Study shows that banning bottled water on campuses just makes students switch to bottled soda, with obvious detrimental consequences to health and no decrease in bottle waste.
Pakistan’s transgender tax collectors.
A couple of posts ago, I mocked the Muslim activist who claimed Mossad broke into his house and stole one of his shoes to creep him out. Jonathan Zhou corrects me and points out that this sort of thing is actually a known intelligence agency tactic.
A systematic review of all 55 medical conditions whose risks vary with your month of birth.
Popehat does some very impressive investigative reporting into the government trying to make a (literal) federal case out of random libertarian blog commenters criticizing a judge at Reason.com. A pretty good example of the abuses of power possible if laws about Internet threats are made too strict. Followups here, here, and here.
Probiotics watch: maybe eating fermented food decreases social anxiety?
Nevada enacts comprehensive school choice law. The experiment has begun.
Life imitating JRPGs – mysterious “time crystals” may hold the secret to outlasting entropy. No word on whether you have to get all seven, or whether they are hidden in temples themed around the seven elements. Some people on Tumblr try to help me understand the implications.
A while ago, I was getting the impression that the Mexican drug cartels were unstoppable and the Mexican government was too corrupt to be able to do anything about them. Now the cartels are almost all defeated or in retreat. What happened?
Long ago I reviewed a book claiming the future was glia. Now some scientists are proposing that maybe SSRIs work by affecting glial cells.
American Hippopotamus describes the 1910s plan by two larger-than-life Boer War guerilla-assassins to “turn American into a nation of hippo ranchers”. The story alone would be worth your time even if it wasn’t well-written, but it happens to be very possibly the best-written article I have ever read. Long, but also available on Kindle
Program that teaches college women how to avoid rape may cut risk of rape in half as per new study.
This article on whether the US could replicate Scandinavia’s low poverty rate is interesting throughout, but what makes it for me is the claim that Swedes in the US have the same poverty rate as Swedes in Sweden [edit: possibly this is false?]. How much should we make of this?
Not only are we living in the future, but it’s exactly the future Philip K Dick told us to expect: “Abortion drone” to make first flight into Poland
The mysterious resemblance between the ancient Numenorean calendar and the French revolutionary calendar (h/t an-animal-imagined-by-poe)
I’d always heard the story “Iceland rejected fiscal austerity and did everything exactly the way the left wanted and did great.” Scott Sumner and Tyler Cowen say that actually Iceland had lots and lots of austerity.
I think it’s probably time to stop bothering Rachel Dolezal. She seems like a good example of a person who’s not hurting anyone, has some really weird problems she needs to sort out, but because she doesn’t fall into a designated “here are people we have agreed it’s not okay to mock” category we are mocking her. The psychoanalyst in me wants to say this is some kind of displacement where people who are upset they can’t get away with making fun of real black people suddenly see an apparent black person (and NAACP leader, no less!) lose their magical protection and become a valid target, and are now channeling years of pent-up rage at her. Anyway, not totally related, but an explanation of why this is not a good analogy for transgender.
Article originally reported as “no gender gap in tech salaries” gives a more nuanced description of their result. Summary: true based on sample of equally qualified people one year after graduation; no evidence whether or not it’s true in other situations. This article is also good example of “if you have data supporting a controversial point, ignorant people on Twitter will throw out some terms that sound statistics-y and bad, like ‘confounding’ or ‘cherry-picking’, then say you have now been debunked.”
Doctors with the highest ratings on those rate-your-doctor sites may deliver worse care than less-well-rated docs. Maybe you get higher ratings by giving patients what they want, which is usually amphetamines, narcotics, antibiotics, and unnecessary tests.
The time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an article about Lord Byron’s divorce so controversial it caused a third of The Atlantic’s readership to cancel their subscriptions.
Alyssa Vance writes on Facebook about Ivy League colleges’ sketchy methods of soliciting alumni donations.
In a study of 20,000 people, an uncommon allele of the MAO-A gene may cause a sevenfold increased risk of violent criminal behavior, making it probably the strongest gene-crime link to date.
Previously on SSC links: if robots are taking our jobs, how come productivity numbers aren’t increasing? Now: okay, productivity numbers are increasing, but the robots still don’t seem to be taking our jobs.
A man angry at the German government for falsely imprisoning him is adopting a thousand children in order to make them German citizens and do his part to strain the welfare state. Apparently everything legally checks out and no one can stop him. Open borders advocates take note. [edit: old story, loophole since possibly closed?]
Anti-science-denial group Committee for Skeptical Inquiry wants to make a $25,000 bet with the global warming doubters at the Heartland Institute about future climate trends. While I totally approve of this strategy (“A bet is a tax on bullshit” – Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan), the exact terms seem kind of dumb – AFAIK, Heartland doesn’t believe that the Earth is not getting warmer, just that it’s not necessarily human-caused. Betting on next year’s temperature does nothing to settle that.
In the last links post, I mentioned a study that tried to use transgender people to test the sources of the gender gap. A new study from Brazil tries to do the same with race – Brazilians are frequently very multiracial, and different companies might classify the same employee differently. The study tries to match that with salaries – does a boss who thinks of an employee as white pay them more than their boss next year who thinks of them as black? They conclude that 40% of racial income gaps can be explained in that way, though of course it sounds like Brazil’s racial situation is different enough from America’s that it might not generalize.
Nothing sophisticated or intellectual about this one – just trucks driving off aircraft carriers. Wheeeee!
Some linguists talk of “the Anglic languages”, a language family including English and some of its weirder relatives and descendants that have evolved to the point of mutual intelligibility. You’ve probably heard of Scots, ie “the reason you can’t understand Robert Burns”. But did you know about Forth and Bargy?
Google’s neural nets can now amplify images without human guidance. And by amplify, they mean add shoggoths (warning: shoggoth). Also, this seems way too much like the visual effects of LSD to be a coincidence, and I look forward to neuroscientists explaining the exact connection.
A mildly interesting Wall Street Journal article on how jobs are staying open longer because employers can’t find qualified candidates also contains some surprising information – 5% of job interviews include an IQ test, and almost 20% include a personality test. I’m not sure how that meshes with our recent discussion of Griggs vs. US. I’m starting to think the importance of this case is overblown – the actual ruling specifically banned assessing qualifications based on IQ tests or on degree completion. Everyone does the latter, so why are we so sure this case is restricting people from doing the former?
Obvious once I heard it but something I never thought about it before – the Statue of Liberty is green because all old tarnished copper is green. When it was first built, it was, well, copper-colored. When it tarnished the government was supposed to raise money to fix it, but never got around to it. Now it’s impossible for me not to find the idea of the Statue of Liberty being green kind of hilarious.
California college professors told they can be disciplined or fired for committing “microaggressions” including “describing America as a melting pot” or saying that “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”. Assumed this was some kind of total fake, did some digging, still seems legit, but if anyone can find otherwise I will correct myself with apologies and relief. At least every time I see this sort of thing it’s in universities, suggesting the contagion is somewhat contained. [edit: a claim that this doesn’t matter much]
We already know that many medical studies and many psychological studies fail to replicate. What about economics studies? The necessary work is still being done, but the recent progress report suggests that about 66% of replication attempts completely fail to replicate the original finding, with another 12% partly failing to replicate and only 22% replicating completely. Possibly an argument for privileging theory more in the interminable Econ Theory Versus Empiricism Wars?
Contrary to some reports, nationwide gun violence and nationwide violence against police do not seem to have spiked after the latest round of police brutality stories and race riots.
This wins my prize for real case most like the sort of weird murder mysteries you see in books: A man is found dead in the desert with an obvious fatal gunshot wound. He has no enemies but recently suffered a major financial setback; everyone suspects he committed suicide and only wanted it to look like murder. However, this ruse is very convincing; no gun is found anywhere nearby. How did he shoot himself?
How long can a con man with no soccer talent whatsoever play soccer at the professional level before anybody catches on? How about twenty years?
IQ researcher, Ian Deary collaborator, and SSC victim Dr. Stuart Ritchie has written an introductory book on IQ and intelligence studies
Thought process:
“Hey, wait, why would you do that?”
“Oh, it’s a cross-validation set. We do that in machine learning, and sure enough there are good reasons for it. Gold star.”
Nice to see a paper where my initial qualms about the statistics aren’t validated. Even nicer to see a group that doesn’t just spit out the raw regression.
Well it’s not cross validation, just validation. Cross validation requires you to do this like 5 times on different samples of the dataset. Also validation is for setting hyperparameters. This seems more like a test set, which is just to test if your method works after you’ve committed to it.
On the google robots thing, I feel like the reason for the similarity to LSD could be obvious – just like with the AI, the brain’s pattern-recognition software is working in overdrive. The same description could be applied to the mental level, so it makes a lot of sense.
Really cool stuff though – the connection to psychedelic visuals was by far the most interesting thing about the story to me, in the “wow, brains really are just computers” sense.
I agree it’s something like that, I just hope someone can explain more technically what it means for a neural network to be in overdrive, in a way that makes sense in both a computing and a neuroscience context.
The neural nets in question are really quite different than human brain neural nets in both response function of individual neurons and in the way they are layered.
It would be sort of surprising if the two are totally related- the way you create the weird google images would be the equivalent of taking output from the brains image recognition and feeding it back through the eyes over and over again.
I think maybe the similarities are related to properties of the images rather than of the specific method of image recognition.
It wouldn’t have to be fed back to the eyes, just through the visual cortex mechanisms. Presumably there are mechanisms for controlling how much visual-cortexing the visual cortex does and those could be increased?
Note that this was already sort of my theory of LSD – see part III here.
There is now an interactive live stream of a neural network hallucinating: http://www.twitch.tv/317070
Nice find.
Yes, exactly. It doesn’t really matter that they don’t work the same way. No matter what approach you use to learn it, the structure in the learning data is ultimately the same, and e.g. features such as lines and surfaces are probably going to be used by any successful method.
The original source for the shoggoths is here and the full collection here.
The neural net is a pyramid of neurons. Many at the bottom, few at the top. The first level represents pixels. The second level represents simple shapes, like lines and curves. Higher levels represent more complicated shapes. It can be run forward or backwards. What’s happening in the images is that they start by running the network forward, up the image. Then they choose a node that is activated, indicating that the pattern was found in the image, increase the value of that node and run the network backwards to get a new image. For example, the swirly line picture is probably the result of increasing all of the low level nodes that correspond to curves.
The brain might do something similar because it does inference. We rewrite our perception of low level details as a consequence of high level interpretation. You might imagine that LSD causes interpretation to go into overdrive, rewriting perception more than usual.
But that’s about the opposite of most of what I’ve heard about LSD. My understanding is that it reduces interpretation and gives access to low-level sensory data. But we don’t perceive pixels. We perceive shapes. We perceive features at all levels of the network. Probably what LSD does is increase the salience of low level features. If we do not perceive pixels directly, it is not clear that there is any meaningful difference between increasing the salience of lines and running this algorithm to increase the sharpness of lines already in the algorithm.
I’m not really sure what you mean by this. In my experience, probably the most prominent features of the psychedelic mindset are epiphanies and “archetypes”, so to speak, both of which are results of increasing interpretation and feel like to me to be the mental version of “image recognition going into overdrive”. That being said, I’ve never taken enough to actually see the kind of imagery in question, and I’ve heard the headspace on that level is very different.
Low level visual sensory data is never pixels at any point conscious processing can possibly “see” it. It is already in the form of circular wavelets when going through the optic nerve, and becomes more like edges and line segments even before entering the primary visual cortex.
I also immediately thought of Scott’s loopiness article upon reading what the researchers did. In hindsight, seeing ghosts is kind of the obvious result of putting pattern recognition networks into a runaway feedback loop. If you look hard enough for a specific shape, you’ll find it everywhere.
If you haven’t read it, you might like this book. It describes the sense in which the human brain might be structured like the pyramidal neural net you describe at the beginning of your comment.
One effect of LSD I’ve noticed is the inability to actually finish a sentence. Phenomenologically, it feels like a recursive process petering out prematurely. Perhaps the salience of low level visual details is increased under the influence of LSD because the recursion up to the top of the pyramid is suppressed, preventing full integration of the low-level details into higher-level ones.
Oh awesome, a chance to talk about LSD with smart people that’ve taken it as well.
The last time I took LSD, I dropped 5 tabs (twice as much as I’d ever done before.)
The best way to describe the visual hallucination….
You know how when a screen gets broken, or is poorly adjusted, you get those lines of colored light sort of courescing off the images? Like they’re shooting off rays of red and green and what not? You get that- or I did- streams of what looked like perfect pixels streaming off of things.
I experience the epiphany as well. One thing though- I didn’t have trouble FINISHING thoughts so much as with writing them down- my brain was running so much faster than my hand.
I will say, upon examining the ten or so scrawled pages the next day- most of the stuff held up. I had personal epiphanies- and in the cold light of two days later, they still made a lot of sense- but they only make sense if you have the memories of the experience to give the scribbling context.
I suspect part of the epiphany effect is that very, very rarely in life will you spend a solid hour doing nothing but thinking about your life as obsessively as possible. It’s like sitting around thinking for five minutes by the clock- everyone thinks they do it, almost no one actually does.
>I suspect part of the epiphany effect is that very, very rarely in life will you spend a solid hour doing nothing but thinking about your life as obsessively as possible. It’s like sitting around thinking for five minutes by the clock- everyone thinks they do it, almost no one actually does.
I agree! In fact because of this I find lying in bed with insomnia to be a somewhat psychedelic experience – you live for hours on your thoughts alone.
Yes, that sounds very familiar. I think what I was trying to describe might be better explained as “trying to put thoughts into language” — that is, I have an epiphany or coherent thought (or at least the experience of one) but then when I try to convey it to someone else via speech (or to myself later via written language), I’m never able to capture the original thought.
This may be partially because, like you say, my brain is running faster than my hand or mouth. I do have the impression (which, TBH, could be completely invented post hoc) that the more I try to force my epiphanies into a linguistic frame, the more distorted they become until I realize the words I’m left with fail to convey what was so interesting or insightful or important about the initial thought.
I’ve never had this exact experience, but despite what I said above, I have been able to, as I put it, “bring things back with me”. These insights are usually non-verbal, but I can start to express them once I’ve come down and can concentrate on complex thoughts again.
For example, in one psilocybin adventure I had the insight: “the audience is the muse”. Interestingly, there’s a short story called “The Art of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes” or similar in which the narrator consumed LSD, looked at a collection of photographs of strangers, and subsequently has the same insight (word for word: the audience is the muse).
This goes back to what I said above about my impression that trying to frame my insights linguistically distorted the content of those insights. First, I try to describe the insight in terms that might be used by an analytical philosopher, but find that this sort of reductionist approach to understanding the insight crowds out what I perceive as important about it. Then I decide I need to write a story or poem or song to convey the insight rather than a densely-worded philosophical text — that the insight can only be conveyed indirectly to someone who is already “on the same path” so to speak. Then imaginary guitar parts start playing in my head and I pay attention to those for an hour or so instead.
With stronger doses I get more interesting epiphanies, but it’s harder to retain the context in which they occurred, so it’s harder to hold onto them when I come down. I remember on one trip going through a typology of attitudes towards the universe and how the attitudes relate to each other; for example, one type was “madness”, and another was “enumerator of types” which, because the universe is ultimately chaotic and “types” are imposed by the human mind, ultimately leads back to madness. And then I realized I was engaging in enumeration of types by going through all these possible attitudes towards the universe.
Most of my LSD epiphanies seem, like these two examples, to have something to do with recursion.
Lots of recursion.
I wonder, going off of the discussion of LSD interfering with signaling, if part of the effect is A. false positives (I remember distinctly a few epiphanies where I ended up going- wait, no that’s stupid) and
B. Presumably when I have a sober epiphany, I have the realization first, and then have to put it carefully into words. If that communication is being blocked, I’d have the same result…my subconcious realized something, but there’s a barrier between realization and verbalization.
As for your “sorting the types” moment- a lot of LSD epiphanies turn out to be very….banal, afterwards.
The sciencey bit of brain goes “Well, you were fucking with the “epiphany” center of your brain. The emotional bit goes “maybe we just don’t realize how deep the banal could BE, man.”
I feel envious of all these people who’ve had life-altering epiphanies and incredible visual experiences on LSD. The one time I took it I just had crying jags and panic attacks followed by vomiting and a skull-crushing headache.
The one interesting bit was some tactile hallucinations (feelings like threads or hairs/bristles touching my face and fingertips) and a sense of the world somehow being more three-dimensional than usual; things just looking “different” in a way that was hard to pin down, like I was looking at everything through a lens. But I didn’t get any of the mental experiences that many people describe.
Granted, I took a low-ish dose so I maybe didn’t get the full experience, but after how unpleasant and scary it was I probably wouldn’t take it again.
@ Mark Atwood:
It’s possible that it was something else, but I’m pretty sure it was LSD. I’ve read about other people having experiences similar to mine. I think part of the problem is that I just wasn’t mentally prepared for it (though I thought I was at the time), and I wasn’t in the best state of mind going in, so it quickly turned into this self-feeding panic loop that felt like having a nightmare while fully awake and relatively lucid.
Despite it being an experience I probably won’t repeat, I don’t regret doing it. If nothing else it gave me a healthy respect for psychedelics. It’s not a drug to be taken for escape; it demands to be felt, for better or worse.
> It can be run forward or backwards.
I’m a bit confused on how the “run backwards” works.
It’s pyramidal, fewer nodes at each layer than the previous, so the thing as a whole would work something like a many to few function, right?
How exactly is it run backwards?
I actually (mis)understoood it a bit differently: that it was an inverted pyramid on top of a regular one, and the layers were trained in pairs so that the thing as a whole would produce output as similar to the input as possible. Since it passes through a bottleneck, that means it would have to usefully compress the data. To do that, it’d have had to learn useful facts about regularities that show up in the data, and the deeper layers represent those regularities that it found.
But I would have thought getting an image out from the inner abstract properties layers involved running the inverted pyramid, which was trained together with the base, rather than running the base backwards.
Did I completely misunderstand how this works?
Yes, “running backwards” can be used for compression. That paper contains pictures of double pyramids, a bottleneck. But the two pyramids are the same. It is ambiguous what “the same” means because one has a one-to-many function and the other a many-to-one function. Once you have decided what “the same” means, as a function of parameters, the training is done subject to the restriction that the parameter is the same going both ways. Also, you may be interested in the paper To recognize shapes, first learn to generate images.
Let’s restrict to the case of just two levels, pixels and curves.
You could compress by throwing away the pixels and reconstructing them from the curves. If they did that, then they could produce a tweaked image by exaggerating the curve values. But if they did that, they should not compare the original image to the new image, but they should instead compare the compressed image to the new image. Both images are produced by describing curves, one a natural set of curves and the other a supernatural set of curves.
I do not think they did that. I do not think that they did compression. I do not think that they threw out information. I think that they decomposed the image into two pieces of information, the curves and the residual information to reconstruct the pixels from the curves. Then they exaggerated the curves and add back in the residual information.
If it’s just two levels, I think that is a bad idea and comparing the compressed image to the image produced by tweaking the compressed parameters is a better idea. At the very least, one should look at that before looking at the variant I think that they actually do. But with many layers, just using the high level compression parameters is probably a bad idea, and that’s why they’re probably keeping the residuals.
Douglas: Huh, interesting, thank you! I wasn’t really aware of Boltzmann machines, didn’t know about that style of neural net.
I have some reading to do. Thanks! 🙂
The relationship between compression, prediction, classification and interpolation is deep, and I wish I had the education and time to really dig into that and understand it. I feel like there are some big things waiting to be discovered there.
Some of the coolest stuff I’ve read about is people using generic compression algorithms (gzip, etc.) to perform pretty sophisticated classification, including apparently doing authorship attribution as well as stylistic models.
I don’t think they are doing it this way.
If I understand correctly, starting from an input image they compute the activation of a few layers in feed forward mode, as if they were doing classification, then they increase the contrast after a specific layer and use backpropagation with gradient descent to search for the input image which produces the desired output.
So if you feed the network an image of the sky with clouds, and some layer detects a weak “dog face” pattern at position (x, y), then if you increase the contrast of the activation of this layer and search for the corresponding input image, you will get some variation of the original image with a dog face appearing at (x, y), in addition to all other pattern that were detected by that layer.
Yeah, a lot of what I said about “running backwards” is wrong. RBMs are symmetric, so it makes sense to run them backwards. In theory, running them either direction is random, but in practice running them forward is often deterministic. And in the first paper I link to, they do that, labeled transpose. But for the “fine-tuning,” I think that they change the parameters of the compressor and decompressor separately, contrary to what I said. In the second paper I linked to, I’m not sure what they do.
It is always possible to run a classifier backwards by sampling from a posterior distribution, though this may be expensive. I think that the second paper I linked to does this. The first paper, on compression, should want a deterministic result. Maybe they look for the maximum a posterior point, rather than the whole distribution?
Yes, V, it seems that is what google is doing, too. You could interpret this as a kind of decompression. Take the image, compress it, change the compressed representation, and decompress. But how much of the weirdness is due to the change as opposed to the compression itself? This was my earlier comment. Before changing the compressed representation, they should apply the same search to the compressed representation of the original image. That is, they should search for an image that maximizes the likelihood of the same neurons lighting up.
It sounds like they might be Going Loopy.
(www.slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/)
You can think of what google is doing as semantic sharpening. “Sharpening”, in image editing software, usually designates a filter which enhances the local differences in color and intensity, thus making edges more salients. And indeed, if you run google’s algorithm at a very shallow layer of the neural network, edge sharpening is what you’ll get.
What these deep networks build is a stack of representations which progressively abstract important feature of the image. Shallow neurons typically represent simple edge detectors (Gabor like features) but as you go deeper in the network, they represent more abstract concept. Sets of edge detectors are combined to form feature that detect shapes, those shape detectors are combined to detect more complex shapes, until you eventually have a neuron acting as a dog detector.
What this algorithm does is look into those deeper levels and tweak the input until it generates a sharper signal. If you saw something vaguely dog-like, make it even more dog like. It’s a way too boost apophenia.
Well, they have now open sourced it. Building it and playing around with it shouldn’t be completely out of reach for anyone computer literate (at least with access to Linux or Mac, some of these libraries are not very Windows-friendly).
I don’t know how much that helps in understanding it, but it’s cool anyway!
It would make an awesome photoshop or GIMP filter. When I was young, I would entertain myself by making a gradient then going over it with the sharpen tool and watching the 1 pixel-wide zebra stripe patterns emerge out of formless grey shades.
http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/06/19/getting-closer-to-digital-lsd/ is a fun article on the topic.
It doesn’t seem like Swedes in Sweden have the same poverty rate as Swedes in the US. After transfers/etc, It seems like Swedes in Sweden have < 1/2 the poverty rate as Swedes in the US. Has anyone else looked at the numbers?
After transfers/etc, It seems like Swedes in Sweden have < 1/2 the poverty rate as Swedes in the US.
Source? The ultimate source for the claim that Swedes in Sweden have a similar poverty rate to Swedes in the U.S. is Poverty in Europe and the USA: Exchanging official measurement methods, Geranda Notten & Chris de Neubourg (pdf).
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_income_in_the_United_States_by_ancestry, Scandinavians don’t look particularly rich relative to other white ethnicities (Swedes are in the middle, “scandinavian” is at the bottom). My suspicion (this could be checked!) is that the low poverty rates people are claiming for people who identify as Swedish on the census is driven by non-response bias: Something like a third of people don’t fill out the census ancestry question, and I suspect the ones that do are disproportionately wealthy.
There’s probably strong geographical effects there. Outside the Western states, the ethnic background of white Americans tends to correlate closely with geography; Scandinavians for example tend to be concentrated in the Upper Midwest, which despite the recent fracking boom isn’t a historically rich area.
Right, you should not use self-reported ancestry. Many people avoid this problem by meaning “white Minnesotans” when they say “Swedish-Americans,” but it opens up other problems. I do not see any source for the claim that the Swedish-American poverty rate is 6.7%, so I cannot tell the methodology.
I would say that that certainly does open up other problems. There’s considerably more German ancestry in Minnesota than Swedish ancestry (a fact perhaps concealed due to a tradition which developed in the early and mid 20th century of the Minnesota Germans talking less about their ancestry than the Swedes do).
due to a tradition which developed in the early and mid 20th century of the Minnesota Germans talking less about their ancestry than the Swedes do
Due to legal and extra-legal persecution of Germans (and Lutherans) by Woodrow Wilson.
I don’t know about poverty. But Tino Sanandaji has blogged frequently on something close to this subject.
I don’t think Swedes are rich relative to Americans I think they are rich relative to Swedes in Sweden.
According to him as of 2007
Self reported Swedes in US have GDP/Capita of 56k and a poverty rate of 6.7%
Compared to 36k GDP/Capita in Sweden. No poverty rate is reported but the EU poverty rate is 8.1%
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/01/dynamic-america-poor-europe.html
ETA: Just looked and Meg. McArdle links to a Tino article. I believe the above link takes you to the source of his claim and it is from the Census American Community Survey.
1) Sweden has much lower poverty rates than the US (See http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=47991 )
2) Swedes are not propsperous compared to other non-Swedish whites in the US.
The main point is that something like 40% of white people don’t report ancestry on the Census, and so people who report ancestry at all are weird and non-representative.
Tino is an interesting dude. He’s a first-generation immigrant to Sweden — Kurdish Iranian, came there as a kid in the 1980s. His background is in engineering — polymer chemistry IMS — but somehow he’s morphed into a columnist and public intellectual who is one of the loudest internal critics of Sweden’s economic and social system.
Anyway: he’s the originator of the 6.7% claim, but he doesn’t properly source it. He just says it’s “from US Census data” and that’s it — no further information, no explanation, no methodology. So there’s literally no way to cross-check it.
Doug M.
Here is what Tino has in his methods section.
“Method
I have calculated per capita GDP for the US and 18 western European countries. I have also calculated Gross State product for 50 U.S states and Washington D.C. In addition, as far as I know for the first time I have calculated imputed per capita GDP of Americans by European ancestry, and compare them with those in the home country. My sources for population and Per capita (purchasing power adjusted) GDP are OECD Factbook 2009 (latest available GDP is for 2007, latest available population 2008).
My source for relative income for Americans of various ancestry is Census 2006-2008 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates. I use per capita income of each group relative to per capita income of the US (so if a group is 10% above average it will have a per capita GDP = 1.1*45489). (click on Selected Population Profiles).
My sources for Gross State Products is Bureau of Economic Analysis, Per capita real GDP by state (chained 2000 dollars) in 2007. I show the results adjusted to the OECD GDP per capita figure (so again if a state is 10% above average it will have a per capita GDP = 1.1*45489).
UK includes British, Welsh, Scottish, Scoth-Irish and those that simply identify as “American”.
British excluding “American” has population 41,181,917, per capita income $59775.5 and poverty rate 6.8%.
French includes French-Canadian and Basque. German includes Pennsylvania German.
A small group identifies as “Scandinavian”, and a the group that call themselves “European” are included in EU.15 (of course technically some of the Scandinavians are Norwegian and Icelandic).”
No, Anthony, that is not the source. That is merely the source for converting the Swedish statistics to be comparable to American statistics.
No. Dolezal is a custom-tailored negative externality machine who deserves every bit of ridicule, shame, and punishment she will possibly get and more. She has been faking hate crimes against herself, and anyone who fakes hate crimes is burning the fabric of social trust for attention. She deserves to be treated like Dylan fucking Roof.
The only class of people I can think of that deserve a more “disproportionate” punishment are prosecutors who cheat to get innocent people convicted, the minimum sentence for which should be whatever the accused was going to be punished with.
I agree about her faking hate crimes, but it does seem this might stem from some sort of mental illness. Her ability to calibrate empathy seems to be broken in a serious way.
why blame mental illness when the career benefits of her doing so are so obvious?
Because how risky it is. I feel like we get so caught up with the arguing that we forget the inherent ridiculousness of the situation.
This is a person that is not only pretending to be black (through “blackface”, of all things!), and somehow became a prominent figure in the NCAAP.
This is probably the plot of Tyler Perry’s next non-Madea movie. It was bound to blow up in her face, and the real question is how it didn’t happen sooner. As such, it seems suspect that personal gain could be the only motivation.
True, but the other direction.
Taken a look at the national NAACP president lately? The relevant academic subculture makes questioning if someone’s looks are “black enough” totally taboo.
it isn’t risky though, as she’s proven. Telling a sympathetic audience what they want to hear is always a safe strategy, which is why she was able to get away with it for so long.
It’s the parents
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/06/lets-talk-about-rachel-dolezals-parents.html
It might be the parents. But that poster strikes me as herself too confident, too inclined to pick a side and take conjectures as facts.
That’s what it looks like to me too. Some sort of awful childhood which was a significant causal factor in serious mental problems, one of the systems of which is pathological lying. Of course, it is tough to say when dealing with a pathological liar whether the abuse actually happened or is just another lie, but in this case there are some other indicators besides just her word.
If all that is true, it may not completely excuse her bad behavior, but I’d think it would at least soften the vitriol.
Parenting has virtually no effect on how children end up once they have grown up and left home, so I doubt it
> Parenting has virtually no effect on how children end up once they have grown up and left home
Ha. Hahahahaha. Ha ha. As someone whose parents were abusive… ha ha ha ha no.
More seriously, using non-anecdotal evidence: “parenting has no effect” is only true once you filter out the abusive childhoods. Parents can certainly have an effect on their children by giving them PTSD or preventing them from eating. It’s just that this effect is in the opposite direction of the effect most studies of the type are looking for.
Seriously? You think people who were abused as children are at no greater risk than the non-abused for serious mental illness? I’d love to see the cite on that one.
Any links or further information about her faking hate crimes against herself?
See this highly credulous report from a couple months back about “racist threats” she “found” in the mail, now considered almost certainly faked by her. Money quote: “Officials said this is the 9th hate crime in less than a decade for Rachel Dolezal.” All of them are trivially fabricated, stuff like finding nooses on her property. I would in no way be surprised if she was also behind the pamphleteering, but that’s presumptuous. Washington does presumably contain at least one normal racist.
This woman has built her entire career on the active, fraudulent, and deliberate poisoning and destruction of civilization. And that is flat evil.
Edit: And here’s a followup from last week.
Hey now, black people can fake hate crimes just as well as white people!
Exactly.
In biological terms, it makes much more sense to switch races than to switch sex..
The biological difference between a white woman and a black woman is 1) skin color, and 2) hair texture. That’s about it. Those things can be altered with techniques that are much less invasive than the many plastic surgeries that it took to make Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn.
The biological differences between the average woman and the average man include:
1) Height
2) Weight
3) Proportion of muscle to bodyfat
4) Levels of hormones such as estrogen and testosterone (which affect many things, including behavior)
5) Hair growth patterns (facial hair, for example)
6) Hair loss patterns with age
7) Various physical features such as Adam’s apples
8) External genitalia
9) Internal reproductive organs, which mean that women menstruate and bear children, whereas men do not
10) Breast development and function
11) Chromosomes in every cell of the body
So if we all agree that a biological man can switch to being a biological woman, and vice versa, and that we all have to respect those choices by calling people by their preferred pronouns, just because those people feel really strongly that they identify with the other gender, why do we discriminate against the white woman who feels equally strongly that she identifies with black people?
Switching from white to black is a LOT LESS of a biological stretch than switching one’s sex.
You’re right that changing phenotypic sex is significantly more difficult than phenotypic race, obviously, but seem to have taken that position to a hyperbolic extreme.
Differences in hormone levels, bone structure, patterns of hair growth, distribution of fat and muscle, height and weight between races are well documented. They’re typically, though not always, less than sex differences but you can’t wave them off either.
Again, you made a good case but there’s no need to overstate it.
Sorry, Ever An Anon, but using biology to delineate differences won’t wash. You obviously have not been on the receiving end of a Tumblr lecture when some poor foolhardy innocent has put forward “But gender is biological! What about hormones and chromosomes and genitalia and reproductive systems and and and…”
Then they get shot down about “No! First, intersex people! Then, chromosomes and hormones and the rest of it have nothing to do with your gender orientation! You don’t need to be post-op or intending to have any surgery, you don’t even need to be on hormones, if you consider yourself to be gender This then you are, it’s that simple”.
I hasten to add I’ve never been on the receiving end of such because I’ve never stuck my head above the parapet to draw that on me. But I’ve seen posts using tortuous circumlocutions like “vagina-havers” or “people who menstruate” to avoid using the term “woman” in discussions about periods, and still being picked up on using discriminatory binary language because men can have vaginas too! Not all vagina-havers menstruate!
Compared with that, dosing yourself with melanin to artificially darken your skin and changing your hair style and texture to emulate the physical characteristics of race different to yours is buttons. If you can consider yourself to be CAFB/CAMB (not just “assigned female/male at birth” based on external genitalia, but coercively assigned female/male at birth), then why can’t you consider yourself to be coercively assigned white at birth based on external skin coloration?
And it may well be racist to say that there are differences of “distribution of fat and muscle, height and weight” between races: that is saying that black people are only fit for being athletes and sportspersons because of their physical attributes, because they can run fast but they’re not smart, you terrible person you!
and yet forensic scientists can tell a black woman from a white woman just with a partial skeleton or skull.
Here’s a list off the top of my head of easily documented physical differences:
1) Brain volume
2) Skull size and shape
3) Gestation period
4) Twinning probability
5) Pelvic width inlet (goes hand in hand with the skull differences and gestation differences)
6) Bone density
7) Body weight distribution (ever wonder why black people are better sprinters? At least part of the answer is “lighter calves”.)
There are many, many more.
Whether it’s more absurd to be transracial or transexual I leave as an exercise to those who enjoy debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
What is interesting to me about her is that her existence proves (not that there was any doubt in my mind, but I think there still was in some minds) that victimhood status confers powerful psychological benefits in our current society.
I can’t find the original article, but I recall reading that she also claimed to have some sort of Native American heritage, in addition to having been sexually abused, victim of a hate crime, and, of course, member of an historically oppressed race.
I think it’s clear she has some sort of psychological problem, but I don’t think the root of that problem has anything to do with race. It has to do with victimhood, since she clearly has done everything she can to claim victim status.
Reminds me of the sort of hypochondriac who is constantly ill because either consciously or subconsciously they like being treated as a sick person (people who are sick often get more sympathy, nurturing, etc.).
Of course, society has always had some level of sympathy for victims of any sort, but the appearance of Dolezal’s particular pathology at this particular point in history can’t be a coincidence: we’ve now created victimhood “categories” which don’t require anything bad to happen to you personally (though she claimed the specific sexual abuse and hate crime cards as well) in order to get the special treatment accorded to a victim.
The reason I have a little more sympathy for her than Alraune is that, so far as I can tell, she never accused anyone specific of committing hate crimes against her. She was just trying to claim the victim status without hurting anyone else, though obviously she undermines social trust in a general way.
The people deserving of the most severe condemnation are those who use this new culture of victimhood as a cudgel to get revenge on specific enemies, such as Columbia’s mattress girl, who, recent lawsuits seem to make clear, totally staged this whole thing as a way to get back at a lover who jilted her (and get a lot of attention for herself too, of course).
If that case is too ambiguous for you, I recall one in which a British woman sent her dad to jail for 10+ years by accusing him of molesting her as a child. Later she admitted she was just getting back at him for divorcing her mother or something. No charges filed.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s thought this. We reward people for being seen as apart of victimized classes. We give them political power and benefits, and also social sympathy and, in certain circles, even give their views greater epistemic weight. That’s why everybody is trying to claim their group is uniquely victimized.
I recall the economics blogger Matthew Yglesias making the point that even though he is only 1/4 hispanic, and physically looks like a white Jew like the other 3/4 of his ancestry, he marked himself as a Hispanic when applying for college. Here’s a very privileged guy who suffered none of the social downsides of being Hispanic but got all of the benefits.
It makes me wonder if some marginalized groups (whether immigrant or native) won’t assimilate as quickly as those in the past, or indeed resist it entirely, in order to maintain these benefits.
[V]ictimhood status confers powerful psychological benefits in our current society.
This is an excellent point, and one that gets lost (or responded to with rage) in discussions of privilege.
I’m willing to accept that in general, being white is higher-status than being black. I’ll posit that White Privilege is a thing. You get basket of goodies for being born white.
But blacks get a basket of goodies too. Their basket might be smaller overall and consist of different things, but they still get a Black Privilege basket.
The Black Privilege basket doesn’t have “can get a cab easily” in it, but it does have “if I screw up, I can tell a white liberal that it was because of racism and he’ll believe me.” It doesn’t have “I don’t have to worry about being followed in stores,” but it does have “by default, I’m going to be considered by everyone to be cooler than white people.”
I’m not saying these are even trades, but there are privileges to being black. Dolezal wanted those privileges.
Witness the same souls that passionately insist that there is no black privilege will also insist that it is white privilege not to be assumed to be an affirmative action hire.
Going the other way, I’m given to understand Asian Americans with non-Asian ancestry avoid identifying their Asian heritage when applying to colleges and such.
“Going the other way, I’m given to understand Asian Americans with non-Asian ancestry avoid identifying their Asian heritage when applying to colleges and such.”
Can they do that?
I wonder if white people with surname Lee have taken to including pictures of themselves on their applications?
I don’t really know much about the Dolezal case, so this may be a stupid question, but:
As far as I understand, this is a person who was living in a certain ethnic culture (in this case, Black) for most of her adult life; was accepted by members of this culture as one of their own; was actively working to defend members of this culture against outside threats; and who was finally outed as belonging to a different race than the one she claimed to be (in this case, White).
On the one hand, she did act dishonestly. If I set up a club that has a rule like, “you can only join if you have at least 90% of the following genetic markers”, and you fake your genotyping results in order to join — then you are a liar, and, once the truth comes out, you should at minimum be evicted for the club (and, optimally, compensate the club members for all the resources you’ve wasted).
But on the other hand, if race is just a social construct, then why do your alleles matter at all ?
As I understand it, she isn’t really being criticized for lying about her race. She is being criticized for allegedly faking hate crimes against herself.
My view is unfortunately in a stark minority here. Most coverage has discussed the supposed hate crimes only as an afterthought, which is an awful shame because it is by far the most important aspect of the story to publicize.
She is being criticized for lying about her race far more than anything else. And coming as it did right on the heels of the whole Jenner thing it raised the obvious question: who are you to say that she is lying about her race?
She’s being really criticized about faking her race. Hence all the delighted fun-and-games about her being “transracial,” which tends to be dismissed on the grounds “Because.”
“Because,” comma, “that is not a thing that exists in reality.”
Like I said.
“Because.”
the possibility is erased by fiat.
In practice, it’s pretty much “because.” I haven’t seen a single decent argument that transgender and “transrace” are a priori different, because — as far as I can tell — they aren’t. Now, a posteriori it’s a different story; there are lots and lots of independent cases of transgender people, and ~0 good-faith claims of trans-racial identity. Mainstream criticisms often tried to conjure up some a priori difference — maybe passing as black is “cultural appropriation” in a way that gender transition isn’t, or maybe the problem is that “skin color is hereditary.” (No, I’m not making that one up.)
There are differences between male brains and female brains such that we can look at a stack of brain scans and sort them into “male” and “female” piles with pretty good accuracy.
There are no such differences between white and black brains.
There is a process during fetal development during which the fetus’s brain becomes a male brain or becomes a female brain.
There is no such point at which it becomes a white brain or a black brain.
I have seen criticism of her for using the term “transracial” because that term originated with, and of right belongs to, people of non-white/mixed races adopted by and brought up by white parents in a white cultural background, so they “act” and “talk” white but look black or mixed-race, and suffer ostracisation from whites for being black and from blacks for being “white on the inside”.
So among other things she has done, she is accused of stealing a term to describe herself that does not mean what she says and belongs to real transracial people.
It makes sense to me.
Ironically, the fact that gender is on some level essential but race is a pure social construct means that you can be transgender but not transracial.
Transgender essentially (much more complicated than this, but this is my attempt to summarize) means that a person has brain that has innate characteristics of one gender, but by some fluke of biology a body of the opposite sex. It’s more complicated than that because there are in between states and whatnot. Regardless, that dissonance can be immensely psychologically distressful to some people.
Race, on the under had is entirely based on how other people treat you, which is in large part based on what you look like on the outside. There’s no dissonance to be found. If people treat you like your black or asian, that’s what you are. People are angry at Dolezal because she looks black now, but she seemingly skipped 20 or so years of development where she was instead treated as white.
Because race is purely about
…Has anyone tried? Do you have a reference to someone trying? Because I sort of doubt this claim. I know that black brains are smaller on average, for instance.
@Dr Beat,
Again, as I said to someone else up(?)thread, just because racial differences are often smaller than sex differences doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Brain volume and weight differences between races are larger than the equivalent sex differences, smaller structural differences have been discovered, and obviously psychometric tests reveal large differences in general intelligence and personality traits. Even sex hormone effects on the brain are different to a lesser extent, because different races have different amounts of serum testosterone.
It is quite easy to distinguish brains of different races, in fact it has been done routinely from the early days of anthropology.
This itself is presupposing a certain definition of “male” and “female” and trying to impose it as normative. Give me a basic DNA scan of those brains and I could sort them into different male and female piles based off chromosomes with far better accuracy. Sufficiently advanced DNA scans would be able to make “black” and “white” piles, too.
“~0 good-faith claims of trans-racial identity. ”
How do you know that? Perhaps they are passing because they know you would just deny them.
The reason she’s being talked about is that she highlights the contradictions in the progressive narrative, coming so soon after the Jenner story. Certainly there are differences, but there are enough similarities to make the sjw position that the moral case for buying into Jenners always being every bit equivalent in femaleness to every other woman is self evident, and due to that only opposed by willful evil, doubtful. Sorry for that awful sentence construction.
The amusement value, such as it is, is seeing the exact same arguments used against transgender people being used against this woman or the broader notion of “transracial” as meaning “not identifying with the race I was assigned”.
Such people don’t exist. Such a thing does not exist. This is mental illness. This is deliberate attention-seeking criminal fraud. How come she’s the only one we’ve ever heard of if this is a real thing? She can’t be transracial because biology! It’s impossible to change races and she’s a fake and a fraud and insulting real people of the real race she is claiming!
I do think transsexualism (in its traditional form) has more of an actual medical/biological basis.
But then, of course, you get the people on Tumblr who say that their gender is Cthulu and other people who defend them saying, “unlike sex, gender is a social construct, so people can be whatever gender they feel like, even if they make up their own category.”
And yes, I am one of those people who finds it exasperating that English doesn’t have a commonly used nongendered pronoun, and I will usually check the box marked “other” if it’s available, but I feel like if we’re going to apply the “fuck these categories” line of thinking to gender, we should be able to do the same with race.
When I first heard about this story, my reaction was, “So what? If she wants to be seen as black, let her be black. How is this hurting anyone?” (Of course that was before I heard about the faked hate crimes, which I’d consider much more heinous.)
In a way the angry reactions from the SJ community remind me of the way certain factions of feminists originally reacted to transsexuals; by saying they were men trying to “infiltrate” women (or women wanting male privilege), or men appropriating women’s bodies and experiences, etc. And then they eventually realized that they were on the wrong side of history and most of them scrambled to change their story.
And for a long time, people mocked trendy faux bisexuals, until the SJ community realized that they were alienating huge numbers of potential supporters, then revised their story and started talking about the perils of bi erasure.
It seems their strategy has been to become more inclusive; to say, “there is plenty of room in the ranks of the oppressed for all of you. Let’s stop fighting amongst each other and focus on the real problem, those white male cishet shitlords.” Except now they are running out of white male cishet shitlords because now more and more of those people are genderqueer and transbiracial.
It seems the SJ community faces something of a dilemma with cases like this Option #1: be more and more inclusive and more cool with everyone self-identifying as whatever they want until human identity dissolves into one big amorphous Instrumentality blob and the career victims are robbed of their victimhood status because anyone can be whatever they want.
Or option #2: Start doing some identity policing and telling people, “No, you cannot just SAY you are black and expect people to accept you that way if you’re not black. No, you cannot have your gender be ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’ because that makes no sense.”
Personally I hope they go the amorphous blob route, but it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Boy, this comment was rambly.
This story is the equivalent, Bugmaster, of discovering that 50-100% of annual antisemitic vandalism in your city was actually done by the local rabbi, and that said rabbi was actually Arab, and that he was wearing a prosthetic nose.
Hmm, that makes it sound like the crimes were done by a covert agent. Important to point out that she herself was the target, what the nature of the crimes were, and that she probably does sympathize with the black community more than the white community. (Yrs, she died to get into a black college as a white woman… but then again, she wanted to attend a black college).
She wasn’t, it appears, someone who wanted to have cover to attack blacks, but someone who faked threats to earn them sympathy.
Then it sounds like what happened. Whatever paper-thin excuses she might make for her behavior, what she has done for the PNW’s black community is rob them of time, money, credibility, security, and hope.
I’m not saying she helped blacks (or anyone besides herself until caught) but the first description, of the arab, makes it sound like he acts on behalf of other arabs, perpetrating harms against specific jews from within, rather than in this case a sad confused individual stoking general hatred for spoils.
Either that’s a typo, or Dolezal has occult powers that go far beyond faking her ethnicity 🙂
By “died” do you mean “tried” or “dyed”?
Note that she sued Howard for discriminating against her as a white. So she probably wasn’t pretending to be black back then, though she may have been dying her hair.
They didn’t try and fail. They tried and dyed.
Sorry, “died” should have been “sued” and I should not comment from my phone.
My point was that even though she was identifying as white (using a law intended primarily to help non-whites), so that argues against her actually thinking she was black, she was doing so in order to be surrounded by blacks for her university time, which argues against her acting maliciously, and perhaps for her eventual coming to truely view herself as black.
But in the end I’m glad I don’t have to try to look inside her head, brain scans or not.
“Transgender essentially (much more complicated than this, but this is my attempt to summarize) means that a person has brain that has innate characteristics of one gender, but by some fluke of biology a body of the opposite sex. It’s more complicated than that because there are in between states and whatnot. Regardless, that dissonance can be immensely psychologically distressful to some people.”
I have never seen any good evidence for this ‘brain sex’ theory, just endless MRI data mining that tends to come up with conflicting results in different studies. I would also add that the whole ‘girl brains make you like to wear dresses’ thing is rather sexist.
See here for a good take — http://sexnotgender.com/brain-sex-does-not-exist/
But even if it was true, why not just claim ‘a person has a brain that has innate characteristics of one race, but by some fluke of biology a body of another race’ and use the same argument to justify ‘trans-racialism’? I’m sure a properly motivated researcher can do a few brain scans for you to find ‘evidence’.
Does the suffering of others bring you joy? And if it doesn’t, and it’s about deterrence, then surely there is a limit to reasonable punishment?
Yeah, there’s a limit. Long-term jailing, for instance, would likely be excessive. But in this case, her statutory offense (filing false police reports, a gross misdemeanor in WA) completely fails to capture the harm of her actions (singlehandedly causing the level of danger black PNWers are in from their fellow citizens to be massively overrepresented), so she is in no danger of being appropriately, much less excessively, punished by the legal system.
She is guilty of working to destroy social trust, and in return, is being made pariah. The punishment fits the crime.
She is guilty of working to destroy social trust
“If we let transgenders use the girls’ bathroom, you’ll have boys pretending they’re transgender just to get into the girls’ locker room!” Isn’t that the same rationale about destroying social trust?
The equivalent offense there is preaching horribly inflated rape rates.
That’s an instance of OPPORTUNITY to des5roy social trust
As opposed to faking ordinary ho-hum run-of-the-mill crimes?
Faking hate crimes has bad effects on society that faking run-of-the-mill crimes does not.
On what grounds do you make that assertion?
Faking hate crimes increases racial tension in all of society. Faking a normal robbery that is not presented as a hate crime has no such effect.
and what is so poisonous about “racial tension” that it makes it necessarily worse? Faking a normal robbery would undermine social trust as well — and furthermore would ensure that everyone, regardless of race, could be a victim of the faker.
Rape seems to be in a similar place (though with smaller, more localized effect), and I don’t think it counts as a hate crime (yet).
Mary, two reasons: people are illogical,and that faked hate crimes are more readily amplified by a colluding news media.
A single liar cannot double the perceived rate of robbery in a region.
Eh, I don’t think illogic has much to do with it. Even if we act dumb and ignore the endless historical precedents for ethnic tension escalating into ethnic cleansing that make it rational to pay more attention to the incidence of interethnic violence than other sorts, it’s easier to properly judge people and situations within your own group than when interacting with someone from the outside. All sorts of reputational clues and social cues fall apart when dealing with outgroup members, and it makes it much harder to judge your safety on a case-by-case basis like you could with a member of your own group. Therefore caution is warranted even in good situations, and all the more so if there’s a trend of ethnic strife.
“Even if we act dumb and ignore the endless historical precedents for ethnic tension escalating into ethnic cleansing that make it rational to pay more attention to the incidence of interethnic violence than other sorts”
As if ethnic violence were the only sort there were! There are plenty of tensions that erupt in violence. To focus on one is playing dumb.
“faked hate crimes are more readily amplified by a colluding news media.”
In other words, the root of the problem with hate crimes is that the crimes are treated as special in the first place.
Normal crime-fakings don’t orchestrate racial division and panic. Such impacts are obviously difficult to measure until someone sparks a literal riot, but I live in the area and saw the panicked social media posts from my black Spokanese friends in the wake of her frauds.
She is a con-artist, who has spent years falsely making people live in fear in order to advance her own career. She is both despicable and guilty of causing genuine harm.
Perhaps I’ve missed something, but how do we know that the hate crimes she claimed were fakes? I thought what was established was that her claim to be black was fake. If other people believed it, she could still have been the target of hate crimes.
The existence of one lie makes one more willing to suspect other lies, but how do we know?
We know that Dolezal’s a consummate liar.
We know Dolezal has faked at least one death-threat to herself.
We know she has reported such incidents like clockwork.
We know that the other incidents could have been faked with a similar level of effort to the fake letter.
Therefore, they are all lies.
However it seems that she is being called out over these fake hate crimes only after her fake ethnicity has been discovered.
“Normal crime-fakings don’t orchestrate racial division and panic.”
But they do orchestrate other forms of division and panic. Would you feel much safer if you learned that a vicious random killing was motivated by cruelty, not racism?
I don’t know what bizarre point you’re trying to prove here Mary, but yes, yes I would. The Clockwork Orange boys have severe recruitment problems.
The only bizarre thing is your claim that if you knew you were in danger of being randomly and viciously killed you would feel safer because you knew their motive was cruelty, not racism.
Do you really have no objections at all to be tortured to death?
Not even you live in the bubble you’re pretending to occupy here.
The relevant risk to assess, Mary, is not your odds of being individually murdered by an individual stranger, it is the odds of those murders escalating into a collective action.
According to you.
Anyway, since what you are advocating is unequal treatment under the law, give us what the odds are of collective action in each case. Tell us how you calculate them too, and on what evidence, and how you determined it, and what you did to prevent selection bias.
Random speculation does not justify unequal treatment.
No, I’m advocating symmetric social treatment. Whether or not the legal system treats interethnic (or interwhatever, but -ethnic is the canonical case) threats and violence differently, the people and the media will. This is not only a fact, but also rational behavior on their part, so it’s not going anywhere. That behavior creates an additional incentive where there is a disproportionate reward for faking hate crimes, and the correct response to it is to treat hate crime fakers the same as we do other race war advocates.
“No, I’m advocating symmetric social treatment.”
No, you are advocating unequal protection of the law. If one man brutally tortures another to death, turning his punishment on the fine details of what names he screamed during the process is unequal protection.
“This is not only a fact, but also rational behavior on their part”
On what grounds do you make this assertion? Having vapors about the prospect of being murdered because of your race rather than just being murdered is as irrational as you can get.
Justice Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, disagrees with your analysis. Many criminal statutes prescribe different consequences for the same act depending on motive or intent, and that is entirely reasonable and constitutional.
Court opinion: Wisconsin v. Mitchell; news article about the case: “Justices Uphold Stiffer Sentences for Hate Crimes”.
In defense of prosecutors who cheat to secure for convictions for innocent people: to the best of my knowledge, those prosecutors don’t *realize* that they are persecuting innocent people. Similar to how Dolezal presumably didn’t conceptualize herself as “burning the fabric of social trust for attention.”
There definitely are people who consciously say to themselves, “I am going to do this terrible thing that I know is terrible, because I do not care that it is terrible” — indeed, anyone who has been needlessly rude has done the same thing writ small. I just don’t think that either of your examples are good ones of this phenomenon.
Then let’s start besting your knowledge:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special-reports/article10365422.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/05/08/end-the-use-of-jailhouse-informants/?postshare=311431107162531
http://observer.com/2015/03/california-prosecutor-falsifies-transcript-of-confession/
None of those address the beliefs of the prosecutors about the suspects.
Even in your bizarre delusionverse where framing people for crimes is still having your heart in the right place, there is no excuse for withholding and destroying exculpatory evidence. That particular brand of abuse is literally knowing they should be deemed innocent and arranging to have them convicted anyway, and it happens constantly.
Not all evidence points to the truth. 30% of 70% persuasive evidence points toward falsehood. Just having some piece of exculpatory evidence does not mean you know the accused is innocent.
Alraune, as we’ve seen with cases like the Birmingham Six, it’s easy for police and forensic scientists and judges to fake evidence, concoct confessions, and use every legal trick in the book to force convictions because despite the evidence, they are convinced the suspects are indeed guilty and letting them “get away with it” on a “technicality” is not really justice.
If the police, forensic scientists, judges, and (of course) prosecutors feel so strongly about it, each and every one of them ought to quit their practice and become full time advocates for a legal system where the presumption of innocence and the duty of the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt do not obtain.
Otherwise, each and every one of them, if caught, and after due process, should go to prison.
I suspect we’re conflating some (arguably) different categories of supposed misconduct here. Let me offer a proposed taxonomy:
Planting evidence: very very bad and criminal
High-pressure interrogation designed to elicit confessions: maybe bad, probably depends a lot on the exactly what techniques are used?
“Legal tricks”: legal by definition, moral righteousness open to debate?
[They] ought to quit their practice and become full time advocates for a legal system where the presumption of innocence and the duty of the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt do not obtain.
Lord Denning in 1980 refusing the appeal of the Birmingham Six with what would become known as the “appalling vista” decision:
(Well, surprise, surprise: turns out the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad were regularly fitting up guys for crimes they hadn’t committed).
In 1990, when admittedly he was in poor health and a bit loopy:
(Need I mention that yep, the convictions of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were also later quashed?)
Of course there are excuses for withholding or destroying potentially exculpatory evidence. E.g., in many old cases, it is impossible to perform DNA testing on physical evidence because the evidence was destroyed before DNA testing was invented. You can hardly blame a lawyer in 1980 for failing to realize that new forensic techniques are going to be invented in the future.
Moreover, I think you seriously underestimate how hard it can be to realize that you are holding exculpatory evidence (or, more precisely, evidence that somebody twenty years from now will believe could have been exculpatory). Classic example: a battered woman calls police and screams that her husband is trying to kill her. Medical records show substantial physical injuries, and this is not the first time she’s had to call the cops on him. Six months later during a pretrial interview, she says her husband really loves her, and that she doesn’t want him to go to jail. When you explain that you aren’t going to drop the case, she says, “Well, I was lying and did all those injuries to myself.” That’s an EXTREMELY implausible recantation, and only an idiot would believe it. But it’s still impeachment evidence that has to be turned over pursuant to Brady v. Maryland. Failing to turn it over isn’t “framing” anyone, because there’s no doubt that the guy is guilty, but you have to do it anyway. It can be hard to recognize “exculpatory” evidence that does not remotely affect your belief in the defendant’s guilt.
She deserves to be treated like Dylan fucking Roof.
This is hyperbole (I hope) and in bad taste.
Roof deserves to be hung by the neck until dead. I hope you don’t feel the same about Dolezal. It’s one thing to burn the fabric of social trust by faking some “hate crimes” against yourself. It’s another thing to do it by murder.
Concur.
Slow your roll, man.
I can see his point, that the long term effects of their actions may be the same, but yeah, murder is a big big deal.
Dylann Roof? Rachel Dolezal made up fake hate crimes for fun and profit, but she didn’t kill anybody.
Regarding the time crystals: I have yet to see an explanation for why the rotating ring configurations are actually the ground states.
To me, the rotating ions appear to just be an excited state (accelerated by the initially changing magnetic field). One could trap the ions in a strong confining potential, turn on the magnetic field, and then slowly turn off the confining potential–the ions would be stationary in the presence of the magnetic field (and hence in a manifestly lower energy state than the “time crystal” state).
Anyone have any insight? Or is this just supposed to be a stuntwork experiment?
Re: the microagressions @ UC thing –
Assumed this was some kind of total fake, did some digging, still seems legit, but if anyone can find otherwise I will correct myself with apologies and relief.
From what I can tell, it’s not fake, but it does seem to me that it’s being interpreted with a minimum of generosity. It’s certainly true that elements of the UC system buy into the idea of micro-aggressions, and that they would like to educate people to avoid them, and that they consider a number of sentiments and expressions to be examples of micro-aggressions.
But at the same time, first, this is not an official policy of banning anyone with these views; these are guidelines and suggestions for structuring dialogue. These aren’t policy documents that Volokh is citing, they’re things for educational seminars and stuff like that. And I’m not sure that’s even a bad thing in and of itself – you might not agree with framing it as “microaggression”, but an awareness of how language and assumptions can be interpreted by one’s audience is a pretty useful thing.
Second, I think he’s absolutely cherry-picking examples from the lists, without really acknowledging the context – for instance, the fact that the main document he cites acknowledges that the context of the relationship and situation is crucial to talking about these things. And I think the context where the thing is grouping the examples that Volokh cites together with other examples makes it look, to me, much more like an example of clumsy phrasing and laziness by somebody making a powerpoint for an education seminar, and much less like an official policy banning these views.
I do think that some of it is poorly done (the “Myth of Meritocracy” section of the PDF that Volokh links is not well-phrased and probably just shouldn’t have been included). And you may still think it’s wrong – I imagine most commenters here will still think it’s evil and wrong. But I don’t think it’s anything nearly as dramatic as it’s described.
I’m surprised to see the ‘melting pot’ line considered a microaggression. Is it because of something about it implying assimilation or what? I’ve only ever seen the phrase used in contexts where people are going “yay multiculturalism”, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing social-justice people would be against.
I *think* where they’re coming from is that it implies that race doesn’t exist or is unimportant, in the context of an argument about racism or something along those lines. America’s a melting pot -> we treat everyone the same -> racism is over, could be the kind of thing they have in mind.
I think it’s a pretty dumb line, to be honest. I just think it’s probably a clumsiness thing, not a malice thing.
The original idea of the melting pot is more or less the opposite of multiculturalism: instead of remaining distinct cultures, the different peoples coming into the US are alloyed into a single new one.
Whether people who use it today mean it that comprehensively (or even imagine the contents of a melting pot as metals rather than, say, stew) is open to question.
Pity the statue of liberty couldn’t be made of Electrum, but I suppose that would have been a lot more expensive.
Don’t know how on point this is, but in the Schoolhouse Rock take, individual cultures still maintain their identity in the melting pot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQl6XBo64M
That’s the context I was introduced to it as well (and probably where I got the stew image, though IIRC it also shows up in a MAD magazine book). The metaphor has clearly been modified, in part because the word “pot” sounds more domestic than industrial.
(See also the Melting Pot chain of fondue restaurants, whose name is presumably a backformation from the metaphorical use.)
Stew doesn’t melt. A melting pot, if it does not contain metal, contains wax or some other meltable substance.
Stew, of course, has other unfortunate implications.
That’s of course correct, but it didn’t stop the Schoolhouse Rock piece Edward Scizorhands mentions (which was probably most of my generation’s introduction to the phrase) from depicting the melting pot as a pot in which nothing actually melted.
What I take from this is that use of the term “white” presupposes that this process is or has already taken place; the “whites” as a group in the USA are precisely the output of this crucible. But wouldn’t that make sentences like “White people need to stop saying America is a melting pot” pure doublethink?
As far as I can tell, pretty much. If the enclave adopts aspects of the mainstream culture, that’s cultural imperialism. If the mainstream adopts aspects of the enclave culture, that’s cultural appropriation. Both are seen as aggressions by the mainstream against the enclave.
I agree that this is a line of thought that exists, but I don’t think that’s the sense in which it’s being used in this instance.
Around mid-century, the only way I’d ever seen ‘melting pot’ used was !yay multiculturism! with cheerful pictures of interestingly dressed people having a block party in Brooklyn. I thought ‘melting pot’ was kind of an unfortunate term, but I only recently found out it really began as about actually melting them into a homogenus bloc.
But isn’t the real problem that Universities are going out of their way to protect students from ideas the students don’t like? Two possible outcomes 1) students are so sheltered that they cannot function once they’re exposed to life outside of the University 2) 30 years from now we have a society that shuns anyone who doesn’t toe the line (or tow the lion).
More speech is the answer to speech you do not like.
Quibble: they’re going out of their way to protect students from ideas that the left doesn’t like.
Yeah, I was thinking something like that. Looking at the source document, http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/seminars/Tool_Recognizing_Microaggressions.pdf, it looks to me like almost all the examples are perfectly reasonable, except for the three mentioned in the article. I don’t think that pdf advice is perfect, but I think what it’s saying is basically “these are things people do that’s a problem, try not to” and is broadly right.
That makes me think either, “avoiding microaggressions is good, but there are some other political assumptions which have got mixed in and should be removed” or “the odd items are there because someone expressed themselves badly, or they’re a real problem in a context that wasn’t fully explained.”
Or, “hey, I can see the motte, and I can see the bailey”.
I’ve skimmed over the PDF, and I think that it consists of a mix of perfectly innocuous items (e.g. “America is a melting pot”); outright racist macro-aggressions (e.g. “You are a credit to your race”); and items that are highly dependent on context (e.g. “To an Asian person, ‘You must be good in math, can you help me with this problem?'” — which may be innocuous if, say, the person in question is carrying a stack of math books as he’s walking out of the Advanced Math for Super-Geniuses classroom).
I think my problem with the document is that it lumps all of these things into the same category. Thus, it demotes clearly racist statements to the status of “microaggressions”, while promoting innocuous statements to same. Thus, if people take the document to heart, they’ll be forced to conclude either that a). everything they could possibly say is super-racist, or b). racist statements aren’t actually that big of a deal. Neither interpretation is helpful to anybody.
But the document provides for disciplinary action against professors, with the use of the “hostile learning environment” legal language. That’s completely unacceptable, whatever one thinks of the validity of the concept of microaggressions. Micro offenses don’t merit a macro response; any official punishment would be disproportionate. Even the threat of it is disproportionate.
None of the documents have anything about disciplinary actions.
Volokh links to a PR article about a UCLA professor’s research on microaggressions and uses the phrase hostile learning environment. The writer of article is, I repeat, a PR person for the university. She is not a lawyer, and this is not official school policy.
He then links to Berkeley’s page for its policy regarding reporting and adjudicating racial harassment, which uses the phrase hostile environment (not hostile learning environment) exactly once. There is a link with a long definition of what constitutes a hostile environment on the page, which Volokh doesn’t bother to link to or cite.*
He then links to three pages (one of which is linked to twice because, hey why not?). One is the pdf in question, and the other two aren’t documents at all, but collections of resources.
The only actual policy page he links to is the second, which also happens to be the only page that doesn’t have the word microaggression anywhere on it. Additionally, the page is about handling complaints, not about actions that the university can instigate. The university isn’t threatening anyone for anything.
At some point someone probably will file a racial harassment complaint about microaggressions (if it hasn’t happened already). But those documents being circulated don’t have anything to do with it.
*It’s also not clear what he means by legally actionable, against whom or for what, because he links to a page about Title VI compliance. Basically, the law there is that the university has a policy in place for dealing with complaints of racial harassment. Nothing goes to court, or gets investigated by the federal government. A student can, however, file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights (which is a federal agency), but he doesn’t appear to be talking about that, and I’m pretty sure the OCR can’t discipline or fire professors.
Fair enough. After having read your comment and John’s, I’m inclined to believe Volokh is overstating the case here. Thanks for the clarification.
Volokh links to a PR article about a UCLA professor’s research on microaggressions
I’m searching downwards for the term microaggressions and this is the first time I’ve seen it without implied scare quotes. I know it’s nice to accept other people’s terms for themselves, though ‘social justice workers’ etc imo stretches the niceness a little too far; it’s setting up for an attack like “You oppose justice?” But accepting the term ‘microaggressions’ goes far too far. It accepts that ‘microaggressions’ are a thing. And that people who say these-utterances-that-the-SJs-list are somehow ‘being aggressive’.
Scare quotes in general tend to lower the quality of discourse — they’re one step away from repeating your opponents’ arguments in a funny voice.
@ Nita
If funny voice was ranked 10 in rudeness, here is how the steps away might go:
10 – funny voice
9 – “the so-called” or “the self-styled”
8 – writing it with full quote marks
7 – writing it with semi-quote marks
6 – using it with distancing allowed by tone or context
5 – accepting its literal meaning with no distancing at all, which becomes rude to the people who do not accept it
It’s disingenuous to fall back on the “but it isn’t official policy!” argument. It’s becoming increasingly clear that professors and students are terrified of expressing an opinion that goes against a certain political orthodoxy because of the very real possibility of severe repercussions, particularly in the case of professors, who can be (and are) easily fired for committing these micro-aggressions. Issuing a document informing people that talking about the existence of a meritocracy is a micro-aggression has the effect of making absolutely certain that no professor will ever, if he or she values their job, suggest that the US is a meritocracy. It doesn’t need to have an “or else” stamp on it. That’s implied.
Look what happened to Laura Kipnis. It’s been depressing seeing so many people argue that everything’s fine since she didn’t lose her job. As if anyone who wasn’t an incredibly brave soldier (as Kipnis clearly is) would be willing to risk speaking their mind about sexual politics after what happened to her.
