agent just has “more” than its creators and can therefore make an agent which has “more intelligence” than its creator, and there’s no way to figure out if an upper bound stops this process or what that bound might look like, or even if the process makes sense in the first place.
Agreed; FAI proponents are usually pretty vague on what “superintelligence” means (other than “smarter than a hundred Von Neummans put together”). But I think most of them would roughly agree that a superintelligent agent could achieve most (or all) of the following:
* Fully simulate millions or even billions of human beings in real time (or much faster)
* Convince any human to do anything the agent wants it to do
* Hack any electronic device nearly instantaneously
* Invent molecular nanotechnology and deploy it ubiquitously
* Solve any currently unsolved problem in science or mathematics
This still doesn’t tell us what “superintelligence” truly means, because these are just applications of “superintelligence”, not its core components. However, given that we currently have no way of achieving such powers; and that at least some of them may in fact break the laws of physics (as we currently understand them); it follows that a “superintelligent” agent must be something so advanced as to be completely beyound our current understanding of the world. Thus, setting that as a starting point in the discussion has always felt a bit disingenuous to me. Yes, I absolutely agree that such an agent could bootstrap itself exponentially to arbitrary levels of power, but FAI proponents would first need to convince me that it could get to the starting point at all.
If anyone is familiar with the facts behind https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/ I would be interested in any independent perspectives/other sides of the story. What is the author leaving out or misrepresenting if anything? In particular, if anyone has read the paper and can point to a substantive critique of the mathematical claims, that would be very interesting. Trying to combat confirmation bias here, and also cognizant that participants in these sorts of controversies cannot generally be trusted to give honest accounts. FWIW I am much more interested in discussion of the process/academic norms question here than of the more directly CWish question of whether GMVH is actually true for mathematical ability or not.
That’s how I feel, too. Peer review (and academic publishing more generally) can be a very ugly, messy process, but the story recounted in the Quillette piece is not something I would ever expect to see happen. OTOH, we have only the author’s word for what did happen, so maybe the actual story is very different in some way that explains why the paper got withdrawn.
This should help. Fields medalist Timothy Gowers thought the paper was bad and should never have been published in the first place.
Thanks. From reading that post and its comments and the linked HN article, nobody comes off looking very good. AFAICT what seems to have happened is:
1. Hill and his collaborators write a paper whose model rests on an assumption which they don’t justify and which is prima facie implausible, namely that “variability” is a heritable property of a subpopulation. Gowers gives a good account of why this is prima facie implausible. I wouldn’t be quite so quick to dismiss it as he is (and note that he also dismisses as implausible the idea that most men don’t have offspring but most women do, which as I understand it, and commenters point out, is actually the historical truth). But it absolutely requires serious evidence in order for the paper’s overall argument to be sound and they don’t provide any, and in general the paper does seem to me (a “dead” mathematician in the Erdosian sense of the word, with a Ph.D. to my name but no real research activity in 13 years) to be waaaay less rigorous than any “serious” mathematical journal should stand for.
2. They initially attempt to publish the paper in the Math. Intelligencer which isn’t really a “serious” journal. This gets accepted and then the acceptance gets retracted for what really do seem to be discreditable political reasons; unsound though the argument may be, there is no basis in the paper that I can see for it to be regarded as fomenting or excusing bias or discrimination against anyone.
3. Then, frustrated by that, they come up with a corrupt backdoor way of smuggling it into a real journal with the connivance of an axe-grinding editor.
4. The rest of the editorial board of the real journal, upon discovering this scheme, understandably revolts and demands it be fixed.
5. The fix is carried out in a ham-handed way that doesn’t really repair the journal’s editorial integrity (for which purpose they should have just fired the axe-grinding editor and put a disavowal note on the paper) but does allow Hill to continue to nurse his persecution complex.
Ugh.
Caveat to #2: we cannot be sure that the version of the paper accepted and then retracted from the Intelligencer was the same as that uploaded to Arxiv. It is sometimes the case that authors of inflammatory texts will revise those texts after initial criticism to be much more anodyne, and then make themselves look more martyrish by claiming the criticism was levied against the revised anodyne version.
There are 9 versions available on the arXiv, two of them from before when he claims it was accepted to the Intelligencer. The commenter “Mathematician” similarly claims that version 2 is close to what was accepted.
Why on earth is it implausible that variability varies across populations?
Variability varying isn’t implausible. Variability being heritable in the sense the authors need it to be is. Gowers’ key point is: “Those poor individuals at the bottom of population P [the one assumed to be more variable] aren’t going to reproduce, so won’t they die out and potentially cause population P to become less variable?”
Suppose to take an extreme example that in subpopulation P, half the members are six feet tall and half are five feet tall, while in Q, everyone is five foot six; that height is 100% heritable; and that for “selectivity” reasons nobody, from P or Q, succeeds in having offspring unless they are at least five feet eight. Then P is clearly more variable in height than Q, and the offspring of the overall population (P plus Q) will be drawn disproportionately, and in fact entirely, from P. But they will all be six feet tall, and thus clearly less variable than the prior generation! Now you can tell a just-so story where instead of having a gene for height there could be instead a gene for variance in height and so it is that which is inherited instead. But this is implausible enough to require unusually strong evidentiary justification and as far as I can tell the paper provides none.
@Nicholas Weininger
the trouble with your example is that we know for a fact that male height is more variable than female, despite there being reproductive benefits to height. And this pattern repeats for just about every trait we can measure. Greater male variability isn’t a hypothesis, it’s a fact.
@Cassander, I’m not claiming GMVH is false generally (though do note that its truth for one trait does not imply its truth for other traits). I’m claiming that the reasoning behind the authors’ hypothesized mechanism to explain it is unsound.
I haven’t read the article, but I think there is a simple response to your argument. If height is precisely controlled by genes and taller men have greater reproductive success, then eventually everyone will be tall. Also smart, handsome, … given similar assumptions.
But we observe that not everyone has reproductively optimal characteristics. The obvious explanation is that there isn’t a way in which the genes can reliably produce tall men. There is a gene that, metaphorically speaking, tries to produce tall men and sometimes fails. The taller its target height, the worse the failures. Where the optimum is depends on how large the benefit is of being tall and how large the cost is of failing to be tall–in your simple story, being short. If the payoff to being tall is very large, it pays to try to produce very tall men even with a sizable failure rate. So the bigger the difference in reproductive success between successful individuals and unsuccessful individuals, the wider the optimal distribution is.
Greater male variability is due to the X-chromosome. If you have one X, you get whatever is encoded on it. If you have two X you get the average of what is encoded on those two. This averaging effect reduces variance.
Now, if you look at what the X chromosome is enriched for, surprise, surprise, its stuff like height and cognitive function, which directly impact male reproductive success.
Variability can also be a heritable property of a subpopulation if this subpopulation for some reason engages more in assortative mating. In that case it is not encoded in any genes, but in the distribution of genes over chromosomes and of chromosomes in genomes. If the assortative mating stops, recombination will break up this distribution and the variance will decline. But for the time being, it would be a heritable trait.
“But we observe that not everyone has reproductively optimal characteristics. The obvious explanation is that there isn’t a way in which the genes can reliably produce tall men. There is a gene that, metaphorically speaking, tries to produce tall men and sometimes fails. The taller its target height, the worse the failures.”
I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Height is highly heritable, so people actually get what their genome specifies. But, height isn’t an unalloyed good. There are always selection pressures to decrease height too. Maybe the tall guy doesn’t survive the famine. But because of the higher variability of male reproductive success it makes sense to throw the dice and occasionally have a tall son who gets all the girls, hopefully before he starves to death.
So the average height of men would still be optimal in the average environment of his population. But the environment varies and therefore the optimal height varies too. And for men it has higher benefit to try to nail that optimal height.
How variability can be inherited:
Genetic transference to the X chromosome. (Yes, we see generic transfer between chromosomes. Google that shit.) Any allele that has a more neutral heterozygous expression will result in greater variability in men. If this is advantageous, this variability will spread. Boom. Inheritable variability. (Double points if one copy is good, one and a half copies are great, and two full copies will kill you. For men. For women the numbers would be more complex, but both “great” and “deadly” would be much less likely.)
@Nicholas Weininger
There are two kinds of selection effects that can increase the proportion of a subpopulation that meets the more selective sex’s standards.
One is selection of strictly beneficial genes, e.g. genes that raise general intelligence without any adverse effects.
The other is selection of genes that might be beneficial but that come with an associated risk, e.g. genes that raise general intelligence but increase the risk of developing autism or some neurodegenerative disorder.
As far as I can see the first effect would cause the less selective sex to become less variable over time, that is, they would become more uniformly good, while the second effect would cause them to be more variable — at the level of the genotype, not just phenotype (so you don’t need such things as “genes for height variability”), although any individual genes whose phenotype is “variability” would also be subject to this effect.
If Gowers’ summary is accurate, Hill ignores the first effect, while Gowers seems not to understand the second or to be conflating it somehow with the first. How well Hill’s model translates to the real world depends on the proportion of genes that come with adaptive tradeoffs. I don’t know how tractable an empirical question that is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was high: as pointed out above, even height has tradeoffs if being short can win you the jackpot when the famine hits.
Also, this apparently isn’t reflected in Hill’s model, but not all women find the same things attractive. People have idiosyncratic preferences; therefore, people can benefit from being idiosyncratic in random ways. Most of the time random idiosyncrasies will be deleterious or neutral, but they will be less heavily selected against in men if their only chance of success is to be in the 99th percentile in something.
@BlindKungFuMaster:
I agree that an alternative explanation for a distribution of characteristics is that the distribution is superior to everyone having the same characteristics. My standard example is giraffes. If all of them have very long necks, a short necked giraffe will be able to eat from low branches and avoid the costs of carrying a long neck. So there is an equilibrium distribution of heights, in which the net benefit to all neck heights in the distribution is the same.
The equivalent for intelligence could be a trade off between benefits of higher intelligence and costs, such as the calorie cost of a large brain. If there are some niches in which high intelligence pays enough to be worth its cost, some in which it does not, you could get a similar equilibrium.
But that still leaves the possibility of the explanation I earlier offered, in which a characteristic in the phenotype is unambiguously positive, but the more of that characteristic the genotype is trying to produce, the less often it succeeds. And that gives a heritable distribution, which is what Nicholas was arguing was inherently implausible.
All of which suggests that the proper response to Hill et. al. is not to refuse to publish the paper but to publish it and let others read it and offer their criticisms.
@aho bata
Loosely speaking, probably all genes have a certain amount of adaptive tradeoff. Whether or not its a quantitatively relevant amount is a much harder question.
For those who are curious about this specific topic, you can look up stuff on antagonistic pleiotropy. That’s one name the phenomena goes by for biologists.
Unlike most people who quote Gowers, he himself acknowledges not being an expert on biology: “I am also far from expert in evolutionary biology and may therefore have committed some rookie errors in what I have written above.”
The first thing that comes to my mind is that men have one copy of the X chromosome and women have two copies, so any trait that is (partially) encoded in the X chromosome will likely have different variability between the sexes. But, not being a biologist myself, I have no idea what traits exactly this refers to (other than men more likely being colorblind).
Gowers is way, way off with his ideas about heritability of variation etc. He hasn’t a clue. See my post below.
The fact that he couldn’t even come up with the example you did (which an educated academic ought to know) is not a good sign for how much he thought about this before posting.
His caveat is just lame ass covering.
@Nicholas Weininger
Not to dogpile, but with respect to (1) Gowers shows that he is clueless with respect to biology. He shouldn’t have brought that up yet as far as I can tell that’s his primary critique. He admits he may have made a rookie errors to cover his ass and surprise! He did. His critique resembles many stupid critiques of the past that biology can’t generate randomness but only deterministic traits. Generating deterministic traits is no harder or easier a priori than “random” traits or anything inbetween. If a gene raises the mean but also the variance of a trait, it could be selected for or against depending on how selection acts on that trait. Genes aren’t a blueprint to which organisms are made to tolerance.
In addition to the many above examples of increased heritable variability due to men lacking a full chromosome (essentially), I’ll give an extreme example of selection for a random mechanism. The number of sperm with a Y chromosome compared to sperm with an X chromosome is very close to 50/50. This ratio is the evolutionarily stable strategy in humans for well understood reasons. It’s not the only ratio you see across species. There are some species where a lot more females are born than males, although I can’t remember the name of the species off the top of my head. I vaguely remember the life history details though if you’re interested.
EDIT: Just saw this
No, it’s not that implausible because your entire model of how genetics maps to phenotype is way off. It’s pop culture level understanding. There is no “gene for height” or a “gene for variance in height”. Most genes are probably pleiotropic with respect to high level descriptions of phenotype. That means most genes affect multiple parts of phenotype. And a priori there is no reason not to suspect they influence both means and variances of traits. The mean is usually focused on, but that’s not because of biological plausibility. Your understanding of genotype and phenotype and how they are related is lacking. You are overconfident despite a lack of knowledge.
EDIT EDIT:
Honestly, main reason to doubt the story in the paper has any application to intelligence etc. is because it doesn’t fit our fragmentary knowledge of how intelligence is likely related to genetics (largely intelligence is probably due to having less generally deleterious mutations), and given that the variance in intelligence differs among human subpopulations I have other doubts. Also I kind of doubt the average effect of women mating is selective for intelligence in and of itself, but that’s a much more murky question.
EDIT EDIT EDIT:
Sorry for the negativity. I thank you for posting a criticism even though I think it is naive, because it did make me think about why the paper didn’t seem very applicable to me. I skimmed the paper and thought it looked vaguely cute but not worth reading closely, but I hadn’t really thought about why until I had to respond to your post. Now I know it’s partly because I think that the topic the author was interested in isn’t described well by this sort of model.
Elephant Seals.
The argument is due to Sir R.A. Fisher. The implication is that sex ratios will be equal if the cost of producing males and females is equal. Male elephant seals are much larger than female elephant seals, so the same argument implies more females than males produced.
I didn’t know that example! That’s a very interesting one. Different reason too than the example I was familiar with.
I was actually thinking of a different species of some sort of insect (or maybe arthropod) that mostly lives its life cycle inside a plant of some sort after hatching but eggs are dispersed in clusters between plants. Because of the high level of relatedness of individuals in one plant, the optimal sex ratio shifts to produce more females. Producing more males than needed is competing with yourself, in essence. Rather different than well mixed mating.
EDIT: Just noticed a mistake I made in higher up post about “variance in intelligence differs among human subpopuations… other doubts bla bla”. That’s poorly thought out because obviously the idea was that there was a variance in variability among subpopulations in the model, but I was thinking of different subpopulations that didn’t mate with each other until recently which is a different issue than the subpopulations in the model.
“The argument is due to Sir R.A. Fisher. The implication is that sex ratios will be equal if the cost of producing males and females is equal. Male elephant seals are much larger than female elephant seals, so the same argument implies more females than males produced.”
Ah, that’s interesting. I always assumed that the ratio would mirror the ratio of genetic material transmitted (after controlling for childhood death), so the only way to get more females would be to have a species where females contribute more genetic material to the next generation. But the cost to the mother is another factor.
But wouldn’t that lead to a kind of antagonistic selection? If the male elephant seal figures out how to produce only male sperm, the females are out of luck.
I should probably read a book. Figuring this stuff out on my own is bound to leave some pretty big holes. Any recommendations?
“Because of the high level of relatedness of individuals in one plant, the optimal sex ratio shifts to produce more females. Producing more males than needed is competing with yourself, in essence. Rather different than well mixed mating.”
That also makes sense. If you shift to group selection, more females come in handy.
@Blind Kung Fu Master
You’re quite mixed up. Unless elephant seals are way different than humans (which I really really doubt because they’re also a mammal although apparently some mammals do use a different system…), sex is determined by a small fraction of DNA depending on which of two chromosomes the male randomly passes on (X or Y). The amount of genetic material being passed on isn’t relevant although the amount passed on is basically half from each parent (slightly less DNA is from your father if you’re a male actually).
Males aren’t trying to make males and males don’t breed true so to speak. You need both sexes so there’s no selection pressure for more males in order to benefit males. More female descendants is (almost) as beneficial to a male in this situation as it would be to a female. Not quite the same since mothers bear more costs, but close. Or as beneficial to almost all of the male’s genes depending how you want to look at it. If you’re male, daughters are just as closely related to you as sons.
What level do you need? On the one hand, what you wrote about sex determination is way off. On the other hand, you recognize that having more relatives in your environment as competitors and less nonrelatives is kind of like group selection (which is correct!), but most people wouldn’t recognize that.
My area of specialization roughly speaking is evolutionary theory and mathematical modeling of populations. So I can recommend fairly high level texts on that. I’m less sure for beginner material because I took a rather strange route myself.
But I think maybe you should learn some basic genetics too. Depends on your goals and current knowledge.
I’m sure it isn’t the best source, but I explain Fisher’s argument in Chapter 1 of my webbed Price Theory, under the subhead “Economics and Evolution.”
“You’re quite mixed up.”
You are awfully quick asserting other people don’t know what they are talking about.
Unfortunately you seem to have completely misunderstood what it is I was talking about. I spell it out for you:
1) If you have a population with a stable 2:1 ratio of female to male, being a male is just better. If every kid has one dad and one mom, in this population males have twice the average number of kids.
2) This means there is selection pressure to have more sons. Over time this selection pressure will ramp up the number of males and there will be a balance. This is the reason why usually there are equal numbers of males and females.
3) This assumes that both sexes contribute roughly the same amount of genetic material. If however, the species is triploid and females contribute two chromosomes and males one of each type, than the 2:1 female-male ratio is stable, because while males are more likely to have kids, females still get to contribute the same amount of genetic material. I’m not saying that happens, I’m just saying this is one mechanism to get a lopsided male-female ratio.
4) In the elephant seal example, there are more females because a female can have n>1 female babies with the same effort as having one male baby. This, as explained in 1), means that being male is just better, ie fitter, than being female. Because males aren’t paying the cost of a pregnancy and generally cannot count on having multiple babies with one female (turn over of alpha males can be pretty rapid), there is a strong incentive for males to sire these fitter sons. Because sperm determines sex, evolutionary changes in that regard are difficult to counter for the females. If there is only male sperm, it is going to be a son.
5) This is what I called antagonistic selection. A more common term is antagonistic sexual co-evolution. In this specific scenario males want to have sons and there is evolutionary pressure to “breed true”.
@Blind Kung Fu Mater
Mea Culpa. I thought you were saying something much weirder. I’ve never heard of any species like (3) though, which is probably partly why I didn’t make the connection. Who knows though, maybe some plants do something like that. Plants are weird. Perhaps I shouldn’t post so late.
With respect to (2) sure, but there’s also selection pressure in that population for females to have more sons as long as costs are equal. It benefits a female to have more sons in that population. A female with a novel mutation that led to sons with more sons would benefit roughly half as much as a male with a mutation for more sons (I’m guessing based on a heuristic). A female with a mutation that led to more sons immediately would benefit just as much as a male with a mutation with similar effect.
With respect to (4) and (5) though I’m not sure which genes control the ratio of X to Y sperm. You’re obviously right that only males have sperm, but genes that affect the ratio of X to Y sperm may occur in both sexes. It is not obviously true that females can’t easily interact with the genetics of sex determination. That could only occur if all the genes controlling the ratio of sperm “sex” were on the Y chromosome. Even then, females could potentially develop ways of sorting sperm based on sperm sex.
The ratio of X to Y sperm could be affect by meiosis though so my guess is a pretty large number of genes could have an effect, some of which females have. I see no reason why females with genes that caused there to be an uptick in Y chromosomes in sperm wouldn’t benefit from having more sons with sons. Most females are no more related to a female than most males, so it’s not obvious to me that it’s in any individual female’s interest not to have sons that have more sons. It would take a gene that increased the number of sperm with Y chromosomes spreading to a pretty large chunk of the population before it was bad for females that had that gene (Unless elephant seals tend to mate with relatives). Only at that point would having sons that have more sons be bad for a female.
In other words, my point about sexes not breeding true was that we should expect females to be “defectors” against other females as long as they don’t pay the cost of a gene for more males right now. Because roughly speaking a female isn’t more related to a random other female than a random male.
@quanta413:
Now you seem to have completely dropped the assumption that sons are more costly for mothers.
Yes, if the sex ratio is lopsided both females and males benefit from having the underrepresented sex in their progeny. You’ll get female “defectors” etc.
But the whole point of the elephant seal example was that mothers pay an additional cost for sons. If a mother can have either three daughters or one son, and there are no further factors, you’ll get that 3:1 ratio. That is the equilibrium. With that ratio three daughters are as costly and as fit as one son is.
But only for mothers …
@BlindKungFuMaster
No, I’m saying something different. If a gene affecting number of sons affects the balance of X to Y sperm, then even if that gene is in mothers, mothers who have it don’t pay the additional cost of sons because they don’t produce sperm. They only pay the cost once the gene is so common that most males have it. But at that point so do any mothers who don’t have the gene.
That means that a mother with a mutation that causes her sons to have more sons because the gene affects the ratio of X to Y sperm is initially favored by natural selection if males who had more sons are favored by natural selection. Up until the point where the sex ratio is skewed too far and sons who had more sons would themselves do worse.
This is distinct from a gene that say, caused a mother to sort Y sperm towards her eggs and X away or something to that effect. A mother would pay the cost of that gene and so would all her daughters, so it could be disfavored.
Basically the reproductive success of any gene in an individual mother doesn’t care about the gene’s effect on other mothers.
In reverse, a mutation that caused females to sort sperm inside them towards the optimal male to female ratio for a theoretical female is actually a beneficial mutation in a male because males don’t sort sperm. So males can also have genes that defect against the optimal male:female ratio for males as a group as long as those genes aren’t on the Y chromosome.
Mutations on the Y chromosome are unique in that because the Y chromosome is only in males, mutations in the Y chromosome that affect sex ratio are only favored if it increases the number of sons. I think this is true even if the mutation pushes the number of sons too high even from a male individual’s perspective.
@quanta:
I was actually thinking of a different species of some sort of insect…
It sounds like you were thinking of aphids.
@littskad
Thank you. Aphids seems like the right fit.
Fairly weak response IMO:
Well I’m afraid that to me it doesn’t suggest anything of the kind. If females have a higher cutoff than males, wouldn’t that suggest that males would have a much higher selection pressure to become more desirable than females? And wouldn’t the loss of all those undesirable males mean that there wasn’t much one could say about variability? Imagine for example if the individuals in P were all either extremely fit or extremely unfit. Surely the variability would go right down if only the fit individuals got to reproduce. And if you’re worrying that the model would in fact show that males would tend to become far superior to females, as opposed to the usual claim that males are more spread out both at the top and at the bottom, let’s remember that males inherit traits from both their fathers and their mothers, as do females, an observation that, surprisingly, plays no role at all in the paper.
Ok, so we take it as axiomatic that there will be an equal number of males and females born, then we can see that mating is a zero sum game. If one male gets a female as a mate, he is removing her from the pool for all the other males. So the normal evolutionary model of “higher selection pressure” doesn’t really apply: since everyone’s trying to improve all the time, one person doing this doesn’t get them anywhere in the stack. Besides that, there will already be high selection pressure applied, eg from competing tribes. So imagine you’re the spirit of evolution in one of the shitty males, and you want to get a mate. What do you do? You’d like to improve your genes in a stable, guaranteed fashion. But so does every other male, so that doesn’t move you up in the totem pole. So instead, you throw a hail mary: you pick random genes that have a low chance of getting you lots of mates, but also have a chance of getting you no mates. Let’s say this succeeds: The problem is that the people in the population in the next generation are people who succeeded: it’s not sufficient to just hang onto your succesful hail-mary, you need to throw another one to reproduce next generation too.
Now let’s come up with genetic models for this. It’s important to remember that evolution is itself subject to evolution, and so the best ways of evolving (eg sexual reproduction) are going to win out over poorer ones. So if there are mechanisms that control how likely it is for a mutation to occur, then these mechanisms can change in the presense of selective pressure. Now how would such a change propagate only to males of the species? Easy: store it in the y-chomosome.
This is all to say not that the paper is right or useful, but that it should be debated in the open on it’s merits and by experts in the field, not hidden away in blog posts and preprints with the brunt of the discussion concerning the well established MGVH, or it’s implications.
Genes do not have to be deterministic in their effect on phenotype at a high level. Most aren’t strictly deterministic at a high level of description. And most genes affect many traits and most traits are affected by many genes. The paper is about heritable variability that is maintained which is a reasonable idea since we know natural selection can select for very precise randomizing mechanisms when there’s pressure (like sex ratio of gametes). Sometimes there may be mutations that increase variance of a trait but not the mean. It’s not that weird for a gene or genes to affect variance as well as mean.
I went to read it a little more closely though this time…
As for some of his other assumptions,
1. I’m pretty sure humans for at least the past couple thousand years have not typically had half of the males or more not reproducing. Probably not even much farther back than that unless I’m missing something. I’m not sure what fraction of males we think don’t reproduce among hunter-gatherers. So his model would imply that since human females are not selective (by his definition), we should see male variability decreasing. Any current higher variability would be do to either other factors (like… having one copy of the X chromosome) or due to a distant evolutionary past or something.
The author isn’t ignorant though. He does notice this implication and loosely ties it to the idea that a decrease in mate selectivity compared to the past may be driving a trend towards decreasing male variability. Whether or not this trend exists? Or a change in mate selectivity? Who knows. His citation is pretty loose, and I don’t think it really applies. In some countries, the male/female variability has grown over time in one way and decreased in another. I’d be surprised if mate selectivity has changed that much anywhere since we’ve started taking these measurements, so I don’t buy it.
Seems like his description of choosy females makes more sense for animals with a consistent harem mating system. Men have had harems sometimes, but I doubt in any society that these men ever had enough concubines that things crossed the threshold of half of men not reproducing.
2. I said this above, but I don’t think this model makes sense as a model for evolution of human intelligence neither recent nor long ago. My understanding is a lot of the genetic contribution to higher intelligence is just having fewer rare slightly deleterious mutations. This sort of thing affects both men and women and doesn’t increase variability in men in the sense he’s talking about (which requires a fat upper tail of intelligence not just a fat lower tail) because those genes are either basically adding 0 or negative.
Also what you said about how many of those genes are shared by men and women. That would imply that any shared genes for variance in intelligence ought to be selected against by the non-choosy male population. I think the sliver of genes that affect variance in intelligence but only do so in males is probably pretty low. Your solution of storing those on the Y-chromosome works, but I don’t think that jives with what we know at the moment (which isn’t much yet).
Farb and Wilkinson have each now posted statements about their roles.
They both start by asserting that they will contradict something Hill said, but I don’t see a single point they dispute.
On top of that, Rivin disputes Farb’s claim that the peer review process the paper underwent was abnormal. I see no reason to believe Farb over Rivin since the bizarre story here is largely due to Farb’s side of the story. The whole thing would’ve been a nothing burger if published as originally expected.
There had to be something strange about the refereeing. Because any normal mathematical referee, on seeing this paper, would say this isn’t a math paper of the sort NYJM publishes.
Here is the table of contents for the most recent issue. Here is the most recent arXiv version of Hill’s paper.
Hill doesn’t have anywhere near the level of mathematical sophistication of anything else in that journal. There is one applied paper in the current volume and it is a similar level of mathematical sophistication to the others.
Now, you can argue that it is good to be able to explain models in simple terms without a big toolkit. Maybe Hill’s article is good and the robot motion article I linked is dressing up nothing in big words. But Hill’s article isn’t the sort of thing I would expect to see in NYJM, so something is strange in its acceptance.
The paper is at a lower mathematical level, but it’s not weird for referees to comment on correctness and accuracy and not worry much about an article’s suitability in a particular journal. That’s normally the editor’s job. Although the journal can decide whatever it likes.
Rivin’s choice as editor was unusual compared to his normal choices or his colleagues, but I think that’s all that’s required to explain it. It’s not always weird or sinister for an editor to mix things up once in a while. When the journal is wide-ranging which this one is. Although it’s possible Rivin was trying to get someone’s goat. If so, he succeeded brilliantly. But I think it more likely he or Steinberger found the paper interesting, thought the journal had a broad enough coverage that one unusual article wasn’t too out of place, and sent it off for review.
Like I said, it would’ve been a complete nothing burger if published as expected. The few people who skimmed it would have briefly paused and thought “that’s rather more applied than normal”. That’s about it.
It all brings to mind “in academia, the politics are so petty because the stakes are so low”. Poor articles get published all the time with little comment for various political or other reasons (although I can’t judge this particular journal’s frequency of that since I’m not familiar enough with the subjects), but an article of any quality that hits the wrong buttons or is by the wrong person leads to somebody starting a petty squabble. As if they couldn’t afford server space or something.
Usually we just don’t hear about it, because nobody but academics gives a shit about their internal politics.
Yeah, Reviewer #2 gets us all from time to time, but usually she doesn’t bring a Twitter mob with her.
Actually, only Farb says that he is rebutting “unfounded accusations of Ted Hill”; Wilkinson does not attribute the source of “some unfounded allegations.” Hill’s article has mutated into other claims and she would want to rebut those; moreover, she would not want to enumerate mutated claims, because they are potentially boundless. But I think most people in such situations just “tell their side” or “clear the air” rather framing it as a rebuttal.
Lot of speculation by non-biologists… but this suggests: shouldn’t the paper have been submitted to an (evolution-related) biology journal in the first place, rather than a math one? (Perhaps after consulting with a biologist.)
Perhaps. The story is only interesting because of the claims of the author that his paper was spiked by external social pressure despite the normal reviewing process. If some third-tier journal somewhere accepts his paper and it’s crap, or if it rejects his paper even though it was worthwhile, those are both normal things and no story. Bad papers get accepted and good ones rejected every single day.
Using social/political pressure to tamper with the normal peer review process sounds like a genuinely bad idea. Rejecting technical papers for social/political reasons also seems like a genuinely bad idea. To the extent that these are happening often, that’s news I think is important to get out to the world. To the extent this is just another paper getting rejected for good or bad reasons, *yawn*.
Exactly.
I wrote a paper, submitted it to a third rate journal. It was rejected.
Submitted it to a second rate journal. It was rejected.
Submitted it to a to journal. It was accepted.
Love the paper by the way. Easy to understand, not trivial, answers something I never understood.
I do wonder if preferences affect the tendency though like you mention. When it’s really hot or really cold outside, I do find I want the indoors to be slightly colder or hotter respectively.
Perception is Bayesian. When you read Scott’s post about the dangers of indoor CO2 levels, the air around you suddenly feels more stale and kinda suffocating.
So too is perception about race and gender. When you read an essay saying that women are unlikely to achieve in math due to fundamental biological differences, that impacts your perception of them. If a woman and a man collaborate on a math project, you will ascribe more of the success to the man. If a woman applies to a job requiring serious math ability, you will view her resume with more skepticism.
Is it at all surprising then when women’s groups feel it is threatening to women when an essay gives a biological explanation for the math achievement gap?
Even if those essays are completely correct (and I don’t think they are), they harm women who are strong in mathematics by influencing people’s priors about them. This includes those women themselves, who will be less likely to believe in themselves and do ambitious work.
One more thing: when people say that the reason you see fewer high-achieving women is because their abilities have lower variance, rather than lower mean, they seem surprised when this claim is viewed as an attack on women. However, the result of that claim is the same — that there is a powerful biological force keeping women out of math.
I believe that your hypothesis is known as “stereotype threat.” As I understand it, the objective evidence supporting the stereotype threat hypothesis is pretty flimsy.
I’m talking about medium/long term goal setting and life planning, not short term performance differences on tests due to being reminded something you already know.
Do you have evidence, then, for the hypothesis in your second paragraph?
I believe that “stereotype threat” — as the term is normally used — includes medium/long term effects.
But if you prefer to use a different phrase, that’s fine. Let’s call it the Peter Pan Hypothesis. i.e. the belief that beliefs in inherent group differences are themselves responsible for a significant portion of observed group differences.
So my question is this: What is the evidence for the Peter Pan Hypothesis? How would you test it? How would you measure it?
Also, what is the best evidence against the Peter Pan Hypothesis?
It’s not a surprise to me — those women’s groups generally object to any observation which puts women in a negative light compared to men — even if those observations are true. Do they object because such observations are truly harmful? Or is it simply a matter of hurt feelings and rationalization?