What you say about a chilling effect may or may not be true. I think it probably is true, although I suspect I think it’s less serious than you do. But Volokh’s characterization of the documents in question was still inaccurate and deeply misleading. And I think that’s still showing up in your comment – taking the PDF as a list of things that are microaggressions and will be punished is just not accurate to the context and content of the document.
I’m not on campus, so I can’t talk about the chilling effect first hand. But I feel comfortable saying it’s a very serious problem, given the sheer volume of complaints coming from professors, many of them anonymously out of fear of retribution. This is way, way over the line.
I think you’re misreading my comment, since you again mentioned “punishment,” presumably meaning some sort of official action taken by the school. This comes up an awful lot, and I think it misses the point.
The fact that there isn’t some sort of official punishment (although that certainly may happen too) as a result of these guidelines does not close the issue. Disciplinary hearings or what have you don’t have to result from these “guidelines” in order for them to immediately chill speech. Most professors aren’t tenured. As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, many professors don’t even need to be fired – they just need to not be rehired. And given the climate on campus, you better believe that these teachers are not going to open debate on affirmative action after these guidelines were published.
I just don’t see how anybody could argue that these guidelines are harmless – I don’t even see how you can argue that they’re acceptable. Something is wrong when universities are issuing speech codes to professors!! How can this not be self-evident? I don’t care if it’s the dean, the diversity office or a PR agent. This matters.
My argument is that the specific documents we’re talking about in this instance are not speech codes, nor are they being issued to professors.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that the concept of microaggressions and political correctness have a chilling effect in themselves. But there’s a distinction between those things and the kind of chilling effects which they might have, and a programmatic speech code and the kind of chilling effects it might have. And my issue is that Volokh – and, to a lesser extent, I think you – are speaking about the latter, when this is an example of the former.
@ ddreytes
And my issue is that Volokh – and, to a lesser extent, I think you – are speaking about the latter, when this is an example of the former.
Now that is a slippery slope I could worry about.
RE: The Heartland bet, Heartland has repeatedly claimed that we’re in some kind of global-warming-pause, and several of the people they tap for articles about climate change occasionally claim we shouldn’t expect warming. The actual CSICOP press release quotes a 2013 Heartland report:
The actual bet is essentially “land-only 2016 will be warmer than 1986”, which is something of a no-brainer. CSICOP does say they’re intending to repeat the bet every year for the next 30 years, which is a prediction that for the next 30 years, year n will be (land-only) warmer than year n – 30. There are /absolutely/ Heartland-associated denialists who would say that isn’t going to happen. Their environment page currently includes a chart by Christopher Monckton, who will endorse literally any position that is tangentially connected to global-warming-isn’t-happening – he’s a walking weak-man of the entire no-global-warming community. They regularly have Fred Singer write stuff, including Heartland’s NIPCC report, and Singer claims that the temperature record has been manipulated to support GW claims.
The NIPCC report itself claims that climate sensitivity is an /order of magnitude/ smaller than the IPCC’s figure, a view which can only be consistent with a Earth continuing to warm if you also reject thermodynamics. It also contains the claim:
, from the executive summary of NIPCC’s CCR2: Physical Science report. It goes on to claim that surface-based temperature records have a significant warm bias due to the urban heat-island effect and that there’s no ‘trophospheric hot spot’, a phenomenon that should occur if Earth is warming, no matter what drives the warming.
It is entirely fair to ask Heartland to put up or shut up on whether it’ll keep warming for the next 30 years. They’d be stupid to take the bet, though – they’ll lose every single year, short of massive vulcanism (like several VEI 7-8), global thermonuclear war, or other similar unpredictable forcing.
I bet you $100 the world will be 100 degrees colder, on average next year*.
*as measured by me, with reasonable mathematical adjustments should I think the measured temperature doesn’t accurately capture how cold I think the earth is.
CSICOP is not GISS. There’s no evidence that GISTEMP has been manipulated in any political way; in fact the adjustments end up reducing the global trend*. And CSICOP would still win the bet handily every year for the next 30 years on GISTEMP raw, or on HADCRUT raw or processed, with or without oceans. I assign less likelihood to them winning the bet every year for the next 30 years on RSS or UAH, but that’s mostly because the trophosphere is not the surface and ENSO events are massive in the satellite datasets – it’s possible that there’ll be a massive la-nina event in 2028.
*Adjustments reduce trend on net because early-record sea-surface temperatures get increased – the ‘bucket adjustment’. Land trends increase slightly, mostly because of TOBS adjustments. The effect is quite large in the contiguous US, so you see a lot of Shocking Graphs of the effects of adjustments on US land temperatures that don’t seem to realise that it’s justifiable and has very little global effect. All of this is almost besides the point, anyway – the effect of adjustments from 1985 onwards is close to zero. See this post by Zeke Hausfather. It was also published on Curry’s blog, so don’t bother playing the “Oh SkS” game.
EDIT: Victor Venema has a pretty good blog post on this too: here
Sorry, referring to adjustments does not cut. The claim that global warming has stopped is normally made by showing one of the main datasets, which are naturally adjusted to remove non-climatic changes, because we want to see the climates changes.
(Did you see the article yesterday on WUWT on the adjustments of the sunspot series by a mitigation skeptic?)
My point was that making a bet when one team gets to record the score is pretty disingenuous tactic.
Unfortunately, what should be a straightforward scientific question has gotten tangled up in politics. The teams are activated. Both sides will falsify data if it helps them, and both have been caught doing so. But only one side has control of academia. So they can make all the “bets” they like, secure in the knowledge that even if the world enters an ice age next year, there will be either no change or slight warming in the official datasets.
Are you really claiming that the scientists who work at NOAA, GISS, BEST, CRU and the MetOffice would be willing to do a bad job, would be willing to put their reputation on the line so that a bunch of physicists the do not know at some sceptical society would not lose a small bet?
I would almost wish my colleagues were that stupid. That would make it very easy for me to demonstrate their errors and write many high-profile scientific publications.
“would be willing to put their reputation on the line so that a bunch of physicists the do not know at some sceptical society would not lose a small bet?”
No. I think they’d be willing to not question the data, fudge the data, ‘ajust’ the data, ‘correct’ the data, ‘scale’ the data, ‘use modeling techniques’, and anyone of the other thousand ways that consciously and unconsciously, scientists low-key falsify data all the time. And yes, there are legit uses of all those things- but you know and I know that lots and lots of times they’re the savior of those with weak data.
You’re presenting a false dichotomy- I don’t think Michael Mann (the denier boogyman!) is sitting around actively fudging the books. I think he’s very unlikely to present his data or his opponents with the strictest self criticism possible, because people in far less politicized careers don’t.
” That would make it very easy for me to demonstrate their errors and write many high-profile scientific publications.”
Why? If I overturned relativity tomorrow, I’d expect a great deal of difficulty in publishing my results, and that’s in a field with a lot less politics.
Further- ARE you doing this? Are you actively looking for errors in your colleagues work to publish on- or do you given them the benefit of the doubt, consciously or unconsciously?
I suspect that unless your working relationship with them is terrible, there’d be a lot of pressure not to go out and publish- internally and externally. Again- we see this factor in areas of much less political activity.
And yes, there are a lot of denialists getting cash from oil sources- but if the IPCC came out tomorrow and said “actually, we’ve revised our position- warming is entirely natural and has nothing to do with human activity”….a LOT of people would be out of jobs. A LOOOOOT of people would have seriously damaged careers, a lot of money (lot more than oil money) would stop flowing.
I don’t think that either group has been particularly seduced by the green side of the force into active, continuous lying, when, as demonstrated in this thread, there’s plenty of people willing to do the dirty work for free. I do think both sides have lying liars, however (hardly a difficult bet, statistically speaking).
Yes, naturally I actively look for problems. My most cited scientific article on homogenization is where I am checking the results of others.
The colleagues whose methods are not that good (but still improve temperature trend estimates) are naturally not happy. Tough luck. Then they should develop better methods.
And my group was so fortunate to find a problem in one of the best methods we have. When you do good work, people want to build on it and improve it (which means finding problems). It is a great honor when other scientists find (non-trivial) errors in your work and this helps you as well to develop better methods.
Finding problems is not easy. The other scientists are not stupid. But it is the best thing you can do to build a good reputation in science.
That I was able to find some problems seems to have helped my reputation.
Science is not a think tank.
No, Victor.
I am really claiming that the vast majority of the people dedicated enough to environmental ideals to make a career in climate science are politically aligned. They will not do a bad job, they will do a great job to justify why they believe what they believe, and hell, they could be correct! But that would be sheer chance. Because they are going to find evidence of warming (and once the warming thing fades as a public policy lever, whatever follows it). The framing of their hypotheses, the methodology of the studies will all be very complicated and rigorous, but it will only produce one result.
I always recommend a visit to Yale’s Cultural Cognition lab. Smart people aren’t less likely to be wrong on any given subject, but they are much better at resisting attempts to prove them wrong. And climate scientists are very, very smart.
Tarrou, why would someone who thinks the environment is important make up an environmental problem rather than work on reducing the real ones? Environmentally interested people are overrepresented in the environmental sciences relative to the rest of society, but there are still a lot of conservatives; your “theory” would also need to explain why they are unable to find the glaring mistakes made by the others.
May I conclude from your comment that there is no evidence that could ever convince you that global warming is real? Or did you forget a part of the argumentation?
If you are into psychology/cultural cognition, you surely realize that global warming is about the worst kind of environmental problem to get humans to do something about; it is the worst kind of tragedy of the commons, every single person contributes only little, the consequences are long term, the threat is very abstract, hard to see with your own senses, a powerful lobby is against it and no big baby eyes looking sad into the camera. Surely people could have made up a better problem.
Scientists are not only smart, they are also scientists. They are, I repeat myself, not a think tank.
Propagandistically, it seems that it doesn’t matters if past models of Doom have failed,
because current models of Doom still predict doom, which is bad, therefore something must to be done and “deniers” are evil. Therefore the bet is a suckers bet for “Heartland” (whoever that is) because Doomists have already shown that they are propagandistically immune to their own bad models. “Heartland” wins, it doesn’t matter. “Heartland” loses, “deniers” are refuted.
(Scientifially, there’s no burden of proof on “Heartland” to provide “better” models. Don’t know why they do.)
If you think climate change is nonsense, you should expect Heartland to win this bet. How many years of the results coming up such that Heartland would have lost it would it take for you to update?
Keep in mind, from my point of view you (and Heartland) are the people completely blind to the empirical evidence that, for example, models very definitely perform better than the no-change model, basic physics predicts a greenhouse response and still-pretty-simple dynamics predict it to be positively forced, the amount by which global average surface temperature has increased over the last 30 years is close to impossible to understand without a significant greenhouse forcing, etc..
The reason I ask for a hypothesis from Heartland is because it would be very surprising from a pure-physics point of view if global warming isn’t a thing, and pretty surprising from a dynamics point of view if the feedback isn’t positive. ‘Global warming is happening and a problem’ isn’t a single simple hypothesis you can snip out of the web – if it’s wrong, then there are big implications to chase up. There’s a /reason/ the vast majority of publishing scientists think GW is a thing.
When you’re disagreeing with a scientific consensus built upon some pretty-well-accepted physics, you had damn well better be able to demonstrate a better model.
James, the obstacle the current Doomsayers have to overcome is people like me, who are ordinary clods old enough to have lived through several scares.
By this hour of my life, all human civilisation should have been destroyed by:
(1) Overpopulation! We are entering into a period of mass starvation and global famine that has never been seen before, and the hungry masses will boil out of the Third World, over-run the West, and we’ll all go down in a scrabbling mass of starving wretches clawing one another’s eyes out!
(2) The next Ice Age! Really Scientific Data indicates that we’ll all end up over-run by glaciers as it is undeniable that Global Cooling has begun! Albedo! Sunlight reflected off the impenetrable cloud-cover of Earth and we’ll all end up icicles!
(3) Nuclear war! It’s only a matter of when, not if the Cold War turns hot, and/or some rogue state [insert pet bugbear here] develops its own bombs and starts throwing them around! Reagan provoking the Soviet Union with “The Evil Empire” rhetoric and the crazy Star Wars space defence notion? We’re doomed!
(4) End of fossil fuels! Within
tentwentyby the 21st century, oil will have run out, our industrial civilisation will have collapsed, and we’ll all be poor, freezing and starving in the dark!So you see why yet another “This time we’re gonna boil to death!” scare sounds less than convincing to us plain morons? It’s not necessarily denialism on the part of a lot of people, it’s more Apocalypse Fatigue.
Several things are wrong with this viewpoint:
– Your list is terrible. (1) I’ll accept (although I’d argue that it could still be a genuine problem that was merely put off by Borlaug), (2) never reached anything like the level of consensus we’ve got for global warming – it was essentially some speculative research that the media ran with because the media is awful. This is not in the same reference class. (3) was a real potential problem; we are lucky the trigger wasn’t pulled, and (4) peak oil is a real thing, although catastrophist glosses on it are fringe. It’s also not supported by 97% of relevant papers in the field, unlike GW, with high-nineties percent of publishing scientists accepting it.
– You’re leaving out several things that should be in the reference class but change the character of it – for example, CFCs destroying the ozone layer, SOx and NOx emissions causing acid rain, leaded petrol, smoking and Y2K. The first several are clear-cut cases of there being a real problem that scientists brought up and then vested interests fought solutions to for years. Y2K was overhyped by the media, but it was also a real problem that people had to spend significant amounts of money to avert.
– You make no distinction between “thing widely believed by the scientific community to be a problem” and “thing hyped by some segments of the media”, and you make no distinction between the single most catastrophic prediction that the media can dig up and what is actually mainstream. Nobody is going to boil to death until something like 6 degrees above preindustrial. GW isn’t a human-extinction event without humanity being so stupid we deserve it (burning literally all the coal would do it, for example, but that’s never going to happen).
James Picone, I think you’re missing Deiseach’s point. Global Warming looks superficially similar to the points on that list, especially to people who only get their information from traditional journalistic media (still a supermajority of the 50+ demographic).
I do not doubt the differences that you are emphasizing exist. Can we agree they are not being emphasized enough in traditional journalistic media?
@Chaosmage: Yes, I am very happy to agree that the media is awful at discussing climate change.
In Dieseach’s defense, “Okay those other things were bullshit, but this one is real and is not bullshit because of Reasons” is a thing I expect to be said by everyone supporting a thing that is bullshit and comes from a longer line of things that are bullshit. “All the other things that look like this are wrong but you should make an exception for the one that is currently being pushed” is not a compelling statement.
The main reason I’m a “denier”?
There have been several reputable, actual cases of literal,actual, fucking with the data.
As in “we artificially raised temperatures for South America”. “Climategate” also comes to mind.
most of these aren’t broken by one guy finally saying “it’s all awful!” they’re broken by people who get ahold of “random slice of emails” and go “damn, this random slice of emails has many lies”
Science is only good when ALL the data is rigerously, intensely, and entirely unfucked with.
That’s the primary reason- i don’t care what 97% of the people working on it think, because 99% of them aren’t collecting data, or typing in data, or checking data. They’re taking “Dataset 452” and plugging it into their models.
Second- if CO2 causes warming is pure thermodynamics, we need to examine thermodynamics, because based on the serious events since the last ice age, CO2 correlates to high COOLING levels. Most of the X kiloyear events that involved massive cooling also saw massively high levels of CO2.
Third:
You know what this reminds me of? I heard this song the other day, one of those “I’m an old fashioned dude, I don’t do XYZ” songs. And the singer was going on about how twitter doesn’t cut it- he wants a phone call. Don’t let the warm, personal touch of a phone call die away. Obviously, earlier generations had the same complaint.
So tell me: what is a “normal” climate? On the large scale, earth varies between “miles of ice to the equator” and “no ice caps at all, anywhere, any when)
The temperature, weather, and climate we’re so obsessed with is a historic freak- A brief, glacier free pause before the ice comes down again.
4th. There’s a reason for spherical chickens in a vacuum being the old jokes about physics. I have no doubt that in a wee lil bottle in the lab, CO2 heavy atmospheres do capture more overall heat than lower CO2 levels. I also have no doubt that there are a hell of a lot of other factors influencing the earths climate.
Simply put- I view it as more like…discussing the impact of genes on intelligence. Sure, maybe, even probably. But if you sit around trying to explain that every smart person ever had just the right genes, you’re gonna be fucked, because a lot of things impact intelligence.
To get a much longer, much better review of this:
http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/06/climate-wars-done-science/
Believer turned denier. The guy knows science, he understands the concepts.
Also, other memes I’d like to see die-
the “OMG it’s all so complex listen to the experts.”
No, it isn’t. I’ve got a MS in Envi. Sci. Mathematically, you need primarily good stats, which isn’t that hard and pretty easy to grok, and the concepts are very simple.
For example, if the ultimate gap between “layman knowledge’ and “expert knowledge’ is in math (arguably), then Environmental science is much closer to english lit. than it is to physics. I was a history major who easily got an MS in the sciences. I didn’t even need to take remedial stats because I’d had calc. (I took some remedial stats study anyway.)
It’s also the only climate human beings have ever effectively engaged in large-scale agriculture in.
In fact, the brief climactically stable period we’re currently in started about the same time that (or a little before) agriculture was invented.
But James, global warming was hyped to the utmost, and yes, it was the usual media leaping on the bandwagon.
But I do think some activists encouraged it in the spirit of “scare ’em straight”; in order to get governments to move on addressing climate change, mass public opinion had to be swung round to “Something must be done!” and the quickest way to do that was panic.
Yeah, my list is terrible: because every so often, another and contradictory panic came along to say we were all doomed, doomed! in the next five/ten/twenty years. And lo and behold, five/ten/twenty years later, we were still here.
So older, more conservative types are burned out on this. Climate change may be every bit as catastrophic as it’s portrayed, but a lot of people are shrugging their shoulders and going “Eh, heard it all before” not because they hate science or don’t believe in it, but because they think it’s simply another media flap that has been blown up into a doomsday scenario and that in five/ten/twenty years time, it’ll be the robots or the aliens or the god-emperor computer that is going to doom us all.
Also because for the “We’re all going to freeze to death” flap, we had Real Scientific Evidence By Real Scientists With Graphs and Everything being splashed about. Superficially, Real Scientific Evidence By Real Scientists With Graphs and Everything for “It’s getting hot in here” looks very reminiscent of that.
Wait, I thought it was already the god-emperor computer that’s gonna doom us all. At least on this website.
AI risk is probably the weirdest catastrophe that gets written about on this site, but it’s not the most likely one. The last LW poll put existential risk from natural or engineered biohazards higher than from AGI.
Those numbers depend somewhat on the form of the question, though. In particular, global warming (aside from an unlikely runaway scenario) is a catastrophic risk but not an existential one: it’s quite unlikely to kill 90%+ of humanity, but it’s quite capable of making life a lot less pleasant for them.
@DrBeat: Several of the things on Dei’s list were not bullshit. And she left off several things that very much weren’t bullshit that we dealt with.
@CJB: I’m not sure you’ve gotten a single thing accurate there.
AFAIK no major dataset has ever been demonstrated to have been manipulated for policy effect (adjusted for non-climactic effects like UHI, TOBS, whatever, sure. That’s somewhat different). You’re going to want to point out exactly which of the leaked emails supports the claim that there was data manipulation going on, because so far I haven’t seen anything in them that’s worse than scientists getting pissed off, in private, at deliberate misinformers.
If you think CO2-has-a-warming-forcing is even remotely questionable here, you’re on the crackpot end. This is creationism levels of wrong. Roy Spencer has written blog posts about this, for heaven’s sake, and he’s very much not on my side. This isn’t a small effect – this is a Earth-is-about-30c-warmer-than-it-should-be effect.
I’ve seen Matt Ridley’s bullshit before. It is not convincing. It is, in fact, just a giant Denialist Meme Romp. An ice age was comething in the 1970s! No, that wasn’t even remotely the consensus, global-warming effects were far more discussed then then ice-age stuff, scientists are hardly to blame if friggin’ Newsweek decides to run a big story about how we’re all going to freeze to death. Matt Ridley and Ian Plimer are, in fact, in the pay of fossil-fuel interests; this is public record. Jim Hansen became an activist because the data he was looking at convinced him, not the other way around, the ‘lukewarmer’ position is the Intelligent Design of climate denialism – the position is still Anything But Mitigation, it’s just a marketing ploy to try and keep the crazy end from making Ridley look bad, even as he quotes them (hint: WUWT happily publishes articles by people who deny the greenhouse effect), Ian Plimer is at least consistent with his rejection of consensus – he also rejects consensus astronomy (he likes the ‘iron sun’ thing) and some consensus medicine (he thinks asbestos is perfectly safe). Ridley, as far as I’m aware, only rejects consensus in science in this one specific area for some reason (he says it’s because it’s a consensus about the /future/, and that makes it different. No word yet on whether he thinks the consensus that if he inhales asbestos fibres, he is likely to get cancer in the future is nonsense). His range of possible temperatures forecast by the IPCC is… weird. I’m not entirely certain whether he’s talking about the output of various scenarios (as in, he’s talking about the range between we-stop-emitting-CO2 and we-keep-emitting-lots-of-CO2) or whether he’s talking about climate sensitivity (which fits the numbers and the whole lukewarmer thing slightly better, except that the ‘end of the century’ line doesn’t make sense then). The claim that sensitivity PDFs cluster at the lower end is somewhere between trivially false and subtly wrong, depending on exactly what he means – certainly the peak of PDFs for climate sensitivity is large enough that doubling atmospheric CO2 content would be unpleasant. ‘Denialist’ is not intended to evoke Holocaust denial, it’s intended to invoke, you know, denial. Ridley proceeds to just flat-out make shit up about the 97% stuff – there’s been far more than two surveys, all getting high-90s values (hint: the American Meteorological Society is for weather forecasting, not scientists), Tol’s just flat out wrong on approximately everything – check it yourself, Cook made a nice web tool that lets you classify papers yourself, hardly ‘preventing replication’. Joanne Nova is another greenhouse-denialist – see what I mean about Ridley using ‘lukewarmer’ to avoid association with the ‘no warming at all’ position while freely quoting from them? Water vapour feedback is experimentally demonstrated in the real world. The trophospheric hot spot is a feature of any warming of the Earth’s surface, not just CO2-driven warming; by claiming it doesn’t exist, Ridley is claiming no warming. There’s nothing in mainstream climate science that has a problem with temperature falling while CO2 concentrations increase, it’s just that that isn’t what’s happening right now. Estimates of climate sensitivity are only getting ‘lower and lower’ if you only pay attention to a specific kind of climate sensitivity study, which is known to generate underestimates. If you look at paleoclimate studies, you get larger values. If climate sensitivity were as low as some of the studies Ridley is referring to claim, it would be impossible for Earth to leave ice ages. Yet we do. And no, temperatures are still inside the model envelope.
I’m going to stop now – this comment is getting far too long – but suffice to say that the rest of Ridley’s deliberate misinformation is just as accurate. God knows why you trust him and the rest of the liars over actual scientists.
“In particular, global warming (aside from an unlikely runaway scenario) is a catastrophic risk but not an existential one: it’s quite unlikely to kill 90%+ of humanity, but it’s quite capable of making life a lot less pleasant for them.”
That’s the conventional wisdom, but I have not yet seen any good arguments for it. At the high end of the IPCC projection for the end of this century you are talking, roughly speaking, about converting the climate of Minnesota to that of Iowa and shifting coastlines (assuming nobody bothers to dike) in by about a hundred meters. You are also talking about sizable increases in agricultural productivity due to CO2 fertilization, and an expansion of the land area of the Earth that is warm enough for human habitation by an amount several orders of magnitude larger than the loss from sea level rise.
The current climate was not designed for us nor we for it. Humans currently prosper across a range of climates much larger than the projected change. The popular arguments for large net negative effects either exaggerate the projections or list only the negative effects.
A lancet article estimated that deaths from cold outnumber deaths from heat about twenty-fold world wide. The physics of AGW implies that winters will get milder by more than summers hotter, due to the interaction with water vapor. Yet alarmist articles routinely cite increased mortality from increased heat while ignoring the decreased mortality from decreased cold.
“Ridley proceeds to just flat-out make shit up about the 97% stuff – there’s been far more than two surveys, all getting high-90s values”
Cook et. al. 2013 got its 97% figure for categories 1-3, where 1 was humans as principal cause, 2 as saying humans were a cause (the example given used the term “contribute to”), 3 as implying what 2 says. The paper reported only the sum of the three, and Cook in a later paper claimed that number was for humans as the main cause. In fact, the paper’s webbed data show that category 1 is 1.6%, not 97%.
Anderegg et. al. found that climate researchers who had publicly expressed a view on the IPCC position divided about 2:1 between pro and con–a fact you need to go to the supplementary material to discover. They got the figure up to about 97% by eliminating all save the 50, 100, or 200 who had published most. That might mean that the experts all agree or that it is easier to get published if you support the current orthodoxy.
Various other studies use very weak definitions of what is being agreed on or very small sample sizes. But the results are then converted from “X% think global temperature is rising and humans are at least partly responsible” to “X% say humans are causing warming and the results will be terrible.” Can you cite any respectable study that gets the latter conclusion with X>90?
For details on Cook et. al., including a link to Cook’s response, in which he attacks me for an argument I did not make and entirely ignores the argument I did make, see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.in/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html
With regards to the various crises Deiseach mentioned, there’s also the bit how the alarmists’ suggested societal response to each and every one of them is “give all the power, influence, and money to me and my left-wing friends.” An amazing coincidence, at the very least.
If it helps, the Doomsayers are idiots. Global warming will be expensive and kill many people. But it will not turn the planet into a ball of dust.
@David Friedman:
There’s an entire five IPCC reports discussing impacts if you really want the evidence. Briefly, though:
– Climate change doesn’t stop at 2100. The scenario where we do nothing (whether it’s dressed up as ‘let the market and technological development solve the problem’ or not) doesn’t end at 2100. This effects most of the cheap adaptation measures (for example, diking).
– Most plant growth isn’t limited by atmospheric CO2 content. Water and temperature are likely to become more limiting factors in high-warming scenarios. For example, the state I live in, South Australia, is already hard to farm in – chances are by 2100 under a high emissions scenario, it’s essentially impossible without significant technical investment.
– Earth is not a cylinder. Gaining new land in Siberia does not offset losing agriculture at lower latitudes.
– Having to pick up and move a substantial fraction of the largest cities in the world in ~100 years and/or spend vast and ever-increasing amounts of money trying to fight the sea don’t seem like good value to me.
– Human civilisation was designed for the current climate. I make no claim that this is the optimum climate, in any sense, but abrupt transition will hurt, and business-as-usual carries a significant risk of really very bad outcomes. If we hit the 1% jackpot and ECS is >4c, I really hope we haven’t doubled CO2 content twice, because if you get >7c rise some parts of Earth’s surface become too warm to inhabit by humans without technological assistance to maintain body temperature.
– Cold kills more people than heat worldwide, but the marginal effects of more heat when it’s hot are substantially larger than the marginal effects of more heat when it’s colder. AFAIK currently some places are projected to have less temperature-related deaths in a warmer world, but there’s more there than you give it credit for. The effects on temperature extremes can be pretty significant, after all – that most recent heatwave in Russia would have been a six-sigma event prior to the 1970s-present warming.
– I’ve answered the Cook stuff above, but broadly I don’t think he’s done anything wrong, and you’re relying on a criterion that would conclude that economists don’t think prices are determined by the market and physicists don’t think gravity exists.
– Given that EiE will publish approximately everything, I think the easy conclusion here is that there’s a lot of denialists spouting nonsense to the public because it’s easier and more profitable than research. Roy Spencer seems to get along fine and even occasionally gets someone to publish his curve fitting, for example, so it’s not like this is impossible. And, y’know, if it’s hard to pass peer review with a non-consensus position, maybe that’s because the consensus position is roughly correct? Peer review isn’t that high a bar.
– Scientists hard to survey to a degree of rigour that will satisfy people who are never satisfied: news at eleven.
@ThirteenthLetter:
Well it worked out for CFCs, smoking, leaded petrol, and SOx/NOx, for whatever value of ‘give all the power influence and money to us’ that is relevant here.
“Good news, everyone! We’re all going to boil to death due to runaway global warming a lustrum before the unfriendly god-emperor computer can enslave, torture and degrade us!” 🙂
If you read the “Good news, everyone!” in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, Deiseach’s comment sounds like a pretty entertaining Futuruma episode.
A few responses to Picone’s long post:
“Briefly, though:– Climate change doesn’t stop at 2100”
How reliably do you think people in 1900 could predict what the problems of 2000 would be? We have some evidence on that question–Jevons prediction a little earlier that England would shortly run out of coal, widespread claims that the U.S. was running out of topsoil, concerns about dysgenic effects of higher fertility of the poor leading to eugenic programs.
We do not know what humans will be doing in 2100. William Nordhaus, one of the economists associated with the IPCC projections, conceded that his calculations beyond 2050 were very uncertain. Bearing expensive costs now on the basis of our guesses about what will be problems a century hence makes very little sense.
Nordhaus, in a piece attacking those who thought AGW was not a problem requiring urgent action, reported his estimate of the net cost of waiting fifty years to do anything instead of taking the optimal action immediately. He put it as a single sum, which sounded large. He didn’t mention that, converted into an annual cost, it came to less than a tenth of a percent of world GNP per year.
For details see: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
“Most plant growth isn’t limited by atmospheric CO2 content. Water and temperature are likely to become more limiting factors in high-warming scenarios.”
Higher CO2 content increases productivity for many, although not all, plants. The EPA, in a piece designed to argue for your position, conceded that. Further, higher CO2 reduces water requirements. Low temperatures limit agricultural output more than high, as you can see by looking at where on Earth plants grow.
“Having to pick up and move a substantial fraction of the largest cities in the world in ~100 years and/or spend vast and ever-increasing amounts of money trying to fight the sea don’t seem like good value to me.”
And you believe that a substantial fraction of the largest cities are within one meter of sea level? That’s the high end of the IPCC projection for 2100. The rough rule of thumb is that coastlines move in by a hundred meter for each meter of sea level rise, although of course that varies from place to place. How much of the largest cities in the world is within a hundred meters of the coast? You might consider that the Dutch have been occupying land below sea level for a very long time, and started doing it with the technology of centuries ago.
There is a convenient web page that shows the effect of various levels of SLR:
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=-27.839076094777802,138.1640625&z=13&m=7
Playing with it will give you a more realistic view of the subject.
” I make no claim that this is the optimum climate, in any sense, but abrupt transition will hurt”
And you regard warming of about a tenth of a degree a decade, the average since 1911, as abrupt? Is it abrupt if it goes as high as three tenths of a degree per decade, as some projections suggest? Sea level rise of about an inch a decade, which is roughly the average so far? Two or three inches a decade?
The only a priori argument for expecting AGW to have negative effects is the one you suggest–that we are currently optimized against the current environment. That would be a serious argument in the case of rapid change, but the change we are observing is very slow. By the time farmers have to change crop varieties to deal with a temperature change of one degree, they will have changed crop varieties several times for other reasons.
The only version of that argument that strikes me as at all plausible is the application not to humans but to other species, the claim that change that is slow for us might be too fast for some plants or animals. That might be true—I don’t know enough to evaluate it. But having seen a lot of arguments for a conclusion that I can show to be bogus, I am reluctant to trust arguments for the same conclusion that I can’t readily evaluate.
“Cold kills more people than heat worldwide, but the marginal effects of more heat when it’s hot are substantially larger than the marginal effects of more heat when it’s colder. ”
Your evidence for that is? I’ve seen quite a lot of claims about the negative effects of warming that include estimates of increased mortality from hotter summers and simply ignore the decreased mortality from milder winters.
@David Friedman.
People in the 1900s didn’t have many ways of causing significant changes that would persist for centuries. CO2’s atmospheric lifetime is very long. Unless the singularity happens between now and 2100, we’re going to have to care about agriculture, temperature, and sea level. Saying “Well if there are any problems technology will solve them” is making a risky bet; I don’t want to make it. Would you have made a similar bet for CFCs instead of outright banning them? Because if you had, you would have lost the bet – technology wouldn’t be mitigating the health effects of ozone depletion.
Higher CO2 content increases productivity for plants, as long as they have enough water and a good temperature range. Those conditions may obtain in some parts of the world. I doubt it’ll increase production worldwide, and I expect the effects of previous prime agricultural areas no longer being prime agricultural areas, at least for the crops they usually grow, will suck.
I suspect the temperature effect on plants, again, is an example of marginal effects – cold kills, but an extra degree C at the top end is unpleasant.
The IPCC’s SLR estimates are likely low. This has been the case for a while – careful reading of the IPCC’s SLR chapters will reveal that they neglect dynamic effects of ice sheet breakup altogether, because we don’t have a good model for them, and the IPCC is very conservative with its predictions. If you ask SLR experts, they will tell you that we should expect substantially more. Some of the evidence in favour is that ice sheets the world over are melting faster than the IPCC predicts – the Arctic, of course, is the IPCC prediction furthest from reality, but is sea ice so doesn’t affect sea level. Greenland and Antarctica are also melting faster than was predicted. This paper found that the difference between the IPCC’s SLR projections from 2001 and 2007 and reality is testable nowadays – IPCC’s projections are too low.
I do think that a substantial fraction of large cities are within the range of SLR we should expect.
The Dutch have been occupying land below sea level in a world with comparatively small year-on-year sea level rise. I expect it would be much more expensive if the wall had to keep being built every year. And, of course, that depends on local geology – with that much sea level rise, south florida isn’t a place any more, dikes or no dikes, because the local rock is porous.
Warming will be faster than the average since 1911. We know that because it’s already faster than the average since 1911. Trendline from 1970s (you know, where there’s actual statistical evidence of change in trend and aerosols aren’t a concern) is ~.17c/decade. If CO2 content in the atmosphere continues growing superexponentially (i.e., we do nothing), that will accelerate.
And yes, that is rapid. We’re seeing heatwaves that would have been once-in-a-thousand-years in the preindustrial (Moscow 2010). There are adults alive today who have never seen a year that was average in the preindustrial. The current warming is likely more rapid than any other warming in the past several thousand years, and we’re likely warmer than any other point in the Holocene right now. I don’t understand why the evidence that if we continue emitting CO2, the Earth will warm up, on average, 1.7 degrees every ten years isn’t terrifying to you.
3.2 mm/year is a fair amount of sea level rise, yes. Again, that one is going to accelerate if we continue growing atmospheric CO2 content superexponentially. This should be obvious given that straight-line extrapolation gives 32cm by 2100 and the IPCC projects as high as a metre (and their projections are running below reality here, by a fair amount).
RE: temperature mortality. See this paper, particularly these charts.
(and broadly speaking that has to be true eventually – at ~7c warming, some parts of Earth reach wet-bulb temperatures high enough that an inactive human in shade will die of heat exhaustion, but that’s probably not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe. We’d have to burn literally all the coal.)
The IPCC’s AR4 chapter on temperature-related mortality (here) quotes several studies that consider the effect on cold-related mortality.
“The IPCC’s SLR estimates are likely low.”
That’s the insidious thing about these consensus-denying anti-science people. They turn up where you least expect them.
I think I put up a long response to James Picone’s long comment in the wrong place, so am putting it again here:
“People in the 1900s didn’t have many ways of causing significant changes that would persist for centuries.”
They believed they did—in all three of my examples. Using up all of England’s coal, for instance, would have been a significant change that would have persisted for much longer than that.
My point was not about what they could do but about what they believed. If anything, the world is changing faster now than then, making it even harder to predict future problems and solutions.
“Higher CO2 content increases productivity for plants, as long as they have enough water and a good temperature range.”
Higher CO2 reduces water requirements, as I already pointed out.
“Those conditions may obtain in some parts of the world. I doubt it’ll increase production worldwide, and I expect the effects of previous prime agricultural areas no longer being prime agricultural areas, at least for the crops they usually grow, will suck.”
As I keep pointing out, we are talking about very slow change. Looking at the world at present, do you observe that if two places have average temperatures a few degrees apart, they grow not only different varieties but different species? Wheat currently grows, in North America, from Texas to Alberta, a distance of 1500 miles North/South.
Of course, they grow different varieties of wheat. What do you think the odds are that, even without AGW, agricultural areas will keep growing the same varieties of the same crops a century from now?
“The IPCC’s SLR estimates are likely low.”
The simplest test is past performance. Was the SLR projection in the first IPCC report higher or lower than what actually happened? For temperature it was higher—have you checked SLR?
The second test is bias. It’s easy enough, reading IPCC reports, especially the summary for policy makers, to see what conclusion the authors want readers to reach. That suggests that any bias is likely to be in the direction of exaggerating the arguments for that conclusion.
“I do think that a substantial fraction of large cities are within the range of SLR we should expect.”
That range, for 2100, being?
“The Dutch have been occupying land below sea level in a world with comparatively small year-on-year sea level rise. I expect it would be much more expensive if the wall had to keep being built every year. And, of course, that depends on local geology – with that much sea level rise, south florida isn’t a place any more, dikes or no dikes, because the local rock is porous.”
I don’t know what your “that much” is. I pointed you at a web page that lets you see the effect of various levels, calculated from topographical maps. Without diking, one meter still has a tiny effect on Florida.
And SLR is slow. Eight inches in the past century.
“Warming will be faster than the average since 1911. We know that because it’s already faster than the average since 1911. Trendline from 1970s (you know, where there’s actual statistical evidence of change in trend and aerosols aren’t a concern) is ~.17c/decade.”
Or in other words, you first assume that the previous pause (roughly 1940 to 1970) can be eliminated from the record by special casing it, then deduce the average rate by looking at the period thereafter.
As I think I already pointed out, the pattern of warming suggests some effect that alternately cancels and reinforces warming. If that interpretation is correct, you are taking a full cycle of reinforcing plus less than half a cycle of cancelling.
“And yes, that is rapid. We’re seeing heatwaves that would have been once-in-a-thousand-years in the preindustrial (Moscow 2010).”
Do you find it surprising that, somewhere in a large world, there is some event that has only one chance in a thousand?
“I don’t understand why the evidence that if we continue emitting CO2, the Earth will warm up, on average, 1.7 degrees every ten years isn’t terrifying to you.”
Does the rate you are now claiming decribe the effect of current emissions on the equilibrium that will be reached several thousand years from now, ceteris paribus? It’s an order of magnitude higher than the trend line you just reported.
“3.2 mm/year is a fair amount of sea level rise, yes. Again, that one is going to accelerate if we continue growing atmospheric CO2 content superexponentially. This should be obvious given that straight-line extrapolation gives 32cm by 2100 and the IPCC projects as high as a metre (and their projections are running below reality here, by a fair amount).”
One meter, last time I looked over the report, wasn’t what the IPCC projected. It was the high end of the range of projections produced by the high emission scenario.
“RE: temperature mortality. See this paper, particularly these charts.”
Thanks. Bookmarked. Looking at the table, the only place for which they give separate figures for the effect of heat related mortality and cold related is England, for which the reduction in cold related mortality is about ten times the increase in heat related mortality. Have you noticed any of the people arguing for the perils of AGW mentioning that fact? If not, does that suggest that your opinions may be based on a highly biased selection of facts and arguments?
Observe that the comments emphasize reasons to minimize estimates of the benefits and maximize estimates of the costs. Given any complicated externality issue, it’s almost always possible to tweak the calculations in the direction you want—a point I have been making in the climate context for a long time.
“(and broadly speaking that has to be true eventually – at ~7c warming, some parts of Earth reach wet-bulb temperatures high enough that an inactive human in shade will die of heat exhaustion, but that’s probably not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe. We’d have to burn literally all the coal.)”
And in unreasonable time frames, populations shift. The U.S. alone had a million migrants a year in the period before WWI. The world is much richer now and transport technology substantially improved.
If you are talking about changes over a thousand years or more, you should assume populations are mobile. We lose lowlands in the equators, gain Antarctica and the northern edge of the northern hemisphere.
ThirteenthLetter:” the alarmists’ suggested societal response to each and every one of them is “give all the power, influence, and money to me and my left-wing friends.””
James Hansen, I guess an “alarmist” if there is anyone, has advocated fully refunded tax on carbon on the source. This means that all the tax collected on carbon emissions, be distributed evenly across all citizens. If you emit more than average (including indirectly) the tax is a net gain to you, if you emit more it’s a cost.
How is this giving all the power, influence, and money to him and his left-wing friends?
“James Hansen, I guess an “alarmist” if there is anyone, has advocated fully refunded tax on carbon on the source.”
Hansen seems to be one of the more reasonable people on the alarmist side, and my guess is that he is arguing for a position he honestly believes in. It doesn’t follow that that applies to everyone, or even most people, on his side.
“How is this giving all the power, influence, and money to him and his left-wing friends?”
The nearest thing to an implementation of a carbon tax in U.S. politics so far was the cap and trade bill that passed the House but died in the Senate. The cap and trade part was equivalent to a carbon tax. But it also included allocation of valuable carbon credits to various favored groups and extensive regulations.
@David Friedman:
We know for a fact that we can put CO2 into the atmosphere that will not come out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, or until the Singularity happens, whichever comes first. Deciding not to deal with a problem because the Singularity might happen seems like a profoundly stupid way of handling risk management.
The various problems that having more CO2 in the atmosphere will cause (ocean acidification is another big one that you should probably look at some time) aren’t Singularity-levels of hard-to-deal-with, but the consensus of experts in the field seems to be that they’ll be unpleasant – that’s what the IPCC is for, after all. I see no particular reason to believe your assertions over them. And I see no particular reason to believe that the society of 2030 can shrug off heatwaves that would have been impossible in the preindustrial, that the society of 2050 won’t have to care about whatever effect the Arctic ceasing to exist has had on global climate, that the society of 2080 will trivially be able to handle a sea rising several times faster than it is right now. You’ve noted, on another thread, that I have “a remarkable talent for not seeing what you don’t want to see”. I think you should strongly consider how much your politics influences your perception of large-scale coordination problems. I think if it was 1980 we’d be arguing about whether CFCs can really get into the stratosphere, and besides we’ll have solved the problem of skin cancer in the future. Why should I believe this is a london-full-of-horse-manure problem, and not a CFC problem?
I am not an expert on plant biology; neither are you. The IPCC’s position is that we’ll see some greening, but not as much as one might naively expect because other nutrients and temperature changes limit the effect. Seems plausible. But funnily enough, the various experts contributing still think food security implications are worth considering. You can’t just change the climate of an area and have farmers either move to somewhere with a better climate or change their crops. It doesn’t just *happen*. Infrastructure has to be built. People go out of business. There are huge transitional periods. It costs money. Alternately, we could spend a comparatively small amount just by imposing a friggin’ consumption tax on CO2.
I disagree that the change we’re experiencing is slow. I expect to see an ice-free Arctic in the next ten years. I expect to see a new warmest-year-ever every decade. It’s not just fast on geological timescales.
The study I linked on SLR – this one – does the comparison. 3.2mm/year is ~60% more than the IPCC projections have for this time. IIRC the IPCC reports even note that they’re likely an underestimate. Because dynamic processes are hard to estimate so they left them out entirely. Temperature rise has not been underestimated.
Broadly speaking, we should expect ‘more than the IPCC range’. God knows how much more. There’s a reason they didn’t try to include dynamic effects. But it’s enough.
The widget you linked just colours in squares that are below sea level + SLR blue. Tidal effects and storm surge can be worth somewhat more than that. The sea is not a bathtub.
The past century is not representative of the SLR we can expect in the next century. For starters, it’s only been ~3.2 mm/year since 1970ish.
Here’s a page with various graphs of forcings over the instrumental period. There’s a reason to consider the 1970->present period.
Positing magic epicycles based entirely on eyeballing of a graph is not what I would describe as a sound analysis.
Graphs of extreme values show the expected increase. We are seeing more one-in-a-thousand-year events than we would expect. One-in-a-thousand-years is sufficiently rare that it’s noteworthy – there have not been very many one-in-a-thousand-year heatwaves in recorded history.
1.7c/decade was a brain fart; you are quite correct that .17c/decade is the current trend. That is a lot.
The high emission scenario is roughly what you are suggesting we follow.
I have actually heard that England is supposed to have less cold deaths than they are gains in heat deaths. England is quite cold. Most of the world’s population lives somewhere warmer than England.
Despite your implications, the IPCC remains biased conservative. They talk entirely about what we can very certainly expect given our current observations – uncertainty cuts both ways. Political pressure is more likely to make the IPCC push less hard for change than anything else; politicians don’t want to actually take action on climate change if that hurts voters, because it’s unlikely to be popular.
I of course consider Hansen no alarmist, I consider him likely one of the best informed people on the issue. If you knew nothing about his conclusions, only about his background and credentials, you’d probably believe that too.
A carbon tax does not require any huge bureaucracy. It’s as simple as any tax can get. It’ll be significantly simpler than VAT, which many (most?) countries have. I should not even have to say that, Alraune. It’s bloody obvious. If you want a society where even the capability for basic tax collection is too much power for government, be my guest, but then it’s you wanting less government, not Hansen wanting more. The government we have is more than sufficient to implement a carbon tax.
One reason cap and trade was preferred over a carbon tax was that it was supposedly more “market based”.
Another reason is resistance to redistribution. If pollution is free, then suddenly isn’t any longer, that shakes things up. The way around that is to establish property rights in proportion to what people have simple taken pre-property rights: if you let out 50 tons of CO2 last year when it was free, congratulations, you now have a tradeable permit to emit exactly 50 tons of CO2 per year.
You see how that is perverse, but also how it achieves its goal of not making losers out of current winners or vice versa.
It’s been done like that for many other things, and it’s not as if it isn’t understandable – you don’t get popular from threatening a core industry, even if that industry gets its dominant position from overexploiting a shared resource.
But nice, so we can agree we shouldn’t do it that way? And maybe we should start a FRCT low and gradually ramp it up to make the necessary restructuring less destructive? This would be a great start. But unfortunately, agreement on that is not worth much if you underestimate the need to cut carbon emissions.
James Picone offers a long defense of his view that AGW is a terrible thing. Much of it comes down to “trust the experts.” I am inclined to trust experts when there is no better alternative, for instance on the claim that temperatures have trended up. But often there is.
For instance… . One of the people producing the IPCC conclusions about consequences is William Nordhaus. He is in my field, economics, and I can read what he writes and make sense of it. I observe him writing a response to a WSJ editorial on warming. The editorial argued that it wasn’t a crisis situation requiring immediate action. Nordhaus disagreed. He gave his estimate of the cost of waiting fifty years instead of taking the optimal action at once: 4.1 trillion dollars, and remarks that “Wars have been started over smaller sums.”
What he doesn’t do is convert that figure to an annual cost spread over the world for the rest of the century. It comes to about .06% of world GNP per year. He is attacking people for a position that his own research supports–some evidence of the pressures determining which side he wants to be seen to be on. For details see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/contra-nordhaus.html
Along similar lines, I see multiple claims about mortality that count the effect of hotter summers and ignore the effect of milder winters. I see an EPA page trying to imply that AGW reduces the food supply. The only solid fact it contains is an increase from CO2 fertilization. The rest is pointing out that droughts and floods and such could reduce output–but with no evidence that droughts and floods will be more common.
Figuring out what “the experts” believe and how solid it is isn’t a trivial problem. Fifty years ago the experts predicted severe problems from population increase and resource exhaustion, and works making catastrophic predictions in the fairly near future were taken seriously. On the evidence so far, they were wrong–things moved in just the opposite of the direction they predicted. Other examples where what purported to be a scientific consensus was something closer to a political consensus can be offered.
For my discussion of the general problem of judging outside your expertise, see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/06/judging-outside-your-expertise.html
Finally, and getting back to one of my arguments with James, I see a prominent figure in the AGW movement make a provably false statement about his own work, and I have not yet seen anyone in that movement recognize the fact. That James can talk himself into denial on the plain evidence on John Cook is not so disturbing. That nobody in his movement, at least nobody I have seen, is willing to come out and criticize one of their own when he has been demonstrably dishonest tells me something about how much that movement is concerned with truth and how much with supporting its side. Along similar lines, the head of the IPCC is apparently now out due to accusations of sexual harassment. But he remained in office after accusing critics of junk science in his defense of an alarmist claim by the IPCC (the vanishing Himalayan glaciers) that turned out to have no scientific basis at all. That says something about organizational priorities.
For all I know or care, Hansen may be a technocratic saint with no ulterior motives. We’re talking about pattern-matching here. Your description is still isomorphic to “give my team all the money and power,” and given the weight and importance of the energy industries, the massive gap between law-as-summarized and regulations-as-implemented, and the competence of our political system, the odds of what comes out of that sausage grinder being what you put in are ~0%. You can argue that whatever mangled system is put in place will probably still be better than no system if you like, but Deisach’s skepticism remains highly warranted.
“If you think climate change is nonsense, you should expect Heartland to win this bet.”
If you think warming stopped in 1998, which I gather is the Heartland position, (or 2002, which is my best guess from looking at the data), you should expect Heartland to lose the bet for the next thirteen (or seventeen) years, because each year’s thirty year average is replacing one of the years before the warming ended with one after. So if the bet is presented as “Heartland losing means Heartland is wrong,” Heartland will get undeserved bad publicity for the next thirteen (or seventeen) years, since they would lose the bet even if they were right.
Which makes me conclude that the people offering the bet are engaged in deliberate fraud, counting on other people not recognizing the implication of a thirty year average. If they were honest, they would propose comparing the average from 1998 to this year with the average from 1999 to next year, since that’s the test of whether temperature is continuing to rise.
The position that temperature has increased from 1970 to 1998-2002 by magic and is then stationary thereafter doesn’t make sense. If Heartland thinks that rise is natural variation, they should expect global average surface temperature to go down, and soon.
The bet you propose is certainly harder for people who think CO2 is a significant climate forcing – 17 years is not very long in climate terms – but I’m pretty sure CSICOP would win that bet more often than they lose it over any reasonable span of time.
You do realise that picking 2002 as the inflection point is the exact same mistake as picking 1998, right? I’m sure I’ve asked you that before.
The problem is- we’ve seen shifts that big before- see ‘medieval warm period’ and ‘little ice age.”
If you look at the temperate shifts leading up to those, and extrapolate along the graph, you suddenly find that we should all be dead of boiling and/or freezing by now.
The climate does these things. Randomly- England really was a warm green paradise for a while. The wine really did freeze in the glasses at Versailles.
I’ve heard anthropogenic suggestions for this- essentially that North America was clear cut by the Indians, causing the warm period, and when they died after Columbus, the resulting growback caused the cooling.
That essentially requires that North America was sustaining a pre-agricultural population of a hundred million or so, however- a level it wouldn’t reach again until 1900, after years of immigration, population boom, and expansion, using industrial revolution tech.
Hell, using IRON. It takes a long freakin’ time to destroy a tree with fire and stone.
Either the Algonquin did more damage to the forest primeval in a few hundred years than we did, or the climate did some weird freaky stuff we don’t really understand yet.
I continue not to see where Picone is getting the “and soon” part from.
“You do realise that picking 2002 as the inflection point is the exact same mistake as picking 1998, right? ”
I don’t realize that. 1998 is visibly an outlier. 2002 is not. A straight line fit to the webbed NASA data from 2002 to 2013 (I did the calculation before the 2014 data were in) gives a very slightly negative slope.
But since I have your attention, would you like to explain:
1. Why Cook et. al. 2013 reported the sum of categories 1-3 but not the numbers for the individual categories–when doing so would have revealed that category 1 was tiny?
2. Why Cook claimed later that the paper showed 97% for humans as “main cause” when that describes only category 1?
My point is not that researchers do or do not agree with one claim or another about AGW. It is that the source of a prominent article cited in defense of AGW claims, and the proprietor of a web site used for such defense, has demonstrably lied, in print, about his own work. Unlike your claim about Ridley, mine is supported by evidence you can check for yourself, all of it provided and webbed by Cook and his coworkers (two articles and the webbed data from one of them).
You used the phrase “God knows why you trust him and the rest of the liars over actual scientists.” I think I have demonstrated that one of the people you apparently trust is a liar. Do you care?
“If Heartland thinks that rise is natural variation, they should expect global average surface temperature to go down, and soon.”
That depends on the form of the natural variation. If they think it is a random walk they should expect it to be quite a while before next year’s temperature is cooler than the temperature from thirty years earlier, since the data on which the bet is based show rapid increase in the period prior to 1998.
Are you assuming that they believe that each year is a new random draw? That seems wildly unlikely given the data, but without that I do not see how you get your conclusion.
Do you agree that the form of bet offered, with a thirty year average instead of a seventeen year average, means that the people offering it are either dishonest or mathematically incompetent?
@David Friedman
GISTEMP LOTI, 1975->2014, 12-month running mean: here
2002 is the next peak in the record after 1998, so it’s got all the problems of doing statistical work by eyeballing an interesting peak and drawing a line from there (and /that’s/ the fundamental problem, not that 1998 is some special magical outlier – it’s just the most convenient one. If I drew the trend from 2000-present, what would you say?).
From what I know of you, you should have the statistical chops to calculate uncertainty margins for that linear trend line. I would strongly recommend you calculate them and then look at where the 1970s-2002 trendline sits – it’ll be inside your confidence interval. Remember to account for global average surface temperature being highly autocorrelated. Alternately, just use the SkS trend calculator. -0.01 +/- 0.179 c/decade for the 2002->2014 period, at 2 sigma. 0.177 +/- 0.67 c/decade for 1975->2002, 2 sigma. Even at 2-sigma, the central estimate for prior to your selected period is (just) inside the confidence interval, and that’s before correcting for the whole eyeball-selected-peak thing.
RE: Cook’s consensus paper, I’m pretty sure I addressed that in my comment here. I’ll say it again – I have no problem with Cook presenting categories 2 and 3 as congruent with the IPCC position. I’m not surprised that category 1 is small. How many papers on economics say, in their abstract, that they think the law of supply and demand drives prices? If you did a similar study on economics papers, wouldn’t you end up with a similar structure – a small number of papers that explicitly say, in their abstract, that supply and demand drives prices, and several other papers that strongly imply they use that fact without outright stating it?
Matt Ridley has “financial interest in coal mining on my family’s land”. He /is/ fossil fuel interests. That one is trivial to find – I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that his association with the GWPF has earned him money and that the GWPF is funded by fossil-fuel interests.
If Heartland thinks global average surface temperature is a random walk, I am steelmanning their position. That would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
I’m suggesting that they think the climate is underlying temperature given current forcings, which I’ll call T, plus a random distribution V, with draws from V each year correlated strongly with each other (that is, if V is on the upper end this year, expect an upper-end-ish V this year, but some probability of low V). Heartland claims V has been drawing high since 1998, maybe even earlier. I’m not sure how else to construct their views without literally invoking magic – a climate that gets hot and then stays hot for no reason at all.
I agree that the form of the bet offered makes it highly likely that CSICOP will win, and that it’s probably a bad bet even if you think Heartland is right. I don’t think it’s bad-at-maths or dishonest, though – it’s not like it’s abundantly clear what’s going on actually reading the bet. I think it’s trying to tie Heartland to an actual prediction instead of them waffling on about 18-year-four-month pauses, and I think it’s trying to make the point that you actually do need long periods of time for the trend to outweigh noise.
James – I really think you are being WAY too soft on Cook here. If his methodology, applied properly, would lead to an absurd result then that shows that it is a bad methodology. It is the height of intellectual dishonesty to claim that papers say something other than what they actually say in order to get a result closer to what you want.
I mean, surely it’s not like saying “Yeah, Cook’s paper is bad but AGW is still probably real” is such a huge concession? Why defend this crap?
@Nathan:
I don’t think this is a question of “methodology applied properly leads to absurd results”, I think it’s “methodology how Friedman wants to apply it leads to absurd results”.
Cat1 is a very strong condition – it’s the papers that explicitly say, in their abstract, “Global warming is happening, and it’s mostly human-caused”. Cat2 is papers that explicitly say “Global warming is happening” in such a way that human impact is implied without quantification of human impact. Cat3 is implicit global-warming-is-happening-and-has-some-human-impact, like papers that talk about mitigation mechanisms. Knowing that ~33% of all papers they found with a simple search are in categories 1-3, and if you remove category 4 (Papers that express no clear position – for example, some impacts papers, some paleoclimate stuff) you end up with ~97% in categories 1-3.
That there are vanishingly few papers that implicitly or explicitly minimise human contribution to global warming is a Big Result.
I don’t think it’s a bad paper. And I think Cook has been exemplary in doing this openly and honestly. Huge swathes of data from the paper are available on SkS. They created a tool that lets you rate papers yourself. They emailed authors whose papers they rated and asked the authors to rate their own papers. They raised the fee that the journal charges to make papers open-access, so the paper could be read by people who don’t have a journal subscription. This doesn’t read like someone trying to be deceptive to me.
Picone writes:
“I’ll say it again – I have no problem with Cook presenting categories 2 and 3 as congruent with the IPCC position.”
How about with his presenting the sum of categories 1-3 as papers saying that humans were the main cause of warming, as he did in the second paper? Does a paper saying that greenhouse gases contribute to warming—the example for category 2—imply that humans are the *main* cause of warming?
You don’t think it’s a bit odd to only report the sum for categories 1-3 and not give the individual numbers—thus obscuring the fact that category 1, the only category which claims humans as the principal cause, was only a tiny fraction of the total?
Did you compare my blog post with Cook’s response to it? Is that consistent with the belief that Cook is an honest man? Perhaps you could point to where in my post I make the argument he attacks me for making?
My point is not how many people do or do not believe in AGW. It’s that John Cook has lied in print about his own work. Since you regard SKS as a reliable source of information, that ought to matter to you, assuming you care whether your beliefs are true.
Which of these claims do you dispute:
1. Only category 1 consisted of papers whose abstracts claimed that humans were the main cause of warming (“Principal cause” in the definition). Categories 2 and 3 do not.
2. Category 1 was 1.6% of the papers (after category 4 was eliminated)
3. In the second paper, Cook claimed that the first paper showed 97% of the papers supported humans as the main cause of warming.
If you agree with all of those, you agree that Cook lied in print, no? If not, which do you disagree with?
Most issues in the climate controversy are difficult. I have been pushing this because it isn’t. You can check all of the relevant facts for yourself, since both papers and the data from the first are webbed.
And for other people reading this thread, I suggest that they look at my blog post on the subject themselves and reach their own conclusion.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html
@David Friedman:
Broadly, yes, I have no problem with that. The position (cat2 & !cat1) or (cat3 & !cat1) only makes sense in the context of absurd premises – claims like “humans have no recently significantly increased the CO2 content of the atmosphere” or “there are negative forcings of ~2 W/m**2 magnitude that we don’t know about” or “forcing due to doubling of CO2 isn’t in the neighbourhood of 3.7 W/m**2”. I very much doubt more than a handful of the papers in cats2&3 would endorse one of those premises.
Cook2013 reports the numbers in all categories. Again, it’s a friggin’ exemplar of open research. The abstract doesn’t specifically say how many papers were in which category, but that’s because abstracts are highly space-limited and anybody who wants that information can read the paper. They report the aggregate for cats1-3, 4, and 5-7 in their abstract because those are the takeaway – something like 3% of all papers that can meaningfully be ascribed a position implicitly or explicitly question the consensus. That’s a big deal.
I really don’t understand this harping on cat1 being small. It’s expected to be small. Nobody writes a paper, and in the bloody abstract, says “Oh and by the way we think this basic principle of the field is true”. I still think it’s a useful tool. Applied to medical science, you’d see a change in proportions of cat1-3/4/5-7 papers on ulcer causation after the experiment that demonstrated they were bacterial.
Yes I compared your blog posts. Notice that my original comment on the matter, long ago, suggested that what was going on is that Cook pattern-matched what you were saying to the “but cat4 is 30% of papers! Cat1 is tiny!”, rather than “Cat1 is tiny compared to cat2&3!”. There has been a lot of that. If you went to a denialist blog in the wake of Cook2013, it was almost certain you would run into people saying that. Mistakenly concluding that that was your argument is pretty easy to do if you’re just skimming.
Again, if you did a Cook2013 survey on whether economic consensus was that prices were set by supply and demand, how many papers do you think would be in cat1?
James Picone says, about Cook et. al. 2013:
“Cook2013 reports the numbers in all categories. ”
That is not the case. The webbed data make it possible, with some effort, to count the numbers in all categories. But what the paper–not the abstract, the paper itself–reports is only the sum for categories 1-3, labeled “endorse AGW,” not the individual numbers. You seem to be confusing the paper with the abstract.
The paper itself is at:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
Would you like to point out where it gives the separate numbers, or percentages, by category?
As I keep pointing out, in the second paper Cook doesn’t say “97% endorse AGW,” a vague and possibly true claim. He says:
“Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”
Is that a true statement? Is it close to a true statement, given that that particular study found 1.6% holding that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the principal cause? Is it not in the least suspicious that the original paper failed to report that fact, gave 97% for the much vaguer “endorse AGW,” and the author then claimed that number for the stronger claim?
I keep pushing this point because it is a much simpler issue than the climate questions we are discussing, and if you are not willing to admit that 2+2=4 when doing so leads to a conclusion you do not like, neither I nor you ought to trust your conclusions, or your summaries of the evidence, on much more difficult issues.
With regard to Cook’s response to my criticism, I concede that it’s possible it was not deliberate dishonesty but error. But if so, he is willing to accuse a critic of dishonesty without making any serious effort to actually read the criticism and see what it says. And it is at least suspicious that he attacks me for an argument I didn’t make to which he has a rebuttal and does not even mention the argument I did make–to which, as I have been arguing here at some length, there is no rebuttal. That is not the behavior of a man who cares whether what he writes is true.
Looks like you’re partially right – I thought the broken-down-by-category numbers were in the supplementary material, but instead it’s just all the articles with their ratings, which can trivially be turned into the numbers you’re looking for. The abstract does report numbers for categories 1-3, 4a, 4b, and 5-7 though.
I think it’s a true statement. Again, papers in cat2&3 can only be taken to not agree with the consensus if you add in an insane premise. If someone says “They fell out of an aeroplane!” and someone else describes that statement as agreeing with “they died after falling a long distance”, well strictly speaking the first statement doesn’t necessarily imply the second, but without a premise like “…and they were wearing a parachute” or “…and the plane was on the ground”, it seems like a safe assumption.
Again, if you did a Cook2013 survey of economics papers on the question “The market is the principle factor determining prices”, how many papers do you think would be in cat1? Would it be fair to say that when you found >95% papers in cat 1-3, but a tiny proportion of that in cat1, that you have found that >95% of economics papers endorse the position that the market determines prices? (equivalent cat2&3: ‘explicit claim that the market is a factor in price determination, without quantification’, ‘implicit claim that the market is a factor in price determination, without quantification’.)
Given that he didn’t get your name right, it seems abundantly clear that he glanced at the post, noticed the ‘cat1 is small!’, went “Oh it’s another one of those“, and wrote the standard reply. I don’t think that’s the behaviour of a man disinterested in honesty, that’s the behaviour of someone who’s seen several bajillion really terrible arguments against his paper and no longer has the time or inclination to read every single rebuttal. I’m willing to bet you’ve given people the simple argument against some manifestly-wrong argument against AnCap stuff without noticing that they have a subtly different, less obviously-wrong argument before.
tl;dr: If you believe “CO2 causes warming”, “>50% of the recent warming is anthropogenic” is the only sensible conclusion, unless you also believe something manifestly untrue. (“Humans aren’t the cause of recent CO2 increases”, “CO2 hasn’t increased”, “There’s an extremely large forcing we don’t know about”, “Climate doesn’t follow the laws of thermodynamics”). No, even if you think ECS is low that doesn’t help – the actual attribution is ~110% of the recent warming is anthropogenic.
EDIT: And, of course, if there wasn’t a consensus, categories 5-7 would be larger. Much larger.
James Picone writes:
“Looks like you’re partially right – I thought the broken-down-by-category numbers were in the supplementary material, but instead it’s just all the articles with their ratings, which can trivially be turned into the numbers you’re looking for.”
Precisely my claim, except that it isn’t trivial to sort and count thousands of articles. My blog post included a link to that data. What was “partially” right about what I wrote or only partially wrong about your claim that the numbers for the separate categories were in the article?
The authors of Cook et. al. 2013 counted the articles in the separate categories in order to compile their 97%. You don’t think it a bit odd that they didn’t bother to report those numbers but instead only reported the large figure for categories 1-3 without mentioning how tiny the figure for category 1 was? It doesn’t suggest anything to you when they first avoid giving the small figure for category 1 and Cook then applies the figure for the combined categories to a description that only applies to category 1?
You have an extraordinary ability not to see things you don’t want to see.
“The abstract does report numbers for categories 1-3, 4a, 4b, and 5-7 though.”
Precisely what I have been saying. It reports the large number for categories 1-3, does not report the small number for category 1. And you really think that posting a list of some 12,000 articles on the theory that readers of the article will go through them, sort them by category, and add up the numbers, is a reasonable substitute for reporting numbers they have already calculated? Nothing odd about it?
“Again, papers in cat2&3 can only be taken to not agree with the consensus if you add in an insane premise.”
The claim in the second paper was not that 97% agree with the consensus, a conveniently vague term. It was that “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” A much more precise claim, and one that was off by almost two orders of magnitude.
Do you disagree? Did category 2 and 3 consist of papers holding that humans were the main cause of warming? If not, then only category 1 classifies, meaning that Cook misrepresented 1.6% in his own data as 97%. I don’t understand why you keep talking about the consensus, when my charge is about Cook’s claim in the second paper—”main cause.”
“And, of course, if there wasn’t a consensus, categories 5-7 would be larger. Much larger.”
How many times do I have to tell you that I am not arguing about how many people believe in AGW, I am arguing that John Cook lied in print about his own work?
This isn’t rocket science, or even climate science. It is the reading of straightforward English.
@David Friedman:
The consensus is that anthropogenic GHG emissions are responsible for 110% of recent warming.
I very much doubt that there were more than single-digit papers in cats2+3 that would argue against that.
Getting the individual category counts out of that data file is half an hours work if you know what you’re doing. No, I don’t think that’s too much of an imposition. It’d be nice of Cook to report all those figures, but whatever. It’s not a big deal.
No, I don’t think it’s suspicious, and I’ve explained why.
I note that you’ve steered very well clear of my argument that Cook’s methodology would show similar results on questions widely agreed-upon in any scientific field.
pretty surprising from a dynamics point of view if the feedback isn’t positive
Pretty shocking from an anthropomorphic principle standpoint, though. You don’t have a billion year old biosphere with a climate dominated by positive feedbacks.
This is pedantic of me, and I apologize, but I think you mean “anthropic”?
How many times has Earth frozen to ludicrous degrees? Five. One of which may literally have frozen the equator.
How many times have mass extinction events killed most life on Earth? Depends how you count, but several, at least five. Some of them were climactic, some of them were climactic precipitated by asteroid impact or vulcanism.
Earth is not a friendly place on long timescales.
I think there’s some occasional confusion because ‘positive feedback’ in the climate sense is different to ‘positive feedback’ in the electrical-engineering sense. It’s not runaway. One unit of warming produces <one unit of additional warming. Plus there are geological-scale processes that can clean up – rock weathering, plant matter getting buried and fossil shells burying CO2, for example.
If your positive feedback is “not runaway” then what you’ve actually got is negative feedback.
@Alex Godofsky:
There’s a meaningful difference between systems where increasing parameter F results in dynamic changes that oppose the increase enough to prevent any increase at all (very large negative feedback), systems where increasing parameter F results in dynamic changes that oppose the increase without completely wiping it out (negative feedback), systems where increasing parameter F results in dynamic changes that on net neither oppose nor enhance the increase (no feedback), systems where increasing parameter F results in dynamic changes that enhance the increase, but at less-than-unity (that is, each unit of F is worth 0<n1 increase) (runaway positive feedback).
Climate feedbacks are almost certainly positive. They are almost certainly not runaway positive, at least in any climate state that’s existed on Earth before. I don’t know how control theory uses those terms, but in climate science that’s what it means.
“and pretty surprising from a dynamics point of view if the feedback isn’t positive.”
Could you expand on that? I thought everyone agreed that there could be both positive (water vapor) and negative (albedo) feedbacks, so that the conclusion that the net feedback was positive depended on data, not theory.
I swear I’ve seen an excellent chart showing estimated magnitudes of particular feedbacks, but I can’t find it now. I did find this completely-irrelevant-but-interesting history of IPCC radiative forcing charts, though.
The straightforward answer is just that every single published ECS estimate with most of its probability mass >1c is claiming net positive feedback, and there are /extremely few/ published ECS estimates with substantial probability mass <1c. Here’s the IPCC’s list of ones based on mostly direct measurement (and some based on the Last Glacial Maximum for some reason). Energy-balance approaches like most of those studies tend to underestimate climate sensitivity, as well – that’s a known drawback to the mechanism. Paleoclimate studies tend to generate higher values, but it’s not clear whether that’s because it’s including slow feedbacks that aren’t relevant on a century-long timescale.
If you’re just trying to Fermi up an estimate, notice that water vapour is easily the largest feedback by magnitude, and is positive.
(Are you talking about surface albedo or cloud albedo? IIRC surface albedo is thought to be a weak positive feedback, because melting ice -> lower albedo -> more energy absorbed. Cloud albedo is negative of uncertain magnitude, and is probably one of the least constrained values here. Net cloud feedback is also uncertain as a result, could be slightly positive to very negative).
James Picone writes:
“The straightforward answer is just that every single published ECS estimate with most of its probability mass >1c is claiming net positive feedback”
I wouldn’t be surprised. But I was responding to the claim that it would be “pretty surprising from a dynamics point of view if the feedback isn’t positive.”
That appears to be a claim not about what the data show but about what they have to show on theoretical grounds.
“Basically every scientist studying the matter concludes that it would be surprising” seems like a strong argument to me.
On theoretical grounds – again, water vapour is easily the biggest feedback, and it’s positive. There are very few identified negative feedbacks. And a climate with net negative feedback likely never leaves ice ages.
I’m not following this global warming debate at all but I see no apparent contradiction between believing “warming ended in 1998” and “2016 will be warmer than 1986”.
If warming ceased in 1998 taking the 30 years bet would result in losing it for 13 years straight even if you are right.
Heartland claims that the warming is natural variation; that combined with the pause stuff implies pretty strongly that we’re at a peak, and should then expect a reduction. Notice the vague planetary-cooling prediction from the NIPCC.
Would be basically impossible for that bet to go anywhere other than towards CSICOP for the next few years, though, yes (assuming no large volcanic eruptions etc. etc.).
Next year obviously won’t decide anything but I think 15 years might. If there is no significant warming between now and 2030, then it will put the pro global warming crowd in an awkward position.
I don’t share your confidence. The pro crowd wasn’t brought to their position by correct predictions. That doesn’t seem to be an issue for them. So long as the IPCC et al keep on humming, I think their cultural allies will stick by them.
Can someone better versed in this explain why the “pause” SHOULDN’T significantly reduce my confidence in climate predictions? I’ve seen some post hoc explanations for “where the heat went” and that the “pause” was covered by the predictions (just barely, and in models that predicted a slower but steady trend, not a sudden stop). But these don’t seem to escape the conclusion that there were substantial gaps in our understanding of the climate long after the “science was settled”. What’s to say that now we’ve got all the parameters right?
The big issue for me is that the pause period is something like 2 decades – and the entirety of the strong evidence for anthropogenic warning comes from at best a century. 20% of the data (the most recent, and only predicted 20%) failing to match your model seems pretty bad, not just a blip in a solid long term trend.
“The pause period” isn’t a meaningful thing to talk about from a statistical point of view; records are a really bad way to summarise noisy statistical data (can you sensibly say that people have not got better at the 800-metres since 1983 when the current world record was set?)
There’s weather in the short term, there’s climate in the long term, and there are awkward things like el Nino events which fit between them; 1998 had an anomalously hot el Nino event.
“1998 had an anomalously hot el Nino event.”
I think that’s correct. It is the reason that I date the pause from 2002, since when temperature has been pretty close to flat.
But it’s not like the data post 1998 follows the pre-1998 trend with 1998 as a single outlier. Yes, anomalously high 1998 made it look worse, but the running average has been flatter for the last 20 years than for any time since the mid 20th century.
Your last point is what bothers me – it’s not clear we can dismiss 15 or 20 years as “weather” while staking our hat to a “climate” change that’s been going on for <100 years. Those strike me as same order of magnitude. Even IPCC scientists seem to be comfortable admitting that this trend is unlikely and requires better explanation.
Climate scientists explain the apparent pause through things like multi-decadal ocean and trade wind fluctuations, and some heat getting trapped in the deep ocean. But evidence for this is controversial – apparently a NASA study couldn't find any deep-ocean warming. Either way, this potential impact of the ocean is not something that was even able to be studied until quite recently – which seems to require a reduction in confidence of our models going back to past centuries. When you tell me there's big multi-decadal changes going on that you can't fully explain or apparently predict, but you're totally confident that a trend that only started 100 years ago will continue indefinitely, well, it's hard NOT to be skeptical.
TL:DR version: even now, there seems to be substantial, legitimate uncertainty sufficient to create a not fully explained 15-20 year break in the trend of AGW. What other unknowns are hiding out there, and why should I believe that our prediction of the next 30 years is going to be much better?
I would relish some accidental slip of the tongue where someone says “increased greenhouse gas concentrations have caused surface temperature to accumulate over the last century.”
The magnitude of my enjoyment would be about the same as how impressed I am that climate scientists can know how much heat accumulated in the oceans from say 1890-1930 with almost no error.
I think the pause is real, despite various people trying to argue it isn’t. A while back, I did a linear regression of the webbed NASA data starting in 2002, because eyeballing the data that seemed to be when the warming stopped. The slope was very slightly negative. There’s one more year of data now, and my guess is that including it would make the slope slightly positive, but I haven’t checked.
My interpretation, based mostly on eyeballing the data, is that the pattern reflects the sum of two trends, one a roughly linear increase due to AGW, one a roughly sinusoidal perturbation with a period of about sixty years. That explains the mid-century pause, during which temperature was constant to declining from about 1940 to 1970. Also the fact that warming started in about 1911. My guess is that the perturbation has something to do with heat moving between the atmosphere and the ocean, the ocean being the obvious place to put large amounts of heat with little visible effect, and I’ve seen a reference to at least one paper providing a mechanism.
The IPCC special cased the earlier pause as due to particulates in the air. There doesn’t seem to have been a good theoretical basis in advance for predicting the size or even the sign of such an effect, so it looks like adding another parameter in order to explain a deviation from the model. It might be right, but it looks less plausible once one observes the pause reappearing more or less on schedule.
If my interpretation is correct, the IPCC has probably overestimated climate sensitivity and over predicted future warming by taking the periods when the perturbation reinforced AGW as the norm.
Your last paragraph is a concern I share – if the pause is a result of some sort of periodic fluctuation, it doesn’t seem like climate scientists are appropriately discounting past warming for similar fluctuations.
Basically, they’re taking a 50 year trend and calling it nominal, even if the same fluctuation causing the current pause may have been “artificially” increasing past temperatures on the upswing.
There’s not enough data to find a sinusoid in global average surface temperature with anything like confidence. Mostly because it’s really easy to fit nearly anything with a linear trend and a sinusoid.
You know full well that the uncertainty on a 2002-present linear trend is massive and includes the prior-to-2002 trend.
There’s no statistical evidence of a change in trend past 1970 in the data – that is, there’s no ‘pause’.
There’s the visual appearance of a pause because 1998 was stupid-warm, and eyeball-mk-1 is terrible at stats.
This realclimate post does some stats stuff, including the output of a changepoint analysis on global temperature.
The blogger Tamino is a statistician, and has written several blog posts about the pause. This one demonstrates that post-1998 temperatures fit on the pre-1998 trendline easily. This blog post is Tamino doing changepoint analysis on global temperature data. And this one might make it clear why linear trends from 1998 or 2002 are less than impressive – year-to-year temperature is both very noisy and autocorrelated, so the uncertainty in trends over periods as short as 17 years is massive. The uncertainty in the 1998-present trendline includes the 1979-1998 trendline because of that.
From a climate point of view, talking about a pause since 1998 is only slightly more respectable than talking about a pause since last week.
Oh it’s worth noting that most of the “Look here’s a pause!” charts use the RSS satellite dataset, which shows the least warming since 1979 of any of the four major temperature datasets, partially because the satellite record measures lower trophosphere temperature, not surface temperature, and responds much more to el-Nino/la-Nina than the surface record, partially because satellite temperature measurements are Really Damn Hard and require substantial adjustment and there’s some question over whether RSS has cold biases, and partially because the satellite measurements don’t include much of the poles, which warm faster.
SkS trend calculator: https://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
Play with that, it’ll give you 2-sigma uncertainties for linear trends over arbitrary timescales on temperature data.
Not to be flip, but every graph I’ve seen looks like it has a flat spot since ~2000, even if I cover up/ignore 1998. This seems effectively unprecedented over the last half of the 20th century, when AGW was supposedly the dominant factor in global temperature change. And several IPCC scientists have talked credibly about the pause, and NASA has looked into pause-related ocean conditions. So am I supposed to trust the scientists or not?
The fact that you can fit 15 years of non-warming into a 2-sigma model (barely) does not particularly boost my confidence in dire predictions for 50 years from now.
I’m not a statistician, just a lowly rocket scientist that runs Monte Carlo sims all day, but I can tell you if I showed something like the global average temp 5 year moving average to my bosses and said “don’t worry about explaining this flat bit up here, it’s within the 2-sigma bounds” that wouldn’t cut it. If you’re planning massive societal intervention, I’d like a model that reflects reality a bit better than that.
What if you explicitly draw the pre-1998 (or pre-whichever-point-you-think-the-pause-starts) trendline in, like Tamino did in the blog post I linked? Here’s the graph you get with GISTEMP. Other datasets look similar, although the satellite datasets it’s a much shallower trendline.
Are rocket Monte-Carlo simulations anything like as noisy as temperature data? Look at that graph – there are single-year jumps of something like 1.5C. Meanwhile, the trend is ~0.45 / 34 = 0.13 C/year. The noise is more than ten times larger than the signal.
It’s not like we haven’t had periods like that before. Here’s 1980->1995. Looks pretty flat. Here’s one where the entire 1970-presentish (it ends in february 2014) range is covered by several negative-to-flat trends.
2014 is the best candidate for warmest year ever. 2015 is looking like it’ll beat it. Of the ten warmest years on record, only 1998 isn’t in the 21st century.
I’m really not sure what else I can say here. The stats are what the stats are, and there’s not enough evidence to conclude that the trend from any point after the 1970s is different from the trend since the 1970s. Even at 2-sigma, even not correcting for deliberately selecting a warm outlier to start the trend on. Eyeballs are great at seeing patterns, so great that they’ll see them even when there isn’t enough data to justify it. Don’t trust your lying eyes – trust the maths. Surely that applies to Monte-Carlo rocket simulation just as much as any other mathematical subject?
@James
Notice how much longer the flat trend is on this last one. The only reason we haven’t deviated from the trend line is because there was such a big jump in the 90’s. If average GDP growth was 3% and then it hit 6% for 5 years straight, GDP might still be above the trend line if there was a recession for two years. It might not be time to declare a “new normal” but it would be a lie to declare that the economy had never stopped “statistically increasing”.
Regardless of whether you want to call it a pause or not, there is still the problem that much more warming was predicted than we got.
@Wrong Species:
Nope, 1980->1995 is flatter than other pause periods of similar length (all uncertainties 2sigma, using GISTEMP):
1999->2014: 0.090 +- 0.136
1998->2013: 0.066 +- 0.143
1998->2014: 0.062 +- 0.127 (17 years)
1980->1995: 0.057 +- 0.158
2001->2014: 0.013 +- 0.156 is flatter, but shorter – only 14 years.
For comparison:
1975->1998: 0.163 +- 0.084 (23 years)
I’m not entirely certain what you’re getting at RE: GDP growth. I’m not saying ‘statistically single year temperatures haven’t been below the trendline’ (‘GDP growth hasn’t gone negative’), it wouldn’t be a trendline if there weren’t temperatures below it. I’m saying that the trendline from the 1970s up to the present day fits the data better than a piecewise linear function with a break anywhere after the 1970s. This is a mathematical claim. It’s directly testable. You can test it.
(The GDP-growth example is probably not amazing because GDP-growth is a trend on an exponential function, and temperature is not a measurement of trend of some underlying function).
Hell, just for fun I can play the opposite game – the trend from 1992->2006 is 0.309 +- 0.171. That’s nearly twice as much as the 1970->present trend! For 15 whole years!
If, in 2006, someone had pointed that out to you, would you conclude that global warming was worse than the IPCC was suggesting? Notice, incidentally, that the IPCC didn’t use that trend in reports.
We’re still within the model envelope, and I don’t know why people keep claiming we’re outside of it. The model envelope is friggin’ gigantic. They’re not supposed to predict el-Nino events or natural variation, they’re supposed to predict climate. And they do that better than naive models – Hansen’s written-in-1984, published-in-1988 model does better than assuming no change would have in 1984, for example: here. (Although you have to be careful with it because there are three scenarios and we haven’t matched any of them perfectly, and also Hansen had a slightly different CO2 forcing value than is considered correct now – 4 W/m**2 vs 3.7 W/m**2 – so you end up having to consider forcing growth for each scenario vs real world instead of simple GHG emissions).
The problem with The actual bet is essentially “land-only 2016 will be warmer than 1986″, is that it’s like betting “[baseball team] will not lose by more than 5”. If CSICOP wants a fair bet, it will offer Heartland or other skeptics a bet that some temperature series (as currently defined) will not be lower than the average of the climate model predictions at some time down the road. So if the predicted rise is 2.3 degrees C, CSICOP should pay out if the rise is less than that. I’d even be willing to spot them half a standard deviation at even odds – if the predicted rise in temperature in the highest 69% of model predictions (or the value of mean minus ½ sigma) is at least 1.8, CSICOP wins the bet if the actual rise is at least 1.8.
But that would let Heartland off the hook for its own over-ambitious prediction. Why not a three-valued wager, in which if Heartland passes (a suitably corrected version of) the original test it gets CSI’s money; if the GCMs turn out to validate after all CSI gets Heartland’s money; and in the highly likely event of neither of these happening, everyone keeps their money?
I will step up and offer to take the money if no one wins.
Why would CSICOP want to take a bet that they would lose 50% of the time in the event they were right?
According to: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/16/exclusive-well-all-be-dead-before-climate-change-orgs-admit-theyre-wrong-says-mp/ some guys went around a Royal Society meeting asking how long would surface temperature need to stay pretty much flat before you decide you were wrong about this global warming problem, and the answer they gave was 50 years (as in 2065).
Really have to admire their commitment.
Richard Feynman said one of the most difficult problems with testing the standard model of particle physics was doing the math and figuring out exactly what the model actually predicted. But at least they had foundation to work from. There’s no formal theory of [CO2]-forced climate change, just some related postulates and climate models. So the question of what in particular does “the theory” predict is a doozy.
I once asked that question in an internet forum and had this interesting exchange:
Me: What, and please be very specific, testable predictions does the theory of ACC make?
Reply: Equilibrium climate sensitivity is between 2.0 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.
Me: By what metric do we determine that equilibrium has been reached?
Reply: When all feedbacks have resolved.
Me: By what metric do we determine that all feedbacks have resolved?
Reply: Depends on the feedback.
Me: Could you give an example?
And that’s where the conversation ended. But from this perspective the Royal Society is in quite the hurry, as the general idea is that feedbacks will resolve in something like 2500-3000 years. So it is of course a technically testable prediction, the best kind of testable prediction. Unless of course something unexpected happens which throws off the experiment. A possibility.
I would say that if Heartland and CSI do set up this bet, they largely deserve each other. In the meantime let all of us continue to assert that morality requires unshaking belief in the correctness of an only moderately coherent and generally untestable hypothesis.
“Unless of course something unexpected happens which throws off the experiment. A possibility.”
Given the current rate of technological progress, I’m compelled to regard “possibility” as a tongue-in-cheek understatement. It’s one of the things that bothers me about the impetus to do something about climate change. The most dire IPCC claims are in the ballpark of ten-degree changes over the next century, by which time we’ll have invented who-knows-what. For example, by then, I expect we’ll have a pretty good handle on how to terraform Mars, and there’ll be machines there, busily mining the air, extracting and melting ice, etc. It’s more likely IMO that we’ll be able to directly address imminent climactic features as fast as they manifest. Meanwhile, we adapt to temperature changes of 60+ degrees on a 6-month cycle now, routinely.
In 2000 years when they thaw out my brain and upload my consciousness to the matrix, if human beings don’t have very active control over the weather, I’m going to think out a tweet about how very disappointed I am in them.
Of course adaptation and mitigation are the appropriate response to any potential climate change problem. Which is why I think it’s so obvious that when it comes to energy policy and climate science the tail is wagging the dog.
The paradox of technological progress is that if the techno deus-ex-machina comes to save us, it will be despite people like ryan. For technology to come along and save us, technology has to realize there’s a problem to be solved, and if you oppose, say, carbon taxes, there isn’t very much problem to be solved from the market’s perspective.
When “the market” decides to dismiss environmental concerns/repeal environmental legislation/block environmental legislation that would otherwise have passed, I suppose it’s a bit like your AI that hacks its own reward function.
“and if you oppose, say, carbon taxes, there isn’t very much problem to be solved from the market’s perspective.”
There is a problem to be solved–fossil fuel costs money. So there is an incentive to find less expensive substitutes. There isn’t an incentive to find substitutes that cost more than fossil fuel but less than you think fossil fuel ought to cost with a suitable carbon tax.
Your argument depends on the claim that global warming produces net costs. I’ve been arguing at some length in various places, including here, that there is no good reason to believe that. Warming will produce both costs and benefits, the size of both is uncertain, there is no good reason to expect the costs to be larger than the benefits and some reason, well short of certainty, to expect the benefits to be larger than the costs.
Claiming technology doesn’t realize it needs to give us more powerful energy sources is like claiming technology doesn’t realize it needs to make us all immortal and kill all our enemies. Those are the primary problems technology exists to solve.
@Alraune:
@David Friedman has the crux of the argument right.
Those who believe the science that predicts AGW also believe that rapid induced climate change has negative externalities. The market doesn’t solve externality problems on its own.
Saying that the market will try and provide power at a cheaper price per unit by either increasing power output or decreasing cost is not the same thing as saying the market will try and reduce externalities.
For a community that cares as much about AGI as this one seems to, I’m surprised that people don’t think that the risk of dire outcomes from AGW warrants action.
I think it warrants migration out of some marginal environments, and probably geoengineering.
‘I think it warrants migration out of some marginal environments’
That’s fine, except that those marginal environments include Mumbai, Lagos, the whole country of Bangladesh, all the giant capital cities of West Africa, most of the state of Louisiana; migration out of any one of those would be on the scale of the rearrangement-of-populations after World War Two, which is only not remembered as a hideous catastrophe because of the more hideous catastrophe than preceded it.
@Alraune:
That’s a little like saying you think Clippy warrants being nuked from orbit. It’s not a statement about reducing the risk of Clippy occurring, it’s a statement about a presumed method of dealing with Clippy once Clippy happens.
And intentional geoengineering to combat side-effect geoengineering has it’s own risks, separate from the risk that it simply doesn’t work, so this really doesn’t address my basic contention.
The market doesn’t solve externality problems on its own
Not in the general case. If, e.g., runoff from the local paper mill is polluting a river, the quest for cheaper paper doesn’t necessarily give you less pollution.
But in this specific case, the modal energy source for fixed power is coal, and the modal energy source for transportation is petroleum. Those are what drive the price structure the market is trying to beat. And those are also, coincidentally, the most carbon-intensive practical energy sources. So, in this specific case, a free market’s efforts to reduce prices, will incidentally reduce the carbon footprint as well.
@John Schilling:
That’s not necessarily true. For instance, the search for cheaper energy gives you mountain top mining which actually increases rather than reduces externalities. Even if, say, solar reduces in Price Per Watt below various fossil fuels, all that does is force fossil fuels to look for even cheaper ways to extract.
To some very real extent, the drive for fossil fuels when competing with carbon neutral sources is a drive to increase externalities. See the the court case decided today against the EPA in the regulation of mercury emitted by coal plants.
Edit: Looked at another way, on the margin, every single producer of anything would love to increase externalities if it lowers their own costs.
@HeelBearCub:
Please stop using the word, “externalities”. That word is a plural, whereas the rest of us are talking about one specific externality. That externality is atmospheric CO2 emissions, and global warming to the extent that this correlates with atmospheric CO2. I do not believe anyone here has claimed that the free market automatically resolves externalities in general, only that it may be reasonably expected to resolve this one specific externality. And I thought I was clear and specific on this being a local, coincidental exception to the general rule that markets don’t do externalities well.
Mountain top mining may have plenty of negative externalities, but a greatly enhanced carbon footprint seems unlikely to be one of them. The solution space for cheaper power includes things that will have little net impact on CO2 emissions, and things that will greatly reduce CO2 emissions, but (coincidentally, in this specific case, can I stop repeating that now?) not much that greatly increases CO2 emissions. By the time the market is finished trying everything it can, CO2 emissions will have gone down. And if we’ve turned the EPA into the all-global-warming, nothing-but-global-warming regulatory agency, maybe we’ll have some conspicuous wastelands where used to be scenic mountains, etc, but mostly carbon-neutral wastelands.
And, since you bring it up, cheap solar power doesn’t force coal miners to look for cheaper ways to extract. Competition from other coal miners already does that, more directly and more efficiently. If the coal industry does come up with a new mining technique that’s as cheap as solar, then A: that’s still carbon-neutral, and B: if it’s cheap solar that actually motivated this, then that means somebody is actually using enough cheap solar to cut into their profits. So, we hypothetically get a combination of a carbon-neutral solution and a zero-carbon solution.
But after a couple hundred years of industrial-scale coal mining, I wouldn’t expect “improvement” in that field to outpace solar.
@HeelBearCub – “And intentional geoengineering to combat side-effect geoengineering has it’s own risks, separate from the risk that it simply doesn’t work, so this really doesn’t address my basic contention.”
The argument that it CAN’T work doesn’t seem very compatible with the climate change perspective in the first place, and presumably we’d have something like a century to get it right?
The general response to geoengineering proposals from the Climate Change side is part of why I have a really hard time believing them. Climate Change has been pitched as an existential threat to our entire civilization for at least two decades, and I remember Global Warming being ten years from wrecking the world a decade before that. In all that time, we’ve made pretty much zero progress at curbing co2 emissions, and that doesn’t look to be changing in the immediate future. And yet, the only solutions anyone is willing to discuss are regulatory schemes and taxes. That doesn’t seem to add up.
Surely if Climate Change is as dire as predicted, all options should be on the table? What makes geoengineering more dangerous than Climate Change itself?
[EDIT] – Ditto for nuclear power. Again, near-perfect solution, some downsides, but definitely preferable to the collapse of our civilization, and the vast majority of the resistance to it comes from Climate-Change-adjacent groups.
The IPCC is supportive of nuclear energy:
Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change
They put out a report on geoengineering but it didn’t get official working group endorsement:
IPCC Expert Meeting on Geoengineering
Personally, I’m broadly supportive of any measure that brings clear instances of market failure closer to a pure competition model, and tradeable pollution credits seem to fit that mold pretty well (they worked for sulfur dioxide), but I frankly don’t see how any sort of cap-and-trade scheme or even outright regulation of absolute allowed emissions levels will work in this particular case, just because of the global scale and the fact that any one country, even the U.S., in the long run can’t make much of a difference on its own. Geoengineering or just some form of technology allowing us to adapt to changed conditions (something like a molecular printer to make food without farming), is probably the only realistic long-run mitigator. Thankfully, “long run” still probably means past the end of my own lifetime.
@Adam – “The IPCC is supportive of nuclear energy…”
Good to see, but why the resistance from what one would presume to be their allies in the broader climate change movement? Where’s the broad social push for Nuclear power that we see for carbon regulation or taxing?
Thanks very much for the link to the geoengineering report; I’ll read that when I get off work tonight.
@John Schilling:
First off, I’m not sure why you felt the need to bold some stuff for emotional effect.
Second, in your original comment you said “So, in this specific case, a free market’s efforts to reduce prices, will incidentally reduce the carbon footprint as well.”
Now you are saying it will be either carbon neutral or reduce it, which is a weaker claim. As you said, the reduction of the carbon footprint is merely incidental. It assumes that non-CO2 emitting technologies can be made cheaper than CO2 emitting ones.
If the market figures out how to extract fossil fuels in even cheaper manner, or the existing regulatory structure is altered in such a manner that the existing costs due to some other currently regulated externality was not imposed, then the market won’t address the carbon issue at all.
I’m not sure why you think that carbon-free sources of power are guaranteed to be cheaper than those which emit carbon. If that is the crux of your argument, can you expand on it?
I am saying that each individual measure taken by the market will be either carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, and therefore the sum total of market efforts will be carbon-negative.
The market doesn’t do just one thing, which is why we have e.g. more than one type of powerplant. And in another generation of cost-reduction efforts, we’ll have still more types of powerplants – some of which will emit much less CO2 than what we have now, and none of which will emit much more.
@John Schilling:
How is this different than the argument that, before regulation of runoff from paper mills, that the market was already solving runoff from paper mills in an incidental manner? Is it because you think we are so mature in the fossil-fuel industry that we can’t possibly carbon pollute any more than we already do now?
When you look at things like tar-sands extraction, assuming that is made as cheap as other sources, that is actually more polluting, in terms of carbon, than other sources (probably negligible, but still, there is a point there vis-a-vis whether your assumptions about fossil fuel are correct).
Nothing will make me happier than if carbon-free sources of power arrive at being cheaper (enough) than carbon-polluting sources, and I certainly think that it is possible. If that happens then, yes the market will mostly take care of phasing out fossil fuels.
There is still the question of whether carbon-free sources get cheap enough fast enough to avert great external costs. To some extent, its too late on that front. We will have great cost. Its more a question of how great the cost.
It’s not about maturity. A hundred years ago, most of our power came from coal, the fuel with the worst possible carbon footprint. Here and now, most of our fixed power still comes from coal; transportation has shifted to the slightly less CO2-intensive petroleum.
The difference between energy production and paper production is that the paper industry does not presently implement the solutions that generate the worst plausible level of toxic runoff, but the energy industry does presently implement the solutions that generate the worst plausible level of CO2 emissions. That’s purely a matter of coincidence. not intent. But it means that the market has no place to go but better, in the area of energy-related CO2 emissions.
Indeed, seeing that the energy industry is paying fifty dollars up front for every ton of carbon it emits, there’s a pretty powerful incentive to make things a lot better. And will continue to be even if improvements elsewhere cut the price of coal mining in half.
“For a community that cares as much about AGI as this one seems to, I’m surprised that people don’t think that the risk of dire outcomes from AGW warrants action.”
You are assuming zero risk of dire outcomes from action to prevent AGW. The end of the current interglacial, to take the most obvious example, would impose larger costs on humanity than most of the high cost/low probability outcomes in the other direction.
You are also assuming dire outcomes that happen fast enough so that there isn’t time between their becoming obvious and becoming dire to do anything about them.
“That’s fine, except that those marginal environments include Mumbai, Lagos, the whole country of Bangladesh, all the giant capital cities of West Africa, most of the state of Louisiana;”
How large a sea level rise are you assuming? Checking the flood map at:
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=-27.839076094777802,138.1640625&z=13&m=7
I observe that seven meters, seven times the upper bound of the high emission projection for 2100, leaves most of Mumbai and almost all of Louisiana above water. I didn’t check the rest, but the one map I’ve seen that shows a substantial fraction of Bangladesh flooded was, if I remember correctly, for 250 years in the future–produced by a government funded agency as part of an argument for why other countries should give, not lend, money to the Bangladesh government.
Or in other words, unless you anticipate a sea level rise in the tens of meters, your assertion is a wild exaggeration.
“…And those are also, coincidentally, the most carbon-intensive practical energy sources. So, in this specific case, a free market’s efforts to reduce prices, will incidentally reduce the carbon footprint as well.”
It’s not that simple. What replaces one source may well be something worse. Even if the market lucks out and delivers less pollution, it’s going to underdeliver unless there is a cost attached to the pollution. Underdelivery matters.
Alraune, you’re the last we should listen to when you talk of what is warranted, since you don’t accept the science. I also wonder how you imagine “migration out of some marginal environments, and probably geoengineering” could be achieved without much bigger government than a fully refunded carbon tax would need. Sometimes I think you’re just trying to spread noise.
@Harald K:
“Alraune, you’re the last we should listen to when you talk of what is warranted, since you don’t accept the science.”
First off, that was @John Schilling’s argument, not @Alraune’s. I think he is broadly correct that we just happen to be in a situation where the first exploited fossil resource also happens to be the least efficient in terms of CO2 per Watt, although this might be akin to spritzing water on someone who is standing in lava.
As to your point about Alraune, pointing out someones biases is relevant. Saying that they should not be listened to because of those biases is wrong.
Make the argument, above all else.
Migration takes place person by person, and the most plausible geoengineering schemes are the ones that could be implemented by a relatively small number of interested actors. Neither requires “bigger government.”
Good to see, but why the resistance from what one would presume to be their allies in the broader climate change movement? Where’s the broad social push for Nuclear power that we see for carbon regulation or taxing?
Everything may be different in different countries (US here), but here are a few reasons some of us aren’t very interested.
We never believed the super doomsday stuff anyway. Realistic warnings about environmental degradation were enough to go on, and we’re less interested in fringey edge ideas and more interested in boring possible middle ground.
Nuclear stuff is inherently dangerous, and little understood. Talking about how much better it is understood and handled now than fifty years ago … or how much safer Model X is than Model Y … isn’t very impressive when looked at from a Bayesian distance.
All this focus on carbon seems very narrow. A tree farm of young trees may do better with carbon, but the native forest of mixed species and mixed ages is better for other reasons.
The whole carbon/GW thing may have holes in it. It’s just numbers … and so is the claim that Model N Nuclear Plant is better on carbon than Model X of something else. Next year’s figures may be different, but building a nuclear plant is a big expense and big committment; after you’ve built Model N, we’re stuck with it. Better the money should go to better clean renewable projects, which are smaller, shorter, and build on what was learned in the previous project. The fossil fuel industry is full of dinosaurs, but a crop of nuclear dinosaurs set in cement is not the best way to replace them.
I hope that’s enough reasons for our lack of enthusiasm.
Carbon regulation and taxing don’t lock us into any current technologies; they leave invention free.
“Nuclear stuff is inherently dangerous, and little understood. ”
What? No it isn’t- its no more dangerous than any other method of power generation.
“isn’t very impressive when looked at from a Bayesian distance.”
What are you talking about? Nuclear safety record in the west is fantastic.
“Next year’s figures may be different, but building a nuclear plant is a big expense and big committment; after you’ve built Model N, we’re stuck with it”
Yes, because its operating costs are so low you won’t have an incentive to replace it. That isn’t a bad thing.
There also is plans to build smaller, more modular nuclear power plants. It isn’t inevitable that nuclear power plants are large.
” Better the money should go to better clean renewable projects, which are smaller, shorter, and build on what was learned in the previous project.”
Damns aren’t exactly smaller and shorter. I’ll assume you are talking about wind and solar. I don’t think they are capable of providing the amount of energy the world needs. You need a solution that provides the current amount power plants output, plus the current amount cars use (because we will be switching them to electric) plus the amount the third world will also be using as it transitions to first world conditions.
I actually tend to believe the stories of the nuclear advocates about how safe and cost effective nuclear could be with more advanced and efficient designs and more sensible regulations. But despite decades of promises, in practice nuclear has turned out to be quite expensive, always much more expensive than advocates promise. Now, admittedly, in specific cases it is easy to point to seemingly avoidable reasons for this; various bureaucratic and other hurdles and whatnot, producing waste and inefficiency. But these avoidable problems never seem to end up being successfully avoided in practice. I have a few armchair theories as to why, but the crucial point is that until somebody does have a good story as to why things always go wrong, and a well-evidenced explanation of how they will actually fix those problems in the real world in a way nobody else has managed before, it just doesn’t look all that promising. Especially with the price of solar dropping like a stone.
” in practice nuclear has turned out to be quite expensive, always much more expensive than advocates promise.”
Doesn’t that depend heavily on the country? I am under the impression the Chinese and French managed to carry out their programs relatively cheaply.
“Now, admittedly, in specific cases it is easy to point to seemingly avoidable reasons for this; various bureaucratic and other hurdles and whatnot, producing waste and inefficiency. But these avoidable problems never seem to end up being successfully avoided in practice.”
I’m not seeing how you’d expect nuclear power plants to avoid bureaucratic hurdles. I mean lets take the US where they were going to have a place to store nuclear waste (Yucca)… and then Obama canceled it. I’m not seeing what the industry could have done differently.
@Skinner, French nuclear power (I don’t know much about the Chinese program, and distrust Chinese official statistics anyway) is cheaper than nuclear power in many other countries. Nonetheless, it is not consistently cheaper than other energy sources (energy prices vary greatly over time, of course), and not nearly as cheap as the usual promises of nuclear advocates about how cheap nuclear can be. To deliver on its promise, nuclear would have to find a way to take whatever the French did right and take it much further, or find other sources of cost savings.
On your other point, I see that you don’t understand me, though I didn’t think I had been unclear. Nuclear advocates claim that we should be pursuing nuclear. In order for that to work well, bureaucratic hurdles would have to be cleared. Presumably, nuclear advocates believe this can be done. I imagine this is on the basis that what is done by government policy can be undone by adopting a different government policy. My point was that the long dismal track record of nuclear suggested that the bureaucratic hurdles are not actually that easy to remove (since nobody’s managed it before), and may in fact be impossible to avoid. Again, I have my theories about why that might be, but the exact reason is less important than that this clearly is a much less tractable problem than the nuclear enthusiasts seem willing to admit.
@houseboatonstyx – “We never believed the super doomsday stuff anyway.”
Carbon taxes (or large tax schemes of any kind, to be fair) seem like a bad idea to me. Without the super doomsday stuff, why would I support them?
I feel that you’re highlighting the heart of the problem: The modern environmentalist movement seems caught in a contradiction. The situation is dire, so we need a massive new regulatory scheme to protect us from disastrous climate change, but also the situation is not so dire that we should consider geoengineering or mass deployment of nuclear power. The apparent contradiction erodes my confidence that this is an issue that should be taken seriously.
Needless to say, there’s a serious conflict between how you describe the issue and how the issue is described to the public. That’s not your fault, obviously, but doesn’t that disconnect concern you?
@Protagoras – Interesting points. Obviously if, say, 15 billion worth of solar power plants delivers the same energy as 15 billion worth of nuclear power plants, I’d vastly prefer the solar. I would be very surprised to find that was true, though, especially minus government incentives and such for solar. At that point, why worry about carbon at all, if we’re inevitably going to switch to clean and abundant solar-based electricity?
If regulatory and bureaucratic issues hamstring Nuclear power, might that not be attributable to the intense lobbying against nuclear power by the environmental movement? If so, it’s a bit unfair to claim that nuclear can’t be done because of red tape, while actively wielding the red tape dispenser.
Is climate change a crisis that requires drastic action to avoid, or is it a normal-cost-of-doing-business change that imposes costs in line with other national issues? I feel that people in this thread seem to be arguing both at different points. That doesn’t seem kosher.
@Faceless Craven:
“At that point, why worry about carbon at all, if we’re inevitably going to switch to clean and abundant solar-based electricity?”
Why worry about whether the car ends up in the ravine, as long as we are going to turn at some point?
It’s only been very recently that it looked like sure that solar could outpace fossil fuels (which benefit from subsidies themselves). At least some of that momentum comes from the amount of money put into very unsure clean power tech over the last 30 years. At least some more of that momentum comes from the risk that the carbon external cost does start to be pushed back on the emitters.
Broadly, those who worry about AGW have been doing what they can to get the car to turn before it crashes. To now say, “Well it looks like we will make it, so what was the fuss about?” ignores how much effort has gone into turning the wheel and keep the wheel from turning back.
“Is climate change a crisis that requires drastic action to avoid, or is it a normal-cost-of-doing-business change that imposes costs in line with other national issues?”
I don’t think that coalition politics can be ignored here. There was a brief period, before all out opposition to anything Blue became the Red strategy post 2008 election, when Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi appeared in adds together saying we had to do something about climate change. When Red decided that they would turn back to denying climate change, etc. that means the only possible alliance on the issue is left. No point in pissing off the left side when it doesn’t get you any support on the right.
There is the very real issue that I don’t think any country has actually implemented a long term high level nuclear waste strategy. There is also the very real issue that when a nuclear accident goes bad, it goes really, really bad (Fukishima, Chernobyl). MIT estimates that we will have 4 serious nuclear accidents every 50 years.
I’m not sure how much we would have to increase nuclear power to replace fossil fuels, but given the public reaction to even one Fukishima (Germany and France completely phasing out nuclear power), it seems like a bad bet to think that you can sustain the kind of nuclear industry needed.
Pricing information isn’t always available, and solar is complicated by the high variance in power delivery, but there’s enough information floating around for, if not an apples-to-apples comparison of some recent projects, then at least an apples-to-pears.
Recently a handful of new nuclear units have been approved, following a long drought since the late Seventies. Vogtle 3 and 4 are an in-progress nuclear project with an expected nameplate capacity of around 2.2 gigawatts and an expected cost of about $14 billion. Projects like this always generate cost overruns, so let’s round that up to $20 billion, or about $9/W at peak generation.
Meanwhile, the Topaz Solar Farm is a recently completed $2.5 billion project with a nameplate capacity of 550 megawatts, or $4.5/W at peak generation.
That looks a lot cheaper, but the nameplate comparison is misleading. Nuclear has a considerably higher capacity factor than solar; factors of .7 to .9 are typical. Recent values in the US are on the high side of that range, but I’m inclined to lean low for new reactors; let’s say .75. Topaz, meanwhile, averages 125 MW, for a CF of 0.23.
After taking those into account, Vogtle ends up costing a little over $12/W, and Topaz a little under $20/W over average generation. Closer than I’d have thought!
This analysis disregards operating costs, but I’d expect those to be low for both types of plant in comparison to capital costs. Somewhat higher for nuclear, but those plants probably last longer too.
“There is also the very real issue that when a nuclear accident goes bad, it goes really, really bad (Fukishima, Chernobyl). ”
Really, really bad? How many people did Fukishima kill?
“The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), released a report on the Fukushima accident April 2, 2014. It stated that the scientists have found no evidence to support the idea that the nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011 will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects.[9]
None of the workers at the plant have died from acute radiation poisoning.”
If your position is based on Soviet nuclear accidents, I invite you to look at the rest of their safety record.
“This analysis disregards operating costs, but I’d expect those to be low for both types of plant in comparison to capital costs.”
Nuclear operating costs are about 5% of fixed costs (although I don’t remember if this refers to total operating costs or just the fuel).
@Samuel Skinner – but how much land is off limits, and how much did the cleanup cost?
According to Wikipedia, about six hundred square kilometers was temporarily evacuated, but the no-entry zone has since been opened and crops grown in the area are now safe for human consumption. Cleanup costs were initially estimated at $13 billion (USD), and likely to come in below that level.
By comparison, the total economic damages due to the Sendai earthquake are estimated at $235 billion, plus almost sixteen thousand dead.
If the dangers of civilian nuclear power amount to a 5-6% increase in the economic cost of any magnitude-9 earthquakes and tsunamis in the vicinity, with nobody being killed, that seems not intolerable.
If the psychological effects of nuclear power is that it causes people to forget that one of the worst earthquakes in history killed fifteen thousand people, that seems very strange – but judging by the international media reaction, at least, that’s how it works. There might be some useful social engineering to be done there, but that’s out of my field.
@John Schilling:
Fukushima could have been much, much worse, right? I believe the Japanese Prime Minister said it had the possibility of being 10 Chernobyls (although I think that was predicated on all the reactors melting down, but I think that was a possibility if #4 did melt).
Yes, they managed to get it under control. But it definitely was not a sure thing in the early going.
Not true! Two people were struck by a crane.
@HeelBearCub: There’s only one (former) head of government that can speak with authority on matters of nuclear engineering, and he isn’t Japanese. “Ten Chernobyls” is at least 99.9% hyperbole.
What made Chernobyl such a nightmare is that the Russian RBMK-1000 reactor was basically made out of coal, and housed in a building without a roof. Well, OK, graphite rather than coal, and there was enough structure up top to keep out the rain, but same difference. Carbon doesn’t melt, so if the reactor overheats, the options are limited to A: catch fire and B: vaporize. And with no containment roof, pretty much the entire radioactive core of the reactor is free to disperse across the landscape as smoke and ash.
But
coalgraphite-moderated reactors are basically used to breed plutonium for nuclear weapons; the RMBK-1000 was a dual-purpose design, and not the first graphite-moderated reactor to go bad. Fukushima, and pretty much every other pure power-generating reactor, was A: built of metal and metal oxides, B: used water as a moderator as well as a coolant (hence, nuclear reaction cannot continue if water level drops), and C: was fully enclosed by a meter or more of steel and reinforced concrete.Metals and metal oxides melt before they burn or vaporize. And they can’t melt while there is still liquid water present; takes a lot of energy to boil a reactor’s worth of water. And even when all this happens, there’s all that steel and concrete.
With first- and second-generation reactors, at least, it’s possible to daisy-chain failures so that the molten core breaches the containment structure. But gravity still works, meaning that the radioactive core winds up as a blob of slag buried underground with a meter of steel and concrete as a cap. And maybe some radioactive steam gets vented early in the process, and maybe ground water can get at the buried core and leach away some radioisotopes, but even in the worst case that’s not going to be even a tenth as bad as Chernobyl, never mind ten times as bad.
Nuclear power generation is as safe as you can hope for in any power source so long as you don’t do mind-bogglingly stupid things like building the reactors out of coal, or not putting a roof on the containment structure. Or experimenting with “what happens if we turn off the primary power supply to the coolant pumps for our nuclear reactor made of coal?”, but really you lost me at “made of coal”.
You can tell feedbacks have resolved by looking at top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance, which is directly measureable.
Some other predictions:
– You will measure more infrared coming down from the sky than the sun is emitting (and you’ll get actual numbers, I just don’t want to look up the value right now). That’s ‘there is a greenhouse effect’, the prediction.
– If we put more CO2 in the atmosphere, all else being equal, there will be more energy in the system. You really ought to count this one as a fulfilled prediction, because it was made prior to the 1970s and hey, we put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and suddenly the poles are melting and it’s warmer than it used to be.
– If the warming is due to increased greenhouse gas content, the stratosphere should cool. This isn’t the case for solar warming, or some kinds of natural variability. There’s limited evidence here, because the stratosphere is hard to get good data in, but what we’ve got suggests the stratosphere is cooling.
– Manabe 1991 predicted increased Antarctic sea ice as a result of putting more CO2 in the atmosphere from a model, and that did happen, but that one might be Texas sharpshooter over the entire scientific establishment – lots of things getting predicted.
– If you examine proxy data from paleoclimate, you should expect ECS to be in roughly that range. You can usually assume paleoclimate data is in equilibrium, because geological data tends to be, the problem is stuff like dating and getting accurate-enough data and so on. Paleoclimate ECS estimates tend to be larger than instrumental ones, probably because they’re over a longer period of time and so include slow feedbacks.
“suddenly the poles are melting and it’s warmer than it used to be.”
*looks at record breaking ice pack levels*
Here’s the IPCC commentary on the poles circa 2001
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=593
”
Satellite observations show no significant change in Antarctic sea-ice extent over the 1973-1996 period.***** Analysis of whaling records and modeling studies indicate that Antarctic sea ice retreated south by 2.8 degrees of latitude between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.***”
“whaling records”. That’s a bit of irony for you.
“Arctic sea-ice extent has decreased by 2.9% per decade over the 1978-1996 period; sea ice has thinned, and there are now more melt days per summer. Sea-ice extent in the Nordic seas has decreased by 30% over the past 130 years.***** It is not yet clear whether changes in sea ice of the past few decades are linked to a natural cycle in climate variability or have resulted explicitly from global warming”
Since then, things have not improved for the “poles are melting” argument.
Here’s a plot of 12-month-mean Arctic sea ice. Notice how it has fallen off a cliff. Arctic sea ice, in fact, is the place where IPCC projections have been most off-base with reality – it’s melting far faster than the IPCC originally predicted.
Antarctic sea ice has an upwards trend. It’s not yet clear how much the very-recent massive upswing in Antarctic sea ice is the new normal or an outlier; the trend there is much less certain.
Antarctic land ice is melting. No good plots here, I’m afraid, but here’s a study.
To the best of my knowledge, the evidence is that the current low in Arctic sea ice is unprecedented in human history.
That is actually surprising to me. I would expect increased snowfall (from increased water vapour) to dominate melting from increased temperatures.
@Harald K:
That effect dominates in some parts of Antarctica. ‘Tis a big continent. From what I can tell a lot of this is fairly new, too – mass-balance data from Antarctica only started getting collected in 1990, and ice only started going noticeably down semi-recently (during the ‘pause’). Greenland is losing ice faster, too. The SKS article about it is pretty good. Apparently the mechanism is believed to be warmer ocean water melting the edges of the continent.
Can you offer any mathematically specific and readily predictable test of future observations (with caveats as to possible intervening effects is fine) which, if incorrect, would demonstrate that “climate change/global warming/whatever it is that occupies your brain” is actually wrong?
So, eg, technological breakthrough happens and it’s suddenly possible to very accurately measure the rate of T change in the stratosphere, what rate over what timeframe would mean “theory thing” is incorrect?
I’m insufficiently expert to give a snappy answer here. Searching around on the web, I did find this Science of Doom blog post which contains a 1967 model projection of stratospheric cooling with more CO2, and references some stratospheric temperature reconstructions. The results aren’t an amazing match, but they are the right sign and show the right general behaviour (temperature profile goes the right direction at the right time). There’s complexity because ozone depletion is actually relevant here so you end up with two somewhat-uncertain effects being combined for a more-uncertain projection compared against pretty uncertain data.
Giving single testable predictions that are clearly wrong or right which test large edifices of theory is not an easy problem. Can you come up with a single mathematically-specific testable prediction that would establish whether or not evolution is the best explanation for human intelligence? A similar principle applied to physics might result in the rejection of relativity – observed galactic rotation curves don’t match relativity very well. There’s a somewhat more complex interplay here than “Does this pass simple test X?”. Global warming is the output of several hypotheses that are individually testable and some modelling, much the same way galactic rotation curves are the output of general relativity and theories of galactic formation and uncertain observations of stellar density. It’s hard to work out which bit of the edifice is wrong when predictions don’t line up.
@James
I think you gave pretty much the right reply to the question. “Climate Change” refers to a wide variety of hypotheses of varying specificity and with varying levels of testability and evidential backing.
Relativity is an interesting analogy. GPS satellites and ground stations need to agree about how much time has gone by for them to work correctly. The satellites experience the flow of time differently due to both special and general relativity. If the satellite doesn’t make the adjustments necessitated by each theory, it’s clock won’t agree with the ground clock. If it does make the adjustments, then it will.
So when general relativity has trouble with galactic rotation curves, we can be confident the problem is in our misunderstanding of some other element of rotation curves, or that general relativity needs an update for very large scale phenomena. But we don’t lose any confidence in its correctness in terms of adjusting clocks on GPS satellites.
Consider then the greenhouse effect. It works by radiative heat flow in and out balancing where it is emitted to space and the convective adiabatic lapse rate maintaining the surface at a higher temperature in proportion to their separation. Extra GHGs work by increasing their separation by raising the altitude of emission to space. There’s no way this is wrong.
But the greenhouse effect alone does not give rise to much warming, rather it is magnified or reduced by a variety of feedback mechanisms, the total effect of which is unknown. Software climate models have been built by researchers, in which these feedbacks roughly treble the warming due to anthropogenic GHGs alone. These software models are the embodiment of the best scientific understanding of climate we’ve got. But these software models make predictions known to be false. They differ from reality in numerous ways, including the behaviour of clouds, the amount and variation of precipitation, humidity, upper tropospheric temperature trends, and even surface temperature (their estimates of natural background temperature vary by several degrees between models).
I don’t really know if the analogy to rotation curve problems fits here. Regardless, a good deal of people consider “climate change” to be an indisputable scientific fact and even has epithets for people who dispute their conclusion. It seems clear to me that no logical or scientific reasoning has led to this state of affairs. Instead I see raw tribalism.
The dispute then between CSICOP and Heartland is quite figuratively monkeys flinging shit at each other. We might pause and reflect on the sad state of affairs, but no one should make the mistake of thinking their dispute is in any way meaningful.
Speaking of global warming bets, anyone remember Nate Silver asking if anyone wanted to bet him on the temperature in their hometown? I wanted to bet him, but didn’t have any blog, let alone a ranking blog. Would have made a few hundred dollars, too.
Nate would have learned that, over the short term, weather trumps climate.
Provided he took a diversified basket of these hometown warming bets, I think he would have done well.
No, he was letting anyone from anywhere bet him based on their hometown’s weather over (IIRC) the next three months.
Climate sceptic here, and I would not take that bet. Let’s compare the two points of view.
The “consensus” view is that with a very high probability, large increases in CO2 will cause large increases in temperature.
My view (which may not be exactly shared by all sceptics) is that we don’t understand the climate well enough to predict it with much confidence. But simply based on the history of the last 300ish years we should expect the modest natural warming trend we’ve experienced over that time to continue in the a science of any strong reason to believe it has stopped. (Note: a decade and a half of no warming might be problematic for a prediction of 4C rise but not so much for a prediction of a 1C rise).
So both I and the consensus expect the world to warm. The difference is by how much and with what confidence. So a fair bet would need to be either weighted by odds (I don’t expect temperature to stay flat but I think there is some probability it will) or be based on an over/under on some projected amount of warming.
Why do you expect the warming trend to continue if you don’t think anything’s causing it?
The relevant phrase here is “climate isn’t a bouncing ball”. It doesn’t go up just because it went down some hundred years ago – it has to be forced.
I’m expecting temperature to go up because that’s what it’s been doing since the little Ice Age, for reasons unknown to me but clearly unconnected to anthropogenic emissions of Co2 as that didn’t start in earnest till the 20th century. I don’t expect the trend to continue forever, but I have no reason to predict that it’s going to stop in the near future, nor is the current pause enough to say that such a slow trend has stopped, given the noise that exists in the temperature record.
Little Ice Age hits its minimum at about -0.8 relative to 1950-1980 reference period, at 1600. On that reference period, 2004 is ~0.4.
1.2 / 400 = ~0.03 C/decade
1970->present is an increase of ~0.7 c in 45 years, or 0.15 C/decade, some five times larger.
There’s no obvious driver for some kind of recovery from the low period, and there is a very obvious driver for the increase from 1970 that scientists have been talking about since the late 1800s.
LIA recovery is not a very good explanatory mechanism here.
Why are you citing the 1970-2015 trend? We started increasing emissions significantly around 1945, as you can see here: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/TrendsGlobalEmissions.png
The right trend to use would be 1945-2015.
Also, even using your selected time period which truncates 25 years of data for no clear reason (I’m assuming you’re not deliberately leaving it out to exaggerate the warming trend), that’s a warming rate of 1.5C/100y – WAY less than we are told to expect. Why should I believe that we are headed for a warming three times that between 2000-2100 – a period that is already 15% over with nothing happening?
There’s statistical evidence of a change in trend in the mid-1970s. I’ve probably linked to this realclimate article already, which contains a graph showing the output of a change-point analysis. IIRC it’s probably to do with air quality laws reducing aerosol output lessening a substantial anthropogenic negative forcing.
I note that you have ignored the point that ‘recovery from the little ice age’ cannot possibly explain recent trends. 1945->present is about 0.11c/decade, which is still ~4 times larger than it should be if it were a constant recovery from the LIA.
Transitional climate response is different to equilibrium climate sensitivity – TCR is how much warmer you get each year if you keep emitting some amount of CO2, ECS is how much warmer you get if you hold CO2 levels fixed for some amount of time. We haven’t gotten all the warming from the ~400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere yet, and emissions are increasing exponentially. Warming should speed up if we keep emitting exponentially. If we stop emissions at some point, we should see something like a logistic curve.
“There’s statistical evidence of a change in trend in the mid-1970s.”
I’m sorry James, but I see this sentiment as being completely and utterly indefensible. It was the one I was trying to generously assume you did not in fact hold.
What is the simplest test of the proposition that lots of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to lots of warming? Dump lots of CO2 in the atmosphere and see how much it warms. And we’ve been doing that since 1945.
But you measure from 1970ish instead. Why? Because “There is evidence of a change in trend”. In other words, because you don’t want to include the 25-30 year period where we were emitting CO2 at high rates but the world wasn’t warming, BECAUSE it wasn’t warming.
Deliberately leaving out relevant evidence because it does not support your conclusions is just not good enough. It inclines me to disbelieve that you are in fact taking a fair minded view of this issue.
You say “LIA recovery is not a good explanatory mechanism”. I think you have slightly misinterpreted my view. I am not trying to explain the recent warming. I don’t believe I can, I don’t understand the climate well enough. And I don’t believe anyone else does either, no matter how convinced they are that they do.
The reason I disbelieve the doomsday scenarios is not because I believe I have a better model, it is because I believe the temperature record does not support the doomsday model.
That isn’t to say I view the LIA recovery model as being “wrong” per se – sure, recent warming is above trend, but long flat periods and sudden jumps are all contained within that long term trend, as we can see from reconstructions like this:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/1998Q4/211/project2/lia-pic3.gif
Maybe there’s some underlying reason beginning in 1650 that causes the temperature to rise slowly and unevenly. Or maybe there’s a bunch of different positive forcings coming in at different times, and CO2 is the latest of these. I don’t know, and I don’t believe that anyone else knows.
@Nathan:
I measured from the place where there’s a statistically-testable change in trend because I wanted to catch the actual rate of current warming that I expect to continue (and accelerate). I pointed out the negative forcing that geared up from 1945-1970. And I also pointed out that starting from 1945 doesn’t actually change the fundamental point here – we’re warming up quite a bit faster than we would expect if it was some kind of warming-since-LIA thing. Remember your original post?
I’m pointing out that the recent warming is entirely unlike anything in the past 300 years. It’s likely unlike anything in the past several thousand years. Doesn’t matter whether you measure it from 1970 or 1945. But that said, if you want a clear CO2 signal, starting from 1970 is a Good Idea.
Here’s a graph of Mauna Loa CO2 data, which unfortunately doesn’t start until ~1958. 1970->present, CO2 concentration goes from ~325 to about 398, for about 1 W/m**2 of forcing (5.35 * ln(398/325)).
CO2 prior to 1958 but at usable resolution is much more sparse. Preindustrial CO2 is usually taken as 280 ppm, so that’s a pretty good overestimate. 1945->1970 with that overestimate is 5.35 * ln(325/280), 0.8 W/m**2. GISS has some ice-core data (here) giving 310 ppm for 1945, which gives 0.25 W/m**2 for that period.
TL;DR, even with ludicrously favourable assumptions, 1970->present has more CO2 forcing than 1945-1970. Plugging in actual data for 1945 makes the forcing increase from 1945->1970 ~a quarter of the 1970-present rise. And there was a significant negative forcing operating over that period – aerosol emissions. If you want to compare climate-science predictions to temperature increases, you have to look at net forcing, not just CO2 content.
Frankly, you’re ignorant. You’re waving around ideas that are entirely unconnected to the actual hard data and mathematics and statistics underlying climate science.
I don’t think that graph shows what you think it shows. It’s not an actual paleoclimate reconstruction – it’s 50-year averages of Central England temperatures up to the 1950s by Hubert Lamb. Here’s what it looks like if you superimpose CET up to 2007. Note that CET isn’t global and is pretty untrustworthy prior to 1900. And yet, you describe it as a ‘temperature reconstruction’, imply it’s global, imply that it shows jumps warmer and stronger than the present (hard to evaluate without a scale on the y-axis), and think it confirms your views.
James Picone writes:
“We haven’t gotten all the warming from the ~400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere yet, and emissions are increasing exponentially. Warming should speed up if we keep emitting exponentially. ”
My understanding is that the warming goes as the log of CO2 concentration. I haven’t worked out the math in any detail, but is your claim that any exponential growth results in an increased rate of warming?
Do you think predicting a continued exponential growth in emissions is plausible over the rest of the century? The obvious arguments against are exhaustion of supply and improvements in the technology of substitutes, most obviously nuclear and solar.
I’ve seen a calculation by someone at Cal Tech suggesting that the IPCC high emission scenario burns about twice the estimated world supply of coal by 2100. If the cost of solar continues to fall as it has been, I would expect solar to start replacing fossil fuel in any application that doesn’t raise storage problems within a decade or so.
James Picone writes:
“We haven’t gotten all the warming from the ~400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere yet, and emissions are increasing exponentially. Warming should speed up if we keep emitting exponentially. ”
Warming goes as the log of CO2 concentration, so linear growth in equilibrium temperature requires exponential growth in concentration. Concentration is the integral of net emissions, and the integral of an exponential is an exponential. I haven’t worked out the math in any detail, but it looks as though exponential growth in emissions starting with a concentration of zero should give linear growth in equilibrium temperature, and starting with positive concentration should give less than linear growth.
Am I mistaken? Is your claim that any exponential growth results in an increased rate of warming?
Also, do you think predicting a continued exponential growth in emissions is plausible over the rest of the century? The obvious arguments against are exhaustion of supply and improvements in the technology of substitutes, most obviously nuclear and solar.
I’ve seen a calculation by someone at Cal Tech suggesting that the IPCC high emission scenario burns about twice the estimated world supply of coal by 2100.
If the cost of solar continues to fall as it has been falling, I would expect solar to start replacing fossil fuel in any application that doesn’t raise storage problems within a decade or so. That should substantially reduce emissions.
@David Friedman: I misspoke. CO2 content is rising superexponentially.
I doubt the IPCC projections burn all the fossil fuels on the way to 2100. The world we burn all the fossil fuels probably isn’t human-inhabitable. CO2’s hit about 5000ppm in paleoclimate – maybe higher? – so 95 W/m**2 of forcing over preindustrial. Likely enough that ECS isn’t a thing anymore (i.e., feedbacks aren’t linear in forcing any more), but taking 1C for a doubling (i.e. no feedbacks), we get a 25c increase in average temperature. God knows how meaningful any of that is – I don’t know whether all that 5000 ppm is accessible, over those sorts of ranges nothing is linear, etc. etc. – but it’s probably the right order of magnitude.
EDIT: An article by James Hansen calculates that there’s enough fossil fuel reserves to ~quintuple CO2 content with conservative assumptions about airborne fraction. That’s ~8.6 W/m**2 forcing, 4.6 C increase with an ECS of 2, 6.9c increase with an ECS of 3. Non-conservative estimates obviously worse, but it’s hard to figure out how much CO2 ends up in the ocean given a particular pathway. Also I’m not sure if Hansen’s figures include clathrates or
the explosion in unconventional fossil fuels.
James Picone writes:
“@David Friedman: I misspoke. CO2 content is rising superexponentially.”
Are you agreeing that your original claim, that exponential increase in emissions led to an increasing rate of temperature change, was mistaken?
Following your link, it looks as though concentration has risen pretty close to exponentially—the log graph is close to a straight line, although slighly increasing.
But the question is why you expect future increases to be more than exponential. I don’t think you have responded to my reasons to expect it to be less.
What is your assumption about the growth of emissions? Linear, exponential, more than exponential?
“I doubt the IPCC projections burn all the fossil fuels on the way to 2100.”
Then it’s a good thing that the claim I reported was only about coal.
“EDIT: An article by James Hansen calculates that there’s enough fossil fuel reserves to ~quintuple CO2 content with conservative assumptions about airborne fraction. That’s ~8.6 W/m**2 forcing, 4.6 C increase with an ECS of 2, 6.9c increase with an ECS of 3.”
Are those figures for the final equilibrium temperature? How long before it is reached?
@David Friedman:
Exponential increase of CO2 content in the atmosphere results in linear increase in temperatures, yes. Forcing is linearly proportional to log(co2).
A log-plot of Mauna Loa CO2 anomaly is statistically-significantly superexponential. That’s the point of the post I linked to.
I don’t know a great deal about fossil fuel reserves, but as far as I’m aware isn’t coal the most common fossil fuel by a pretty substantial amount? As in, if we burn all the coal, we’ve probably burned all the oil and the vast majority of unconventionals along the way, just because there’s so much of it.
Equilibrium temperature before very-slow feedbacks – ~a century after the concentration is reached. The 2c estimate should be read as lowest-physically-plausible, the 3c as central estimate. My earlier spitball involving ~5000ppm CO2 is probably massively out because most of that CO2 has ended up as calcium carbonate or buried as fossil fuel reserves deep enough that they’re not realistically extractable, or something. Hansen’s estimate is much more reasonable, but it’s based on a 1/3rd airborne fraction, and AFAIK 1/2 is the amount we’re currently seeing.
I don’t expect solar technology to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels for some time. Nuclear probably could be, but I’m not sure the political capital is there. I don’t think this is a problem that credibly just goes away with technological development, at least not fast enough. And I’m not sure a slow phaseout of fossil fuels starting a decade from now is sufficiently fast.
I wouldn’t expect effective exhaustion of some fossil fuel (AFAIK oil is plausibly exhausted in the next few decades?) to affect emissions much – my understanding is that there’s significant amounts of unconventional fossil fuel reserves, and enough coal that we’re unlikely to run out fast enough for it to be relevant (and, per Hansen’s figures, burning it all is a potential human extinction event, and I don’t think we’re collectively that stupid).
My response to things like “climate isn’t a bouncing ball” is always “it isn’t? Neat, how’d you figure that out?”
Just once I’d like to hear the reply “well, we didn’t, our models just assume it’s the case.”
The answer is ‘thermodynamics’.
@James
No, it’s not.
So how does the climate system manage to hold itself out of equilibrium? That’s the thermodynamics issue. If the LIA was real there’s a 1.2c difference between its trough and our peak. If even half of that is supposed to be unforced, that’s a pretty substantial difference in energy flow without anything to cause it…
If it’s all driven by solar variation, that’s okay – that’s a forcing. But solar forcing is close to trendless over the instrumental period and has been this high for a while as far as we can tell. If there is any trend, it’s downwards – most recent solar cycle was quite weak. So that can’t be the explanation.
@James Picone
You seem to be repeatedly accusing your interlocutors of positing no forcing mechanism, when a more likely (and charitable) reading of their models might be that they are positing an unknown forcing mechanism which may or may not include anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In the short term, this naive model would reasonably predict recent trends to continue, plus or minus some noise, no matter what the underlying mechanism of forcing. I don’t believe anybody would be confident in making long term predictions with this agnostic model, though.
@Ptoliporthos: Forcings that big are unlikely to be invisible. What effect did you – or they – have in mind that’s worth on the order of 2 W/m**2 over the entire Earth’s surface?
Meanwhile there’s a line of scientific argument stretching back to the late 19th century that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is relevant to climate, and if you do the maths the magnitudes seem to line up…
Maybe the planets are held in their orbits by some as-yet-unknown force that happens to line up pretty well with predictions from the gravitational model, but I wouldn’t bet on it. That seems like an analogous argument to me, just transplanted to a domain with more certainty and less political implications.
(See also: the people arguing that maybe ozone levels just naturally started declining around about the time we started emitting significant quantities of a chemical we had strong theoretical reasons to believe would catalyze the ozone->oxygen end of the equilibrium)
@James Picone
I don’t believe all your interlocutors are actually trying to argue with you about the identity of the forcing mechanism. I think the point of their argument is that you don’t need to agree on the forcing mechanism to know that the bet is a trap.
“Don’t think anything is causing it” is not the same as purposefully agnostic about it for the sake of a mathematical argument.