I dunno about that. As soon as I read your comment, I immediately began to believe that it was flimsy.
Which then makes me think it might not be flimsy.
I thought stereotype threat was ‘being told women.are bad at maths makes them actually do worse at maths tests’
My impression is that stereotype threat is just reminding people that they’re in a group that there’s prejudice against.
There just might be ethical issues with exposing people to microaggressions (or macroaggressions) and then testing them to see whether they don’t do as well at whatever.
This is a non-trivial empirical claim about reality that I’ve seen people throw around in various contexts. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any empirical support for this claim or variants of this claim. One could just as plausibly posit that knowing about such fundamental biological differences would lead someone to value and laud the woman more, for having had to work harder than the man to get to the same place. Or it could lead someone to put their thumb on the scale in favor of the woman, in order to “right” what they consider a cosmic injustice. There’s just as much empirical support (i.e. none) for those claims as the one you make, as best as I can tell.
The absence of empirical evidence here is hardly surprising, as this is extremely difficult to study!
Agreed! Which is why we should refrain from making claims that have no empirical backing, and be highly suspicious of people who make such claims and then use those claims as justification for other actions.
And in the meanwhile, it would probably good to get rid of that absence of empirical evidence – that is, do that extremely difficult work of studying this issue and finding/producing empirical evidence to analyze, to lead us to actual empirically supported conclusions, without the expectation that it conform to our preexisting intuitions about what they should be.
Ivlin:
Speculation is a part of how we get more information–if only by motivating people to check it out. And in practice, it’s hard for me to imagine an equally speculative/abstract paper which predicted that women should outperform men in the hardest subjects would have the same problems. (Though maybe it would–it’s not like we have any kind of widespread survey of this kind of paper-spiking exercise that we can draw on to examine statistics!)
There is one fairly simple test–the relative ability of men vs women who make it through the filter.
My sister went to Boalt (Berkeley Law School), I think in the late sixties. My memory of her account is that about ten percent of the students were women, and one year, out of the six top students (two in each of the three years), five were women. That pattern suggests that, for whatever reason, women had to be abler than men in order to get into Boalt.
It should be possible to look for that pattern in other ways in other areas. Chess players are rated. If the sort of effect being discussed tends to keep women from going in for chess, one would expect the average rating of those who do to be higher than that of the men who do.
If the overrepresentation of men relative to women in STEM fields is because of a wider variance in mens’ intelligence distribution (or other mental traits), then it’s interesting to ask why this only happens in STEM fields or math-heavy fields. It seems intuitively like you should need to be way out in the right end of the intelligent distribution to be a working biologist, but that field is much more gender-balanced than physics. And it’s not clear to me that you should need to be smarter to be an engineer than a lawyer, or an economist than a psychologist, and yet in all those cases, the math-oriented field is heavily male dominated.
It seems to me that the most plausible single explanation is a slightly right-shifted distribution of math ability of men relative to women, rather than a higher variance. That would give you the pattern we actually observe–economics is more male-dominated than psychology, engineering is more male-dominated than law, computer science is more male-dominated than medicine, biology is more male-dominated than physics or chemistry, etc.
I don’t know enough about STEM to know if this is true – just speculation on my part.
But it might be that in STEM fields, the methods of testing and evaluation are more objective and robust, such that those fields have been able to more credibly resist demands for equal representation as political forces have increasingly demanded gender parity.
As a comparison, sports have done a great job resisting such demands because it’s clear and obvious that male athletes are superior to female ones. Politicians could try and force an NBA team to sign a female player if they wanted to, but their inferiority would become overwhelmingly obvious the second they hit the court. Therefore, the pressure doesn’t come.
If there is some threshold below which low ability does not matter, higher variance with the same mean and higher mean produce similar results. That is, if you need an (arbitrary) math ability score of 90 to be an economist, group A with a higher percentage of 90+s will have more potential economists than (similar-sized) group B, even if they also have a higher percentage of 10-s.
Agreed with Matt.
As to biology vs physics, econ vs psych, engineering vs law, I’m really not sure those are great examples. I’m pretty sure the male dominated ones of those tend to require more intelligence at the high end. For that matter, it would be easier to switch from the male dominated one than in the other direction. I think you could find paradoxical pairings, but I don’t think the ones you listed work.
MattM:
Okay, but sports are a weird special case, because the differences in strength and size between women and men are huge. The differences in mental abilities, as best we can measure them, are quite small (small verbal advantage for women, small mathematical/spacial advantage for men).
albatross,
Sports is useful as an edge case, but let’s walk through this.
Imagine a society composed of two groups – the Supermen and the Plebs.
Supermen are, on average, 10% better, at everything than Plebs are. Smarter, faster, stronger, more sociable, all of it. I’m not a statistician, but 10% seems like a threshold such that it would manifest itself in a clear and visible way at the upper edges of society (corporate boards, sports teams, nobel winners etc. would be all be over-represented with Supermen), while at the same time, leaving plenty of room for everyone to personally know really smart and accomplished Plebs and really dumb loser Supermen.
Now let’s say that polite society decides that this is not actually the case. Supermen aren’t inherently better than Plebs at all. That entire notion was all a fictional invention of Supermen-supremacists to hold back and oppress the poor Plebs. There is no difference. The difference we see in outcomes is all attributable to discrimination, which must be reversed as soon as possible.
Where would we expect to see this reversal manifest itself quickly, and where would it take longer? Presumably, it would manifest quickly in disciplines where success is somewhat arbitrary (and where the stakes in general are low), and take a lot longer in disciplines where objective measurements are easy (and the stakes are high).
If you believe that Engineering is more objectively evaluated than Biology, you would, therefore, expect Engineering to resist such demands for reversal, while Biology complies more quickly and easily.
Another fairly simple test is to look at broad social trends as cultural pressure eased. The percentage of female doctors (a difficult and well compensated profession) has been rising for a while and the percentage of females among college students is higher as well. You have to posit extra misogyny in certain fields to suppose that it isn’t some innate trait keeping women’s participation from rising.
@albatross
Know that whichever it is, it is most likely a result of more objective standards being applied.
Feminists are already openly arguing in favor of making stem less objective because women do worse on objective tests. See, e.g.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858417743754
Over-representation doesn’t have to reflect a difference in ability. It can also (partially or fully) reflect a difference in interest.
For example, imagine a society where men are judged more on their status and money-earning, while women are judged more on looks. One would then expect men to sacrifice more to get status and a high income, making it seem that they better at being CEOs, while in actuality, they may be better at: “be willing to work 80 hour weeks for decades to achieve very high income and status.”
The overrepresentation of men relative to women in STEM fields is at least in part because more men than women want to partake of most STEM fields. That’s going to make it very difficult to deconvolve other effects. And if you’re going to even try to pull the hypothesized greater male variability out of that morass, the last place to do it is at the barely-made-it margin where you are closest to the center of the distribution function.
@John Schilling
If that we a major reason it would be easy to see in statistics: If men dominate STEM because they prefer it they will have a disproportionate share of the worst performing STEM students.
By way of example:
Math School: 1000 Students, 900 Men 100 Women. If preference predominates, we would expect the bottom 100 students in GPA, admittance tests (SAT/ACT) and exit tests (GRE) should have >90 men. Over several student bodies this effect would be shown to be statistically significant.
@idontknow131647093 says:
the people in stem classes are self selected. the people who do worst at it don’t take stem classes to begin with, or fail out. though I’d actually bet a fair bet that if you look at the rates of people who fail stem classes, it would be overwhelmingly male.
@idontknow131647093
If interest is independent of ability, that claim does not hold; if an interest-granting oracle randomly samples 900 from the male population and 100 from the female population, I expect the bottom 100 to be 90 men, 10 women.
If interest is strictly dependent on ability and the populations have the same mean and variance, it is true.
If interest is related to ability in some more complex way, that perhaps differs between genders, this test can tell us nothing.
@cassander I don’t see how self selection on ability would change the % of anything at any level, in your situation it would seem the population %s would be similar at all rankings within a school.
@The Nybbler I think you are right with regards to my initial statement, which leads me to revise it more closely to what I wanted it to mean: If there is a kind of deterrent effect against women that causes them to be disinterested in STEM (or encourages men to enter it), as some feminist theories posit, this will most likely affect the marginal student (the classic is an freshman engineer who graduates in another major, usually business for men). Under that model, we would expect men to cluster at the bottom, because lower performing men would either be more encouraged to sign up, or stay in comparatively.
Women were quite deliberately chased out of some fields in STEM. Computer Science for example had a lot of women at the start, but that fell off a cliff, and that was driven by internal politics more than anything else: The men in the field did not want to be working in a womens occupation, because they accurately judged that this would do large amounts of damage to their prestige and earnings, so they set out to get rid of as many of them as they could.
That does not still hold, but if you ignore the historic impact of blatant and overt sexism, you will just not have an accurate picture of reality.
Thomas –
That is quite a series of remarkable claims all wrapped up in a neat little bow.
I am pretty sure you are just mischaracterizing the history of IT with regard to the now obsolete job of “calculator” (among other jobs that would now be characterized as data entry related), but if there is something more to the claim, please surprise me.
ETA:
The specific claims I’d like to see evidence of:
Large numbers of women in early computer science (if it isn’t just going to be people who move punch cards, please don’t bore me with that)
That men specifically tried to chase them out.
That men specifically tried to chase them out for prestige-related reasons – this seems implausible on its face, suggesting these mathematics sorts were politically saavy enough to both see the advantage in it, and cooperate to achieve an ends.
That the women involved were successfully chased out, because this seems implausible on its face as well, even given all the other stuff happened. It just sounds like “Oh those dainty women, they couldn’t handle the rough and tumble politics.” Which seems like the sort of thing you might believe if you had met neither early century working women, nor the sort of women who end up in computing, the shared set of which sounds particularly unlikely to let themselves be quietly chased off.
I think idontknow131647093 is onto something. If there’s an interest gap between men and women of similar ability, then it seems logical to expect that the population who fails (say) the basic weed-out engineering course is going to be disproportionately male relative to the population of the course.
I thought there were some statistics showing that men were disproportionately represented at the bottom of STEM fields, due to women being more likely to drop out of STEM majors than men if they got mediocre grades. Though a difference in interest levels is not the only thing that would explain this phenomenon (if I’m correctly remembering the studies that found this, and if the studies were accurate).
@Thomas Jørgensen
That is an extraordinary set of claims, as Thegnskald points out. We know computer programming (which was very different, but still recognizably programming and debugging) was female-dominated in the ENIAC era. But the ENIAC programmers were selected at the tail end of WWII, when a lot of men were busy elsewhere. We know when the US Department of Labor started keeping statistics (IIRC late 1960s), programming was male dominated. Margaret Hamilton has indicated that the profession was male dominated in her time in it, which began in the early 1960s. As far as I know, no one has pinned down when the changeover happened, and certainly no one has conclusively demonstrated the reasons for it.
The claim “Men chased them out to help the prestige and earnings of the profession” sounds like a mash-up of two strands of very modern feminist reasoning (“chased out” and “female-dominated professions lose prestige and financial value as a result of being female-dominated”). Furthermore, the profession didn’t become at all prestigious until much later — after the personal computer revolution, certainly.
I did over egg the argument badly, but the solid facts are that it started majority female, had healthy (and climbing! see those bureau of labor statistics) numbers of women in it until the pc era, and then female participation very abruptly fell off a cliff.
Pretty much exactly when it became a generator of great fortunes. Which is where I start putting an incredibly hostile gloss on things, because this is not what biological factors look like – this is a cultural campaign of exclusion.
The kinder read on things is that the entire profession of coder got run over by a marketing juggernaut – The personal computer sales pitch was just incredibly gendered in the professions infancy, so a whole lot more boys were handed one as teenagers, with predictable results, and the media portrayals that defined the popular conception of the computer geek ranged from “quite incredibly misogynist” – the revenge of the nerds films have so much rape in them. Just so much rape – to “the only women in the movie are there to be explained at”
So an entire generation of women were informed in no uncertain terms that computing was a boys club. Resorting to biology to explain the ratio after that is, well, not necessary?
@Thomas Jørgensen
It started majority female, when there literally six programmers in 1945. Even by 1950, programming occupations were not considered significant enough to mention by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As I said, Margaret Hamilton mentions in an interview that the profession was male-dominated at least from 1959.
According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States (1976 edition), by 1960 census we have a whopping 9000 male computer specialists (not broken down further), and 4000 female computer specialists. In 1970, 207,000 men; 51,000 women. In 1972, 259,200 men, 16,800 women. According to the 1982 edition of the Abstract: In 1981, 1,087,500 men, 38,500 women. This is the early PC era, with the IBM PC being released in the middle of 1981. One estimate is that only about 1.8 million PCs — total — had been sold by the end of 1981. These aren’t people who grew up with PCs; those won’t enter the labor force until the late 1980s.
What we see is not men driving out women. What we see is a field expanding, but unevenly. The number of women doubles; the number of men quadruples.
_Revenge of the Nerds_ was 1984; as I recall, it has rape by fraud (played for laughs), but hardly “so much rape”. Then there’s _Weird Science_, where it’s the nerds who are there to be explained to by a woman. And _Real Genius_ where you have a 3-man, one-woman ensemble. The idea that _Hollywood nerd movies_ drove women out of the field is even more unlikely than the idea that the men in the field did.
If I had to eyeball it from teaching (not a very large sample size, very biased sample, etc.), I’d say men are perhaps a little more likely to be among my worse students in physics. But I think it’s probably either because men are somewhat less conscientious, or it’s just noise.
Oops, I read the wrong data from 1972 and 1981.
1972 has 276,000 computer specialists, 16.8% women (46,368).
1981 has 627,000 computer specialists, 27.1% women (164,900).
1982 has 751,000 computer specialists, 28.5% women (214,000).
At this point occupational categories change. If we follow the detailed occupations of “Computer Programmer” and “Computer Systems Analyst” (which made up “computer specialists” in 1982) and assume “Computer Systems Analysts, scientists” is essentially the same as “Computer Systems Analyst”, we get
1983 719,000 total 30.7% women (220,700)
1984 817,000 total 33.4% women (272,500)
1985 893,000 total 31.8% women (283,700)
1986 934,000 total 34.2% women (319,100)
1987 974,000 total 34.5% women (336,400)
1988 1,049,000 total 31.0% women (324,800)
1989 1,127,000 total, 33.8% women (380,900)
1990 1,199,000 total, 35.2% women (422,500)
1991 1,221,000 total, 33.8% women (413,100)
1992 1,243,000 total, 31.1% women (386,600)
Thus through the PC era we see a rise at the beginning followed by fluctuations with no trend, with a possible drop starting the Internet era. I’ll stop there for now because I’ve been typing these by hand from scanned BLS reports, and I’ve probably made mistakes and will make more.
I think the “driven out by mid-1980s Hollywood nerd movies” and “driven out by the PC era” ideas are not supported. Continuing through to the dot-com bust (which definitely drove women out, but wasn’t sexist) might show more, but I don’t think it’s going to substantiate men driving women out. Especially since I was in the industry at the time, not doing any woman-ejecting.
I thought that was driven by the first wave of computer science hiring occurring during the period when most of the male candidates were fully occupied with Extreme Nazi-Punching, and the second wave occurred during the culturally conservative 1950s.
Citation very much needed for this explanation.
For that matter, citation needed for women being “gotten rid of” at all, for their numbers “falling off a cliff”. My understanding is that the absolute number of women employed in computer science(*) rose almost monotonically through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and that only their relative participation declined as men joined the field even faster.
* NOT hand-calculation in lieu of computers not being available yet, because we don’t need elaborate theories of discrimination to explain the calculators not all being rehired as coders any more than we do to explain John Henry never being employed as a steam-drill engineer.
I don’t think this is a reason. The same disparities also exist in countries where such political pressures don’t exist (e.g. Hungary), as well as in contexts where participation is purely a matter of choice, or depends on objective tests.
Furthermore, while the assessment of the correctness of a result is the most objective in math, the importance of a result is just as subjective as in biology.
Interest and ability are very hard to separate. If you are more interested in something, you are more likely to study and understand it properly, so you are going to be better at it. So if there is an innate difference in interest but not talent, once you have to understand complex math, it will translate to a difference in ability. Vice versa, if you are not good at something, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest.
Isn’t this what really matters, though? Why should the absolute number be the one we focus on, especially in a quickly growing industry and especially during an era where female workforce participation in general was also growing very quickly.
MattM –
I think you are responding to a response to the argument that women were chased out.
Pointing out that the absolute numbers of women didn’t decrease is a strong argument against the idea that men moved in and pushed all the women out.
The relative representation doesn’t matter to this specific discussion, even if it matters a lot to the broader question of women in STEM.
I suppose that’s fair if you take “chased out” very literally. I was thinking of it more metaphorically.
One way to be sure you won’t get any more empirical evidence is to demand that the issue never be discussed.
If one assumes for the sake of argument that actual ability gaps do exist (not an outrageous hypothesis), it’s hardly a surprise that some people would come up with difficult-to-falsify hypotheses that explain away the evidence for such ability gaps.
And stereotype threat is conviently difficult to falsify.
not to be that guy but actually stereotype threat studies usually fail to replicate and I don’t think anyone without a lot of political investment in progressivism takes it seriously any more
I disagree with this comparison. Scott’s post about CO2 levels identifies many ways in which one might remedy the situation. You might feel stuffy in a closed environment, but you won’t feel stuffy in a large, well ventilated, open space – because Scott specifically tells you that these places are unlikely to be affected by this problem.
Similarly, if you read a study that says that, on average women aren’t as good at math due to variability, that doesn’t tell you anything about the comparison between male author and female author, and any decent reasoner should be well aware of this qualifier and should apply it to their analysis – thereby not ascribing more of the success to the male than the female.
I suppose it’s possible that this level of nuance in analysis might not be capable by the very stupid, but it’s really not that advanced or nuanced. It’s not difficult to explain to someone that variability explains why there are few female math geniuses relative to male math geniuses, but that this does not mean that the female geniuses who do exist are inferior to the male ones. Just as “indoor space = CO2 = stuffy” does not mean that all indoor spaces have high CO2 counts and are stuffy.
If you believe that biology dictates that it requires a 1/100 event for a woman to be the best mathematician in the world, will you not be skeptical if someone reports that the world’s best mathematician is female?
If the math paper of the century is cowritten by a man and a woman, will your belief not impact how you percieve whose insights were most important?
I’ll be as skeptical as the statistics indicate that I should be.
It’s also ~1/100 chance to flip a coin and have it land heads 7 times in a row. If I saw that happen, I might ask to examine the coin to see if it’s a trick coin or something. But weird random things happen frequently.
Last year, I lost my car in what was supposedly a 1-in-500 year flood event. All the skepticism in the world ain’t bringing my car back.
Yes. And rightly so.
Skepticism, of course, is the same as flat out disbelief. And, upon confirmation, I will then be skeptical of the original belief.
In each case, that skepticism only extends to a degree warranted by the strength of the evidence.
Depends on the distribution and how often people have claimed that a woman is the top mathematician. If the latter claim is rare enough there isn’t much reason to be skeptical that the woman being claimed to be at the top than any individual man named. If the claim is rare enough it might actually make you more likely to believe the one time you hear it.
Agree with baconbits.
When I get hit with a “once in every 500 years” flood every three years or so, I do indeed start to get very skeptical.
Not skeptical that a flood happened, but skeptical that the people who declared it to be supposedly so rare have any idea what they’re talking about.
True, it’s just one data point, so the skepticism would be small. To update your prior, you would prefer to have a list of the previous (as many as possible) top mathematicians.
But to learn that a particular outcome is the 1% is surprising. Even if you should encounter 1% events periodically, the 99% is the way to bet.
@Matt M
The difference is, in your scenario, we know for a fact that a flood occurs, and so it is only the statistic that is questionable.
Whereas in the mathematician scenario, we don’t really have any more reason to believe the study showing “top mathematicians are 99% men” or the subjective evaluation “x, a female, is the top mathematician”, but we should consider that they are both evidence, however sparse, against the other.
For a while, one of the world’s best chess players was a woman. The criteria for math aren’t quite as tidy, but I don’t think mathematicians would have a hard time recognizing a woman equivalent of Gauss or Von Neumann.
Randy M: And that skepticism harms the person you are skeptical of!
DavidFriedman: That’s not obvious to me – Georg Cantor killed himself because the mathematics community was dismissive of his findings.
Hmmm? Cantor died of a heart attack at age 72, according to wikipedia at least. Where did this story of him killing himself come from?
Protagoras: Oops, you’re right. Don’t know why I thought Cantor killed himself! Apologies, DavidFriedman.
Still, he was hospitalized for depression in 1884 and switched from math to philosophy and literature for a long time due to intense criticism of his work.
DavidFriedman: A better response to your argument (though not a perfect one):
Gauss and Euler lived in time periods where women had almost no freedom, even rich women.
In fact, during Von Neumann’s time, the world did produce Emmy Noether. She had an extremely difficult time getting universities to accept her, despite the support of David Hilbert. Noether’s Theorem is one of the most profound bits of physics I have learned, and something I still wrestle with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem).
No it doesn’t.
Maybe it’s just my bias against the more pure forms of mathematics, but as successful as he was Cantor doesn’t strike me as nearly as important and influential as Gauss and Euler.
@quanta413
Cantor doesn’t strike me as nearly as important and influential as Gauss and Euler.
Good Lord, you have high standards. That said, Cantor’s work is absolutely fundamental in the modern understanding of the infinite, and has unexpected applications in just about every area of math.
@littskad
Sure, Cantor’s work is important to mathematical foundations. But it’s not that my standards are high. It’s that Gauss and Euler are really high standards. I wish I’d die 1/100 as successful in my field as Cantor. I figure that’s about 1/10000 as important as Gauss or Euler. (Numbers just illustration of rough idea, not meant to be taken seriously.)
Unless I’m missing something, Cantor’s range was much smaller than Gauss or Euler’s. It’s mostly foundational math with not 0 but not that much application outside of its range (well… compared to Gauss or Euler). In the sense that you’ll not use it much if you’re not in those fields, not in the sense it doesn’t lay logical foundations. Gauss and Euler both made major contributions to multiple branches of mathematics and physics. It’s hard not to use their work if you do any physical science or engineering. Or large chunks of math.
But like I said, maybe my bias. I think set theory is interesting and logically important, but I don’t rate it as highly as graph theory, differential geometry, physics, individually much less all combined.
To be fair to Cantor, Euler and Gauss did live earlier. That has significant advantages in these sorts of comparisons.
Not if I have no reason to believe that the people who evaluated her work were biased against men.
Also keeping them out of jail and homeless shelters.
“High variability” in and of itself is not typically considered a desirable trait, at the individual level at least.
A female professor does not care about this. She cares about whether she can get tenure, not the fact that some other woman somewhere is less likely to be homeless.
A women’s group that cares about high-achieving women will not be mollified by your statement.
Well if high-achieving women were the only demographic that mattered, your concerns might be relevant.
You seem to be focusing entirely on one aspect of this question, which is how this might harm high-achieving women, while completely ignoring how it might
1. Benefit low-achieving women
or
2. Harm or benefit men
Those things also seem relevant when asking the question “Should we ban discussion of this topic” do they not?
When determining whether to ban discussion on something, a whole host of factors are important (including whether we want to start a precedent for banning discussions).
All I’m saying is that essay harms someone, and it is unsurprising when groups or individuals concerned about that harm say so.
“It’s understandable that women’s groups suppress the paper because it’s in their interest to do so”, that’s a pretty low standard. Yes, it’s understandable, but the important question is whether it’s good, legitimate, or not morally repugnant. (A much more salient reason than yours that it’s in women’s groups’ interest to suppress such research if their goal is to increase women’s representation is that if people believe, rightly or wrongly, that the cause of women’s low representation in STEM is discrimination, then they are inclined to engage in affirmative action to increase women’s representation.)
This appears to be a re-invention of stereotype threat. Which has not been very robust to replication.
See my reply to fortaleza84
cmdrkeen:
In living memory, we had a whole social order that said that women were unsuited for science and professional work, that they were mostly unsuited to becoming doctors or engineers or lawyers. My mother in law has harrowing stories of how she was treated as a PhD student in psychology, and she’s not remotely alone. There were authority figures arguing that most women shouldn’t and couldn’t go into these fields. Many colleges wouldn’t even allow women into those departments.
And yet, somehow, we’ve seen women reach parity or better across most fields, including medicine and law and accounting and biology and psychology. That’s happened over the last 50 years or so.
If the massive social pressure and social messaging against women being successful in those fields didn’t keep them out (despite plenty of active harassment and opposition), why is it plausible that a fairly obscure mathematical paper would manage the trick?
I think this is the best response my post has received so far. Your argument is that women shouldn’t care about the influence of these essays. What about if the dean of the school makes this argument? What about the fact that battling arguments of this kind is part of why women have managed to get into fields previously denied them?
His argument isn’t that women shouldn’t care about these things, its that they have demonstrated that they don’t.
At the risk of defending someone that I think might well be a troll, I think this analysis is missing something.
While it’s true that particularly ambitious women have been “fighting the power” and succeeding in male dominated occupations for many decades, this doesn’t necessarily mean everything is fine.
Perhaps there are women out there who excel in math, but are also not incredibly ambitious. Or perhaps they are very conscientious or shy or what have you. In a world with perfect gender neutrality, they’d enter math and be, well, not the greatest mathematician in the world, but pretty darn good. But because they don’t want to rock the boat, they go become a good biologist instead. Presumably, this is a sub optimal outcome that we’d like to avoid.
Part of what’s missing from the “obviously it’s sexism” argument is an explanation for why math/physics/engineering, of all places, are where anti-female discrimination has held out. The men who go into those fields aren’t exactly the alpha jocks you’d expect to be hardcore masculine stereotypers. Furthermore, math and physics at least do almost all of their practice in academia, which is dominated by social progressives.
Absent that, some sort of difference in average / peak skill and interests seems to be a more plausible explanation. Basically, discrimination has gone down more or less equally across society, but women only pushed into the fields where they have the most skill and interests.
I don’t think his argument was that particularly ambitious women were making it happen, the point made was that women had matched or exceeded men in some of these fields, and it isn’t simply women on the fringe of ambition making it.
How do we know that?
My point isn’t so much that women shouldn’t care, it’s that I don’t think there’s any reason to think that allowing this kind of article to be published is going to discourage any substantial number of women from pursuing STEM careers.
We have this worked example, where there were massive social messages from high-status people saying women shouldn’t (for example) go into medicine and law. Despite that, women reached parity in both fields a couple decades ago. That seems like pretty strong evidence that women can and will, in fact, ignore such social messaging when there aren’t actually rules keeping them out of those fields.
In fact, right now, the high-status people are all telling women and girls that they can be whatever they want to be, that all fields are and should be open to them. It’s *really* hard to imagine how allowing people to discuss mathematical hypotheses about the cause of the male/female imbalance in STEM fields would have a lot of impact on womens’ choices of field.
And the other side of that is that we’re talking about suppressing research papers. Having the suppression of scientific research be a normal operation we do to accomplish social goals seems like a terrible idea, to me.
A lot of useful information that comes out of science is very uncomfortable. Lots of people would be happy to suppress the most discomfort-indusing information. But then we end up blind, as a civilization.
Arguments that fewer women than men are good at X weren’t the big obstacle for women. False factual claims such as “no woman is good at X” were, as well as attitudes that were not justified by the (possibly true) factual claims (e.g. factual claim=”fewer women than men are good at X”, attitude=”no woman should be admitted”).
Women didn’t succeed by suppressing true or plausible factual claims, or arguing that true claims were false, or arguing that plausible claims were false without evidence. They succeeded by arguing that false claims were, in fact, false, and by battling attitudes not justified by facts.
If stereotype threat is true (evidence is apparently sketchy), aren’t women’s groups also at fault for priming women to believe that they will be under constant threat of discrimination, and that any career setback is likely due to rampant structural sexism?
See my reply to fortaleza84. I don’t care about priming.
Yes you do, it’s what your whole original post is about. Call it something different if you want, but your response to Fortaleza was not responsive to them, and certainly isn’t to my post.
My argument applies equally to medium long term planning as it does to short term priming, and that’s the only difference you offer between “priming” and “the suspiciously priming like thing you are worried about”
I am arguing that the impact of perception matters in two ways:
1) Others’ perception of you
2) Your own self-perception, which I believe impacts ambition and the decision to invest in yourself
Neither of those has much to do with performance on standardized tests when someone does or does not briefly remind you of your race/gender.
That’s how priming is studied but it’s not the only way priming and stereotype threat would work in the wild, if they are real effects.
It’s obviously also not what I was talking about, my objection would certainly cover the “impact of perception” in both the ways, particularly 2, you note.
That’s about as charitable as I can be, either engage with arguments or don’t, but don’t play silly semantic games to avoid the question.
Apologies, most people use the word priming to refer to something “measured” as a short term effect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology), where all the entries I bothered to read are short term.
Let’s go back to the definition you used. Yep, if you are constantly concerned that you are under threat of discrimination, this is likely really distracting, and many feminists believe that treating women as victims is counterproductive.
In fact, the popular “Lean In” movement focuses on ambition rather than victimhood. “Circles are a place where women can be unapologetically ambitious.” (https://leanin.org/circles).
Thank you. I’d also suggest the Wikipedia page on “stereotype threat”. I think that tracks pretty closely with your 2).
Note that yes, a lot of the studies (which are by necessity short term) involve some sort of stereotype intervention followed immediately by a test, however the actual effects are hypothesized to be more long term (no one really worries about the sort of artificial scenario of priming tests, the whole point is that the tests are intended to extrapolate to real world stereotype effects, which would by necessity be more medium to long term).
Much of the weakness in evidence, as I understand it, is in demonstrating a link between short term priming and long term perception/stereotype effects.
That is, the evidence for short term priming is stronger than the evidence for longer term effects due to “perception” changes caused by exposure to derogatory information such as a study showing lower peak female skill.
It would be nice if we could collectively forget we ever considered women to be less likely to achieve greatness in mathematics and let everyone thrive according to their abilities unburdened with any preconceptions.
Unfortunately, the world we inherit has women statistically underperforming men, and why this is so is a great question of our age of enormous political significance. We cannot afford to hamper the pursuit of truth with regards to this question, as it won’t stay unanswered, and a false answer can and will cause societal damage.
By some metrics…
There are also quite a few metrics where men underperform compared to women.
Yes, but we don’t wonder much about those.
It wouldn’t be nice if what we were forgetting was true, since the false belief would lead to the conclusion that women were being discriminated against in mathematics and policies to eliminate that nonexistent discrimination.
DavidFriedman: Whenever I hear this argument, it feels a lot like God of the Gaps.
Sure, science has now disproven 99 crucial parts of the biblical story, counter to practically everyone’s firmly held beliefs, but the 100th? Haha, where’s your science for that one?? Therefore, God did it, and we should sit on our hands and bask in the warm feeling that everything is the way it should be.
Sure, women overcame a widespread belief in biological inequality and achieved parity in 99 fields, but the 100th? Haha, where’s parity for that one?? Therefore, there’s an innate, insurmountable biological difference, and we should sit on our hands and bask in the warm feeling that everything is the way it should be.
I know exactly what you’re talking about, all of the people disagreeing with me (always on the retreat in the face of surmounting evidence) also worship and sacrifice to the Gaps.
This is a straw man (or at least a weak man). More often, the arguments I see are more like “disproportionate participation alone is insufficient to demonstrate discrimination. Parity, near-parity, or even super-parity in similar fields in fact suggests that discrimination is unlikely to be the primary cause of the apparent disparity. Therefore, the causal factor is more likely some combination of differing interests and skill levels, which may have an innate genetic component”
Especially if the more-than-parity in the other direction, the preponderance of women, can be predicted – as Scott observed:
That article is a must read:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
The reason the “god of the gaps” fallacy is a fallacy is because it presumes “god did it” as the default explanation for anything we don’t know, despite the lack of evidence for a god.
So your attempt at creating a parallel between it and Friedman’s point just fails completely, because he’s not presuming that there’s an innate, insurmountable biological difference despite the lack of evidence for a difference. Neither is he calling for everyone to sit on their hands and bask in the warm feeling that everything is the way it should be.