Your gravity analogy is quite relevant, after all, people were pretty good at predicting planetary motion without a theory of gravity. Your interlocutors are basically saying that the proposed bet doesn’t help distinguish between a theory of gravity and a theory of the music of the spheres, because a only a sucker would take the bet, no matter what underlying model they believe in.
If you feel strongly about the gravity parallel I’d suggest that you should be able to make some very confident predictions with your model.
Here’s a suggestion — why not make some prediction and offer to donate money to Heartland if you turn out to be wrong. You get to define all the terms of the donation, and then everyone will be able to see just how confident you are in your model and your predictions by how much wiggle room you leave yourself and how much you will put on the line.
@James
Your claim, I believe, is that for any given solar input, total heat in the atmosphere/ocean system can only on long time scale average (years, instead of say days) accumulate or dissipate within certain bounds (I presume less than the Joule equivalent of delta 1.2C in surface atmospheric heat?). Awesome position to take, and if a true discovery a laudable one.
But I remain unconvinced this is a discovery. Rather it seems to be a facet of how climate software engineers model the system.
Ryan: I might put it as “Over non-geological averages (enough to average out the solar cycle at least), either top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance is zero, or you’re in the middle of some kind of Event” (like a large volcanic eruption, sudden burst of greenhouse gases, large meteorite impact, whatever).
I think that’s broadly the same as your formulation. Put another way, if temperature is varying by more than some threshold, something is driving that change.
I maintain that this is a consequence of thermodynamics, and shouldn’t be controversial. I don’t see any mechanisms for natural variability to ‘hold temperature up’ against a top-of-atmosphere imbalance (or the other way around) that doesn’t imply runaway feedback (for example, if variation in water vapour was sufficient to change temperature enough to maintain the new water vapour concentration, you have runaway feedback).
I of course accept that long-lived greenhouse gases vary naturally over geological timescales and that affects ToA budget and temperature, that continental configuration affects things, that solar insolation varies and that’s relevant, etc.. I just think that all of those factors are comparatively slow in geological terms, insufficiently strong to have caused the recent warming, or the wrong sign for the recent warming.
@James
So over some longish time frame that I think we have sort of the same idea of, heat can accumulate or dissipate, but within some upper and lower bounds? As an aside isn’t a bouncing ball kind of a good metaphor? Regardless, thermodynamics that is, OK checks out.
Climate software models are programed such that heat may accumulate or dissipate within bounds that sort of emerge observationally from the parameters and form of equations chosen by the engineers. Run a climate model without including changing forcings, and it will fluctuate, but on a long run heat content remains at some average.
The software engineers are not capable of, so far as I know, modeling climate in such a way that it could shift from one alternate stable state to another without the shift being caused by changes in external forcings. It’s hard enough for them to build models which are stable to begin with. Programming a model in which feedbacks could get out of hand, but then get back in control, is totally out of the question, at least for now.
I don’t think it’s rational to conclude from this that the climate can’t shift from one alternate stable state to another without the shift being caused by forcings. It really seems like that’s a lot of people’s reasoning.
Can killing a ballot measure (calling to kill gays) set a precedent to to later kill other, less vile ballot measures in the future, because they are “inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public, and tend to mislead the electorate”? Or am I seeing the ghostly hand of SJW where there is none?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/06/23/california-kill-gays-initiative/29195825/
I wouldn’t be worried. The test there seems to be something like “should said amendment pass, would it be immediately unenforceable for obviously conflicting with the US constitution?” That’s a high bar, and not one likely to creep downward.
Editing in: my point is that there’s Legal Logic going on there, not SJW Logic, so I wouldn’t worry about things developing in the bad-SJ sort of way.
They put those on the ballot all the time.
They probably shouldn’t though. It would probably be good if they didn’t.
*should said amendment pass, would it be immediately unenforceable for obviously conflicting with the US constitution?” *
Good thing the meaning of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t keep changing every time a court issues an opinion.
I don’t have the citation handy, but the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the opposite way almost a century ago — a precedent which has been buttressed with many following cases since then.
Following World War I, anti-Catholic groups proposed a constitutional amendment to require attendance at public schools, in other words, to ban parochial schools.
The exact same arguments were advanced in an effort to keep it off the ballot: it was obviously unconstitutional, it would generate unnecessary divisions, it would waste public resources.
The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the constitutionality of a proposed amendment could be considered only if it had been adopted, and refused to keep the question off the ballot.
The proposal went to the voters twice, in 1920 and 1924, and was soundly rejected both times.
Oregon *passed* such a measure, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it.
After hovering over the link, I thought it would have been that he shot himself in a hot-air balloon in such a way that he would fall out of it afterwards and the gun would stay in the balloon.
As a bonus, it could be possible to rig the balloon so that the gun falls out of it automatically a while afterwards. I’m not sure how this would work — the simplest solution these days would be to use some sort of computerized device.
That’s not what happened, of course — and it wouldn’t have been possible for someone with financial difficulties who didn’t already own a hot-air balloon, since five seconds on Google suggests that the simplest model costs something like $10k. But the general idea seems sound. How far could an unmanned hang glider travel?
Then again, these days you could just use a drone.
In that case, though, surely you’d expect some injuries/damage from the fall unless it was an extremely low-flying (almost crashing) balloon. Though the guy falling out would lighten the balloon enough for it to take off again.
What if he just tied a balloon to the gun? Wouldn’t it float away when he died and his grip relaxed?
He didn’t tie enough balloons, apparently, and they found out that that’s what he had done.
Yea! I guess that makes me as smart as someone not smart enough to fake his own murder.
I had some similar thoughts — set an accurate rifle up half a mile away with some sort of auto-firing mechanism, and be in the right place when it fires. The trouble with that sort of thing is that it’s conspicuous; although it wouldn’t be found immediately, it’s unusual enough that someone’s going to link it to a mysterious murder when it is.
I think I have a better idea now, though. Remove the primer from a round of ammunition and replace it with a short length of fuse. Light the fuse, discard the match, and hold the cartridge to your temple. It won’t be nearly as powerful as it would be if it was fired from a gun, but at that range it should still be lethal. The recoil will pull the brass out of your hands; ideally it’ll send it somewhere it won’t be easy to find, but even if it is found it won’t be trivially obvious what you did.
Bullets do not work that way. The brass cartridge is there to provide obduration for the chamber. It is not strong enough to allow the powder to build lethal pressure. In the scenario you describe, I’m not sure you’d actually get enough pressure to unseal the bullet from the case mouth. You might just get a useless jet of flame out the primer hole. If the powder burned fast enough, the case mouth would swell to allow the powder gases to vent around the cartridge, imparting enough energy to the bullet to give it maybe two inches of free movement. Hand burns and possibly facial burns from the venting powder would be your most serious injuries.
You’re probably right. I was thinking about it as a small explosive more than a miniature firearm, along the lines of tossing a box of ammo into a fire, but now that I think about it the primer hole would probably vent too much for that to work, if it even generated enough pressure in the first place.
What if you kept the primer, touching it off from outside instead, and filled the case with something more energetic?
Same problem.
I used to have an old issue of Guns & Ammo where they set up a bunch of tests involving cooking off loose ammo. This was pre-internet, and there were rumors of firemen being killed by cook-offs in residential fires. they used a blowtorch to cook the ammo, cloth-covered modelling clay to simulate flesh, and used a variety of rifle and pistol calibers .22 to 30-06.
The worst danger was the primer, which was light enough to become a projectile and create shallow penetrations in the clay in some calibers, possibly life-threatening if it penetrated between the ribs and got the heart. None of the bullets traveled more than an inch or two; the brass swelled out into a bell and vented around it before imparting any appreciable energy.
SAAMI has apparently done some training vids on the subject for fire departments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1470&v=3SlOXowwC4c
[Edit] – How much more energetic are we talking? I mean, you could fill a cartridge with plastique, and that would probably do it…
Well, it’d have to be something that our clever suicide could get his hands on without raising too many eyebrows, so that probably rules out plastique. Wouldn’t have to be in quantity, though. Priming compounds, perhaps?
The problem is that the bullet weighs more than the cartridge. Inside a gun, the cartridge and the gun function as a unit at the moment of firing, so the energy imparted to the cartridge is also imparted to the gun, resulting in recoil. If you set off a bullet not in a gun, the bullet would end up with less velocity than the cartridge.
The other problem is that even if you managed to rig up some sort of tricksey thing strong enough to set off the primer- most of a bullets acceleration comes from being pushed down the barrel by the gases. I wouldn’t particular WANT you to say, point a bullet at me and smack the primer with a screwdriver, but I’d be very unlikely to die.
And if you did die, it’d look nothing at all like either a normal firing pin (you can tell guns apart by firing pins to a degree) a normal bullet wound (very low velocity) or a normal bullet (no normal rifling impressions)
Also you’d leave powder burn on your own hands.
Presuming that his ultimate motivation was insurance payout (Suicide doesn’t pay, murder does)- there has to be an easier way. It doesn’t even have to look like murder, bro.
Like, you can’t fake up a bit of broken wire, or sharp rock and slice your femoral? “Oh, gee, terrible accident. sliced his femoral. Tragedy.”
Suicide usually doesn’t bar life insurance payouts after a period of two or three years after purchase. (Presumably, beyond the time horizon where most people who might actively plan to buy insurance and then kill themselves would find it tempting.) Though within that timeframe there’d still be a motive for covering up a suicide, of course.
I was expecting the gun to be tied to a terrified horse. It seems more reliable than the balloon version.
But someone would find the horse. The balloon will probably land hundreds of miles away, in some totally random place, in the middle of the woods, or an ocean, etc.
Isn’t it easier to just ask somebody to shoot you? Murder is much easier to get away with if the victim cooperates.
Fun fact about the Statue of Liberty: the outer shell is made of copper, but superstructure that supports it is made of iron. Because of various ill thought out preservation methods, for about 20 years the whole thing accidentally became a battery with about a .25V differential. Because of how batteries work, this meant that electrons were being pulled from the iron structure into the copper. When iron looses electrons, it more or less dissolves (see Galvanic Corrosion). By the time the damage was noticed, some key support beams were down to 50% of their original thickness.
That was a fun fact, but not as fun as I hoped when I read “the statue of liberty was a giant battery.”
Oh yeah, and not only that, but WAS DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO PARTS COLLAPSING AT THAT POINT, and the reason the corrosion was discovered was that some people were trying to climb the statue in order to hang a protest banner.
The whole story is a good chapter in the book “Rust: The Longest War”, which is definitely worth a read.
Article originally reported as “no gender gap in tech salaries”…
Also true based on actually being IN the tech industry. The same study looked at men vs women with CS degrees (from that college, one year after graduation, with a full time job) and found a quite substantial gap. So either women aren’t getting that first tech sector job (whether they’re applying and not getting it, or deciding not to use their degree isn’t available data), or men with CS degrees are somehow getting better paying non tech jobs.
I may well be making all the wrong assumptions here, but did they control for things like women prefering more parttime work, age at which they should have children, and so forth?
Replying since I can’t edit: nevermind, I should learn to read. The post specifically said they looked at women with full-time jobs in the relevant sector. I’m a lot less doubtful now.
The gender gap statement appears to be incorrect if you actually read the study. Looks like an example of incorrectly saying a debunking is debunked than the other way around.
The main “supporting” study literally says the opposite of what’s claimed, “over one-third of the pay gap cannot be explained by any of these factors and appears to be attributable to gender alone” and also notes that of the 2/3 that’s accounted for, one of the possible causes driving those factors is discrimination.
The debunking refers to the 77% of a man line that often goes around.
“The main “supporting” study literally says the opposite of what’s claimed, “over one-third of the pay gap cannot be explained by any of these factors and appears to be attributable to gender alone””
That’s the part that is possibly discrimination. Other theories have been raised (such as differences in bargaining), but as is, we should put it down as an “I don’t know”.
“one of the possible causes driving those factors is discrimination.”
This should be said more clearly. The other 2/3 does not include discrimination, but things like different hours worked or career choices.
This is possibly due to discrimination, but because this is replicated in so many countries (including ones like Sweden that are highly committed to gender equality) its generally taken to be due to choice.
Does it refer to that? The qz post is a response to comments that an older qz post claiming that “there is no gender gap” is wrong. The original article claimed that there is no gender gap and linked to a study that showed that 2/3 of the gender gap could be accounted for as evidence. YMMV, but I find “two thirds of the gender gap can be explained by some known factors” to be different from “there is no gender gap”.
“The other 2/3 does not include discrimination, but things like different hours worked or career choices.”
Have you read the study that’s cited by the original qz article? That’s not what it says.
If the issue is whether or not there’s actually a gender gap or that, in general, claims about whether or not a gender pay gap exists have been debunked, I have no comment. I haven’t read enough about the issue to be well informed. But the particular qz post that’s linked is typical buzzfeed quality linkbait, which can be seen by reading the post it’s defending and then looking at the sources cited, which don’t even support the claims in the post. Unless I’m reading the paragraph that has the link backwards or am missing a bit of irony, it strikes me as a non-optimal example of the general phenomena that’s being described.
From the end of that story about the thousand adoptions (which was from 2006):
“Germany changed its law in 2008 in response to this case, making it possible for the state to challenge paternity claims and require a test.
Mr Hass was sentenced to two years and six months in prison in Paraguay for breaking the country’s laws on adoption and furnishing false documents.”
Apparently there was something they could do to stop him. Open Border advocates take note! 😛
And that law was declared unconstitutional in 2014 by the Federal Constitutional Court.
And this isn’t really about adoptions, it’s about voluntary acknowledgment of paternity. Yes, that guy claims that all these children are really his biological children.
If you’re an open border advocate please note that this only works because he is too poor to pay child support on ‘his’ numerous children…
“this only works because he is too poor to pay child support on ‘his’ numerous children…”
isn’t a terribly serious reduction, because almost everyone is too poor to pay child support on a thousand children, and those who aren’t could, in the circumstances described in the article, adopt ten thousand instead.
“because almost everyone is too poor to pay child support on a thousand children”
Yes, but they seize income above a certain amount for your own survival, even it it isn’t enough for all your children.
How much child support *he* owes doesn’t matter to him because he’s basically a beach bum in Paraguay.
For people actually earning money it makes a difference because most people don’t want to be poor.
Isn’t Paraguay landlocked?
I’m sure they have at least one lake.
Looking it up they have two, but one is so polluted people are banned from it. So that mean he is hiding at Lake Ypoá!
Does anyone else find it really weird that the ‘teaching people to avoid rape’ intervention worked so dramatically well? The training they were given seems fairly platitudinous.
Well, there’s only so many times you can have people redefine every sexual experience they’ve had as rape. Once you’ve used the “all alcohol is rape!” and “Creepy people looking at you is rape!” the rape rates have to fall pretty dramatically.
I assume this part is pretty important…
Yeh, I thought that the bit where they were told to respond by “physically resisting” and not just “crying” and “pleading” seems like it could be an active ingredient, simply for lack of any better candidates. It’s still kinda stunning that this *halved* rape.
I’m sure that teaching them *how* to actually break holds and so on would be useful, but I wouldn’t have predicted it to be so efficacious and I’d expect this to be considerably worse than any old self-defense course (where they’re learning solely about self defense, rather than here where most of the course seems to be role playing discussions and basic factoids). Yet it would be striking if teaching people basic self defense was *even more* effective at preventing rape than this program was.
I suspect most of the active ingredient is the experience of actually purposefully physically hurting someone (as an adult).
If you’ve never done that, you can feel a weird aversion to defending yourself. I’d describe it as an inhibitory fear that fighting back could lead into an even less predictable situation that the one you’re already in. I suspect many girls – who haven’t hit anyone since their fifth birthday – have exactly that inhibitory fear, and don’t know it because everyone underestimates how very stressful situations change reactions.
But it isn’t hard to overcome. Once you’ve actually consciously hurt somebody – whether at a self-defense course or at this anti-rape course or in a martial arts class or whatever – it becomes an option. You feel, not just know, that you’re able to hurt people. It becomes available to your System 1, which is good because in very stressful situations like physical assault, System 2 will be overwhelmed and not much help.
And then it turns out most people will just stop whatever they’re doing when they’re surprised and/or in pain. More actual self-defense expertise might be less useful that the very basic ability to act at all in a physical confrontation.
Other factors that might influence it-
Without getting all SJW- there are some (*sigh*) problematic narratives (*SIIIIIIGHHHHH*) that do go “hey bro, she really wants it, chicks just don’t want to feel like whores”. And while I do think that pressing the point a little isn’t anything even like rape, the simple fact is that a not-terrible-far extension of the idea that it’s ok to push boundaries a little when you’re making out is to extend those boundaries into rape. Much as one can quickly push a 65mph speed limit into a 90mph crash.
But the simple fact is that someone with those narratives in mind is going to react very different to someone saying “please stop” and someone hitting them and going “let me go, you fucker!”
So I think that’s where most of it comes in- guys whose internal narrative was “this isn’t rape” suddenly being treated like rapists.
Much as I hate to give SJWism any cookies at all- narratives do matter, and these actions break the narrative in a big way.
Also- rapists aren’t terminators. While a significant amount of rapes are committed by people who seem to be hardened criminals (oh god- is that unintentional pun too awesome to delete or too offensive to keep) someone has to be doing it for the first time, and thus probably easy to frighten.
CJB, I thought that was a very insightful comment. Thank you.
You don’t need to be a SJW to think that encouraging people to violently resist rather than cry and plead or do nothing would help deter rapists tbf. I’d have expected arch-conservatives to recommend the same. I’d also have assumed that it would work without ‘bro’s thinking that she *really* wants it’ is a factor: if the victims are just crying and pleading them to stop, it seems hard for even the broiest bro to think that they are just acting coy.
An issue with this interpretation is the fact that reported attempted rapes decreased significantly more than completed rapes. So it seems that it’s not just about people resisting more once someone has started to attempt rape, although you could imagine that it makes people more deterringly resistant before.
@Chaos Mage
The thing is that then I would expect people who have done martial arts or self defence of any kind to be similarly enormously less at risk of rape or even attempted rape, which would be somewhat surprising, and a tragedy if true and no-one has even bothered to look into it.
I’m a sample. Never been threatened with sexual violence, but in real life scuffles, and even in thought experiments, my system/s totally shut down at the idea of causing actual damage. Luckily my NOW self-defense course left me walking like a bad-ass.
I can totally understand how even a harmless move like twisting free could scare off an attacker if it shows trained expertise. So if that’s the only training she can absorb, that alone can make a big difference. And knowing that if you stick to the first set of motions you’re not in danger of harming anyone, can let you twist, or whatever, with full strength.
@houseboatonstyx:
“I can totally understand how even a harmless move like twisting free could scare off an attacker if it shows trained expertise”
As a complete guess, scaring off their attacker isn’t what is going on here. Rather, I think what is going on, at last some very substantial part of the time, is the aggressive party getting it through their thick skull that the other person actually means it.
I say this, because I don’t think the numbers of forcible stranger attacks are very substantial. And we also have this sick model set up where guys expect to hear no, that then transforms to yes.
My wife was essentially assaulted in college. The boy she as with closed and locked the door and said my wife couldn’t leave until they had sex. She seems to think he was trying to be persuasive. I think if she had forcibly prevented him from touching her, he would have actually gotten the message that he was NOT just being persuasive.
I assume part of the issue here is that if things then escalate, the risk of substantial physical injury rises, or the fear of it rises.
Another note-
It doesn’t take a hell of a lot to freak out the average person.
Tell me you don’t react to, say, a mouse darting towards you the way you’d expect to react to a semi darting at you.
A person suddenly resisting violently is an order of magnitude more difficult to deal with than someone who just isn’t cooperative- that’s why the police always end up dogpiling people. Holding down someone that doesn’t want to be held down is very, very difficult.
Essentially, the same reason anything struggles- if you fight hard enough, you’re not worthwhile prey.
1. You can’t teach someone to effectively break a wrist or choke hold held by someone stronger than them in one session. It would take weeks of drilling to make the technique useful in a real-world scenario.
2. I think very little campus rape is forcible rape of the type that would be helped by breaking wrist or choke holds.*
3. Of the three suggestions here, “yelling” seems by far to be the most likely to be effective.
However, going over this stuff might be effective by priming the target to resist instead of cooperating. That’s the most likely scenario I believe. Edit: Maybe also something to do with confidence in general, though that might also be affected by the roleplaying.
*I wouldn’t expect chokeholds to be a favored technique of rapists since it tends to put the attacker’s crotch at the center of the target’s back (for rear chokehold) or their shoulder (for guillotine chokehold). However, a properly executed chokehold can knock someone out in about 30 seconds by blocking bloodflow to the brain, so there’s that.
I think you’re overestimating what they mean by ‘chokehold’. I think they’re talking about pressing on the neck from the front with the hands or forearms, rather than something like a guillotine or RNC. It’s not something that’s going to be very effective for actually choking someone unconscious, but it can be used to control a weaker untrained opponent (as most female rape victims presumably are).
My initial thought is that the seminar may have changed the students’ perception of what constituted rape. They could have continued to engage in drunken hook up culture as much as before, but then have been less likely to report having been raped on a later survey.
The article in question explicitly says the seminars included telling students things like “if someone had sex with a person who was intoxicated, the act could be defined as sexual assault”, including a real-life example of a student who reevaluated a previous experience as rape, and I get the strong impression they including other stuff about consent as well, which if anything I would expect them to increase the level of reporting as a portion of rapes committed.
Which makes the massive drop even more shocking, actually.
Where do I learn how to do those first two things?
Any Brazilian jiu jitsu gym, but look for one that has a reputation for good technique moreso than aggression.
Extremely cynical thought: people who have been taught how to avoid rape may feel responsible for avoiding rape and therefore be less likely to expansively classify situations they’ve been in as rape on a random survey.
I actually wondered whether something like that might be at play when I first read about it: people who’ve been through all this training might feel *more* ashamed if they were to be raped and so less likely to report it during followup. But fwiw, reports about the training (potentially cherry picked anecdote to be sure) suggest people feeling less ashamed about being raped and also more likely to think they’ve been raped than before.
Your “extremely cynical thought” is mentioned by the researchers! To wit:
“Differential reporting between the groups is possible. Women in the resistance group might have underreported sexual assaults (perhaps believing that they should have been able to resist them); however, it is also possible that reporting of outcomes would be increased in women sensitized to sexual assault by the resistance training.”
So… yeah. Does it balance out? I dunno.
Without having read the study, I have four theories:
Theory #1: A large number of rapes they were measuring were of the weird-communication-failure variety. It makes sense that “defining personal sexual boundaries” beforehand would cut down massively on that.
Theory #2A: The prevention program caused its participants to internalize a stricter definition of rape than the brochures did.
Theory #2B: The prevention program gave victims a greater sense of agency in their own victimization and the resulting shame suppressed reporting rates.
Theory #3: Rapists are pushovers.
#1 Interestingly the training included telling the women that no rape was ever “miscommunication” and that the men always knew that the women didn’t consent (and that is why you shouldn’t try to reason or plead with your rapist).
#2A The intervention group did have lower rates of attempted rape as well as rape. But presumably that could be due to women taking the advice to “if you think someone is going to rape you, leave” and so on. Attempted rape was reduced more than completed rape. It also has lower coercion, attempted coercion and nonconsensual sexual contact, so I guess it’s not just about definitions shifting.
#3 Funnily enough Lisak’s research does suggest that rapists tend to target quite precisely women who they think will be vulnerable to being raped, so I guess making these women signal difficult-to-rape by making them try to explicitly negotiate boundaries and say pointedly “My friends know where I am and will pick me up later” or whatever might succeed in deterring rapists (from targeting these particular individuals at least).
Se CJB’s comment above. Perhaps being told that no rape is ever a miscommunication makes the woman act more forcibly in the cases where there is a miscommunication, hence preventing miscommunications.
@ David Moss your point about #3 is actually a common concern about “rape prevention” tips and whatnot*, if a tip causes women to deter rapists, the rapists will just look for someone else, so it’s a rat race.
A truly successful rape prevention thing would need to reduce the *total* number of rapes in an area, which unfortunately would be a lot harder to study. (you’d need to somehow isolate entire social units as study groups for extended periods such that any rapists in a given group could only target women in that group, and have enough of them to be a good sample size). I suppose you could try it a little with different prevention programs at different colleges, but I’d imagine there are far too many confounding factors to get any useful results.
*at least among feminists, the only place I’ve seen it before is mixed in with social-narrative criticism about how they put the emphasis on women failing to prevent rape rather than on men for committing rape.
Theory #4: By giving the participants skills that would enable them to physically engage with their attacker, and discussing situations in which it would and would not be appropriate to use these skills, the participants became more confident about saying “no” when they were uncomfortable in a situation and if the guy insisted, they could follow up by breaking the bastard’s wrist if he tried to ‘persuade’ them.
Perhaps the rape training scheme carries some negative externalities; it may be that rapists chose to rape other women instead who looked less confident having not gone through the scheme and so the scheme failed to actually reduce rape in total.
If the women were told that no rape is caused by miscommunication, the externalities are even more obvious.
the rape training scheme carries some negative externalities; it may be that rapists chose to rape other women instead who looked less confident having not gone through the scheme and so the scheme failed to actually reduce rape in total.
That seems rather like saying that if X% of the residents put stronger locks on their doors, the burglars would just break in other people’s houses. But the more people who have better locks, the more time a burglar would waste trying to find a weak one, and the more chance of getting caught while trying. Thus, the fewer actual burglaries.
I should think that a negative externality would be an increase of rape in total. If it just shifts the targeting from one group to another, with the total number of rapes remaining the same, that would be a neutral outcome, ie zero change.
I would phrase Theory #3 as so: Because they had not been trained to believe that they were absolute, powerless victims in all capacities, utterly devoid of agency and completely at the whims of men, they actually took actions aimed at preventing their victimization and some of these actions succeeded.
I don’t think it is as absurd as you try to make it sound. The prevailing feminist narrative to women who are potential victims is: “You have no agency whatsoever. Do not take actions. You have no capacity to affect the outcome of events. Make no effort, on even the slightest level, to ensure your own well-being. It is entirely the responsibility of men to do that for you.” I would expect that if we polled a group of people who are given that message and that message alone, and compared it to people who were told ANY kind of way to prevent victimization, that the second group would have a much lower rate of victimization than the first.
#5: The vast majority of sex being classified as rape, graduates of the class are now less likely to have any sexual contact, thus reducing the “rape” rate!
Of course, a complete lack of sexual contact won’t stop some rape complaints.
Also can anyone explain to me why:
“The 1-year risk of completed rape in the control group was nearly FOUR TIMES as high among previously victimized women as among women with no history of victimization (22.8% vs. 5.8%)” [emphasis mine] ?
Because whatever factor in your life tends to lead to rape in the past tends to lead to rape in the future? I imagine this is a pretty general effect, that e.g. people who have been in automobile accidents have a substantially higher automobile accident rate than those who haven’t, and so on.
Of course. I’m wondering what those factors are. If this was the general population it would be easy to think up explanations that could account for the huge difference (different neighbourhoods, totally different population of people around you, totally different lifestyles etc.); when it’s comparing people who are all students sharing the same campus it’s more striking and it suggests that these factors could be the kind of thing to intervene-at.
This is the sort of thing you get in trouble for saying, but these kinds of lifestyle interventions have become taboo because they have been deemed to be victim-blaming. One of the big correlates of rape starts with “al” and ends with “cohol”. Emily Yoffe got a lot of flak for pointing that out in an article on Slate some time ago.
This whole study seems sort of taboo and victim-blamey, though? I mean at least they didn’t compare it to the effectiveness of teaching college men to avoid raping, but…
@suntzuanime I’m a bit surprised you had that impression, because I thought the article at least was careful to distinguish these protective/defensive tactics from actual victim-blaming and offered plenty of caveats expressing the standard liberal concerns about this sort of thing. Care to expand?
They are saying things that would definitely get you lynched for victim blaming in other contexts (for example, suggesting that women learn self-defence, avoid lonely areas, saying to be careful in contexts where there are drugs, be wary of leaving a bar with someone you just met etc. etc.).
OTOH they are offsetting this by constantly repeating that rape is never a woman’s fault, that men might rape because they’ve learned they are entitled to sex, writing a long paean at the end about how this is a “feminist project” based on “feminist theories”, including in their advice that people should “Fight for women’s rights” and complain about sexist jokes, saying “Sexual harassment is not about sex
and fulfilling sexual desires. It is, in
fact, about power” and so on.
So it signals pretty heavily which “side” it is on and I think people mostly care about “sides” more than concrete content. No doubt some will still call it victim-blaming.
Two possibilities:
1. Some people had and continue to have a more expansive definition of rape than others.
2. Some women look like easier targets than others. My impression is that some women signal, deliberately or not, softness, vulnerability.
“One of the big correlates of rape starts with “al” and ends with “cohol”. ”
I got into a huuuuge (longer than many of scott’s threads on a website with an average of 100-200 comments per post) flamewar some years ago for arguing about this.
Essentially I pointed out that the “drunken sex is always rape” narrative is a deeeeeeeply problematic one and things went from there.
But the point I always remembered is pointing out that anti-rape training like this is actually pretty excellent and effective, and getting a lot of “Women ALREADY know this, you don’t think we’re constantly trained in this?? Why not teach MEN not to rape, huh?”
And I wish I’d had this study then. It wouldn’t have mattered, but I would’ve enjoyed it.
This study(‘s intervention materials) actually describes alcohol as one of the “oldest rape drugs” you’ll be pleased to know.
If you are repeatedly raped by the same person over a period of months or years (e.g., most child victims, many victims of marital rape or boyfriend rape), then your odds of being raped twice in a year approach 100%.
Yeh, but again, that doesn’t seem to apply so easily to the campus case (unless a lot of people in their sample were being repeatedly raped by the same person over the course of the year)- and if that was the case then you’d expect one of the best ways for their intervention to reduce rape rates would just be to get these people away from their abusers.
Isn’t that just the 80/20 rule? Criminal victimization following a power law distribution shouldn’t be surprising, things transmitted among social networks usually follow power law distributions and criminal victimization is transmitted among social networks. (Extremely cursory Googling says that, yes, at least some work on repeat victimization finds power-law distributions apply.)
Which, wow. That’s got some extremely unfortunate implications as to the rationality of victim-shunning, if not victim-blaming.
It’s a big jump to assume that this has anything to do with social networks. The claim is that being raped in high school predicts being raped as a freshman. The social network has probably changed a lot with the change of school. (But Canadian college is local.) I’ll stick to victim-blaming. If it does have to do with rape victims choosing bad social networks, it’s a mistake them make repeatedly. Similarly, maybe it’s a bad sign about your social network that it has rape victims in it, but it’s a bad sign about your choice of that social network and if you jump ship and start over, you’ll probably just get more of the same, just like the rape victim moving from high school to college.
In what sense is that a large jump? That social interactions travel through social networks is nigh-tautological, and crime is a form of social interaction. How are you defining “social networks” here?
Also I think you’re reading my concluding line backwards? I’m saying that refusal to associate with victims of crimes is probably rational. Whether that’s because “likelihood of victimization” is a variable and contagious attribute or because it’s a fixed attribute you want to signal a lack of is just another of those Calvinism-like dilemmas, interesting but not very relevant to the end result.
Small pilot study (n=450) with a huge effect size? Yeah, I don’t think it’s likely to last.
But there’s always so much resistance to teaching women how not to get raped — doing so might “deflect responsibility from potential perpetrators” or whatever — that it seems plausible that there’s low-hanging fruit there. Yeah, sure, women get advice on how not to get raped all the time, but it’s (a) probably not the most effective advice, on average, and (b) not coming from high-status, trusted sources.
Armies teach unarmed combat, not because anyone thinks it’s that useful in actual warfare, but because it instills in the trainee a mindset that he’s capable of defeating his enemy at the most basic physical level. The same thing is/was true of the use of the bayonet: even two hundred years ago, there was an awareness that battles rarely devolved into hand to hand combat. However, a soldier with a bayonet on the end of his rifle and a basic confidence of being able to stick it in someone was more likely psychologically to complete an assault (or die trying), rather than stopping and trading potshots the moment he entered range, which has always been pretty useless.
Whatever these women were taught, the actual effectiveness probably isn’t that important. What’s important is that it gives them confidence they’re capable of getting out of a bad situation on their own. It’s pretty clear that creating a micro-environment where it feels awkward to say no is a standard seduction skill, and these encounters easily fall under loose definitions of “assault”, even though there is approximately never even an intent to use actual violence on the part of the “perpetrator”, and not having a “words-only” view of the world is probably a good way of avoiding these techniques.
This is very insightful and comports with my experience.
Yes, this was my immediate thought of where the effect came from. Confident people are less likely to be singled out as victims.
It’s pretty clear that creating a micro-environment where it feels awkward to say no is a standard seduction skill […] and not having a “words-only” view of the world is probably a good way of avoiding these techniques.
Physical contact moves for avoiding them and/or countering them without behaving uncool – would be a very good thing to practice in self-defense classes.
…and there goes the information value. Is it possible to see the results for “force and threats” separated from “drugs and alcohol” somewhere?
The survey does make that distinction, so you could extract it if you could get the raw data, but the distinction is not published anywhere.
From the article on rape prevention:
“one in five” STRIKE ONE!
“she was startled to learn that if someone had sex with a person who was intoxicated, the act could be defined as sexual assault” STRIKE TWO!
“I felt an adrenaline rush and some shock,” Ms. Boyes, 22, said. “It was eye-opening to realize that I had been raped in high school.”
And there it is!
The actual example, in context, does not seem to be an otherwise innocuous sexual encounter redefined as rape post hoc (if I correctly understand your implication). It reads like a prototypical example of malicious abuse of an intoxicated person, which the victim took to be her own fault until this realization.
And yet the description is perfectly anodyne and aside from the word “Assaulted”, which is a journalistic choice from someone deeply invested in one narrative could be a perfectly innocent encounter. Two teens got drunk (how drunk? We don’t know) and had sex. Under the new fake guidelines, this is rape. But who raped who? Technically fake-speaking, both are perpetrator and victim, but in reality only men will ever be charged.
This is sexism, misandry and a reprehensible erosion of the horror all sane people rightly feel at the real crime of rape.
Of course, she could have been taken advantage of, we don’t know. But we do know she didn’t think she was taken advantage of until someone explained to her that she could offload any and all responsibility for her actions onto another person by virtue of her sex.
Doesn’t really prove anything. It’s very common for victims of abuse to believe the abuse is their own fault even when it’s not.
Is it?
Is it more common than people hitting college, redefining their identity and at the same time being immersed in a society in which victimhood is the ultimate status, and thus reinterpreting any vague event from their past life in the worst possible light in order to gain this status?
Perhaps you’re right, specifically about the word “assaulted” – I can’t know what led to the choice of that word – but it bears saying that children who are victim of sexual abuse often have similar realizations about being taken advantage of only much later, and I hope you’d consider that abuse prima facie. Which means this kind of belated realization is *really* not much of an indication either way.
When the woman is 16 and drunk, i think its a different scenario than a 5 year old that has no idea about the nature of sexual relations at all. In the five year old’s case its obviously abuse, the only question is determining if it really occurred. With the 16 year old, even if it occurred, the mechanics of how it occurred matter (was she passed out? overpowered? or just “very drunk?”). The NYTs reducing these things down to “drunk sex is assault/rape” isn’t an accident.
Children are incapable of consent by definition, thats why we have that handy legal term “Age of Consent”!
The girl in this story is past that, and so we must judge her actions by the standards which all other consenting adults are judged. A sixteen-year-old, barring some bizarre cult compound retarding her understanding of sexual matters, is perfectly capable of understanding the difference between “rape” and “not-rape”. If college administrators later convince her that the legal lines drawn by the government are wrong and in fact, any interaction with a man that ever made her uncomfortable was, in fact, rape, this doesn’t change the original facts.
@Tarrou All I can say is that you’re not looking very hard. I’m not even especially interested in the topic, and I’ve come across a fair number of stories of women of around this age who were not raised in a cult compound and who underwent what even by your standards would be incontrovertibly considered rape but who did not realize it until much later. So no, in practice, understanding the difference between rape and not-rape is not that simple even in cases that are perfectly clear-cut to an outside observer.
THANK YOU!
That one weird trick that men hate: turning the legal definition of incapacitation into “very drunk.”
(STYLE GUIDE NOTE, DO NOT DESCRIBE THE ASSAULT, JUST STATE THE ENCOUNTER WAS AN ASSAULT)
…I mean, seriously, she was “very drunk,” then a guy offered to take her home, then he “assaulted” her? Thats the entirety of the description. All my media obfuscation detectors immediately went on full alert. Lets break this down.
*********
“I felt an adrenaline rush and some shock,” Ms. Boyes, 22, said. “It was eye-opening to realize that I had been raped in high school.”
At 16, she had been at a party, drinking alcohol for the first time, and was very drunk. A boy offered to take her home — and then assaulted her.”
********
1. She was “very drunk.” Unless she was passed out/obviously unable to tell where she was and what she was doing, this is not the legal definition of incapacitated.
2. “A boy offered to take her home — and then assaulted her.” So the word, “assaulted” is doing the entirety of the work. Did he just have sex/make sexual contact with her? Assuming the “very drunk” point above wasnt just a red herring, this is the logical assumption. Thus, its probably not legally sexual assault. If the writer meant he used force in his contact, then why not say so? Why just say “assault” and be done with it?
I would bet money the “very drunk” part is the operative part, not the bland labeling of the event as “assault.” And in that case, no rape/sexual assault occurred.
I think we’re not that far gone that we should drop the assumption of good faith (when a story is being recalled, obviously things are different when an accusation is being made).
The whole point and framing of the narrative in that article is not a good faith, even handling of the facts, or a narrative on one technique to reduce the incidence of rape. I am, of course, interested in how that rape prevention class could have possibly reduced rapes by half – that’s an interesting question. If the article had just reported on the success of the class, i would have no objections.
Rather the problem is that the article endorses the idea that there is a rape epidemic on college campuses. I deny that there is anything going on other than lots of meaningless drunken sex by people not mature enough to emotionally deal with the vacuous nature of these exchanges (*ofc rapes do happen, no there isnt an epidemic). I mean, when the writer asserts that having “sex with a person who was intoxicated, the act could be defined as sexual assault” without clarifying the *could,* and then goes on to describe a scenario where the only thing suspicious occurring is that the woman is drunk, i think we are outside the realm of charitably.
Finally, this is an issue right now because proving that there is a hostile environment on college campuses is being used for a variety of feminist power moves. The most scary being the Title IX kangaroo courts that kick men out of college and label them rapists on bare accusations of a previous female partner while denying the accused basic procedural safeguards.
Of course SSRIs work by affecting glee-al cells.
“Scott recommended a better antidepressant” Tom said gleefully.
“At least the insanity is limited to our universities” = “At least the poison is limited to our water supply”
So, I think this metaphor isn’t 100% for a number of reasons, but I’ll pick this one because it seems most central to your point:
If we know the water supply is the only place poison can come from, that’s AMAZING NEWS. All of the poison in a single public trust, where we can filter it before delivering it to anyone? That’s arguably substantially safer than real life, where anything could be poisoned, but actually is poisoned with such low frequency that it’s not worth checking.
At times like this, I remind myself that the political environment at American universities in the late 1960s and 1970s was approximately a thousand times more toxic and evil than it is today. Ever read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? We seem to have gotten through that reasonably well; at least, without the Little Red Book becoming a template for the next generation of corporate HR managers.
Re: Abortion drones.
This is beyond awful. How can anyone with any decency allow such a thing?
Women On Waves do this for publicity value, not actual abortion provision. Previously they’ve sailed ships into ports, including once to Ireland, for this whole “We’ll provide the women of Ireland with surgical abortions” (I don’t think anyone took them up on it).
I’m not going to comment on this whole thing, because I know I’ll just degenerate into yelling and swearing (take it that I’m a horrible fascist anti-choicer who wants women to die from backstreet abortions using coat hangers, right?).
Okay, that’s a lie. I am going to comment on this.
The U.N. is getting into the debate as well re: Ireland’s abortion laws, even though we’ve just taken the first step in legalising limited abortion. But that’s not enough, apparently. Abortion for everyone now! As an aside, that’s why I am not convinced by those who pooh-pooh or scoff at the “slippery slope” argument, because I’ve seen the slippery slope in action.
Abortion, my younglings, though you may not believe it, back in the Bad Old Days (i.e. the 1970s), abortion was only going to be the very last resort in the very gravest cases. Married women who were mothers of young families and were in immediate danger of physical death in childbirth. Rape and incest then later, and later still where the foetus was so physically malformed it could not survive long after birth (or was so mentally disabled, as in the case of hydrocephalus). Abortion was not going to be birth control, it was not going to be on demand, it was not going to be for unmarried women, it was a terrible, tragic choice that was going to be rigorously overseen by qualified medical professionals and only permitted in the least possible number of cases.
Abortion for “threats to the physical or mental health and well-being of the mother, rape and incest” was campaigned for as compassionate response to hard cases that would only apply for a relatively low proportion of pregnancies, and permitting it on these grounds would never, ever lead to the liberalisation and extension of abortion laws, no way, no how.
And now, countries that permit abortion only on these grounds are finger-wagged at for their “highly restrictive” laws, and newspaper articles trot out the activists’ line that this is a violation of women’s rights with no question.
So – back in the Bad Old Days either the campaigners were deliberately lying about the impact of making abortion legal (possible that some of them were) or they honestly believed what they were saying and thought abortion would be held as so abhorrent, and as such a last desperate resort, that there would never be women aborting their pregnancies because the foetus had a cleft palate, or that doctors would wink at the laws and rubberstamp abortion requests or sex-selective abortions, or that it would be considered too expensive (where “too expensive” means “but we’re not rich enough to afford two sets of fees for private school”) to have twins so one should be aborted.
Hence the slippery slope, where what was the last resort of desperation gradually becomes the unwarrantable restriction of a natural right.
I think Savita Halappanavar would object to your characterisation of Irish law as allowing abortion in cases where the mother’s physical health was at risk, you know, if she wasn’t dead.
Medical technology is not perfect. Who knew?
If Halappanavar had received an abortion for the foetus that she couldn’t carry to term (she had already miscarried), then she wouldn’t have died.
This isn’t a question of medicine being imperfect. This is a straightforward example of a medically-necessary abortion where the foetus was dead either way being refused because of Irish law (or at the very least, the interpretation of Irish law under vogue at that hospital), and a woman dying as a result.
Don’t practice medicine and deontology at the same time, kids.
“If Halappanavar had received an abortion for the foetus that she couldn’t carry to term (she had already miscarried), then she wouldn’t have died.”
Or so you think. The doctors, based on available data and in compliance with their oaths and the local law, made the choice. Just because they couldn’t save their patients doesn’t mean they didn’t try.
Woman shows up on day 0, suffering from a miscarriage (that is, it’s over – this foetus will not get born). She asks for an abortion, was told that it wasn’t legal because the foetus had a heartbeat and her life “didn’t appear to be in danger”.
Day 2, she collapses because of septic shock.
Day 3 the foetal remains are removed.
Day 7, she dies.
I’m not entirely certain how someone can look at that timeline and not conclude that maybe the reason she developed septicemia was because a dying foetus was left in her for three days longer than it had to be.
This isn’t a difficult question. The medical professionals involved could have given her the abortion she needed on day 0, when she first showed up. Instead, they delayed until day 3 because of Irish law, because they had to wait until her life was in direct danger, rather than preventing that direct danger to begin with.
My bad for misunderstanding the meaning of “miscarriage” in this context. I had been under the impression that the case was not fatal yet.
However, it’s still the case that the issue was misdiagnosing the danger, rather than a simple case of not getting treatment “because no”.
Don’t practice deontology and medicine… not a fan of the Hippocratic oath?
@ randy m It seems to me that if you actually interpreted “do no harm” literally (and I think a very reasonable interpretation would be “don’t do anything that wouldn’t be considered OK if it weren’t for the other positive consequences in this case”, which is pretty much standard deontology), it would eliminate entire branches of medicine. Like any form of surgery.
Since she did not die as a result of being denied an abortion, IIRC, I’m doubtful. She *was* denied an abortion, but that isn’t why she died (it was basically misdiagnosis/incompetence.)
As you might know if you bothered to fucking read that article you cited (the Aftermath section, at the bottom), Irish laws were changed in response to Savita Halppanavar’s death to allow abortion in cases of physical risk to the mother.
Slippery slope is real, BTW, as you yourself realize.
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.htm
I’m bitterly disappointed that the Rube Goldberg diagram in Volokh’s paper failed to include either a boiling frog or a cloud the size of a man’s hand.
Since we’re not going to get anywhere with the argument about abortion rights in themselves, would you agree that the fact that when polled the majority consistently support more liberal laws https://www.ifpa.ie/Hot-Topics/Abortion/Public-Opinion but the political interests make it impossible to change is a little fucked up?
I’m also curious how the dynamics would change if the UK and other countries stopped allowing Irish women to travel for abortions. My suspicion is things would change pretty quickly. As it stands for anyone rich and well enough to travel its de facto legal, it just means that the poor and people like poor Savita get screwed over to defend the symbolic integrity of the state’s ban.
Although I am pro-abortion, I would still disagree about the fucked-upness of the government not acquiescing to the will of the majority. There is still considerable support for the death penalty in the UK (around 50%). When it was abolished in 1965 there was around 70-80% support for it. I’m glad that it was abolished when it was – I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with the government leading the people.
“I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with the government leading the people.”
Okay, sorry, gonna be that guy: Why don’t you think there is anything wrong with that?
From your own statement, opposition to the death penalty was a small enough slice of public opinion that it bordered on fringe belief. What exactly made the government qualified to overrule the people’s opinions on this matter?
(To be clear, I’m not arguing that the government didn’t have the legal ability to abolish capitol punishment, I’m just asking why it was okay to oppose public opinion in this case.)
@ThirteenthLetter
Are you looking for a defense of abolishing the dealth penalty, or of the claim that its okay for the government to differ from majority opinion?
I interpreted the parent’s claim as analagous to “Sometimes the ends justify the means. Here is case where the end I wanted justified this potentially questionable means.” In this reprasing, your response of “But how do you *know* that particular end is desirable?”. In short, it kind of seems to be missing the point of the parent’s argument, in that you’re attacking the assumptions rather than the inference.
A side note: I’m not sure what constitutes a fringe belief, but my implicit assumption is that it’s much rarer than 20%, maybe 1% or fewer.
I get the impression that there are a lot of ~15% prevalent views that can be deemed fringe or not based on context.
Ah, the Savita case! I wondered when that would turn up. What about the safe, legal, registered medical clinics that provide abortions? Such as this one in the U.K.? Funnily enough, I’m not seeing this case splashed all over the national and international media as an indictment of medical failure.
Savita Halappanavar died not because of lack of access to abortion but because of shoddy and neglectful hospital care that permitted her to develop and die from sepsis.
But don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll get abortion in Ireland in a few years time. I don’t think it’s going to be the great panacea we’re being promised, though, anymore than child abuse suddenly disappeared because now “every child a wanted child” because of access to contraception and abortion. People are still having children that they neglect and positively abuse, and unless there is going to be some kind of mandatory 24/7 monitoring by government agencies to make sure ‘unfit parents’ women don’t get pregnant or if pregnant that the pregnancy is terminated, that is never going to change very much.
If you’re trying to argue that abortion in the UK is horribly unsafe, linking a death that led to three medical personnel being charged with manslaughter (compared to as far as I can tell no serious repercussions for the Savita case) is probably not your best bet.
John, the Savita Halappanavar case was a tragedy, but it was immediately reported globally as if “See? If only backwards Ireland permitted abortion, this woman would have been alive!”, even though it turns out it was shitty medical care and not being able to recognise when someone is dying of sepsis that killed her. There have been other mini-scandals since then about maternity services in Ireland, and dead babies and dead mothers, but since none of them were useful for the cause of arguing Ireland should have abortion, they haven’t made the global news.
Meanwhile, in our neighbouring island, where safe, legal medical abortion is practised, a woman died of complications from one of those safe, legal surgical abortions that we mustn’t criminalise because that would drive women to dangerous back-street abortionists, yet there is no corresponding wave of publicity about “How could this happen?”
And a good thing too, because the drone operation seems so very prone to disruption. Trolls shooting down or stealing the drones in midflight are the obvious issue, but what about someone sending in an extra drone carrying some other superficially similar pill, or switching out the cargo en route? Did they not think through what a terrible idea it is for people to be taking pills delivered by a jerry-rigged system across long distances?
Sugar pills that don’t result in an abortion.
Laxative pills inserted by an advanced troll who still thinks shit jokes are the best thing ever.
Scarlet letter pills that make the user flush red or otherwise look visibly marked for an extended period of time.
Poison pills.
Scaling up drone delivery at national distances would require so much identification, verification, security, etc. that I expect it rapidly loses any advantages it has over regular transport. Once you start sticking on certificates indicating that the cargo is really from Source S and has not been tampered with, and this has to fly over a hostile country for a hundred miles with an escort, and/or there’s some medical testing authority on the receiving end, it becomes a lot easier for that country’s government to go “Stop that, you”.
Scarlet letter pills that make the user flush red or otherwise look visibly marked for an extended period of time
Niacin. There’s a reason health-food stores market “no flush” niacin because I can testify that the other stuff does make you turn red and feel as if someone is holding a blowtorch to your face 🙂
Silver would probably be a more permanent option (it stains the skin blue).
@bluto: Jesus Christ that’s evil!
Wait. I thought “no-flush” meant that it wouldn’t be excreted by the kidneys too quickly!
The object is to convince their supporters that they are the Wave of the Future and cannot be stopped.
Yep — and to overawe their more gullible political opponents. Use a magic technology word, ideally one which can be spun as subverting some evil technology normally used for right-wing purposes, and their friends in the press will handle the rest of the narrative.
I’d be willing to bet a shiny nickel that there is no physical “abortion drone” or even any plans to buy one. Actual hardware isn’t needed, just a story about it.
I’m confused. I didn’t think Ireland changed its abortion laws in the 1970s. Are you speaking of some other country?
I’m speaking of the general attitudes, in Ireland and the U.K. (the 1967 Abortion Act was hard-fought and there were sporadic attempts over the years to have it revoked, and even now it’s not applicable in Northern Ireland) and even the United States.
Attitudes to abortion have changed. That’s the point of the slippery slope. When I see people laughing at the very idea of such a thing because come on, those worst-case scenarios are absurdities dreamed up by the nay-sayers who don’t want to give an inch, I still believe there is such a thing, because attitudes do change and what was an impossibility becomes an exception becomes normal becomes a right to which everyone is entitled.
Look at how same-sex marriage – which was not even dreamed of back when people were campaigning for the decriminalisation of homosexual behaviour – has now become a human right which it is immoral to deny.
I’m not concerned one way or the other about civil same-sex marriage; it’s become legal in my country and I can’t see that it is going to destroy marriage more than straight people have already done. But it does mark a change in attitude that would have been unthinkable within my lifetime and such changes in attitude are not static and do not confine themselves to nice, happy, rainbows and sunshine outcomes.
The issue, from my perspective, is that applying death is such an easy, neat, and simple solution to any social problem or inconvenient person. Dangerously easy.
Legalizing death (abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, capital punishment) is usually very popular. And the slippery slope is indisputable: the easier it is to utilize Death to solve a problem, the easier it becomes, and the more problems it can be applied to.
Your post describes this evolution with respect to grounds for abortion. A similar experience applies with physician-assisted suicide in the countries which have legalized it.
That being said, abortion is also a personal autonomy and self-determination issue. At least in my moral universe, a woman cannot be compelled to bear children against her will.
Moreover, it is preposterous to call a fertilized egg or a blastocyst a human citizen entitled to all the rights and protections of the born. And the process of developing from a single cell to a baby is gradual, with no bright line to mark an arbitrary boundary between “worthless bunch of cells” and “precious human being”.
Hence, it’s not sustainable to partly legalize abortion. Either you allow the decision to be made (by the woman and her doctor) or you don’t. Any rule about “circumstances” or “reasons” or “health” will be stretched to fit any need.
By supporting legal abortion, I carved out an exception in my no-legal-death-for-problem-solving rule. Hence, I feel a responsibility to strongly oppose other manifestations of easy legal Death, such as physician-assisted suicide (euthanasia lite) and capital punishment. I don’t want abortion rights to be generalized into those situations.
I don’t see how you can say abortion is about “applying death” and also about “personal” autonomy. (Unless you mean non-human death, in which case it doesn’t fit your other examples). If youare willing to call what is happens to the fetus “death” (at least of the same type of death as the other human examples listed) then the personal autonomy is basically a non-issue in comparison, or else I find your ethics incomprehensible.
But that’s exactly the thing: abortion is inherently ambiguous, because of the gradual development problem.
By some standards, even the destruction of a microscopic fertilized egg is a human death. I acknowledge that view, even though I don’t agree. For others, abortion at some point further on would be a human death — but there is no consensus on what that precise point would be.
(We’re talking about public policy here, so I don’t get to intuit my own wonderful solution and impose it on everyone. What the rest of the community thinks about this matters a lot.)
So okay, the later you are in pregnancy, the more likely the fetus would be considered human, and the more serious a matter it is to abort, but what does that mean operationally? A reason to abort that would have been good enough three weeks ago isn’t good enough now? Maybe, but as Deiseach illustrated, these matters get very slippery very fast.
Rather than getting into precise stages and standards, and searching desperately to find a hill to defend and draw a strict moral line, I prefer to trust that the people directly involved (including administrators and regulators where applicable) will make appropriate decisions under individual circumstances. Even if that decision sometimes entails the death of an unborn human being.
You could say, anyone not born yet isn’t human, so abortion is not a death and always okay. But that position makes no more sense than giving single cells full citizenship.
You could say, abortion in the third trimester should require extra scrutiny. I say, great! Scrutinize away. Form a review board. Tie it to the doctor’s licensing. Just don’t stack it so that the answer is always the same. And be prompt, since every passing day makes the choice harder. Mindless delay is the worst possible approach.
“We’re talking about public policy here, so I don’t get to intuit my own wonderful solution and impose it on everyone.”
Could have fooled me. Actually, you did:
“At least in my moral universe” ; “By supporting legal abortion, I carved out an exception ”
I was responding to your post as if you were describing your views on morality.
Anyhow, I still see a contradiction between saying hat there is a morally relevant death and that the pressing issue is “bodily autonomy” It is claiming protection of a right while denying it to others.
I just mentioned that to explain why others’ ideas of whether or not a specific fetus is a human being are relevant to the discussion.
The gestation/abortion issue is sui generis. You either privilege the life of the fetus over the consent of the mother, or vice versa. There is no sustainable consensus “in-between” position.
I think it’s monstrous to hold a woman’s life hostage to a single cell, or a blastocyst. But once you allow any abortion, you’ve opened the door to all abortions, because there is no meaningful boundary to contain just the extreme cases, or just the cases you or I think would be reasonable.
Therefore, the cost of giving priority to the consent of the burdened party is that some deaths (as you or I might varyingly define them, assuming we had full knowledge) will occur. That is not a good thing, but it is a necessary thing.
The nature of reality forces moral compromises, and it does not work to put human life absolutely above all other considerations. How could we have a transportation system without accepting in advance that people will be killed? Why allow surgery for non-life-and-death conditions, when we know that some small percentage of the patients will die on the operating table?
What I am strongly opposing is the ability to single out someone and legally put them to death for being troublesome or inconvenient. Making the exception for abortion obviously means that I’m not including the unborn as “someone”. It doesn’t mean I completely disregard the problem, or miss the obvious parallels between abortion and (say) euthanasia.
“I think it’s monstrous to hold a woman’s life hostage to a single cell, or a blastocyst.”
Oh don’t be such a dramatic. Outlawing abortion would be requiring her to take the same consequences of her actions as every ancestor she’s ever had has faced.
Anyhow, that’s a lot of nice justification. Yes, life has risks inherent, even deadly risks. The way we deal with that is usually to allow those effected by the risk the most to make the choice. Seems to me like the way you’ve chosen to draw the line with abortion and euthenasia is consistent in one way–deny the rights of those with the most to lose.
Btw, your ethics, as described here:
“By supporting legal abortion, I carved out an exception in my no-legal-death-for-problem-solving rule. Hence, I feel a responsibility to strongly oppose other manifestations of easy legal Death, ”
remind me of one of the quirks of utilitarianism Scott’s spoke of–Trying to bargain with the moral calculus in unrelated areas. Paraphrased, “Abortion is isomorphic in important ways to morally problematic issues , but I can let it slide because I’m going to watch these other, analogous but unconnected dilemmas very carefully to make up for it.
It’s also weird that you keep arguing that it is impossible to draw a line during pregnancy, but then say that what matters is what people collectively think about it. Seems that collectively westerners find abortion early acceptable and late disturbing, and so have in actual fact set up such lines. They may not actually be grounded on logic (but no less so than birth; a mother by law must care for or relinquish children, so much for bodily autonomy there), but they have proven that those deaths you see as “not good, but necessary” were not actually the latter.
I’ll just leave that here.
Nope, that’s ridiculous.
People with views like yours, back in 1972 when my state voted on legal abortion, predicted that it would lead to devaluing human life in other areas. They would not have been surprised by what Deiseach recounted above: what was promoted as an extreme solution for rare, grave cases has become relatively commonplace.
My friends in the right-to-life movement have pointed out that the exact same dynamic is going on in Europe with regard to euthanasia, which has rapidly expanded to include children, prisoners, physically healthy adults, and people who gave no consent. Guidelines and safeguards which were supposed to limit the practice are being widely disregarded. I think this is rather alarming. source source source source source source
This is exactly Volokh’s slippery slope, linked and discussed in prior comments on this thread. Did legalizing abortion (position A) pave the way for the euthanasia craze (position B)? Yeah, probably it did.
I support (A), but I make no apology for not wanting to slide all the way down to (B).
@ Larry K
By some standards, even the destruction of a microscopic fertilized egg is a human death. I acknowledge that view, even though I don’t agree. For others, abortion at some point further on would be a human death — but there is no consensus on what that precise point would be.
In a serious discussion elsewhere, a devout and sophisticated Jew said: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. – So, what’s hard about that?”
Some supporting quotes are badly presented at the Christian site … http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/19/1285933/-Bible-Life-Begins-at-Breath-Not-Conception#
… but I have seen the same idea attributed to Jewish sources also.
Larry Kestenbaum:
Forgive me if this leads to massive derailing, but have you read our host’s blogpost on this subject? There are apparently some people out there willing to seriously misrepresent the data in order to make things sound much scarier than they are.
Thank you, I hadn’t seen that. Perhaps I should have been more wary of numbers provided by partisans.
I remain opposed to euthanasia, but it would be nice if the situation in Europe isn’t as alarming as I thought. I will investigate further.
I believe he’s referring to the arguments trotted out in favor of liberalizing abortion laws in the 70’s, not the actual laws themselves.
On the other hand, the abortion rate in the US reached a peak in 1989 and has been declining since. If the current rate of decline continues, it will reach zero in 2053. In 2054, a left-wing media outlet will blame the abortion epidemic on capitalism. (The only reason Cthulhu always swims left is that the direction of left keeps changing.)
Women on Waves do actually try to provide abortions (not surgically, but through pills administered by doctors onboard their ship), as well as provide information to women on how to do it by themselves relatively safely.
Their missions just usually fail for one reason or another. Turns out the governments and anti-abortion activists in the countries in question don’t really like them.
The culture wars, in a nutshell:
Progressives: “We need A!”
Conservatives: “That will cause bad things B, C, and D, and in five years you’ll be back asking for E.”
Progressives: “That’s crazy talk! No rational person would advocate for E! Straw man!”
[Five years later]
Progressives: “We need E!”
Conservatives: “Bad things B, C, and D have happened, E will make them worse, and we told you so.”
Progressives: “Bigots!”
Speaking as a conservative, the problem with this argument is that a) the liberals really have won quite a lot of political fights, and b) life is actually pretty good right now.
I think a fairer (and perhaps more idealistic) representation would be:
Progressives: We want A!
Conservatives: No, A brings B and C, which are bad.
Then, some time later
Progressives: Here’s A+
Conservatives: But what about B and C?
Progressives: A+ already accounts for B, and we’re dealing with C by using D.
Conservatives: OK then.
Progressives: Also, we want X
Conservatives: No, fuck X.
Hmm, I don’t know, I feel like some of the progressive causes worked out reasonably well (whereas some others have not). I’m not sure about conservative causes — perhaps you could list some ? Anyway, off the top of my head:
* Women’s suffrage: I think this worked out fairly well, and was kind of an obvious move, in retrospect.
* Legalization of contraception: yet another unambiguous win.
* Legalization of abortion: this one is pretty much a matter of faith; I personally think it worked out well, but I can see why some might disagree
* Equal Pay Act: worked out pretty well, all things considered
* Desegregation: another one of those issues which, IMO, should’ve been obvious in retrospect
* Affirmative action: Mixed results here.
* Gay rights, anti-discrimination: worked out pretty well, though admittedly this is also a religious issue
* Gay rights, gay marriage: seems to have no major downsides so far
* Environmental protection: huge win, just look at China for comparison. Worth it for the non-poisonous tap water alone.
* FDA: Mixed results, but on the whole positive, I think.
* Drug legalization: too early to tell, but initial indicators are good
* Hate speech laws: mostly negative, I think
* Internet lynch mobs: technically not government policy, but still, a clear loss
* Trigger warnings, microagressions in colleges: same as above
I’m not sure what all the major conservative causes are, other than the opposition to some specific progressive cause. I can think of a few, though:
* The Drug War: a clear loss.
* Iraq War: a clear loss.
* Creationism in schools: a clear loss, but this is a religious issue, as above, so YMMV
Are there any others ?
I assume the conservatives want to take credit for opposing the Soviet Union. Clearly better than before, but not a total victory?
I’m not a conservative, but here are some suggestions for their list:
* Deregulation of airlines belongs on the conservative list (even though it happened under Jimmy Carter), and it was a clear win.
* Other kinds of deregulation? A mixed bag, depends on the field.
* I don’t think the drug war can be laid on the conservatives’ doorstep. It dates back too far. And in the early 20th century, alcohol prohibition was advocated as a progressive idea, closely tied to women’s suffrage. (When William Jennings Bryan demanded a “progressive” candidate at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, he meant a supporter of Prohibition. The “wets” were seen as conservatives then.)
* School choice: high hopes don’t seem to be borne out so far. But the concept has led to greater choices generally, for example, opening the possibility of legally sending a kid to a different public school district, and that seems good.
* Charter schools: small successes, but also fraud opportunities. I’ll mark this as unsettled yet.
* Weakening labor unions: here’s one where nobody is going to agree. What I see as a big loss, conservatives see as a big win.
I’d say opposing international socialism was a pretty big win. But I would, wouldn’t I?
I’d say Communism was a pretty big loss, all things considered. Does Colonialism count as progressive? I guess that one’s still divisive, though.
A problem is that we’re not all that aware of stuff that was proposed but stopped before it gained enough momentum (which would be a conservative victory). One such case that gets thrown around here was eugenics.
I’m tempted to say that anything that happened more than a hundred years ago should not be counted toward any modern political tendency, because it’s too easy to make plausible-sounding arguments out of context if you are not a historian and not enough of us are.
Hear, hear!
That’s fair.
Duh? Just what do you think “conservative” means? The vast majority of conservative causes and victories will always be about not doing things, because political conservativism is ultimately just a strong default preference for maintaining the status quo.
In America, “conservative” tends toward “classically liberal,” which does have a program beyond “don’t change things.”
America as a whole leans more classically liberal. America broken down by region has conservative regions that tend to be more classically liberal than the liberal regions. But overall, “conservative” tends towards “endorses whatever was thought in the local environment 15-25 years ago.”
“political conservativism is ultimately just a strong default preference for maintaining the status quo.”
Despite the name, I don’t think it is this as much as it is a preference for maintaining (existing) hierarchies.
“I suspect you are looking through the assumptions of your own grinding axes, and mistaking it for other people’s own experience of their own beliefs.”
@Mark Atwood, You can disagree, but my conclusions are based on my observations, just like yours are. If you attribute a not-so-nice reading of conservatives to “grinding axes,” then the level of discourse on this forum has *really* gone to the dogs.
Honestly, I’m just confused by the suggestion that “a strong default preference for maintaining the status quo” and “a strong default preference for maintaining existing hierarchies” are different things.
You’re all missing the important issue: who gets credit for the National Raisin Reserve?
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29619
Republican party charter of 1856.
Abolition (Still a key plank in the republican platform)
Traditional Marriage (No polygamy!)
Support for bill of rights- check. Support for the rights of states- somewhat check?
Support for gun rights- it comes up quite clearly, check.
I mean- it’s a lot shorter than today’s party platforms….but it’s not unrecognizable to this conservative, in much the same way that while we aren’t currently dealing with the same issues, I recognize a lot of similarities twixt modern conservatives and Reagan.
@Nornagest,
Aw, but the 100 year mark slices right into Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Surely we should get to count him as a progressive.
Different belief sets. I don’t think a foetus is a person. Presumably the people operating the ‘abortion drone’ have a similar viewpoint.
This isn’t the only problem here.
These people are wilfully seeking to violate another nation’s sovereignty. Imagine if someone started sending weapons, on a technicality, to a dissident group in someone else’s country. This kind of behaviour – not respecting other nations’ laws and customs to be what they are in that very nation – is how you get the 30 Years’ War.
Yeah, like all those people telling people how to set up proxies to get around Middle-Eastern nations’ internet censorship. I’m surprised we’re not in the middle of World War 3 already.
A group of private citizens engaging in a publicity stunt opposed to a foreign nation’s domestic policy is not shocking to human decency in and of itself.
So what happens if someone takes one of the abortion drone’s medication and has side effects? Who is legally liable there?
Or these South Koreans sending anti-Kim-Jong-un propaganda over to the DPRK by balloons.
Obviously, Someone is liable.
Ireland used to ban birth control and tampons.
Yes. Tampons. (that’s what you get when you let the church run things)
The same sort of groups used to illegally import tampons and birth control/condoms for women in the republic. (oh no, an attack, they might open fire on us with the tampons)
Normally there’s a lot of citizens of the country involved in such efforts so it’s largely change from within.
So violating the law is okay if you have local collaborators?
@AbuDhabi I have no particular ethical allegiance to the law. I suspect I’m far from the only one in this forum.
I see.
I disagree with that stance, on grounds of lawfulness promoting Good Things, even if the laws themselves are sometimes odd, stupid and inefficient. Dura lex, sed lex.
Are you this upset about all violations of law? Or, like, possibly not actually violations of law but it’s a weird gray area? I think some members of this community like to buy nootropics at online pharmacies without FDA approval, are they beyond awful? Can those few of us with any decency allow such a thing?
> I think some members of this community like to buy nootropics at online pharmacies without FDA approval
You can do that?
Not without violating the sacred bond between government and citizen you can’t.
@AbuDhabi often the law is simply stupid, often it is genuinely insane, often it is cruel.
The law has almost zero moral weight on it’s own.
It’s a not uncommon position that when the law is actually immoral and/or malevolent that there is a moral impertaive to violate it.
For example if a countries law considers slavery legal many would take the view that rescuing slaves is a moral imperative even if it is theft and against the law in that country.
In some countries where abortion is legal some people consider that immoral and so set up fake abortion clinics to delay women seeking an abortion until it is too late to get one legally. It’s fraud and illegal to do this but they consider it a moral imperative.
>Not without violating the sacred bond between government and citizen you can’t.
My question was more oriented to “possible” than to “allowed”.
My answer was more oriented to “making fun of AbuDhabi” than to “helping you break the law”.
suntzuanime: No. I’m upset about a) foreign support for rebels in my country, b) the rebels explicitly being in favour of killing my countrymen, c) this being spun as something good.
Murphy: I grant that some laws are evil. But to elevate everyone to be a critic of the laws? In both of the cases you mentioned, stirring up trouble in this fashion is wrong.
>My answer was more oriented to “making fun of AbuDhabi” than to “helping you break the law”.
Would it help if I told you I wouldn’t be breaking American law?
@AbuDhabi You’re maintaining that rescuing slaves from a country where they’re considered property is wrong? well I can’t fault you for consistency.
Murphy: Pretty much. It’s as if we hold consistent, but mutually exclusive ideas about this matter. 🙂
I strongly disagree with this.
Sure, there are immoral and stupid laws, laws which no one takes seriously, and laws which one might even have a moral duty to break. That doesn’t mean that laws generally have “almost zero” moral weight.
Is there really “almost zero” moral difference between, say, conducting a stock market trade in a legal way or an illegal way? What about casting a vote legally or illegally? Disposing of waste legally or illegally? Negotiating a contract through legal or illegal means? Getting into a serious auto accident while following traffic laws, or while breaking traffic laws?
I’d say, even knowing nothing more, there is a significant moral dimension to each of those.
Of course, with more information about the specific law and circumstance, that moral difference may turn out to be greater or less or even negligible. But (1) that explanation or justification would be unnecessary if both choices were legal, and (2) it’s probably not morally negligible.
Doing those things illegally is evidence of a moral difference, because things that are made illegal are generally made illegal for a reason. (Not, necessarily, a good one.) But it’s not something that carries moral weight in itself. A specific trading practice, e.g., is not ethical the day before it’s banned and unethical the day after.
We might regard individual traders, in some situations, as more blameworthy for doing it after it’s banned, but my intuition says that would apply mainly when they’re originally relatively uninformed, say if they were ticking a box on a 401K option sheet without fully understanding what it meant.
Nornagest, trading practices don’t exist in a vacuum. There are many conventions that are equally reasonable. For example, brokers of some financial products are supposed to act for their clients, but for others it is buyer beware. Violating the convention is immoral, not the trading practice by its platonic self. And much of the point of the law is to set the convention.
Many traffic laws exist for the same reason. Driving on the right side of the street was immoral in Sweden until the government switched it, in a single day. Speed limits exist in part for the same reason, and they do establish conventions, but those conventions have a complicated relationship to the law.
@Larry Kestenbaum all those examples have moral weight for good reasons that would still apply even if some inept lawmaker struck them off the books tomorrow. There’s a law against murder but it’s not wrong purely because of it being illegal. If it was struck from the lawbooks I’d still consider it wrong. merely being on the statue books isn’t what gives something moral weight.
Yes, some laws are intended to cover cases where the existence of a standard is more important than its content. But the relationship of those laws with ethics is a complicated one, and it’s certainly not a matter of “law, therefore ethics” — there are conventional laws that are unenforced and largely unfollowed, and there are conventions that are widely followed but have no legal force, or have legal force only through implication.
Larry’s comment is ambiguous, but I was aiming more for regulations concerning e.g. Ponzi-like schemes and their relatives, where the law isn’t merely conventional but is trying to address some (real or perceived) harm.
I think the terms y’all are looking for is “malum prohibitum” and “Malum in se”
Bad because prohibited, bad because it is.
Smoking pot- Malum prohibitum.
Murder- Malum in se.
Sure it is. Let’s say it’s legal and common practice — maybe a bad thing, perhaps misleading to customers, but everybody in the biz does it.
Then it’s banned, for good reason. After that, it’s illegal.
Still “almost zero” moral difference between doing it when legal, and doing it when illegal? I would certainly judge someone more negatively for breaking this law.
Here’s an example of doing something legal and moral, before the law changed, became illegal and immoral.
…yes? As far as I can tell you just restated your position from your first post, which I understood fine the first time.
If the practice caused actual harm, e.g. by misleading customers, it was unethical in the first place and hasn’t gotten any more unethical afterwards. I’d judge naive offenders more harshly after than before, but that’s because there are now fewer mitigating circumstances, not because the act itself has gotten less ethical.
If it’s trying to establish a convention, as per the direction-of-traffic example, then the ethics of following it get a lot more complicated and I don’t want to venture a full-fledged opinion, but as a first cut it seems to me that they’d depend both on the harm caused by not having a convention and on how successfully it’s enforced. In a lot of the Third World, for example, there are de jure traffic laws but very few de facto ones, and I don’t consider drivers unethical for not adhering to them. Not so in the US.
(I wrote this post responding to the thread before reading Nornagest’s second paragraph there, and I think we don’t really disagree on closer inspection).
There may be the same harm in defrauding customers when it is illegal and legal, but there may be more justification when legal, as when it is illegal one is also taking unfair advantage against one’s competitors, while when it is legal one may not be able to practice the profession profitably while abjuring the questionable but legal act.
Even if you don’t hold a lot of sympathy for aspiring but tempted stockbrokers, the principle generalizes to, say, labeling laws. Is it more ethical to list every ingredient on the package than have no list unless specifically requested? Probably, but I wouldn’t blame a business for not being the only one to do so, especially if every brand was using safe but suboptimal ingredients (say, gmos or some preservative which were believed by many to be dangerous). However, the one who avoiding labeling the products while there was an uneforced law to do so is gaining an unfair advantage, and thus acting more unethically.
Yes! Thank you for this.
Aren’t mitigating circumstances relevant to judging the ethics of an act?
I think we might be dealing with conflicting ethical models here.
Me, I’m basically on board with the consequential interpretation of ethics (though I have some issues with full-blown utilitarianism): what makes an act ethical or not is the good or harm it does, full stop.
But that introduces some problems around information. Intuitively we draw a distinction between accident and deliberate action, and assign ethical consequences only to the latter, but a sharp distinction like that isn’t really well motivated; there are lots of different levels of information you can have about the likely consequences of your actions.
The way I resolve that is by separating out concepts of guilt and blameworthiness from raw ethics, and admitting different levels of guilt for equally ethical actions according to how available and actionable information about those actions’ harms was. Law still doesn’t occupy a privileged position after that — the source of information doesn’t matter. Law is a source of information about consequences, though, albeit a fallible one. And it can in some circumstances change the harms of an action by changing the social environment.
Because they don’t consider the victims fully human.
Given that they’re operating from Germany, are targeting Poland, and apparently consider their victims subhuman, does that make them Nazis?
/joke
My general feeling is that whenever your solution to a minor problem is to systematically deny rights to sub-humans… you’re prooooobably doing it wrong. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that these sorts of programs never come out well in the long run.
Until someone can come up with a cogent argument for any particular policy that doesn’t rely on dehumanization, I feel no obligation to consider them anything other than despicably motivated reasoners.
Now, whether my atrocity prevention heuristic shoe fits, and should be worn in this case………
I believe that, provided a comprehensive ecological analysis and prevention of negative externalities, exterminating mosquitoes is a huge net positive. I base this conclusion on the belief that mosquitoes have literally no ethical value and no rights – no more than trees, mountains, and other inanimate objects. At the same time, they’re massively hurting humans, and, for that matter, other highly sophisticated mammals too. Am I doing it wrong?
“Subhuman” implies membership to the genus Homo. (Or is it the clade Hominina? For the sake of this discussion, the distinction is irrelevant. My point is that, afaik, “everything but Homo sapiens sapiens” is non-standard usage.)
You are doing it right, insofar as you are not calling for the wholesale denial of rights to hominin in the first place so the sufficient justification standards don’t apply. Arguments based on the dehumanization (dehomininization?) of nonhumans are not automatically invalid.
If I could I would add quotes to the sub-human in my original post. My point was that all the dehumanizing arguments hitherto have been bullshit, and resulted in denying rights to (/wholesale massacring) full-humans.
I draw the line at which things get fully instantiated rights at genus/clade level as an inoculation against dehumanization. If someone wants to deny people rights, pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about, say, negroid morphology wouldn’t cut the mustard. He would have the (hopefully) nigh impossible task of arguing that they are in a completely different clade. The morphological (/genetic) variety among extant humans is significantly less than that between H. sapiens and H. habilis.
Yeah, some things are in fact not fully human. It’s just funny to me because it’s such a common leftist hyperbolic attack on people who disagree with them on like gay marriage or affirmative action or whatever, whereas it’s quite literally true of their position on abortion.
I love the solicitations I get from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Your donations are desperately needed: If you don’t give money for fellowships, some promising grad student might choose to attend Princeton instead of Harvard!
(Oh no!)
That whole post made me bizarrely proud to have attended state-sponsored institutions for my whole education.
I worked in my college’s call center for a few months. Callers were given monetized incentives to get people to give as much money as they good. It was a frustrating job to work at because girls did much better than guys at getting money, and the more they flirted the better they did. It reminds me of the sort of people who spend thousands on strippers in order to feel a personal connection with them.
Disagree w/Ozy. Transracial people are fairly well known. Good case in point, Bobby Fischer, who grew irate at references to him as a Jew. Maybe you’d discount him as mentally unstable, but his feelings on his racial identity were real to him.
I think the distinction between being transgender and mentally ill. People with delusions about for instance their racial identity are usually treated by attempting to persuade them that they are mistaken. Therapy for transgender people doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) involve persuading them that they are the gender they were born as.
Why do you call racial dysphoria a delusion, but not gender dysphoria?
Why not?
Many people experience gender dysphoria, then alter something physical (their clothing or their body) and are cured. I suspect that for most people with racial dysphoria, magically changing their race wouldn’t cure them – the underlying mental disorder would be expressed in another way.
If someone with racial dysphoria did magically change their race and become cured, I probably wouldn’t call them delusional.
There is also the issue that it is possible to change physical things in the case of gender dysphoria, but not in racial dysphoria. To me, this suggests that even if they are the same in terms of whether the person would be cured if they became what they believe/want to be, it still makes sense to call racial dysphoria a delusion, since the cure they desire is impossible (whereas it isn’t in gender dysphoria).
…interestingly, this seems to be precisely what happened in the case of Ms. Dolezal until she was outed.
So now, the legitimacy of a condition is dependent upon how advanced medical science is in “curing” it? This is a fascinating proposition that I don’t think you’re willing to accept in any other setting.
Actually, many trans persons experience dysphoria that is more socially oriented, and simply having people refer to them by their preferred pronoun and generally socialize with them as their identified gender is sufficient. Not all trans people get or want physical treatment for their dysphoria.
Ozy’s response is a bit of a mess. Transracial can’t be a thing because it’s something you choose? “Transracial” people are just doing it for attention? Isn’t that precisely the argument made against homosexuality or being transgender?
And if race has so few ohysical markers, and those easily changed, then how was Dolezal not “authentic”?
Ozy makes a good case for race being less “real” than gender. But if that’s true, it proves too much, because it makes even less sense to criticize someone for choosing to live in the culture of another race.
I suspect what Ozy may be getting at is that the magnitude of dysphoria and the difficulty of transitioning is much greater for being transgendered people, which is probably true, but that has little bearing on whether we should accept Dolezal as black.
Dolezal is not the equivalent of someone dressing as a woman so they can feel like themselves, Dolezal is the equivalent of someone dressing as a woman so they can catch kidnapping victims off-guard.
@Alraune
…that’s not going to go over well with the transgender community. They spent all those years trying to overcome such stereotypes!
The biggest question is what justification do you have for the claim
How, precisely, did you determine that she doesn’t feel like herself when she presents as a black woman?
@Anonymous
Donzeal didn’t magically change race, she pretended to be of a different race. This is analogous to a transman who hadn’t had any medical treatment walking round saying “Yes I am a man and I was born male and I have a penis I’m not transgender in any way” in which case he is either lying, or mentally ill in the same way as Donzeal (albeit possibly for more understandable biological reasons).
I don’t think it’s a particularly outlandish proposition. My point is that desiring things that you can’t have but trying to get them anyway is a sign of mental illness. Saying you’re black and trying desperately to look black probably falls into this category – however hard you try, you won’t magically gain loads of melanin. On the other hand, if you say you’re a man (despite not being biologically male) and wear men’s clothing for long enough you’re quite likely to be able to get a doctor to give you a penis.
If you’re concerned about offending the transgender community, Anonymous, maybe you should stop trying to analogize their experiences to those of a hatemongering predator in blackface.
…so says your essentialism. What precise criteria are you using to distinguish?
The analogy you’re imagining is if Dolezal had blonde hair, blue eyes, pasty skin, and was walking around saying, “Yes, I am black, I was born black, and I have black skin. I’m not transracial in any way.” That’s simply not the case for Dolezal.
And there’s more essentialism! Once you have a surgically attached/altered penis, it’s a penis, and you’re a real man!
“…saying you’re a man and trying desperately to look like a man (to the point of mutilating your genetals) probably falls into this category – however hard you try, you won’t magically gain a Y chromosome.” Your essentialism isn’t bad just because it’s essentialism… it’s really bad essentialism to boot!
Many people experience gender dysphoria, then alter something physical (their clothing or their body) and are cured.
The Belgian transman who requested and received euthanasia (as instanced in another post on here), on the grounds of feeling the surgeries he had undergone had made him a monster, would presumably have disagreed with you.
One of the reasons for the “medicalization” of the procedures for identifying and going through gender reassignment, even though many trans people object to having to “jump through hoops for doctors to prove they should be given hormones/surgery”, is for those very reasons: some people think changing their gender will solve their problems, but it turns out that gender dysphoria was not after all at the root of it, and the problems remain in the new identity.
@Alraune
I’m concerned about intellectual integrity, first and foremost. I care not a whit about who hates who. So, if you’d like to provide some calm, rational analysis and answer some of my simple questions, I’m all ears.
however hard you try, you won’t magically gain loads of melanin
And however hard you try, you won’t magically gain loads of testosterone/oestrogen, which is why trans people need prescriptions for their hormones.
Why not a prescription for your melanin?
“Intellectual integrity” here meaning the deliberate ignorance that allows your intellectualization of the situation to remain free of all the concrete details that make it farcically wrong.
@Alraune
…please, describe some of those concrete details. Preferably, you’d link to peer-reviewed studies which support each of your assertions, but I won’t demand that all the time. Internal consistency would be appreciated for its own sake.
You seem to be going out of your way to avoid the issue, preferring instead to ascribe nasty things to me. That’s not necessary, true, or kind.
Why is that every time someone thinks differently than someone else, they have to be “mentally ill”? The majority of the time there is nothing physically wrong with these people. They don’t have a disease in really any sense of the word. Not saying that we have to accept everyone’s belief but I hate how everything that is different is pathologized.
In an ideal world “mentally ill” refers to differences strongly associated to negative health outcomes. People who self-report as transgender have staggeringly high suicide attempt rates for example. I don’t think there’s any solid basis for knowing what particular help they need, but they clearly need help.
“People with delusions about for instance their racial identity are usually treated by attempting to persuade them that they are mistaken. Therapy for transgender people doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) involve persuading them that they are the gender they were born as.”
Hoooooo boy. I might get eaten alive for this one.
So, first off- both the data and the experts disagree. Johns Hopkins, (who literally invented sex reassignment) doesn’t do sex reassignment surgery because their long term studies showed that it makes no difference whatsoever to health outcomes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6942832
Simply put- Gender Dysphoria is one of a number of dysphoria diseases, included anorexia, Body integrity identity disorder and Body dysmorphic disorder. The difference is that when someone REQUIRES that we cut off their leg to make them feel happy, we just go “no, you’re crazy” but when people do the same thing with their penis, we go “we have to support your choices.”
Evidence suggests that gender dysphoria is no different from any other mental disorder, and should be treated the same- lovingly and with kindness, but with a goal on HEALTH, not just coping.
Now perhaps wearing dresses is just a simple solution to the issue- which is fine. What worries me is people A. giving HORMONES to their CHILDREN to INTERFERE WITH PUBERTY JESUS COCK CHOKING CHRIST, B. pressure on doctors to perform unnecessary surgery that has no impact, and C. the impact that cultural-wide support for mental disorders has on us.
Obviously sex reassignment surgery isn’t appropriate in all cases (for instance on young children). However, I don’t think you can use one study to say that it is never a good idea. Apart from anything else, I’d imagine that people who undergo surgery have more severe dysphoria than people who don’t, and therefore are less likely to be successful for that reason, regardless of how effective the surgery is. As far as I know, the difference between gender dysphoria and other forms of dysphoria, is that at least some people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are happy afterwards, whereas no-one who chops their leg off is happy.
The six subjects who had an amputation at their desired site reported that following the amputation they felt better than they ever had and no longer had a desire for an amputation.
…no matter which side of the various questions you fall on, it’s ridiculous to present them as easy problems.
It’s not one study- it’s a meta study. Which isn’t perfect, but is much better.
And, while appeal to authority irks me- I don’t think the same people that invented it are going to stop doing it without some pretty solid evidence.
“is that at least some people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are happy afterwards,”
Yes. And that number is basically the same as the number of people who were in the control group and were happy.
In other words, if you want me to believe that GRS is necessary and useful and important, you have to demonstrate that it’s literally better than nothing.
Dammit-
At Anon above:
Your study is interesting- did you see anything about follow up TIME? I’d want to see the data from a year or so.
@CJB
I did not, and I agree that the timescale is an important factor in making general conclusions concerning these interventions. However, it is not necessary to disprove sweeneyrod’s simplistic assertion.
Oh, I agree- I’m just really curious….just not 35 bucks worth of curious.
The PROBLEM is that the positions aren’t “we need to be sensible!”
It’s “Deformed freak!” against “Accept me without question!” and people in the middle (like the Hopkins psychologist that wrote about this and is already catching flak) are ascribed to one side or the other.
I think some people will be happier after surgery, or lifestyle change. I don’t think MOST will be, if for no other reason than happiness levels seem fairly immutable without significant intervention.
We need to help the happier ones get the surgery, help the helpless get help, and in general, chill the fuck out about the Trans folk.
“No one who chops their leg off is happy”
I have literally seen an interview with a man who did exactly this and did indeed claim to feel much happier as a result. (Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, on the off chance anyone cares, no idea if the episode in question can be tracked down).
Which is enough to convince me both that for at least some people gender dysphoria is an issue not caused by some social influence, and that the problem is clearly with their brains rather than their bodies.
“JESUS COCK CHOKING CHRIST”
Thread over.
Pool’s closed.
That study is old as hell. We know that HRT and SRS are *significantly* better today than in the 1960s . In fact, I personally know lots of trans people that were suicidal pre hormones and loving life now so my personal experience differs in a large way.
“A. giving HORMONES to their CHILDREN to INTERFERE WITH PUBERTY JESUS COCK CHOKING CHRIST”
Actually, they are hormone “blockers” that delay puberty and have been used for decades for precocious puberty. “JCCC” is not a rational or considered reaction to this.
Therapy for people who were obviously male or female but insisted they were female, male, both or neither did exist, on the grounds that such delusions were proof of mental illness.
How could a married man with children provably his claim that he was really a woman? Obviously this was something needing medical help and not a real thing!
How can a woman who is undeniably white in appearance claim she is really black? Obviously this is something needing medical help and not a real thing!
Jews are not a race by any reasonable definition though.
…and there’s the essentialism we were looking for!
I do not think I am being an essentialist here. I just think it’s the wrong category.
…what (essential) features would you say determine whether something is a race?
Remember, we don’t get categories. My queer theory prof quite directly said that the whole idea of categories was just bunk.
Ok, then what function does is serve to call jews a separate race?
I haven’t really thought this through, but I think my first objection would be that you usually can’t tell if someone is Jewish from appearance.
I’m not sure what function most racial classifications are serving, so I imagine it’d be nice to set some baseline for functionality.
I think there are certain physical characteristics that are common amongst Jews. Of course, they are not universal or always obvious (no physical characteristics ever are).
Jews are a complicated case because the group most Americans are familiar with (East European Ashkenazis) have enough common ancestry to have a somewhat-recognizable appearance in the way Irish or Italian people do, particularly a few decades ago. But technically, Jews can look like anything, because anyone can convert to Judaism. Additionally, the intermarriage rate is so high in recent years that you can find lots of Jews who don’t look anything like Mel Brooks.
I think the correct term is ‘ethnoreligious group’, but you look at all the other examples of that and they’re not well known outside the Middle East.
Milton Friedman is said to have replied to a Swede who said our system than the American system is better because there is no poverty in Sweden by quipping there are no poor Swedes in the US either, so that proves nothing.
I’d have thought the better group to look at would be immigrants from other countries to Sweden, and see how their stats compare to people in the country of origin
I’m sure that Somalis in Sweden heavily outperform Somalis in Somalia…
I’m sure Somalis in Argentina also heavily outperform Somalis in Somalia…
All three of them.
It has been looked at. While only 5% of Swedish children with two Swedish parents are poor, 39% of children where both parents were immigrants to Sweden are poor.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/03/mystery-of-child-poverty-in-sweden.html
Milton Friedman said all sorts of things. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a cite supporting this one.
Googling, there are more recent cites to a 2012 paper by the conservative Institute of Economic Affairs claiming that “based on US Census data”, Swedes in the US have a low poverty rate of just 6.7% — but the paper seems to have vanished off the IEA website, and I’m not seeing it mirrored elsewhere. Hm.
So, (1) I’m very skeptical that Friedman had any firm foundation for making that remark. Mind, that’s assuming that he even made it. I’m not seeing a convincing cite for that, either, so it may be a clever quip that someone else made up later and attributed to him.
And, (2) I’m mildly skeptical that the IEA or anyone else has managed to come up with a methodologically sound way of making that comparison. I’d be happy to be wrong! But the obstacles to be overcome are large. For instance, the citers claim the IEA used census data. That would be problematic about three different ways, starting with the fact that it would only capture census respondents who are self-identifying as Swedish-American. That’s a group which is almost certainly much smaller than, and significantly different from, Americans of Swedish descent generally.
I’m guessing that what attracted Scott’s eye to the otherwise pretty worthless McArdle article was that idea of comparing the same ethnic group in two different environments? Alas, I suspect that the rigorous comparison he’s looking for doesn’t exist. Again, I’d be happy to be wrong.
Doug M.
The IEA paper moved here.
Holy crap, that’s horrible.
The paper quotes — and I am not making this up — (1) The 2009 OECD Factbook, which does not give information about Swedish-Americans. (2) the Notten and Neubourg paper already cited downthread, which *does not say what they say it says*. (3) “US Census Database” without giving any further detail; and (3) An unquoted David Brooks column in the New York Times.
That’s it. Go and look — it’s page 21. That’s all they’ve got. No further details, no methodology, nothing.
SCOTT. THIS WAS A BULLSHIT ARTICLE CITING A BULLSHIT PAPER. I’M SORRY. I KNOW IT LOOKED INTERESTING, BUT THERE’S NOTHING THERE.
Doug M.
Pray tell, what does it say and what do they say it says?
I strongly support your skepticism about the attribution of a nice-sounding quotation. See “Nice guys finish seventh”: False phrases, spurious sayings, and familiar misquotations.
> This article on whether the US could replicate Scandinavia’s low poverty rate is interesting throughout, but what makes it for me is the claim that Swedes in the US have the same poverty rate as Swedes in Sweden [edit: possibly this is false?]. How much should we make of this?
On standardized tests, American students perform worse than Europeans, and American performance has been getting worse for some time. But once you control for race, the effect reverses. In other words, white Americans do better than white Europeans, and similarly for other races, but because the US has more of certain races their overall performance is worse. This is an example of Simpson’s paradox. Perhaps a similar effect partially explains the difference in poverty levels.
10% of non-hispanic whites in the US live under the poverty line, which is about 0.7X the national poverty rate (source: https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf , table 1). The US uses a weird arcane poverty definition, but the OECD has a poverty measure defined as “Makes less than 50% of median income” at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=47991 , and the US’s poverty rate using that definition is 1.8X higher. And that’s a definition that makes the US look artificially look good due to our low median wage relative to GDP per capita compared to other countries.
You can fret about impact on growth, but taxes and transfers successfully reduce income inequality.
My understanding is that comparisons like this are often problematic because much of the US’s assistance to the poor is in kind, in the form of food stamps/housing projects etc., whereas most of the European welfare states distribute a lot of cash, and cash transfers get counted when comparing your income to the median income but assistance in kind does not.
I think assistance in kind is kind of a boneheaded way to go about things, but the cash value of the assistance is surely not zero and the OECD’s measure overstates the degree to which US citizens are impoverished.
(I also don’t love the use of relative measures of poverty, since what they really measure tends to be inequality, not privation, and it seems perverse to me that increasing everyone’s real income by an order of magnitude would have zero effect on the poverty rate. But AIUI median income for Sweden and the US is pretty comparable, so the use of relative measures is not skewing this comparison.)
I’d love to use a cite that US aid is in kind in a way that the OECD doesn’t account for. From what I can tell, food stamps are counted as cash transfers by the OECD, and I’d be surprised if section 8 vouchers and WIC weren’t as well. Almost all aid to the poor at this point is either cash or cash-like vouchers.
I could easily be mistaken. I don’t have specific knowledge, I just know that it’s an easy trap to fall into and US poverty is frequently overstated.
suntzuanime:
> US poverty is frequently overstated
Compared to what? Europe? Sweden?
I’m too unfamiliar with economics to trust even GDP calculations. My very personal impressions from visiting the US were that the US has way more poverty. I saw streets I was told to avoid entirely in order not to be robbed; I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere in Europe. There were way more obviously homeless guys. And weirdly, very few older people, especially among the employed. Where do your old people go, and are they happy there?
Simpson’s Paradox would lead you to see that without America being any worse than Europe. The absolute amount of poverty would be higher, but only because groups that are higher in poverty are more common, even if the groups themselves do better than similar groups in Europe.
The US has some weird poverty demographics. Compared to europe the poor in the US are more likely to have tv’s, cars, bigger place to live etc, more material wealth but a much worse social/political/health situation.
Murphy, you may be right; especially when I look at the WSJ article The Richer You Are the Older You’ll Get combined with the US ranking in 34th place on Wikipedia’s list of countries by life expectancy, it follows that the poor in the US don’t live as long as the rest of the developed world.
But my point isn’t poverty statistics, it is that I don’t trust them because I simply had a visceral impression of poverty when I saw Baltimore and New York. The people with eyes darting around. The places nobody seemed to be responsible for cleaning. The stink. Maybe an American visiting Germany would be appalled that poor people here might have nobody in their circle of friends who owns a car, and that would be just as selective as the impression I got.
One other problem in poverty comparisons is that the calculations are usually done at one instant in time, so a society where individual incomes vary more year to year looks as though it has more poverty. I remember hearing a paper long ago which tried to measure poverty by consumption rather than income, since people tend to average out their consumption over time, and concluded that, by that measure, income inequality in the U.S. was about the same as in Canada or Europe.
If I went to a foreign country known to contain old people and hardly saw any, it might lead me to suspect that my experiences there were unrepresentative in other ways as well.
” I saw streets I was told to avoid entirely in order not to be robbed; I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere in Europe. ”
Where the fuck have you traveled in Europe? Upper class english tea parties?
In Ireland and the UK, i was warned multiple times about entire groups of people (Pikeys) that you can’t trust for an inch or they’ll rob you blind. In traveling to london, the tour books make it clear that some places are Not Good Ideas.
Italy- jesus christ have you been to Naples.
“There were way more obviously homeless guys. ”
I can’t say that in the big euro cities (IE, places I’d compare to NYC) I noticed any fewer. I used to work with the homeless, so I also have a higher tendency to notice them.
“And weirdly, very few older people, especially among the employed. Where do your old people go, and are they happy there?”
Florida. They fucking love it.
“simply had a visceral impression of poverty when I saw Baltimore and New York.”
Well, first off, we’re eliminating Baltimore here, primarily because it’s one of the worst places in America. It’s a burnt out feral ghetto that every single sane american leaves the hell alone.
Ever been to manchester? Like that, but ever so much more so.
“The people with eyes darting around. The places nobody seemed to be responsible for cleaning. The stink.”
What major cities have you been too that AREN’T like this? Are you from Singapore?
Long story short- are you sure that you weren’t just paying more attention being in a new place, and letting confirmation bias get the best of you?
Also, have you separated out your impressions of NYC and Baltimore.
Sorry CJB, but you don’t get to eliminate Baltimore. Because fighting poverty is exactly about raising the lower bound of the conditions your citizens can find themselves in.
Sure I had some confirmation bias. Walking through Manhattan, I saw lots of places I knew from movies, and was very conscious of the realization that there were no car chases going on and no bullets flying. 🙂 I hadn’t seen The Wire, though.
Of course I agree my experience is nowhere near representative. But I’ve been to a dozen European countries, including some of the bad parts of London that you mention, and seen nothing like Baltimore.
Actually I lived in a place in Berlin for six months and at the end of that period I learned that my exact street was considered, at the time, to be the epicenter of Germany’s drug trade – and I had not noticed any of that except the rent was remarkably cheap. So it does seem to me the worst of Germany is far better than the worst of the US.
“I remember hearing a paper long ago which tried to measure poverty by consumption rather than income, since people tend to average out their consumption over time, and concluded that, by that measure, income inequality in the U.S. was about the same as in Canada or Europe.”
These sort of “ACTUALLY, INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE US ISN’T HIGH” thing is usually driven by surveys which both 1) Exclude capital gains, and 2) don’t have the coverage to survey the extremely wealthy 0.1% by which most of our income is concentrated.
The percentage of wealth held by the top 0.1% of the population is much larger in the US than in Canada or Europe. There is no statistical adjustment that makes that go away.
@excess_kurtosis – “The percentage of wealth held by the top 0.1% of the population is much larger in the US than in Canada or Europe. There is no statistical adjustment that makes that go away.”
…I might be totally off base here, but don’t the super-wealthy pretty much have free pick of where they want to live? I mean, if you’re worth north of 500 million dollars, I would imagine that immigration to any country on earth is probably a formality at worst.
And in the complete opposite direction, if the majority of the super-rich are native, how much worse off are our poor versus other countries? Because if the state of the poor is roughly comparable, wouldn’t more super-rich be a good thing?
I apologize if the above is painfully naive. I used to be fairly sympathetic to leftist economic concerns when I was an illegal alien and long-term unemployed. Then I returned to my native country, got a factory job, worked a bit, went back to community college, dropped out, got a white-collar job anyway, and am now doing very well for myself. Maybe I’m just really lucky?
“I might be totally off base here, but don’t the super-wealthy pretty much have free pick of where they want to live? ”
The US is a bit special in that they tax overseas income. You can renounce your citizenship, but then it makes traveling to and from the US very difficult, which in practice would make it very difficult to actually run a buisness.
There’s an entire cottage industry trying to deny this by looking at household surveys that ignore capital gains income, or by using low coverage survey data, or why going into existential dorm-room discussions about inflation adjustment.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/charts-income-inequality-middle-class-census is a helpful primer that links to graphs showing income shares from IRS data, which sidesteps most of the methodological isssues.
For international comparisons, http://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/ is the most comprehensive source I’ve seen out there. They compile a variety of different income inequality measures, and the US is more unequal than Sweden with respect to every one of them.
I just want to make clear that it really is empirically true that income inequality is 1) Much higher than it is in Europe, and 2) has been increasing. Obviously people can disagree ideologically about whether or not that’s a problem.
“the epicenter of Germany’s drug trade […] the worst of Germany”
Does that follow? I don’t know the official estimates and I wouldn’t know how much to trust them even if I did, but invarious spans of years I’ve heard Miami FL, northern CA, and Vancouver BC repeatedly pointed out as hugely important hotspots in the drug trade here in North America, and they don’t seem ever to appear in “worst of North America” in any other ways.
If the theory that zero-sum competitions and/or the extraction of economic rent by monopolies are the cause of poverty is correct, then to a first approximation increasing everyone’s real income by an order of magnitude really would have almost no effect on privation. Poor people would be better able to afford food, clothes, furniture, gadgets, and other things you can buy at the Walmart Supercenter, but the lion’s share of expenses (housing/education/healthcare/taxes/women/etc) would simply increase by an order of magnitude.
If prices increase along with income, isn’t that just inflation, and therefore isn’t that definitionally ruled out by stipulating an increase in real income?
It’s not just inflation. The economy really does produce an order of magnitude more stuff (or an order of magnitude better stuff, or some combination thereof), and you really can afford to buy an order of magnitude more stuff at the supermarket. In fact, if the dollar supply stays constant, a dollar at the store can buy an order of magnitude more, which is if anything deflation.
It’s just that you still pay most of your income to the rentiers/monopolists, so it doesn’t improve your quality of life all that much.
Consider a toy model with 100 producers and 10 rentiers. In year 1, The producers initially make 1000 units of grain, for an average income of 10 units of grain each. They pay 90% of their income to the rentiers, who thereby end up with an income of 90 units of grain each on average, and the producers are left with 1 unit of grain each.
Now, assume that on year 2 the economy grows by an order of magnitude and the produers are able to make 10000 units of grain, for an average income of 100 units of grain. They still pay 90% of their income to the rentiers, so they are left with 10 units of grain on average each, and the rentiers make off with an income of 900 units of grain, on average.
Is this just inflation? In this scenario, the economy produces ten times as much grain as it did before, and everyone gets paid ten times as much real, tangible grain as they did before. The producers are also left with ten times as much grain for their own use after paying off the rentiers. It seems fair to describe this as a scenario where everyone’s real income increased by an order of magnitude, yet the producers aren’t much better off. They still better make sure they have enough of an income to pay the rentiers, except that now it’s an income of about ten times more than before.
(This model is making me sound way more like a Marxist than I really am, so let me just clarify that I have no problem with private ownership of cargo ships, factory equipment, server clusters, or other such manufactured capital, and that I think capitalists such as Henry Ford and Steve Jobs who made their money through millions of positive-sum trades created tons of wealth and deserve every damn penny. Also, I do not think the world is cleanly divided into producer and rentier classes, as it was in my simplified model.)
…
No it doesn’t! They have 10x as much stuff! They’re massively better off!
They are somewhat better off, but they are not nearly as better off as you would naively expect from increasing their real incomes by an order of magnitude. Naively, you would expect them to end up with 91 units of disposable grain after paying the usual 9 units of grain to the rentiers. If you went up to a producer in year 1 and told him that you were going to multiply his real income by ten, he would think that all his money problems would be over. And all his money problems really would be over if it was just him that decupled his real income, instead of the whole economy. But decupling everyone’s real income simply makes the rentiers increase rents.
Our incomes are much, much higher in real terms than those of people 100 years ago; our economy is much bigger, and we can buy much more and/or much nicer things at the supermarket. And yet, the average person today is not nearly as well off as a person from 100 years ago who made the equivalent amount of real income modern people do.
We have tablet computers instead of notebooks and miniature chalkboards, and we have portable MP3 players for each member of the family instead of a bulky gramophone in the living room for the whole family, but we still work just as hard as our ancestors did (at least those ancestors who worked after the 40-hour workweek became the standard); all those predictions about people working only a few hours per week did not come true. Why? Because rent prices went up in real terms, and because taxes have always been percentage based, and because college sprang up and suddenly started demanding any money you had in savings plus all the money you could borrow if you wanted to have a job, and because wedding rings are supposed to cost two months of your salary no matter how high that salary is, and so on and so forth.
That’s false, and it’s false by definition. It follows tautologically from the definition of “real income”.
If they are buying actual stuff from the rentiers – e.g. if you are talking about literal housing rent, that sort of thing – then the ~10x increase in price of the goods and services purchased from the rentiers will factor massively into the calculation of the price level, which will increase by nearly as much. Which means that real income has not increased by 10x, only nominal.
But that doesn’t match your model, in which the only good is grain and the ratio of grain consumed by the producers after to before is 10, which is definitionally a 10x increase in real consumption.
Look, let’s sketch the actual model you have here. There are two goods, grain and housing. There are two groups of people, building-owners (rentiers) and farmers. Building-owners have a cartel and cannot defect; farmers are in perfect competition. All agents have log utility in both goods. Each period, each group receives an endowment of their respective goods that they can trade to the other group (i.e. no substituting leisure). There is no storage and no inter-period contracts.
In the first period, there is some trade between the two groups, at a price favorable to the rentiers.
In the second period, we suddenly give the farmers 10x as much grain. We do not change the stock of housing. As a result, farmer consumption increases by less than 10x, as the rentiers are able to increase the price of their good.
But this does not represent a 10x increase in total real production, because only a portion of production was multiplied by 10.
“Sorry CJB, but you don’t get to eliminate Baltimore. ”
We weren’t talking about fighting poverty- something I have little to no interest in. We were talking about “ChaosMages view of American society.”
And you saw, per your comment, the very bottom of the scale, and the median of the scale for large cities in the United States (two cities known for their very urban liberal policies, BTW- they’re very european in that regard)
You didn’t see the top of the scale.
http://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-live/2015
So I’d argue that I’m doing exactly what you did- eliminating an extreme (In my case, deliberately) Otherwise the furthest range our discussion can take is “bad to median” not “bad to best”
“Sure I had some confirmation bias.”
That’s not the confirmation bias I’m talking about. The “LOL americans hate poors and are fat and smell bad” cliche. Particularly given the way your comment is written.
“But I’ve been to a dozen European countries, including some of the bad parts of London that you mention, and seen nothing like Baltimore.”
You’ve never been to Glasgow:
http://www.businessinsider.com/europe-dangerous-cities-2011-9?op=1
More particularly- Baltimore and Detroit are extreme outliers on the urban decay map, where the lack of infrastructure rebuilding is an issue.
The best counter example I can give? Rap videos from the 90’s. There’s a lot filmed in South Central LA at a time when it was pretty much the worst….and it looks like a nice, suburban area- until you notice the security, and fences, and so on.
I learned that my exact street was considered, at the time, to be the epicenter of Germany’s drug trade”
And again- despite the cliches, really bad neighborhoods don’t always look that way, or even SEEM that way. From what I understand, going into Camden (Baltimore but so much worse) isn’t particularly dangerous if you’re an outsider. Even a white one (would not recommend.) Drug dealers A. don’t like violence for the same reason the Mafia doesn’t- it brings the heat. and B. mainly fight with people they know. Strangers aren’t the concern. If you look like a cop, they’ll pass the word, but that’s about it. Obviously lots of street crime too, but it’s not like muggers are ubiquitous.
But even so, I wouldn’t be surprised. The nicest parts are a lot better, too. We’ve got 4 times their population and god only knows how much more land. Baltimore got to be that burned out due to capital flight- I suspect, in the US, large groups of people just up and leaving is a lot easier than in germany due to space.
I’ve lived in several places on that top livability list, visited several others, and as far as I can tell they’re using “livable” to mean something like “museums per capita”. Or, in other words, “stiflingly paternalistic, full of lawyers and smug retirees, and requires your firstborn child in deposit before you can rent a one-bedroom”.
But yes, the food’s good. I guess that’s something?
”as far as I can tell they’re using “liveable” to mean something like “museums per capita”’
I’ve lived in Asheville, which is often on top of these lists.
And on the one hand- lovely place. Lots to recommend it.
On the other- given me ten minutes with the buskers and a baseball bat, and I care not a whit who makes the nations laws.
Give me a pair of pliers and carte blanche on nose rings and gigantic ear plugs, and I’ll do whatever you want me too.
Every “bad” part of Europe and Canada I’ve been to can’t hold a candle to the discomfort I feel in America’s worst areas. I live in Oakland, and have felt more safe traversing foreign Vancouver’s “skid row” than I have walking around about 20 blocks to my south.
“until you notice the security, and fences, and so on”
It seems like only a few days ago FC was telling me fences don’t exist in the US.
@TheAncientGreek – Come now, sir. I explicitly mentioned concertina wire fences at least twice, to contrast with the British abominations.
“Makes less than 50% of the median” is an odd measure – it means that if some people become wealthier and no one becomes poorer, suddenly poverty will increase. It also means that a much more equal nation, such as India, has less poverty than the US.
Having just moved to the US from India, I can suggest that that definition is clearly not agreeing with intuition.
“some people become wealthier and no one becomes poorer, suddenly poverty will increase.”
You can see how this could be true, right? Some goods are supply constrained and so one person getting money without anybody else getting more money is going to drive up prices and decrease utility.
You are assuming that people getting richer means somehow getting more money with no increase in goods produced. If people get wealthy by producing things, rather than by printing money, which is normally the case in a market society, there is no reason why their wealth should come at the expense of others.
You stipulated that one peson got wealthier and everybody else’s income was unchanged.
Switzerland is a good example of how exogenous income shocks can fail to considerably increase living standards. They have a nominal GDP per capita that’s almost twice as high as the US due to their international banking sector, but their PPP GDP per capita is somewhat below the US’s level.
The reason for this is that you can only buy so many tradable goods (ipads, etc). After that, you run up against real supply constraints and just drive prices up.
Luckily for Switzerland, they have a government that has done a lot to redistribute the nominal gains from their banking sector. But if this wasn’t the case, it’s easy to see how it would have made most people worse off in absolute terms.
Kurtosis, Switzerland is not that banking-heavy. It is 12% of GDP. Whereas, America is 8% finance+insurance (21% FIRE). I think Britain is ahead of Switzerland, but I cannot find numbers.
” It also means that a much more equal nation, such as India, has less poverty than the US. ”
I’m currently in India, and wondering what the basis is for your “much more equal nation.” I don’t have data, but my casual impression is that it’s the most unequal society I have ever observed.
I am currently sitting in a small apartment in an institute in Bangalore where I gave a talk yesterday. The institute’s campus is a rectangle about half a mile on a side, surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. Inside is lovely, green, forested, very low density–I would guess that well under half the land area is being used for anything. Outside is rather different. I had a similar impression in Delhi, where the observed poverty seemed much worse, the minority of well off and westernized people seemed to have a pretty pleasant life style.
The World Bank says that India’s 2013 Gini coefficient about 33 while the US’s was around 40. So by that measure India has less inequality than America.
“odd” is a very charitable way to put it
Actually, the data contradict this. The rising numbers of Hispanic students in California were blamed for lowered reading scores, in order to shift blame away from curricular changes.
This question arises out of a report on a case in the local paper, where a farmer back in 2002 had to slaughter his herd of pigs due to illegal use by him of Carbadox.
My question is this: are we in the E.U., Australia and Canada (where the substance is banned) all cowardy-custard scaremongers, or are you in the U.S.A. (where it’s perfectly legal) all dare-devil risk takers?
Is the data being interpreted wrongly? I realise that if the stuff is prescribed and used under tight controls and as directed, it may be safe – but the fact remains that it probably isn’t being used that way. Our local farmer was able to get his hands on bags of the stuff and use it freely, and I doubt he had the veterinary training to diagnose which of the animals needed it, to use it correctly, and to taper it off sufficiently in advance of sending the animals for slaughter.
Not alone is it used to treat swine dysentery, it’s used as a growth-promoter, and I’m willing to bet any money farmers are using it on healthy animals.
I haven’t read through the comments, so don’t know if someone else has already pointed this out:
The CSI challenge, if I correctly understand it, is fraudulent, since they would win the bet even if Heartland was correct. The question is whether the 30 year average of temperature goes up next year. Heartland claims no warming since 1998, which is only seventeen years.
Suppose temperature was rising until 1998, constant since then. The thirty year average would keep going up until 2028, since until then the years at the early end of the 30 year period are being replaced by later and warmer years.
Three possibilities:
1. I have misunderstood the challenge.
2. The people making it are mathematically incompetent.
3. The people making it are dishonest.
Anyone with evidence to choose among them?
You’ve understood the challenge.
Heartland has expressed the belief that global average surface temperature should decrease because of solar factors (I quoted the NIPCC above), and they’ve expressed the opinion that the current highs are due to natural variation, which together with the ‘pause’ implies that we’re pretty much on the top of the natural-variation world and should thus expect average surface temperature to reduce Any Day Now.
If you expect temperatures to start reducing very fast, the bet might make sense.
You could look at this another way: the bet implies that CSIPCOP’s opinion is that looking at spans shorter than 30 years is stupid, and also the fact that it would be a really bad idea for Heartland to take the bet implies something about global climate.
In discussions of global warning, “1998” is a red flag. Any time you see that particular date mentioned, your ears should perk right up.
Why? Because 1998 was a really, really hot year — the hottest of the whole 20th century. So, climate change deniers like to measure starting from 1998. “See, it’s hardly gotten warmer since then!”
Doug M.
Friedman’s point is that if Heartland’s position was “temperature trends upwards from mid-1970s to 1998, and after that has no net change” they would expect to lose the bet up until 1998 + 30 = 2028, so a good 13 years, and they’d expect a 50-50 shot of winning the bet for the next 17 years – so it wouldn’t be a good idea to take the bet, even if you were 100% sure of Heartland’s position. I don’t think the standard 1998 bugaboo applies here, except to note that the hypothetical Heartland position is pretty suspicious because of sticking a changepoint on a massive outlier.
The bigger problem is that Heartland has argued we should expect temperature to decrease.
Decrease when? While I disagree with Heartland about natural variation being the sole cause, I’m not aware that they’ve staked out any position on its time scale which would require a decrease in temperature in the immediate future.
NIPCC, CCR2: Physical Science, Executive Summary, published by Heartland):
That’s not very definitive, it’s true. The other thing is the claim that the recent warming is natural variation, which they make several times in several different ways in various NIPCC reports. The thing about natural variation is that it varies, and if it’s already at a high point there’s only one place for it to go.
And anytime someone thinks that 1998 is the only issue, your ears should perk up.
The temp trend is not a smooth line with 1998 a single outlier. It goes up until 2000 or so and has been pretty flat since. The plateau exists even if you delete 1998 entirely.
About the suicide in the desert, maybe someone took the gun from the corpse after he died?
If hippopotamuses were such a good solution to America’s meat crisis, why didn’t the free market make it happen? Near as I can tell, Burnham raised $50k of venture capital, hands were sat on, and then everyone involved got distracted and/or dead.
It might be a public good. The article seems to imply that most of the cost would be towards getting the first hippos established.
Like the atomic bomb, whose mechanism was rediscovered many times, the most critical piece of knowledge about hippos in America is whether or not it works, and this knowledge cannot be hidden from the rest of the world. Once you’ve pioneered hippo raising and shown that it is economical for at least one person, then all the rest (how to raise them, where to get a breeding pair, unexpected challenges like diseases) is details.
(Reminds me of Silk Road 1, actually. The actual implementation of the site could be created within weeks by any good web programmer, or within months by even a non-web-programmer like Ulbricht. The secret sauce was the business model itself, which had to be publicly explained before anyone would use the site, and can be easily replicated, and has been by 70+ groups now. Considered as R&D, Ulbricht never captured more than a small fraction of the gains from his innovation…)
A little bit of insight into the “microaggressions” thing from a UK academic: the article says the examples were used in an optional seminar for deans and heads of department. These seminars are regarded by most researchers as pointless bullshit to be ignored in favour of actual work – any actual policy changes are always announced through other channels as well. That goes triple when they aren’t even invited to the seminar to begin with. (Did the announcement even go out on a general mailing list? Promoting it on internal sites most academics have never visited and will never visit doesn’t count.) It’s unlikely that it would filter down to them, either – heads of department are generally academics themselves, so they generally filter out most of the bullshit before the people below them have to smell it.
As a bonus, it’s very unlikely that the person giving the seminar has any authority in the university whatsoever. Normally what happens for diversity seminars is that the higher-ups say they’d like a seminar about x with no detailed guidelines, and then either an external agency or an internal lecturer gives the seminar. So if that person starts talking out of their arse, they don’t actually have the weight of the university behind them.
Basically, if it was a genuine attempt to chill speech, it was quite possibly the single least effective one I’ve ever seen. Ironically, the Post article chills academic speech far more than the original seminar by creating a sense of danger where previously there wasn’t one.
I don’t think it is wise to underestimate this sort of authoritarian attacks to freedom of speech. The slope is genuinely slippery.
John is arguing that this is in fact *not* an example of an authoritarian attack on free speech – at least, not a significant one. There is little danger in the mere existence of people who think that speech should be more heavily censored as long as nobody is taking them seriously.
Except that this is not random people but the college administration, even if it is not an official policy it will clearly have an effect, especially on the non-tenured staff.
And it’s not an isolated case, at least in the algosphere, authoritarianism is on the rise in academia.
Except, as John’s second paragraph said, it wasn’t the college administration either, it was a third party guest lecturer who was likely talking out of his ass. And as John’s first paragraph said, this probably never even made it to most of the staff anyway.
Re the Sweden article.
1) It’s Megan McArdle. That’s a red flag right there.
2) Sweden is not by any stretch a “homogeneous” society. That’s a lazy generalization that’s also about two generations out of date.
Sweden has been very open to immigration for about 50 years now. So, as of 2015, almost 20% of the citizens or permanent residents of Sweden are either recent immigrants or their children — some from Eastern Europe, but most from Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. Add to them about 150,000 refugees (about half of them from Syria) plus an indeterminate but large number of guest workers both legal and otherwise, and the number rises well above 20%. And then, “native” Swedes include several non-Swedish ethnic groups, such as the Finnish Swedes and the Sami. So when you total it all up, about 25% of the people living in Sweden are not ethnic Swedes. That still may not be quite as diverse as the US, but it’s definitely not “homogenous”.
2) The main thrust of the article is that Sweden can afford its welfare state because it’s freeloading off of US innovation. This is, in a word, nonsense. Sweden has been producing a steady drumbeat of world-class innovations for decades now, from the three-point seatbelt, the milk carton and ultrasound in the last century to Skype and AIS in this one.
But never mind past accomplishments — let’s look at objective numbers. In 2012, the United States granted 121,026 patents to persons resident in the United States. (All data here is from the World Intellectual Property Organization, http://www.wipo.int.) Sweden granted 2,434 patents to persons resident in Sweden. Now, Sweden has about 1/33 the population of the US — in 2012, around 9.4 million vs. about 312 million. So, if we calculate “patents granted per million people” the figure is about US 383, Sweden 255. The US is clearly ahead, but Sweden is not exactly slacking.
But wait: what if we correct for GDP? We’d expect countries with bigger GDPs to have more patents, right? And while Sweden is a rich country, the US is even richer. Well, US nominal GDP in 2012 was about $16.3 trillion. Sweden’s was about $404 billion. So if we measure patents granted per billion of GDP… pow, more than half the difference vanishes: it’s now US 7.44 to Sweden 6.02. The US is still ahead — go us! — but not by remotely enough to support the “lazy Nordics mooching off our innovation” model that the article is trying to push.
(Incidentally, the US is not the world’s leader in either patents granted per capita or patents granted per GDP. Just sayin’.)
4) The article does a certain amount of lip-smacking over the fact that the Norwegians are supporting their welfare state on oil. Somehow it manages to ignore the fact that the Swedes have no oil, no gas, and indeed hardly any natural resources at all beyond iron ore, timber, and fish. Most of the country is marginally habitable subarctic wasteland. Most of the population lives on a thin, chilly strip of bleak, flat coastal plain on the wrong side of the Baltic. Yet somehow they’re managing to run one of the world’s most advanced economies. It’s almost as if they’ve managed to organize their society in some strangely efficient way. Go figure.
Doug M.
Sweden also considerably outperforms the US in terms of scientific publications per capita, http://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/18768/revisions . I don’t have the link off hand, but my impression is this lead stays when you restrict to high impact factor articles.
Ah, but here’s a big difference between the US and Sweden: Sweden is free-loading on the security provided by the US military. If Sweden had to truly pay for its own defense, such a society might be much more difficult to maintain.
This is the point I always make when I see the “WE SPEND MORE THAN THE NEXT X countries COMBINED on the military!”
Like- yes, I’m aware that we spend too much and have lots of boondoggles.
But we’re also the “Baltic Army”. We’re guaranteeing the borders of a lot of places right now who are incredibly nervous at even a HINT we won’t be coming in like the wrath of god if Russia decides to get all Anschluss-y….again.
Off the top of my head- if the US stopped protecting other places……
Singapore and South Korea would last a week, tops. Most of Eastern Europe would become it’s historically realistic position of “greater Russia”. Japan wouldn’t last too long either- the Chinese have a big ol’ grudge they’ve wanted to settle for 70 years.
Large cartel expansion in Mexico and south America, sudden explosions in the size of terrorist groups. Palestine would cease to exist.
You thought I was gonna say Israel, didn’t you? Israel will be fine. They’re mean, their neighbors are helpless, and their stuff isn’t good enough to interest the big boys.
Palestine only exists because we keep begging the Israelis not to bomb them into atoms every time they perform an act of war against civilians.
The Baltic states would last a very little while.
The Nordic countries would last, I think- but only after Europe gets its shit together. Finland might not make it….they’ve gotten a lot wussier since Simo Hayha.
Ultimately? We’re the only ones actually living up to the NATO treaty and spending 2% of GDP on defense.
I’m surprised you think Japan would fall, or South Korea for that matter. I’d predict both could get a reasonable nuclear deterrent rather quick.
Unfortunately, North Korea has a nuclear deterrent right now, and a historical predilection for an aggressively forward defense posture. That’s a recipe for instability in the interval between “right now” and “rather quick”.
Japan won’t fall; North Korea doesn’t have enough nukes to flatten it, China barely does but has bigger concerns, and neither has the naval or amphibious capability to conquer an incompletely-flattened Japan. But the Japanese kind of hate North Korea, and the North Koreans really, really hate the Japanese, so a few flattened Japanese cities would be a distinct possibility.
1) It’s an open question whether NK can miniaturize weapons to fit on their current rockets. They say they can; but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
2) Japan has quietly been “one year from a bomb” for about 40 years now.
3) Really unclear what possible motivation NK could have for an ultimately suicidal attack on a distant country with ~5X the population and an economy over 100 times bigger. “Because they really hate them!” seems a bit of a stretch here.
Note that from the narrow POV of North Korean elites, NK’s foreign policy has actually been both rational and reasonably successful. They have various good reasons to act crazy; this does not mean that they are in fact crazy. Narratives that focus on their various provocations tend to miss the fact that those provocations have consistently stopped well short of actually getting them into a shooting war with anyone.
Doug M.
I’d say you underestimate the tensions between China and Japan, and the degree to which the chinese political establishment cares about casualties. They’re pretty ideally set up for expansionism, but they don’t really have anywhere to go- although I think they might cut a deal with Russia to move north and possibly west.
One interesting argument I read pointed out that US hegemony prevents nuclear proliferation. If the US is seen as backing off it’s commitments (Like maybe to a nation that signed a treaty securing it’s borders in exchange for it’s nukes, a treaty we supported pretty heavily) then lots of little, rich places are gonna go nuclear, in places we really don’t want having nukes (I’m pretty sure the Gulf states could flat out buy them.)
It’s an open question whether NK can miniaturize weapons to fit on their current rockets. They say they can; but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?
It’s not just the North Koreans saying that.
Claims that North Korea can only build big, clunky Fat Man style atom bombs, are unsupported by evidence, generally devoid of any technical rationale or understanding of nuclear weapons design, and usually come from politicians tasked with the impossible problem of dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and desperately trying to kick that can down the road a few more years.
We’re at the end of that road. North Korea almost certainly has 12-20 nuclear warheads that it can mount on medium-range missiles any time Kim wants.
As far as wanting to attack Japan, a major issue for North Korea is ensuring that South Korea stands alone in any conflict. Right now, much of the basing and logistics for US forces earmarked for Korea, flows through Japan, and Japan is perceived as susceptible to nuclear intimidation. “Nice island you’ve got there; be a shame if something happened to it. Oops, did you just lose Hiroshima again?”
If, as hypothesized, the US is no longer part of the equation, that obviously changes.
Most obviously, nuclear attacks by North Korea become less inevitably suicidal, because nobody else would find it safe or easy to destroy the North.
If, beyond that, Japan declares itself a pacifist neutral, then Japan is probably safe but South Korea’s in a bad spot. If Japan and South Korea form a defensive alliance against external threats, then again the DPRK is going to want to make it painful for Japan to remain in that alliance. And China will probably feel the same way, but want somebody Not China to do any necessary dirty work.
If the first thing the new alliance does is to announce that they are going to deploy their own nuclear weapons in a year or so, that makes for a very interesting year.
1) Who’s going to invade Singapore? There are only two neighbors, and neither one has any reason to bother. Malaysia actively _does not want_ Singapore — they kicked them out back in 1962! Indonesia already had one “confrontasi” with Singapore back in the ’60s, and it was such a fiasco they’ve never moved in that direction since.
2) South Korea has double the population and ~18X the GDP of the North, and they spend about twice as much on their military. They have fewer men under arms (about 650,000 vs. an estimated 1,100,000) but those men are vastly better trained and equipped. It’s very nice for South Korea to have US support, but it’s not an existential necessity.
3) If the US disappeared tomorrow, NATO would still exist. NATO without the US would still be by far the world’s strongest military alliance. And the other NATO members have a fairly strong vested interest in keeping the Russians out of the Baltic States.
(Finns: not sure where you’re getting the “wussy” idea from. Finland has total male conscription — every fit male, and many women, does time in the military — and devotes a higher percentage of its GDP to the military than any other country in the region. The military is very popular. Finland sends troops all over the world, from peackeeping missions in Mali and Lebanon to active deployment in Afghanistan. No, they haven’t had a war in 70 years, but there’s no reason to think they’ve become any less badass than they were in 1940-44.)
4) The PLA Navy has very rough parity with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force — China has more stuff, Japan’s stuff is better. However, PLAN has basically zero ability to deliver large numbers of troops over blue-water distances. China is not currently capable of invading Taiwan, never mind Japan.
Doug M.
Sweden is a neutral country. It’s not a member of NATO, nor is it allied with the US in any other way.
Doug M.
“Sweden is a neutral country. It’s not a member of NATO, nor is it allied with the US in any other way.”
That’s nice. And notably, last time there wasn’t a single worldwide hegemon, they went over like a load of wet bricks in a paper balloon.
Not to mention that, again, Neutrality isn’t a default position where everyone stops wanting your resources. Switzerland, the other notable Euro hold out, maintains it’s neutrality through a heavily armed, well defended position. The swedes maintain it because we won’t let anyone take them over.
I’m sorry, but back when the USSR was really expansionist, you really think the French army was what was keeping them from moving into Sweden?
One may fairly note that there was never a land border between Sweden and the Soviet bloc, because Finland provided a buffer.
One may also note that the Soviets tried to conquer Finland, Sweden declared itself non-belligerent (not neutral) in that war and sent more than a few volunteers and arms their way, and that the USSR settled for modest border concessions instead of outright conquest.
(Also, Sweden did maintain a fairly large military deterrent during the Cold War. It’s reduced it since because it has far less to fear in this international situation.)
And I can’t think of any way the socialists can fully accomplish their goals without mountains of skulls, therefore I get to accuse them of being a bunch of Pol Pot wannabes, every last one. Right?
If a person, or a nation, is conspicuously not doing some horrific thing that would benefit them, the charitable assumption is and the default assumption ought to be that they are not horrible people. Claiming that they must secretly desire to unleash horrors but are being somehow restrained, probably ought not be done without real evidence.
Israel is very dependent on an influx of money from the US,
US foreign aid is just under 1% of Israel’s GDP, and comes with enough strings attached to be less useful than an equivalent sum of domestically-sourced money. It would be quite disruptive if this were to go away unexpectedly and instantly, but “very dependent” is I think understating it.
Or, to link this cross-thread, Israel is maybe as dependent on US money as Sweden is dependent on US military might.
Not really. The US may or may not defend Sweden in case of an attack (there is no open alliance). The US will certainly defend Israel in case of an attack, as historically it did multiple times, and in addition the US subsides Israel and supports it at the UN Security Council.
Think of it, if Israel didn’t depend on the US that much, why haven’t they bombed the hell out of the hated Palestinians already?
I think you’re misunderstanding their point: Sweden is not very dependant on US’ military might, Israel is not very dependant on US’ money.
They, of course, have strong US military backing, but the US is also one of the things keeping them in check.
Think of it, if Israel didn’t depend on the US that much, why haven’t they bombed the hell out of the hated Palestinians already
According to the Palestinians, the Israelis dropped a Hiroshima’s worth of bombs on them last year alone, with quite hellish results. So I gather you are really asking why the Israelis haven’t bombed the Palestinians into (local) extinction or the like.
Hmm, let’s think about that a bit. Is there any possible reason why the Israelis might be averse to engaging in genocide? Possibly because western democracies in general aren’t keen on genocide, or possibly because of some unique quirk in the Israeli national psyche for some unfathomable reason?
Nope, nope, that can’t be it. Everybody knows the Israelis are secretly genocidal maniacs, restrained only because Bibi is Obama’s bitch.
What John said.
Also, note that Israel actually has cool-to-okay relations with some of its Arab neighbors, most notably Egypt and Jordan. Israel and Egypt quietly cooperate on a range of issues, they just signed an agreement on Jordan on exploiting the Dead Sea, and trade across the border is exploding — about a thousand trucks a month are crossing the King Hussein Bridge now.
This hardly means that everything is going to be hunky-dory! But Israel is doing rather well by the current status quo, and has little interest in upsetting it.
Doug M.
>Nope, nope, that can’t be it. Everybody knows the Israelis are secretly genocidal maniacs, restrained only because Bibi is Obama’s bitch.
The thing is that Israel is always in a retaliation position. The idea is not that they’re going to go ahead and just kill all those pesky palestinians, but that their retribution to attacks from Hamas could be much stronger.
When CJB said that Palestine would be gone, I didn’t think he’d mean “Glassed, following by the systematic erradication of Palestinians”, but rather “Completely annexed, with a two-state solution as a distant memory”.
“Annexed” won’t do it, because then they’ll have to deal with all those Palestinians who actually live there. What are they going to do, let them live in new Greater Israel but without civil rights or the ability to vote?
Annexation plus ethnic cleansing, now.
Doug M.
What I assume happens is something like this:
Reduced US hegemony leaves Israel on it’s own. Israel is more or less fine, probably raises taxes and increases military spending to compensate. It’s known to have nuclear ballistic subs, so it’s probably safe from open invasion by a major power.
And the duly elected Palestinian government returns to radicalism. And as has happened many times in the past, the duly elected Palestinian government launches an act of war against the Israeli state….except now there’s no reason to listen to US liberals- and they’re the only people on earth willing to actually do anything about the Israeli situation. The big powers that could care (Russia, China, UK) won’t. The other big powers (France, Germany, Japan, etc) are going to be busy probably worrying about the first list of people.
Then you get basically a war of modern weapons against people with RPGs and AK-47s…..except this time they don’t have the advantage of soft power.
I’m presuming between the bombings, the other bombings, the mass attacks, the disease and disruption and eventually the just plain fleeing, Palestine would end up pretty depopulated.
The United States, both civilian and military establishment is the best friends the Palestinian government ever had.
Given the Israeli policies for the last decades (e.g. this), which culminated with the election of people who say that all the Palestinians are enemies and there will never be a Palestinian state, and the general lack of effort towards a two-state solution, it seems quite clear that the prevailing political position among the Israeli calls for annexing the Palestinian territories.
Since the Israeli aren’t obviously willing to give Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians, the Palestinian territories will have to be depopulated before the annextion by some combination of displacement and genocide (e.g. something like what happened to the Armenians in Turkey).
The question is why they didn’t do this already. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that the US is holding the leash.
That sounds like an excellent reason for the US to reallocate some of its military spending to social security.
Sweden wasn’t even dragged into WW II. It also has good submarines.
…and very good fighter jets, and very good missiles, and light antitank weapons so good that the United States Army buys them.
Sweden is one of the top ten arms exporters in the world, which serves to subsidize a arms industry that gives Sweden an independent defensive capability it would not otherwise be able to afford. Swedish military security is complicated, and not accurately described as ” free-loading on the security provided by the US military”
The US spends 3.8% of GDP on it’s military, Sweden spends 1.3%. US government spending is 34% of GDP, Swedish government spending is 51% of GDP. That is to say, differences in military spending explain only 10% of the difference in government spending between the US and Sweden. This is a really stupid talking point.
I was getting all geared up for an argument when I realized that I’m not posting on the part of the internet where any incorrect statement forever discolors everything you say, and it’s perfectly acceptable to say “That information is new to me, and while I think my underlying point is still good, I think you’re probably right about this.”
So that information is new to me, you’re probably right, and while I think my general point about US military involvement stands, you’re probably right about this.
That’s such a relief. You know how awful it is to defend terrible talking points because you’re in a fight and concession is weakness?
This comment makes me really happy; I think the fact that people feel this way about the SSC comments is a real credit to Scott.
I am thrilled to be part of an online community where this is possible, and I will strive to uphold this standard with my own behavior.
Sorry for the tone!