Ironically, the “god of the gaps” fallacy has a tight parallel to the very common argument that any gender disparities must be evidence of discrimination or systemic bigotry. Much like how “god of the gaps” presumes without evidence that some god exists who does things that we can’t explain, that latter argument presumes without evidence that, without bigotry, the genders would be identical in some given measure. In fact, this isn’t just evidence-less faith, it’s faith that specifically denies the current best scientific evidence.
You have perhaps seen this chart?
This does not show a single exception or even a very few exceptions.
The fact that removal of formal discrimination resulted in women’s participation in certain professions going to gender parity (or even domination by women, as with veterinarians) while other professions changed little if at all is evidence that there is some relevant difference between those professions with respect to women; that is not a “god of the gaps”.
Exactly my point, although I spoke too obliquely to steer away from culture warring in open.
The (now approximately 40 year old) scientific understanding of the biological differences in professional outcomes in STEM fields is that the difference exists mainly at the interest level, rather than the ability level. The “achievement gap” you mention can thus be a reflection of fewer women entering the field, but the way you’ve worded it makes it sound like there are equal numbers of men and women in the field and the men are producing higher quality work than the women, a claim which lacks support.
The other half of perception-being-Bayesian is that people’s priors get revised upon contact with new evidence. Whatever latent ‘skepticism’ exists of a woman’s math ability should last up until the moment her aptitude is demonstrated. I would also caution against conflating skepticism with the less interesting but more plausible feeling of never having met/worked with a female math PhD before.
“Interest” does not exist in a vacuum, though. Consider representation on the screen. Do we claim that fewer Asians have an interest in acting? Perhaps individuals have been less interested, because their prospects were not good. There are many testimonials that they never imagined that such-and-such career could be a possibility for people who look like them, until they saw someone else do it.
I don’t have the link now, but there was a study showing that young girls’ interest in STEM fields were most influenced by whether or not there was a woman STEM role model in their lives. Increased representation increases interest.
(note that this is different from a claim of discrimination, which would be the bailey)
Interest doesn’t exist in a vaccuum, but I am somewhat skeptical of Hollywood representations being a major driver of differences in interests. It seems plausible to me that women might have an inherent tendency toward being more interested in people jobs than abstract-thing jobs, but that absolutely could be an artifact of our society that won’t apply always and everywhere.
I didn’t mean “we need more depictions of women scientists.” Minority actors were inspired to become actors by seeing other minority actors. Similarly, girls are more likely to become interested in STEM if an adult in their social circle (a parent, relative, family friend, etc.) is also in STEM. Although seeing lots of awesome lady scientists in the news would be cool, too. The change of narrative about Hedy Lamarr has been good.
No, but people who are high in trait conscientiousness and low in trait openness would be dissuaded from pursuing a career in acting, especially in Hollywood. My understating is that this is generally the case for Asians.
I would put a big chunk of it down to acting being in almost every way a staggeringly terrible career choice, and Asian cultures generally having stronger antibodies against same.
No, because the advice for a lot of Asian-American actors is that you have to go to Asia to have a career. There are plenty of dreaming hopefuls overseas, when they’re the majority demographic. It’s not an Asian cultural thing.
@cmndrkeen:
The air around me didn’t. I took more care the next days to refresh the air in my room, but the air didn’t feel any different.
That could easily prevented without silencing science: make people who evaluate candidates not know that it’s a man or a woman, see only the initials (that could also prevent race/ethnicity discrimination).
Essays that pose those sorts of explanations may harm the perception of women. But then so do essays that call to ban those essays. If I read essays about how we can’t publish research about sex differences because it might hurt women’s feelings, it changes my perception of them:
1. sex-differences research must be fairly rigorous, because otherwise the objections would be against the research methods themselves
2. if authorities in academia are willing to suppress research to help out women, then it is possible they are tipping the scales toward women during the hiring process, and perhaps some women don’t deserve their awards/tenures
So even if you are right that this sex-differences research is a harm to women, there’s no way to fix it. Suppressing the research is also a harm to women and a much greater one, since it implies that academia is willing to suspend their integrity to support women.
I’m not sure what you think happens if you don’t publish the essay. If this sort of thing is a problem (others give good reasons to be doubtful) then surely we can only get round it by making sure people don’t know there’s a gender discrepancy in the first place, or by convincing them it’s there for reasons that no longer apply.
If people think there’s a discrepancy due to discrimination, that’s surely more off-putting: people can know how good they are at maths compared to their peers, so can overrule the prior of ‘how likely am I as a woman to be good’ with more accurate data. Whereas they can’t do this for discrimination.
It’s possible it would have that effect in terms of how others see them, but I suspect only on the margins especially if the field is male-dominated (which would fit with a ‘women tend to be less good, so fewer of them get in’ model).
A belief that one sex is worse at something on average is only going to be an issue if people hold it but society also forces jobs in that area to go to both sexes equally. In that case the corrolary is that sex is a good guide to competence in that field.
But the better solution is probably not to force job distributions (even if you’re sure ability is equal, as a difference in interest or in another ability could mean that in one sex all the best maths people do maths whereas in the other they choose to do other things).
Hello, I’m new to this site but I’ve found it very thought-provoking and it occurred to me that it might be a good place to ask a question that’s been bugging me:
Is there a cogent counter-argument to making pharmaceutical sales illegal?
One opposing narrative that I’ve found is roughly the “reduced sales would reduce R&D which would reduce innovation” but I don’t find that very convincing since I am taking no stance on price, just a stance against misaligned incentives. There’s also a study that suggests drug spending is not correlated to innovation but it seems to make some mistakes in terms of conflating countries’ HQ domiciles with their end markets / centers of R&D (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/).
I found one older post related to this topic but it didn’t seem to focus on the question of whether it should legal or not… https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/17/pharma-virumque/ – maybe I missed the point.
Does “criminal gangs are worse than drug companies” count as a cogent argument? If not, how about “many fewer people die if the drugs they’re taking are what they’re supposed to be?”
Like yeah, there are problems with drug companies and misaligned incentives. But if you make something illegal, not only are the people who do it criminals by definition, but it gets wrapped up with a bunch of other criminal activity.
There’s a reason that the movement to decriminalize all drugs has traction. i don’t know how you end up swinging so far the opposite way.
I’m very sorry for the confusion – I meant sales representatives!
Have you misstated your question, or are you proposing making it illegal to sell medicine? The argument against such a ban would be that medicine helps sick people and capitalism is a generally effective system for ensuring they can get it.
As per above – I’m very sorry for the confusion – I meant sales representatives!
Do you mean sales as in ‘marketing, advertising and other sales associated costs’? I’m assuming you don’t mean making selling pharmaceuticals illegal as that is probably a bit ridiculous.
If you mean advertising well then that is an interesting question. It would be interesting to compare countries which allow direct to consumer advertising of prescription requiring products (pretty much only the US I think) to those that don’t. You would however have to untangle the effects of that from the various subsidy schemes which would differ place to place. Advertising to doctors is obviously another point you’d have to look at – i’m unsure of the relative spend compared to consumer advertising.
As per above, I meant to ask specifically about sales representatives… Advertising strikes me as more benign (more regulated).
The study I linked to attempts to untangle some of those effects you mentioned.
Without taking a position, some potential answers come to mind:
(1) Prescribers are busy, and on net direct to prescriber sales and marketing might make them more informed.
(2) More patients will receive treatment. Obviously this is not without downside but plausibly at least is net-good. And to the extent that patients are over-treated, likely only a bare minority of the effect is due to advertising / sales activity.
(3) Many sales calls are about informing prescribers of patient assistance programs, compliance statistics, etc. E.g. “encourage your patients to register with our patient assistance team. It will save them 75% off the cost of their medicine and improve adherence by 50%.” Again these things are at least plausibly net positive.
(4) Philosophically, should we outlaw otherwise-legal activities because [the authorities] determine them to be utility negative on net? Should it be illegal to advertise fatty foods? Illegal to cut down a tree in your yard if the majority of your neighbors object?
There are of course reasonable arguments that pharma sales and marketing should be severely restricted or prohibited, but I think it’s far from a slam dunk (both on philosophical and empirical grounds).
Those are interesting points – thank you for the feedback.
Let’s suppose you put parachutes on 100 young dudes and made them static-line jump under ideal conditions with zero training. How many would end up fine/hurt/dead? Anyone know?
Probably quite a few would end up hurt or dead, depending on parachute design. Modern skydiving parachutes are actual wings, and have to be flown to a landing in a downwind/base/final setup just like a light aircraft. This includes facing into the wind on final approach.
I once accidentally turned the wrong direction off of my base leg to downwind (even I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking). That was very memorable. The ground starts going by really fast, and after doing so I realized that my landing was going to end up being on the paved ramp, rather than the grass field I was aiming for. I fully expected to break one or both of my legs doing a PLF, but managed to only scrape up my hands getting dragged across the pavement, and got banged up and was sore for a couple of days. That was after knowing how to at least do a parachute landing fall, and realizing that I made a mistake in time to minimize the consequences.
You say that modern skydiving parachutes are “actual wings, and have to be flown”. Do they really not make simpler parachutes that don’t particularly need to be flown? If such exist, I’d think we could give them to our rookie jumpers given the scenario’s call for “ideal conditions” outside of their lack of experience.
According to this Norwegian study, at least 20 injuries, probably more and probably heavily weighted towards the ‘splat’ kind of injury.
EDIT: I’m apparently blind; that’s the rate per thousand jumps.
That study also indicates that the “splat” kind of injuries are rare, not weighted towards. (Assuming by “splat” kinds of injuries, you mean a malfunction resulting in a nonfunctional chute, rather than screwing up the landing.)
In civilian skydiving, most deaths occur under a perfectly good parachute. Malfunctions are very rare, and having both your main and reserve malfunction are even rarer. The kinds of people who skydive are thrill-seeking, and a great part of the fun is flying the parachute after it’s open; however, if they misjudge the distance to the ground while flying it, they will either make a low turn or accidentally catch the ground while close to it, and impact the ground or another obstacle with high vertical or horizontal speed.
If you’re just freefalling to 2500′, then quietly flying your parachute to landing, skydiving probably isn’t much more dangerous than riding a motorcycle–I had an instructor claim it was safer (“Your jump is safer than the drive here”), but don’t recall the statistics offhand to be sure that’s true.
Yeah – since the specification is zero training, and those figures are for at least somewhat-trained paratroopers, I was thinking they’d be pretty optimistic. Haven’t thought about it enough to make a useful estimate, though.
Paratrooper chutes don’t require the same degree of skill to fly though, right? They typically use plain round or squared round designs rather than the wing-like skydiving chutes.
Correct, although there are still techniques for making a safe landing and dealing with malfunctions. (I may have read both the military static line and free-fall parachute manuals.)
How much less likely are injuries if you’re not fully rigged up with a week’s worth of fighting gear? I thought part of the issue with paratrooper injuries was that the amount of extra weight taxes the load limits of the chutes (and the average ankle).
My best guess is, assuming benign conditions, an unweighted static line jump with an untrained individual (who is at least smart enough not to screw with things too much) would, at worst, result in a twisted ankle or knee from a bad landing – it would definitely not be fatal unless the chute failed, which is pretty rare in static line jumps right? I mean, unless the person was deathly afraid of heights and died of heart failure.
How “ideal” is ideal? If they’re not carrying anything, using a basically idiot-proof/minimally maneuverable parachute like the T-10, in daylight with zero wind onto an endless expanse of powdery snow, I think the number of injuries is around zero.
The number one cause of static line parachute injuries is hitting the ground the wrong way under a good chute, and the number one thing taught in static line training is how to hit the ground properly. If the drop zone is anything short of absolutely ideal — i.e. the ground is basically pretty hard — I would expect about 50% of the jumpers to get “hurt” (sprains to ankles and knees) with about 10% of them breaking bones (same). If they’re wearing helmets there won’t be any fatalities. If they try to maneuver (or have to because they start drifting into the trees around the drop zone), more will get hurt the way CatCube talks about, trying to turn too close to the ground.
Daylight, no wind, dropped from 5000 feet onto a grassy field.
If you have them chant “keep your legs and ankles together before you hit the ground” a few times I doubt more than 10% would get hurt.
Current T-11 has a desired rate of fall of 5.8 m/s. This is about the same as falling 1.7m, or about 5 feet. If you can jump down that far, you’ll probably be ok.
This assumes the jumpmaster makes sure everyone is fastened into their harness correctly.
Depends a bit on how you define ‘zero’, but your description sounds a lot like my first jump in the army and none of us died. Few bruises and sprains.
Of course, we had general army training from obstacle courses and stuff which meant we knew how to fall. Also a brief blackboard introduction on what to do.
Have there been any verifiable instances where someone broke another person’s neck using the “sleeper hold plus forced neck jerk” move that is common in action movies?
Well, a 2010 study found 26 cases where a patient died due to the “cracking the neck” part of a chiropractic manipulation, mostly due to tearing of an artery leading to a stroke. So it certainly seems plausible that someone doing the same thing but much harder could cause incapacitation, though not necessarily a literally broken neck.
It would be nice if I could read that, but it’s paywalled.
I don’t have much info on that portion, but having done research on the sleeper hold (AKA rear naked choke hold) for a scene I wrote, I can tell you that while you really can knock someone unconscious after about 3-10 seconds of shutting off blood flow, you then either kill them by holding it way too long, or else they wake back up 3-20 seconds later, somewhat more upset at you.
So all those movie scenes of knocking someone out, laying them down and just walking away to infiltrate some place are unrealistic. You’d need to have something to really quickly restrain and gag them before they woke back up if you wanted the same actual effect.
Holywood has failed me. Watching the hero or villain trying to gag and ziptie someone in less than five seconds sounds hilarious.
1) How long do you have to hold to kill them by stroke or cardiac arrest?
2) Given the importance of grappling in historical armed martial arts, it’s noteworthy that the gorget (neck armor) goes back to the earliest-known solid plate armor, the Dendra panoply.
I’m pretty sure that styles of grappling in which people are wearing armour are less about choking the other guy, or even joint locks. They’re more about pinning the other guy so you can stab him in the eye or something like that.
That’s certainly a common goal, and it’s behind a lot of Western wrestling (you can see recognizable wrestling moves in 15th-century longsword fencing manuals). But joint locks still work, and there’s some stuff you can only do in armor: the style of jujitsu I study has some throws that historically involved grabbing an opponent by the helmet straps, and some breaks that benefit from rigid torso armor. There’s even one that historically involved trapping the opponent’s arm between the dome and the crest of your helmet: unarmored, you use the back of your neck (which works okay, IME) or your forehead (which doesn’t, again IME).
Choking, maybe not.
At least a few minutes if it’s a perfect choke, which it rarely is (it’s a tricky hold, and even advanced students sometimes have trouble with it). Things get a bit dicier if they’re older or have circulatory problems, though. Conventional wisdom in my corner of martial arts is to never choke anyone over fifty all the way out unless you’re willing to risk killing them. Or, if you’re over fifty, to tap out before you fall unconscious.
That’s probably erring on the side of safety, though.
Google suggests that after about 6 minutes without oxygen, brain damage begins. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone’s going to hold a choke that long, even if they do want to inflict harm.
One thing that’s always puzzled me is the reaction when an MMA fighter gets choked out. It’s way less bad for you than getting knocked out.
I don’t know if there are any cases of a neck crank or similar breaking a neck, but it can jack your neck up – anything from “off the mats for the next few days” to “lasting damage.” If it is possible to break a neck, it can’t be easy, because if it was easy then white belts going too hard on finishing a choke would have a death toll.
The Canadian province of Alberta has often been called the “Texas of Canada”.
There’s a number of similarities including –
Significant agriculture presence esp. cattle ranches
Center of petroleum industry
Generally higher than average economy
Conservative leaning politics and culture
Openness in both locations and people
Minor separatist movements
That said, the title of the Texas of ___ exists for many places.
For example Bavaria is sometimes described as the Texas of Germany due to its conservationism, strong economy and minor separatist streak.
What are other regions or even subcultures than can be described as “Texas’s” and why?
Georgetown in Austin, TX has a decent claim to the Texas of Texas of Texas of Texas. If you found a good enclave within Georgetown you could toss another of Texas in there.
Texas enough for you?
Isn’t Austin a bit too blue-state to be the Texas of Texas?
Georgetown isn’t Austin. It’s a different county even.
EDIT: I see that Thegnskald said it was, I should have replied directly to his thread.
That isn’t how Texans think about cities. “Dallas” is larger than Connecticut, and encompasses many cities and counties, not just those labeled “Dallas” (much to the consernation of the politicians of some of those cities, who want it to be called an increasingly convoluted acronym composed of the first letters of the largest cities in the conglomerate).
I understand what you’re saying, and in one context you’re absolutely correct – Georgetown is part of the Austin Metro Area, no question. But when it comes to “Isn’t Austin a bit too blue-state to be the Texas of Texas?” then for those purposes Georgetown is very much not Austin. I lived in Georgetown until my recent divorce and currently live in Austin (so no one can argue with me, muahahahaahaha).
Incurian –
So Georgetown is “part” of Austin, but is contrarian to Austin’s views, and only sort of considers itself part of it?
It’s the same question as whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, it depends on the context. If I’m trying to quickly explain where, geographically, I used to live to someone not familiar with the area, I’d probably just say “Austin,” knowing that in fact it’s a different city, county, population density, and political persuasion. If there were a need to explain where I lived in more detail than just fat fingering it on a map, I wouldn’t say Georgetown is or is in Austin.
I define Texas to be more about a certain contrariness, than to be about a specific direction of political alignment.
Not sure if that works by itself. Noone is calling Quebec Texas despite it being more contrarian than Alberta in a number of ways.
That is because Quebec is clearly the California of Canada.
ETA: And no, Austin isn’t the California of Texas. Californian contrariness is more like an extreme version of the dominant ideology; Texas contrariness is more like an extreme version of the opposition ideology. This doesn’t quite capture the connotations involved, but close enough.
As someone who grew up in rural Texas (just outside Austin, in fact), I see Texas contrariness as a belief that you’re doing fine, combined with a feeling of not needing to prove it. It’s like that one-ton bull in your herd. Yes, it knows you want it to go to the next pasture. That’s why it walks in that direction – at its own pace. You’re invited to try to make it walk faster and see what happens.
And then there’s this.
ETA: and this.
Vancouver is clearly the LA of Canada, so BC, not Quebeck, must be the California of Canada.
Right, BC is totally the California of Canada. Quebec would be like the Rhode Island of Canada or something, I don’t know.
Quebec is different from the rest of Canada because of linguistic differences, religious differences (which matter less now than they once did), and a history as a conquered people. I don’t think there’s a close fit to that in the US, but Utah sort of fits in the religious dimension and the history of antagonism between Mormons and gentiles.
“linguistic differences, religious differences … and a history as a conquered people” Sounds like Puerto Rico is the Quebec of the US.
David Speyer:
Except that Quebec is the first province of Canada, and originated a large part of Canadian culture including the word “Canada” itself. While Puerto Rico is very much peripheral to the US.
There’s never any way to make these “X is the Y of Z” stand to scrutiny.
Austin is the Canada of Texas, clearly.
Now everyone is offended.
I’ve not heard anybody call it this, but Scotland has a reasonable claim to be the Texas of Britain.
It’s got the cows, petrol, good economy, empty space and separatist movement. The big difference is it’s less conservative, not more.
Scotland and Québec make decent parallels:
Historical grievances about being under the thumb of the English
Separatist movements
Nationalistic to a degree that would be politically incorrect elsewhere in the country
Cows
Energy resources
Actually, Canadians (other than Quebecers) are very nationalistic, even though they pretend not to be. Canadians will tell people (including foreigners) that their country is the greatest country in the world, which is not something you’ll ever hear a Quebecer say.
Argentina has long struck me as the Texas of South America, for obvious reasons.
Can Texas be called the _____(insert other region/country/etc) of the US? I mean, it’s a lot more recent of an invention than most of those other places.
I’ve heard Texas called the America of America, on the grounds that within the United States, Texas fills the cultural role that the United States does for the rest of the (free) world. Large, very distinct, proud, arrogant, filled with gun-toting cowboys, etc.
Texas is the Yorkshire of America, I think.
Modesto is the Texas of California.
Why?
“Cowboy actor” Louis Burton Lindley Jr., better known by his stage name Slim Pickens was born there.
I rest my case.
Western Australia could be considered Australia’s Texas for several reasons, but falls short in others.
Similarities:
Biggest state by far
Has tried to secede at least once
Massive Mining and Resources Industry, including huge offshore oil and gas deposits
Complains that the rest of the country doesn’t appreciate it’s contribution to the economy (is this true for Texas as well? I’ve heard mixed reports.)
Very isolated from centres of national governance
Dissimilarities:
Not a particularly distinctive accent, although there are many local quirks of speech and ways of saying things that are different from the rest of the country.
Nowhere near as culturally different from the rest of the country as TX is from USA.
The expression I hear more often is “Venice of …”. Basically, every city with canals gets called Venice. St. Petersburgh, for example, is sometimes called the Venice of the North, even though they are not similar at all.
My guess is that “Texas of” is going to be as accurate.
I’ve heard Ukraine described as the Texas of Russia (as in this Life magazine piece). Their separatist movement was more successful, though I guess the final outcome remains to be seen.
I’m not proud of this but I haven’t been able to get through any of the adversarial collab posts. I can read any walls of text Scott throws at me, but it seems I’m unable to extend this to his guest bloggers.
Same. I was able to get through the opening parts, then said to myself “eh I’ll finish it later”, and had to force myself to read through the rest, despite the topics being ones I’d usually find interesting. Having such long essays posted so close together was probably what did it. But since the goal is for the readers to vote on the best essay it makes sense for them to be posted in rapid succession, since if they were spread out more it would be hard to remember the first essay by the time one got to the last, and it doesn’t seem fair to choose a favorite without reading every entry to the end, or ask the authors to significantly cut down their writing.
In my opinion Scott is almost uniquely good at producing enjoyable and readable walls of text.
Perhaps in the future, he should simply post any guest contributions as if they were his own work, and only clarify a few days later, after everyone has already read it 🙂
That sounds like a fun experiment if nothing else.
Plot twist: all of the collabs were ghost-written by Scott, as a fun experiment.
Same here. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one.
Me, too.
I think that it should have been spaced out over time. Reading four long essays at the same time is a large ask.
It was a lot to read, but I read them all. I would put those four essays on a par with Scott’s best. They all had fascinating information. Please read them all if you can make time.
I plan to vote for the the Islam one, because it actually had enough information to make a reasoned judgment about the issue. (The six countries were so varied that it indicated that simply having a Muslim majority was not restrictive enough to determine the type of government. Therefore, it seemed reasonable to me that an Islam majority would not preclude having a liberal democracy. This isn’t a slam dunk, but I thought it made a good case for this).
Even though the Islam one was the best, the other three were all good, and I can imagine voting for any of them if their competition wasn’t so good.
Now I better vote, because I don’t know the deadline.
If you haven’t yet, consider trying the podcast; they’re all available, around an hour each I think. (Don’t know where Mr. Jeremiah got the time.) It isn’t the highest production value podcast of all time, but for me at least it solves the wall of text problem.
I’ve read them and found them very good. They all did seem to err on the side of completeness/exhaustive/precise/etc. This made them very airtight, but somewhat long winded in spots; especially since most readers of this blog have some basic familiarity with the topics. Not sure what the right balance is, since people so often willfully misread controversial topics like these, but saying things like “most, not all” when “most” will do does reduce readability.
I have to say, I was definitely surprised in a good way about the quality of the ACC entries. I ended up voting for the vaccine one because I thought it was the best structured, but I could see any of them winning. Bravo to all involved.
I read only 3 of the 4 entries, I voted anyway. I think this is justified: one of the entry was totally uninteresting for me, and I think the entry level of interest can be a factor for judgment.
I’m sympathetic to this (I was only interested enough in 2 of the topics to even consider reading them — I haven’t read any yet) but it creates a perverse incentive for future collaborators to choose topics that are sensational/very much in the public eye, rather than topics that might be even more important but less a matter of public controversy.
Yeah. I voted for the educating smart children one, which is probably the least hot/inflammatory.
I am choosing not to vote for two equally important reasons:
* The voting method appears to be first-past-the-post, rather than approval or RCV. I predict the “winner” will not have a majority.
* I didn’t have enough time to read all the entries.
What happens if I record another response on the ACC poll? Is it possible to spam the poll? (Because I would obviously rather this weren’t possible.)
That’s what I wondered as soon as I saw that option. Do you want a Chicago stuffed-crust ballot box?
Alternate names for this blog, as determined by a bunch of distracted people amagramming scrabble tiles:
(these are rearrangements of SLATESTARCODEXN/SCOTTSALEXANDER)
Full anagrams (plus a teaser for the resulting blog, where applicable):
Colder Assent Tax
Lost Sand Excreta – oddly poetic
Colander Sex Stat – no kinkshaming, please
Real Sextant Docs – Renaissance Era Astronomy: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Clan Stars Dot EXE – Plausible scifi title
A Narco Settled Rx – A druggie talks about drugs. Could be a tag on the blog as is.
Dr Oxen Cattle Ass – Ungulates: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Partial anagrams/good words:
closeted
adolescent
desolate
atlases – no shrugging, at least.
coldness
exactness – pretty on brand, and doesn’t use too many vowels
contextless – not a word in some spell checks, nonetheless excellent
anecdotes – if only we could afford “contextless anecdotes”
And our favourite:
Excel at Arson – Go big or
goburn down home. Bonus: the remaining letters are STD. No comment on that.Excel At STD Arson – after we eradicate malaria, let’s burn those other diseases to death!
I thought it meant that right when you set someone’s infected genitals on fire, you jump on the computer and start manipulating spreadsheets.
IIRC, when Scott launched the blog he was undecided between Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. I preferred the latter, FWIW. It managed to include the N, and I think it sounded slightly cooler.
ale detox can rest
no cat-related sex
Hey, I didn’t know Thony Christie was renaming his blog!
I’d read this one for sure!
New top level post to talk about more recent meetups. (Or those of us that didn’t get around to posting in the last OT.)
Vancouver (BC) meetup report:
– We had 9 people show up and 3 more sending regrets
– One of our high-value contributors was a semi-retired prof who had only recently found out about SSC
– A format that worked well for the initial meetup was asking job-interview type questions. “Where do you want to be in 5 years” launched many good conversations.
– For future meetups, we might prefer to focus around a particular article or post. However we don’t want to make it required reading, due to the risk of scaring people away.
– Our stim toys helped come up with alternative names for the blog: I brought Scrabble tiles for SLATESTARCODEXN. See other post.
Northampton (MA) meeting report:
– We had 12 (I think) people.
– I was late-hopefully arlie will fill in more details
– Wide mixture of ages–high school student to fifty-ish.
– Engaging and interesting conversations on a variety of topics.
Food Preparation Question!
Background: I value eating over work. Unless I’m actually at a meeting at the time or on a conference call I can’t hang up on, I will get lunch at 11:30am every day. But I’ve hung up on people and ended meetings a bit early to eat lunch, saying I have an 11:30.
Someone else, however, says I don’t appreciate the culture of residency and she says that during this past weekend, she was unable to make any time to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Since she did this before and I got mad about not prioritizing eating, she says she ordered pizza for everyone at 7pm. I suppose a side-question would be to all doctors, asking if it’s really a problem if a first-year resident makes a bit of time (say 5-10 minutes) to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Question: What are some fairly easy things to prepare that you can eat with your hands that you can grab out of tupperware container in a refrigerator within minutes? Preferably nothing that gets too soggy potentially like a mini sandwich, but I won’t eliminate that possibly entirely (perhaps if you toast it first it’s less soggy?)
Thanks!
Not a doctor, but I would quit any job that didn’t allow me ten minutes to eat food three times a day.
I am a vet, not a physician. I’m in a relatively low-key outpatient general practice. It is common (at least once a week) for me to have a busy enough day that I not only don’t get ten minutes to eat, I don’t remember to drink water or use the bathroom between when I get to work and midafternoon. When I worked daytime emergency, I would bring food for breakfast and if I was lucky, get it eaten by 5 pm. When I was in clinical training, it was routine (more days than not) to be working minimum 14 hour days with no allowed/designated rest breaks, and supervisors would definitely notice and complain if people took rest breaks anyway – so whether or not one took a rest break depended mostly on tolerance for adversarial interactions with supervisors. Anyways I’m not saying your reaction isn’t healthy for yourself, it sounds like a great standard to set. I wonder if there’s any person in the western world who can say, “I am a doctor, and I would have quit a job that didn’t allow me ten minutes to eat food three times a day.” I think on the whole probably not; those who would quit such a job are, de facto, not doctors.
That’s demented. How can a single person be that irreplaceable that you can’t spare a few minutes throughout the day for them to take care of necessary functions? What happens if that person gets hit by a bus on the way to work? Will everything fall apart? That’s actually a failure on the part of the supervisors, if they can’t cope without a particular person for a few minutes.
I’d go so far as to say that the culture is sick if it’s not allowing its personnel ten minutes to eat. I mean, shit, even in the military you take turns so everybody can get food into themselves, so long as you’re not actively engaging the enemy.
It’s also dangerous, since the ability to think and some emotional stability is dependent upon eating (think of the people who do get pissy when they haven’t eaten–I’m one).
And also, based on Thisbe’s comment, there may be many otherwise-capable potential doctors who don’t go into the profession (or who drop out) because they can’t cope with the food/sleep deprivation.
I’d be interested if anybody can defend the status quo on this. It sounds like a bad system, but normally when I think that I’m missing something. What am I missing?
Government restrictions limiting the amount of potential doctors comes to mind. It sounds to me like it’s a situation of there being too few doctors, therefore, hospitals have to get as much labor out of them as humanly possible.
Licensing and other requirements almost certainly are standing in the way of the market clearing itself properly.
ETA: John Schilling’s suggestion of “pointless hazing” also seems plausible to me. The medical field is both respected and insulated enough that the public will “trust” that the people in charge no what they’re doing and of course all of this is highly necessary, despite the fact that it seems virtually impossible to justify as far as I’m concerned.
Perhaps this is too cynical, but it seems like a perfectly natural result of rational self-interest. The higher the barriers to entry, the higher the equilibrium wage. So if the rules setting the barriers to entry are controlled by those who have already gotten through those barriers, it’s in their interest to make the barriers high.
It’s the same logic that makes it in the interest of existing barbers to support absurd licensing requirements–hundreds of hours of classroom study before it’s legal to charge people to cut their hair.
Yeah, pretty much every field that structurally has to deal with sustained high-tempo operations, e.g. the military, knows to organize overlapping shifts so that everybody gets something approximating three quick meals and at least four hours of sleep a day with very few exceptions. So I’m pretty sure this thing where the medical community insists that the newbies work forty hours non-stop for “training”, is really approximately 100% hazing.
Telling your patients to keep bleeding until you’ve finished breakfast, will almost certainly lead to better average long-term outcomes.
That is trivially provable, since doctors are specifically not exempt from the European working time directive, and European medicine and doctor training has noticeably failed to collapse.
Also, why don’t labor laws apply to interns? Are they not considered workers? Can’t interns unionize?
I am pretty sure that any other industry that tried to pull off this shit on their workers would be facing indefinite industrial action and countless lawsuits.
While I can’t say that an internship in Spain is a pleasant thing, I have never heard of it being impossible to eat during work (I am not a doctor, so I may be misinformed). I have heard about the American situation, though.
Interns are (for some purposes) employees. Residents are students.
Thanks for the explanation. I had a vague idea that it was the other way around; this system seems really counter-intuitive.
Using students/interns for structural* work is illegal in Spain, although this gets ignored regularly. The worst offenders seem to be high end restaurants, which treat assistant chefs abominably. They do kind of admit this is hazing, and always say that they went through it, too.
*”Structural work” in Spain is a legal term that refers to work that has to be done in order to keep the company running. It can be a bit murky, so companies frequently abuse this.
Honestly I’m not totally sure I’ve got it right. It’s slightly different here, where it’s illegal to not compensate your employees, but education and training counts as compensation. Interns have at least some labor rights, but it’s very difficult to exercise them, and in any case an employer can claim that what would otherwise be an illegal violation of an employee’s rights is an essential part of the job, and I would expect courts to be deferential to a hospital’s assessment of what is necessary for the hospital to function.
Yeah – I’ve been in the military (although in a non-combat role) and also worked in management consulting, which is often thought of as about as demanding and high-workload and minimal balance of a white collar job as you can get (possibly excepting I-Banking or private equity).