@CJB/@Larry Kestenbaum/@Eugene Dawn:
How do we have more of this and less of everyone fighting to defend weak arguments and the associated problem of being incapable of seeing their arguments are weak?
Certainly, modifying one’s own behavior around one’s own weak arguments to the extent that it is possible, is the first step. But that runs smack into the problem of frequently not being able to see that one has a weak argument.
What steps can anyone take to help others to identify/acknowledge their own weak arguments?
One idea that seems reasonable is to be willing to call out arguments which are weak which support a viewpoint or worldview that you believe to be true. It’s easier to accept criticism from your “own” side.
That strikes me as a fundamentally hard thing to do.
@ HeelBearCub
For what it’s worth, while composing a comment on where mass shooters get their guns, I noticed a flaw in my own argument. The Aurora and Tucson guys spent months planning, and Aurora (and Breivik) spent a long time accumulating equipment. With that kind of diligence, they could probably manage to get an illegal one.
The Newtown guy might have been acting on impulse and been deterred by the lack of convenient guns in their house, if his mother’s background check had discovered a son under mental observation living with her.
I’m too lazy to look up more samples, but a key might be ‘murderous crazy + OCD’.
@houseboatonstyx:
Certainly, being willing to examine one’s own thinking and identify flaws is what we should be after. Acknowledge the flaw out loud can make for a powerful example to others.
@HBC
Hahaha, as if I know 😛
As a pretty new commenter here, I hardly feel as if I’m qualified to talk about how to raise the standard of discourse, but what I’ve tried to do so far is
1. Refuse to respond to a thread if reading the thread makes me frustrated or angry, since that’s likely to activate the motivated reasoning parts of my brain
2. Try and make my comments as factual as possible, without much argumentation
3. If I say something that is more opinionated, try and distance myself from it — I’ve tried to say things like, “my intuition is”, rather than “I think”, since I feel that it commits me less to the position I’m advancing. Another one that I try and use in real life is not to respond to flaws in arguments with “Oh yeah? Well what about ______”, but rather to try and say something like, “I think a possible response to that is ________”, again putting some distance between me and the counter-argument I’m making. I really find that this lets someone attack my view without me feeling like I have to go on the warpath to defend it.
I’ve also found that this technique helps me keep discussions from turning into arguments, which again are where my motivated reasoning comes out.
As with all sorts of personal virtues, I think the best strategies don’t rely on you being able to muster up the strength to be virtuous once you’re in a difficult spot; rather they prevent you from getting in such a spot in the first place. This implies a certain ability to ignore what you feel are extremely wrong arguments, though, which has its own drawbacks.
But yeah, it’s pretty hard, in general. I think part of it is also to forgive yourself and others for failing to uphold perfect standards of discussion at all times–pretty much anyone in the SSC comments is doing better than the vast majority of the rest of the internet.
@Eugene Dawn:
All very salient points for modifying one’s own behavior. My intuition is that #3 is very important.
It seems that even just examining one’s own comment and putting the think/believe/intuit modifier where this is actually what is happening is important. We should strive to differentiate between what we “know” to be true based on citable evidence and what we are less sure of.
I am using the word know here in a fairly weak sense. I’m not asking for the accumulated body of evidence for classical and quantum physics. But I feel that it is all to often easy to unconsciously remove admissions of the limits of our own knowledge in effort to make our arguments appear stronger than they are.
You make a good point that this, also unconsciously, pre-commits us to defending weak arguments
I’m very tolerant on the tones of others. I tend to write in a fairly obscene, sarcastic, CAPITALS AND EMPHASIS heavy manner, which I hope comes off as jocular and fun to read, but can come off abrasively. Dinna fash yerself lad/lassie, as the Scots.
While I’ve got you all here-
Any shibboleths, taboos, customs of the country I should observe as a noob?
@CJB:
I’ll be honest. Your previous comments to me have read as abrasive, not jocular.
I’m glad you posted this. I have updated my expectations of what you are likely to post in the future.
“Sweden is free-loading on the security provided by the US military.”
Or, perhaps, the US is spending far more on its military than is necessary simply to defend Americans from foreign attack.
Don’t see a contradiction here.
The United States has traditionally spent enough on its military to defend the free world in general from foreign attack. If we don’t do it, no one will, and a generation after the rest of the free world falls it would be the United States alone against the now-wholly-unfree world. Rational in the long term, but in the short term bloody expensive and tends to mean people who’d rather be attacking other free-world nations feel they need to go after us first.
We keep trying to convince the rest of the free world to step up and help out. Sometimes, a select few free world nations can offer useful assistance in places like Korea and Iraq. Other times, the free world wimps out in the face of e.g. Slobodan Milosevic or Muammar Gaddafi.
@Doug M.
Isn’t this all sort of orthogonal to McCardle’s argument.
“In 2012, the United States granted 121,026 patents to persons resident in the United States… Sweden granted 2,434 patents to persons resident in Sweden.”
Isn’t that only point that matters to her argument? She is basically saying that Sweden gets the benefit of 121K US Patents, but the US gets the benefit of only 2.5K Swedish patents (assuming all patents are, on average, of equal benefit to global society).
I’m not actually endorsing the argument. I feel like there is a fundamental flaw in what she is saying because it ignores every other nations contribution and the logical endpoint is that a nation that produces no patents of there own should do the best.
Basically, I think you are treating her argument as more sophisticated than it actually is. Rather, it is a simplistic argument.
You have to pay to use patented technology, Since when was that free riding?
@TheAncientGeek:
I never used the phrase free-riding. I think the basic argument goes like this: Any patented tech that generates royalties must be worth more to the user than the royalty payments, so clearly the tech is of net benefit to the user, and therefore the globe. Clearly technology has been benefiting humanity since we first started making tools. The US is benefiting the globe more than Sweden by producing more patents.
That was the argument as I understood it.
But @Dore signal boosted the following quote down-thread [which was the part I managed to gloss over in my analysis, making mine fundamentally wrong]:
“[Innovation] disproportionately comes from economies where “incentives for workers and entrepreneurs results in greater inequality and greater poverty”.
McArdle offers no attribution for that claim. If it were true, then the Swedish model, spread worldwide, would result in a net decrease in new technology. That is where McArdle is getting her “free”-rider claim from.
@Dore states the following:
” Sweden … is, according to rankings of choice, 1st in income equality, 3rd in innovation.”
That seems a slam dunk counter-argument. I think the innovation rank is from the Global Innovation Index
I’m not sure I see your point about the innovation. Pretend that Sweden and the US are the only two countries in the world. Then, using your numbers from 2012, there would be a pool of 123,460 patents (which for this discussion we are using as a proxy for innovations) for the US to use and 123,460 patents for Sweden to use. That means that the US would be supplying 98% of its own patents/innovations and Sweden would be supplying 2% of its own.
In this case, imagine the US implementing an anti-poverty policy that reduced their innovation output by 10% to get them more in line with the Swedes per capita/per dollar innovation rates. That means that the pool of innovations that both countries could use would be reduced by about 10,000. That’s a big loss (actually it’s about 10%).
Now if Sweden did the exact opposite and abandoned some of it’s anti-poverty policy in favor of something that increased innovation by 10% the effect on the total number of usable innovations would be much much smaller – 243 (about .2%).
That is a huge marginal difference in the effect of policy, and yes, using your numbers for analysis, would allow Sweden to “free ride” off US innovations in order to worry more about poverty.
@Matt:
“In this case, imagine the US implementing an anti-poverty policy that reduced their innovation output by 10%”
Well, that is the heart of McArdle’s argument, and one she makes without attribution. She (and you) are making the implicit claim that Sweden is reducing their own innovation output over what it would be if they had less egalitarian policies.
If it is true, then you and she have a decent argument. If it is not true, then the argument falls apart. Given she does not attribute this claim, and that by some measures Sweden ranks ahead of the US in innovation, the argument seems to fall apart.
The basic claim needs to be substantiated to evaluate the argument.
I’m seeing the following when I cross-examine the immigration claims:
“Sweden has been very open to immigration for about 50 years now” is qualitative, and seems plausible, so I won’t dispute it here.
“So, as of 2015, almost 20% of the citizens or permanent residents of Sweden are either recent immigrants or their children — some from Eastern Europe, but most from Africa, Asia, or the Middle East.” – When I search for Swedish immigration population, I get the Wikipedia article, which in turn cites Eurostat. It claims 14.3% of the population as foreign-born, in 2010. If both claims are accurate, then Sweden had C% of its pop as children of those 14.3% in 2010, and acquired A% of its pop as immigrants and children of the 14.3% within 2010-2015, and A+C is in the ballpark of 5 (I can’t quantify “almost 20%”), or roughly 500,000 people (Sweden is roughly 10 million people). This seems plausible.
“Add to them about 150,000 refugees (about half of them from Syria) plus an indeterminate but large number of guest workers both legal and otherwise, and the number rises well above 20%.” What’s “well above”? 150k people is only 1.5%.
“And then, “native” Swedes include several non-Swedish ethnic groups, such as the Finnish Swedes and the Sami. So when you total it all up, about 25% of the people living in Sweden are not ethnic Swedes. That still may not be quite as diverse as the US, but it’s definitely not “homogenous”.”
Okay, this is where I get more skeptical. Saying Sweden is diverse in part due to all the Finns feels to me a lot like saying Minnesota is diverse in part because of all the people originally from the Upper Peninsula. Syrians and other Middle Easterners would be a much better example of the type of heterogeneity people mean when they cite the challenges with adopting the Scandinavian model in the US. Going back to that Wikipedia article, the split seems to be 65-35 between non-EU and EU, and of the latter, some are presumably non-Scandinavian, so maybe 70% of the aforesaid 14.6% (~10%) is immigrants from places people could reasonably expect to have a different expectation of how to run things.
By contrast: I see an article from cis.org that claims 1.4 million new immigrants to the US from 2010 to 2013:
http://cis.org/immigrant-population-record-2013
and 41.3 million immigrants total. This is about 13% of the US.
Sounds like a comparison favorable to Sweden. However, immigration is but one proxy for diversity. I think people are looking at multiple perspectives, including rural/urban, North/South, red/blue, Catholic/Protestant/Baptist/etc/etc/etc, and others.
It’s always good to have one’s figures interrogated! But yes, this was a deliberately rough, BOTE calculation in support of the proposition that Sweden is not a particularly homogeneous country by any reasonable definition. I’ll stand by the “around 25%” figure, but it could be as low as 20% and that would still be enough to knock it out of “homogenous” territory.
Finns and Sami and such: note that while Finns have lived in Sweden for centuries, and are culturally fairly similar, they do preserve their own language and are (they say) ethnically and to some extent behaviorally different. It’s not like two different fifth-generation hyphenated-American groups in Minnesota. And the Sami of course are quite different indeed — they’re still mostly nomads or seminomads, with their own culture and language. Of course, there are only 20,000 or so of them.
Doug M.
Didn’t see your reply before posting mine but I agree. The article makes for a very weak case.
It’s Megan McArdle. That’s a red flag right there.
I don’t think she likes those very much…
What’s wrong with Megan McArdle?
Worthy of note is that the immigrants to Sweden are doing MUCH worse than native Swedes, as are their descendants. See Tino.us on this (exhaustively).
By the way Sweden did not invent Skype.
Well, to be precise, it was created by the highly successful partnership of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, a Swede and a Dane. And Zennström, the Swede, was always the senior partner. He literally hired Friis off a help desk, and he was the CEO of all their companies including Skype.
(I’ve also seen Estonia claim Skype, because Zennstrom and Friis used a lot of Estonian engineers in the design process.)
Doug M.
It seems to me like saying, “Besides their massive endowment of natural resources, the Swedes have no natural resources to depend on”.
Sweden is immensely resource rich. Oil isn’t the only one that counts, it just counts for a LOT.
However, the real secret behind the Scandinavian model is that they combine a very large welfare state with very free markets (everywhere outside of oil rich Norway, that is) and huge resource endowments. The only Scandinavian state that LACKS a huge resource endowment, Denmark, is coincidentally also the one with the freest market supporting its large welfare state.
And you’re making a lot of ado about very aggregated statistics. Outside the largest cities, Sweden is actually very homogenous. In line with this, Stockholm is less equal than the US. Not that I think heterogeneity is a very good argument against a large welfare state, just saying. Greater inequality is a REASON for a generous welfare state if that means you’ve got a lot of very poor people.
Are there any practical takeaways from the Glial link to depression? (For non-researchers at least)
I was a little disappointed with your “The Cost of Satisfaction” summary. You know when you read an article about something and the article talks about the half of the results they like but ignore the others?
“respondents in the highest patient satisfaction quartile (relative to the lowest patient satisfaction quartile) had lower odds of any emergency department visit (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.92; 95% CI, 0.84-1.00), higher odds of any inpatient admission (aOR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.02-1.23), 8.8% (95% CI, 1.6%-16.6%) greater total expenditures, 9.1% (95% CI, 2.3%-16.4%) greater prescription drug expenditures, and higher mortality”
So patients were more likely to get routine care rather than ending up in the emergency room and were between 5% and 53% more likely to die in that time. (hazard ratio, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.05-1.53)
That’s one hell of a wide confidence interval.
Subjects were followed for between 1 and 6 years.
This reminds me of an analysis which showed that death rates drop when doctors are away.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530032.100-death-rate-drops-when-top-heart-surgeons-are-away.html#.VYqXJUau_Zc
Because surgeries tend to be put off while the doctors are away so the death rate drops. The patients aren’t getting better care but over the short term the added risk from surgeries increases mortality.
Now imagine 2 groups of people, one who’s doctors ignore their complaints until they end up in the emergency room and the other who’s doctors run tests and refer them for surgery if they find something serious.
Over the short term, just as with the surgeons being away, we’d expect the first group to have lower mortality while the second group are more likely to get needed surgery right now and get their dose of micromorts in the short term from surgeries.
they adjusted for chronic diseases but that will also mess things up if one group of patients are less likely to know they even have the long term health conditions in question, indeed we’d expect people with better doctors to look sicker by that score.
Health care expenditure?
lowest quartile: 4542
highest quartile: 4534
Oh but in that case the ignored the totals and picked out the one sub item in the list where patients in the most satisfied group paid slightly more while ignoring the areas where they paid less. This is also a spot where they stopped doing stats and just compared the numbers without stats because then they would have had to adjust for the other 100 things they were measuring.
They also neglected to mention that patients in the most satisfied group were more likely to rate their health as better and more likely to come out as healthier in the questionaire.
Bullshit alarm is going off (WEE OO WEE OO)
They’ve pretty blatantly scoured the data for anything where the highest quartile looks even vaguely worse than the lowest quartile then only mentioning that as if it’s a primary outcome.
Unfortunately they don’t appear to have preregistered their study design (as is best ethically when running studies involving human participants) so we can’t say for certain whether they changed their primary outcome measures after peeking at the data.
I note that the article also manages to ignore the fact that many countries have welfare states nearly as large and as generous as Sweden’s. Germany, for instance, has universal health care, large pensions, generous unemployment benefits, a raft of mandatory benefits for employees including high minimum wages and generous maternal and paternal leave, heavily subsidized state-run day care, and absolutely free state-funded higher education.
With 80 million people and the world’s sixth largest economy, Germany is not exactly a small country. Yet somehow Germany has managed not only to survive but to prosper. (Among other accomplishments, it’s the only large economy that’s managed the trick of running a massive trade surplus with China.)
Doug M.
Scandinavia has almost thirty million people. It isn’t really *that* small in the scheme of things.
That’s true, but I actually hesitate to lump “Scandinavia” all together. Although they all have ‘welfare states’ by US standards, if you look closely the details are very different.
To give a single minor example, it’s really really hard to fire someone in Sweden. (Like, unless the employee is caught stealing from you, you almost have to declare bankruptcy to get rid of him or her. That level of hard.) Denmark, on the other hand, makes it easy for employers to fire people — employment is basically at-will, like in the US. But Denmark balances this with very generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs, much more so than Sweden. There are lots of things like that.
Doug M.
Ah. So that’s why the Swedish natural rate of unemployment is so high.
Your inclusion of the minimum wage in that list is somewhat misleading. Until recently, Germany did not have a minimum wage, and still did well economically, so that can’t be an explanation for Germany’s relatively strong economic performance. The minimum wage law is only in effect since the beginning of this year, so it’s still too early to tell what the consequences are.
Actually, about 90% of Germany’s workers have had minimum wages since the 1970s. That’s because Germany has really strong unions, and the unions in each sector negotiated minimum wages for that sector. So construction workers had one minimum wage, supermarket cashiers had another, and so forth. There were a few sectors that didn’t get covered — most notably food preparation workers in restaurants — but the great majority of workers had minimum wages, and fairly high ones at that.
What Germany didn’t have until quite recently was a national minimum wage set by law instead of bargaining. That was seen as almost unnecessary, since almost all industries already had wages set by bargaining with the unions. So it took them years to get around to it.
Doug M.
For the sake of most of the economic arguments around minimum wages, industry/union-negotiated minimums are the same as “no minimum.” Getting a contract where no new worker in your same job can come in and undercut you does have some negative externalities, but they’re substantially different (and according to anti-MW arguments, less harmful) ones from passing a law where no new worker even in a completely different field can undercut you.
You’re talking about *Tarifverträge*, which are quite different from a minimumg wage. Aside from being negotiated between unions and employers, rather than being set by the government, *Tarifverträge* do not establish a uniform minimum wage in a particular sector (to which not even all the employers in that sector are bound), since the wages in question vary by factors such as the type of job and seniority.
I don’t know where you’re getting this 90% figure from. The figures that I found with a little bit of googling are that a little over half of all employees are paid according to a sector-wide *Tarifvertrag*. See for example https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/BevoelkerungSoziales/Arbeitsmarkt/Tarifbindung.html
90% isn’t how may employees are paid a minimum wage, but rather how many are working in sectors where a minimum wage has been established — since having a minimum wage in an industry is going to affect everyone in the industry, for good or for ill.
Doug M.
The ~50% figure IS the proportion of employees who are working in firms which are bound by a sector wide “minimum wage” (a Branchentarifvertrag). And no, such a Branchentarifvertrag does not affect everyone in that particular industry since not all employers are bound by it.
Re: Tolkien and the amount of work he did on designing his calendar; from a letter to Naomi Mitchison:
I am also very pleased to see the link about Yola 🙂
Re that adoption thing: His last name, “Hass”, is the german word for “hate”.
Now remind me how it’s called when the name describes the person’s character…
Edit: Ah… it was nominative determinism.
Anyway, just felt like pointing that out is a thing around here, so there.
Hah! It’s nominative determinism.
I’m embarrassed to ask this, because I think of myself as good at spotting ambiguity, but: what ambiguity do you mean, in the book subtitle?
I assume the intended meaning of “Intelligence: All That Matters” is that intelligence is the only thing that matters. If I squint a bit I can contort “all that matters” into meaning “all of those things matter” instead, but even then it’s a stretch to make the referent be “things other than intelligence”. Is that what you’re suggesting, or am I missing another interpretation?
“All That Matters About Intelligence” vs. “Intelligence is All That Matters”
Oh, I see, thanks.
The first one didn’t occur to me, because it seems like such a contentless subtitle that doesn’t add anything to the title. I still think the second one is intended, then, especially given the chapter heading “Why intelligence matters”.
The first one conveys that v the eponymous time has all one needs to know about intelligence–no other reading required. The second is making a strong case about the role of intelligence, but doesn’t claim to describe everything about intelligence.
@Rachael, @rand m:
Another way to put it:
“Hand Crafting Dollhouses: All That Matters” has an entirely different connotation.
Shit, I read it as “Intelligence is All That Matters” vs “Intelligence: It Matters!” Go figure.
Please tell me this title is a Legend of Zelda reference…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters,_Inc. presumably
Damnit. 🙁
Probably Monsters, Inc.
The cartel link is incredibly misleading at best, and probably just plain wrong. (The Mexican government’s official position is that there are 9 cartels left.)
There are two possible steelmen of the cartel article. One is that there are only two national alliances of cartels in conflict with each other. This says absolutely nothing about progress in the war, and contradicts the article, but is true from a certain point of view.
The other is that killing the leaders of cartels leads to the cartels balkanizing/fragmenting into smaller groups, which is true. But this again does nothing to actually reduce violence or the drug trade, and AFAIK it’s flatly false that all but two cartels have fragmented.
(Mexico actually does appear to be making some progress; e.g. homicides have declined from their height. But the article is wrong or misleading.)
The Ozy post seems to be a reblog of someone else?
Great. My wife is pregnant with our first, due in November. November, apparently, is the cruelest month. Like I wasn’t nervous enough. 🙂
I was born in November and turned out okay.
OK, that helps. Plus my dad slapped me in the head at lunch today when I voiced concerns after reading the study. His take: “that’s stupid.” Sage wisdom, probably.
Especially because kids don’t necessarily arrive when expected. If the kid stays in for nine months, count your blessings.
“A while ago, I was getting the impression that the Mexican drug cartels were unstoppable and the Mexican government was too corrupt to be able to do anything about them. Now the cartels are almost all defeated or in retreat. What happened?”
Appearances can be deceiving.
During the Battle of the Atlantic, you had steadily mounting Allied losses — higher and higher — and then, abruptly, one month, in which the Allies introduced no radical new measures, they collapsed, and the next month (two months?) nothing, followed by one last trivial attempt and no more.
If you analyze it in terms of Allied losses per sub it was in decline a long time. They just managed to reach a tipping point where Allied anti-sub measures — centimetric radar, Leigh light, aircraft carriers — were deployed widely enough to counter increasing fleet size.
Re: Rachel Dolezal. There probably isn’t a chemical that changes the race of someone’s brain. But on the other hand, it’s still plausible that someone with the right childhood experiences and upbringing can identify with a race that they don’t physically match,in a way that they can’t just throw off later in life. She did have black siblings, after all.
(And on the third hand, I suspect people seem to be picking on her because she seemed to have been calling herself black in order to gain benefits, which is not relevant to the Tumblir post, but is relevant to your explanation of why people pick on her. They’re not picking on her because they’re anti-black and found a person that society lets them be anti-black against; they’re picking on her because the fact that she benefits from doing this calls the narrative into question.)
Also it looks like that’s by someone else on Ozy’s Tumblir because of the way Tumblir does quotes, it’s not by Ozy.
Isn’t DNA a chemical?
Your glibness is grating.
DNA is literally a chemical, but that is not the connotation of the word “chemical” in this context.
Never mind the connotation, DNA doesn’t “change” a person’s race, nor could it unless it was swapped out at the moment of conception.
The outrage against Dolezal seems fairly straightforward: she’s a fraud, which trips our cheater-detection, retributive-anger response. There’s also a bit of cognitive dissonance created, among those with a certain political bent, who may find it hard to articulate exactly how she’s a fraud, whom she is defrauding, and why.
How does this make sense? Even Jon Stewart said that passing as black only brings hardship and pain, not benefits.
You may have noticed that when it comes to “SJ” subjects, Jon Stewart never ever ever stops lying.
Similarly, the benefit of being black is, at least in part, that you have a large contingent of the population who are willing to never ever ever stop lying in order to defend you from consequences of your actions, get you things you want, and shower you with attention and victimhood.
Most of the non-benefits… malefits?… of being black apply to actual black people regardless of what race they claim, and do not apply to white people who claim to be black. All of the benefits of being black apply to white people who claim to be black.
I’m pretty sure that was sarcasm.
Since I can’t tell if you’re joking here…
In this case, the hardship and pain were fucking lies that only hurt the other black people of the Pacific Northwest, while the speaking engagements and professorships were real and accrued directly to her.
The lies about hate crimes are separate from the penalties that accrue from being black in America.
Normally, when these things accrue to black people, we say that they happen in spite of their position of disprivilege, not because of it.
That’s not true. They are in part due to their position, which has an unequal and oft changing mix of benefits and drawbacks.
…not according to Jon Stewart (and a suspiciously large contingent of other commenters).
Yeah, being black is a huge disadvantage for becoming an African Studies professor
It’s not obvious that it brings exclusively hardship and pain if you personally strongly value the company of black people and the camaraderie of black institutions. It seems the same sort of category of thing as pretending to be Jewish because you enjoy Talmudic argument and the company of yeshivot, or pretending to be an aspiring priest because you value the Oxbridge collegiate environment at a period in time when there was a clerical requirement.
I don’t think those are the types of benefits that Jiro was referring to (this hunch is supported by Alraune’s response).
RE: pretending to be Jewish, what about the arguments over defining who is Jewish?
If the Orthodox (or orthodox) argument is that heritage is through the maternal line, so that only the children of a Jewish mother can be Jewish, what about the children of Jewish fathers or descendants of more remote Jewish ancestry?
Some strands of Jewish thought accept people as Jewish even if they can’t produce the requisite matrilineal proofs. Are they transracial wannabes, only pretending to be Jewish for the benefits?
This is the example that occurred to me as well. My initial feeling is that anyone with some sort of “meaningful” Jewish ancestry or connection with Jewish tradition or heritage ought to be allowed to identify as Jewish (“meaningful” being left deliberately vague) — thus someone with a Jewish father should count, or someone adopted into a Jewish family and raised Jewish.
I think this intuition is also behind my feeling that race and gender really are different for this sort of “trans” phenomenon–it would be absurd for someone to claim that they just “feel like a Jew”, or that they “should have a Jewish body” — to be Jewish is as much historical and cultural as strictly biological.
With less confidence, I’d say something similar holds for being black, perhaps especially in America — that there’s a culture element and an element of some shared history as well. I think I remember debates about whether Obama should be considered part of the “black community” as his African ancestry was more recent, and for example his ancestors had missed out on slavery.
I think this is what people find most unlikely about Dolezal’s claim, and what separates it from claims to feel like a woman–even if you “feel” your body ought to have more melanin, that would’t make you truly African-American any more than a Ghanaian born with strong, stereotypically Jewish features would be considered Jewish. Whereas, anyone with female features really is considered a woman.
Of course, there are still complications and edge cases, hinted at by the issues raised by others, but I think this sort of idea underlies my intuitions.
I know Jewish conversions are fairly rare, but do exist.
Presuming the convert is a woman, are her children considered Jewish?
No comment on how to make the decision, but I was highly amused by the genetic evidence suggesting that the Ashkenazim are descended from male Jews who picked up Italian wives and then settled in Germany. Basically, their Y chromosomes (the paternal line) look Levantine, while their mitochondria (the maternal line) looks southern European. So very likely by this standard, most European Jews aren’t Jewish!
@CJB
Yes, they would be, with the caveat that different denominations have different standards for what counts as a conversion.
Aaaand, while looking up Jewish conversion, I discovered the existence of the Subbotniks, a Russian Christian sect that adopted Jewish rites and eventually came to regard themselves as Jews, while still holding reverence for Jesus and the Gospels.
Following Wiki, it seems many of them moved into the Pale of Settlement, or became early Zionists and moved to Palestine, intermarrying with ethnic Jews.
It seems Subbotnik communities don’t celebrate Hannukah, as it has no religious significance, and is only significant as a national holiday for ethnic Jews.
Well, that is just fascinating. I have no idea what this means for the possibility of “identifying as Jewish”.
Not really so rare. There are more converts to Judaism (“Jews By Choice”) in the world today than ever before.
A convert is considered completely Jewish, just as if he or she were born to a Jewish mother, so yes.
Of course, different movements have different standards for what is considered a valid conversion. I have heard of a guy who went through conversion three times, with differently affiliated rabbis, in order to satisfy various conflicting authorities.
In Biblical times, Jewish descent was patrilineal. The matrilineal thing came along later.
Jewish settlement in Central Europe was in medieval, not biblical times, though. Definitely post-Rabbinical Judaism.
Interesting, the way social forces push on some but not others.
My ex-gf is mixed race, half black/white. She said that as a child she was never white enough, and by high school she wasn’t black enough. The latter is what has shaped her self-conception as definitely black, as the perception of the black community is what she considered most authoritative. She’s now with a black husband.
But an old Barnes & Noble coworker of mine, also half black/white, refused to pick one side or the other, and more or less considered her identity to be shaped by her interests (graphic novels and going to Comic Con). Her boyfriend is white.
I suspect a lot of geeks consider themselves that first and an ethnicity second.
FWIW, I see a lot of black nerd women on OKC making it quite clear they’re fine with interracial dating. 😉
“Contain somewhat contained”
Because it’s not like universities influence nearly every single person who good on to any important position in the nation.
“Open borders advocates take note”
Was that an admonition to beware of how their goals can weaken the west, or to adopt these tactics in order to accomplish their noble goals?
Scott, I think it’s pretty clear that Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be black is in fact a good analogy for transgender considered in the way you discussed it.
As far as I can tell, you basically said that we should redefine “woman” to mean “a human being who wants to be called a ‘woman’,” and that we should do this to be nice to them. In that case, why not redefine “black” to mean “a human being who wants to be called ‘black'”?
If we can find a reason not to redefine the word ‘black’, we can probably find one not to redefine the word ‘woman’.
The problem here is that the way Scott discussed it is different from the way that other people discuss it. Scott’s principle was broad enough that it does cover transracialism (and otherkin). The principles espoused by the Tumblir post are narrower, and don’t. How much does Scott agree with the Tumblir post, and is he aware that agreeing with it means disagreeing with his previous post about transgender?
This is why I generally reject the standard argument for accepting transgenderism. (Or rather, I accept it only on a personal rather than societal basis, essentially out of politeness and not being particular about being a stickler in social situations; I’ll even respect otherkin’s identity preferences, as long as they don’t pee on my carpet.)
A better argument is the one Scott linked via Ozy, which is based on the actual science of gender. Did you read that?
The argument there seems to be, “sex/gender essentialism -> transgenderism good; racial non-essentialism -> transracialism bad.” Strangely, this cuts in the opposite direction of the major thrusts of arguments in the last half-century.
I’m not sure essentialism is exactly the right way to slice this. For instance, this approach can accomodate various axes and degrees of gender, which essentialism would forbid; it is also compatible with a racial essentialism that denies any mechanism that would produce a transracial person as hormones might a transgender person.
…only if those axes/degrees are rooted in some essential material feature. So, still essentialism.
This is less clear to me. I think their perspective does necessarily rest upon a racial essentialism, but they try pretty hard to avoid the appearance of it.
That was because Scott’s defense of transgender was wrong.
Anything that concludes “the only cost is that we are a bit nicer to people” is one hundred percent guaranteed to be absolute bullshit and you should weight it as having no factual relevance. If we were to be obligated to “respect” everyone’s claims about their identity, then the Identity Games would become our national fucking pastime, and personal identity would become exclusively a thing that you manipulate in order to demand other people give you things you want or to be able to abuse people and get away with it.
The actual defense of transgenderism has to do with the empirically verifiable neurological differences between male and female brains and the fact that brain differentiation occurs at a different stage of fetal development than the body’s sex differentiation and there is a small but extant possibility that this process won’t go the way it is supposed to.
Perhaps we should be less stereotypical and demanding of conformity to gender roles of people’s brains.
What does that have to do with anything?
Because by saying men’s and women’s brains are different, you are reinforcing complementarianism rather than egalitarianism, and since the emphasis has been that men are superior to women in part because of their brains which are built to run on reason and logic and science, while women’s brains are built to run on emotion and fluffy kittens, you are saying that women can’t do maths, can’t read maps, and should stay in the kitchen making buns for tea 🙂
That escalated quickly.
In America anyway.
That’s just finding the physical mechanism causing it all, though. It doesn’t follow from that that we should accept the self-identification as true. If we found (as I’m sure we have) empirically verifiable neurological differences in the brains of schitzophrenics, it wouldn’t follow that we should declare that the voices they hear really do exist, and deny github commit privileges to anybody who says otherwise.
That’s not even close to comparable?
The brain you have is the person you are. With transgender people, the brain they have is not the same gender as the body they have. The fact that we can see there are differences means that their statement that they are the opposite gender their body appears to be is NOT a delusion. The brain architecture backs this up.
There are empirically verifiable differences in brain structure between schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics. It does not follow — and nobody has suggested — that the voices they hear are real. It follows that they are schizophrenic, and they have the brain of a schizophrenic person. Schizophrenic people may experience delusions. But saying “I am schizophrenic” is not itself a delusion. (Unless we’re talking about like Munchausen’s where they’re lying about schizophrenia to get — fuck, you know what I mean.)
IN CONCLUSION:
“I have the brain of a woman, so I am a woman even though my body is not” != “I am schizophrenic, so the voices I hear are real.”
“I have the brain of a woman, so I am a woman even though my body is not” == “I have the brain of a schizophrenic, so the fact that I hear voices is real.”
That’s a nice assertion you have there. Bonus points for the essentialism.
Schizophrenics don’t actually hear voices. Their brain thinks they hear voices. So, “I have the brain of a schizophrenic, so the fact that my brain thinks I hear voices is real.” == “I have the brain of a m2f transgender, so the fact that my brain thinks that I am a woman is real.”
The biggest unsupported piece of gender essentialism in your post is the claim that “having the brain of a woman” is a thing. There is some research to try to show this, but to my understanding, it’s not ‘good’ yet.
The sensation of hearing is one made entirely by the brain, so I don’t see how “I hear voices” and “my brain thinks I hear voices” are different in any meaningful way. Anyone who actually hears another person actually speak, also has a brain that thinks they hear a voice.
In the former, sound waves excite the eardrum, which passes the signal to the cochlea. There, clever arrangements of neurons process this signal and pass it on to the portions of the brain which interpret it as “hearing voices”. Only the final stage (the interpretation of hearing voices) occurs for the latter.
Affirming the consequent is quite out of fashion.
But if brain architecture over-rides bodily structure, so that it is irrelevant if you possess a penis and testicles and have testosterone levels and secondary sexual characteristics comparable to those of males, it’s what your brain thinks that identifies you – why should it be relevant that the voice the brain thinks it hears is not actually caused by the vibration of air against the eardrum passing on the signal?
If the signal is faulty in one instance, why can’t we say it’s faulty in another? Your schizophrenic brain architecture makes you think you hear voices, unlike the brain architecture of a non-schizophrenic person. Your transgender brain architecture makes you think you are a different gender, unlike the brain architecture of a non-transgender person.
The sensation that I am a woman does not arise out of any physical input from my body; the sensation that I hear a voice speaking to me does not arise out of any physical input from my body.
Why validate the brain architecture over the bodily reality in one case but not the other?
(You know, I begin to see the appeal of Least Convenient Universe and things like creating the Trolley Problem; there’s a kind of sadistic enjoyment in forcing people to put their backs to the wall and defend their position to the utmost detail in the teeth of all objections, cutting down those same objections and going “But what if – what if – “)
You are being deliberately obtuse. If you have the brain of a schizophrenic, you are mentally a schizophrenic. This does not cause any changes in external reality. You do not erroneously or delusionally believe you are schizophrenic. If you have the brain of a woman, then you are mentally a woman. It is a statement about the brain. About the brain. Not external reality. The brain. If you compare it to a statement about factual external reality you are lying.
It is not a delusion, quit acting like it is — a delusion would be “I don’t actually have a penis and testicles, these do not exist.” That is a statement about external reality that is analogous to “the voices I hear are real”. Since that is not happening, stop fucking posturing as if it is. It is no more a delusion than phantom limb syndrome is a delusion. People with phantom limb do not claim the arm is really there and was never amputated. They claim they still experience sensation as if it was there, and that is true.
The sensation that you are a woman does not arise from any physical input from your body, whether or not your body is that of a woman. It is from your brain. Your brain has a map of what all its parts are and what they are doing. It’s the sense of proprioception. This is why people get phantom limb syndrome — part of their body is taken off, and not removed from their brain’s map. Transgender people have a brain map that says their body is all wrong. It is not a delusion. It is not a belief. It is a state of their brain. They say it is a state of their brain.
The way we have to solve this is by altering the body so it matches the sens of proprioception, just like if we HAD the ability to regrow limbs, that would be how we treated phantom limb, and why therapy does not treat phantom limb. Because these neurological states are not delusions even though they do not match external reality.
You are not presenting the least convenient world — you are just conflating things.
You are being deliberately obtuse. (…see how easy and unhelpful that was!)
If you have the brain of a m2f transgender, then you are mentally transgender. This does not cause any changes in external reality. You do not erroneously or delusionally believe you are m2f transgender. This is a statement about the brain. About the brain. Not external reality. The brain. If you compare it to a statement about factual external reality you are lying.
It is not a delusion, quit acting like it is. A delusion would be, “I am actually a woman, and you should treat me like one.” That is a statement about external reality that is analogous to, “The voices I hear are real.” Since that is happening, stop fucking posturing as if it isn’t.
The sensation that you are hearing voices does not arise from any physical input from your body, whether or not your body is that of a mentally-well person. It is from your brain. Your brain has a map of what’s happening in the world. Schizophrenic people have a brain map that says the body is all wrong about what they hear.
The way we solve it is to adopt a strongly ideological philosophy that ignores thousands of years of traditional Western philosophy.
You are not presenting any reasonable distinction – you are just conflating things.
(Repeat the above using various other body dysmorphic disorders and demand that we solve them by altering the body so it matches the senses. Just flipping phantom limb for body integrity identity disorder is sufficient (because it forces you to confront the fact that you’re hiding normative value), but cases like anorexia should work, too.)
The words you ever-so-cleverly substituted into my argument caused you to say complete fucking gibberish, because you do not understand the discussion, because you are choosing not to understand the discussion, because you believe strategic incomprehension will allow you to win, and I’m not going to bother with your feigned idiocy any more.
Seriously, if you think ANOREXIA involves PROPRIOCEPTION… No. You don’t think anorexia involves proprioception. You just threw things into a word-pudding that would allow you to keep posturing.
…are you seriously hinging all your claims on some idea that there is a unique relationship between gender dysphoria and PROPRIOCEPTION that is not captured by something like body integrity identity disorder (my main example)? If so, that’s a heck of a new one, and I’d really like you to explain further so that we can rigorize it.
If not, then please stop intentionally going off on irrelevant tangents and instead stick to what we both know is the core of the discussion. And please lay off the insults; they just make you look silly.
Bodily integrity identity disorder and phantom limb syndrome also involve proprioception. That is the brain’s map of the body. Anorexia does not. Making an analogy to anorexia because it involves the brain thinking something, rather than this specific sense that works in this specific way, is just substituting words in at random and acting as if you’re being insightful. Just like you are when you claim that any statement involving the word “should”, as in “you should treat me like a woman”, can be delusional and an inaccurate model of reality. Should statements are not models of reality.
And yes, the treatment for someone who actually has bodily integrity identity disorder is amputation of the affected limb, I don’t know why you acted as if you had driven me into a corner on this. If you have a brain map that says “this limb does not exist, it is not part of your body”, no amount of therapy is going to fix that. People should be screened to see if they actually have BIID as opposed to an amputation fetish or general self-hatred expressing in a way that appears similar to BIID, but people who pass the screening should get the amputation because that is what information suggests makes the best outcome.
What would be the benefit of forcing someone to keep a body part that will always feel repulsive and alien?
Agreed. Now your challenge is four-fold:
1) Provide evidence that gender identity disorder does as well. (This is not trivial; DSM doesn’t seem to make any feigns in this direction, though it does make analogy to certain forms of schizophrenia.)
2) Give a criteria for why “involves proprioception” is a meaningful distinction for types of psychiatric conditions.
3) Provide evidence that “having the brain of a woman” is a thing rather than “having the brain of a transgender.” (Note the essentialism here.)
4) Provide a test for determining whether individuals “have the brain of a woman”, so that we can make the distinction Deiseach is concerned about below.
If you can’t do the first/second (which you haven’t yet), then anorexia is still relevant (…and it might be even if you’re successful at these items). Thus, I bring it up in order to cause you to actually argue these two points. So do it.
Many medical professionals disagree with you, and there is evidence showing that such treatment is not more effective than a control group. So we can add to your challenge,
5) Explain why proprioception, in particular, is a critical feature for determining that the appropriate treatment is always to do what the individual asks for.
How close is the correlation between brain architecture and feelings of gender identity? Are there any studies about this that include both cis and trans people?
I mean, I’d expect there to be some overlap, in that brain architecture probably has some influence on whether someone “feels” male or female. But I’d also expect there to be some women with spatial/mathematical “male” brains who still identify as women, and vice versa.
Plus, lots of people with mixed or ambiguous brains.
@Hyzenthlay
My understanding is that it’s really quite bad at this point and doesn’t come close to demonstrating the things some people want to claim. They’re just being hopeful; that’s all.
Has there been a brain study of transsexual people who weren’t taking hormones? For that matter has the original study been replicated?
What do you do if someone identifies as transsexual, gets the brain scan, and is told “Sorry, your brain architecture and physical gender are congruent”?
Not really transsexual? Only faking? Deluded?
Transtransgender. They have dysphoria over not being transgender. Gender dysphoria dysphoria, if you will.
I am admiring the biological essentialism on show here, that is usually the first thing decried in discussions of “what makes a transgender person transgender”.
If we are claiming there are measurable physical differences between male and female brains, and if we are claiming that racial attributes are also physically measurable, are we really going to go so far as to say there are black brains and white brains and Asian brains?
What if you scanned Rachel’s brain and found she had a ‘black’ brain? If the developmental influences in utero on the foetus can alter brain architecture independently of gender chromosomal phenotype, what about environmental developmental influences in utero that can alter brain architecture independent of racial chromosomal phenotype?
Not really transsexual. Since, you know, the entire argument is about how transsexuality is a verifiable neurological state and not merely what someone “identifies” as.
Some people think they are transsexual and are not. Some people will think they have ANY medical issue you can name, but really do not. This is why screening processes for elective surgery are such a good idea.
Those don’t exist. Gender differentiation in utero was not made up in order to fit a theory and you cannot make up other things that look like it to fit your theory. Every person’s DNA contains information for both male and female development; the gender differentiation is based on hormone levels, and hormone levels are ACTIVATED BY the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, but the information of what the body does in either case is fully present in everyone. There are people with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who are mentally and physically female, but have XY chromosomes. They had the male sex chromosome, but the signal it gave off couldn’t be received, so their bodies and brains developed as female. There are people who are mentally and physically male and have XY chromosomes, because due to transcription error they got an X chromosome with the “Turn On Maleness” gene.
Developing fetuses cannot differentiate as being either white or black, the information for both phenotypes is not present in all white and black people and there is no “Turn On Whiteness” gene. This is why people of mixed racial heritage can inherit some but not all features of a given race in their parentage, but someone who has one male and one female parent does not commonly inherit Mom’s boobs and Dad’s penis.
I’m going to repeat one more time. Please cite your sources for this. Peer-reviewed publications are obviously preferred. Show me precisely how strong gender essentialism is and how we can quantify “the brain of a woman”. I know Deiseach wants to know so that she can feel put down by you.
@ Deiseach:
What do you do if someone identifies as transsexual, gets the brain scan, and is told “Sorry, your brain architecture and physical gender are congruent”?
Or…what happens if a person who’s happy with his birth sex gets a brain scan for an unrelated reason and accidentally finds out his brain is actually female?
Should he be told, “Hmm, you’re clearly a woman. You need to start identifying as ‘she’ and get genital reassignment surgery right away.”
“B-but wait…I like being a guy!”
“Sorry, you have a large hippocampus, a high ratio of gray to white matter, and language centers in both hemispheres. No penis for you. TAKE HER TO THE SURGERY ROOM!”
Okay, this would never happen, but it illustrates (for me, anyway) the problem with trying to define gender exclusively by brain structure.
Hyzenthlay:
This happens. Today. In Iran.
Granted, they don’t use MRIs to diagnose, working off of revealed preferences instead.
Also, as the penal code would otherwise require execution, there’s an argument that such surgeries, under various degrees of compulsion, are compassionate.
There are other opinions.
@notes:
I guess I should amend that to, “this would (probably) never happen in America.”
Troubling stuff.
Are there actual peer-reviewed studies on this? Because if you’re going to turn society upside down, require people to deny the evidence of their own eyes, and accept a person with their dick swinging out in the women’s locker room, then you better be damn sure you’re right.
And how does this take into account people who decide to “transition” well into middle age? Many of these people were traditionally masculine for most of their lives, married women, fathered children… then one day they suddenly decide they want to be girls? Sorry, but no. Blanchard’s autogynephilia hypothesis makes a hell of a lot more sense here. If that’s the case, then Bruce Jenner is just a pervert, and we have no obligation to play any part in his weird sexual fantasies.
Here’s a study and I am not looking for more because for some fucking reason Google has decided not to function for me, again. Have you searched with Yahoo lately? It’s AGONY.
The link you provide does not appear to be about someone with their dick swinging out in the women’s locker room. It appears to be about a woman who saw someone who looked like a man enter the locker room, and that’s all the information provided about the incident. Unless it’s in the video that I can’t get to work. But if it’s not, you’re saying this is bad based on an egregious behavior that you yourself invented. (Someone who swings their dick around in the women’s locker room is probably not an MtF transsexual. “Hey, gals, everyone look at the genitals I hate and am repulsed by because they shouldn’t be part of my body! Whee!” doesn’t pass the smell test.)
I don’t think Bruce Jenner is a pervert, and not everything usual that involves gender is a “weird sex fantasy” but I don’t think he is transgender, no. He participated in masculinity with enough zeal to make me very, very, very suspicious of a declaration that he has “always been a woman”; having actual dysphoria makes that kind of behavior agonizing to engage in. While people can work through it, calling that much ATTENTION to it, and calling that much attention to the body you are repulsed by because it shouldn’t be yours, just does not match up at all.
Plus, picking the name “Caitlyn”. Caitlyn is a name that is popular recently. If he was always a woman, he would have picked a female name much, much earlier, when “Caitlyn” wasn’t on the radar.
I FULLY support a screening process before sex reassignment surgery, because there are people who believe they are transgender but are not, and should not be given surgery that will be irreversible and not address the problem. This is also why psychological screenings before plastic surgery are such a good idea: there are some people who want nose jobs because they hate their noses, and some people who want nose jobs because they hate themselves. The former should be allowed to get plastic surgery and not the latter.
I think that Bruce Jenner appears, given the information available, to be someone who thinks he is transgender but is not and will end up regretting SRS.
I don’t think your weird murder mystery can beat the bizarre and fascinating murder of Rodrigo Rosenberg.
Other than the fact that there’s no way to do it without lieing, is there anything else explicitly wrong about Rachel Dolezal? She assumed blackness in a way that was recognizable, so presumably she got the harms as well as any benefits that blackness confers on a day to day basis, and she seems to have been working for the cause.
I sort of like the idea of a world where we can choose our race. In my opinion, if she’s willing to appear black, she should get to be black.
She faked a bunch of hate crimes against herself in order to get more of that sweet, sweet narcissistic supply.
Thanks, DrBeat – I didn’t know that.
I still don’t know that…
[she] faked a bunch of hate crimes against herself
… which is a claim of fact, provable by physical evidence etc (though whether it has been proved I don’t know)
in order to get more
… which is an opinion about a motive that would need solid evidence to prove (such as a statement from her, letters or recordings of her admitting this, etc)
narcissistic supply
… which is an opinion about, well, a diagnostic term that is not subject to solid evidence at all (though if several psychiatrists after much testing agreed to it, might be accepted by some court as a defense against libel)
of that sweet, sweet
… which is just nasty talk.
http://www.people.com/article/rachel-dolezal-black-woman-cover-blown-hate-crimes
This article has a good review of her reported hate crimes. Any one of them, I might give her the benefit of the doubt. (And I might still give her the benefit of the doubt on one or two.) But there’s a big pattern, and for one noose her landlord told her before she called the cops that he had hung it for deer.
If that’s lying, is Bruce Jenner lying?
No. Jenner isn’t trying to cause anyone to believe false things. For instance, he is not claiming that he has female biological features. On the other hand, Donzeal was trying to make people believe that she had considerably more African heritage than she actually did.
Jenner and his apologists, however, are trying to enforce social stigma against anyone who points out that Jenner is not actually a woman. This isn’t facially the same thing as lying, but it does require people to lie by implicature.
Worse, they are trying to enforce saying Bruce Jenner was *always* a woman, even when competing in men’s sports and fathering children, in a way that is every bit as much of being a woman as someone who mothered children. It sure looks like it is less about Jenner’s feelings and “just being nice” and more about asserting control over what people perceive as truth–objective, physical reality be damned.
In addition to what DrBeat said –and that is a drum that deserves to be pounded every time anyone thinks of defending her– you’ll notice she faked being black in PNW academia, not the blue-collar south. Blacks are not a homogenous group, some get a lot better benefits:harms package than others.
In my perfect world, you’ll be able to measure your racial oppression (imperfectly of course) by how many people switch races, and in which directions.
That seems like a poor choice of proxy variable, it’s gonna be non-monotonic with the level of oppression.
I don’t think it’s just prescribing pain killers that skews physician ratings. Whenever the topic comes up I always think of Dr. Hodad at Harvard:
“How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444620104578008263334441352
Exceptional physician and horrible surgeon.
For the study from Brazil – the employees actually self-report their race and the employers then ‘report’ it in the sense of collecting and forwarding the information. There is a racial wage-gap in Brazil, so if people with ambiguous races adopt the race they observe in their new workplace environment a wage-gap will be observed by the study.
“Thus, our data on race emerges from a process that is primarily based on information provided by the worker, but where the employer’s interpretation of that information may play a role. “
“Thus, our data on race emerges from a process that is primarily based on information provided by the worker, but where the employer’s interpretation of that information may play a role.”
Shouldn’t that be, “where the workers have motive to report their race as whatever race they perceive as on the higher side of a wage-gap, according to their observation on the ground, which ought to count as evidence of something”?
Shorter Ozy: Transsexualism is a real thing. Is Transracialism a real thing? Doesn’t seem so.
I am 21 and just got my first date ever and it’s to a girl that is actually very good looking. I always hear that depression is an internal thing and you won’t be cured just by changing your circumstances but I have been miserable for half of my life and have felt ecstatic for the last week.
Maslow is still descriptively helpful.
Also, good luck.
Yep.
8 years in while I don’t have the same thrill as the first few months/years I’ve still got a warm glow and contentment where there used to be an endless chasm of fracturing self hate that became my mind before.
Humans are social animals. Sexual/romantic intimacy is good for the mind.
That’s great! I’m happy for you, and I hope it goes well.
But on the topic: from my experience, at least, it’s totally possible to have issues with depression and also be happy. IME depression does not mean being constantly miserable; it means having this recurrent miserableness that follows you around, that can show up as a disproportionate response to negative stimuli or even as a totally inappropriate response when things are going very well.
So be happy and that’s good and that’s great! and like Murphy said, intimacy is good for the brain. But you should probably still be careful about depression generally even so.
There is such a thing as depressing situations and especially if you’re a very romantic person, never having had a date at the age of 21 certainly counts.
MDD “proper” is an internal reaction that’s wildly out of proportion to, and not helping with, one problem or another. It can be useful to emphasize that because fixing the external issue will not usually help; somebody who’s already in a depression loop will just find something else to despair over, so it’s better to focus on the depression loop and ways to get out of it. But of course depression doesn’t happen entirely in a vacuum.
I’m not a doctor, but if you want my opinion anyway, please consider that in the absence of depression symptoms, you have the ability to improve your life in a way that you can’t while you’re miserable. And some possible improvements can indeed help guard against the symptoms coming back. Some of the usual suspects are: increase exercise, eat better, identify a few people who are dragging you down and reduce their impact on your life, actually get around to working through that depression self-help book… or whatever you never had the energy for although you know it’d be good for you.
Take care, and cultivate gratitude.
This. There are kinds of feelings miserable that are not the unchangeable-no-matter-what-happens kind of depression. It seems to be something of a fashion lately (in Western culture, and subject to variation within that) to deny that it’s ever appropriate to feel miserable unless it’s due to a clinical inability to feel happiness, i.e. MDD; but that’s bullshit.
I’m saying this as someone who has also been miserable for most of their life, but whose happiness level can and does vary based on external circumstances, of which my romantic situation is a significant aspect.
There is a treatment modality called Interpersonal Psychotherapy that treats depression by focusing on improving the quality of one’s close social relationships. The theory is that one’s social needs are important to mental health and that problems in one’s relationships can lead to depression. In this model, depression is not just an internal thing but an interpersonal thing. So from this perspective, starting a warm close romantic relationship could be quite therapeutic. Of course, I am not saying that internal factors do not matter, rather that they are not the whole story.
All the best with the dating 🙂
That’s right, but as far as I understand it, Interpersonal Psychotherapy in practice is usually focused on improving the worst relations you have, because those are the ones that are giving you problems.
And usually it’s the parents. People tolerate behavior from parents that they’d never tolerate from a friend or even a romantic partner. That tolerance is expected in our culture, and with lifespans getting ever longer, there’s a growing incentive to “get along with”, or tolerate, terrible parents since they can be around for most of your adult life. But tolerance is a conscious choide from the “grown up mind”, and there are smaller, simpler, more sensitive parts inside any human mind that can have a much harder time handling the stresses that puts on the whole system.
@Wrong Species, Congratulations!
Thank you! And same to everyone else who commented.
Note how you’re feeling in six to twelve months. That will give you a better idea whether this young lady at that point has lifted you off the hedonic treadmill.
The craziest thing about this comment thread is that we’ve got dozens of comments on Rachel Dolezal – well discussed everywhere – and none on Burnham v. Duquesne, a rivalry that spanned the Boer Wars and the logistics of rare earth metals during WW:I, with a temporary alliance in the great cause of turning the Gulf Coast into a giant hippo-ranch… in significant part, on the theory that bringing in one invasive species to eat another would work just fine.
This is a story that includes more than a dozen jailbreaks, of all kinds, on three continents. It has professional critique of Winston Churchill’s escape from a POW camp. It’s got implications for childhood education. It’s got a description of exactly what the Boy Scouts were designed to produce, and he’s unexpectedly lethal.
For crying out loud, this is the King of Scouts vs. The Black Panther! This is the kind of real-life adventure that pulps tried to emulate (watch for H. Rider Haggard looking to life for his inspiration).
This really shouldn’t need signal-boosting, because it is awesome.
I will take the blame for that, but not apologize.
I expect the length is at fault for the lack of hippo reaction though. Give it a day, they’ll read it until after the initial commenting flurry has died down.
It was this comment that got me to read the article, and I loved it, so thanks.
Which I think explains why people are commenting on the Dolezal article instead — it has “inertia”, as a topic, from a lot of pre-existing exposure. When there were no comments up, I doubt a person not exposed to any story in these links would be that much more likely to comment on Dolezal, but more people have been exposed to Dolezal’s story and formed opinions they want to voice. Once the comments get going, they guide views and discussion — here as much as with the golden opportunity to have an
argumentdiscussion on race.Yes, yes, that’s interesting, but what exactly is there in that article that I can use to promote my beliefs and my personal virtues?
Well, if you’re into free markets, you could point out that problems left to the market got solved (molybdenum), and problems left to the government didn’t get solved (hippos). In fact, my reading indicated if Burnham had taken his 50k in venture capital and just started a hippo ranch, either (a) I can have hippo bacon and turkey omelettes for breakfast (and factory farming is less destructive) or (b) hippos wouldn’t have actually worked in America for some reason and the whole venture was doomed from the outset.
(I’m unclear if hippo ranches needed special government authorization because nature preserves or environmental regulations or something, or if they were just waiting for another 250k before starting the hippo ranch. In the former case, you also get to add “government regulation of the free market stopped entrepreneurs from developing hippo ranches, leading to the modern factory farm and the corresponding environmental destruction.”)
Excellent possibilities for arguments on unschooling (Burnham turned out fine), child-labor laws (Burnham, again), and Scouting curriculum.
Hippos haven’t been domesticated. They’re highly aggressive, and kill people. Lots of people. Ranching them implies great pulp adventures; may not actually be efficient.
A more zealous Boy/Girl Scout curriculum would apparently involve badges in bridge demolition, sabotage, escape, and assassination… which would certainly be different.
You’re wrong, at least about the Demolition merit badge: I just sourced some C4 for my Scout son for his proj…
Be right back!
Yeah, I’m going to spend the next month annoying all my friends into reading this article.
The trucks aren’t driving off the carrier. That’s a catapult test. They get something big and heavy, fit it so it rolls well, and fire it off to make sure they’re working.
In fact, that’s the tests of the new electromagnetic aircraft launch system on the USS Gerald R Ford.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOijb3JPCe4
That is amazingly cool. Thanks for the context.
And for those of you tracking the progression of sci-fi into reality, the “electromagnetic aircraft launch system” is what you might call a “railgun.”
You mean we could have been firing trucks this whole time? Quake really dropped the ball.
But Half-Life 2 picked it up. Well, not trucks, but big things (violating Newton’s 3rd Law, but still).
There is another element to the schools soliciting donations.
Rankings.
https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2015/world-ranking/#/
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2014#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?int=9ff208
There’s a small number of influential rankings that make a big difference to universities. Being one of the top 10 vs top 50 or top 100 vs top 300 makes a huge difference to the prestige and influence of the university.
As you’d imagine the ranking system is strongly distorted to favor the dominant institutions and one of the ranking elements is “Alumni giving”, the justification is that if your uni is really awesome then lots of your graduates will be wealthy and also grateful and so will donate a lot. In practice it’s a way of abusing the system to boost the rankings of collages popular with the already rich.
There’s a number of metrics of Alumni giving but some are as simple as the percentage of alumni who’ve ever donated anything at all, even a dollar so they’re strongly incentivized to try to get even poor alumni to donate something.
I’d better use this analogy before the nativists do: Is there any truth to the rumor that Jürgen Hass is planning to change his name to Shub-Niggurath?
I can’t make heads or tails of this.
Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young is her full title.
Ja! Ja!
If time crystals are the only way of doing an infinite amount of complex computing, then with probability 1 we are in a computer simulation run by a time crystal.
What if the crystal is in fact a cube?
In that case we really are educated stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWsXzrh17Dw
By that reasoning, the computer simulating the time crystal is also inside a higher level simulation inside a time crystal, which is inside, etc.
It’s time crystals all the way down!
Are there any studies on whether courses to teach men not to rape work? If the contentions that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a small number of remorseless sociopathic serial rapists, then I’d think not.
Teach men not to rape? How fucking offensive is that? It’s a goddamned felony, second only to murder!
There’s big swathes of the country where if the male relative of a raped female kills her attacker, no jury convicts him. Rapists are the lowest status people in our society, even in prison.
Every man knows not to rape. What all men don’t know or don’t agree with is the radical anti-male definitions of rape that if a woman ingests one drop of alcohol, she is incapable of consent, if a man asks twice, a woman is incapable of consent, if a woman consents enthusiastically but gets caught by her husband, it wasn’t real consent, hell, even if a man has the gall to not, technically exist, he can still from the ether of a woman’s own imagination, gang rape her all on his own (and break bottles on her face!)!
You’re gonna need more than one class to teach men all that. You may want to book the room for the semester.
The offensiveness of this concept needs to be restated as often as possible. No one would propose fighting neonaticide by “teaching women not to kill their children”, even though it’s at least as gendered a crime as rape. Most rapists are men, but most men are not rapists, and it’s unacceptable to treat us as if we are. It would be unacceptable even if these so-called rape-prevention classes actually lowered the incidence of rape.
Actually, when you start including in the definition of rape things like “emotional coercion (i.e asking more than once)”, “sex with someone who’s functional but had a couple drinks”, “touching/kissing without explicit verbal consent” or any of a number of other things that fall afoul of “affirmative consent” but not outside normal sexual behavior… then it’s not clearly true that “most rapists are men”.
There is a pretty good body of evidence that most rapes, like most crimes in general, tend to be performed by repeat offenders. I think it was Derbyshire that pointed out rape and mugging are not hobbies- you either never do them, or that’s all you do.
Obviously very reductionist, but the point stands. I think there needs to be a “this is rape, this isn’t, this could become rape so heres how to proceed safely” class, but specific “Boys, here’s how to not rape” classes are just going to piss off all the boys taking them.
Also to help boys that get raped, maybe? But that seems like it should be a different thing.
Ok CJB, now go read fifty romance novels and formulate a class for women about their “problematic” expectations of male behavior and sex.
Whatever. I know lots of ladies have fantasies about this stuff, and feminists like to inflate the number of behaviors counted as rape, but real rape, as in forcing someone to have sex with you or drugging them and taking advantage of them, is very wrong. We didn’t give Armin Meiwes a pass (or rather, the Germans didn’t) because his victim wanted to be killed.
That Meiwes analogy would only work if you were talking about statutory rape.
I am certainly not arguing that rape isn’t wrong. You have to read a lot of things that aren’t there into what I wrote to get that.
My point is that sexual interaction that isn’t rape has a lot of uncomfortable situations and the expectations both men and women have can be at cross purposes. Expanding the definitions of rape to cover every awkward encounter is a vile intrusion into the most intimate of private interactions.
the Statue of Liberty is green because all old tarnished copper is green. When it was first built, it was, well, copper-colored. When it tarnished the government was supposed to raise money to fix it, but never got around to it.
As the link says, much like other oxide layers on other metals, the tarnish is protecting the underlying metal.
If it was “fixed” by polishing it all off, you’d have to replace the entire statue’s skin every few decades (or so).
What if you only polished it on special occasions, like, say, the centennial?
Before we stop making fun of her entirely: The Original Rachel Dolezal
I was sorry to see that the Nevada law doesn’t allow you to spend the Education Savings Account money for things like college tuition etc, except when it is ‘dual enrollment’ (ie, taking the college class during high school).
They do allow the money to roll over from year to year, but if you’ve been frugal, you lose the money when the kid graduates instead of being allowed to apply it to college costs. What a shame.
People would have a real incentive to spend the money prudently if it could later be used for college costs. I bet it would be a real incentive for someone teetering on the brink of staying home and homeschooling their kids.
The rape prevention article is here and the editorial, both open access.
I don’t think that’s a truck driving off an aircraft carrier. I think that’s a truck being fired off an aircraft carrier, by the catapult normally used to launch planes.
My first thought when reading this: Uh, do you mean beer? :D
“Whose Shining Garden is this?” Tom asked in Scots.
Re: The Popehat story
Ken does good work, and that’s a good story about a very important subject. I’m just not sure that the important subject is internet speech laws per se.
I mean, as far as I can tell, the gag order and subpeona are already somewhat beyond the scope of the law- or at least the law as you or I would interpert it. Even if we never see restrictive SOPA-style regulation of internet speech, these sorts of scary investigations are a consequence of very basic bans on traditional threats. Not many people are in favor of legalizing all threatening speech, which means that the best we can hope to do is minimize abuse through a review or responsibility-assigning process.
…but it seems to me that this is the same sort of thing which has happened in non-virtual history pretty regularly. In fact, it seems like exactly the sort of situation which came up in Watts v. United States in 1969.
I might be misunderstanding you. If you mean (as Ken touches upon briefly here) that these kinds of traditional threat laws have problems dealing with the incredible hyperbole common to online comments because of a failure to contextualize well, I’d agree with that. If you mean that it shows that proposed laws targeting internet comments are dangerous, I’d agree that they are, but not that this case demonstrates it very much.
In any event, great links post. We need more trucks being flung off things!
Yeah- I was all “MY. GOD.” until I read the post and was like….yeah, that’s issuing threats against a federal judge.
I’m all for less restricted speech, but the “threats” law seems pretty good and well implemented.
I would say that this was government over-reaction, but unfortunately it is in America, where some people really do make crazy-sounding, aw c’mon they can’t be serious, threats online and then really do go out and shoot people, make bombs, send anthrax through the post…. goodness’ sake, in the Big Shouty Gun Control comment thread, someone said that yeah, America is a violent society and always has been and that’s why Americans like guns, have guns, and should be permitted to have guns to defend themselves from the other people who have guns.
We’ve just seen an idiot kid shoot nine people dead in a church. Anyone who saw the stuff he posted online would have said as well “This is just silly posturing”. But he went out and did it.
So yes, it may sound very over-the-top, but it’s an unfortunate fact that there’s a real (if tiny) chance someone might think that a judge needs to be shot pour encourager les autres and won’t content themselves with shooting off their mouth online.
Besides which, are we really supposed to just shrug and accept the coarsening of discourse where, when disagreeing with a court judgement, it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to the judge as a “cunt” and talk about feeding her into a woodchipper feet-first?
I don’t think the keyboard warriors really mean to do anything of that sort. I do think my mother would have slapped the faces off them for using that kind of language about anyone.
@DeiSeach – “Besides which, are we really supposed to just shrug and accept the coarsening of discourse…”
…What’s the alternative? I would sacrifice a chicken in your honor if it resulted in even the worst 1% of offenders encountering the back of your hand, much less all the gentlemen who have expressed malicious carnal intentions on my bum or that of my mother. Unfortunately your hand would be worn to a stump before you made it through even a fraction of the queue.
The scale is the problem. I mean, we know “talk is cheap”, but hamburgers are cheap. Coca-cola is cheap. We’re talking about something that requires wiggling your fingers for ten seconds in exchange for a considerable brain-tingle reward. When you’re looking at tens or even hundreds of millions of mean things said to every actual act carried out, I’m not sure you even have a correlation any more.
Westboro Baptist Church might possibly be a good control group here, as they’re a group that pretty much everyone agrees deserve a good punch in the nose, and I think they’ve even received a few.
[EDIT] – …And also, it occurs to me that this vast explosion of meanness is actually probably a relatively recent development, since most of it requires the relative anonymity and mass audience of the internet. And despite this, violence has still been trending downward for the entirety of the internet’s existence.
I’m actually pretty opposed to the idea of catharsis; my prior is that thinking and talking about something repeatedly encourages you to think or talk about it more in the future, and maybe even act on it. I’ve got to admit that this seems like contrary evidence to that position, though. Maybe the coarsening of discourse lets people vent their aggression in the safest way imaginable, and they are less likely to engage in real-world violence as a result?
Not this again.
Yeah, I kinda feel like maybe someone should elaborate on some of the more likely factors for WHY america is more violent. The “Americans are uniformly barbarians” meme grows… off-putting.
Heh. Funny story- gun stats are the first thing that turned me into a fairly right wing conservative (Grey tribe, but a very red grey) from slightly left of Bernie Sanders (or more precisely, what I think he believes but doesn’t say).
I was pro-gun control but I liked shooting and hunting once in a while, and I liked cool old guns. So I looked up some gun blogs, saw some stats, said nu-uh! and…
Well, honestly, a lot of stats were nu-uh. But some were yah-huh.
Basically, to get the “AMERICAN GUNS MURDER MORE PEOPLE THAN HITLER” memes going, you have to present the data carefully. First, you have to include suicides. Which is as may be, and I’ve seen the same studies on “guns correlate to suicide” as you have- but we have the same suicide rate as the UK. We have a pretty LOW suicide rate for developed nations. Undeveloped nations? No suicide rate to speak of (Seriously- look at the world stats on suicide. They’re quite interesting.)
(also pointing out that lots of people **PLAN** suicide and thus might, you know. Buy a gun.)
Also, you have to correlate “illegal” and “legal” guns because the crime rate among legal gun owners…well, I’ve never gotten good data on ALL gun owners. Concealed Carry Permit holders have a fantastically low rate of revocation, and only a fraction of that fraction are for violent or weapons offense. You’re much safer around a CCP holder than a cop.
Nothing really indicates that legal guns correlate with crime. Astonishingly enough, they correlate with gun accidents, in much the same way owning a pool probably correlates to accidental drownings.
And it involves a lot of decontexualized numbers. There are TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE A YEAR killing in mass shootings. Over FIFTY CHILDREN DIED of gunshot wounds…..and then you have to eliminate the ones shot in drivebys.
If the question you’re ultimate asking is “how likely am I to be shot by someone who isn’t already a criminal on multiple other offenses carrying an illegal weapon” the answer is “not very at all.”
I don’t have more than a 30% confidence in this as true, but I’ve suspected the international media drives the “Crazy redneck US” lines to use to drive their own population leftward:
“We need more security cameras everywhere!”
“But I heard someone say that those who exchange their liberty to gain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”
“Oh ho! Someone’s been listening to the AMERICANS!”
*general titter*
“but seriously folks, unless we want to get gunned down in malls like the Americans- more cameras! And no knives with points!”
Not trying to challenge the bulk of your post, but you gotta be careful about saying stuff like this. A lot of public health data for developing nations is really deficient, and a lot more of it is massaged up or down for murky international politics reasons that you and I generally aren’t privy to.
You can kinda trust numbers on stuff like malaria deaths, where there are NGOs specifically working to get an accurate view on the problem. (The World Bank is a good aggregator of this kind of data, though it’s got its own slant.) Stuff like suicide? Not so much.
@CJB – Yeah, we went through that with a buncha people last thread. Showed em the stats and everything. Linking actual data seemed to be a good way to kill a thread stone dead. It doesn’t seem that anyone actually looked at them, just sidled off when the cognitive dissonance kicked in. The general response seems to be that we were loud/rude/overbearing for not letting the usual canards pass without comment. Probably not worth pushing it.
But but but…..muh stats.
Still, thanks for the tip. I’ll avoid it unless it turns into a thing again.
@Nornagest – excellent point! Thanks for pointing that out.
(I’d also note that the trend held true for “Shitty places I’d still expect to have decent record keeping”- Jamaica for example….although that’s more complicated than you’d expect as well.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Jamaica-s-low-suicide-rate-no-reason-to-celebrate–warns-counsellor_17513871
That article is short on relevant information and long on non-sequiturs that try to create a feeling that suicide is a big problem without actually advancing an argument. It’s sort of understandable coming from a suicide counselor in a low-suicide nation, he’s trying to justify his existence, but I’m not sure why you thought it was worth linking.
Funny thing: I had the opposite experience with homicide stats. But I’d rather not get into a long wrangle over some very minor points of disagreement.
@FacelessCraven
As someone who without having given the matter much deep thought is in favour of gun control, I thought you had a number of unanswered good points, and made me much more skeptical of my previous unexamined position; I would at least make a much more serious effort to engage with the anti-gun control side before stating an opinion in the future.
“Concession is weakness” applies even in SSC comment threads (though hopefully less so than elsewhere), so judging success by the reaction of the participants in a thread can be misleading. I find my mind is much more likely changed by exchanges that I only observe, rather than participate in.
@CJB: I’m not sure what stats you’re looking at about mass shootings rarely using legal weapons. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/nine-facts-about-guns-and-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states
That’s really a side-point (I was just curious about the stats you mentioned, so I googled), but I do think you didn’t address the obvious question of whether legal gun ownership correlates with illegal gun ownership. I don’t know the answer. I suppose based on your professed stances you think that there is little to no effect. Can you offer evidence?
FC
“Yeah, we went through that with a buncha people last thread. Showed em the stats and everything. Linking actual data seemed to be a good way to kill a thread stone dead. ”
My memory is that you announced a precomitment to ignore statistics that don’t suit you on the basis of a theory about cultural differences. That sort of thing will kill a thread.
@TheAncientGeek – “My memory is that you announced a precomitment to ignore statistics that don’t suit you on the basis of a theory about cultural differences. That sort of thing will kill a thread.”
If that is the interpretation you were left with after our numerous exchanges, it is certainly your right to retain it. In any case, our conversation remains available for all to view. If you feel my comments were unreasonable enough to cite to your advantage, I invite you to plunder them verbatim. I do however note that your paraphrases often do not sound much like what I remember writing. I do not think that sort of reinterpretation is likely to lead to mutual respect and understanding. You also don’t seem keen on answering questions. I still don’t know your stance on knife prohibition, for instance.
@Jeremy – “I’m not sure what stats you’re looking at about mass shootings rarely using legal weapons.”
A “Mass Murder” is defined by the FBI as one where there are more than four victims in a single event. Spree killings I think are similar, but in different locations. Thr problem is that there are two distinct patterns that fit this criteria: crazy people shooting random strangers in public, and career criminals killing rival career criminals and whatever bystanders get caught in the crossfire.
The crazy people are very rare, usually have no significant prior criminal history, and usually use legally purchased guns.
Murder committed by career criminals is the overwhelming majority of murders committed, and they overwhelmingly use illegally purchased guns.
The mother Jones article screened out career-criminal murders to focus on the crazy people, which is why their stats show the majority being legally owned weapons. This makes sense if the modern Amok incidents are what you’re worried about. On the other hand, they are a vanishingly small minority of actual murders, and it is arguable that our best strategy might be to ignore them and stop giving crazy people encouragement to aggrandize themselves via random murder.
“but I do think you didn’t address the obvious question of whether legal gun ownership correlates with illegal gun ownership.”
Uh, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. If you can legally purchase guns, why acquire them illegally? If you can’t legally purchase guns, all your firearm acquisitions are by definition illegal. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question?
http://www.guncite.com/journals/gun_control_katesreal.html
…Specifically the Massacres and Law Abiding Gun Owner As Domestic and Aquaintance Murderer sections and their citations might be of assistance for a more in-depth look at the statistics.
Unfortunately, yes, this again. When our native born scumbag criminals started shooting each other in the streets and carrying out “gangland hits”, the first thing most people said was “My God, it’s getting like America here!”
@Deiseach – “Unfortunately, yes, this again. When our native born scumbag criminals started shooting each other in the streets and carrying out “gangland hits”, the first thing most people said was “My God, it’s getting like America here!””
…Well, at least in this case they’re referring to the violent crime problem that actually does exist.
If everyone’s going to assume we’re kill-crazy maniacs over here, though, I say we run with it. Hockey masks and football pads with spikes sticking out. cars accessorized with decorative flamethrowers. Elaborate titles declaring our stature as warlords and delineating the extent of our rule. I could handle being the Ayatollah of Rock n’ Rolla.
If I inadvertantly claimed that mass shootings are done with illegal weapons, I withdraw it. They’re about the only crime that IS routinely performed with legal weapons.
I read through the thread. It was about half people quoting stats back and forth and about half people going “Well, I know very little about the US, guns, gun laws, violence statistics there, or the available literature on violence in America- but I see a lot of it on TV.”
“but I do think you didn’t address the obvious question of whether legal gun ownership correlates with illegal gun ownership”
I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t. I expect there to be a correlation between the amount of legal drugs and illegal drugs- that doesn’t mean we should forbid law abiding people to get Oxy.
Here’s my new gun rights argument:
The CDC points out that 2 children a day die of drowning. Dying in swimming pools is the second most common cause of death in children 1-4. Drowning has a disproportionate racial effect. Overall, 3,500 people die of drowning every year, thousands of them in pools.
By what right, sir, by what RIGHT do you claim the ownership of a swimming pool? There’s no constitutional right to swimming, no SCOTUS ruling permitting pools. Oh sure, the vast majority of pools will never be involved with a drowning- but the hideous toll on our children cannot be ignored.
Being a smart person, I’m presuming you see the obvious flaw with that argument- we don’t restrict reasonable adults activities and ownership of things, even dangerous things, based on the risks they pose to children. Instead, there’s an expectation that the world has unpadded edges. We dont’ deal with sharp edges by padding them all- you deal with it by teaching children to be careful around sharp edges so when they’re old enough they understand the risks well enough to use pools and guns and cars and prescription medication and bathrooms and any of the other thousands of things that cause lots of death every year.
Pretending that guns are a carved out exculusion to this understanding requires explaining why we should ban (Things that are involved with thousands of deaths A) and not (Things that are involved with thousands of deaths B)
Hippos! 3,000 people die of hippo attacks every year. Is the value of having “Large african mammal” WORTH 3,000 lives? That’s a 9/11 EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. Explain to me how the oppourtunity cost of “having hippos” being “3,000 dead human beings a year” is in any way functionally different from the oppourtunity costs of “guns” being “thousands of dead people a year”…..
And that’s ignoring that no one deserves hippo death, while many of those shootings were plenty justified.
Oh, I’m sure at least a few of the people killed by hippos were asking for it
Most people like responding to scope insensitivity, fictional evidence, and a basic need for an Other to aggrandize themselves against. Most people, in other words, don’t know what they’re talking about.
I hope for better from these comments. If you think for some reason that SSC needs to hear what the Irish man on the street believes about the violent proclivities of the American public, please think again; I hear more than enough of that shit on Reddit.
” 3,000 people die of hippo attacks every year”
But think of the bounty of hippo meat we get in exchange!
Just keep the hippos in public swimming pools surrounded by people with guns. It’ll work out.
Deiseach, in her ignorance, believes the United States has too many guns. Therefore, it is appropriate that every American who ever says “go to hell” be the target of a federal investigation, just to be safe.
Because, yes, some of the “threats” being investigated are variations on “go to hell”, which no reasonable person would interpret as manifesting a real intent to cause harm or fear. And when Reason’s lawyers proposed complying with the subpoena w/re the (remotely) plausibly threatening comments but stripping away the merely angry rhetoric, the Feds responded with “No, we need to go after all of these people”.
And, Deiseach, the bit about how America is some hyper-violent dystopia where any insult can presage a bloody massacre, is not true, not kind, and not necessary. Knock it off already.
Funny thing: I had the opposite experience with homicide stats.”
I’d be genuinely interested to hear that story, if you feel like telling it.
@suntzuanime:
Yeah, I dropped the explanatory section while copy/pasting a comment. Essentially the point I wanted to make was one he raised- that a lot of people “commit suicide” though dangerous behavior, that even in a fairly well organized society like Jamaica, they still have problems with underreporting.
@FacelessCraven: thanks for point me to that- great discussion. I left a comment on the ammo control idea, if anyone’s interested.
People who are positive they have all the answers tend to be extraordinarily intolerant of people who express even slight disagreement. Remember what happened to Scott Aaronson when he said he was 97% on board with feminism?
Now, look. I’ve read all your recent posts. You’re a great guy, you’re articulate and knowledgeable. I value and take seriously all that you have to say. I look forward to meeting you in person some day.
But when it comes to guns, I tend to doubt you’re willing to entertain the possibility that someone else may have even a tiny contrary point about anything.
@CJB – “I’d be genuinely interested to hear that story, if you feel like telling it.”
I actually started writing a reply saying the same thing, figured it would be taken as a thinly-veiled attempt to start the argument back up, couldn’t think of a way to say it that didn’t sound like that, and deleted it.
@Larry Kestenbaum – “But when it comes to guns, I tend to doubt you’re willing to entertain the possibility that someone else may have even a tiny contrary point about anything.”
I can’t help feeling that’s a fairly accurate assessment of my own behavior, at least. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but I know I’d be happy to forgo replies/rebuttals entirely to hear your take, and the OT is pretty well empty by this point.
For what it’s worth, you mentioned in one of these threads that you’re trying to be an example of a reasonable liberal to the conservatives around here. I think you’re doing a damn good job of it.
John, in any other country in the world, I would say “they’re just being idiots”.
In America, we see that even if they are only a tiny minority, there are still sufficient angry extremists out there who will, after ranting on the Internet, pick up a gun and go shooting, or make their own bombs, or try and poison people by sending suspect packets through the post.
It’s not necessarily that you have too many guns. It’s that you have too many crazy people who apparently have easy access to guns.
Thank you for that. It means a lot, seriously.
FWIW, I don’t see myself as “trying” to be reasonable, rather, I like to think I am reasonable.
@Deiseach – I guess what I’d try to point out is that I don’t think we have much more of a crazy people problem than you do. We don’t get our murder rate from crazy people, we get it from the massive number of violent criminals emerging from the massive permanent underclass created by the collision of slavery, racism, two horrifying attempts at prohibition, and terminally awful social policies.
People saying mean things on the internet has no connection to either in any case.
@Larry-
“But when it comes to guns, I tend to doubt you’re willing to entertain the possibility that someone else may have even a tiny contrary point about anything.”
I suppose I can see what you’re getting at here. If your rationale is “will CJB be converted” the answer is “probably not”….although I would’ve said the same thing before I started playing with stats about guns.
If you’re worried about a flame war- I precommit to both not replying with anything more than a “thanks!” nor of allowing your opinion to influence my opinion of you. I’m sucessfully not allowing Deiseach’s comments to influence my high opinion of her, and I react far more strongly to perceived anti-americanism than perceived anti-gunism.
@Deiseach
You’re a smart woman, so you’ll see the point here.
I went to Northern Ireland one time- had some friends in Neury and stayed with them a few days.
And the younger brother of my friend was maybe 16 at the time? And this was in 2009, so the Good Friday Accords were, at best, out of his memory if not lifetime.
And these were not political people, even by US standards, let alone Norn’ Irn ones.
And so we’re sitting around BSing, and the younger brother starts going on about the ‘RA, which, being at the time young, stupid and a Plastic Paddy Republican, I thought was the coolest shit ever- a REAL northern Irishman talking about the glorious struggle!
Looking back now, I realize that he was doing nothing more than glorifying murder. Hell, at the time, I had FRIENDS in the British army, and so did the brother I was staying with- several of the people we lived with at college were Scots going into or in the army already.
So my point here is first, anecdotal, and second is – motes and beams, man. Motes and beams.
I am also, based on FCs comment above, not going to make any more posts on guns in this thread- I put up one in the other thread for those that really want to argue with me about it, but he and Larry have good points about not starting up another flame war.
I would, however, be interested to read any comments pointing out why my “pools dont’ kill people, drowning kills people” argument is weak, although I won’t respond.
That is like saying that violent TV is okay in your country, but since our country has some people who watch violent TV and then go kill people, America must ban violent TV.
Or that brushing your teeth is okay in your country, but since our country has some people who brush their teeth and then go kill people, we shouldn’t brush our teeth here.
If a behavior is engaged in by a very large portion of the population, the fact that one country’s crazy people engage in that behavior as well isn’t significant to an attempt to stop them from doing crazy things. People rant on the Internet. Killers are people. Therefore killers rant on the Internet.
That’s not at all what I was talking about.
If I could sit for an hour and talk Mitt Romney out of being a Republican, I’d worry about his mental stability. If you suddenly decided that the Second Amendment wasn’t all that important, I’d worry about yours.
What I mean is, could you ever admit the possibility that your model of the world is only 95% right, instead of one hundred point zero percent right? Do you do nuance?
That is NOT what I want. If I’m wrong, or there is some problem with my facts, I want to know about it. Obviously I don’t want a flame war either. What would please me the most is constructive and mutually respectful engagement on details.
You’re a big picture guy; I’m a detail guy. I’m much more interested in getting things to work on the ground than in any kind of consistent overarching philosophy.
And damn right, swimming pools kill people. Freakonomics (love that book) has a chapter on how swimming pools are a lot more dangerous than guns.
some of the “threats” being investigated are variations on “go to hell”, which no reasonable person would interpret as manifesting a real intent to cause harm or fear.
Not even “go to hell,” which is effectively saying “die and go to hell” (to the point where it can be/is translated as “die”), but “I hope there’s a place in hell,” which is saying that he hopes that, after the judge dies, there exists a specific type of afterlife for him
@Larry: when I read your initial statement, I was simply confused by it. I just don’t see the connection between homicide stats and turning left-wing. I’m not saying “defend yourself,” just wondering how that happened
@Larry- ok.
Let me contextualize my response- I was thinking you were saying something more like “Hey, you’re a cool dood but if I challenge your taboos I don’t know if you’ll freak.”
Hence precommitting not to freak.
I generally operate on the silver rule in internet comments-and this is the least flamey place I’ve ever been.
I am, as I pointed out, not super great at the….clinical sounds negative, but i think it’s a good word for the tone here.
But I’m also pretty funny, so you know. Tradeoffs.
So, circling back to the original point- yes, I’m able to engage with details, and recognize nuance.
For example, two things gun nuts aren’t good at engaging with:
Illegal guns are, far and away, stolen, legal guns. This is typically caused by people who don’t properly secure, store, or carry their weapons. There have also been cases with CCP holders getting weapons stolen out of cars when they entered a gun free area.
If we want to reduce illegal guns- and we do- then we need to work on Joe Gunowner having a better system for control of their weapon.
We could also really use a better background check system- the problem is implementation without either side sabotaging it for political reasons. Background checks are good, useful ideas that reduce guns in criminal hands, but need better handling. So if you’re up for it, I’d like to hear about the homicide stats and your nuanced ideas. I do tend to get….deontological about my overarching philosophies, admittedly.
@careless et al.
Playing devils advocate here-
First, some of those threats were actual threats that can, reasonably, within my libertarianish principles, be investigated.
Second, from an FBI/Enforcement perspective….
Well, to use an extreme example- if one member of a mosque blows someone up, for damn sure the rest are getting looked at. In this case, several people committed a federal crime (lightly prosecuted, admittedly). That they’re looking at everyone who posted there, seemingly in concurrence with the threats?
That doesn’t seem….entirely unreasonable for a police investigation.
Illegal guns are, far and away, stolen, legal guns.
I thought straw purchases edged out stolen guns, but I could be mistaken.
In any event, that’s for the contemporary United States. In other countries, illegal guns are police or military guns sold by corrupt officials (e.g. Mexico), or Cold War leftovers thanks to the Great Warsaw Pact Going-Out-Of-Business Sale (e.g. much of Europe), or legacy guns from a time when such were still legal (e.g. modern UK), or manufactured in black-market machine shops (e.g. Brazil, Pakistan), or smuggled from elsewhere (in which case we redo this whole analysis at the point of origin).
The United States is going to be stuck with a legacy stockpile of tens of millions of guns and billions of rounds of ammunition, even if we implement absolute prohibition and confiscation tomorrow. But, more generally, black markets work. The last time I checked, the price of a generic black-market handgun in the United States was about $200. Which was also the price in the no-private-handguns-for-anyone United Kingdom, and most of the rest of the world. If the demand exists, it will be met. If there is a local source of supply, it will be tapped out of convenience, but if not, smuggling always works.
There is probably nothing you can do to the legal supply of firearms in the United States, that will be more than a small and temporary inconvenience to criminals. If it is more than a small and temporary inconvenience to law-abiding gun owners, we are going to be very suspicious of your motives.
I haven’t ever needed to look up handgun prices on the black market, so I could easily be wrong, but I was given to understand that guns are one of the few items that’s more valuable on the black than the open market? That doesn’t quite jibe with the $200 figure for me.
I mean, you can get a handgun for $200, but it’s going to be an exceedingly cheap one. Generic used semiautomatics, last I checked, were going for around double that.
Well, yes – the black market deals mostly in cheap, crappy handguns, because most criminals only need to threaten to shoot people. But even if you’re looking for something specific and/or fancy (and by black-market standards a stock Glock would count as “fancy”), there’s still no requirement that it sell for more than the legal, retail price. Aside from straw purchases, none of the usual sources require the black-market supplier to pay retail in the first place.
Also, back when ex-WP Makarovs were being legally imported to the United States, the retail price was IIRC in the $120-$150 range. That implies millions of reasonably potent and reliable military handguns being offered for two-digit wholesale prices, by sellers who probably didn’t ask too many questions. Until that supply is exhausted, it puts a cap on what the black market can charge for generic handguns – $100 plus smuggler’s markup,
more or less.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, we’ve got lots of competing smugglers with efficient, proven supply and distribution chains.
@John Schilling: I’ve never quite understood the notion that we can’t confiscate all (or something close to all) guns if we really wanted. Yes, millions of law-abiding Americans currently possess guns, and seizing them would in many cases require invasive home searches.
But so what? Suspicionless searches of millions of Americans’ homes would be expensive, but expensive is not the same as impossible. And remember that gun confiscation already assumes we are going to repeal, redefine, or ignore the Second Amendment. I’m not sure why we couldn’t equally well repeal, redefine, or ignore the Fourth Amendment at the same time. Heck, the Fourth Amendment is a much easier task: while the Second Amendment says that the right to bear arms “shall not be infringed,” the Fourth Amendment merely forbids “unreasonable” searches and seizures. It would be odd for someone who was pro-gun confiscation to say that the necessary steps for gun confiscation are unreasonable.
(I know that anti-gun people are almost universally in favor of a very strong Fourth Amendment. I just don’t know why.)
@FJ – “I’ve never quite understood the notion that we can’t confiscate all (or something close to all) guns if we really wanted.”
This is the part where people usually start talking about prying guns from cold dead hands, La Resistance, etc etc, but really that’s unnecessary. Canada passed a mandatory gun registration law a few years ago. Canadian gun owners saw this for the prelude to confiscation that it likely was, and simply refused to comply with the law as a unified group. The law was repealed within months. No voting from the rooftops necessary. No one went to jail even.
A few more examples:
http://www.guncite.com/journals/gun_control_katesreal.html
“Some anti-gun crusaders have their own, predictably onerous proposal for avoiding the need for any accommodation. Their plan is for Congress to ban handguns and command their confiscation by a law imposing a mandatory minimum prison sentence of a year on every violator. Much the same proposal was made to the New York State Legislature in 1980. It was tabled when the Prison Commissioner testified that the state prison system would collapse if just 1 percent of the illegal handgun owners in New York City (where ordinary citizens cannot get a permit) were caught, tried, and imprisoned.
Likewise, the federal prison system would collapse if it tried to house even a hundredth of one percent of the tens of millions who would not obey a federal handgun ban. Fortunately, violators would not get to prison because the federal court system would collapse under the burden of trying them.”
“…The problems of terminal systemic overload equally doom the anti-gun program. As noted earlier, the most specific proposal for banning and confiscating all guns (or even just handguns) also depends on mandatory sentencing: a mandatory 1-year term for anyone found with a gun, whether good citizen or felon. Forget about felons, either for gun crimes or crimes of any kind. To seriously enforce this law against the often-fanatic owners of 70 million handguns would far exceed the combined capacity of all courts in the United States, even if they stopped processing all other criminal and civil cases to try only gun cases.
Less extreme anti-gun proposals are only less unrealistic. Consider the anti-gun claim that a waiting period, during which criminal records were checked, would have prevented John Hinckley from buying the gun with which he shot President Reagan, and would have prevented Patrick Purdy from buying the gun with which he massacred the children in Stockton. Regrettably, that claim is simply false–though it ought to be true!
During the 1980 campaign, Hinckley, who was then stalking President Carter, was caught committing the state felony of carrying a concealed handgun and the federal one of trying to take it on an airliner. Neither charge was pressed “in the interest of justice” (i.e., the interest of prosecutors in focusing on their current overload of serious violent crime cases rather than on people who have not-yet-committed such a crime). The promise of gun laws is epitomized by the fact that, if he had been convicted and sentenced under those laws, Hinckley would not have been at liberty to shoot Reagan a year later. The frustration of that promise by systemic overload is epitomized by the fact that, even if a law existed to require a waiting period or a felony conviction check, it would not have prevented Hinckley from buying his new gun. He had no felony conviction record to be checked! The same is true of Purdy: he had been arrested for a succession of felonies over several years, but all had been plea bargained down to misdemeanors.”
I guess I should admit that our situations are not precisely symmetric. I’ve always been somewhat left of center, and the stats I mentioned didn’t change that.
What I found, some thirty years ago, was a seeming statistical anomaly that forced me to rethink my views on certain things. I’ll expand on that some time.
My life project has been to strive for a better understanding of the world, or at least the parts of it that interest me most. Data is (or can be) news from the real world.
Yes, I got that, and appreciate it. I just really didn’t want you to walk away without responding at all.
Noted, and very much appreciated.
@FacelessCraven: thanks for the thoughtful response, but I’m not sure it’s as fatal as you believe it to be. Sure, we couldn’t incarcerate even a tiny fraction of the 70 million gun owners in the U.S. But that wouldn’t be necessary: the goal is to confiscate guns, not incarcerate recalcitrant gun owners.
In 2011, the NYPD conducted 685,724 frisks. There were about 3.4 million housing units in New York City in 2011. So if the NYPD could search an apartment in the same amount of time it takes them to conduct a Terry frisk, they could search every apartment in the five boroughs in about five years without increasing staffing above 2011 levels.
Now, presumably a home search takes more man-hours than a Terry stop. But presumably New York police officers didn’t spend their whole shifts constantly frisking, either. And if you’re willing to increase staffing for a few years to end the scourge of gun violence, it’s entirely plausible that you could search the majority of Americans’ homes in less than a decade. It would be a big job and you’d never be entirely finished, but you could make a very serious dent in the gun supply without straining the prisons or the courts.
FJ- if you don’t mind me getting personal….where do you live?
Because that’s…..not the sort of thing someone who is familiar with the American political landscape would say.
One example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
Now, you can think what you like about Cliven Bundy (no relation). I’m fond of the man for reasons I frankly don’t care to get into right now.
But here is ultimately what went down:
Court ordered him to move cattle.
He said no.
Shit happens.
Bundy puts out the word.
Days later, heavily armed people from all over the country show up, force a number of federal agencies to back down. To my knowledge, he is still grazing his cattle in the same spot.
You can go for hours over the details, but the simple fact is- this nobody rancher in Arizona summoned hundreds of people hundreds of miles- over cattle grazing rights. Which are a Big Deal in the west, but even so.
Now, consider what happens when the first cop shows up to confiscate the first gun. As in, an actual constitutional right that even non-gun people are pretty willing to defend.
And when you ask “Were they bluffing?”
There’s a very famous picture of a man looking down a rifle at the cops from a sniper perch. People who know what they’re doing (and these were people who know what they’re doing) will never, ever, ever point a gun at something they don’t want destroyed for pretty much the same reason you don’t shit in the office coffee pot.
From a time-management perspective, sure. But that requires that gun owners A. have no access to search warrant law, and B. the armed people way into self defense won’t defend themselves.
The only way to get wide scale disarmament is for everyone to want it at once.
Right now, lets say we got 99.7% of the vote, but that .3% is royally pissed?
That’s over a million armed and really pissed off people. That’s a lot of fucking people. And now no one else has guns.
@FJ – ” thanks for the thoughtful response, but I’m not sure it’s as fatal as you believe it to be. Sure, we couldn’t incarcerate even a tiny fraction of the 70 million gun owners in the U.S. But that wouldn’t be necessary: the goal is to confiscate guns, not incarcerate recalcitrant gun owners.”
…Huh. Gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming. Like, you’re saying that there’s no actual attempt to engage the gun owners beyond what’s needed to secure them while you search? Let’s ignore the question of time and cost, and say we have can afford to do this sort of search. Heck, let’s not even make it guns, just anything prohibited. You’re saying we abandon the Fourth Amendment in exchange for zeroing out all legal consequences for being caught with contraband, right?
…At first blush, I would think that losing the threat of law would mean MASSIVE indirect resistance. You’re turning prohibition into a game; the advantages of breaking the law are still there, but the downsides are almost completely removed. Like, this seems like a strictly less effective version of prohibition.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like it actually might be MORE effective, because it removes all the dead weight that makes regular prohibition ineffective. It removes a lot of the hazard from disobedience, but it also a great deal of the cost from the enforcers.
Fascinating!
@CJB: I live back East, where Clive Bundy-style resistance is met with aerial bombardment. Not that I’m endorsing that!
@FacelessCraven: Precisely right! Glad I could tickle your fancy. I think The Great Contraband Roundup would work best if there were no criminal penalties on possessing contraband, or at most a bearable fine on par with a traffic ticket. Fines make the system self-financing, but they incentivize greater resistance, so I don’t know if they are worth it in this case.
[Proposal to ban guns, search every house in America to confiscate same]
It would be a big job and you’d never be entirely finished, but you could make a very serious dent in the gun supply without straining the prisons or the courts.
How does this not strain the prisons or the courts? What is it you are expecting the police to do, when they find an illegal gun in the possession of a now-criminal gun owner, that doesn’t involve prisons and courts?
For that matter, given that the fourth amendment is A Thing, one that blue tribe values quite highly and red tribe certainly will by the time you get anywhere near this proposal, how do you even conduct these searches without a separate judicial action for each and every one?
If you are imagining that the prospect of having the police certainly search their house will cause every single one of America’s gun owners to quietly turn in all of their guns in advance, without a fuss, then you really, really, don’t understand the United States of America at all. And if even one percent of America’s gun owners pick any of the alternative strategies to “turn in all the guns without a fuss”, then the whole thing collapses into a bigger fiasco than Prohibition ever was, with vastly more guns in the hands of criminals.
American policemen know this, American politicians mostly know this, and so most every gun control law that has or ever will be passed in the United States includes a grandfather clause saying that anyone who already has a gun (and doesn’t commit any other crimes) can keep it.
@FJ: given the scenario described, wouldn’t the populace just get a lot better at HIDING their guns? Even WITHOUT assuming any behavior changes it would take at least a hundred times longer to competently and non-destructively search my apartment than it would to search my person – I don’t have THAT many pockets when I’m walking around town. But once I know the government is doing a house-to-house search for guns I’d be inclined to keep a spare hidden somewhere that’s not IN my apartment so the search wouldn’t find it.
(Though on the plus side, such a program would do wonders for the nation’s collective skills at gardening and carpentry if we all have to start keeping our guns under well-tended potted plants and behind well-constructed false windowsills rather than in a traditional gun safe or on a traditional gun rack…)
@CJB
Illegal guns are, far and away, stolen, legal guns. This is typically caused by people who don’t properly secure, store, or carry their weapons. [snip] If we want to reduce illegal guns- and we do- then we need to work on Joe Gunowner having a better system for control of their weapon.
(Please take this in the most polite, non-aggressive way possible – I am smiling, partner, when I say this.)
I find this highly problematic in two ways – one, because I am a homeowner who had her firearms locked away in a cabinet. Thieves – criminals – broke into my home, stole stuff, and picked up and walked out with the locked cabinet. I am not really sure what else one would have wanted me to do.
Secondly – “well, were your guns locked up?” sounds, to my ear, very much like asking a rape victim, “well, what were you wearing?” THEY BROKE INTO MY HOUSE. THEY TOOK MY STUFF. WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU MAKING THIS OUT TO BE MY FAULT????
*ahem* A highly non-rational response, I give you that. Also a response that could easily have been predicted.
A third, and likely more significant point – while firearms thefts are accounted as felonies in most areas, if no one was hurt, the cops don’t have space to chase it. The assumption is that the weapon went into someone’s trunk and is on the way to a major (gun-free) city for cash sale. It might show up a year from now, or ten years, or thirty, or not at all. And there is nothing any registration in the world is going to do about that.
A final point as I ramble on – firearms are things. Are property. The same technology (fingerprints, interviews, etc) that looks for other stolen stuff looks for stolen firearms. How badly do we want to find stolen stuff? To what lengths will we go?
And I lied – one more point. Anyone who thinks that the owners of firearms in the USA will stand by peacefully while their homes, barns, sheds, and crawlspaces are searched for firearms needs to get out more. Their social circle is much too small.
Hold it, hold it, this is all my fault. Time out.
A few miles upthread, there was cheerful consensus that we had talked out the gun issue for the time being, and didn’t need to belabor it any more.
If nothing else, I think, we figured Scott would appreciate it if his comment sections weren’t completely flooded with gun arguments. This is a psychiatry blog, after all, not a gun blog.
But in discussing a funny story that I refrained from posting, I happened to ask our Cool Dood CJB if he did nuance. Turns out he did!
Unfortunately, he gave a big pile of specific examples, and the whole war ignited all over again.
Now we’re already into suspending the 4th Amendment, police searching our crawlspaces, and criminals walking off with locked gun cabinets.
Can we just call this off for now and (at least) wait until the next reasonable thread?
@John Schilling – you’re missing the point. He’s not talking about a legal regime that attempts to modify or enforce behavior through punishments. He’s talking about a super-pragmatic “we will search every nook and cranny for X, and destroy it when we find it.” No penalties to the person caught with it, beyond the obvious one that they don’t have the contraband they paid for anymore. You lose your privacy, but you also lose the penalties that are a significant part of why that privacy was necessary.
This is obviously not a realistic policy suggestion; it’s so far outside the Overton window as to be laughable.
It’s also unlikely that it would actually work long-term. the biggest choke-point for drugs is probably the border, and we already search for contraband there more or less to the limit of our ability. There’s just too much volume flowing through to practically search, even when you have it all narrowed down to a single port. I’m pretty sure the ability to import and produce, combined with the ability to conceal, is pretty much always going to be orders of magnitude greater than the ability to search, if for no other reason than that there are orders of magnitude more civilians than there are police.
It seems like this logic terminates in “well, make everyone the police”, at which point it starts blending into some sort of weird anarcho-capitalism or something?
I wish I could be that optimistic. A more likely scenario is something like East Germany’s Stasi, which was a largeish force on its own (about twice the size of the NYPD for a country with twice the population of NYC) but which managed a network of informants that by some estimates made up a tenth of East Germany’s population at its peak.
(Note I’m not trying to invoke some kind of horns effect by bringing up a communist secret police group; it’s just the most widespread informant network I can think of.)
@FJ – pretty sure you want no fines. I’m picturing some sort of system where… Hmm.
Let’s say your local police department has a rack of orange vests right in the lobby. The vests have a omnidirectional body camera and microphone system, plus batteries and memory for 48 hours worth of recording. It also contains an RFID card that, when activated with the one-use code, will unlock any lock in the country. All locks are of course required to comply with this technology. The vests and keycards are freely available to the public, but must be checked out like a library book, and must be returned in a timely fashion. Anyone wearing the vest can, from the hours of 9am to 5pm, legally enter any non-government structure in the country and search for items on the contraband list. Any they find may be collected for disposal at the police station. If they find more contraband than can be carried, they can call others to assist them. assaulting or otherwise interfering with the searcher bears penalties as though they were a police officer. Obviously, bad conduct on the part of the searcher is also punished severely, and they lose the right to use the vests ever again.
…And now I’m sliding the other way, because it seems to me that community members have a much clearer idea of what’s going on than the police. The obvious problem would be intimidation against the searchers, to keep them away from lucrative stashes. Maybe they get a mask too?
Damn, this is an amazingly weird idea.
@Nornagest – maybe the bad part there is “secret”? Remove that, and you have citizens cooperating with the police to enforce prohibition. Logically, that’s probably the only way a prohibition is ever going to work, right?
@Larry Kestenbaum –
Can we just call this off for now and (at least) wait until the next reasonable thread?
I’m…confused, about why/how it was “decided” that we didn’t want to talk more about this.
However, in good faith, *shrug* okay. I’ll keep a look out for the next thread, and bring up my issues with the “gun nuts ignore their own responsibility for gun thefts” meme then.
In the theme of noting how wonderful SSC is – it’s not a burden at all for me to go *shrug*, okay, we’ll address later. In other places, I’d feel very comfortable assuming that the person who wanted to halt the convo was a person who wasn’t interested in listening in the first place, and that that person thought I was making too much headway. Good on you, SSC.
@ FacelessCraven –
I like your idea, until I put that police station with the vests in a gang-infested city, or in, oh, Belfast. Or the worst sort of Jim-Crow South.
Then all of a sudden live and let live starts to look a lot more attractive.
@general discussion of gun control transitions:
After a spree shooting in Australia, we had some pretty stringent firearm laws get brought in. Part of that involved confiscation of firearms and compensation of the people who had their firearms confiscated. Wiki article seems like a pretty good summary.
I don’t remember hearing about any violent confrontations as a result of that, although something something Australian and American culture is very different, we probably had less guns to begin with.
Australia’s experiment in gun confiscation involved seizing Evil Assault Weapons(tm) from less than 0.1% of the Australian population, and forcing maybe 2% of the Australian population to trade in their hunting or target guns for new models of roughly equal utility but without the Evil-Gun features. That’s not the basis for an effective civil disobedience campaign (or armed revolt); Australia’s police, courts, and prisons could have accommodated the dissenters, who would have had no popular support.
FJ’s proposed Universal American Gun Confiscation would be roughly two orders of magnitude greater in relative scope, and even greater in its unpopularity.
I feel like there must be a pretty big difference between Australian and American culture in terms of guns, because when the govt took our guns we got so angry that we went and formed a new “give back our guns” political party that gets 2-3% of the vote in some states… and, like, it’s really hard for me to comprehend a different reaction. You would resolve your political argument by SHOOTING PEOPLE? Really?
“You would resolve your political argument by SHOOTING PEOPLE? Really?”
No, that isn’t what he is implying “looks at civil rights movement” okay, not since the 60s.
Many people view guns are vital to protecting themselves. Eliminating that and making them depend on the government works… poorly.
Nathan: I expect Americans feel precisely the same way about America taking their guns away as Australians feel about America taking their guns away.
until I read the post and was like….yeah, that’s issuing threats against a federal judge.
“I hope there’s a special place in hell” is a threat? As I wrote on Popehat, there’s no way to see it as one, unless you believe that the person who wrote it is, in fact, a god.
No. There’s a well-established legal doctrine of “true threats”. A threat has to not only be explicit, but such that a reasonable person would think that it was meant to be carried out.
If I threaten to “punch” my brother “into orbit”, this is not a true threat. Likewise, saying on the internet that a judge should be fed through a woodchipper isn’t a true threat unless the person also knows where the judge is, has a woodchipper and could conceivably make good on it.
And anyone who disagrees should be beaten to death with unstarted chainsaws!
If I threaten to “punch” my brother “into orbit”, this is not a true threat.
Woops. In so far as punching him into the hospital or onto the ground is feasible, it can be a feasible threat. Hyperbole may signal non-seriousness, or “If you keep doing that, I’m gonna get mad and give you a bloody nose” — which can serve a bully’s purpose just as well.
Well, have a whack at convincing a jury that I legitimately intended to remove my brother from the gravitational pull of the planet via my mighty fists.
In the meantime, don’t open an investigation of Facebook, where I post said “threats” and get a pretty facially unconstitutional gag order on them to keep them from discussing what the government is demanding of them.
If I threaten to “blow your fucking head off” with my .45 automatic, does the fact that a .45 ACP round is not capable of physically decapitating someone mean that I won’t be arrested and convicted?
The law, and reasonable men, operate on the “reasonable man” standard, not the “pedantic technicality” standard. Most of the alleged threats in the Reason piece don’t meet that standard, but punching someone “into orbit” could reasonably be interpreted as a threat to punch them very hard.
Time crystals offer a great explanation of how the computer continues to work in Asimov’s The Last Question.
Time Crystals are a strategy for BETA CUCKOLD ORBITERS. I’m holding out for BRUTE STRENGTH.
The thing that struck me is that pretty much ANY of those colored pills could negate entropy just as well as the brute strength one.
Blue and Green, sure. Grey too, probably. I don’t see how pink and orange can, and whatever way black and yellow can doesn’t seem to be large enough to be relevant.
I’m not remotely qualified to hold an opinion on time crystals myself. But at first glance, it at least looks as if all the pop science articles about it are from 2012-2013, and predate this phys.org piece, “Physicist proves impossibility of quantum time crystals”
It bounced!
It bounced and then it flew off again!! That is so good!
(I have just noticed that almost no of my comments go through the ‘necessary’ gate…)
It seems to me that if you’re going to fail a gate, the necessary one is likely a good choice.
After that video, Youtube automatically cued up some tests of what appears to be a 3-inch naval gun firing full-auto. We live in an age of beauty.
I personally think of Rachel Dolezal as Black.
I think people who are Trans-racial should be given support. I would validate their self-identified race. And I would hope that they were given access to whatever medical technologies could improve their transition.
Rachel Dolezal however really did terrible things She faked hate crimes. I am not even sure what a suffient punishment for faking hate crimes is but it needs to be severe. she should e put in jail to deter people from faking hate crimes in the future. However I do think she should be able to transition further in jail if she wishes. And even if she was incarcerated I would wish people would treat her as Black.
Me, too.
The traditional test of blackness in the U.S. is the “one drop of blood” rule. Under Louisiana law, for example, your birth certificate had to state your blackness if you had as little as 1/64 black ancestry. In other words, if one of your great-great-great-great-grandparents was from Africa, and all the others were from Sweden, you’d be classified as some sort of black person.
Your shameful “Negro” ancestry contaminated all the rest, and people were NOT kidding when they said things like that.
As a result, there was a substantial number of Americans who (1) were identified and lived as black despite looking completely “white”, or (2) “passed for white” while keeping their black identity secret.
Passing for white was a perilous business; read some accounts of those who did. If your blackness was detected, you could lose your job, your home (if it was in an area restricted to whites). If you married a white person, you were breaking the law in many states; you’d be subject to prosecution. You had to cut yourself off from your more Negroid-appearing relatives: your neighbors would take notice if they came to visit.
The major biography of Warren G. Harding (president in 1921-23) is titled The Shadow of Blooming Grove. This “shadow” was the scandalous rumor that he might have had a black ancestor. Had this been proven true, he would have been discredited and driven from office.
Surveys show that most Americans still believe in the one-drop-of-blood rule for defining blackness, but we don’t enforce it with the same old zeal. To a very large extent, race and ethnicity have become a matter of self-identification. Census data is based on how individuals classify themselves.
If self-identification is the standard, nobody has the right to tell Ms. Dolezal she’s not black.
That’s actually the opposite of what the result was. This is another progressive “would think”.
The actual result is that white people in the United States have extremely high amounts of European genes.
If passing was widespread then you’d see more gene flow from African descended people into the European descended gene pool. You don’t.
That’s kind of insulting, frankly. It’s the result you’d logically expect from the data.
That doesn’t follow at all. Most African-Americans could not plausibly pass. The ones passing had as much as 98% white ancestry. They had light skin and European facial features.
And back when this was going on, there were ten times as many white people in this country as black people.
If a small subset of the black population passed for white, AND somehow all their genes were “black genes”, AND they all got married and had children who identified as white, even then, it would have an infinitesimal impact on the white genome. You probably would have trouble finding it.
Moreover, passing was a secret. In some families, it still is. It’s not possible that millions of people did this, but we don’t really know how many.
Some time (decades) ago, I read about a court case which overturned laws in two southern states (MS and AL, I think) which defined “black” as having 1/32 or more sub-Saharan African ancestry. What I remember from then was that meant there was *no* legally enforceable definition of any racial group except American Indians. (And possibly only for specific tribal membership, as opposed to being “American Indian, N.O.S.”)
Am I remembering things at all correctly?
You are correct, and it was Louisiana. Indeed, you’re more correct than I was, elsewhere in this thread, where I wrote it was based on 1/64 ancestry.
See http://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/30/us/suit-on-race-recalls-lines-drawn-under-slavery.html
Also http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/26/weekinreview/the-nation-in-summary-louisiana-drops-racial-fractions.html
On the topic of drug cartels, my understanding is that before 2011, the united states government provided material aid to the cartels and actively stymied the mexican governments attempts to deal with the problem. Now the us government does this much less, and the newly freed mexican government can respond as they have desired against a weakened cartel force.
That sounds very much like conspiracy-theory nonsense, of the sort where I’d really like some evidence beyond “my understanding is”.
I’d also like to see some evidence that the cartels are actually weakened. Yes, there are now two major cartels where there were once many. The usual reason “many cartels” becomes “two cartels” (and eventually “the cartel”) is that the whole point of a cartel is to establish a monopoly. As cartels become more powerful in a particular market, they necessarily become less numerous, with the weaker cartels being assimilated or destroyed by the stronger. It isn’t necessarily the case that fewer cartels = stronger cartels, but it’s usually the way to bet and I’m not seeing anything in Mexico to suggest otherwise.
If the government also destroys cartels, that’s fine. Sianola thanks the Mexican government for breaking its competitors up into more easily digestible chunks, and the current generation of Sianola leaders are fine with some of the last generation languishing in prison.
While I would like to see support for Nicholas’s claim, I wouldn’t put it over the US government to try such a thing. Don’t they have a track record of supporting dictators, contras, etc? Doesn’t anyone remember Operation Northwoods?
While I might want A: evidence and B: a motive before supporting Nick’s claim, to just automatically say “nun-uh, conspiracy theory” is silly.
So you can randomly pick any bad thing that is caused by any vaguely political group of people, and without evidence or plausible motive say “I think that the United States Government is secretly behind that”, and this isn’t silly? Because the United States Government has done some bad things, has supported a minority of the world’s dictators.
Not buying it. The one thing that almost all conspiracy theories in the modern world have in common is the assertion that the rulers of the United States of America are secretly behind whatever unpleasantness the conspiracy theorist is peeved about today, without supporting evidence or a plausible motive. And pretty much everybody who does that sort of thing, either is a conspiracy theorist or is being sloppy and could come up with the evidence if they cared. For example, there is some actual evidence regarding Operation Northwoods, which can be found by a quick google or just hitting Wikipedia.
So, not at all silly to point out that this sounds like a conspiracy theory and that the claim needs to be backed up by evidence or dismissed.
Alright, so the first example of the US government’s interference in how the Mexican government conducts their drug war was when in the second term of the Bush administration, president Felipe Calderón had a bill on his desk to decriminalize certain drugs and create a supply line of those drugs that didn’t go through cartel sources. After steady pressure from the Executive Branch, Felipe Calderón reversed his position and vetoed the bill, citing strained foreign relations.
Fast and Furious, the US program to allow the sale of firearms to cartels and then not track what they did with those guns, was a government program to sell guns to cartels, which is about as material aid as you can get.
It’s not per say a conspiracy, I don’t believe there’s a grand plan to destabilize Mexico. But the actions of the US government made the situation worse, and the US government only reversed course during the most recent Mexican presidential administration.
In a more general sense: Every US administration has eventually been found or disclosed that a conspiracy of personal profit or episode of inexcusable negligence has occurred during that administration. Thus the prior that the government may be, say bugging the Watergate Hotel, or selling Iran guns so that they can fund the Contras, or antagonizing the Empire of Japan, or planning to assassinate FDR and start a Fascist coup, or overthrow the government of Iran, should be very high outside of dissenting evidence.
Alternate title to Cartel Story: CIA Conquest of Mexico Complete.
[link]
OK, there’s probably still reason to ridicule (or worse) Rachel Dolezal specifically. And maybe we’re even going to ridicule the trans-black in general, and maybe we should. But first, what about the trans-white?
And for that matter, I think most of the hostility against transgendered people is focused on trans-women, with trans-men getting off relatively lightly. I don’t recall, e.g., Nora Vincent getting any serious hostility when she came out towards the end of her year as a man.
Historically, of course, “trans-whites” and “trans-men” were common long before we had the “trans-” prefix to label them; mostly we just referred to them as “passing”. Assumed that the motive was to escape the social, economic, and legal disadvantage of the traditionally inferior race or gender, and maybe disapproved of the practice but didn’t see it as ridiculous in concept.
So when we do now ridicule trans-women or especially trans-blacks, is that because:
A – It is inherently ridiculous, a sign of mental illness even, to want to be seen as a member of a disadvantaged class, for approximately the same reason it is an understandable ambition to want to be seen as a member of a privileged class, or
B – Having accepted that our society has treated women and blacks poorly and maybe owes it to them to make up for some of the damage, trans-women and trans-blacks are seen as signaling “Ha, Ha, Fooled You! We actually have it pretty good, especially now that you all are giving us special privileges out of your guilt!”, or
C – Trans-anythingism is seen as an inherently ridiculous denial of objective reality, and we’d generally laugh at them all the way we do the trans-Napoleons in the local asylum, but people who can make a credible attempt at passing for white or male have an obviously rational and somewhat sympathetic motive so we cut them a bit more slack?
Black people who try to pass for white have to say “I am white” as part of the process, but they don’t actually consider themselves to be white; when they call themselves white they are lying. This makes them not an analogy to transwomen.
I am talking about the way the rest of society reacts to trans-black/white/men/women/small-fuzzy-green-things-from-outer-space. In this context, it does not matter that the antebellum quadroon passing for white is flat-out lying whereas Ms. Dolezal may believe her claims. The rest of the world, mostly doesn’t care about such subtle distinctions. Dolezal is written off as a liar, and ridiculed. The quadroon, if caught, is written off as a liar but mostly gets a “nice try, now get back where you belong”.
Same dynamic, I think but with less certainty, w/re transmen and transwomen. There’s a double standard in both cases, and I’d like to understand it better.
“The quadroon is lying”
Could a quadroon pass? My sense was that was reserved more for octaroons.
And they were lying in a legal sense. But in a real sense? Someone with 7 white great grandparents and one black one?
Until we start treating black in the same way we would treat Italian and/or French in that same scenario, I think we have an issue.
Lying in the only sense that really matters – they know what “black” means to the person they are talking to, they believe themselves to be “black” by that definition, and they say that they are “not-black” with the specific intention of deceiving that person for private gain.
That you can phrase a statement in such a way that it is technically correct IFF interpreted using locally-nonstandard definitions of the words in the statement, doesn’t make it any less a lie.
@John Schilling:
I was going to start making some arguments about whether someone who passes as “white” will necessarily know that they had a black ancestor, but I realized it doesn’t really matter to your point.
The actual lying/not lying is completely beside the point. It’s the assumed motivated reasoning that you are trying to point at.
So imagine two people in the old South, [A] who thinks they are an octaroon (but are not), and [B], who thinks they are “white” by the definition of the time (but are actually an octaroon). Neither of these people are liars, they tell people what they believe to be true.
Once the actual truth is found out, [B] will be seen as a liar, but [A] will be presumed to have been simply mistaken, as their is no conceivable motivated reasoning that the time could fathom for lying when in [A]’s position.
If we then find evidence that [A] is, in fact lying, they will be seen as depraved in some manner, because there is no motivated reasoning that is seen as sufficient.
Now, I would also take issue with your assertion that [B] would suffer no extra repercussions for having passed if they, while passing, did things that would have impugned the [presumed] honor of associated whites. For instance, if a black man, while passing, dated a white woman, and then was found out, a lynching might soon follow.
If a black man was caught dating a white woman in the antebellum south, he’d have been lynched whether he was “passing” or not – there’d have been no extra penalty for passing. Pragmatically, I expect his odds would have improved in the passing case, as the white woman’s reputation could still have been saved by quietly running the black man out of town.
But, more generally, yes – it’s the reaction of the community I was getting at. I think the odds of an octoroon not knowing full well where they stood in the antebellum South are pretty small, but that wouldn’t matter in the case of discovery. If recognized as black-passing-for-white, it’s “get back in your place”, and as you note punishment for any specific violations of the social order while passing. White-passing-for-black is either “that can’t be right” or “WTF is the matter with you, you freak!”
A friend of mine has a black father. (In pictures, he’s *very* black, though that may partly be the film. His features all read as black, though.) I did not realize she was part black until she posted pictures with her father on facebook. Some of her physical features could be interpreted as indicating black ancestry, but none unambiguously. Her sister, on the other hand, looks mestizo.
I don’t think Nora is equivalent. There’s a difference between spending time walking in someone else’s shoes and just taking their shoes. I would jump at the chance to spend a day as a woman, or even as a random non-sentient animal, but I’m not some kind of trans-otherkin.
People who don’t believe trans is “a thing” will believe transwomen are men and transmen are women, and as such, they will be far far far far far more hostile and violent and hateful towards the ones they see as men, because that is what happens with literally every gendered distinction.
People who pretended they were white were doing so to prove they were worthy and had merit when they did not have a chance to do so; this is a laudable goal. “Trans-blacks” are lying in order to get attention and victimhood, to have other people cater their behavior to their needs. This is not a laudable goal.
Proving that you are worthy is not considered a laudable goal if you are, in fact, not worthy. Yet people who genuinely considered blacks and/or women to be categorically unworthy, did not generally treat “transmen” and “transwhites” with the same degree of contemptuous ridicule that e.g. Dolezal is getting for her transblackness.
But we don’t need “laudable” for your framing to work. “Rational” and “sympathetic” may be enough. However much we may disapprove of them, we don’t generally ridicule bank robbers because, well, that is where the money is, and who ever has enough money?
Because by the time others found out about a ‘transwhite’ person, they’d got along well enough to prove they were capable of doing things and thus “one of the good ones”.
They also tended not to draw lots of attention to themselves; not true for a ‘transblack’ faking hate crimes against herself to get attention.
“Transwhites” wanted to be contributing members of society, “transblacks” want to be victims and have other people act on their behalf. We consider wanting to be a contributing member of society laudable, and wanting to be a waited-on victim not to be laudable.
You have an enviably optimistic view of human behavior.
I think the idea is that blacks are not necessarily non-meritorious, but rather that racist society did not permit them the chance to demonstrate their merit. So blacks masquerading as whites could legitimately demonstrate their worth, which is laudable. They were, in this model, not trying to be deemed worthy just on account of their whiteness; they were trying to get their foot in the door, after which point they would rely on their actual worthiness.
Different people have different concerns, there’s not a single answer and setting those scenarios up as mutually exclusive or exhaustive would be misleading. That said, there is one asymmetry that does generalize, and from which you can derive a lot of the relevant dynamics: When you have two groups, segregation between them protects the positions of the bottom of the “better” group, but the top of the “lesser” one.
Integrating the male sports leagues endangers the rankings only of the lowest male players, while opening the female leagues to transwomen endangers their champions. Allowing black labor into white unions displaces only the least productive white workers, while opening black neighborhoods to white businesses displaced many black entrepreneurs. Permitting “vaguely ethnic” actors like Rashida Jones and Ben Kingsley to audition for whatever they please lets them capture only a tiny percentage of all white roles, but a statistically relevant number of those written for minorities.
In short, when a member of a low-status group tries to pass as a member of a high-status group, it’s so they can compete on their merits. When a member of a high-status group tries to pass as a member of a low-status group, it’s so they don’t have to. The latter are far more likely to be malefactors.
I don’t think that’s quite right. Consider people who pretend to be military veterans (or to receive militar honors). They are hated because they didn’t sacrifice like actual military veterans, but that’s not really low status in the normal sense.
In the case of Dolezal, Blues don’t like her because she claimed high status, just like the fake military veterans. If you think of reds as assigning low status to black people, you could argue that that fits your scheme, but I would say that the reds hate Dozel because they consider her to demonstrate that blues are lying about the status of black people being low.
Do you really think Blues regard black people as higher status?
I think what you are actually saying is that Blues afford black people a conscious status boost, in the attempt to override a predicted unconscious status discount.
But that’s putting words in your mouth.
If by “regard as higher status” you mean “believes they have more power in larger society”, then no.
If by “regards as higher status” you mean “gives them more power within Blue areas, allows them to do more and get away with more and devotes more attention and resources to them”, the answer’s a pretty obvious yes.
@DrBeat:
I find your position lacking in empirical evidence. Can you cite some way in which Blue Tribe members actually treat black people as higher status than white?
Do most Blue Tribe white members consciously seek to live in areas of high black concentration?
Do Blue Tribe members higher blacks over and above their general population percentage?
Do Blue Tribe members primarily want to hang out in gatherings made up mostly of blacks? Do they actually? Do they feel excluded because they cannot?
Do Blue Tribe members feel that if only they were black, they could have accomplished [x]?
Or do Blue Tribe members act in a manner that is consistent with regarding black association as enhancing their own status? This is different than regarding black tribe members as higher status, yes?
>Do most Blue Tribe white members consciously seek to live in areas of high black concentration?
>Do Blue Tribe members hire blacks over and above their general population percentage?
>Do Blue Tribe members primarily want to hang out in gatherings made up mostly of blacks? Do they actually? Do they feel excluded because they cannot?
I don’t know it they actually do or think those, but I’m sure many of them claim they do.
>Do Blue Tribe members feel that if only they were black, they could have accomplished [x]?
Acheive a high position in the NCAAP? would seem so.
More seriously though, is the usage of the term “status” that you object to? Do you not agree that, in blue circles (Like, say, academia) blacks are protected class, and as such one could obtain benefits from passing as one?
“High-status” and “protected class” do not necessarily coincide. For a hopefully uncontroversial example (giggle, snort), consider the situation of women in Victorian-era England or the US.
That said, status is a pretty broad brush, and you can paint just about anything as high- or low-status depending on what you choose to emphasize. We’d probably be better off talking about the specific benefits and disadvantages of being black in Blue circles: the first one that comes to mind is the privilege of being listened to more carefully on certain topics.
@Whatever happened to Anonymous:
“I don’t know it they actually do or think those, but I’m sure many of them claim they do.”
Well, the question is what Blue Tribe actually thinks, not what they say they think. What you don’t see, behaviorally, is Blue Tribe members moving to black neighborhoods where rent is cheap in great numbers. If I could move to a high-status neighborhood where rent was cheap, would I not prefer it over a lower-status neighborhood where rents are higher?
Instead we see gentrification, which is a different process altogether. Only after the character of the neighborhood has been changed by gentrification is the neighborhood seen as high-status.
“Do you not agree that, in blue circles (Like, say, academia) blacks are protected class, and as such one could obtain benefits from passing as one?”
Where Blue Tribe has a great deal of control, blacks are a protected group.
Children, the elderly, and any of those who might be classified as infirm are protected groups in, well, pretty much every tribe, but certainly in Red Tribe. Why does Red Tribe protect those groups? Why do they give them more benefits?
It might be interesting to look at the Red Tribe – Blue Tribe divide on women to understand how this dynamic plays out in reality. Woman are protected in both tribes, for the same proximate reason, but different ultimate ones.
Is it? I spent several years living in Oakland, and while my neighborhood wasn’t one of the affected ones I think I was still close enough to get a good view on the gentrification process.
What I saw was a progression that started when white urban hipsters discovered a semi-crunchy (but usually not truly bad) neighborhood with cheap rent, good food, and access to the kind of culture they like. They move in as properties become vacant through normal turnover, and rent slowly creeps up. After a few years, businesses catering directly to the hipster demographic spring up in the area, and after a few more, new housing starts getting built. At that point it’s mainstream enough that the hipsters starts losing interest (although they may hang on for a while if enough art galleries and drip coffee joints move in), but it’s developed a reputation as a cool part of town and there’s more than enough demand among sub-hipsters to replace them.
Wait forty years and you have the Haight.
@Nornagest:
Did hipsters move in because the neighborhood was high-status in Blue-Tribe generally? If so, why weren’t those properties already occupied by much broader mass of Blue-Tribe that is wealthier than hipsters?
For every neighborhood that gentrifies, there are so many others that do not.
If gentrification was really a broad, blue-tribe status seeking, then segregation would be a thing of the past. Blacks would generally have trouble keeping their neighborhood as concentrated black, as they generally lack the financial resources to outbid the Blue Tribe whites which would presumably be clamoring to live in their high status neighborhood.
If, as a Blue Tribe parent of two children I said I was moving to, say, Compton, from my nice suburban subdivision, the reaction from Blue Tribe would not be “So Lucky!” but “So Brave! Good Luck.”
Blue Tribe isn’t a monolith, and different parts of it have different status criteria. Hipsters moved in because the neighborhood was attractive to the segment of Blue Tribe that most valued urban amenities and a certain flavor of authenticity and least valued stability, and they became a spearhead for the rest. This is an incremental process: you don’t get established Blue families moving in right after the hipsters do, but you do get single Blues who want some of the same things hipsters do but would be scared off if the hipsters weren’t already there. Then they open up the door for Blues on the new margin, and so forth.
This happened early to the Haight and a few other neighborhoods, but in a broader context it’s a fairly recent phenomenon — I want to put the inflection point in the early 2000s, but that might be off by as much as five years in either direction. I don’t know how it’s going to evolve or what it’s going to do to urban segregation. But I do feel fairly safe in saying that the homogeneous white suburbs of the Eighties and Nineties are increasingly low-status in Blue circles.
“Blue Tribe isn’t a monolith”
Wasn’t the debate started by an assertion about black status in Blue Tribe monolithically? You seem to be turning the burden of proof upside down. I’m certainly willing to say that some Blue Tribe members view living in majority ethnic neighborhoods as obtaining a status for themselves, that living there has a certain cachet. This is of course different than viewing the residents as high-status, but I don’t think I particularly need to debate that assertion at the moment.
“But I do feel fairly safe in saying that homogeneous white suburbs are increasingly low-status in Blue circles.”
Living in a heterogeneous neighborhood is absolutely desirable in Blue Tribe. I’m absolutely willing to concede that given two neighborhoods that have identical amenities, the heterogeneously habitated one is higher status. That still doesn’t mean that the black residents of that neighborhood are seen, generally, as higher status.
If you’ll kindly scroll up, you’ll find me arguing against that, too. But in this narrow context I don’t particularly care what the debate started as, and I’m not interested in being mistaken for an opposing soldier in whatever war you think you’re fighting.
I’m arguing that gentrification provides a mechanism for Blues moving into black (and other poor) neighborhoods en masse, one that starts with a certain shade of Blue moving in in small quantities. It doesn’t demonstrate that those neighborhoods are uniformly high status, because they aren’t, but it wouldn’t work if they didn’t have high-status qualities among Blues.
>Why does Red Tribe protect those groups? Why do they give them more benefits?
Because they are seen as both vulnerable and valuable. I’d assume it’s a similar rationale for blacks among blues. I’m not trying to question if this status as protected group is deserved or not.
But I’m still not sure where you’re going with all of this. If this black… privilege (ugh) exists, for whatever reason it may, then it stands to reason that, if someone were able to pass as black, they would be able to claim those benefits.
Now, I’m not sure this was the case: while the benefits are non-trivial, how hard it must’ve been to pull off and how easy it would be for it fall apart make it weird to me that someone would do this without other involved reasons.
However, it seems really likely that it played into it. Hell, going back to your example of children and the elderly, people pretend to be younger or older all the time to claim the benefits conferred by the protected status.
@Mark:
Are you contending that those neighborhoods had an influx of residents BECAUSE they were black? If so, why does the influx continue long after they have ceased being majority black? Why doesn’t the trend slow as soon as some certain number of black residents are displaced?
And are the blacks being followed to their new neighborhoods, broadly speaking? Or do they just concentrate somewhere else?
@Nornagest:
“and I’m not interested in being mistaken for an opposing soldier in whatever war you think you’re fighting.”
Sorry, I’m not sure what I said to make you think I was being so belligerent. I wasn’t intending that to be my tone.
“It doesn’t demonstrate that those neighborhoods are uniformly high status, because they aren’t, but it wouldn’t work if they didn’t have high-status qualities among Blues.”
I completely agree with this statement. Perhaps we are in vehement agreement.
Again, my contention is that blacks are given a status boost by blue tribe, rather than being seen, generically, as higher status. This is the original contention by Jiro that I was speaking to.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous:
“it stands to reason that, if someone were able to pass as black, they would be able to claim those benefits.”
To the extent that those benefits are better than their current situation, yes. I agree with this. Dolazal clearly derived some benefit from claiming that she was black. She may have even received a status benefit (in Blue Tribe) over poor white evangelical member of red tribe.
“make it weird to me that someone would do this without other involved reasons.”
Yeah. I completely agree with this.
“Hell, going back to your example of children and the elderly, people pretend to be younger or older all the time to claim the benefits conferred by the protected status.”
Sure. But broadly speaking, if a child wants a status benefit, they will lie and increase their age. If someone is older (than 29, say) and wants a status benefit, they will lie and decrease their age. To the extent that they lie the other way, they don’t want a status benefit, they want a more tangible benefit.
I think this is a great example of a situation where status is too broad a concept to make useful predictions. Younger people are seen as cheaper, sexier, more hip, more intellectually agile. Older people are seen as more experienced, more skilled, more cautious, probably more expensive.
Depending on the situation you might be inclined to lie in either direction for a situational status boost: if you want to get hired as a mid-level manager at IBM, the optimal age is very different than if you want to get hired as an entry-level Web programmer at MoveFastAndBreakThings.com. And I’d expect to see a hilarious peak in the OKCupid data at age 29.
@Nornagest:
Sure, I buy that.
But I don’t think are going to go so far as put themselves into the protected class, right? I 55 year old is going to try and pass as a 65 year old for a status bump. They might try and do it so they could claim social security or a retirement benefit, but is there some status bump that you can think of being generally conferred on them?
More broadly, the protected classes get benefits precisely because they are generally seen as having to combat some disadvantages. If you fake your way into that protected class, you will inherit the presumption of those disadvantages (regardless of whether you actually have them).
I suppose you might benefit from being seen as an exceptional member of the class, but that would probably only confer within the class. So a 55 year old faking being 65 so they would have better luck dating 65 year olds seems plausible, but it doesn’t seem plausible they would do it so they would have better luck with 55 year olds.
@HBC — No, I can’t think of too many situations where you’d want to claim senior status per se, outside of benefits fraud or one of its private-sector relatives. There are social peaks at 35 and 45 and 55, but 65 is pretty much universally seen as over the hill unless you’re trying to be elected Pope.
But in the other direction, I can easily think of situations where adults would want to pass as minors, or minors as adults, for purely social reasons. And that’s just as much a protected class, isn’t it?