In both cases, not giving you ten minutes to eat would be considered egregiously cruel and completely unacceptable.
In the units I was in (engineers), it was considered a positive obligation to ensure that your subordinates ate. I believe that this is true everywhere in the Army, but don’t know how much that was honored in the breach rather than the observance elsewhere.
However, in my units, if I was regularly denying my personnel food I’d expect to be relieved for cause, and I would relieve subordinates for cause if I found they were doing this. The general expectation is that the company commander and First Sergeant were the last people through the chow line–this is a bit of theater, admittedly, but one time when we discovered that we missed getting a subordinate through before us, we were actually embarrassed by this.
I suspect that for whatever reason “doctor culture” didn’t develop this habit, and anybody now who claims that supervisors should ensure that their people can eat or piss at some point during the day are called whiners.
Right. I was genuinely surprised when I transitioned from military to corporate that “make sure your subordinates are taking care of their basic needs” was not something most supervisors saw as an important part of their job.
Eating last is a great way to make sure your unit is actually getting enough food.
@sfoil
Oh, I understand why the practice evolved. Since the commander and 1SG are responsible for quantities ordered and ensuring portioning (nominally the commander, but a good captain will trust his first shirt on this, and they’re a team), it’s a great way to ensure that there’s an immediate signal to superiors if something has broken down.
However, in the US and at current contractor-operated forward-deployed dining facilities, it’s mostly theatrical because there’s no shortage of food, and if it came up short you could probably get more in short order. But maintaining the cultural requirement is important so that when there is a logistics-constrained environment, you’ve already got the expectation of the senior leaders eating last built-in. (In a battalion-level field kitchen, the battalion commander and sergeant major eat after the last company commander and 1SG)
It’s just weird to me that you have an environment where the workers will be there for days on end, and the supervisors don’t see it as imperative to ensure that they’re properly fed and taken care of. Like @Matt M, it’s weird when you come out of a military background.
I once got in medium-trouble for publicly pointing out that the leadership was violating the “feed your soldiers” norm. My civilian friends couldn’t understand why it bothered me so much that I felt the need to make an issue of it (which I admit was a dumb thing to do, especially the way I did it, but it was frustrating that they didn’t even understand the motivation).
If I were to steelman the “hazing”, I would guess they are trying to make sure the doctors can cope with a disaster scenario where those conditions may arise.
Which, if you are limited to X doctor’s on staff, makes sense. It stops making sense if you cannot even fill out X positions, however, since additional doctors who can’t cope with the disaster would still leave people better off in the disaster.
As John Schilling mentions above, the proper way to prepare/train for such scenarios is to realistically identify that people need to eat and to develop contingency plans that actually solve the problem of “how do you enable people to eat when they’re really busy for long stretches of time”
“Force them to keep working and they can eat whenever the emergency over” is pretty explicitly not a viable long-term plan that can be deployed in an emergency.
But even putting that aside, there’s a difference between “make someone prove they can work a long time in a row in case an emergency requires them to” and “make them do that every day, as a matter of course, for a year”
ETA: The highly acclaimed documentary series on military medicine, M*A*S*H, featured multiple scenes of orderlies and nurses holding sandwiches and sippy cups of juice up to the faces of surgeons who were required to work 10+ hours straight. That’s what planning and preparedness looks like. Not starving them during non-emergency times just to make sure that in the case of an emergency, they can still perform surgery with no food and no sleep.
And don’t forget self-imposed abuse as a way of demonstrating one’s value. Aren’t internships at least partially a kind of competition for scarce rewards like plum assignments or post-internship jobs?
In most places, they are “competitions” to demonstrate that you can do the actual job better than the other interns, not that you are willing to endure greater suffering to get the job. If I’m looking to hire someone, how much they want the job is near the bottom of the list of things I care about. Why they want the job, that’s interesting and potentially informative, but you don’t really get that datum out of pointless torment.
It’s funny you say this. The more experience I get in the corporate world, the more I feel like “how much they want the job” is near the top of the criteria used for promotion/hiring decisions.
I think I know what you’re referring to but I would phrase it more like “A candidate’s willingness to feign interest in our business is a good indicator of future willingness to embody the pretense that this bullshit corporate job is Very Important, e.g. behaving as if a brief service outage in a business application is an emergency on par with a plane crash.”
Here’s a counterpoint:
Las Vegas Mass Shooting
It was around four o’clock when I started trying to look at a CAT scan report. I tried to read it, but I think I burned every neurotransmitter that night. I remember looking at it and not understanding a single word that was on there. At that point, I knew I was more dangerous to the patients than helpful. These were stable yellow tags that needed a set of fresh eyes. By then, we had a lot of doctors who had arrived, so I turned that aspect of care over to them.
…
The surgery team performed an unprecedented feat that night. The numbers speak for themselves. In six hours, they did 28 damage control surgeries and 67 surgeries in the first 24 hours. We had dispositioned almost all 215 patients by about 5 o’clock in the morning, just a little more than seven hours after the ordeal began. That’s about 30 GSWs per hour. I couldn’t believe that we saved that many people in that short amount of time. It’s a testament to how amazingly well the hospital team worked together that night. We did everything we could.
This doctor, after a heroic effort to save lives from 10pm to 4am, ended his shift early (normally 8pm – 6am) and let others take over for him at 4am because he determined that “At that point, I knew I was more dangerous to the patients than helpful.”
Just a data point.
But here’s a couple of questions: Do you think Dr. Menes found time to have a sandwich during this disaster? If not, is it possible that a 10 minute meal (for him or anyone on his team) could have enabled him to continue working until 5-6am instead of 4am? Enabled them to perform with fewer mistakes, thereby saving more lives?
I’m a physician, not too far removed from internship. And I’m kind of touched by all of your incredulity.
DragonMilk’s description is accurate. Medical training is generally an exercise in sacrificing your own health in order to ensure the health of others. The level of onerousness depends on the specialty and the venue – surgical training seems to be the absolute worst – but pretty much everyone gets it bad. The general adage is “eat when you can, pee when you can, sleep when you can.” Of these, the inability to sneak off and eat is probably the least important. I have gone an entire day by stealing graham crackers and peanut butter out of the inpatient nutrition rooms.
What really gets bad is the lack of sleep. The subject of sleep in medical training is a matter of intense debate. Everyone knows you need to sleep to function, but, no one really seems to know how much sleep is worth missing medical experiences.
In the initial stages of my training, I was on Q4 in-house call, meaning every fourth night on the inpatient service, I would remain in the hospital overnight and stay awake caring for patients, then make rounds the following morning as usual, and leave around noon. I would eat a big meal, then sleep from about 1500 until 0600 the following day, and then I would get up and do my usual 12 hour shift. This gets pretty miserable when you do it 4 weeks in a row. A lot of people became concerned that there were too many medical errors due to horribly disordered sleep patterns. Residents driving home after a 40 hour call are basically driving drunk.
So, the ACGME made Q4 call illegal for most programs. This forced residencies to use night float systems, wherein there is one team who only does the overnight work, a week or two at a time. This led to more transitions of care (another source of medical errors) and decreased continuity of care (another detriment to learning). A lot of people rightly questioned whether this change in the call system was actually achieving its purported goals. As far as I can tell, no one can demonstrate that it has, and not for lack of trying.
As for why? As the old-timers are fond of saying, the only bad thing about Q2 call is you miss half the cases. That’s not exactly wrong. You can’t become a physician without practicing medicine. You have to build a highly-informed intuition by seeing a lot of patients in a variety of situations.
When I got into my neurology training, I took house call every 3-5 nights for three years. This means that I would go home at the end of the day, but if a patient had a neurologic problem, I had to wake up, drive to the hospital, see them, talk to my attending, and carry out their treatment plan. This probably occurred 1-5 times a night, in addition to the phone calls I would get that I could merely wake up and handle over the phone. That kind of workload basically bends you into shape. I got really good at handling things. I also was incredibly miserable in some very serious ways. And I wasn’t even a surgical resident. Those folks go through absolute hell.
It does get better once you are out of training.
Isn’t “practice makes you better” universal of all occupations?
I’m not trying to deny that medicine is very important and that it’s highly desirable we have well practiced doctors who can thrive under stress.
But surely it isn’t the only occupation in society for which this is true? And yet, this sort of deprivation-style hazing seems almost uniquely exclusive to it.
The term “hazing” does not apply to all situations of difficulty. Hazing is the deliberate imposition of artificial difficulty upon those who wish to join a society, organization, or profession. This isn’t hazing.
For one, the difficulty is not artificial. Medicine is just plain difficult, particularly for trainees. The amount of direct experience necessary to develop well-informed intuitions is extremely steep. Decreasing workload has not been shown to be beneficial for trainees, and not for want of investigation. The difficulty of learning to become a physician is very, very natural.
Moreover, physicians are not clock-punchers by nature. As a profession, they are well-known to be
compulsive, controlling, and anxiousexcessively conscientious. That means that the pressure to see ever more patients is not entirely imposed from without, but also comes from within. Making sure your colleagues eat, sleep, and rest is not easy – I have had to wrest patient care responsibilities from resentful colleagues.What’s more, society wants it this way, for good reason. From The role of compulsiveness in the normal physician, JAMA 1985 :
Lastly, medical students and residents are not looking to join the medical profession – they have already joined. The day you enter medical school you are treated as a nascent physician, and med schools and residencies work extremely hard to ensure that you don’t have to leave medicine, sometimes bending over backwards to keep trainees that really don’t have what it takes. (There are exceptions – some extremely competitive fellowships will admit more trainees than they intend to fully matriculate, but this seems terribly rare.)
So it’s not hazing. Medicine is just plain hard. Medicine attracts, creates, and requires a certain kind of excessively-conscientious personality. And the difficulty is not a price of admission to the profession, it is kind of the prize that is bestowed by the profession.
The fact that your previous post started with “I can’t believe outsiders are questioning our grand traditions!” and ended with “And I did it myself and got through it just fine!” is a pretty strong tip-off that it totally is hazing.
As for the rest, look, I’ll happily concede that medicine is very difficult, very demand, and attracts candidates who are willing (and maybe even eager) to put up with that difficulty and those demands. It’s almost certainly in the top 5% of professions by those standards, no questions asked.
My point here is that it’s not completely unique. Certain other fields (like consulting, investment banking, and possibly even military or police work) can also plausibly make those claims as well. And yet, they not only don’t seem to have this ritual of requiring new joiners to go a whole day without food as a matter of routine, many of them have long-standing traditions and specific policies in place to ensure that doesn’t happen.
In a job where you’re not really busy, and when getting reps isn’t important, and when the candidates are lazy and don’t care that much, you don’t need a “make sure your subordinates eat” policy. It’s just a given that they will. The fact that the military has hard policies on this, and that consulting firms have cultural expectations of it, doesn’t prove that they are categorically different from medicine. It proves that they are categorically similar. With the sole exception of not having these hazing-like “traditions” and a million lame excuses to justify them.
Matt M,
I am not denigrating your time in the military or your work in management consulting, or any other profession. Medicine does not have the market cornered on difficulty, smarts, conscientiousness, or nobility.
Medicine has had success learning from other professions (checklists! checklists! checklists!). So, I wish that the policies that have been effective in the military and management consulting were effective in medical training. Unfortunately, those policies don’t seem to transfer.
I don’t know why that is. I wish this all came down to simple malice, or market inefficiency, as those problems would present clearer solutions. Available evidence suggests that the difficulty lies somewhere else.
I stated a what I think is a clear definition of hazing, and the reasons why I think the difficulty of medical training does not meet criteria for hazing.
You might disagree with the definition, or you might think the difficulty of medical training actually does meet criteria. Maybe discuss that. It’s not really that satisfying for you to ignore what I wrote and resort to your initial reaction.
(If you think I’m deluded, or brainwashed by hazing, just say so.)
The argument that medicine is somehow unique because American hospitals have tried to improve it fails when you look at non-American hospitals. Medicine is high pressure everywhere, especially surgery. But nowhere else do they fail to give doctors ten minutes to eat.
If you are saying the American healthcare system has tried several times to improve conditions and failed, I would like to examine those cases.
A lot of people go through hazing and don’t realize what it is.
I’d be interested in reading about that. You may have seen something I haven’t. Can you point me to some reading material?
How does the difficulty of medical training meet criteria for hazing? Just saying “hazing” over and over again doesn’t make it so.
@rahien.din
The “policy” in this case is the supervisor pulling somebody aside after an emergency about midday and asking “Have you eaten?” If they answer in the negative, it’s “Go grab your sandwich out of the break room and take 10 minutes to get food into you.” Then they go through their subordinates until all of them have had food, even if its sending them off one at a time.
As I said above to @Thisbe, if the organization really can’t cope with them stepping out for just long enough to get food into themselves, then the organization is broken. I’m going to ask the same question I asked there: what if this person got hit by a bus on the way into work? Then the ER will have to do without them for a whole day, or at least a few hours until you can find somebody to cover. If it won’t break down in those circumstances, then there’s certainly the ability to give people time to take care of basic needs, and if the supervisors aren’t, it’s because they don’t care to do so.
I may have been too strict by saying this doesn’t happen anywhere else. I correct it to most countries. I have been told about the personal experiences of doctors who have gone through residencies in Spain and Sweden, and this does not happen.
I fail to see how not having ten minutes to eat every shift for weeks is a necessary criteria for training doctors. Or going sleepless.
Sure, there will be surgeries that last 16 h+. But surgeries this complicated would have a team of doctors. Having just one surgeon do a 16 h surgery seems very risky and unnecessary. And interns won’t be performing crazy complicated long surgeries every day for weeks. So an intern will be changing tasks every so often. While it may make sense for an intern to run overtime to finish a task they started, it is unnecessary to have an overworked intern work the next task. There should be another, rested person doing that.
This seems like hospitals not hiring enough personell, or organizing it in an unefficient manner.
Rahein,
I’d like to withdraw from most of this, because I worry that we’re coming too close to insulting each other and there’s no more conversation to be had. But I would like to go back to this:
I’m interested in exactly how these investigations were done. To be very clear, my complaint is not that residents work 14 hour days, when 12 would be just as good. That part of this equation is not unique. Some consultants, bankers, and military members also work 14 hour days. My complaint, similar to CatCube’s comment above, is the assertion that resident hours are so incredibly valuable and the nature of the job is so unaccomodating to any interruption that a general policy of “allow everyone at least 20 minutes, at some point, within every 6 hours or so, to eat, go to the bathroom, and take a few seconds to clear their thoughts” is considered some sort of luxury unnecessary for all but spoiled sissies. That is the part of this that other high-demand occupations reject, and for good reason.
My suspicion is that studies on “workload for residents” were of the “compare someone who has an 8 hour shift vs someone who has a 12 hour shift” variety, and not of the “compare someone who works 14 hours but their boss makes sure they get 10 minutes every 6 hours to eat vs someone who works 14 hours with zero interruptions whatsoever” variety.
But perhaps I’m wrong.
Doctors who make mistakes can cause a lot of extra work (and damage), so malnourished and under-rested doctors may have so much work because the mistakes they make.
Matt M,
Thanks, you’re right. I regret that. But, I should stop here, too.
I agree with how you seem to be formulating the root question : we need to know how precious these duties actually are with respect to medical training. That is an ongoing question in medical education.
I don’t think the most recent studies are set up to answer our exact question here. The more blunt questions (should we make interns stay up 40 hours at a time?) remain unanswered, and may be hard to answer at all.
The other thing that has been entirely lost here : the patient can not necessarily wait. Telling your patient, as suggested above, to “keep bleeding until you’ve finished breakfast” is at best unprofessional, at worst malpractice.
Thanks for your discussion, as always.
All,
It feels weird to say, but, thanks for your sympathy? If medical training appears this bizarre from the outside, that’s validating to me. If you want to read a rather intense caricature of medical training, Samuel Shem’s The House of God is essential reading.
I don’t think this is what is being recommended.
The military doesn’t simply leave guardposts empty while everyone takes a break for meals. And consultants don’t simply ignore client requests when noon comes up and it’s lunchtime.
The proper solution here is to either schedule overlapping shifts, such that one person is available to cover for the person who needs to eat, or to schedule such that there is enough slack in the system that at some point within a 6-hour window you can expect at least 10 minutes during which nobody is actively bleeding on you.
A scenario wherein doctors are actively treating bleeding patients for 14 hours straight with no 10-minute opportunity for breaks doesn’t sound like “something you need to do to prepare for emergencies.” That sounds like it is an emergency. And if doctors are operating all the time in emergency-like conditions, that would suggest, to me, that there is absolutely zero slack in the system and that in the event of a real emergency, we’d all be pretty well fucked.
Medicine might be special, but it just doesn’t match the experience of most of other people and doesn’t seem to make sense. How can impaired young interns barely removed from drunks be expected to retain anything useful? Or perform at a reasonable level? You’d get fired for showing up to work drunk, so I’m not sure why you would expect anything better showing up to work extremely sleep deprived.
I only really have immediate and second-hand experience in business fields. There are a lot of people who are of the “lots of hours, no time to eat!” variety, and there are a lot of people of the “40 hours, no matter what” variety. Typically the “lots of hours” comes from an internal mindset, not a condition: those people just feel like working a lot of hours so they can appear to be working hard. Companies have different cultures that may or may not reward that kind of thinking, but it’s usually not a result of underlying conditions.
Also, it really sucks to work for managers like that, because it’s obviously bullshit, and said managers usually create unnecessary work.
It can be a result of conditions, but such conditions will ALWAYS result in missing deliverables. You should always staff with slack, knowing that you will occasionally be buried in work, but still have staffing for it. If your staff is always working insane hours all the time, they will eventually miss something. It’s not avoidable. And it makes management a lot tougher, because you always have to discuss priorities and let your stakeholders know that you’ll fail to get a deliverable, because you are under-staffed.
Typically you do need to work harder when learning, but IME most people who SAY they are working harder to learn are really doing nothing of the sort. Obviously, medicine may be different, because all industries are different. YMMV.
But I absolutely wouldn’t advise anyone to go into medicine specifically because of this. Come on over to Financial Analysis! You graduate in 4 years, work some crazy hours occassionally but normally get nice corporate gigs, and can make 6 figues after a decade of work experience. Plus you meet lots of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes.
You’re not wrong!
What’s more, a common joke is : if doctors were actually as smart as they think they are, they would have become investment bankers.
Just to add post: YMMV. I am not a doctor. I can’t speak to other industries. I just have the intuitions from my own industries and industries of friends. So I don’t want to assert that you are wrong, because that’d be talking out of my ass.
I agree with Matt M. Also, the rest of work/life balance. I’d quit any job that didn’t let me spend 20 hours a week on exercise/hobbies.
On your question about food, sandwiches are probably the way to go. They’re reasonably quick to prepare (depending on what you put in them) and you can eat them while walking if you have to. I don’t really understand your point about sogginess. I’ve never had a problem with sandwiches going soggy.
I’d also submit: a tupperware of cooked potatoes.
Pasta stays yummy even if it’s cold.
I am a big fan of canned seafood. Tuna, sardines, smoked oysters. There’s also now several companies putting out pouches of spiced tuna, salmon, etc that come with a little spoon. There’s a jalapeno salmon one I love. High protein, fast, no refrigeration required, and you can buy them in bulk and keep them at the office. I have a drawer full of these things at my desk for snacks.
Any recommended brands? Are they available at pretty much every supermarket?
Should be available at any store. I haven’t found a bad brand, but I really like the Geisha smoked oysters. I’m currently out of the packets with the built-in spoons with the spices and I can’t remember what brand they are, but I also have tuna packets (no spoon) from StarKist Selects and those are good, too. I prefer canned fish in oil rather than water, but whatever floats your boat.
It’s just neat they’re adding all the spices and things these days. Canned tuna was sort of “comfort food” for me growing up because it was something I associated with band practice after school or road trips with friends in college. Just something quick and cheap you could take anywhere. And now they’re all gourmet-ish, so it’s nice. Makes me happy.
ETA: Herp, forgot there’s this thing on the internet called a “search.” The jalapeno tuna stuff with the spoons is from Bumblebee. Very tasty. $1.50 a packet.
Nice – and are any of these nonmetal? I’m afraid she’ll be careless in her busyness and cut herself, haha.
Yeah, the pouches are…pouches. They’re made out of…pouch material. I guess it’s plastic? I don’t know. I’m going to pretend there’s farms where majestic pouchbeasts are raised and humanely slaughtered to harvest pouchhide from which pouches are made.
Pretty sure it’s plastic-coated aluminum foil. I guess it can give you a nasty “paper” cut, but you can open them without tools and they are much less dangerous than cans.
An egg dish such as a fritatta/quiche/spanish omelette works well. About half an hour to make, and can be done in a large pan for several portions at once.
Savory pies are also a good option (pasty/empanada or whatever it’s called in your country), especially if the ‘eat with hands’ is important. You could even use the fritatta as a filling.
If eating with hands is really required: sandwiches, cut up veggies, hard boiled eggs, cheese and crackers, falafel. If this constraint can be relaxed: frittata, rice and beans.
Grapes. Apples. Apricots. All in the “easy to eat with your hands, no preparation required” category.
Off the top of my head, from least fancy to most…
Fruit – if there’s some kind of fruit you like, much of it doesn’t even need to be refrigerated and practically all of it is finger-food. Not very filling (with some exceptions), but the only prep you need to do is pick it up at the grocery store. I’d go for bananas if you/she like(s) them, they’re fairly solid as fruit goes.
Hardboiled eggs – fast to make, not too slow to peel, you can do a bunch at once, and reasonably solid food. (Deviled eggs if you have time to throw away, but I don’t think that’s the situation you’re describing, and ordinary hardboiled eggs are still pretty good. Better if you add a small container of salt.)
Cheese and sausage – like, a chunk of cheese and a chunk of sausage (or small sausage) of a type you like. Optionally add crackers and cut up the cheese/sausage if you like cracker mini-sandwiches. Alternately, sandwich with nothing wet in it – sandwiches with tomato disintegrate like anything in my experience, but plain bread and cheese doesn’t, and I don’t think adding butter makes a difference (don’t know about other condiments)*. Alternately, they used to sell cheese-and-salami wraps that were really good (as in, salami wrapped by cheese); they probably still do, and you could probably make one yourself with fairly little effort. This one is a high-fat high-protein option but if you’re dealing with constant hard work all day that might not be bad.
Bag of cut up veggies – whatever you like but I’d go for things like carrots and broccoli that keep well cut up and avoid bell peppers – with small sealed container of dip of your choice. (Ideally something solider like hummus.)
There are various savory pasties/savory pies if you look outside modern American cuisine. I don’t know how hard savory pasties are to make, but I know they’re still done in modern Britain, and you can occasionally find them in the USA. You can definitely find savory croissants although they may be either expensive or not very good (I’d guess they’re very hard to make). My own experience is with the cheese-and-egg veggie pies, or the meat pies, that we have from historical sources (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Misc10/Misc10.pdf for recipes), many of which are both fairly simple to make and very good, and which are another “make one pie on the weekend, put it in the fridge, bring a sizeable slice to work every day” thing – a real solid meal, but probably even so a good deal more work than you’re looking for.
… That was fun! Food prep is a broad subject and I probably missed a lot of options, poke me if you want more. And good luck to you and your coworker.
*Technically places that sell pre-made sandwiches deal with tomato just fine – I’m not sure if they keep it from touching the bread or drain the seeds or what, but if you care about that you may be able to make them not disintegrate. It hasn’t come up enough for me to look into it myself.
PS: Oh, I missed an obvious one. If you live near a chinatown, chinese bakeries do their version of savory pasties – bao – often for -very- reasonable prices, with a very wide variety of fillings. BBQ pork is the standard but there are many, egg custard is also great. My university used to have a tradition of student groups that wanted to fundraise buying a lot of boxes from chinatown and then selling the buns for the significant markup of $1.50-$2.00 apiece to students coming into/going out of classes, because they were about right for eating in the five (or three) minutes before you had to be in your next class. Wonderful tradition. Good luck!
Thanks! Actually I have a pretty chill job food-wise, as long as work gets done, no one gripes about trivial things like taking time to eat. It’s my fiancee I’m talking about (I guess I was vague to the point of confusion).
I generally buy ready to eat things myself and am not an experienced cook, so I’m trying to think of simple things i can make that would be easy to eat.
I’m a fan of peanut butter and raisins in a tortilla for ‘on the go food’. Approximates a PB&J, takes longer to go stale than the sandwich, and does not get soggy.
Actually, any sandwich is better as a tortilla wrap if you’re worried about the thing going soggy.
Ah, that’s quite clever, I’ll have to try the tortilla thing in lieu of bread
Peanut butter is better with sliced apple. Raisins might be good as well.
Almonds and other nuts
Cheese cubes or cheese sticks
Protein bars
Peanut butter sandwiches on wheat bread
Cut fruit and veggies
Hummus
Lots and lots and lots and lots of coffee
ETA : don’t get mad at her or scold her for not making time to eat. You really can’t understand what she is going through, or why. Medicine is a priesthood. Do your best to support her.
Teaching to the test gets a bad reputation, but in principle there is nothing wrong with it as long as the test is well-designed and you are willing to let the kids fail. AP classes, for example, are explicitly designed to teach students how to pass the AP exams, and they are usually pretty great.
The problem is that when people talk about teaching to the test “the test” is usually some lowest common denominator crap that you have to spend all your time and effort getting the stupidest kids in the class to be barely able to pass. The example I am most familiar with is the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, for obvious reasons. As my middle-school civics teacher once said, “everything we do in this school is in order to please the great god FCAT”.
Most of the AP teachers I know think that the AP standards are way too low to be equivalent to college classes and teaching to the test for APs means giving a poor education, so instead they teach a much larger superset. (There appear to be a few APs where this is not the case. For example, apparently Music Theory.)
Just anecdotally, I got a 5 on my Music Theory AP and found that it
a) was the hardest test I have ever taken, and
b) did not prepare me for 100-level college music theory courses.
This was a single-digit number of years ago.
If that is the case most AP teachers are stupid. I took 5 AP exams and got a 5 on all of them, they were much harder tests than the equivalent midterms/finals in similar 100 level classes I took in college. Indeed, by a quirk at my university I had to take physics anyways (as background, my AP physics teacher was probably the worst in school history, and was fired after the year because our class got majority 1s and 2s on the exam), my University professor was surely worse even than him but he taught probably 1/2 the material we learned in AP Physics, I learned nothing in his class and just watched videos on my laptop while setting the class curve on 3/3 exams.
My Psych, Micro, etc 101 classes were pathetic in curricula and midterm/finals compared to AP US History and Chem. The only classes I took that seemed similar were that CALC BC seemed similar in test difficulty to Calc III and AP Comp Sci similar to my Engineering 101 course.
I agree with idontknow. If we compare a 3 to a C, 4 to a B, 5 to an A, than anecdotally AP tests were harder than upper level undergraduate classes for me. I spent much more time studying for AP tests than undergraduate classes, and my GPA, converted with the scale above, was 0.25 points higher in undergrad, than AP.
My friend was a schoolteacher and it seems indoctrinated in the American Education system that testing is bad. As a Chinese-American, this view is unfathomable to me as basically in China, your life is essentially determined by one big test at the end of high school, and standardized testing is to me the most fair way to compare kids across different schools.
You make a good point that it depends on the test and objective. What if median rather than lower quartile test score was emphasized? Leave some children behind (but seriously, it seems analogous like a goal of eliminating poverty)!
One problem in America is that a significant portion of Americans can get perfect scores on the main tests (other than SATs and ACTs, of which relatively little is teachable) without doing any studying at all. So if you teach to the test, you’re doing a disservice to your students. I imagine that your single big test is significantly better at differentiating students.
Not all that large a fraction, but some. And we could certainly design these tests to make perfect scores happen once per Terrence-Tao-level genius. It’s a choice not to do so. I’m not entirely sure why they do it that way.
Probably because the fraction of people the test wouldn’t tell you anything useful about would rise if it were calibrated for a genius.
RE: Hoopyfreud
I don’t think that’s the case – you can make tests purposely too long to finish, so to speak, with easy questions first per section, and harder questions later. Let all test takers know that they are not expected to finish the test, and they can feel free to skip questions, but that generally the test is getting harder.
You can get plenty of info out that way.
Standardized testing has become a highly politicized topic in America, which means that it’s impossible to have a rational discussion on the matter.
Mean score would be better than either. Median means your incentive is to entirely give up on the bottom two fifths or so and also means largely ignoring the top fifth.
Here in the uk the key stay was how many get a grade from A to C and it encouraged people to ignore high achievers and those who never get a C
Isn’t teaching to the test a prime example of Goodhart’s law?
Right, so the resolution is not to try to defy the law, but to have your metrics better align with your goals.
https://thinkprogress.org/half-of-adults-in-detroit-are-functionally-illiterate-5c0ca20df0a9/
This is a bad reply, it just flat assumes that people who can pass the basic tests will grow up to be mostly literate. Teaching to the test is considered a negative because being able to pass a test with someone coaching you on it specifically doesn’t translate to being able to functionally use the material, its a way of passing people without them actually mastering the skills.
How does he think that half of Detroit is functionally illiterate when public school has been mandatory for a century?
Matt doesn’t say that tests make people literate. But if half the kids are getting through without being able to read, it means that the schools need to be checking their own results at least slightly more than they do now.
There are places where I would worry about “teaching to the test” but not basic literacy.
Your data’s a bit stale.
(TLDR: the 47% statistic comes from a 1998 model based on a 1992 survey that did not test anyone in Detroit; the proficiency levels are based on an average result on three distinct sets of tasks, and so don’t tell you much about what the people in question have trouble with; “functionally illiterate” is an extremely ambiguous phrase which may technically describe a person with partial proficiency at level 1 tasks but implies that they would fail almost all of them.)
(Even shorter: C’mon, people. Sniff test. 47% of a major city is functionally illiterate? In 2018? In a country where all of the cash is the same size and color? What, are they paying for heroin with quarters?)
~~~~
Based on what I can find, the 47% number is based on a 1998 statistical model (which I don’t feel like digging up) which was itself based on a 1992 survey of literacy rates in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington AC, and Kentucky. From the 2002 report based on the 1992 data (p 17), 22% +/- 1% of adults surveyed demonstrated only level 1 literacy; there is no level 0 in the survey. Further, 25% of the people in this group were immigrants who may have been just learning English, 19% had a vision problem that made it difficult to read print, and about a third were at least 65 years old (ie would have graduated high school in 1945), and about 2/3 hadn’t actually completed high school. The 2002 report only examines differences at the region level (Northeast, South, Midwest, and West; p 71), but I shall trust the blockquote from a memory-hole’d tumblr post that the 1998 report has the actual 47% number for Detroit.
These estimates were created in response to demand for city- and county-level data which, of course, only existed in the twelve states that volunteered for the study. The current estimates only show county-level percentages, but for Wayne County, Michigan (no, you didn’t miss Michigan in the list of states up above), they show level 1 literacy levels of 15-30% in 1992 and 6-21% in 2003. I’m not sure how they extrapolated from the 1992 data to get estimates for 1998 or 2003; I think they just used demographic changes from census data.
All of the following information on the meaning of the NAAL scores is pulled from section III of the 2002 report, which starts at page 94 of the linked pdf.
The NAAL scores are based on tasks broken into three categories:
– Prose literacy: The ability to pull information from an expository text like an article or essay, or occasionally a poem or novel.
– Document literacy: The ability to pull information from more varied types of texts, such as data tables, graphs, forms, and maps.
– Quantitative literacy: The ability to perform arithmetic operations using numbers pulled from one of the above classes of text. Quantitative tasks varied in how explicit they were about the operations required, and occasionally asked for an explanation or required a calculator to perform.
Prose literacy at level 1 indicates the ability to find a piece of information in a relatively short text, with misleading or information relatively far from the actual answer. The questions are very direct, with no real ambiguities about what is desired. Level 2 generally requires a minimal degree of interpretation in reading the question or finding the answer. At level 3, longer and less organized texts are introduced. Higher levels proceed from there.
Document literacy at level 1 requires the person to find or enter a single piece of information from a very simple document. One example task asks them to sign a Social Security card; another asks them to fill out a fairly simple job application form. Level 2 begins dealing with more complicated documents, such as pulling information from a particular cell in a table. Level 2 also starts doing graph interpretation.
Quantitative literacy at level 1 asks the person to take two given numbers and perform a simple operation on them (though they may not specifically say “add” or “subtract”, and the simplest task in the set requires you to know how to interpret a deposit slip; I’m actually a little confused by it, since I haven’t used a deposit slip in ten or fifteen years). Level 2 is still a single operation, but without any “simple” qualifier, and occasionally requires you to know which operation needs to be performed.
A level one reader is estimated to be able to answer level 1 questions (of any type) bit less than half the time; for a level 2 reader the expectation is closer to 80%. Whether or not a level 1 reader is “functionally illiterate” is a matter of interpretation; personally I would expect a “functionally illiterate” person to succeed on these tasks something like 20-30% of the time, depending on the category; at 50% I might be willing to call them “barely literate” or some similar thing, but I would not want to imply total illiteracy.
~~~~
I don’t think it’s Yglesias’s fault that he used a statistic based on no direct data at a level of precision the then 19 (now 26) year old original study did not report; the power point he got it from was only about a month old.
What is special about literacy? There is a good amount of evidence that absent practice skills learned in school fade out very quickly (Bryan Caplan cites a study that 3 months out of school drops one month worth of schooling, extrapolating that someone who graduated high school could be literate at a 6th grade level by the time they turned 30).
Is there evidence that literacy is an exception to this general concept (or that the concept is wrong)?
@baconbits
Literacy isn’t special as an educational goal, just important and nigh universal. Certainly the DRWF thinks so.
@baconbits9
Well, that certainly accounts for part of my wretched educational experience. My school system apparantly knew this, 40 years ago, so they spent the first part of each year reviewing last year’s material. The problem is that I don’t recall them ever covering anything I’d actually forgotten. So either I “practiced” all summer, or the amount of forgetting is highly variable. (Or I was so far ahead of the class that no matter what I lost, it wasn’t something the school had ever actally covered, so I didn’t notice :-()
Looking at literacy in particular though, it’s somewhat of a sad indictment of our society – and our schooling – if it’s something lots of people don’t practice outside of school.
@arlie
It’s not; the Yglesias post is bullshit based on bullshit which is itself based on wildly out-of-date and inadequate data, and the whole idea relies on sleight of hand with the definition of “literacy”.
A reference to a hypothetical crisis is not sufficient support for a call to action unless accompanied by genuine evidence that the crisis actually exists.
In principle I agree, and “I taught these kids so well! …but only in a way which can never be objectively measured” is only slightly more respectable a claim than “There’s a dragon in my garage …which is invisible, incorporeal, and only breathes heatless fire.”
In theory, shouldn’t test length vs. sample size sometimes be an issue? If you want to make sure that kids know most of a few thousand quickly-recollectable facts then you can ask multiple choice questions about a couple hundred of them and get a very accurate estimate of what percentage they know… but if you want to make sure that kids are able to handle most of a few hundred types of long complicated problems, such that they might take half an hour to figure out each, then the pass rate is going to depend on luck as much as on skill. You might be able to give every kid a different test and thereby get a good sample of how their class/school/district is doing as a whole, but you won’t be able to use it as an exit exam unless you use a very low threshold.
In practice, I thought the SAT and ACT and AP tests I took way back when were all pretty solid, but if they had been the *only* component of college admissions (much less graduation!) then I would have expected Goodhart’s Law to wreak a nightmarish vengeance on the 90% of my curriculum they didn’t cover.
I don’t agree in principle because the purported purpose of education is mostly about positive life outcomes afterward, and not how well you do on a test. Testing only matters if it correlates beyond things like IQ and socio-economic status going in. Without good reason to believe that increasing test scores results in better long term outcomes it becomes a “something must be done, this is something” situation.
Yes, but the purported purpose of education is mostly a lie, and almost all the correlations with education disappear if you adjust for IQ and SES. So what education is doing is mostly just measuring those things and presenting them back to you as grades and test scores.
Wanna bet these things are very highly correlated?
Some problems with tests could be fixed by making better tests. For example, if the test covers only 10% of what you learned, the obvious solution is to add questions for the remaining 90%. If that’s too many questions in the test, then always choose a random subset. This can be further tweaked by choosing one random question from chapter 1, one random question from chapter 2, etc., so that despite the randomness all chapters are covered.
It seems to me that people often don’t even try this, before they give up.
The AP program provides exams for almost every subject. Coverage only gets broader if you include the very similar CLEP exams as well. If you had a high school education which consisted of nothing but training you to pass the AP and CLEP exams associated with the typical required high school courses (algebra, biology, world history, English literature, etc…), on top of training for the SAT and the ACT, I think you would probably have a better high school education than 90% of people.
What’s on the AP architecture exam?
(ed: not to say that I think architecture in particular is an essential subject, but the AP tests have a pretty narrow focus on getting people into college, which in turn gives them an extremely useful (if they’re lucky; sorry “Communications” majors) but nevertheless fairly narrow education.)
How many high school students take architecture? How many high schools even offer architecture?
My point is not that electives wouldn’t suffer. My point is that electives constitute the minority of a high school education, and that since everybody takes different electives any single one of them can’t be essential anyways. If it’s okay for some kids to take JROTC and other kids to take Speech & Debate, why isn’t it also okay to take neither?
I took architecture in high school. Basically we spent the whole semester “designing a house” from the initial brainstorming stage, up through basic-level blueprints in AutoCAD, and then had to build a little scale model of it as our final project.
It was mostly an easy joke type of class (taught by one of the shop teachers). We occasionally went on Friday field trips to nearby houses under construction and roamed around, which was kind of cool though.
Obviously no particular elective is essential, otherwise they wouldn’t be electives. The presence of electives is necessary in order to avoid pouring the vast majority of our economic effort into producing workers for a relatively narrow class of jobs that cannot stand in for all the things that need to be done. A modern economy needs its workers to specialize, and it needs them to specialize in different things. That process is severely hampered by a monomaniacal focus on classical western literature, miscellaneous historical events, expository writing, and the prerequisites to univariate calculus during the first twelve years of a typical citizen’s formal education.
Agreed. Electives expose students to potential career options that are available outside the narrow English-Math-History-Science specialization that the public school system enforces.
And given how the vast majority of students eventually obtain careers as things other than authors, mathematicians, historians, and pure scientists, my belief is that there should be a lot more of them, not less.
It’s Sunday, so some silly fun links for the end of the weekend!
(1) Vengeance for Yuggoth! Take that, deGrasse Tyson! We may soon see Pluto restored to its rightful place as the ninth planet of our solar system (yes, I’ll take “making sufficiently large satellites into planets under this definition” as well as a compromise).
(2) Please excuse the trashy sensationalist take on this – Peter Thiel is a vampire! Well, no,not exactly, but it looks like the story about Pope Innocent VIII and his Jewish physician will be getting vindication of a sort – tranfusing the blood of youth into older veins to combat aging. I’m especially amused by this since I’ve read at least one 19th century horror story where this is the plot: aging countess has succession of young ladies as companions who start out healthy, then all sicken and die while she goes on in the pink of health; will you be very surprised that the spoiler is her doctor (I think a Sinister Italian, but can’t swear to it since it’s ages since I read it) is transfusing the blood of the young women into her veins to keep her alive?
That the old trope of the elderly stealing the vitality of the young should have something to it, thanks to modern scientific research, tickles my fancy immensely.
(3) Our presidential election will be happening on 26th October (along with a referendum on removing the offence of blasphemy from the constitution; a second referendum on the place of women in the home has been deferred. Our recent governments seem exceedingly eager to overhaul the constitution; I’m not sure I am happy about this, since they seem to be treating it as ‘how can we get easy social capital and approval that will turn into votes out of this’ instead of ‘should we be treating the foundational document of the state like a box of tissues to blow our noses on?’ I’m also always wary of politicians who want to muck around with constitutions as I feel it is more like ‘under the old law we’d all be strung up by our thumbs so let’s just snip that part out of it, okay?’)
Anyway, the main point is that unlike the US, our best hope is having our septuagenarian incumbent (and First Leprechaun President) return to power, as the candidates thrusting themselves forward at present range from the hopeless to “go away and stop bothering us you lumpkin (yes I mean you Seán Gallagher)”. If you care, here is the list of some of the contenders pushing themselves on the public notice (they haven’t included all of them, presumably on grounds that those left out are really no-hopers). To date it seems like the political parties are pretty much in agreement to either back Michael D. or not put forward a candidate of their own, save for Sinn Féin who will let us know in September, as for once they seem to be reading the mood of the public correctly who are happy enough with himself above in the Áras.
1 > Forget Pluto! When will we finally get a clear ruling over whether sub-brown dwarves are planetary-mass stars or free floating planets?
Naval Gazing has been busy lately. First, an account of the most incredible long-range bombing mission in history, as part of the ongoing series on the Falklands War.
Second, I neglected to post the link to our continuing discussion of strategy for a modern navy.
Third, meetup report. We had five people show besides me, and everyone seems to have had a great time, although it was a very long day between the engine tour and the main tour.
In “Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life”, a young Eliezer Yudkowsky claimed to know of three “software” methods of increasing intelligence; learning to code, studying CogSci/EvoPsych/AI, and reading hard science fiction. I know the document is deprecated (and for good reason), but does anybody agree with his list? I don’t think doing any of these can literally raise your IQ, but maybe they can make you more open-minded or something?
I have no idea if there’s any way to increase g (the thing IQ tests are trying to measure). You can raise your IQ score to some extent by practicing a lot on the kind of questions your IQ test will be asking.
One big question about the Flynn Effect[1] is how much of the rise in raw IQ scores is based on improved test performance vs improved actual intellectual ability. For example, having kids accustomed to pencil-and-paper tests and used to sitting in a quiet room and doing stuff with books and paper both probably boost the score they get on IQ tests, even if they’re no smarter now than before. But better nutrition and fewer childhood diseases and less lead exposure to small children all probably can actually improve how well their brains work, and so can make them smarter in ways that IQ tests will measure.
[1] In most of the world, the average raw scores on IQ tests go up a little every year, requiring the tests to be renormed every few years, since IQ scores are normally reported in terms of a normal distribution (mean=100, standard deviation =15 is common but there are some IQ tests that do it differently). IMO it would be better if all IQ tests just reported their results in terms of percentile scores–that’s a lot more intuitively meaningful, even though down in the tails you need to add decimal places. (A good programmer at Google is likely in the 99th %ile, but a theoretical physicist doing research at Caltech is probably in the 99.99th %ile.)
So much of this sort of debate revolves around G,
when there’s a lot that’s plainly obvious you can do to improve your ability to navigate the world, even if you’re unable to meaningfully stretch your G.
I like the general outline given by https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html
which is try to learn the most valuable 80-90 mental models to make sense of the world.
(which is also an argument for diminishing returns once you already grok a particular model, ‘go learn another model, and add another tool to your tool belt’)
I’d guess you’re off by an order of magnitude:
– An undergraduate in the harder third of majors at a UC school is probably 99%.
– One of the better programmers at Google is probably at 99.9%.
– A theoretical physicist at an elite school is even money to be at 99.999%.
Haha, no.
I don’t know if I would even expect selection efficiencies that strong even among groups specifically selected by IQ test. If you have a bunch of people that an IQ test has said are really smart, measurement error means some of them are ‘just’ quite smart and lucky.
In any sort of natural group of people things like personality, conscientiousness, dumb luck is going to regress you to the mean pretty hard.
There are apparently about a quarter-million students in the UC system.
At a rough guess, about 5-10% of California’s population is “college aged,” loosely. Let’s say 10%. California’s population is about 40 million, so let’s say 4 million.
Even if 100% of the smartest college-aged people in CA went to the UCs, the UCs would have the top 6% or so smartest people in CA. The smartest third of them would be the 98%. If you mean the “hardest third of majors” meaning not the majors accounting for the hardest third of student body, but the total number of majors, regardless of how many students they had, divided by three, then 99% wouldn’t be unreasonable — except that it’s pretty ludicrous to imagine that the top 6% of the smartest college-aged people in California are entirely going to the UC system.
Intelligence tests (and indeed language tests and similar) are less reliable the further you go from the mean. An IQ test has essentially no ability to make the distinction between 99.9% and 99.999% meaningful.
I am skeptical of the ability of a paper-and-pencil IQ test to distinguish from 1/1000 and 1/100000 intelligence, but I rather suspect that MIT’s PhD program in physics can manage to make such a distinction passably well.
I’m pretty sure they can’t, and I’m not even sure why they would try.
First, what they actually value is the combination of IQ, conscientiousness, aptitude for and interest in physics specifically, and culture fit with the rest of the MIT physics department. Pulling out IQ specifically would be difficult, and of no particular value to them.
And second, of the 1/100000 intelligence crowd, probably 99% have no great desire to ever be an MIT physicist in the first place. Which means that the MIT physics department will get maybe one such applicant per year, which isn’t a big enough statistical sample to calibrate a superduperultragenius IQ test or whatever. And, again, of no particular value when their real problem is sorting out exactly which of the 1/1000 intellects they will have to accept to round out their ranks.
Which they will do in large part on the basis of conscientiousness, specific aptitude, and culture fit, and they may find that the star performer of that year’s class is one of the 1/1000 crowd who outworked the lazy ultragenius.
In support of what Freddie said, the GRE to IQ tables I’ve seen show at least for the new GRE there is a ceiling at 145 IQ which is ~99.9%.
I don’t think enough physicists are scoring perfect on the verbal section (or close enough) that it’s plausible there’s enough of them that grad schools could pull many people at 99.999%. There are only around 3000 people at that level in the whole U.S. even if we assume we can get valid measurements to that level.
Oh, look, somebody claiming their specific interests make you smarter in general. Somebody tell the chess people.
No, the claims are nonsense. At best, these interests have a correlation with intelligence.
Learning to code might help you be more concrete and specific in your thinking – or it might not. I code for a living and most of my thinking remains pretty sloppy. I guess it might help me be aware of the sloppiness of my thinking?
Cognitive science… no. Maybe if paired with intensive meditation practice? But I suspect meditation will be doing the heavy lifting there, and cognitive science just saying where to dig. But the overwhelming response to learning the way human thought processes tend to be broken is to immediately start diagnosing all of your monkey rivals with these broken thought processes.
And reading hard sci-fi? No. Maybe writing it, similar to coding, might help you develop insight into sloppy versus rigorous thinking. Reading hard sci-fi can only make a difference if you are the sort of person to validate the author’s results, and then works like coding, acting as practice for rigorous thought patterns. Inwhichcase, you might as well just take physics coursework.
I think the “read hard sci-fi” recommendation is along the lines of “eat your vegetables”; unless you are paying close attention to the realism (more or less) and the depiction of what is physically possible, and lapping up the maths and orbital physics and all the rest of it, then you are only a reader for pleasure (and that is bad).
That seems to be the attitude of some partisans of hard sci-fi, at least: that you’re only reading it for the science, and that any SF that is not diamond-hard is only sensationalist trash for popcorn reading and rots your brain. It’s the Moral Improvement model of literature, and while it can be fun it its own way (because it genuinely is fascinating to read how things work), I’m still going to read sloppy soft Harrison and Bradbury and the Sad Puppies Thrilling Tales of Space Adventure and all the rest of it, mmmkay?
I’ve never coded in my life so I was wondering, is the type of rigorous thinking required for coding in any way similar to that needed to solve math puzzles such as sudokus? Because if so then just from personal experience, getting good at rigorous thought patterns learned from solving sudokus is helpful when trying to solve, say, a KenKen, but not really helpful when trying to solve any real-world problems with more ambiguous conditions.
“What specifically is it about programming that makes it more difficult for some people than others” is not a settled question, but I think the most common answer involves some variation of holding multiple levels of abstraction in your head at one time, which is not very similar to solving numerical puzzles.
Imagine trying to tell someone how to solve a Sudoku puzzle, step by step, which you can’t look at or ask questions about. That is the level of rigorous thinking in programming.
In the sense that there’s a lot of trial and error 🙂
I have the college course sort of coding ability, i.e. solving discrete, really tricky, problems from nothing. My memory of such does indeed feel very similar to what I do paying strategy games. But I understand it to be radically different from the employment sort of coding ability, which involves having the ideal bank of stuff to cut and paste, using trial-and-error efficiently, and using structures that are common and transparent enough to easily integrate with the work of others. That has always sounded utterly tedious, an extrovert’s nightmare.
However, it’s definitely possible to learn new mental tools that make you much more capable of solving problems. There are a lot of tricky mathematical puzzles you need to be really smart to solve, until you learn basic algebra–it then turns out there’s a simple way to solve them all in a plug-and-crank manner.
Logic, algebra, calculus, probability theory, game theory, the study of computer algorithms–all give you powerful mental tools to solve problems that would otherwise take a lot of cleverness to solve individually.
The grain of truth in there is probably that learning things keeps your mind active, and even if it doesn’t, at least you learnt something.
That said, I find his suggestions highly comedic. For all he cares about intelligence and super-intelligence, the only suggestion he can give to other people is to become like him. Considering that his interesting rationality writings are ten years old and since then he has spent his time chasing after his believes about AI, maybe he represents a strong data point that even if hard scifi does not lower you IQ, it still turns you into Don Quijote.
Eliezer himself seems to doubt about the learning to program part? I remember some ironic tweets about it and baseball…too lazy to search.
Dunno what’s his current take on it. As a professional programmer I think it is useful in forcing you to doubt yourself when debugging programs, but dunno how much it transfer to other areas.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
maybe too much honesty. ouch.
It sounds like Baby Einstein for teens and twenty-somethings.
Intelligent people are more likely to listen to classical music, therefore playing classical music to your baby will make it more intelligent! It’s the same “wet streets cause rain” anti-logic that unfortunately underlies most of our society’s thinking about education.
On a bit of a tangent, following Big Yud’s advice on self-betterment seems like a terrible idea because by nearly any standard he’s a loser. He’s internet famous to the extent of a mid-tier YouTuber, a college dropout, fat, childless and not particularly well-off. He doesn’t even seem to be very happy with his situation. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to turn out like he has.
This guy is more of a cautionary tale about a smart kid who never grows up. In real life you don’t get to be Peter Pan by failing to develop your potential, you just end up as a sad middle-aged man writing Harry Potter fanfiction.
This seems like needlessly personal abuse.
If I started giving advice on how to hit a grand slam in baseball, I would hope that someone would point out that I bat a .500 at tee-ball.
That is to say, I’m questioning his qualification to give life advice. How his own life is going is directly relevant to that.
There’s a difference between saying “you bat a .500 at tee-ball” and someone saying “you’re so cack-handed you bat a .500 at tee-ball, you’re too fat to run to first base, and I wouldn’t even have you on my team as a water boy”.
That isn’t what he said though. If you are talking about someones position/status/success physical appearance and romantic success are going to be benchmarks for a lot of people. NaD might have been on the insensitive side but he wasn’t actively attacking with the post, simply stating what his perception was.
Consider the inverse, if EY was very fit or had a girlfriend or wife that was considered amazing by a lot of people, or had a large family these would be used to refute the fact that he wasn’t successful.
It’s really good though.
It’s certainly good by the standards of Harry Potter fanfiction.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a college dropout. According to his autobiography, he never attended high school or college. Eliezer clarifies this point in the talk page of his Wikipedia article; he left the formal school system after graduating middle school at the end of eight grade and became an autodidact.
Thanks for the correction.
That said, from a lifetime achievements standpoint that’s arguably even worse. Graduating high school and college are both very low bars to clear, so it’s a bad sign when someone can’t even manage that much.
It would be one thing if we were talking about Peter Thiel, who has a number of tangible successes he can point to, but this just seems like more failure to realize potential.
There seem to be a lot of unexamined assumptions here. Can you conceive of any reason that someone might choose not to go to highschool or college (as opposed to just not “managing” it)? Do you know of a case where Eliezer’s lack of formal education has prevented him from doing something he really wanted to do?
If you bailed out of your CS program at Stanford to go work on a startup, and ended up a multi-millionaire by the time you’re 30, then I think we all agree you did okay without the degree. But if you didn’t finish college because of the irresistible draw of beer/pot/girls/video games/etc., then that suggests bad things about your future.
While I found Nabil’s original post to be pretty funny, I think the relevant comparison here is how EY has done relative to other non-HS/college grads.
The level of fame and notoriety, even if not easily monetized, he has achieved is surely worth something. If I think about all people I know personally who didn’t graduate from HS, he seems to be doing better than they are…
I’d say he has done pretty well even compared with most people who have a university diploma. (And compared with them, less time wasted and less debt.)
I wouldn’t agree with this, EY clearly should have had no intellectual impediment to completing an advanced degree, nor does he seem to have major work ethic flaws that would have prevented it. You wouldn’t judge a Harvard drop out vs all college dropouts if you could judge them against other Harvard drop outs or even just Ivy League drop outs.
Neither true (at least two objectively false claims) nor kind (duh) nor necessary (the site is marked by EY as obsolete, so attacking his character is clearly not needed to disagree with the content).
Well… given the number of people trying to achieve this, it’s not nothing!
With the added bonus that he’s unlikely to find himself in the middle of Yew Tree 2.0 in 30 years’ time.
Yeah, Yudkowsky is just some random guy who happens to work at a non-profit organization of his dreams having other people send him money to support him following his dream, is famous around the world so that people in many countries have regular meetups inspired by a blog he wrote, and has a harem of girls. What a loser, right? I am sure most of us do much better with our lives.
He should have developed his potential by spending another decade of his life at school and then becoming a corporate drone at Google or a similar company, just like most smart guys do. No one would have heard about him, so he would avoid being a target of similar derisive comments.
(Tomorrow’s topic: Why J.K.Rowling is a loser for writing Harry Potter books instead of taking a job at Walmart.)
By those metrics Jim Jones was more successful than the corporate drone but I know which path I’d want my kids to take.
This argument feels a bit like — “Yudkowsky wrote a book that inspired many people.” “Yeah, just like Hitler.” — Technically correct, but…
Also, seems like the goalpost moved from the original “by nearly any standard he’s a loser” towards comparing with a famous villain. Both have negative emotional valence, but for completely different reasons.
You’re the one who used “harem” as though it was something to be praised
I think a whole lot of people don’t see Freud as a crank or a failure…
Worse luck.
Warning: this veers too close to personal abuse to somebody who is not enough of a public figure that I am willing to tolerate it under a public figure exemption.
(and don’t give me the “it’s relevant to his advice on intelligence” thing – the number of children he has isn’t relevant to whether he’s right about programming increasing IQ”. Also, I’m especially annoyed about the “didn’t go to college” mockery since that’s just contributing to this dynamic)
It might be that learning new modes of thinking or approaches to problem solving will increase your mental flexibility, thus making you a more adept thinker.
But I don’t think that means the same thing as augmenting your general intelligence. If anything, causality flows the other direction.
Yeah, I sort of buy the coding one, because I think that coding requires you to think in a very certain and particular (logical) way that many people will not otherwise encounter.
Not that you have to learn an entire language or something. I myself never got that much farther than “Hello, world” in QBasic. But the general idea behind it was almost entirely new to me at the time and I think it helps that I at least tried it once.
Ideally, I think code should be the least complicated way to express a series of instructions with zero ambiguity. Going with that, provided that you know a language, you arguably understand a series of instructions completely iff you are capable of writing them as code. It seems intuitive to me that a person who is regularly wrong about her level of understanding would develop better mental habits through writing code. I also think that whether this increases your intelligence could easily turn on details of how intelligence is defined, but either way, it seems useful. But whatever causal effect exists is certainly going to be weaker than the correlative effect.
I also think it’s interesting to consider how widely different code looks in functional versus sequential programming. I would argue that functional programming comes much closer to the ideal of being the least complicated way to express something with no ambiguity and that sequential code puts additional difficulty on a problem because it is not actually how you would describe an algorithm with no ambiguity (it does have no ambiguity, but it makes you solve additional tasks that aren’t needed). Definitely in simple cases like sorting algorithms, the functional implementation will look much closer to the natural language explanation people would give if their task was to explain the algorithm fully.
I think you may be typical-minding here a bit. I can code in functional languages, but it feels completely unnatural to me.
Also, “unnecessary tasks”, to me, means “the things that make it easy to figure out what is going on”. People who think the shortest code is the best code haven’t spent a decade maintaining other people’s code. I despise lambdas. Really, I despise just about every trick people invent to make code shorter, because those tricks always make it harder to fix problems. And functional programming, to me, looks like one giant “trick” to shorten code. No. Just write the boilerplate and move on. Your maintenance guy will despise you a lot less for 3,000 lines of legible code than 30 lines of dense logic.
I’ve never heard the phrase before; does that mean assuming my own preference is more typical than it actually is? If so, yeah, you could be right.
Let me explain why I say it, though, it’s not just because I prefer functional programming (though I do). Suppose I ask you to explain the instructions that take a string like “slate star codex” and return “ssllaattee ssttaarr ccooddeexx”. You would probably say something like, “go through the string letter by letter, and insert a duplicate of each letter directly behind its curent position”. In Haskell, that is implemented by
duplicate (letter : rest) = letter : letter : duplicate restduplicate [] = []
In java – if we are taking the instruction literally (i.e. aren’t allowed to dodge the problem by creating a new string instead), it is
for (int i = 0; i < word.length; i+=2) {word = word.substring(0, i) + word.charAt(i) + word.charAt(i) + word.substring(i+1);
}
Look at how much thought this requires about indices. This was what I had in mind when I said ‘unnecessary tasks’. Nowhere in the natural explanation of how to duplicate letters is an analogy to the fact that you have to increase your index by 2 instead of 1 to do this, because your string is growing. Even after writing this, I had to pull up a sheet of paper to make sure it does exactly what I want. If you look at the functional code, on the other hand, it maps almost exactly to the natural description. That’s why I would honestly suspect that whatever positive effect coding has (if any) will be larger with functional code.
quicksort would be a better example, but it’s the go-to thing so I made something up instead to avoid cherry-picking.
You could write the Haskell command in one line instead of two – I forgot how because I haven’t written in Haskell in a while – but there is something to automatically go through lists. Then I think there’s a solid argument for making it shorter but less readable. The two liner is the naive, “natural” approach, though.
sty_silver, your haskell may be shorter than your java, but the flip side is that as someone who doesn’t know either language (although admittedly I do know C, which shares a lot of syntax with java), I can immediately see what your java is doing, whereas your haskell is pure voodoo to me.
Also, I think that forcing yourself to do the duplication in place is a slightly artificial constraint, and that if you removed it the java would be much cleaner.
Sty –
Uh. That is… one way of doing it. Of course, if you are doing it that way, you might as well just go full bore and do:
String newWord = "";String oldWord = "Slate Star Codex";
for(Char c : oldWord) {
newWord += c;
newWord += c;
}
return newWord;
Yeah, I am creating a new string. Many, in fact. So are you, however – every time you change the length of a string the system has to copy the existing character array into a new character array.
The constraints that are important in a large application aren’t “Don’t create things as side effects of doing something”, they are “Make sure the guy who inherits this code from you in two years can maintain it”. The fact that you can do something in one line in Haskell is NOT a point in its favor – it means somebody with more cleverness than sense is going to make my job harder by condensing complex logic into a pile of Boolean spaghetti I am going to have to painstakingly convert into long form just to read, and if I am going to bother doing that, I am just going to rewrite it in long form and leave it.
“If we write in an OO language but aren’t allowed to use OO features, it is…”
Just make a new String and return it. Why is this a problem?
ETA: Also, Java can do recursion too, since that’s arguably the key concept:
String duplicate(String word) {
if (word.isEmpty()) {
return "";
}
return word.charAt(0) + word.charAt(0) + duplicate(word.substring(1));
}
I believe strings are immutable in both languages, with heavy optimization, so fulfilling the “in place” requirement is kind of more about compiler behavior than what the code says.
More generally, if I were trying to teach a complete noob to understand programming well enough to write a simple function, in theory I’d probably want to use a functional language just to avoid introducing the whole concept of objects, with the baggage they bring. But in practice I feel like if I’m teaching a non-programmer some simple scripting, the odds are very high they ought to be using Javascript, just due to it being the default beginner language right now.
@sty_silver
I think you’re being a little unfair in your comparison of imperative and functional programming by using Java and Haskell. Those two languages are different in more ways than just how functional they are. You’re also claiming that it would be cheating to have the Java code create a new string, but that’s exactly what your Haskell code is doing (?).
This is how I would program the the function functionally and imperatively:
// imperativevar newStr = '';
for (var i in oldStr) { newStr = newStr + i + i; }
// functional
var newStr = oldStr.split('').map((i) => i + i).join('')
To me, the functional code above is easier to read, but not that much so. In general, I find the claim that functional programming is closer to how people think suspicious. There are algorithms that make a lot more sense when programmed in an imperative style. There are some that can’t even be written in a purely functional language with the same complexity. I also know professional programmers who have spent years trying to “get” functional programming and learn Haskell but who still don’t understand recursion at all. On the other hand, there are some things that are easier to think about in a functional way and I personally prefer using functional idioms when possible.
I would say that the functional/imperative debate is one of the few where the “both sides have good points so the truth is in the middle” talking point is actually true.
—
As an aside:
Quicksort is a bad example to use for functional programming. It’s extremely difficult to program quicksort correctly in pure functional languages like Haskell. The “one line” versions are often not true quicksorts and have super slow runtimes. See here.
I agree that the example itself is silly, no-one would ever do it that way, and internally more strings are created etc. I really don’t think that has any bearing on the point I was trying to make, which is that you have to think about indices when you implement simple procedures on data structures, and that this is something with no analogy to how humans think about problems. I didn’t think that having an artificial constraint would be that distracting, but if it is then please just forget the example, and replace it with any non-trivial work with indices.
sure, but that’s just because the sequential way of programming is more common.
Java 8
public static String duplicate(String word) {return word.chars()
.mapToObj(c -> "" + (char) c + (char) c)
.collect(Collectors.joining());
}
^ You really don’t understand my point if you think this is an argument against it. I’m not arguing against java, I’m arguing that imperative programming introduces elements that aren’t inherent to the problem itself. The fact that java 8 has introduced functional elements is if anything a weak point in its favor.
Sty –
Indices – or rather, relational information, which indices are just a useful abstraction for – are definitely part of the problem definition for your example case.
Java 8, procedural approach
public static String duplicate(String word) {StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
word.chars().forEach(c ->
sb.append((char) c).append((char) c));
return sb.toString();
}
Note: no indices needed.
When I compare the two solutions, the extra complexity of the procedural solution is creating the “StringBuilder” object for holding the intermediary state. On the other hand, the functional solution does a similar thing inside the “Collectors.joining()”.
(Also, the functional solution could be parallelized, but in this example the overhead of parallelization would probably exceed all gains.)
Specialized intelligence / skill almost always swamps general intelligence because general intelligence is slow.* Studying computer science, at least, can teach you about how problem solving works and why maximal generality is not usually something you want to rely on to accomplish a task, and also give you a bunch of useful procedures for solving problems that tend to show up on IQ tests (or at least inspiration for when you’re generating solutions, which is better than going in blind if the problems are actually similar).
* General reasoning as it is usually meant here (SAT-equivalents or Bayesian modifications thereof) is NP-hard. Unless you’re certain you need an exact solution to the problem in question and that the problem is also in NP, a specialized algorithm or even a specialized heuristic is the best way to minimize your opportunity loss due to computation time. Alternatively you could claim P=NP, but that’s a pretty extraordinary claim.
Coding certainly teaches extremely useful habits of thought. I would say it genuinely does effectively make you smarter.
… I think evo-psyc might actually make you dumber, however. Far to credulous of “just so” stories justifying 1950s americana as the natural state of affairs.
I’d argue that learning to code teaches you how to utterly clearly explain your ideas. it moves you away from “philosophers bullshit” explanations of things where you just say something that sounds kinda wise-ish but which you can only explain with circular references.
If you can’t explain how to do something to a computer… then you don’t really understand it.
Because computers are the ultimate idiots.
They can do precisely as told but waving your hands and muttering a vague description doesn’t cut it.
It may make you more systematic and foster avoidance of bullshit ways of thinking but it absolutely does not make you smarter.
So is a whale not kosher because it doesn’t have fins and scales or because it doesn’t chew its cud or have cloven hooves?
The former — the rule doesn’t operate on a non-mammal/mammal distinction, but on a “lives in the water”/”lives on land” one.
Similarly, Catholics can eat aquatic mammals such as beavers and capybaras during lent.
The current rule (as to what is meat) is “the flesh of warm-blooded animals”.
Note that some localities enforce this differently, as in some jurisdictions only call for abstaining from meat on Fridays during lent, and others still call for it (on Fridays) year-round. Others regularly grant dispensations if say, St Patrick’s day falls on a Friday during lent.
Similarly, there are also historical idiosyncrasies with regards to what counts as meat. I have heard that beaver tails used to be allowed (counted as fish) in one locality, because they tasted much like fish. I have also heard that eggs used to be not allowed (counted as meat) in some place because they were too tasty.
What’s the voting deadline?
Why is Rotten Tomato’s best movie feature so ridiculously biased towards recent films? Consider the animation category. The first animated feature was Snow White in 1937, which to their credit is included. Since then, the Disney Animated Canon has been pretty good at releasing one animated feature every one and a half years or so, and there have been a bunch of competitors as well (my favorite Western animator is actually Don Bluth). That’s on top of an entire parallel animation industry in the form of anime. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the Rotten Tomatoes list of the 100 best animated movies ever made, which includes just 27 movies released before the year 2000! Talk about how Culture is not about Aesthetics!
This is not just a characteristic of Rotten Tomatoes. The pattern of more recent films having more “rating coverage” comes up over and over again if you spend a lot of time exploring film ratings data.
It looks like the rating coverage issue also affects foreign films. Most of the films I recognize as foreign have a lot fewer reviews, and have a higher rating than the films around them. It could be that the analytics work better with more reviews.
As an example:
52. 91% How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) 173 reviews
53. 94% My Neighbor Totoro (1988) 49 reviews
54. 96% Long Way North (Tout en haut du monde) (2016) 52 reviews
55. 89% Big Hero 6 (2014) 207 reviews
The two foreign films have a quarter of the reviews of the two domestic films, despite one being from 2016, and both the foreign films have a higher positive review percentage than the domestic films with similar ratings.
An interesting note: Ponyo (2016) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) have a number of reviews more reminiscent of domestic animated films, and don’t show the higher positive review percentage than the films around them in the list.
Random rant – after much hype, I bought my little sister My Neighbor Totoro and it was the worst movie purchase I’ve ever made. It ended so randomly and I felt like you get such terrible time value out of it.
BOOOOOO
Does anyone actually watch My Neighbor Totoro for the plot? I thought it was all about the adorable character designs and whimsical atmosphere. Even at anime conventions where you think people would be more into discussing these things I’ve never heard any references to the actual story, despite everyone present having seen the movie.
I don’t enjoy the movie *for the sake* of the plot, but the underlying story of young children trying to deal with unexpected and unintelligible fear and change… has a lot of resonance for me. I wouldn’t enjoy the movie as much without it.
The plotlessness was half the reason I hated it. The other half was the part where most of the dialogue seemed to consist of small children hearing a word, then repeating it in a shriek. But then I watched the thing something like ten years ago.
Fun story: it was originally played (in Japan) as a double feature with Grave of the Fireflies. Grave of the Fireflies is possibly the best anime work I’ve ever seen; it’s also the most depressing. You get to watch a pair of kids die over the course of two hours. That’s not a spoiler; it’s clear at the beginning that they will both die, the movie is about how they get that way. I could only get through it in twenty-minute increments, with breaks for deep breaths. Will not watch again. I really want to know what the logic was behind pairing it with frigging Totoro, of all films.
I watched Amélie as a double feature with Requiem for a Dream once. Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro sounds like it’s coming from the same place.
Didn’t they get an American release via Disney? I remember ads for Howl’s Moving Castle as a kid.
There is definitely a sort of isolation of anime, specifically, some of it self-isolation. Most media-review places like AVClub nonetheless decline to review anime (other than oldschool classics), so anime websites have started doing them on their own. Thew few times that anime films get wide releases in the West, no one from film websites goes to see them, both from never knowing about them, and not wanting to see them.
And then other international animation is even more obscure, with other Asian animation only sometimes getting crossover popularity from the anime crowd.
Basically, there is no true “general media” website, because of self-sorting. There is an unspoken expectation that weeb stuff doesn’t count. (See also, for example, how essays on the art-ness of video games end up ignoring anything from Japan.)
Or that the art-ness present in Japanese videogames is not fundamentally rooted in their game-ness.
I dunno, Shadow of the Colossus shows up in those essays a lot.
Suppose for the sake of argument that Michael Jordan in the prime of his career would be a mediocre player in today’s NBA. Would that disqualify him from being the greatest basketball player ever? (I’d argue yes.)
So your argument is that modern movies are better than old movies in an absolute sense, and that most old movies that were considered great classics when compared against their era’s competitors would be considered mediocre if released today and compared against modern competition?
I don’t know, there is definitely some of this going on; few people enjoy watching black and white movies, and nobody but the most hardcore of movie buffs enjoys watching silent movies. But technicolor talkies started coming out as early as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gone with the Wind (1939). There have been other improvements since then, but none as fundamental as the advent of sound and color (and, arguably, some of these advances have been for the worse; compare the puppets and models from the original Star Wars trilogy to the CGI of the prequel trilogy). Considering how much more material there is from 1937-2000 than from 2000-2018, I don’t think that can fully account for the difference.
I think there may have been at least some significant methodological improvements, not just technological. Pacing, for example; old movies do sometimes drag things out a bit much.
My kids prefer the Star Wars prequels to the originals. I have the impression they are not unusual in this respect.
I think that’s more the shine wearing off the originals, plus them being kids. New Hope is fundamentally linear, Empire is solid but a middle movie with a dark ending, and Return is proto-TFA.
I don’t think The Wizard of Oz would be a success if it was released today. It’s not exactly a kids movie but it’s not exactly an adult movie either. It’s a live action musical, which in turns out is not a great form for movies. There’s not much plot or character development, and the action is ho-hum. The female lead would not qualify as a sex symbol. Nor would any of the male leads.
Hm, I think I disagree with that. I don’t have enough basketball knowledge to cite specifics, but let’s talk baseball. “Greatest player ever” can certainly be argued, but “Babe Ruth” is a common suggestion. Now, if you took your Delorean to 1929, picked up prime Babe Ruth, brought him back to the future, and stuck him on the 2018 Yankees, he would almost certainly be ridiculously overmatched. Advances in training, nutrition and conditioning, and even just the environment of the game (strategy and tactics, etc) would be too much for him to overcome.
Does that disqualify him from consideration as best player ever? You apparently would say yes, but I don’t think so. In my mind it’s more reasonable to compare him to his peers in the 1920s and 30s. And a lot of the more advanced baseball statistics try to do this — not solely using the literal numbers (batting average or on-base percentage, number of home runs, ERA or WHIP for pitchers) but adjusting them as “where did they rank compared to other players in that season”. So for example, Pedro Martinez having a 2.07 season ERA is good no matter what the year, but specifically today it would be very good; having it in 1968 would be pretty good; when he actually had it in 1999 it was ridiculously good. “2.07” is what actually happened, but it doesn’t tell you the context. Sticking with the Babe, 60 home runs is always an elite number, but when he did it, that was more than most other entire teams. “Elite” is an understatement.
Assume that “talent at hitting and/or throwing a baseball” is innate. What if you instead set your Delorean for 1915, and then brought 1-year-old Babe Ruth to 1996? Then in 2018 you’d now have a 23-year-old Babe raised with current training and conditioning and so on. Would he be able to dominate MLB now the same way he did in the 1920s and 30s?
I honestly see the merit in having both discussions. On the one hand, being the best relative to your competition is very noteworthy.
On the other, the fact that any current MLB team’s 3rd-best pitcher would strike out Babe Ruth 9 times out of 10 also seems like something we can’t just pass over.
Who should be in the hall of fame, Babe Ruth or any current MLB team’s 3rd-best pitcher?
This ‘hall of fameiness’ is what a lot of people are thinking of when they say ‘greatest’
It seems unlikely that he would strike out 9 times out of 10 against an average modern pitcher. The impression I get is that probably the biggest difference between Ruth’s era and the present is that a great number of modern pitchers throw as hard as the elite power pitchers of Ruth’s era (there are other differences, but the other differences seem to be smaller), and Ruth could hit the elite power pitchers of his era. Facing effectively only elite pitchers would surely lower his productivity, but not by as much as you suggest.
@Protagoras
Huh, that gets into the question of how much training and/or knowledge of meta game helps in the batter’s box. How long would it take for Babe to adapt to the existence of the various trick pitches? Do modern day batters get a leg up for knowing common pitching patterns? It’s as much about the mind game as it is about power, though higher power enables more mind-gaming.
Interesting. I think it’s very likely that 1930 Donald Bradman, with 1930 training and nutrition, would be overwhelmingly the best test match batsman of this or any era he was dropped into. This is partly because Bradman was a genius unequalled in sport, not just cricket, but mostly because I really don’t think test cricket has changed all that much since the First World War – far less than other sports. I had assumed much the same would be true of baseball, but I guess that assumption was unwarranted.
I see what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s “greatest”. That I think is like fastest mile—it’s an absolute measure not a relative one.
A modern example I believe would be Albert Pujols. He’s reached 3000 hits, which basically guarantees him to be entered into the Hall of Fame. But do his seasons since being traded to the Angels change his success with the Cardinals? For perspective, he has amassed 6.7 WAR while playing for the Angels over 7 years, compared to an average of 7.3 WAR per year with the Cardinals.
This is something I think about a lot with the original Star Wars trilogy. They’re still great movies, but by defining the genre they’ve become more stale themselves over time.
It’s ironic.
My high school physics teacher knows more physics than Newton. Who is the greater physicist?
The way ratings work, in my understanding, is that people watch a movie, and then rate it shortly afterwards. Most people will not go and rate a movie they watched 30 years ago, even if they really loved it. My guess is that most of the older movies’ ratings come either from fans who keep re-watching the movie (Star Wars and LOTR have such a cult following), or people who watched those old movies recently.
So ratings will be biased by when movies where watched, and how accessible the internet was then. So, if the movie has a lot of viewers during a time where a lot of people have good access to internet (the last 10+ years), they will have disproportionately more ratings than movies that were as popular but were watched during a time when there was no internet coverage.
Even the most popular movies, in my understanding, are watched mostly during the first year after release. People rarely go back to watch older movies.
Also, the subpopulation of people who watch the movie (age, gender, race, location), and the rate of internet utilization of that group will influence ratings (a movie that is really popular among people 60+ will have fewer ratings than a movie that is popular among the 20+ population).
Eeeh dunno about this.
I watched a bunch of classic animated Disney movies in my childhood, and wasn’t really that impressed by them. Snowwhite, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocho, etc. Some of them in cinemas.
The reality is that, plainly, they aren’t that interesting as a modern animated movie. Plots are more complex in most modern titles, animation (and particularly the CGI) is getting more and more impressive by the year. Add that a lot of old movies decided they had to have some musical numbers in them. Some are memorable (Hi Ho in Snowwhite is great, as is Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo from Cinderella) and other just don’t care about.
Also a bunch of them are about Fairy Tales which…gets old.
That said, Pixar plots may be more complex nowadays, but they are also getting hella predictable. It’s honestly a shame that Inside Out is first place, since that movie is the most transparent of all manipulation movies by Pixar.
My theory is that there is more interconnectivity leading to a greater monoculture today than there was before.
Most of these really high scores depend entirely on receiving very few negative votes from viewers, or, more importantly, critics.
I can imagine that in the 1950s, some newspaper might hire some crotchety independent-minded critic who would shit on whatever seemingly popular movie just came out. I’m sure we can go back and find a few people panning Gone With The Wind or whatever. But today, it quickly becomes obvious what movies are supposed to be good and are supposed to be bad and there is great value in going along with the herd. A critic who routinely pans movies that every other critic loves will probably be fired. Doubly so if these movies are considered to be wholesome family pictures advancing all the right political agendas.
Animated Disney movies also self-select their own audiences probably more than any other genre does.
A critic who routinely pans movies that every other critic loves will probably be fired. Doubly so if these movies are considered to be wholesome family pictures advancing all the right political agendas.
Oooh, this is ringing a faint bell. Wasn’t there some minor fuss a few years back about allegations of major studies putting pressure on media outlets for favourable reviews of their films?
Thank you Google, looks like I was conflating two things: first, an online accusation about Disney bribing critics for good reviews and secondly, Disney did blacklist LA Times movie critics in what was perceived as tit-for-tat over an investigative story into the relationship between Disneyland and the city of Anaheim.
Eh, I’m not even going that far into conspiracy level. I’m just thinking that most film critics work for newspapers in a “pop culture” sort of role where they’re generally expected to entertain and make people feel good, rather than “speak truth to power” or whatever it is the regular journalists think they do.
If we already know that everyone loves Moana, it’s a big risk to trash it in your review, because you aren’t paid to attract controversy. In the 1950s, it wouldn’t be as controversial, because if you work for the Des Monies Register, there’s no way for anyone in Seattle to know (or reason to care) that you trashed a movie they loved. But today, when everyone uses these sorts of websites, the whole world will instantly know that you were the dangerous outlier. Individuals may try to smear you publicly, and your employer might reasonably say “We don’t really need this sort of controversy coming from our film and entertainment section.”
I suspect that the major studios have always tried to exert some form of pressure over critics, but I think today, they don’t really have to as much. They can rely on the public to do it for them.
I think the useful mental model (to cross threads) for thinking about this situation is a Keyesian beauty contest. You see this with pundits as well: Almost nobody judges a pundit by checking the accuracy of their explicit predictions over time; instead, people judge pundits by whether what they’re saying sounds reasonable *now*. Which is largely a function of what the other pundits are saying now, which is ….
This has probably always been true, but you can imagine reasons it might be more important now. (Though I don’t know if that’s true.)
I don’t know if this holds because there are far more niches now. 1950s Des Moines might not have been able to support more than one or two film critics. In this sense you are more pressured to follow local popular opinion, but now you can plausibly trash a popular movie and the 1% of people who hated that movie is enough to support you because you can draw from 100 million potential customers, instead of a few hundred thousand.
Perhaps there are some second order effects where once you have that audience you end up catering to them, but before that it seems more likely that freedom of opinion has increased.
I think the Keynesian beauty contest is really oversold as a useful model, and is a really bad model of markets. It almost entirely depends on information that you don’t have access to, and so you any actor who applies it is actually acting irrationally, not rationally.
Haven’t people been known to do that at times?
Rotten Tomatoes, as I understand it, aggregates reviews from both professional critics and from its userbase.
A film from before widespread access to the internet is presumably going to get a greater proportion of its reviews from professional critics, whereas a more recent film will get an overwhelming number of reviews from the users. Professional critics have an incentive to rate every film, because it’s their job; users have an incentive to only rate the film’s they feel very strongly about, because it’s a hobby.
Maybe my assumptions are wrong and the data points the other way, but I would expect post-internet films to dominate the lists of best and worst movies because they have the strongest responses from the userbase.
Isn’t the base rate for animated movies substantially higher in the last couple decades due to CGI? Even if older animated movies were on average better than newer ones, you would still expect we’re going to disproportionately see “great” movies from the recent animation bucket since we’re pumping out like 20 a year.
“Which 100 movies you should go see” is not the same question as “which 100 movies are best”. For the first, you generally want a recency bias, because you’re more likely to have seen an older movie (to a point, but the odds are long that recommendation culture will actually adapt to the fact that people rotate in and out of society any time soon). Most “top X” lists for almost any domain are actually used as “next X” selectors, and the creators of the list know that, so they have an incentive to be biased towards recent movies. Add some strong filtering effects created by the fact that the number of candidates for “best” is constantly increasing, and you’ve got a pretty clear explanation for the recency bias.
All this doesn’t even touch the fact that “which X are historically important” is yet another distinct question. Innovation leads to widespread adoption in a technological niche, and storytelling is a technological niche (with many, many sub-niches). Oedipus Rex is frankly a terrible story by modern standards, but it was highly influential, so if you want to know how literature (especially drama) developed it’s a critically important read, but if you want an entertaining story about the downfall of a well-intentioned but arrogant hero (or an entertaining mystery story) you should try something more recent, because you can probably find something that draws on Oedipus for a net gain over the original.
Lots more reviewers in recent times than historic average, thanks to the internet? Certainly more reviewers which are available to an aggregator – it is not like Rotten Tomatoes have staff going to the historic archives of lower bumfuck, West Virgina to see what the local newspapers reviewer thought of the film premieres of 1938.
I dont think its as strange as all that – a “top 100 movies” list is not a list of top movies of all time, but a list of the top movies as of today, for today’s audiences. Our sensibilities and expectations for movie quality, story tropes, themes of interest, etc, have all evolved and changed. While one of the things we do value is “historical import”, I dont think its the dominant value.
Thus modern movies would likely make up the majority of the list, as they will conform to that. To take your example, I think Snow White is trite, dull affair – its plot is barely even described as one, its musical numbers are simply independent songs that dont further the characters or the narrative, and while the animation does at least hold up its doesnt stand out. For the audience at the time though, “animated feature that looks good” is all they really wanted, that was enough to defy expectations given the newness of the media, and in fact a complicated plot would have been too much to take in. I dont think there is anything wrong with tastes changing.
Conversely, according to http://www.acclaimedmusic.net seven out of the ten best songs of all times came out in the 1960s.
But that’s not a bias, music was actually that much better back then. <gd&r>
Does the “post anything you want” policy applies to external link? Because in that case I would be interesting in sharing this little piece of mine about political theory and government seen under the lenses of dynamical system framework: https://medium.com/@valeriobiscione/governments-in-a-multidimensional-space-59e1c2751277
But, expecially, I would like to have opinion from anyone that takes those 6 minutes to read the piece.
Interesting piece, not sure the idea of attractors made a lot of sense to me/not sure I agree with it.
(Assuming I’m groking your piece) In ‘close to hell scenarios’ I’m not sure it makes sense to think about it as being attracted to total hell, to my mind it makes more sense to think about it as a system that’s out of equilibrium, which will likely settle on the first workable equilibrium, even if it’s not a particularly good one.
Hi phil, thank you for reading my piece.
yes, this is my current view as well. I don’t think that the worst possible government is actually a stable one, whereas a heaven government *may* be stable. But this is purely speculative and based only on personal intuition.
But even if you don’t agree about the hell government being an attractor, you may still agree that there are probably attractors, and that you can view the government as a dynamical system which movement is partially determined by it’s internal mechanism. That’s the concept I wanted to express 🙂
I am gathering interest on this idea, as ideally this topic would be really suited for agent-based simulation modelling.
This kinda reminds me of some old work I saw on simulating cells.
Living cells tend to be fairly stable most of the time, they’re fantastically complex and they’re governed by , in turn, the unchangeable characteristics of reality and physics, the generally slow to change genome of the organism and finally by the environment they find themselves in.
They contain a lot of regulatory systems, with repressors and promoters which get switched on and off as the levels of various enzymes and chemicals change.
So, there was an interesting paper a few years ago where a team tried to simulate human cells. A titanic task given that there’s still plenty we don’t fully understand. But they made a strong attempt using a large fraction of known regulatory systems.
This gave them what was basically a state machine.
One of the interesting outcomes was that they could then try setting things up with different initial levels and perturbing the system in various ways.
Most roads lead to apoptosis, self destruction, suicide.
But they did find various attractors, stable states that, if the state got close enough they’d end up in one of these stable states and a really nice result was that most of these stable states were equivalent to known major tissue types.
Of course in biology there’s no good/bad, heaven/hell.
If you imagine human nature, the ways humans respond to incentives and various fairly-non-mutable aspects of the human mind as the hard-to-change equivalent of genetics then you might have a similar situation for government types. You might find a large selection of stable organization types, outside which organizations either don’t last long before self destructing or tend towards one of those stable states.
Though governments live in a much more mutable universe. Tech advances can mean that what would have been an unstable government a few decades ago can be stable now because surveillance tech allows things which would have been impossible before.
That’s very interesting, and is exactly the same thing I would like to pursue, in terms of political theory. I feel that we as human strongly need a system of prediction for government’s trajectory.
On the other hand, is quite obvious that we are going to have trouble funding such a system: the government has no incentive to improve itself.
^ “…the government has no incentive to improve itself…”
@vaaal888,
As an employee of a government I wish that were true, but much to my annoyance ambitious or idealistic hire-up desk jockeys are continually issuing directives and memo’s to keep as from tried and true ways that work in favor of buggy reforms that keep us from doing the actual core purposes of our jobs (fixing things) and instead pile on additional paper work and useless meetings, delaying physical repairs.
Change is the enemy of progress!
Fascinating. Do you still have a link to that cell simulation paper?
I think it would help readers to grok your thesis if you made it more explicitly tangible.
You talk a little bit about the UK government and the Italian government, but you do so with a considerable degree of abstraction.
I think it would be a stronger piece if you picked a specific chain of events that actually happened, and described how you think those specific events demonstrated your more abstract principle.
After that, pick a specific state of the universe, and use your abstract principle, to make a falsifiable prediction about how you think that state will change.
(I think this sort of toggling back and forth between the tangible and the abstract is one thing SSC does really well)
Just a suggestion.
That’s a good idea. I am really uninterested in real world politics, I am more interested in meta-politics, but I think that I must put some effort if I want to convince anyone about my framework
Its a tricky thing to implement too,
lots of readers will just grasp onto whatever example you pick, and have opinions about those examples just at the object level, and never make it to your abstract level.
But its hard to get people to see the point of your abstract idea, if they don’t see the tangible effects.
Also, once you’ve made a prediction, readers will judge it based on whether or not it came true, despite it being a sample size of one regardless of the outcome.
I still think you should do this, abstractions are mainly valuable for the predictions they help us make.
The policy seems to be that occasional links to one’s own work are alright, but it shouldn’t happen in every post.
This policy is relaxed, I think, if your work is very popular.
Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed, but then I was already well familiar with the phase-space trajectory way of thinking, which was indeed a colossal insight the first time it was explained to me.
Coincidentally, I just read this highly relevant Caplan piece, which puts forth a hypothesis about government-space trajectories–a good concrete example of the kind of thinking you describe, whether or not one agreed with it on the once level.
Interesting, I arrived to these ideas completely independently. Do you remember who else supports them, a part from Bryan Caplan?
I’m not sure I’ve seen it explicitly spelled out to look at politics this way, though IIRC some of Scott’s Moloch stuff gestures in the direction.
But mostly I encountered it through physics and internalized it enough that it’s intuitive to look at politics that way. I don’t remember exactly where–I read a bunch of popular-science books in high school (I think one of the Science of Discworld books may have covered phase space?), then studied it formally in college, and emerged with the phase-space view firmly in my conceptual toolkit. It’s pretty much the only way to make a lick of sense of quantum physics IMO. Theoretical computer science also might have helped, what with the examination of state machines.
The wiki on ‘phase space’ should give you some idea of how the concept works in STEM if you aren’t familiar.
The attractor state stuff is one of the reasons I drifted away from libertarianism; it isn’t a stable state of affairs, and there are many different attractors surrounding a libertarian state. The state we have appears to be one of the least bad attractors, so resetting to libertarianism runs the risk of falling into a worse state.
I disagree that the starting state defines a trajectory, however. I would say it is more that the starting state makes certain trajectories more likely. I also disagree that we can predict the final state; if you reset the US government to its state as of 1890, to pick a year mostly at random, you wouldn’t arrive back to 1990s era US government after a century. The social context has changed.
A key element in this is that technology advances – this includes both technology of statecraft, and anti-statecraft (criminal, basically) technology. You can’t roll back the statecraft technology and expect to return to a previous state; the anti-statecraft technology has rendered the previous state of statecraft technology obsolete in a way that it wasn’t, in it’s own time.
The tax code is a good place to look at this: If a tax law worked for a century, then somebody discovered a loophole in it, the tax law no longer works. You can’t get rid of the law that closed the loophole and expect tax to work the same way anymore.
Anti-statecraft technologies are a good example of an unpredictable element influencing trajectory. There are many more.
you are right: a more correct model would be that of a probabilistic dynamical system, where there is a probability distribution of trajectory. I am not sure about the mathematical formalism involved in these types of model, though…
The state we have now is not an attractor. It is neither static nor orbiting an attractor, but exhibiting secular movement along several axes. Some of which are pleasant, others not so much, and some (e.g. debt-to-GDP increasing without bound) seem positively apocalyptic.
It may be that there is no attractor, that the old theories of cyclic rise and collapse are fundamentally true. If so, the best you can do is target the beginning of the good-government period of the cycle, get to that stage ASAP and then try to at least slow Cthulhu/Moloch’s inevitable “progress” thereafter.
This is how I understood Orwell’s 1984, as being about a scary idea that all governments converge into an attractor state of absolute repression, rather than merely being an anti-leninist pamphlet like Asimov thought.
Count me among those who think the appendix implies that while such a state is an attractor, it’s neither inevitable nor inescapable.
Asimov was a fan of some sort of cosey soft urban totalitarianism, where there was one state that had also rolled up all economic activity up into itself, and if there were any corporations at all, they were about as tightly welded to the One State as Ma Bell was to the US government.
Asimov is an author that does not improve in the rereading as I get older.
Sometime back I reread a pretty good Asimov novel, I think the first of the robot detective ones, and a Heinlein juvenile, Podkayne of Mars. The Heinlein came across as much better.
@vaaal888
I’m probably too poor of a reader to get what you meant.
Government as attractor?
Multidimensional space of government?
Sorry, it went past me.
Just math jargon. An attractor is a region in a chaotic system that that system tends to settle into over time; if you get near the attractor you tend to fall into it, and if you start inside the attractor you tend to stay in it. Depending on the system it can be a point or a volume or something more complicated. Saying that government is an attractor is saying that once something’s a government it tends to stay a government unless it gets really out of whack for some reason, and also that things that aren’t governments but are similar to them, will tend to evolve into governments.
Similarly, the “multidimensional space of government” is a mathematical way of visualizing all the different possible governments. Math and physics have this concept of configuration spaces, where you take all the ways a particular system can vary and map them to dimensions in a (usually high-dimensional) space; this has lots of useful properties. For example, you could imagine a configuration space for In-N-Out hamburgers in two dimensions, with slices of cheese on one dimension and burger patties on the other; (0,1) in that space then would indicate a plain hamburger, and (2,2) a Double-Double.
^ “Just math jargon. An attractor is a region in a chaotic system that…”
Thanks @Nornagest,
Sadly, it’s stuff past my education level.
I understand, sorry if it wasn’t clear. I certainly don’t use math formalism to confuse people, just to make it clearer, but it doesn’t always work
“I understand, sorry if it wasn’t clear. I certainly don’t use math formalism to confuse people, just to make it clearer, but it doesn’t always work”
No need to apologize @vaaal888, I think I just have far less formelly education than the majority of SSC commenters so stuff will go over my head that others will catch.
The claim is that:
Some governments change. Other governments are black holes – the closer you are, the faster they suck you in, and the harder it is to escape. Once you get too close it’s impossible to escape, and you’re stuck there. If you want to change things at that point, it’s going to take a revolution. You’ll have to start over. (If you don’t want things to end up where they started, you should make the new government far away from that black hole.) Additionally, maybe some ‘black holes’ are nice, while some definitely aren’t.
Suppose half the population of the world suddenly fades to ash in a few seconds. Now obviously their disappearances will cause secondary deaths; uncontrolled cars will hit people, unlucky planes crash if their pilot and co-pilot fade, surgeons die mid operation etc. So how many causalities does this event ultimately produce?
I’d guess the secondary casualties amount to a few percent of the world’s population. At any one time, one third of the world is asleep. Another quarter of the time, people are at work or in school, generally doing things where their disappearance does not immediately kill anyone. Most of the casualties will probably come from passengers in cars whose driver vanished or in cars hit by driverless cars. That doesn’t sound like a big group, particularly since cars without a driver don’t usually keep going. With no foot on the gas pedal, a modern car glides to a stop.
Cars with a manual transmission will keep going as long as they’re in gear, even with no foot on any of the pedals. That hasn’t changed recently, as far as I’m aware.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m thinking a manual car will come to a stop much faster than most automatic cars, because the automatic cars seem to shift into neutral (or something) when you take your foot off the pedal and then even as they approach a stop the torque converter still keeps you going at like 1mph or something, while the manual car will first slow due to engine compression and then stall.
If there is no foot on the gas the manual car will come to a stop much quicker than the automatic. And if the driver of an automatic that is stopped vanishes, it will start to move forward. The manual will stall or sit there idle depending on what the gear position was. (or roll downhill…)
A quick search reveals cars in the US are overwhelmingly automatic (about 96%), while most cars worldwide are manual (80%). So this would be an interesting case where the US has a different immediate dead-driver experience from the rest of the world.
However, a manual car with no acceleration will quickly go slower until it stalls out if it’s higher than first gear. A car in first gear will trundle along at 5-10 mph until it either runs out of fuel or bonks into a tree or something.
One huge factor is the time of day at which the ash event occurs. Whose rush hour does it occur on? This will determine where the most driverless cars turn up, and in the case of manuals, what gear they’re likely in.
Expect several thousand cars drifting out of their lane at that point. This isn’t terribly dangerous to the drivers left, although it’ll be very noticeable and scary. Most people will either shift one lane over to give room, or hit their brakes, and possibly be rear-ended by a wandering car behind them. Cars on the highway will stall out, probably just smashing together on one side of the highway or the other, while drivers watch in stunned amazement. Cars on busy non-divided streets will be in the worst situation, as some will drift across the center line before drivers can realize what’s happening and pull over. However, the stall should happen sooner in those cases – 25-45 mph zones vs. 55+.
I don’t think this will amount to even 1% extra casualties, however. It’ll mostly be a lot of random property damage.
Is this normal? My car will certainly stall in first gear, probably more readily than in higher gears even.
This is based on experience. I used to drive a truck in first gear on the farm when I was three years old, while my dad pitched hay out the back. I couldn’t reach the pedal, but all I had to do was steer.
I think you are underestimating how much active management of cars goes on and how quickly everything will go to shit. For an example when you merge onto a highway the car behind you often slows down a little to increase the space, but they only slow down a little and expect you to keep accelerating. If the merger (on a busy highway) is one of the people disappearing then the car behind them is going to suddenly hit the brakes and any car behind them without a driver is going to hit them well before they have slowed below a critical speed.
This is happening all the time, people are changing lanes, drifting and correcting slightly and getting on and off the highway. Once or twice a week (and I don’t have a commute) I find myself making an opening for another driver who seems to have misjudged, isn’t paying attention or is accustomed to people giving them space. Drivers suddenly disappearing will make all of these things way more dangerous.
Shouldn’t you also factor casualties caused by drivers who were NOT turned to ash, but had passengers who did and freaked out because it’s the most obvious reaction to something like this.
Likewise for surgeons and anyone else performing life-or-death activities that require intense focus.
Also any patients that die from infection due to ash getting in their open surgery because an attending got ashed.
Cars going downhill will presumably keep going until they hit something.
Nice try, Thanos.
Hey I don’t want to overkill here, it’s not exactly a 50:50 split if another 20% of the population dies in the next few years.
There’s an immediate collateral damage effect, and a longer-term effect.
Immediate:
About 1/4 of passenger planes will lose both pilot and copilot, all at once. I suspect this will lead to a fair number of plane crashes, as the (50% diminished) air traffic control folks will be overwhelmed with requests for help.
Every busy highway will become a massive pile-up of death–half the cars just went driverless and crashed, and the rest were the targets/victims. The emergency services are missing half their people, and anyway can’t get through the wreckage to get to people in the middle.
I don’t know how many people that will be–probably not a huge number, but plenty.
Longer-term, I’d expect:
a. Suicide from (say) a mom who had both her kids disintegrate in front of her eyes. If you assume most people have a network of (say) four people who are the most important to them, 1/16 of those people will have lost everyone important to them. A lot of them will help Thanos’ project along a bit.
b. Dependents who die because everyone who was caring for them disappeared.
This is probably a big problem for the couple weeks afterward, but not for a year later. But there will be, for example, babies that have both parents evaporate and then they starve to death in their crib.
Still longer term, there’s social disruption. We have half the population and half the workers, so we *can* get back into balance, but you’d expect things to be pretty rough for a few years till we managed it. There are historical examples where lots of people died in a short time, but I don’t know how many are relevant here. You could imagine this leading to wars or chaos, though I’d expect it wouldn’t be quite that bad.
In that social disruption, you’d also expect to see less available resources for dealing with people with edge-case needs. Cancer patients die because the whole economic network making their super-expensive targeted monoclonal antibody cancer treatment breaks down, and their cancer isn’t responsive to the cheaper still-available broad chemotherapy agents. People on the ISS or research stations in Antarctica stop getting resupply and don’t have a ride home.
I suspect this wouldn’t be a large fraction of survivors, unless you got full blown collapse / civil war. If you stop being able to make targeted monocolonal antibody therapies, you lose a small number of people; if you stop being able to make antibiotics, you lose lots and lots of people.
Doesn’t that depend on the distribution of which people are important to how many and which others at once?
Why didn’t Thanos just directly put an end to the conditions besides population that caused suffering?
Why didn’t any of the heroes who had the chance to talk with Thanos suggest this?
All of said heroes were previously undefeated. They aren’t accustomed to negotiating with villains.
Judging from the human experience, he could have simply magicked effective birth control into existence along with piles of wealth usable by each species individually–that would have also cut population, and in a longer-term way than wiping out half the population of the galaxy.
Because Thanos is insane (in a more interesting way than world destroyers usually are). He’s become so enamoured with the image of “This has to be done and I’m the only one who has the will to do it” that he can’t consider these less drastic options, and if someone suggests it he’ll brush them off as a weak willed fool trying to weasel out of what has to be done.
That makes sense, but the movie, from my point of view (it’s possible I was drinking), seemed to portray him as both saneish and sympathetic, and even smart, except that his plan was stupid. I wish they could have made him less sane while preserving sympathy for him. I may rewrite my head canon to fit.
Hollywood is gonna have a tough time making a villain with Malthusian impulses seem truly evil. For, uh, reasons…
I suspect the number of casualties is large; almost 100%. For example it’s not like we have only 50% of the farms that existed before. We have 100% of the farms, each of them with only half the number of required employees. Likewise for power stations, transportation, communication. All of these services would fail until they managed to adapt. The world would have to reorganize itself into a world that was half the size, and it would have to do so before everybody starved to death. I think this is pretty unlikely to happen, especially if we lose power and electronic communication.
I’m inclined to disagree. For farms, we still have half the farm workers. Maybe they can only farm about half the area, but the rest of it will just go wild – no biggie. Transportation is probably fine. We still have half the bus drivers and train drivers, and we still have some people in organisational roles who should be able to figure out some kind of timetable based on half staff.
Power stations and communication I’m not sure about. But I suspect they’d be able to limp on with people working large amounts of overtime until the whole thing can be scaled down effectively.
Yeah, we only need half as much food, so if we can figure out how to keep half the farms working, we should be good.
Agreed w/ albatross. The food system in much of the world would be one of the few bright spots in the whole exercise. You have half the labor but only half the demand – and you get to use 100% of the land, 100% of the equipment, and 100% of the inputs! For the upcoming season, you can immediately stop using all of your marginal & overfarmed land, focus on the best land and plant it with the best seeds & the recommended amounts of other inputs almost regardless of your economic situation prior to the event, and if your community didn’t have enough tractors & combines before, it sure does now.
And remember, even if you don’t have enough labor to harvest all the crop in the ground, that doesn’t matter – you only need half of it (and you can – obviously – get more than 50% of the crop from the best 50%+ of the land that you can harvest with 50% of the labor and 100% of the equipment).
Yes, advanced economies will suffer severely from transport disruptions post-harvest, but staple grains will be in abundance and the several billion people still living in smallholder farming communities will experience a time of agrarian prosperity the likes of which they’ve never seen before.
In fact, it strikes me that a place like Ethiopia will come out of this relatively better than almost anywhere else:
– Almost no motor vehicles on the ground or in the air (I would say probably 1,000 Ethiopian citizens are in the air at a given time, and that’s only if it’s daytime in Ethiopia!)
– The government has made vast investments in decentralized provision of basic health & ag extension services, such that every village has between 3-5 of each and they are at that part of the ‘S-curve’ where most gains in living standards are coming from knowledge and basic health & ag inputs rather than advanced inputs & high tech equipment – so with 1-3 ag & health workers still left in each village, plus 100% of the health facilities, medicine stocks, grain storage, basic ag machinery, you are looking at windfall gains when you stop relying on the worst 50% of your land
– plus that worst 50% of the land is still the source of basically all disputes today in the country, so that immediately goes away
Ethiopia’s major imports are petroleum (cars will be an issue but they’ve got plenty of hydro for electricity with only 50% of the demand), palm oil (but they have sunflower & soy, so this is fine), sugar (but they have beets, so again fine), and heavy machinery to support their construction boom (…plenty of vacancy now), so they’re basically fine on that front as well.
You can make the opposite argument, the closer you are to subsistence the smaller the hit you can take. Americans can have their real purchasing power cut in half and still afford enough calories to live, that is a lot less true in Ethiopia.
Eventually but currently in the US staples are shipped from long distances. Farmers markets tend to grow specialty items with few things that could be turned into staples, and the mid west is heavily dependent on fertilizers produced elsewhere and modern irrigation which requires quite a bit of functioning infrastructure.
Maybe, but a lot of these communities would suffer immensely and just disappear with half their population gone.
In the long run, if you survive the transition, farming should be fine. The transition though is really rough. every major highway is going to be blocked, only places with virtually no traffic and long straight shots or bumper to bumper traffic will be without massive fatalities. Every car that is going into a bend at the time of the disintegration is going to crash well before it slows down significantly, and every driver that sees such a crash is going to hit their brakes. Massive pileups are rare because when you hit your brakes the guy behind you probably hit his, if half of the cars behind you lose their drivers and don’t hit their brakes and some of those are going to be semis going 60+ miles per hour. Its going to be a horrific minute.
After that minute there are going to be few ways in or out of these major cities, and there is going to be mass panic and no organizational structures.
The cities that get it the worst timing and luck wise are probably just going to burn, cities that get it mildly bad are going to be looking at the worst disaster ever and aren’t going to be shipping food, water and equipment out to help these cities.
How would you clear busy highways of a bunch of stranded, abandoned cars anyway? Would you have to slowly tow all the cars off the road or something?
If every car was a stick shift you could drive a lot of them out of they way, even if it was just over to the shoulder etc because they would stall out and their engines would stop. Any automatic that wasn’t in a serious enough accident to stop its engine would idle until they ran out of gas meaning you are towing or bringing gas for each of them.
Moving cars is doable, but a jack knifed semi takes a lot of time to clear with emergency personal and experienced tow truck drivers. I can’t even imagine how long it would take if you also have dozens of cars piled up on both sides of the truck and probably rotting corpses to boot.
If you’re trying to pretend the world hasn’t gone mad, you have to tow them all and keep track of where they went and all that, and this will take a very long time. But if you’re treating it as an emergency, a large plow will clear all but the urban highways expeditiously (you just shove the cars off to the side or into the median, and worry about complete cleanup later). For the urban highways you might need a mobile crane (because there’s no place to push the cars), but most likely you can get a path cleared with just your plow.
If you’re going to do this, have fun with it. The ultimate mobile crane and a set of designated drop zones near the highways you want to clear.
I’m hoping both Adam and Jamie will survive, because it won’t be nearly as much fun with only one.
Alternately, have one of the better Junkyard Wars teams build a mobile auto-trebuchet.
Snowplows are remarkably good for beating traffic, as seen on Mythbusters.
Google says that either 660K or 1.2M people in the air at any moment. Let’s go with the higher number and 300K people die because both pilots in their plane die. I guess a small number will be able to land safely anyway thanks to luckily having another pilot between the passengers, but also a bunch of planes where only the pilot dies may crash if the copilot cannot do anything to fix it (mainly for planes in an crucial part of the flight, like landing). I guess that another problem is having half the ATCs, plus panic in the remaining ones, so people in the air may have trouble landing.
But it is not a lot of people.
The number for cars is harder to estimate.
Don’t forget that half the passengers on the planes went to ash, so there are only 150K people dying in plane crashes.
Oh, great catch!
I think planes might be safer than people imagine; IIRC they run almost entirely on autopilot for the middle parts of the flight, so really there’s a window of at least a few hours during which there’s a chance for information to be transmitted to any of the remaining passengers as to how best to land their plane (and I imagine communications networks don’t have so many points of failure that they’d stop working in the immediate aftermath).
Too bad about those secure cabin doors.
Is there a particular part of the world that’s affected or is a vertical slice of the population (half of all occupations)?
I agree with others and go with the 50% going to 53%
It’s a reference to the last Avengers movie. And it’s a random half of the population. Every person has a coin toss whether they survive, everybody goes up in ashes at mostly the same time.
Then you won’t really get a vertical slice. Some subgroups are going to be completely wiped out (hope they’re not doing anything very important). Some are going to be entirely spared. Lucky. At first. And then someone starts pointedly asking why *somehow* the one jewish family in town, or the police department, or the next village down the road had not a single loss, although every one else had. My guess is it will get ugly fast. (It need not even be true! Although it might well be).
And of course it works at every scale, all the way up to the states : probably unrealistic to expect any country to be wholly spared but it’s likely at least one, especially one of the small ones, gets, say, only 25% killed in the Event. And what do you know, the toll is way worse than average for their ancestral enemies. Did Elbonia unleash a terrible secret weapon on the world, with no regard for innocent casualties? And how can we trust them not to do it again, if they were willing to sacrifice a quarter of their own? Oh, no proof, OK, I guess a wizard did it then?
I think you’re underestimating the power of large numbers.
The probability of tossing a coin 10 times and getting at least 7 heads is 17.2%. The probability of tossing a coin 100 times and getting at least 70 heads is much smaller: 0.0039%. The probability of tossing a coin 1 million times and getting at least 0.7 million heads is so small Wolfram Alpha can’t calculate it.
A small country of a million people will definitely not have only 25% of its population killed. Even the least populous country in the world (The Vatican, population 800) has only about a 10^-47 chance of having 25% or less of its population killed.
A town of 10,000 will lose between 49,000 and 51,000 (95% certainty).
A town of 100,000 will lose between 490,000 and 510,000 (99.5% certainty).
So yes, you will see “that one family were all spared” but you will not see “that one town had only 25% casualty rate”. Nowhere in the world. This doesn’t scale like you might expect.
Advanced large numbers homework problem:
How many planets with populations of 5 billion would you have to have before you achieved a 50% chance of a planet existing with zero casualties?
ETA:
A hint: The odds against a planet surviving without casualties:
Bar va (gra gb gur cbjre bs bar cbvag svir ovyyvba, nccebkvzngryl.)
That’s fair, my gut feeling was wrong, it does not scale up. So maybe many local dustups (heh) at most.
If there were enough planets for there to be a 50% chance of one with zero casualties out of at least 5 billion, then there would be no need for Thanos to carry out his plan.
This seems to hold regardless of the probability of any one person being ashed.
This is basically the plot of Y: The Last Man, in which all the men on earth (except the protagonist) die all at once and society has to restructure itself. I don’t remember what death toll was given in the story but it’s a pretty good series so if anyone’s into comics I recommend it.
The death toll for all men dying would be far worse than if a randomly selected half of the population dies. There are so many crucially important jobs that are done almost entirely by men. For starters, you can expect the power grid to fail, with all of the dire cosequences associated with that.
And the toll for all women dying would be the end of the species.
This would depend in part on which 50% suddenly fade to ash.
I’d expect 3 main causes of death:
– immediate secondary deaths – passengers, people hit by cars, planes, etc; helpless people whose carer vanishes who aren’t found in time, etc.
– suicide and other violence, as survivors freak out
– failures of complex systems which are no longer viable. At 50% it’s not especially likely to lose all of any particular type of skill, but plenty of settlements and businesses will become non-viable, and depending on the results of the freak out stage, this could get worse than it looks at first glance.
I don’t feel capable of estimating the numbers here. We’ve had other cases of death rates in the 50% range in various times and places, e.g. due to epidemics. It might be informative to examine those cases, but many (most) are very badly documented.
Yes, there are going to be a lot of cases where you think you’ve got recovery well under way and then, e.g., there are no more spare framistat modulators for medical CT scanners anywhere, because everyone went to the same sub-sub-tier contractor for one key bit and their survivors weren’t able to keep the firm running. So now you get to reinvent the wheel, from incomplete documentation, with people dying while you wait. Repeat x10,000.
I don’t think this is much of a concern, if most of the infrastructure is fine there will be tons of capital to raid and there shouldn’t be a sudden shortage of many things.
I think the big concern is maintenance of major infrastructure points. How long can the Hoover Dam be abandoned before something catastrophic happens? Levies along the Mississippi? Can you even repair some of these things if they start to fail with half the population and X% of GDP left.
In the short term, there are at least four networks that we depend on, and if one fails the others fail, or become difficult to repair:
mobile/cellular network
road network
power
fuel
It’s important to note that even for extremely important jobs, like running a fuel depot and delivering fuel, you aren’t going to get more than 20% of your workforce to show up in the first few days. Most of the survivors won’t be able to get to work as they likely have to commute 15+ miles over blocked roads. Others won’t come as they need to protect family from looting, are hundreds or thousands of miles away, or died/injured.
Trying to unblock the roads without a good fuel supply will be impossible. Delivering fuel to critical infrastructure will be impossible. If anything critical breaks, getting parts ordered and delivered with either no fuel, blocked roads, or no communication won’t be possible. Delivering anything in general will be tough because most of the trucks will be stuck or crashed on the roads, and nothing by air.
If it happened during the summer, California would be entirely on fire due to the hundreds of plane crashes and hundreds of thousands of car crashes. Refugees from California would be flooding toward the north I suppose, if they could get there between the fires, the blocked roads, the traffic jams.
I think secondary deaths would be extremely high because I wouldn’t expect most pilots, drivers or surgeons who didn’t get turned to ash but saw someone else do to be able to stay focused.
ISTR some term like “the second kill” to describe this, in the old SF-ish _Earth Abides_.
I’d guess most of the world’s population over the next few years – I think that society, and hence food production, would probably collapse messily in the aftermath.
I’m noticing that none of the replies so far really mention crime and looting. Perhaps keeping people from doing wrong is just an example of a critical subsystem that can become disrupted, but I think this one is different in a key way. There’s a psychological common knowledge sort of barrier that keeps most people in most parts of the world from breaking stuff and stealing stuff and so on. It’s not pure force that keeps people from open wrongdoing, and it isn’t the pure goodness of human nature. It’s some combination of legitimacy of the law, habit, the belief you’d get caught, and so on. If that gets disrupted badly enough things get ugly fast, especially once you factor in desperation.
Another factor would be protests that someone fix things, as opposed to finding constructive ways to help.
Those things might make the cooperation necessary to get things running again harder or even impossible in enough areas to really drive up the casualties beyond the first hour.
One conceptual issue is that when one thing goes wrong there is a fairly obvious point that you can fix, or at least manage. If half of your staff calls out sick one morning you can figure out what to ignore and just suffer through a couple of rough days. If half your staff doesn’t show up, plus none of your deliveries, plus there are downed power lines everywhere from cars running into telephone poles, plus general panic, fear and hysteria what exactly do you do? Where do you start?
Yeah. I don’t really know what would happen there. With enough unclaimed property, there’s little need for looting, but at least at the freak out stage, no one’s going to be acting rationally, even those who think they are 🙁
I suspect it will depend a lot on local (sub)culture, grievances, etc. Personality too, in individual cases. Not everyone has much desire to do wrong, or for that matter to behave illegally (not the same thing). Or their desires are very specific, and not affected by this kind of catastrophe.
Desperation matters too – but remember, there will be twice as many resources per person available immediately after this event than there were before, minus those destroyed during the event itself (cars, planes, etc. and things they hit). And many people/cultures regard it as perfectly OK to use other peoples’ resources without asking in a true emergency. (E.g. breaking into a vacant house to shelter from a storm, in the absence of a better option.)
Mostly I think real crime/bad behaviour will be people acting out from hopelessness/despair/general freak out. Plus those who first crawl into a bottle because of freak out, and prove to be violent drunks.
Food is going to be the big looting item if highways shut down even for a few days.
That will be a problem, but it will be mitigated by the >50% of the population who are no longer demanding food.
Are there historical examples where we can see anything like a 50% die off? Wikipedia says the Black Death is estimated to have killed between 30%-60% of the European population, so maybe that’s a starting model, though the situation is different enough I’m not sure how much we can learn from it.
Wikipedia also claims that the USSR lost something like 13% of its population in WW2, I guess from some mix of war and famine. And nearly a fifth of the Polish population died in the war, about three million of whom were Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
I’m not sure how to use any of those as models, since they happened across many years. But the fact that Poland and the Soviet Union continued to exist as functioning societies after that death toll (and surrounding destruction from the war) suggests that the Earth would probably manage a sudden 50% death toll plus surrounding collateral damage.
Where else might we look for examples?
This makes some sense at a very high theoretical level. But let’s get practical for a second.
Consider a non-wealthy family that has ~5 days worth of food stored in their pantry. Given the general state of chaos, it’s quite likely that their source of income is in chaos and they aren’t back to work at a place able to pay them. Even if they have savings, it’s not likely to be in the form of “cash in the mattress” and they may not be able to access it. Assuming that the grocery stores are up and running and the distribution networks are back in gear to replenish them.
What are they going to do on Day 6? The fact that there’s a lot more available farmland per person, or the fact that there’s a lot more food stored in some warehouse somewhere per person does them little to no good. They still need food and have virtually no means to obtain it, aside from looting.
More likely than this though is that the criminally inclined see this coming, and start their looting on Day 1. Any locations known to have large stockpiles of high-value items that aren’t well secured (and I mean like, armed guards willing to fight security, not a latching gate) get taken over by aspiring warlords quick. Perhaps the warlords are willing to trade some food to starving families, but the terms are likely not favorable, as the families might not have much of value that the warlords actually want.
@Matt M
Good news is it’s now ~10 days cos half the family is dead!
Fun fact about disaster response: this almost never happens.
The idea that social morality is nothing but a veneer over selfish impulses is absolutely not born out in historical diaster response. Instead it’s overwhelmingly true that people express a desire to help others and put forth tremendous effort for little or no personal gain, particularly in their local communties. While disaster profiteering absolutely does happen, among communities directly impacted by disasters, sharing and self-sacrifice are extremely common, while taking more than one needs from communal unprotected resources is quite rare.
I’d be interested to know how this works when the disaster is several orders of magnitude larger than any other disaster ever experienced in the history of mankind, one where quick and speedy recovery is assumed to be impossible, and where a return to the previous status quo is, shall we say, unlikely.
There are good reasons not to loot during a hurricane. Mainly that as crazy and chaotic as things seem in the middle of it, they’ll be back to normal enough such that the government will regain control and will heavily punish such behavior within a manner of days. Furthermore, the community will re-establish itself and those who behaved badly will be punished socially, even if not literally jailed.
I mean, I’d be interested too, but it seems more reasonable that people would behave in a manner consistent with previous disasters – especially when the major sources of disruption can be addressed pretty effectively by people sinply being willing to do necessary work. Evidence shows that in such situations, people are generally willing to pitch in, and unwilling to mercilessly exploit common resources.
Forgive me for saying so, but I find it *incredibly* strange that you of all people would assume that:
A – people will immediately start cleaning out grocery stores with guns
B – nobody will be willing to stop people from cleaning out grocery stores with guns
C – nobody will organize to punish the people who clean out grocery stores with guns
Finally, why on Earth would the community fail to re-establish itself? People are *dead*, but the survivors aren’t scattered across the Earth. People tend to rely on their existing communities in situations like that.
Matt M:
One thing about this disaster is that there would still be an existing government, police force, legal system, etc. They wouldn’t be able to call on the state cops or national guard to help them if they got in over their heads, but they would have the legitimacy to, say, deputize some respectable surviving members of the community, impose a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and enforce laws.
In the US, there are governments at basically every level–city, county, state, federal. So if the mayor is still alive, he’s got the legitimacy and moral authority and probably the willingness of city employees (especially cops) to take his orders. That means if he’s not a complete idiot, he can probably respond to the crisis in ways that will make things better fairly quickly. He can tell the road dept. to start clearing the highways, maybe set up some kind of food rationing, start organizing to care for kids left with no parents, etc.
I think panic and civil disorder would make everything a hell of a lot worse. I imagine that this kind of disaster would end up with some places getting the kind of leadership they needed and basically muddling through, and other places kind-of falling apart. The local political leaders who survive are utterly inept or are driven crazy by the situation or are in some godawful power struggle, and they make a mess of the situation. On the other hand, places where there’s order and some kind of continuity of government will still be capable of functioning. They may have problems with supplies from far away, but that’s a lot easier to deal with when you’ve actually got someone more-or-less in charge who can make decisions, contact other people still maintaining order, etc.
I suppose a few places might keep order, and I agree with whoever above said that pre-existing organized militaries would probably be best positioned to “handle” this sort of thing.
That isn’t at all clear. Military units that suffer ~50% casualties in short order usually become combat-ineffective due to demoralization, often with rapid desertion as the survivors take an “every man for himself” attitude and exhibit a complete disregard for the moral authority of their commanders to order anything different. And the forces which do retain some measure of integrity at 50+% casualties, usually benefit from a clear understanding of how those casualties happened and how their staying in the fight can prevent further catastrophe.
The idea that if 50% of a police department spontaneously combusts, the remaining cops will be walking a beat and keeping order the next day, is unproven and dubious. Likewise the bit where everybody else will accept the moral authority of a mayor or chief of police who couldn’t keep half the force from being ashified and the other half from deserting.
To be fair half of those mayors and police chiefs aren’t around anymore.
John Shilling:
That isn’t at all clear. Military units that suffer ~50% casualties in short order usually become combat-ineffective due to demoralization, often with rapid desertion as the survivors take an “every man for himself” attitude and exhibit a complete disregard for the moral authority of their commanders to order anything different.
Do you really think you can extrapolate from soldiers at war who take 50% casualties then decide to escape the war to soldiers in garrison after an event where the entire world has taken 50% fatalities and there is no apparent escape?
Where will they run to?
The crime element would be beyond anything we can imagine.
Picture the inhabitants of a massive Beverly Hills Mansion vanishing. Some survivors could take over the mansion, and defend it with guns. Who’s going to stop them? The police will be far too busy. The courts will be overworked for decades trying to process all the inheritances. Stuff like this could happen everywhere for years until some sort of equilibrium is established and order restored.
And that’s when the Avengers finally save the day and release everyone from the soul stone!
Does it matter though? The aggressive up-sizing is definitely illegal but something like an eighth of all homes were just vacated and the property market crashed overnight. The police have a lot more pressing issues than a couple squatters with guns taking over a near worthless McMansion. I’m sure the courts will take an interest in a few years when they get around to the case, but it’s not a pressing survival or even an economic issue.
Courts? If this happens I expect organizations which are relatively resilient to losing half their people to take over. That means IBM, Colgate-Palmolive, 3M, Google, GE, Micr.. no, no, really it means militaries.
Government agencies seem to have the largest proportion of “make-work drones” to “actually essential personnel”, so in that sense they are probably more resilient than e.g. Google. Then again they are less adaptable. Tough call.
Zero because it gets retconned away in the next movie. Or, like, maybe 6 or so, depending on who is done with their contracts.
Yeah, the probability of Marvel leaving Spiderman and Black Panther as piles of ashes on the ground is very small.
Awww, no ranked/approval voting for the contest entries?
Yes, it was really hard to decide between some of the candidates, and ranked/approval would be a lot better to express what I think. Not to mention that one would expect something more sophisticated from a rationalist blog, especially given all the talk about how first-past-the-post is a terrible system 🙂
(That said, good job Scott and all of the contestants! It was a very interesting initiative worth repeating.)
+1
I kind of wish there’d been an adversarial collaboration entry on “first past the post is a terrible voting system”.
Isn’t there broad agreement that it is a terrible system?
That’s not the point. The point is that it would make Scott more confused about deciding how to set up the vote for the winner of the contest.
“Approval voting is a better FPtP replacement than IRV” could be an interesting one, although my opinion on it is actually “it depends on what you’re doing with the vote”.
Let’s have a vote on this.
Excellent plan.
I was seriously considering doing one on “ranked choice voting is in practice the best proposal for fixing FPTP in English-speaking countries (that is, especially the US, but also UK and Canada).” I would have been the voice against, and I know plenty of people qualified to be pro.
Seriously, Scott: choose-one voting is horrible, and you could have easily used star.vote, OR used google forms and publicly-available spreadsheet code for running STAR voting, to have something better.
I’m assuming you’re not arguing for status quo FPTP, so what’s your position and what do you think it does better than ranked choice?
Man I would have loved to see this collaboration. Hell if we do this again, I’ll sponsor 50 bucks towards the topic.
I support FPTP in some cases. Including US elections.
I’d be tentatively interested in taking the pro-IRV side in an IRV vs STAR collaboration. Post it next time there’s a contest starting up?
My impression is that ranked pairs seems better than IRV, and if I had to pick a voting method, I’d probably go with ranked pairs.
I’ll take “‘first past the post’ is a terrible name for the voting system it purports to describe”. There’s no “post”, since a candidate can get elected with any number or percentage of votes so long as they got more than any other candidate, and there’s a “first” only in the loosest possible sense of one candidate getting more votes than the others. The system actually described by the name is one where “votes” are cast and tallied over an extended period of time (e.g. by circulating petitions) and the first candidate to hit the required vote tally gets the office.
Instead of “first past the post”, I strongly prefer “plurality” or (if more precision is necessary) “single-member plurality” as a name for the system. It has the virtue of actually describing the key characteristic of the system: the single candidate who receives a plurality of the votes cast is elected.
I think it’s evocative. The most common way of winning is to reach “the post” of 50% + one vote, and after that happens the rest of the votes are irrelevant. The analogy to a foot race is self-explanatory. Whereas the problem with “plurality” is that almost nobody knows what it means.
I suppose you could be more accurate by calling it “first past the post or whoever got closest to the post” but that’s a bit of a mouthful.
Highest hammer hit or first ring? Still a bit of a mouthful I guess.
Counterpoint: I know what plurality means because I have taken US government classes in school, but I’ve always struggled to remember what “the post” is supposed to refer to in “first past the post.”
Also, no candidate passed the 50% “post” in the US ’92, ’96, ’00, or ’16 US presidential elections, so at least for that significant example it’s not really the most common way of winning.
If 50%+1 is the post, then we’re talking about something like the election procedure prescribed in Robert’s Rules of Order, where if there’s no majority, you hold successive ballots until a majority somehow emerges.
And I don’t think you get to name the election procedure based on rounding up to a “normal” case where the winner has a clear majority of votes (or first-place votes). Plurality, Instant Runoff, Bucklin, Condorcet, and RRO all look pretty much the same when there’s a clear majority.
Google trends seems to think that “plurality voting” and “first past the post” are roughly equal in prevalence.
@smocc: “plurality” might be in more common use in the US, I suppose.
I’m not sure what you mean about the US presidential elections; for example, according to Wikipedia, Trump got 56.51% of the electoral vote.
If you mean he didn’t reach 50% of the popular vote, well, it isn’t a FPTP system as regards the popular vote, precisely because of the electoral college.Edit: wasn’t thinking clearly about that. In the context of either a presidential or parliamentary election, the post isn’t 50%+1 of the popular vote, but 50%+1 of the electoral college votes (US presidential) or of the seats (parliamentary).
Second Edit: no, I think perhaps I’m just hopelessly confused in general. That kind of underline’s Eric’s original point, I guess.
I note that in the case of US Presidential elections, a fuller description would be “first past the post, or if nobody reached the post, the House of Representatives decides”.
Perhaps we could add boxing to the mix and call it “first past the post or win by decision”. 🙂
Elections reps will increase until statistical significance is established 😛
That should fix the “tiny margin” issue. 😛
But if anyone gets 50% + 1 of first choices it doesn’t matter what voting system you’re using, since basically all of them will give the same result.
Well … I don’t want to defend my original argument, because although I still find “first past the post” evocative, I do seem to be confused about exactly what it evokes. 🙂
That said, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. In New Zealand’s MMP system (for example) 50%+1 of the overall vote is enough to give a party control of Parliament, but only barely. Under the old first past the post system we used to use, 50%+1 of the overall vote typically meant a large majority in parliament. Not at all the same.
Also, I gather the electoral college rules in Nebraska and Maine work differently to the rest of the US, and in principle those rules could swing a Presidential election against the candidate that got 50%+1 of the popular vote in either or both.
Question: when I fact-checked that, I came across the phrase “winner takes all” describing the electoral college rule used by all US states except Nebraska and Maine. Is this actually the same rule being described upthread as “first past the post” or is there a distinction I’m missing?
Here’s how I understand this:
This only applies to electoral college votes. That is, in the US system, voters don’t vote directly for president. Instead, we vote for electors, who are pledged to vote for a certain candidate. If you vote for Donald Trump in 2020 in any state in the US, you’ve voting for an elector who’s pledged to Trump. That elector then casts his votes in the electoral college to choose the president. In theory, the electors can change allegiance after they are elected, but I don’t think that has caused any serious issues in modern times.
Each state has a certain number of electoral college votes–how many electors they send to the final vote that decides who the president will be. Missouri has 10 electoral college votes, Florida has 29, and California has 55. The number of electoral votes tracks with the number of people the state sends to Congress–2 senators plus some number of representatives determined by the state’s population.
All states but Nebraska and Maine allocate all their electoral college votes (where they elect the people who cast the actual votes for president) in a bloc. That is, if you win the majority of presidential votes in Missouri, then all Missouri’s electoral votes go to electors who have promised to vote for you. This means that a state whose presidential votes go 51-49 for the Democrats gives 100% of its electoral votes to the Democrat. This is the main way that the electoral college can get very different results than the popular vote–every vote for Hillary in California past 50%+1 is wasted, because all those electoral votes are already going to Hillary no matter what. 51-49 Hillary gives the same result as 99-1 Hillary.
Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes by districts–someone wins a plurality of votes in each district, and that person’s electors get sent to the electoral college. So you still get that 51-49 Hillary = 99-1 Hillary effect, but only within a district, not within the whole state. I don’t think either state has ever split its electoral votes, but they could.
You could imagine other ways to do it, like proportional granting of electoral votes. But a political party that dominates a given state has a big incentive to keep the winner-take-all system for electoral votes.
For example, California is heavily Democratic. Right now, they are a reliable 55 electors for the Democratic candidate. Suppose they switched to a district system like Nebraska and Maine: maybe now, on an average year, they give 40 electors to the Democrat and 15 to the Republicans. The Democrats running California would screw their own party over in future presidential elections by changing to a district system. (As would the Republicans running Texas, for the same reason.)
“….That is, in the US system, voters don’t vote directly for president. Instead, we vote for electors, who are pledged to vote for a certain candidate…”
@albatross11,
That’s why I get increasingly irritated by exhortations like “Nothing you do this year will be more meaningful than casting a ballot in November“, because it’s simply not true.
I’ve voted since 1986 in the same district near where I was born in Oakland, California and the elections have never been close, and as a Californian my vote is diluted compared to small States anyway.
I’m tired of being lied to by being told “Your vote matters” when it really doesn’t.
@Plumber:
“Your vote matters” is particularly false for those of us who live in California, but it’s not really true, ex ante, in a presidential election in any state. The probability that one vote will decide the election is very close to zero–well under one in a million if we were using a national majority vote. Calculating it with the electoral system would be hard, but it’s tiny, since it requires that the totals in your state differ by only one vote and that the electoral results differ by no more than the electoral votes of your state.
Saying that it matters is a statement of religious faith unconnected to reality. When I vote they give me a sticker saying “I voted,” and I don’t wear it.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to serve for a year in a combat assignment on the Allied side of WWII. Expect to fire on the enemy and take enemy fire in turn.
You will be trained to do the job and to fit into the time and place you are going to. Don’t expect to change the course of the war; you will not be placed anywhere you could decisively change world history. Fight well, and you might shorten the war by a few days. Die in the past, and you’re dead for real.
Given the facts of life in the forties, actual combat assignments for women in WWII are very rare. Accordingly, for women only, non-combatant support roles in forward areas are acceptable choices in this exercise. You might, for example, be a telephone operator in London during the Blitz or a nurse on a naval base in the Pacific within range of Japanese bombers.
What do you want to do?
This feels like it’s missing something, what part are people getting a choice about?
I’d probably go for not spending a year there at all if I’m not allowed post crib notes to bletchley park on efficient ways to crack enigma etc.
You can choose, with some limitations, what job you want, where you will serve, and when.
I don’t know enough to know what areas were hellscapes so I’ll include a minor note.
My grandfather was an absolutely excellent marksman, but you wouldn’t know it from his army assessments when he was drafted.
Snipers didn’t tend to survive, they’d be left behind to slow an enemy advance when an army withdrew and tended to get a bullet to the back of the head if captured because they’re never popular with the other side.
So, the only thing I’d say for certain is that I’d want to avoid being a sniper.
I do not. Sure I’d get some good stories out of it, but it would be scary and unpleasant and I might die.
I agree with you that this is something I’d never* do, but it’s easy to add enough details to the intellectual exercise to make it worth thinking about.
Suppose, using his time machine, Johan_Larson has managed to take over the entire world. As a rebel against his tyrannical hypothetical-question-based rule, you’ve been sentenced to the option of painful death or being sent back to spend a year in World War II. In that case, it’s easy to imagine saying ‘how much detail can I give when I pick my assignment?’
Then its ‘what level of punishment would I be willing to avoid by taking the offer’? Ten years in prison? Five? Spending 10 years back 30,000 years ago? If you assume there’s some level of punishment you’d be willing to avoid by spending a year in World War II in some capacity, what would you choose then?
I think it would be more interesting with one of the following qualifications:
A) If nobody from your unit dies in combat, obviously you missed the whole ‘taking fire in return’ part and you get sent back for another year assigned to ‘Soviet Infantry, Winter War’**.
B) If too many people pick the same unit, all the extras (chosen at random) get assigned to ‘Soviet Infantry, Winter War’.
* There’s obviously some level of carrot for which this becomes worth doing, but it’s much easier to just imagine a stick. [Added – for a carrot, and an addition to the discussion, when you get sent back, your body is rejuvenated to that of a healthy and fit 18 year old, and you get to keep it in whatever condition it survives the war.]
** The worst assignment that meets the original criteria I could think of on short notice.
You’re right; there are plenty of ways I could have engaged with the spirit of the hypothetical. I could also have just scrolled on and left everybody else to it. But don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying for a second that engaging in silly hypotheticals isn’t a good use of time. I’m just saying that this one seems to have no upside, which is unusual in johan_larson’s ‘missions’.
Some people like to do exciting things even if they are dangerous and uncomfortable. And WWII certainly has moments that offer plenty of all three. Isn’t excitement enough of an upside?
I didn’t mean to sound dismissive; ‘I wouldn’t do this under any circumstances’ is a valid and important data point.
This is also an interesting discussion in that 16 million Americans served during the war; of those, 10 million were drafted, so that’s close to 6 million volunteers (I assume there are other categories, such as ‘serving at the start of the war’). If I recall right, the airborne units were all volunteer (but not the air-landing units).
@johan_larson
Fair enough. I guess what I’m saying, then, is that no: for me excitement isn’t enough of an upside to make me want to enter a war zone.
@Civillis
That’s an interesting point. For some reason “volunteering to serve in a current war” seems like a more reasonable decision than “going back in time to serve in a past war”, but I’m not really sure what the difference is.
It’s also at least somehow emotionally relevant that I already know who wins. There’s not any sense that I can change the course of the war. That’s generally true–unless you’re at the Alan Turing/Robert Oppenheimer/Dwight Eisenhower level of ability, you’re probably not able to directly have a large impact on the war, though a good gunnery officer on the Iowa or a good combat medic or whatever could certainly make things better locally.
But still, knowing for sure that the outcome is the outcome, and that my involvement isn’t going to have any important impact on it, is a big demotivator.
Medical technology? And general changes in the structure of warfare such that “line up and march towards those machine guns” is now a somewhat rare strategy, when in the past, that’s what war was?
Moral obligation to defend your own community but not others, and possibility of making a real difference (which is ground-ruled out in this case)
Gunnery officer on the USS Iowa, of course. I’ll take the whole time she was in commission if I can. If not, we’ll go with the first year in the Pacific.
Alternate plan: Get on Halsey’s staff at Leyte Gulf, and convince him to detach the battleships to guard the San Bernadino strati. Instead of Samar, we get the Japanese battleships on the bottom, courtesy of American battleships, and I don’t have to hear winging about the battleships being useless.
The Battle off Samar is probably my favorite naval engagement of all time and arguably the US Navy’s finest moment, though. It would be a shame to lose it, even if it was only possible because of a blunder on Halsey’s part.
To be honest, there’s a lot of me which completely agrees with you, to the point where I’d probably pick Iowa’s gunnery department over this plan. But it seemed like an interesting way to change the course of the war in a direction I want it to go.
Assuming I’m forced to choose one, the options I’d consider first are:
US Field Artillery crew, US 7th Army, France / Germany
US Battleship crew, Pacific, post-Pearl Harbor (thanks, Bean)
US Carrier crew, non-aviator, Pacific, post-Midway
US/British warship crew, Atlantic, post-Pearl Harbor
If forced to go front line combatant, I’d take ‘US Infantry, US 7th Army, France / Germany’, and if I had to prioritize those three factors, I’d put 7th Army first. If I can’t pick my assignment with that much precision, I’d generally go North Africa > Sicily > Italy > France / Germany > Pacific. As much as I’m interested in armored warfare, without checking the actual statistics my gut tells me that I’d do better as line infantry… unless I know I’m going to the Pacific, in which case I’ll take Tank Crew in an instant.
If forced to go British or other Commonwealth, the results are similar, though it becomes a toss-up between infantry and armor. With the British, the order is North Africa > Sicily > France / Low Countries / Germany (D-Day and after) > Italy > France / Low Countries (the Blitzkrieg) > Indo-China. About the only Commonwealth country I’d consider a better option than Britain itself is Canada.
I’d put ‘Soviet Field Artillery Crew, Post-Kursk’ ahead of US/British Infantry or Tank Crew. While I’d generally rank Soviet frontline combatants below their US/British equivalents, with the Soviets I’d definitely prefer tank (or SP Artillery/Tank Destroyer) over infantry. I might very well take ‘Soviet Tank Crew, Post-Kursk’ over ‘US Infantry / US Marine, Pacific’. (I don’t know if Kursk is the best break point between the early war meatgrinder Red Army and the far more capable forces that crushed what was left of the German Army, but it works as a safe break point; I would almost certainly risk choosing Anzio or Bastogne over the early war Red Army.)
Way down on the bottom of the list are anything with submarines or aircraft crew (except perhaps ASW aircraft). Doubly excluded is anything which involves jumping out of an aircraft (or riding an aircraft into the ground).
You need to be more specific. I’d do the year April 1944-April 1945, in a subchaser assigned to the Caribbean Sea Frontier. Leaving it this wide open probably gets you on a Flower-class in the North Atlantic during 1942, which is not a pleasant place to be at all. Living conditions were horrific, and there were ships going up all around you.
Actually, your best option is probably as a patrol aircraft crewman somewhere in the South Pacific.
The question is whether these observation planes are in enough danger. You need to meet the “Expect to fire on the enemy and take enemy fire in turn, ” requirement.
Personally, I’m thinking of serving aboard a destroyer in the Battle of the Atlantic, chasing subs around. Much more comfortable than the corvettes, and reasonably safe.
I’m sure I can find a time when they took fire and returned it. Maybe one of the bomber groups assigned to keeping bypassed Japanese pounded down would work. They definitely fired on the enemy, and technically took fire in return, but didn’t see that many casualties.
I’m reading The Cruel Sea right now, and I’d advise against it. That was a peculiarly brutal battle. If you do so, make sure it’s during the last year of the war. Or we could go late 1943-late 1944 in the Caribbean Sea Frontier. There’d be some shooting, but not much.
I defer to the expert on this. I tried to answer this question based on what I remembered of history rather than look things up online. I know that the early days of the Battle of the Atlantic (when the Germans could throw battlecruisers out as commerce raiders and ships were going down within sight of the US coast almost daily) were not a safe time period, and I guessed that the change-over happened around the time the Bismark went down.
Your gut is extremely wrong. Among US troops deployed overseas 18.5% of infantrymen were killed in action or died of their wounds. That number is 3% for tankers. God help you if you get posted to the 4th Infantry Division, which suffered 700% casualties in its line infantry between its initial deployment at Normandy and the end of the war. You really, really do not want to be infantry in any army in the war.
For that matter, if you are in a tank you want to be in an American tank above anything else, as their crews had lowest casualty rates thanks to their excellent ergonomics allowing for high situational awareness and easy crew evacuation. If you are in an American tank, you preferentially want to be an American tanker rather than a British tanker since the latter don’t get helmets, which doubles their chances of being killed. Though you probably still want to be a British tanker over a Soviet one because the Eastern Front was a brutal charnel house. Unless you’re a Soviet tanker posted to Far East, in which case enjoy lording it over the comically bad Japanese armoured forces.
You might find this video instructive, the above figures are from there.
With the benefit of hindsight, I’d just go to North Africa. Rommel treated POWs pretty well
Not sure if manning an AA gun in say London or Pearl Harbor is dangerous enough to fit the requirement, but if it is, then that’s the safest and most comfortable way to spend the war that I can think of.
AA crew, Darwin would be pretty nice, if hot weather and beaches are your thing.
Or Port Defence, Sydney, now I think about it.
Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail” convincingly argues that, for an American of suitable aptitude, flying a PBY (twin-engine flying boats used for reconaissance and antisubmarine warfare) during the Battle of the Atlantic would be the safest, easiest, and most rewarding way to get Combat Veteran status as necessary for advancement in postwar America.
Large multiengine aircraft were by that part reasonably safe in routine flight, and while the U-boats did have AA guns they usually didn’t put up a fight on the surface and it is in any event up to the pilot how close he wants to get. Mostly, you’re flying a cool plane and looking at the ocean view, maybe once or twice dropping depth charges on something. Good chance you’re based on the US East Coast, which means better living conditions than any other combat posting plus you get to start cashing in on your War Hero cred on the home front, during the war but without question of shirking, and without competition from the dumb enthusiastic heroes on the front. If not the home front, then probably some tropical island with no fighting. By the time the war ends, you’ll probably have colonel’s wings and a couple thousand hours of flight time in a large multiengine aircraft, quite useful in 1945 and I wouldn’t mind having them in 2018.
Tell me more about “Combat Veteran status as necessary for advancement in postwar America“.
Assuming you don’t just mean advancement in the military, how much did veteran status mean for your social status in postwar America?
All of the Presidents after Truman until Clinton served in WW2 except for Carter, who had a very respectable run postwar in the fledgling nuclear Navy. Johnson felt the need to trump up his record, and Nixon’s service in a rear area seems like something that was held against him when he ran against Kennedy of the PT boats.
Less concretely, it was pretty clear from talking to that generation of men that for many of them service in WW2 really was one of the defining features of their lives. Nobody lost their livelihood because they didn’t serve or overtly ducked into some safe spot. But it was something they had to live with, the big show that they’d missed. Heinlein’s character wasn’t even concerned about his own self-image, but he intended to live a long time and he didn’t want to make it less pleasant by having half the people he ran into busting his balls over it the next sixty years.
Among the non-combat flying in WW2, much of it still very dangerous (ie The Hump) but some like the Catalina or Albatross would have been a blast. Rescuing people from the water, hunting submarines, what’s not to like?
Being able to fly one of the WW2 fighters the way it was intended might be too tempting to pass up even with the massive risk. Maybe mitigate by choosing one of the dominant ones like the P-38 or Dehavilland Mosquito.
I kinda assume that once you get late enough in the war, the risks to being a fighter pilot for the Western Allies can’t be that bad, at least in some sectors, and the direct fun and attendant perks do both seem significant.
Thinking more about the ‘adventure tourism’ comment by the OP downthread, I’d say that if you’re the sort of person that would do this, you’d be better off being a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain than a fighter or fighter-bomber pilot on the Western front late war.
With the risk of death, I think it’s at least psychologically more likely for people to try to minimize the risks of death that they can’t avoid via their own skill. It’s one thing for a thrill seeker to die because the other guy was better, it’s another to die to some unseen, unavoidable mass killer. A thrill seeker is going to minimize the risks that can’t be overcome by skill and maximize the amount of combat that is against comparable-threat enemies.
With late-war pilots, you’ve got the possibility of being stuck doing the exhausting bomber escort role, or you’re based in some dirty airstrip near the front. Either way, the biggest probable killer I would wager is massed anti-aircraft fire, and if you survive being shot down, you’re likely looking at sitting out the war as a POW.
So if I was a thrill seeker and thought I could pilot (I’m neither), I’d study up on the Spitfire until I thought I could really make the best of it, then go for the Battle of Britain. You’re based in the UK, so you’ve got pretty good conditions by WW2 standards. (Almost) all your risk comes from enemy aircraft, so if you’re as good as you think you are, you’ll live. And you have the psychological bonus that while you might not shorten the war, at least that bomber isn’t going to hit London.
You’re based in the UK, so you’ve got pretty good conditions by WW2 standards.
Just be sure that you fit in by dropping your modern day speech patterns 🙂
Deiseach, thanks, that was awesome. Hadn’t seen that before.
Civilis, I’d suggest the Hurricane over the Spitfire:
It was a much better gun platform (the guns being in two tight groups of four in the wings, rather than spread out like the Spitfire’s, it had a tighter cone of fire and it bucked less when they were fired).
It was much hardier (being primarily wood and doped linen construction rather the the Spitfire’s duralumin, the Bf 109’s 20mm cannon shells tended to punch straight through without detonating).
It had a sturdier undercarriage (landing accidents, particularly on beat-up grass fields, caused a surprisingly high number of casualties).
It could still out-turn the Bf 109, just try not to get into the vertical (they will outclimb you, and your float-chamber carburettor will cut fuel supply if you nose-over into negative Gs into a dive).
Your biggest threat, though, is being bounced (there’s that unseen, unavoidable killer!) due to the RAF’s insistence, at the time, on tight formation flying. Try to get yourself posted to Douglas Bader’s 242 Squadron – he was one of the first to experiment with the German finger-four formation, and being part of 12 Group you’re slightly less in the thick of it.
If you think you’re probably decent – maybe a little better than average but not even confident of that – and like thrills a lot but are also very averse to actually dying, the casualty rate for Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain is almost certainly too risky to be the right balance. As far as I can work out, something like 25-30% of them died.
Also, if you haven’t tried it, be aware that flying a small plane just is thrilling, all by itself. I don’t think having to do it off an airstrip in France or Italy would be such a terrible hardship, especially if – like me – you speak excellent French already and have a knack for languages such that you’re confident you could pick up Italian in a hurry.
Actually, a surprising number of patrol aircraft were shot down by U-boats. I’m reading Morison’s The Atlantic Battle Won, and for a while, the U-boats were battling it out on the surface, and sometimes winning that battle. Not a good time to be flying a PBY. Although a PBY itself is low-performance enough you can probably get away with hovering nearby and homing in PB4Ys and the like.
I don’t want to kill a lot of civilians, even on the axis side. So while my initial thought was that I’d like to be on a 1944 US submarine based out of Fremantle, the idea of sinking Japanese merchant ships or troop transports, killing hundreds with a single torpedo would wear me down. Put me in a Mustang doing bomber escorts. I’m firing on the enemy, but only enemy fighters who are trying to take down my bomber. I think that would be easier on my conscience
What was the survival rate for those pilots?
I’d be General McAuliffe’s aide to make sure all these damn time travelers don’t mess up the best laconic middle finger of the century.
My grandfather and his brother both were in the U.S. Army Air Core and survived the war (though most of their duties involved testing, training, and transportation) so I’d want to stick with them!
If that’s not an option, I’d choose the last year of the war on the ground in the west, collecting surrendes.
Keep in mind that Hitler died April 30, 1945, so a year in the US forces in Western Europe could put you on Omaha Beach on D-Day (June 6th, 1944) and would also possibly include such nasty fights as the Hurtgen Forest and the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge). The 1st Infantry Division managed to be involved in all three.
@Civilis,
Yeah, I was afraid of that.
My first thought would be to be in the Maginot line during the “Phony war”, but that would still leave four months of experiencing the invasion of France (and likely becoming a P.O.W.).
Really “Some combat”, likely means “lots”, as far as I know, but my military history knowledge is sparse.
This is the only real detail that’s necessary to answer the question rationally, and it could be broken down to math.
Here’s the analysis:
27,000 people per day died in WW2, including non-combatants. Obviously truncating the rate of death to a constant like that isn’t a great assumption, but the question didn’t necessarily ask which day would be shortened, so I don’t think it’s an unreasonable scenario.
What are the chances you shorten the war by a day? I think basically zero, but since it’s a hypothetical, I think we need Mr. Larson to state explicitly what that chance is. If it’s 0.01%, then you going back in time to fight in the war has an expected value of 2.7 lives saved.
There’s also the relatively large chance you don’t die. The question posits deployment. I can’t find numbers of US soldiers specifically deployed vs non-deployed during the war, but the total amount of people in the armed forces during the war was 12 million, with 407k (3.4%) casualties and 670k (5.6%) wounded.
I think if I knew I could run into a burning building and save 2.7 people, and only have a 9% chance of dying or being wounded during the fire, I’d do it.
I think almost no matter what you have a vanishingly small chance of changing the length of the war, but if you are out to save live you stand a good chance of being able to do that, especially if you go back as a medic in an over-worked field hospital or something similar.
Minor point of order: “casualties” includes all losses to a unit, dead, wounded, missing, and captured, and can include sick in hospital. It’s not a synonym for “dead”. The “casualties” would be the sum of the two numbers, or 1.7mm casualties, with 407k dead. Confusing this terminology is a minor pet peeve, because it sometimes causes people to talk past each other when discussing statistics from military reports.
For what it’s worth, since this is completely optional, I was assuming people who decided to go would be going for a bit of historical adventure tourism, and I added the bits about actual combat so people wouldn’t just go back to watch. I wasn’t expecting people to go back in time to harvest utiles.
Pfft, what are you, new here? Why else would anyone go back in time?
Well, traditionally you go back in time to kill Hitler, right?
So: Red Army, Battle of Berlin, 1945. Chances are poor but it’s the only chance you’ll get after these constraints.
Time travelers don’t kill Hitler in 1945. They kill baby Hitler. You know, to maximize utils!
In that case, I think I should start out by learning how to synthesize as many antibiotics as possible, and “invent” them at the start of the war. Schedule myself to be doing this work in a hospital that’s scheduled to get bombed by Germany the last day of my year (bring a rifle so I can shoot back at the bombers), and make sure my work is well-backed-up. Speeding up availability of antibiotics by a decade or so seems likely to harvest more utils than shortening the war an extra couple days by my amazing leadership on the battlefield.
Alternatively (and more relevant to my own abilities), go hang out in Bletchley Park and help them get working computers a few years early.
But what if we sold the patent for the time machine and used the proceeds to purchase malaria nets?
Time travelers don’t kill Hitler in 1945. They kill baby Hitler. You know, to maximize utils!
Well, black hat time travelers don’t.
And non-utilitarian time travelers often pick 1931 or 1938 so as to kill Guilty Evil Hitler rather than Innocent Baby Adolf. But given the overriding meta-rule of Time Machine + Gun == You Know, and the specific constraints of this scenario to serve in an Allied combat unit during WWII but not influence the course of the war save by maybe shortening it a few days, Red Army Berlin 1945 probably is the way to go.
In that case, I think I should start out by learning how to synthesize as many antibiotics as possible, and “invent” them at the start of the war. Schedule myself to be doing this work in a hospital that’s scheduled to get bombed by Germany the last day of my year (bring a rifle so I can shoot back at the bombers), and make sure my work is well-backed-up. Speeding up availability of antibiotics by a decade or so seems likely to harvest more utils than shortening the war an extra couple days by my amazing leadership on the battlefield.
Looking at the history of the Second World War, there is historical precedent for someone with a hobbyist level of knowledge making minor suggestions that end up as major tactical innovations, so it shouldn’t take some level of modern expertise to make a difference. The Western allies were quite good at allowing innovations from common troops in the field to propagate, such as the hedgerow cutter.
Even if it doesn’t significantly speed up the war overall, how many lives could be saved in any of the urban fights by someone with even a modern gamer’s knowledge of breach and clear urban tactics and reasonable access to period American or British supplies, assuming he has enough luck to survive a couple of repetitions of innovation and improvement?
At which point they are immediately shot by all the armed guards he has hanging around him.
People who go back in time to kill baby Hitler are just looking for excuses to kill babies. If you want to stop Hitler you go to Sarajevo in 1914 and stop Gavrilo Princip. You don’t even have to shoot him, just distract his attention before Ferdinand drives by. Ferdinand lives, World War I doesn’t happen (at least not in 1914), and Hitler remains an unpleasant failed artist and crank living in Munich.
I think accounts of Princip’s attempt suggest multiple time travelers already tried that solution and it didn’t work.
Hell, the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand is probably one of the most convincing arguments for fate there is.
The running gag I tell my friends is that Archduke Ferdinand went on to be the most brutal totalitarian in the 20th century, to the point that there was a conspiracy to head that off.
Princip was that time traveller.
“Utility Harvest” is going in my list of book titles I’m going to use someday.
So, for a talking point/intuitive-first-guess at where/when to go, then: Pearl Harbor shortly before it actually gets bombed? “Shortly” being “days to weeks”, ideally some amount of time during which you can convince your fellow sailors you’re not just being paranoid/psychotic about an impending attack, and so get them to help mitigate the damage.
If there’s time for a little research before going, check on which ships (a) took the least damage and (b) had the most competent-in-retrospect commanders in the actual history, and turn up there.
Aside from the immediate lives saved, this also I think puts you in a position to get your “getting shot at” out of the way early in the year, and improves your odds of getting promoted to non-front-line work where you can help decide where to armor the planes and things like that.
The implications of this are fascinating. If the U.S. battleship fleet isn’t as heavily damaged, would U.S. naval strategy have favored carrier operations so heavily? If the surprise attack isn’t as successful and the death toll smaller, is the U.S. public still as rabidly enthusiastic to go kick butt all around the world? If the Japanese don’t have as smashing a propaganda victory over the U.S. Pacific Fleet, does Hitler still decide to declare war on the U.S.? So many butterflies!
Perhaps the U.S. sends the largely intact fleet toward the Philippines to intercept the Japanese advance, and the Japanese, seeking out their decisive battle, intercept. Which could go lots of different ways, but opens up the possible worst case scenario of a big Japanese victory which sinks a bunch of battleships where they can’t be refloated and repaired, plus a few carriers as well.
If Givewell is to be believed, you can save 2.7 people (mostly kids!) by giving $10,000 to AMF, with no chance of death and no time machine required. If you are willing to make significant sacrifices to save lives that seems like a better avenue.
First choice- be Roy Dunlap, from Ordnance Goes to War. Play with guns, sometimes use them, but not in the mud and blood all day. Second choice- be L Ron Hubbard, dashing anti-submarine patrol commander. Find an oil pool, tell sonar they hear a sub underneath, drop depth charges, go home and report you sunk a U Boat.
This is a trick question, though it may not have been intended this way.
One of the constraints is that you must expect to be fired upon. But one of your obvious goals is to avoid being fired upon. This means that you want to pick the position that has the minimum amount of being fired upon that still counts.
Bearing in mind that almost any military position has some chance of being fired upon even if just in unlikely situations, the dividing line between “doesn’t count” and “does count” is vague and can’t be determined from the stipulations, yet the answer depends on it.
The stipulation that you can save lives but you can’t change history is similar. You want to get as close to the dividing line between those two things as the problem allows, and exactly what that is is unclear.
I don’t know what the dividing line was in WW2, but right now whatever your brigade (more likely regiment back then) commander says counts, counts. Assuming things are the same, a “forward” posting in a secure area that’s occasionally on the same map sheet as errant incoming with an indulgent full bird is what you want if you’re maximizing for survival while meeting the criteria, I think. Finding such a target for your time machine isn’t outside the possibilities of history but it wouldn’t be easy.
The question about “what counts” is “what counts as satisfying the stipulation that you take a combat position where you’re fired upon”. The being who sends you through time determines this using his own criteria; your brigade commander doesn’t.
What counts as “occasionally”, though? You want “occasionally” to be the minimum value that still counts as “occasionally”. And we’re not told what that is.
Technically this is just an instrumental goal. Your true objective is to avoid being hit. The sort of people who jump out of perfectly good airplanes for fun might net gain from scenarios that involve some shooting going on.
Looking at the numbers, you want to avoid being a Soviet, and want to avoid being in the infantry. However, that doesn’t break it down further than the branch of service.
I would guess that the non-trick-answer safest combat posting would be in the artillery, if on the ground, or in the navy (not sure what role would be safest). Air combat personnel actually had a relatively high chance of getting killed, as I understand it; I think bomber crews moreso than fighter crews.
It would be interesting to see numbers that break it down more; it could be that just about anything on the Western Allied side was safer than just about anything as a Soviet.
I choose serving in the tank forces for the first year of the war, in 1. Panzerdivision.
Really? Casualties weren’t horrible, but also weren’t negligible. Just want to be involved in dramatic victories? And wouldn’t it bother you at all to be fighting for the bad guys?
I thought that being part in the blitzkrieg would be safer and more interesting than other options.
As far as morality goes, I dunno, how does it even work when the result is predetermined?
You could always be a saboteur on the German side, that would likely do a lot more than fighting for the allies in any real capacity
Also presumably extremely dangerous. And moral issues aside, Nazi Germany does not strike me as a place I would find pleasant to live.
Clearly I refuse to accept this one; it’s all downside and no upside. If I would have to accept it, it looks like the USS Enterprise was a reasonably safe place for a year starting November 10, 1943. So I’ll be an ordinary seaman there. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything.
Of course the benefit here is serving on the USS Enterprise. Even if it isn’t the right one.
“Say, Chief, how come everyone else is wearing a normal Navy uniform, but I got assigned this red shirt?”
“And why does my console keep sparking?”
What do you mean, “Even if it isn’t the right one”? Of course it’s the right one. The Big E. The ship most often “sunk” in the Pacific. How can you say that she isn’t the right one?
The opportunities to seduce green alien babes were somewhat lacking.
I can tell you what I definitely wouldn’t do. One of the largest battles of the war was fought at Kursk between the Germans and Russians. Both sides spent a long time preparing for the fight before hand, and a lot of prep involved setting up large mine fields. The Russians, being Russian, were long on men and short on almost everything else, including mines. To resolve this problem they assigned a penal battalion the job of crawling through the russian mine fields (which weren’t labeled) into the german mine fields, digging up armed german mines and putting them in a sack, carrying the sack of armed mines back into the russian mine fields, digging holes in the russian mine field (which, I must remind you, weren’t labeled) and burying the armed german mines in the russian fields.
Any one of those tasks was pretty dangerous. All of them together, I submit, were the the worst job in history.
That’s horrifying, but also a really interesting story!
That might be the best summary of the soviet union I’ve ever read.
There are widespread (possibly apocryphal) stories of Soviet airborne troops jumping/being pushed without parachutes from slow, low-flying aircraft over deep snow. The most credible source I’ve found suggests the unit involved was the 4th Airborne Corps in the Vyazna pocket in early 1942. Presumably this was also an unpleasant experience for those involved.
I routinely think back about how close I was to applying for the Naval Academy (and had the recommendations lined up had I chosen to) and I think aircraft carrier duty would have been the most interesting deployment in WWII. I probably wouldn’t have been much of a flyer though, so something on deck.
I wouldn’t accept this assignment, whatever the cost to me. The chances of shortening the war is maybe small so there is only a very small upside, but the downside, if somehow I caused the allies to lose, is huge. Remember the good guys won and we have had a pretty decent peace for the last 70 years, with no wars of such a magnitude again. Yes the cold war was scary, but the good guys won that too. As a society we were extraordinarily lucky in the 20C, anyone wanting to mess with that needs their head examined.
It’s a fair point. If you’re going into this with the idea of making the twentieth century a better place you’re probably in the wrong war.
Are we restricted to out branch of the allies? (eg can a New Zealand woman become a Soviet Sniper/Night Witch?)
Also, are we allowed to choose our combat role (garrison duty as a soviet commissar on the Manchurian Frontier sounds peaceful, but technically meets your requirements.)
Actually, that’s my choice, Commissar, attached to Soviet Field Artillery, Russian/Manchurian Border, April 1944-45
Yes, you can serve in the military of another country.
Yes, you can choose your combat role, but keep in mind that you need to face at least a little bit of active combat.
I’m thrilled to be facing active combat against random bandits using artillery, as well as curb-stomping third rate Japanese troops in 1945.
I knew Call of Duty was onto something when they made it so that you could create black female Nazi characters…
What prevents you from passing critical information up the chain of command from anywhere? Or angling from your initial position for reassignment to a more critical area? (I vote selective amnesia for something exploitable or magic time police for something not.)
What’s the threshold for “decisively change world history”? Could one for example take an assignment that meets a a post-war leader late in the war and feed them information about the post war world up to that threshold?
Some approaches that try not to be too exploity:
1. Get assigned to a war hero’s unit for inspiration/learning to carry back to the future.
2. flying vs the germans, as they had aces with kill scores in the hundreds whose individual loss might not be critical but might be one of the biggest impacts an individual soldier could have. (also high impact, cool, and if shot down one might land behind enemy lines, which seems like an uncriticisable way to get to critical place.
3. Go somewhere where allied atrocities were committed in hopes of preventing it.
4. Whatever needs the most training without being overstaffed. (seeing as you carry it back from the future).
Since the outcome of the war is predetermined and my actions don’t matter to the grand scheme. I will opt for maximizing personal gain.
I choose to be an admiral in the USN in the Atlantic in the last 12 months of the war, commanding some task force or other. I will invest 600 dollars a month for 12 months in the stock of Johnson and Johnson in some sort of trustee account. That initial investment of $7200 will be somewhere around 50 million dollars today.
When I am done with my 12 months, I will hop back in my time machine to the present, twirl my moustache, and go collect my funds.
I had a different take on collecting Utils… what position could do the most good in the present, given inability to help much in the past?
Maybe secretary or adjutant to Hitler, Stalin or slightly lesser big bads, in order to shed light on lost historic details (and possibly sabotage them in some small way)? But I guess that’s non-combatant, so I don’t qualify. Maybe high-level courier in and up to the fall of Berlin… I imagine even the non-combatant positions saw some enemy action near the end, especially if you include up to being carted off as a POW.
If you shoot Hitler (or Stalin), you would pretty quickly be in combat. That’s what I thought you were building up to when you proposed taking those positions.
“a telephone operator in London during the Blitz”
I would pre-emptively defect from the mission rules and begin preparing to harvest selected utils.
Depending on how much time I have to prepare….
During my tea breaks as Ernestine in London, I’ll use Time Travelers’ Handbook to get rich quick.
Then become useful to Bletchley and attempt to save one life: Alan Turing.
I’ve just been reading Stationed Safe out Here by George MacDonald Fraser (of Flashman fame), his account of his experiences as a nineteen year old soldier in the Burmese campaign. A fascinating account, but not where I want to be.
Interesting in part for the culture war between his 1940 attitudes and the 2000+ attitudes in Britain when the book was written. He strongly disapproves of war correspondents interviewing soldiers as to whether they are scared. Of course soldiers are scared–but making a fuss about it makes things worse, not better.
Not directly related but your last sentence made me think about it.
Something that increasingly annoys me is when interviewers focus on negative emotional experiences. You see this more and more in sports (of all places) these days. I swear, during the last winter olympics, 50% of interviews with medal winners started with a question of the “How do you think your father, who tragically passed away from cancer last year, feels about your win today?”
Like, really? Can we not let these people have a minute to celebrate before we force them to re-live an emotional tragedy?
This is almost exactly the same reason I concluded a while back that the best solution to school shootings is to stop reporting them (except locally).
Three obvious choices come to mind.
1) Find the safest job I can. Probably that means being on a battleship in 1944-45, though the air force of that era was pretty dominant too(especially in the Pacific). That maximizes my odds of getting home.
2) My grandfather was an infantryman who mostly served in the Italian theatre, and he died when I was five, so I never really got to know him. There’s a part of me that might want to fight alongside him.
3) Do something that gives me an interesting and useful skill set. Being a pilot is the natural choice here. (Might work well with #1, too)