The progressive stack and its ideological descendants? The way they get extremely upset and demand action when a black person is harmed and nothing else is known, the way people in other areas get extremely upset and demand action when a high-status person is harmed and nothing else is known? Constantly excusing their mistakes and blaming all wrongdoing forever on whiteness? Throwing shitfits when black people are punished for wrongdoing? Making people afraid to disagree with black people on any subject?
“Do people like moving into their neighborhoods” isn’t the only way we measure status — and Blue Tribers sure as fuck love to surround themselves with black people, use lack of black-people-surrounding as a cudgel against competitors and use black associations as a defense against same.
@Nornagest:
The only reason I can think of for someone who is 25 to fake being 17 is the same reason someone who is 55 might fake being 65, so that they could have better luck as they were striking out in their age appropriate cohort.
I’m not sure what other reasons you are thinking of?
And I definitely can’t see anyone who is fully post-pubescent (who isn’t suffering some kind of trauma) trying to fake being pre-pubescent. Yes, there is the awkward period for some early-pubescent girls, but I don’t think that really counts.
>And I definitely can’t see anyone who is fully post-pubescent (who isn’t suffering some kind of trauma) trying to fake being pre-pubescent.
Kid prices, discounts, being able to buy a happy meal for the toy.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous:
Those are examples of tangible benefits, rather than a status boost.
I think everyone acknowledges that trying to enter a protected class for the tangible benefits it brings does happen.
I think that’s an excessively fine distinction. I brought it up in response to Alraune, who claimed that people don’t like whites passing as blacks because blacks are low status. It doesn’t matter if I say “actually, blues don’t like it because blacks are high status” or “actually, blues don’t like it because they give blacks status boosts”; either version counters Alraune’s statement.
Also, re: Victorian women, Victorian protection of women was a kind of paternalistic protection that stated that things were good for women, but ignored women’s ability to decide for themselves. I don’t think this plays a big role in modern-day protected classes. (Of course, people still do ignore members of protected classes who disagree with them, but they are generally seen as enemies, not genuinely thought of as targets for protection.)
@Jiro:
Upthread @John Schilling and I talked about why, if someone faked being in a low status cohort, this would be generally seen as punishable behavior. I realize that wasn’t your argument, but I think there is some reason to believe this type of reasoning is at work.
“I think that’s an excessively fine distinction.”
Mmmm. I don’t think it is, just from the standpoint of who gets angry and why.
If I am attempting to join a new group consisting of avid golfers, one can reasonably say that low-handicap golfers have higher status and high-handicap golfers have lower status.
If I pretend to be a low-handicap golfer, and then I am found out, I will be seen as sad and pathetic, but ultimately the only people who will be angry about it are people whose order in the status I threatened, those who generally feel insecure about their status in the group.
But if I fake being a high-handicap golfer, no one will be angry unless we had some sort of handicap tournament. If I took no material advantage of my status I will just be seen as humble. But if I take 18 strokes instead of 2 or 3, EVERYONE will be mad at me.
This is not true, and people believe it because contemporary feminists do not want the sort of protection Victorian women had, and so conclude that Victorian women did not want that either, and that men were evil and threatening for inflicting it upon them.
Women have always been the only people whose lives have inherent worth. Women have always been the people who others care about making happy. The fact that the things they wanted to make them happy was not the same thing that people today would want to make them happy does not mean their wants were ignored.
Jiro, HeelBearCub, you’re both hairsplitting and missing the point. Dolezal neither “lied about being black –which is secretly actually a marker of high status rather than low– and thereby gained status”, nor “lied about being black –which is given artificially elevated status by the Blue tribe– and thereby gained status.”
She lied about being black, which allowed her to steal a specific racially segregated post in the blue tribe’s priest-class. The JOB is what gave her higher status.
@Alraune:
That was what I was looking at with my high-handicap golfer example.
If Dolezal was someone whose identity as black seemed only extraneously tied to her job, she could say “Look, I’ve felt black ever since I had to protect my black adopted brothers and sisters from my abusive parents”, and we would shrug while she told her story in Dr. Phil.
But because she appears to have had her livelihood directly tied to her racial status, it seems more like theft.
And unlike a black person trying to pass as white so they could simply do ANY non-menial job, this feels like a different kind of motivated reasoning.
Edit: and I don’t think the priest class has to much to do with it. If she was selling herself as a Soul Food chef, she would seem equally as inauthentic. The NAACP thing makes it much more interesting to the tribes, which just raises it’s media profile.
You’re missing some important implications then. A soul food chef wouldn’t be the same situation (also, stop giving Paula Deen ideas), the priestly status is highly significant to how it’s played out.
At the local level (As I’ve mentioned, my emotional pitch on this is as high as it is because I’m personal friends with a couple of her students.) this was taken as Betrayal rather than just misleading marketing or a news of the weird segment (“Local Sushi Chef Actually Squinty Italian!”) because this was someone trusted to shape truth, mentor new agents, and set strategy.
If you’re pursuing a tribe war angle, then, well, the most significant aspect is that Dolezal was by all accounts actually pretty good at her jobs.
Which means you don’t actually need the “unique lived insights” of blackwomanhood to teach people about it, you can just preach the same lines as everyone else.
Which means intersectionality is bullshit.
Which means your increasingly budget-constrained and business-oriented college doesn’t need to fund a separate African Studies professor.
@Alraune:
People are signal boosting this story because it provides some empirical evidence for their world-view.
If Dolezal was a nationally famous Soul Food chef who talked about learning her recipes at her momma’s elbow, her Food Network job would go away right quick and people who watched the show would be angry at being lied to. Her close associates would feel betrayed and hurt. People and US Weekly would cover it with suitable outrage. And then it would go away.
But because it can be used as as a cudgel by one side against the other, well now people start fights about it.
Maybe that is the point you are getting at?
I’m definitely not willing to concede what you are saying about intersectionality. But that serms like a different conversation.
It is, but I should probably explain myself in slightly more detail than “bullshit” anyway. Intersectionality is a graft program, not an academic field. Its sole output is jobs for extremely non-oppressed people.
@Alraune:
Intersectionality, as I understand it, is an approach or technique, not a program. I’m not even sure what “program” means as you are using it.
@Alarune: That’s a very good point, and particularly timely given the recent Jenner transformation. And even where, as with black/white, the “inferiority” of the low-status group is purely a social construct, the perceived threat will remain
until the perception broadly changes.
But Jiro’s not wrong either, which puts Dolezal in exactly the wrong spot – everybody has a reason to despise her, even if they aren’t the same reasons.
Best example of this functioning even with purely social divisions would be the female e-sports leagues that need to cap the number of trans members per participating team. (Unless men are somehow genetically better at Starcraft…)
Assuming they aren’t (and I have neither reason to believe they are nor much specific knowledge of e-sports), what’s the reason for having a gender-segregated league?
Two big reasons. First off, sponsors love having attractive female players to front for their goods; it’s way easily to sell product to the nerdy demographics if you have someone who actually is known for playing the game rather than just using a model. Secondly, there just aren’t many if any ciswomen at a truly competitive level. Part of this is probably because e-sports aren’t something that girls get into and thus develop the skills to be pro at, so the idea is that by having female leagues where they can have people to look up to more girls will get into the game and you’ll eventually end up with more female pros (as well as more players of course making the company more money).
The only competitive video game I can think of which has a cisfemale top level player is Soul Calibur, but I may be out of date on that
Because there’s an audience to sustain it? I don’t know.
Edit: HIE is probably right though.
I’d be surprised to find that men are “genetically better at Starcraft”. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that men’s larger genetic variability (edit: more accurately, phenotypic variability; a lot of the difference is probably epigenetic) tends to place more of them at the far right of the curve on talents that are relevant to Starcraft.
Men are over-represented at the top of almost any competitive endeavor. They’re probably over-represented at the bottom, too, but no one bothers to track that.
That’s certainly a mechanism that shows up in a lot of areas, but I don’t think it’s going to be a primary one here. Higher male variability only becomes a dominant factor when there are enough would-be participants in a field that it can reliably fill its teams with people that have interest, dedication, training, AND freaky mutant powers. The skill level to participate in e-sports has risen over time, but for the moment, and moreso in the past, participation has been primarily based on willingness to dedicate your life to a bizarre and risky new career (which, yes, also skews the demographic towards men, but for different reasons), not by having +3SD reaction time scores.
The most relevant mechanisms are likely that hobby participation is extremely prone to preference cascades in which the minority gender leaves, and that girls (whether naturally or due to socialization) are less interested in ordinal status rankings, therefore less interested in becoming Best Of My Friends At Video Games at age 10, therefore much less likely to be within reach of Best In The World At Video Games come age 20.
I’d be surprised to find that men are “genetically better at Starcraft”.
I haven’t played Starcraft in almost 20 years, but doesn’t a lot of it come down to reaction times? Men consistently have been measured to have better reaction times than women. First google hit: http://www.iosrphr.org/papers/v2i3/R023452454.pdf
(Age matters, too. Those women would probably be much better than me.)
It’s mostly cultural–few women want to get that into video games–but don’t men usually score better at spatial tasks?
And, I just wonder–is there really any social reason to want to get MORE women into video games? Shouldn’t we want to get FEWER men into them? I mean, the fewer people who spend their time on those things the better, IMHO…and I used to play quite a bit… You gain no useful skills playing Starcraft…
What’s this “we” shit? 🙂
Some people enjoy playing video games, and/or watching them played competitively. Unless you take a hard-line stance that anything done for pure entertainment should be eliminated from one’s life, the polite attitude is de gustibus non est disputandum.
Re: gender imbalances and possible cultural reasons for them, we have the same old chicken-and-egg problem: are women less likely to be top Starcraft pros because fewer of them make the attempt, or vice versa? Culturally “neutral” competitive games, like Scrabble — at which my mom, girlfriend, and grandmother are all better than me — show the same pattern as Starcraft. Every single one of the top 10 Scrabble players in the world is male.
@ Edward Scizorhands
Men consistently have been measured to have better reaction times than women.
That would make Just-So sense. A caveman risks a few bruises if he falls down a rocky slope in reacting to an imaginary tiger. A cavewoman with a baby wants to check if there’s a real tiger, and if so, which escape route would be safest for the baby.
I don’t despise her, she sets a great precedent!
For all the flak she’s taken, she got a very sympathetic hearing in the national media (which she squandered, but there it is). NPR ran very sensitive features on her for a week.
And I, for one, look forward to the day when we can all claim to be whichever race we like, because that is one step closer to the banishment of race as an issue from our national discourse. If race is purely a social construct, then having rules based on it is useless! Affirmative action grinds to a halt!
The failure of studies to replicate bothers me a lot, but I get even more hung up on the meta issue of a study which shows that studies are wrong. If a study find that 66% of studies are wrong, should I then conclude that there is only a 34% chance that most studies are wrong?
without reading the article my guess is he disposed of the weapon somehow. Tied it to a balloon maybe?
so did anyone actually respond to the vox article that Vance links to? he makes some good points. i am actually really disappointed with the way the EA community is handling this… seems they are just as tribal as everyone else. “Givewell good, Harvard bad! Screw you and your technicalities about research!”
Thanks for flagging that article. It’s very good.
I was expecting better. He just more-less says “nu uh!”
Harvard does research but is it likely that the extra 400 million will actually yield 800,000 dead children worth of research?
It’s easy to hand wave and imply that research into anything has infinite payoff because research into how many hookers the board members of harvard can bang might be vital to the earths survival next year but it’s stunningly unlikely that the 400 million will be used even vaguely effectively.
I know being skeptical of Harvard is trendy around these parts but I’ve never heard them accused of straight-up massacre before.
Not a direct massacre. Using dead children as a unit of currency is a very old idea of Scott’s that has become a minor meme in EA circles; the idea is that every ~$500 you spend on research could be spent on e.g. malaria bednets, which would save roughly one expected life.
Note that this is an old value and probably a low one; I can’t be bothered to look up where I remember this from, but I seem to recall that more modern values are an order of magnitude higher. And of course it’s vulnerable to the same criticisms that EA in general is.
If you’re a believer in overpopulation as a problem, is not giving to charity the ultimate charity?
And I like that measure. I use similar measures: “Well, I dunno- this *thing I need* is kind of expensive…no, wait. It’s 20 bucks. That’s *one lunch with colleagues*. Will this provide me with more utility than that?”
On the other hand, makes it hard to justify doing anything at all that isn’t work and charity. “Every dollar I don’t give, a swollen baby dies screaming in it’s sobbing mother’s arms! This is the cappuccino of a MONSTER!”
I used to measure utility in burritos. I make a little too much money for that to work well now, but it’s not a bad approach if you can find something that compares well in price.
http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html
One Dead Child or DC is the marginal cost of saving the life of one 3rd world child. When the article was written it was about $800. I used an older number.
Used for opportunity cost comparisons.
I don’t doubt that Harvard’s research money could be better directed. But I’m doubtful that 100 years later, looking back on the most impactful projects of the early 21st century, malaria nets will be among those included. It seems like EAs have a bias towards projects with sure impact so they can feel like they are good people. I would rather the EA movement become “like Harvard, but prioritizing research based on EA principles” than what it’s doing currently.
Why? People who are healthier are more productive and people who are alive are more useful than corpses. While its unlikely we will get earth changing benefits from the difference, but it isn’t impossible. It certainly would improve the situation in the countries affected when people get the opportunity to think a little more about the long term.
Let me give an example. You know gypsies? They aren’t exacted famed for their massive contribution to mainstream society. However they certainly did produce scientists and engineers
http://www.imninalu.net/famous-Gypsies.htm#Scientists
4 scientists and 1 Nobel prize winner
Not too bad for a population estimated to have less than a million people before WW2.
As for optimizing research, I don’t know if we can make any improvements over what is currently done. Scientists and engineers are already motivated to discover the most useful or interesting breakthrough and I don’t see how outsiders could provide anything but marginal improvements in their search.
So you don’t think Harvard’s research funds could be better directed?
I do. I don’t think I or other outsiders could easily figure that out. If it was easy, people at Harvard would have already done it- individual scientists are incentivized to research things that pay off.
You can improve it, but I’m doubtful it would be in the same difficulty range as “deal with malaria”.
Has the EA crew considered the effectiveness of carpet-bombing with DDT instead of mosquito nets? That worked pretty well for eliminating malaria in the US, and if I were African I’d be happy to sacrifice a few birds for the cause.
(Quick googling gives one study.)
Mosquitoes can develop resistance to DDT. In areas where there is a history of DDT use in agriculture, the local mosquitoes may already have had a chance to develop such resistance, and more widespread spraying may also just cause already resistant species to spread out. For various reasons, using DDT residentially doesn’t seem to produce resistance in the way that widespread spraying does, and so it doesn’t have the same danger of becoming self-defeating in the long run (well, probably it would in the extremely long run, as it’s hard to imagine it would have no effect at all in breeding for tolerance, but as I understand it in observed timescales any effect of residential use on mosquito tolerance levels has been too small to detect).
Most places that have wiped out malaria have not wiped out mosquitoes. If it were as simple as carpet-bombing DDT, there would be no more mosquitoes. It is generally more effective to select against malaria than to select against mosquitoes. Putting insecticide in houses selects between mosquitoes. It selects for mosquitoes that do not enter houses and thus do not bite people who are bedridden with malaria. Thus it selects for mosquitoes that do not carry malaria. Also, it puts selection pressure on malaria to be less virulent, to not make people bedridden, the favorite topic of Paul Ewald.
Actually wiping out malaria is not something you can contribute to marginally. It is all or nothing. EAs don’t have enough money to consider this option. Bill Gates does and I’m pretty sure that he’s considered it and does not find it viable. I don’t mean not cost-effective, but simply impossible. (Maybe wiping out malaria in a peninsula like Thailand is possible. But Africa is all or nothing.)
Carpet bombing with DDT is not a very accurate description of what America did. Mainly it was draining swamps. Environmental DDT played a role, as did administering drugs simultaneously to everyone in a region.
Africa did try to wipe out malaria 1950-1970. It failed for a lot of reasons. Mainly the problem was that there were too many places for mosquitoes to hide. This is true on many scales. For one, there are too many individual swamps to drain. Also, they connect regions, making it hard to work one region at a time, which is what was done in America. But also, there was a failure of coordination, to get enough people to take anti-malaria drugs simultaneously. That coordination is not something that money can buy.
He killed himself by attaching guns to helium balloons.
Have you looked into the earth being flat yet?
Very sad to hear an article that I consider to be very poor quality and have very weak arguments to be described as “interesting throughout, but what makes it for me”. The only of those countries sitting on a pile of oil is Norway and whilst it has over 2/3 the GDP/capita of the others its growth rate isn’t any higher, its income inequality is only worse than that of Sweden and its innovation is always ranked top 15 (which shouldn’t be the case if innovation was negatively correlated with equality as the following quote seems to claim).
An even better example would be Sweden which is, according to rankings of choice, 1st in income equality, 3rd in innovation. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that innovation is, thus, the result of a “gap of incomes between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs”, as claimed by the original “research” paper.
Even if the discerning factor for innovation was in pure absolute terms, the world has its fair share of both small and large countries and quickly eyeballing the values doesn’t seem to me that there is any significant correlation (yes, eyeballing is not the way to do it and if anyone else is up to the task I bet $10 the correlation won’t be found).
This is a telling paragraph that shows a lot about where the author is coming from (and the reasons I believe have led to the conclusions, namely ideological). There’s no evidence saying that the Scandinavian governments need a growth rate above any arbitrary level of innovation that the world might or might not be able to support. Their growth rate is far from being high and I think their relative success has more to do with their ability to provide relatively more for relatively less than with them having more to provide with.
(In regards to gdp/capita Norway is the only Scandinavian country within top 10, runner up is 17th. In regards to gdp/capita annual growth rate they’re even worse ranking all below 40th. They’re able to provide quality services to their population despite growing relatively slower than other countries (or maybe because of it))
I do have more things to say about this article but it’s getting late and I need to sleep. I fail to see how that article, the one from WP, and the original research are anything but the result of a jingoistic bubble. None of those pieces present any convincing argument for the “theoretical framework” and yet it spreads and gets signaled as if it were even passably accurate.
/rant
If you look upthread, you’ll notice I opened my comment on the article with “It’s Megan McArdle”.
McArdle is — generously — an extremely sloppy writer. The less generous interpretation would be that she doesn’t care about the truth or falsehood of her assertions; she’s a successful conservative columnist who has moved steadily from one high-prestige gig to another.
Doug M.
If you look upthread, you’ll notice I opened my comment on the article with “It’s Megan McArdle”.
To what purpose, other than preaching to the converted?
I disagree with your characterization of McArdle, btw, having first noticed her in the context of some very well researched and well written essays. But if she were wholly unknown to me, that wouldn’t change the fact that your claim is an unsupported, off-putting ad-hominem. Any claim of the sort, “That’s by X, and all right-thinking people know better than to trust X”, is, well, a big red flag for me.
So if you want to do anything more than make noise in an echo chamber, the first thing you need to do is to show why this article is poorly-researched and factually inaccurate. If you do that, it might then be helpful to note that this is a pattern we should watch out for. Until you do that, there is no a priori reason for us to trust you over McArdle, or anyone else, and the fact that you’re here making unsupported accusations and they aren’t, is reason for us to distrust you.
“There are some cases when it is not (ad hominem) really a fallacy, such as when one needs to evaluate the truth of factual statements (as opposed to lines of argument or statements of value) made by interested parties. If someone has an incentive to lie about something, then it would be naive to accept his statements about that subject without question.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/project-s-h-a-m-e-on-megan-mcardle-portrait-of-a-taxpayer-subsidized-libertarian.html
I often wondered what kind of person would ever post something like what you just did. The essay opens with the fact that her father worked for the government, so she somehow cannot be libertarian . . . no, I’ve never bought that one, but I’ve always been glad to see someone’s opening salvo be “let me tell you about this person’s parents.” It saves a lot of time.
Sure, but my favorite bit of silliness was this claim: “The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page.”
If you click through there are links to demonstrate that, yes indeed, while they were still selling tickets the IHS events page listed specific details about the expected program alongside the info about cost and time and location. Specifically it said ticket-buyers could expect to encounter all of the following:
(a) remarks by Charles Koch
(b) a tribute to Walter Williams
(c) some stories from “a parade of IHS alumni”, and
(d) McArdle as the MC.
BUT LATER when somebody updated the page to note “WE ARE CURRENTLY SOLD OUT OF TICKETS” and point people at a waiting-list, they GOT RID OF the no-longer-so-important “program” section of the page. Which means they eliminated ALL of this from the page: (a), (b), (c), and (d).
Clearly IHS was ATTEMPTING TO HIDE that their event…had a program? I’m confused.
Oh, it’s a brand new user.
McArdle has her stalkers that look for any mention of her name and post their same old links. That’s what we’ve got here, nothing more.
Bahahahahahahahahhahhahahahahaha!
Oh man, McMegan’s Internet Stalkers have found SSC! We’ll need to get the exterminator in, those things are hell to get out of the carpet.
John, I have two long comments explaining why it is, in fact, badly researched and inaccurate.
Noting that someone has an awful track record is not an ad hominem attack. It’s the argument on credibility, which is related but distinct. It’s not “I don’t believe Megan because she’s a bad person”; it’s “I don’t believe Megan because she has a track record of making non-fact statements.” This is why courts since the days of Ethelred and Edgar have admitted evidence about a witness’s past untruths: they’re relevant to judging the witness’ credibility.
Now, you can counter by saying “no, actually her track record is quite good, or so ISTM”, and then we could hash that out. Fair enough! But if in fact someone is consistently sloppy, fails to fact-check, repeats tired old tropes without checking, or just seems to flat out lie a lot…? Then they lack credibility, and it’s entirely reasonable for us as readers to take that into account.
Doug M.
That seems like an awfully pedantic distinction, but never mind that. Seeing as how Doug Muir is a known fabulist, why should we pay any attention when he says that Megan McArdle is a known fabulist and not to be trusted?
Statements of the form, “[X] is not to be trusted; trust me on this”, do not seem to me to convey any useful information beyond signaling the tribal affiliation of the speaker. That is a poor justification for a defamatory and possibly libelous statement, and I’d rather not see that sort of thing here.
John, how is this case different from the comments others made earlier about Arthur Chu? Public and media figures have track records and reputations, which plainly bear on their credibility.
No difference at all. Invoking the name “Arthur Chu” to dismiss an argument, merely signals that the speaker and his intended audience are part of the Tribe That Arthur Chu isn’t in. It’s not persuasive, and it is neither kind nor helpful even if it is true.
Yes, people have track records and reputations. Unless a person is very exceedingly or very recently famous, specificallyfor being some sort of fabulist, assuming that your audience knows and agrees with that record/reputation is, again, just tribal signaling – we are the tribe that is defined by this bit of objectively-trivial tribal knowledge, boo McArdle and/or Chu, yay us.
Otherwise, support the accusation.
What’s it called in European football when an intemperate competitor transparently
feigns an injury?
I never said Arthur Chu’s arguments should be dismissed out of hand, I said his articles shouldn’t be given pageviews. I want running Arthur Chu to be a bad business decision.
Okay, question for John. Say someone links to an article saying that MMR vaccines are linked to early-onset Alzheimers. Someone else promptly posts, “Dude — that article is by Andrew Wakefield.” Would that be acceptable discourse?
Doug M.
Surely Andrew Wakefield comes under the “famous specifically for being a fabulist” exception? A better parallel case would be if someone cited a paleoclimate reconstruction and someone else replied “Dude– that article is by Michael Mann.” That would bug me even though I agree to a large extent about Mann’s untrustworthiness: open questions should not be treated as if they were closed. It’s not the ad hominem that people are really balking at here; it’s the ex cathedra.
In most cases it’s going to be somewhat context-dependent. Mann is less of a fabulist than Wakefield, but probably better known. Either one, a specialist community can reasonably say, “this person generally doesn’t meet our standards, and is locally famous enough that we all know him and known not tor trust them without outside verification”.
But if you’ve got people linking uncritically to articles by Mann, Wakefield, or whomever, then it’s pretty clear that you’re not actually in a community where everybody knows them as unreliable. In which case, yes, CPZ has got it about right.
@John Schilling:
Generally, I think you are right. Most statements of the variety “Well, that was written by so-and-so” is essentially signalling the belief that so-and-so is believed to be identified with a particular tribe.
But, if Keith Olbermann writes an article talking about how horrible and awful and disgraceful [something] is, it is in fact a useful datapoint to know that a) He is very closely associated with Blue Tribe, and b) He is well known for his emotional hyperbole. Just because someone from Red Tribe were saying “Dude, that’s Olbermann” wouldn’t make that fact any less true.
In a Bayesian sense, my prior for Olbermann producing a well-reasoned argument that is not full of hyperbolic and emotional argument is low. So, if I see an argument that appears to be restrained and well-reasoned coming from him, I will only give the argument credence after more close examination than I would require for an unknown author.
Certainly, citation to back up the assertion of an author’s particular trend is needed if it is not already common knowledge. But I wouldn’t reject out-of-hand an opposite tribe assertion of flaws with a particular author.
I would rather see, in this case, some sort of citation or argument to indicate why Doug M. thinks that McArdle is generally sloppy (rather than merely sloppy in this case).
I’d like some help understanding the one about race in Brazil. Also, some thoughts:
First, I’m happy to see a USian study about this. Brazil and the US have large differences in race relations, despite very similar history, and the comparison should teach us interesting things (IMO the most important difference is that we don’t have a “white culture” and a “black culture” around here; cultural differences follow region and class). Also, from all I’ve seen, we’re embarrassingly bad at studying it.
The paper is right in saying that skin tone is the determinant characteristic, and that a history of miscegenation gave us a very large number of people of “ambiguous race”. As a personal anecdote, my 5-year-old stepson recently asked us “what color am I?”, and only then did we find out that my wife thinks he’s white and I think he’s “pardo” (a word that basically means “anything between white and black”).
Anyway. The paper says that people who go from reported non-white on the old job to reported white on the new job are more likely to be going from plants where most people are reported non-white to plants where most people are reported white, and vice versa. They also say that workers that go from non-white to white get a wage “premium”, but at the same time they’re going to plants with lower average wages.
(are the ones getting better wages and the ones going to lower-average-wage firms the same people? are the majority-white firms and the lower-average-wage firms the same places?)
They explain it with workers “manipulating” the perception of their race so they’ll get jobs in places that discriminate against non-whites. Now, from inside the culture, this looks super weird to me, but my stats-fu is weak and I can’t assess how well they supported it (my instinct would be to look at whether there’s a pattern to employers’ different perceptions of where the racial thresholds are on the white-black scale).
Not directly relevant to the current thread, but for anyone who wonders about my day job, I’m in the news today.
Oooooh, look at all that sexy, sexy public affirmation. Your SMV just went up. You are no more a BETA CUCKOLD ORBITER. You have now risen to WEAK ALPHA.
I suggest spending more time on BRUTE STRENGTH and GENERATING MASS. Ladies love MASS and they hate BETA CUCKOLD ORBITERS.
Only BETA ORBITERS and OMEGA MALES spend their time tearing down BETA ORBITERS and OMEGA MALES on INTERNET FORUMS.
Hah! But logic is an intellectual tool, and as everyone knows, only OMEGA MALES are NERDS. What good is your logic against BRUTE STRENGTH?
Pretty good on an INTERNET FORUM where you can’t actually BEAT ME UP.
Besides, this is a bit of a strawman–the whole point of the redpill/PUA/MRA philosophy isn’t that logic is useless, but that it won’t get you laid. And yes, it is useful, but it won’t get you laid.
PUA is all about applying brainpower to solving the problem of how to get laid.
Redpill and MRA are not the same thing, not related, not comparable, and not aligned. MRAs are all about how dudes should not have to “get laid” to prove their value as human beings.
Stop lumping them together.
Looks like you’ll be hard at work starting today! 🙂
It’s much quieter than I expected.
So far today, we have processed six marriage license applications, of which five were to opposite-sex couples, one to a same-sex couple. This is in a county with a population around 350,000.
I am hearing similar reports from counties around the state. There has not been a big rush of applicants so far. Of course, the decision was announced only about two hours ago.
By contrast, when Michigan had a one-day window for same-sex marriage on March 22, 2014, we had a long line waiting outside the door when we opened. We issued 75 licenses in four hours.
Less urgency since it’s a clearly permanent change, plus no impetus to be First due to the previous temporary window?
Yes, it’s ordinary business now. And perhaps in 2014, we drained the pipeline of people who were really anxious to get married right away.
Final marriage license total for today: 25, of which 18 were same-sex, and 7 were opposite-sex.
How do those overall numbers compare with a typical Friday in June?
Confirms my hunch that gay marriage was more “rah gay people” than anything that had significant impact on the world. Imagine a bully taking the toy of another kid and then not playing with it… that’s what the Blue Tribe did with marriage for the Red Tribe.
Except in your bully analogy, the other kid can’t play with the toy any more. What has the blue tribe deprived the red tribe of?
Attention, approval, and points, obviously.
A better analogy would be when the pretty, popular sister takes art lessons because she’s jealous of the attention her mousey sister gets for making drawings. In the simple analysis, it looks like an improvement for the first girl with no loss for the second, but since the motive is overwhelmingly and transparently to win in the zero-sum sibling rivalry, the total outcome will be a protracted and spiteful series of fights that the entire family loses.
@Foo,@Alraune: What these comments prove is that there is simply no point trying to engage in rational discourse with the opposing side. If you wanted to find out what gay marriage was really “about,” you’d have done so.
2% personal desire for it, 8% friends with the first group, 90% status play?
@Alraune:
I have to think you are just trolling with these comments. Or, conversely, that everyone who gets married mostly does so because of “status play”.
I mean, the low number of cross-racial marriages post Loving v. Virginia doesn’t suggest that those who were supported the proposition that it should be legal because it was a right were simply bullshitting about their reasons for backing it.
If I wasn’t convinced that he is just trolling, I’d ask what kind of evidence would be sufficient to change his mind.
But he’s just trolling.
As a ballpark figure, I’d buy it if someone said 90% of gay marriage activists weren’t planning such a marriage, nor had any close friends or relations who were.
Now, I might object to collapsing all impersonal motives into “status play”, which is only true under the broadest, most Hansonian view of status. But I don’t think it’s realistic to say that gay marriage activism was driven mainly by people who personally wanted to marry their partners, either. Maybe in 1994, when this was first on my radar, but not now.
(Not trying to grind an axe here — I think this was about the best realistic outcome under the current regulatory regime.)
“Play” in the sense of a football down, not roleplay. And, yeah, I do think that status is the primary reason people route their relationships through the gigantic expensive year-consuming headache of a public ceremony that we’ve indoctrinated them into prizing for years and years.
It also doesn’t suggest they were all dedicated and consistent rights theorists. I try to be one of those dedicated and consistent rights theorists myself. The first thing you learn is that for the vast majority of people, “Is X a right?” is an indistinguishable question from “is your general opinion of X positive or negative?” The second thing you learn is that even where your opinions are perfectly logical, the levels of emphasis each has won’t be which means the output isn’t.
So, yes, what drove the majority of interracial marriage supporters is more complex than “simply bullshitting”, but not by that much. They adopted their opinion because someone else held that opinion and they thought agreeing with them was socially advantageous, and they broadcast the opinion along for the same reason. We live in a runaway feedback loop in which apparently strong social consensuses just being the amplified opinions of some remarkably small number of people who would give a damn if it changed is the normal situation, not the exception. (In some cases, that “remarkably small number” is zero, and you have a strong, actionable consensus that consists of nothing but socially amplified noise.)
This is so completely wrong that I’m almost speechless.
I think you don’t realize that the context in which Loving was decided in 1967 was completely different from the context of Obergefell in 2015.
A Gallup poll in 1968 (the year after the Loving decision) showed only 20% approved of interracial marriage; 73% disapproved. Before the ruling, 15 states prohibited marriages between blacks and whites, and those laws had more support than opposition in national polls.
The Lovings, plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, were prosecuted under the Virginia law, convicted of a felony and sentenced to 25 years in prison. This is not some minor inconvenience.
When the Warren Court took the Loving’s case and struck down the miscegnation laws in 1967, the ruling was quietly celebrated in some places, but it certainly wasn’t a nationally popular decision.
Indeed, a few months after the ruling, the daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a young white woman, married a black man. This was thought to be such an embarrassment to the Johnson Administration that Rusk offered his resignation! (LBJ didn’t accept it.)
In 1967, there was certainly no “runaway feedback loop” expressing support for interracial marriage.
Larry, I do not see how any of that is in any way relevant to Alraune’s claim.
That Loving occurred at a different point in the trajectory of popularity from Obergefell has nothing to do with the question of why there was such a trajectory in the first place.
The Lovings were sentenced to 25 years of exile from Virginia (or 1 year of jail), not 25 years of jail.
I’m certainly discussing events I wasn’t around for here, but I did know what the interracial marriage approval trends looked like, and was incorporating them as best I could when I spoke. My claim that consensus on social issues consists mostly of amplification of an interested minority opinion, with most people being naturally ambivalent and only holding an opinion because they were told it was a good one to have, is quite consistent with the interracial marriage approval numbers.
At the time of the Loving decision, the public stance towards interracial marriage was consensus condemnation. When it stopped being a live issue because the law was decided, it slowly drifted from consensus condemnation towards no opinion for 30 years. There was no feedback loop in ’67, but in the late 90s, you see a sudden new trend in which people start to approve of interracial marriage en masse, and that seems to have happened entirely because “approve” took that final doddering step across the 50% line and became The Majority View. Interracial marriage has now gained consensus approval symmetrical to its original disapproval rate, which is itself evidence that the approval rate primarily reflects factors inherent to the social structure rather than to the issue at hand.
The primary difference between the interracial and gay marriage situations appears to be that the Warren Court was much less sensitive to the wind than the Rhenquist Court was. SCOTUS should have taken up the matter in 2004 after Massachusetts legalized SSM, and we’ve spent a decade paying the price for their hesitance.
If SCOTUS had considered the question in 2004 it would have gone the other way. (Kennedy is a squish, he’d have bought Scalia’s invective back then. Today it just seems absurd and even Kennedy can see it.) Since they generally won’t consider reversing a decision until about 15-20 years have passed, we’d end up where we are now in 2020 or so.
@ Anonymous:
You’re right — the source I relied on got that wrong. But to be (1) convicted of a felony, and (2) expelled from your home state, on threat of imprisonment, is surely no small penalty.
@ Alraune:
Thank you.
Arguably, that describes the formation of public opinion on any issue. Political views are meaningless in isolation, and almost nobody is a “consistent theorist” whose ideology overrides their environment.
There’s a little bump right after 50%, sure, but overall, approval of interracial marriage shows a very gradual increase from the 1950s to the 2010s, consistent with social changes and generational succession. It was a slow process from start to finish.
Interesting question which the state of Michigan is struggling with right now: should marriage licenses have blanks for the gender of the parties? I mean, should the gender of the parties be explicitly given on the face of a completed marriage license?
What’s the argument in favor of having such a blank at this point? (Assuming it’s been articulated.) Is it specified in the legislation or regulations that define the form?
It would probably be useful for statistical purposes. I expect quite a few people would be interested in those statistics, if this isn’t one of those subjects we don’t want federal bureaucrats to be gathering statistics on for fear they will be abused.
(Nit– state rather than federal bureaucrats for marriage licenses.)
There are a fair number of marriage-related statistics that are (or might be) tracked and of interest that aren’t (presumably) included on the license form. E.g., tracking racial and ethnic disparities in marriage rates, religion, income of the parties, etc.
I’d be leery of turning the marriage license into a survey form on that basis. Given that, I’m inclined to presume against using it that way in this case, unless the state has a persuasive positive reason for doing so. It’s not something I’d go to the wall over or anything, but it seems as if keeping it is more a matter of inertia than something that would be done if starting from scratch.
(And I’d say Chesterton’s Wall doesn’t really apply in this case, since the wall itself has been torn down, for better or worse. We’re trying to decide if some of the landscaping associated with it still makes sense now that it’s gone.)
Update: yesterday, following a discussion about how awkward it is to deal with people of ambiguous gender (e.g. birth certificate shows one thing, driver’s license shows something different), the committee voted overwhelmingly to omit gender blanks from the marriage license form.
Today, there is some pushback going on, so the discussion continues.
“That is it. That is human sex selection. Everything else is triggered by hormones, including the hormones present as the brain develops.”
That’s just… not true. At all. I sympathize with the people who would love to believe it’s true because it makes hormone therapy appear incredibly powerful, but there are several other known mechanisms responsible for sex differentiation.
Obviously, L’affaire Dolezal has had legs because it came on the heels of the Jenner news, and gave those who are skeptical of/hostile to the current Transgender Moment a test case to probe the assumptions and principles of the pro-Transgender (for lack of a better term) crowd. Two things are apparent: (i) even if you conclude that there are important differences between Dolezal and Jenner, it’s not absurd to ask the question and work through the reasoning; (ii) Dolezal/Jenner expose the internal contradictions and incompleteness of the SJW left.
There’s no quick answer to why Transgender & Transracial are meaningfully different. I’ve read smart people explain it, like in Scott’s link. It’s not a short argument. You can’t explain it in an elevator conversation. In order to explain it fully, you need a grounding in what we mean by gender and race, and it’s not as if we’ve got those figured out perfectly. You need some understanding of genetics. The arguments get philosophical quickly. So you can’t just dismiss the proposition that “Transracial” is as legitimate as “Transgender” the way you would dismiss the proposition that the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks are equally good at hockey.
And when you try, you look silly or worse. I saw some Twitter comments that went something like “Gender is how you feel in your brain, race is about your DNA.” Whoa, hold on there: race went from being an unscientific social construct that isn’t real to Hard Science. All it took was someone comparing being Transgender (good!) to Transracial (bad!). Even Scott’s link, while otherwise thoughtful, leads off with a dubious assertion: that “a typical black person cannot just choose to be white.” While it’s true that most people who we think of as black cannot pass for white, the converse is equally true: most white people cannot pass for black – not without tremendous effort. And when even chocolaty black people put in that effort, they can pass for white. See Jackson, Michael. If you’re dismissing the Transracial arguments quickly, you’re doing something wrong.
The way I see it, the SJW left has been forced in advance to reach the “Transracial isn’t a thing” conclusion. All their arguments must lead there. It’s a matter of the history of race in America: You can’t do blackface, ever. You just can’t. That’s one of the big undisputed no-nos. There’s an almost visceral reaction from the SJWs – an involuntary rejection – when someone who is not black does anything that looks like he or she is pretending to be black. Witness the objections to Iggy Azalea and her “blaccent.” So regardless of the independent merits of the “Transracial” arguments, the SJWs absolutely need it not to be a thing. They were ideologically committed to it not being a thing long ago.
And the SJW’s really don’t want to have this conversation, because to do so exposes the contradictions in their positions. They want to sigh loudly and move on. That’s why their arguments have titles, like at the link, such as “About all I have to say on ‘transracialism’.” In other words, here’s my argument, end of discussion. It’s barely a step up from “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
Just some of the contradictions:
(1)(a) In order to say that a person with white skin can’t “feel black” the way that someone with a penis can “feel like a woman,” you must accept that there’s a real difference in the way that the brains of men and women generally operate, and that these differences map to stereotypical gender norms.
(1)(b) We’re supposed to take people at their word regarding their gender identity. We don’t get to examine Jenner’s brain to determine whether he or she really feels like a woman. But if someone says they feel black, we can *never* accept that.
(2) If you argue that gender is a mere social construct and our brains are blank slates at birth, upon which the culture tells us how to act, then the same must be true for race.
(3) Race isn’t real except when it is. Contrary to what SJWs insist, “Black Privilege” is as real as White Privilege. White Privilege may be more advantageous generally, but there are some settings where being black confers an advantage. All the talk of racial boundaries being fuzzy and artificial disappear when someone whom our culture doesn’t consider to be black, like Dolezal, attempts to gain the advantages of blackness. At that point we get very clear definitions of race.
(4) If it is possible to “feel like a woman,” and there’s no such thing as “feeling black.” Yet when Jenner went from Bruce to Caitlyn, he began expressing a white woman’s gender. He didn’t express gender in the way that a typical Japanese or Mandinka would. Jenner felt a need to express a racialized gender. If Jenner’s transition resulted in her acting like a sassy black woman, she’d be accused of racial appropriation, and she wouldn’t be able to defend herself by saying that’s how she felt. She MUST feel like a white woman. But that’s not a thing, right?
Much of these contradictions can be resolved by assuming two things:
(i) when we say “race,” we’re really talking about ancestral origin within the past 500 years. By “black,” we generally mean that you have plurality ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa from that period forward. On its face this isn’t that controversial. But the SJWs don’t like to admit that this is how we define “black” because it makes it something that can be objectively measured, and not mere social hand-waving.
(ii) There are actual physical differences between the way men’s and women’s brains operate, and sometimes this can get crossed up. SJWs refuse to move off the blank-slate model of the brain.
When people bring up “you’re born either male or female according to your genitalia and your chromosomes”, people making an apologia for transgender like to bring up intersex people and conditions such as Klinefelter Syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities to show that there is no such thing as an absolute biologically determined binary gender system.
So what about the argument that you can’t be transracial because there are biologically determined racial characteristics? Such as the amount of melanin in the skin? Or epicanthic folds of the eyelids?
Well, Down’s Syndrome used to be called Mongolism (and persons with it were described as “Mongoloid”) because the slanted eyes of the syndrome were considered similar to the epicanthic folds of Central Asian peoples. XXXX Syndrome people can also have epicanthic folds. So “natural distinctive” racial features can be mimicked by chromosomal disorders in the same way that a person with Klinefelter’s will be perceived as phenotypically male even though they possess two X chromosomes, which is associated with “being female”.
A black mother can give birth to a white-skinned child. White-skinned parents can have a black-skinned child.
If simple biological determinism is not enough to define gender, we may be finding out that neither is it enough to define race. If the existence of intersex people can prop up the arguments for “And even though I have the functional genitalia and the non-aneuploidy chromosomes of one gender, I am actually of a different gender, two genders, genderfluid, agender, or third gender” of transgenderism, then perhaps (as we are now coming to accept transgender people not as mentally ill or fakers looking for attention) in the future we will accept the experiences of transracial people whose genetic profile explains why they have the features of Race A when belonging to Race B (or mixed-race) as supporting the identities of people who say “Although I have the functional phenotype of Race C I am actually and have always been Race D”.
I think the interesting implication of the acceptance of Jenner’s identity and the refusal to accept Dolezal’s (which I think is the correct position), is that it actually implies the relative biological *in*significance of race relative to gender.
In centuries past, people probably assumed white women had more in common with white men than with black women. But I think this is actually not the case. Biologically, the difference between the men and women of any given race is bigger than the difference between the men or women of different races. Not just talking about genitalia, of course, but about the average levels of all kinds of hormones, etc.
Some feminists have opposed Jenner’s self-identification as female because, they say, to truly be female, you have to have had the experience of growing up being treated as female.
A comedy, of course, but for Steve Martin’s character in this movie, I think there’s a real sense in which we might say he *is* black (despite his inborn love of twinkies):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7why8Xo_RQ
Conversely, I think that, even if my parents had, for some reason, raised me as a girl–dressing me as a girl, making me use female pronouns, etc. I would still have *felt* like a boy. If my parents had really wanted me to be a girl maybe they could have made me feel like one by giving my pregnant mother hormone injections of some kind, but by the time I was born, the fact that I had a man’s brain had pretty much been set in stone. And there are weird cases of this–not just transgender, but, for example, a boy whose penis was removed at infancy due to a botched circumcision and the parents decided to raise him as a girl. He had intense gender dysphoria and always felt he was a man.
Another joke, but, isn’t there a real sense in which Barack Obama *isn’t really* the first black president?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDxOSjgl5Z4
Of course, he’s been *treated* as black by those around him, and to the extent that that, or skin pigment, is what it means to be black, then yes, he’s black. But to the extent that it means something cultural, he’s really not very black at all. He was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii by white people. This is the same reason I get annoyed when certain fancy institutions fill their black people quota with the children of powerful, wealthy African families. Other than their skin tone, these students don’t have that much in common with African Americans. Now had Herman Cain been elected, he would have definitely been the first *African American* president (note that Barry Obama started to embrace his blackness once he went into politics and became “Barack”).
Now, of course, if you are a black child raised by white people then you are still going to be treated differently in public even if your parents treat you no differently than their white children. But this only means that you’ve still got half of the equation missing: your parents treated you like a white person (member of their culture), but society is still assuming your culture corresponds to your skin tone (which, in this case, it does not).
In other words, race is relatively cultural, gender biological (though, as with everything, there are elements of both at work in both cases), and to this, all the usual caveats apply. I think this may run counter to a lot of prevailing narratives, even though I think it’s the logical corollary of the acceptance of Jenner and the non-acceptance of Dolezal.
@onyomi:
The basic assertion you are making here seems correct to me.
Another way to state this that might be that sex has a bi-modal distribution. There are those who end up being the rare instances that don’t clump around one set of characteristics, but they are rare.
Whereas “race” (whatever that is) is more like a lumpy 3D hill. You can slice it lots of different ways to try and group people into so called races, but the categories ending up being fairly arbitrary.
One of my favorite illustrations of that is that during the Irish immigration wave, they weren’t considered white. In fact, newspapers of the day frequently depicted them as dark-skinned and attributed to them all manner of negative characteristics.
Now, if you isolate a particular set of characteristics and treat them differently, we can then start to see large “racial” differences. The incidence of slavery among whites in 1860 America was essentially 0%, but that doesn’t mean whites were “naturally” not slave and blacks “naturally” slaves.
“Some feminists have opposed Jenner’s self-identification as female because, they say, to truly be female, you have to have had the experience of growing up being treated as female.”
Those are TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). They exist, their comments will be signal boosted, but they don’t represent the mainstream of current 3rd-Wave Feminism.
As to the Obama not being Black thing, to me that is just a “let me slice this hill a different way”. It’s a no-true-scotsman argument.
I mean nobody ever said Barry White’s name wasn’t black enough. If he was going by Barry and people then “found out” his given name was Barak, they would have had a field day with that. He might be in a slightly difference place on the hill than we would call the “average” black man, but, frankly, that is true of almost all presidents.
In defense of the newspapers of the day, the Irish of the Irish immigration wave were very noticeably different-looking. Based on the photos I’ve seen, I’d guess the average self-identified Irish-American today looks only a quarter as far from the white mean as the average first-genner did.
@Alraune:
That sort-of misses the point, doesn’t it?
Edit to de-snark:
The Irish, both here and back home, have not undergone some radical transfusion of genetic material in the last 100 years.
Edit 2: it’s important to note that it was mostly the previous wave of German immigrants complaining about the current wave of Irish. There was quite a bit of motivated and biased reasoning in the Germans wanting to separate themselves from the Irish.
No, but people who grew up in conditions of grinding rural poverty, disease, and malnutrition in the Auld Sod of the 1840s are going to look quite different than their affluent First World great-great-grandchildren.
The term usually used for people who look like that is “Black Irish”
“The term is commonly used to describe people of Irish origin who have dark features, black hair, a dark complexion and dark eyes.” according to IrishCentral.com
And various pre-20th century brit writers describe various strains of celtic ancestry as “dark”.
Point being, HBC, that talk about xenophobia towards the Irish usually comes from an assumption of absurdity: “Arguments over whether the Irish were white should always have been patently ridiculous, because I can barely tell if people are Irish. So this [and it’s often argued by extension, race itself] must be entirely about cultural perception.”
And that’s ahistorical. That the discussion took place in terms of white/non-white demonstrates how firmly committed the American paradigm has always been to collapsing group identity questions into the Race axis, but the Irish immigrants were quite visibly a xenogroup. So the conclusion I take from the situation is more like “when a xenogroup shows up, people notice and react in the same fashion even if their cultural paradigm and vocabulary are horribly ill-suited for expressing what makes the group different.”
@Alraune:
“when a xenogroup shows up, people notice and react in the same fashion even if their cultural paradigm and vocabulary are horribly ill-suited for expressing what makes the group different.”
Isn’t this precisely my point? Or, perhaps more accurately, why do you assume that their cultural paradigm and vocabulary do anything else other than identify the xenogroup?
It’s the fact that there is a set of characteristics that mark them as a xenogroup that matters. Nothing else in their attributes does.
@Larry Kestenbaum:
I’m arguing that the Irish immigration (and really, many immigrant waves) disproves the notion that our classification of race has very much to do with some intrinsic property of the genome of the people immigrating. The fact that the immigrating Irish may have had deficits that were environmentally caused boosts this claim, doesn’t it?
@CJB:
Whether Black Irish is really a thing and doesn’t just refer to “foreigners with dark intentions” is ambiguous according to what I assume is the same Irish central article.
But even so, there definitely is no indication that Black Irish dominated the immigration wave. We would see these Black Irish today, wouldn’t we? The Irish were broadly described as “dark” and “not white” at that time, by those who wished to impugn their nature.
And I believe this has been true for most immigration waves.
I always thought “black Irish” simply meant “Irish person with dark hair, as distinguished from the large percentage of Irish with red or otherwise light-colored hair.”
I, for example, have blackish-brown hair but very fair skin with freckles. My brother has red hair and even lighter skin. I thought this made me “black Irish,” to the extent I am Irish, as an American with a big proportion of Irish ancestry. The fact is, Irish people are even whiter than most “white” people, as I can attest from days spent at the beach.
I think it’s correct that calling people “swarthy” was just a stock way to describe menacing foreigners. Remember, also, that people had less means of dispelling such notions. If you don’t know any actual Irish people, you can’t just GoogleImage them to see if the description is, technically, accurate.
I think it’s also correct that Irish people, especially if malnourished and wearing different clothes could look weirder than one might imagine. If your standard for “white people” is a well-fed person of even skin tone with straight brownish or blondeish hair, and you encounter a hoard of people with bright red, curly hair, neon white skin, freckles, a weird accent, unusually skinny and small, always hanging out together, then those people are going to seem pretty foreign.
Nowadays, Irish have been largely subsumed within the category of “white,” in the same way people have stopped paying as much attention to finer distinctions within “white,” like Jewish, Italian American, German American, etc. but difference is all relative. If you’re from England and all you’ve ever met is people from England, then people from Ireland probably look weird and foreign, and sound funny when they talk. But if you then meet someone from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, then perhaps you realize that the difference between you and the Irishman was actually quite small.
Ironically and almost amusingly, I remember reading that very early accounts of Chinese immigrants to California described them as “stupid and lazy.”
@ HeelBearCub:
I would certainly think so!
(If you thought I was making the opposite point, well, one of us is confused.)
HBC:
I’ll confess, I wasn’t paying too much attention to what your point was. I expect I was mostly on a tangent. I’ll restate.
The argument that the Irish were non-white is usually used in the following logic chain:
1. Modern Irish-Americans are universally perceived as white.
2. Irish immigrants were not always perceived as white.
3. Modern Irish-Americans look essentially the same as the Irish immigrants did.
4. Therefore, only the internal perception of their race has changed.
5. Therefore, perception of race is culturally arbitrary, and also people in the past were dumbasses.
…but point 3 is false, leaving us with:
1. Modern Irish-Americans are universally perceived as white.
2. Irish immigrants were not always perceived as white.
3. Modern Irish-Americans look substantially less different than Irish immigrants did.
4. Therefore, both the internal perception of their race and what was there to be perceived have changed.
5. Therefore, this example wasn’t particularly informative, which we probably would have predicted if we weren’t all such historical chauvinists.
And I don’t exempt myself from the indictment for historical chauvinism here, it blindsided me as well. The only reason I’m mentioning this is that I recently took a tour through a local history museum, was hit with this nagging “one of these things is not like the other” feeling as I went through the galleries, and was shocked to realize that the category I’d discovered was the Irish.
@Alraune
In what ways did the 19th century Irish immigrants look so different from present-day Irish Americans (and indeed, from Irish people living in Ireland currently)?
I’ve been looking for a good gallery to demonstrate, and ideally also to get more evidence for it having been dietary, but the internet is really big on publishing drawings of emaciated famine victims and frustratingly uninterested in photos of them a couple decades later.
I did find this impressively terrible graph claiming Ireland contained more people than Europe until 1910 though.
That can’t be right… It makes it look like the population of Ireland 200 years ago was almost as large as that of India today! What is the context of that claim?
It is true, however, I believe, that there are more Americans of Irish descent in the US now than there are Irish people in Ireland.
It’s supposed to be the population of Ireland (scale on the left, million/dem) vs. the total population of Europe (scale on the right, hundred million/dem).
Yeah.
@Alraune:
Regardless of whether #3 is really true, because I think @onyomi has a good point there, do you think the Irish of today are the the genetic descendants of the Irish of 100 years ago?
I can’t imagine 2/3/4 generations is significant enough to allow the kind of genetic drift that would say they are significantly different merely based on random mutation or evolutionary pressure. But do you see some other way that Irish should not be representative, genetically, of The Irish of yesterday?
Assuming that you think they are representative, the the add on to point #3 is simply that judging the capability of people based on how they look and their existing economic circumstance is foolish. This is the main argument, not that the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, etc. of yesterday didn’t look “different” from the descendants of the Mayflower, but that judging them based on their external appearance was nonsensical. Time after time, people did this.
Do you think that you can tell, from a person’s external appearance, assuming they are healthy, how capable they are?
Yes — the fact that ethnic groups in America intermarry at high rates.
My own ancestry is not so unusual: my four grandparents, children of immigrants, came from four different ethnic groups. And I was born six decades ago.
The “ethnic purity” (Jimmy Carter’s awkward expression) of a given immigrant population declines monotonically from generation to generation.
Let’s say there is such a thing as the Irish genome, which is characteristic of almost everybody in the all-Catholic parts of Ireland. Presumably you could use this to develop a DNA test for the extent of a person’s genetic Irishness.
How many babies born in the U.S. today would test as 100% Irish? I’m guessing almost none. Fifty percent Irish? Maybe very low single digits.
Anecdote: on a visit to Boston some years ago, before the Big Dig, on a very slow moving expressway, there was a old guy walking from car to car, raising money for the Knights of Columbus or something.
This man’s face caught my attention. He just looked just so extraordinarily Irish, like a picture from Dorothea Lange’s Ireland.
It’s not a common experience here (perhaps outside Boston) to recognize a person as Irish from physical appearance alone.
@Larry Kestenbaum:
Sorry, I thought about spelling out that I meant Irish on both sides of the pond. I guess I should have.
Certainly, if the Irish of yesterday looked so different as to seem “not white”, and it was due to genetics, we would see some population in Ireland today that matched it? If not, how could one explain it?
Even in the US, we would expect to see some remnants of the population, if for no other reason than they would look so different as to reduce intermarriage.
There is an important point about intermarriage to be made though. For whatever reason, when those of African ancestry intermarry with those of different ancestries, the resulting offspring tend to show very clearly the heritage. Of course, this really might say more about the societally imposed costs, than it says about whether the visual markers are particularly noteworthy.
But there is no substantial population of people born on this side of the pond who are anything like “as Irish” as typical natives of Ireland.
How about the fact that “not white” had a different meaning 150 years ago than today? Americans in the 1860s probably had a much narrower idea of what counted as “white”.
But I’m probably just repeating what you and others have said upthread.
This assumes that there were Irish immigrants who would be judged “non-white” by an observer today. Absent any evidence, I dismiss that completely out of hand.
If you graph two different values on the same field against the same X-axis with different Y-axes, you are going to Science Hell.
@Larry:
@Alraune is arguing against the idea that the treatment of the Irish serves as an example of race being socially constructed. The Irish in Ireland of today would be incontrovertibly white. Either the idea of white has been socially constructed to include today’s Irish, or today’s Irish look much different than the Irish back then.
Your point about our view of what is “white” being less narrow today is exactly what I am trying to get at.
Well, then, we agree, and my apologies for missing or misunderstanding the previous context.
Ah, I see, I didn’t even look at the left side of the Y axis, because yeah, that’s weird to plot two different values on the same field like that, though I guess the point is just to show the population of Ireland relative to that of Europe. That is, it shows that Ireland went from being about 1/60th of the total population of Europe to being about 1/10th of the population of Europe in a very short time.
A less confusing graph of just the population of Ireland does reveal that same spike:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Population_of_Ireland_since_1600.png/330px-Population_of_Ireland_since_1600.png
What’s interesting to me is that the famine is preceded by an unprecedented population explosion which I guess, must have been at least partially predicated on widespread availability of potatoes (+improved medical care? Though that wouldn’t explain the explosion relative to the rest of Europe?). So the famine is in some ways more of a painful regression to the mean rather than a painful net loss of population.
I guess there can be a population bubble, just like an economic bubble. Also makes Malthus’s concerns more understandable.
What’s interesting to me is that the famine is preceded by an unprecedented population explosion which I guess, must have been at least partially predicated on widespread availability of potatoes
The first problem is that we don’t have any accurate data for pre-Famine population of Ireland. Estimates run anywhere from six to ten million, so the eight million is the “splitting the difference” figure.
Secondly, pre-Famine and post-Famine society in Ireland changed dramatically. The European trend was for later and less fertile marriage (England was in line with that); the Irish, on the contrary, married early and had lots of kids, and we appear to have had lots of those kids survive birth and early childhood.
Funnily enough, the diet of potatoes, fish and milk was described as being healthy, since people seemed to thrive on it. Possibly for the same reason the “fasting makes mice live longer” diets work?
What contributes to the complication of the whole picture is the political background; since (for example) the Penal Laws aimed to break the inheriting of large estates or farms by Catholics, the pattern of sub-dividing plots of land between all the sons of a family, so that each was enabled to marry and start a family of their own, as you could grow a sufficient crop of potatoes to feed that family on a small amount of land, was established. High population meant cheap agricultural labour. Landlords were also not adverse to having many tenants on small plots of land, as they could charge higher rents (demand for land meaning that people would pay as much as was feasible).
The Famine disproportionately affected the poorer and lower-class sections of society, which are always the ones with the highest birth-rate, but it also affected the cultural landscape. Marriage was now delayed so people were older when they married; land was concentrated in the eldest son rather than being split between the sons; dowries and fortunes were expected with daughters so again, not all the daughters of a family could marry. Tolerance of childbearing outside marriage dropped drastically (“Victorian values” in action). Emigration was the safety valve for the unmarried men and women to leave, those who had little to no prospect of work or marriage or inheriting land.
One of the ironies of our colonial history is that an increasing population was touted as a good thing for England, but a bad thing for Ireland. As you can see from this graph, the population of Great Britain increased in a nice, steady fashion over a century from 1801-1901. Despite Malthus’ warnings, a growing population was seen as a sign of a rich, prosperous, thriving nation.
Thanks for the history, Deiseach.
It’s interesting to think about how drastically material conditions can effect cultural mores, like those surrounding childbirth and sexuality.
I wonder what the percentage in the US that have at least one Irish great-grandparent and 100% catholic great-grandparents.
@ deiseach
Despite Malthus’ warnings, a growing population was seen as a sign of a rich, prosperous, thriving nation.
I thougnt it would be more like, “Despite the fact that a growing population had long been seen as a sign of a rich, prosperous, thriving nation, Malthus warned that [whatever].”
Perhaps it depends on who is doing the seeing. Malthus was agreeing with some old dead philosophers, against then-current popular opinions.
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. […] he found himself attacked on all sides–by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment.
http://www.amazon.com/Malthus-Life-Legacies-Untimely-Prophet/dp/0674728718
On the other hand, as someone once put it “I’ve heard he sleeps with an African-American woman”, so I’d expect him to have some intimate familiarity with African-American culture.
I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed less snarkily by Eurasians as “we inherit the race of our children.”
That actually sort of proves my point–that race is as much cultural as genetic.
But can you imagine saying “I know all about the struggles of growing up female… I’m married to one!”
I don’t think it was even properly cultural to start with. The Anglo-Franco-Germanic Alliance didn’t have one culture, and certainly didn’t think of itself as having one culture, that came later.
I’ve always wondered about that, because I have a sister who seems to have the same personality and the same brain as I do in pretty much all relevant senses. When I moved out, the rest of my family claims she started to act even more like me, so the nurture influence seems to have if anything been towards artificial divergence. So I expect you could have raised either of us as the other, and neither of us seems to be gender dysphoric.
” Despite Malthus’ warnings, a growing population was seen as a sign of a rich, prosperous, thriving nation.”
I don’t think that is in any way inconsistent with what Malthus wrote–rather the opposite. His argument was that raising the standard of living of the masses would result in population growth, and that raising it by as much as Godwin and Condorcet expected would result in an exponential increase at something close to the biological maximum (since in a society that rich, having children doesn’t deprive the parents of anything that matters, and people enjoy sex), which would eventually outrun any plausible increase due to economic growth and drive standards of living back down.
That, at least, is my memory of what Malthus wrote in the Essay on Population, and consistent with the versions of the iron law that appear in his contemporaries, especially Ricardo.
The hippo article was entertaining… but it says that the colorful protagonist wrote in 1917 “…we were all turning into military robots”.
“Robot” in the sense of “autonomous machine worker” dates from 1920, Karel Capek’s book. So colorful character becomes colorful time traveler (possibly robotic).
Wikipedia shows his writing running from 1926 to 1945, so it’s not implausible that “robot” would enter his vocabulary on recollection of his Great War experiences, even if at the time he might have thought “automaton” or whatever.
On the robots stealing our jobs: I predict there is a feedback loop hiding the job loss when you compare countries. When productivity increases prices can fall and the companies innovating the fastest in that direction will take a larger share of the manufacturing market and expand their operations, leading to more jobs in the country they are located in but fewer jobs elsewhere as their competitors lose marketshare. I won’t have a chance to look at the study linked in the article until tomorrow, so don’t know whether the study estimated the global productivity increase vs. job loss by combining their country data or not, but that is the direction I would want to look.
RE intelligence tactics, I’m really surprised the article doesn’t even mention the word “zersetzung”, which is the name of this known and effective method that was favored by the Stasi.
The “moving stuff around” technique would certainly be one form of Zersetzung. But Zersetzung included a much wider range of techniques, including various forms of harassment, entrapment, and indirect intimidation.
Doug M.
Given how things turned out for East Germany, we might dispute the “effective” part…
Just because these techniques were used by crappy, unpopular regimes that ended up falling doesn’t mean they’re not potentially effective techniques. I’d say the jury’s still out on that one.
Doug M.
I assumed that the argument was that the techniques didn’t turn out to allow the regime to survive the withdrawal of the outside support that was keeping it in place for any measurable length of time.
(Unlike, e.g., North Korea or Cuba, which while crappy and unpopular proved not to require active Soviet maintenance to endure.)
Environmentalists should actually push to repeal bans on plastic bottles. Yes, landfills are ugly. But few realize that recycling plastics hastens global warming. Petroleum that has been converted to plastic bottles can’t be burned as oil, and won’t create harmful greenhouse gasses. So more plastic bottles are better for our atmosphere.
You shouldn’t recycle paper, either, if you’re concerned about CO2
Seriously.
Paper is nothing but a block of carbon (n’ stuff, but mostly carbon). As for the “they cut down trees!” argument- you think people are cutting old growth oak for fucking paper mills? It’s farmed cheap pulpwood and pure carbon sequestration.
Most landfills rapidly become anoxic and decay stops- people that professionally do garbage anthropology say you can still find unrotted stuff from the 50’s in there. Very effective way to sequester carbon.
AFAIK recycling paper is also quite energy-intensive compared to just making more paper from farmed-for-paper trees.
I *think* that there’s some local environmental benefit in reducing interesting chemical runoff from bleaching and the like, but I’m not very certain on that.
TL;DR: Environmental tradeoffs are hard, just make emitting CO2 more expensive with a tax and make the market figure it out.
Our local recycling center chops it up and sells it back to me for mulch/composting, kitty litter, animal bedding, packing things for UPS, etc.
The recycling center adjoins the landfill transfer point, so my paper rides along with whatever I’m taking to the dump, and rides back home* with me, chopped. So negliable transport cost.
* It rides home with me if the workers are very quick , or if they’re an example in a forum post. Otherwise I carry someone else’s shredded paper.
As an environmentalist, I’ve been saying that for years; better the oil should go back in the ground where it came from, than up in the air as smoke. Bicycling is counter-productive too; the gasoline we don’t buy, makes gasoline cheaper for the bulldozers and chainsaws.
Bicycling, at least, means the gasoline you would have used can go to other use.
But bicycling as an environmental choice doesn’t make much sense, really, given the tradeoffs you make. The other benefits are what make bicycling worth it.
The crude oil you don’t use will be used, that’s true. It might be for something with bad environmental externalities, as you suggest, but it may also be for something good. As James Picone says, put a carbon tax on it and let the market figure it out.
But the crude oil you don’t use will reduce aggregate demand ever so slightly, which will reduce price ever so slightly, which will eventually make some extraction unprofitable that would otherwise be profitable, leaving slightly more carbon in the ground. Not much, but I would guess about a tank’s worth.
So even absent a carbon tax, bicycling is definitively a good idea.
Paging David Friedman….
@ Harald K
But the crude oil you don’t use will reduce aggregate demand ever so slightly, which will reduce price ever so slightly, which will eventually make some extraction unprofitable that would otherwise be profitable, leaving slightly more carbon in the ground. Not much, but I would guess about a tank’s worth.
My TL;DR here is: Oil prices go up and down; trees go down and stay down.
The oil industry is big and has many elastic elements: supply, demand, overhead, interest rates, tax rules. The oil industry (or the Market) knows how to handle a small loss in sales, and even the highest amount you could dream of would be small to them.
If the price of gasoline did go down, neighbors would fill up their chainsaws and use them this week. Investors would buy low. Some industries that use a lot of fuel would stock up. Some industries that have been using some other fuel would switch to gasoline. Some that were considering switching to clean power will decide to stay with gasoline a while longer.
When gasoline prices leveled out, the investors would sell high, but your neighbor’s trees would still be down.
Another problem is, the bicycling approach needs a lot of people, but has a low ceiling on recruitment. There are only a limited number of USians (for example) who could feasibly do without cars often enough – there’s your ceiling. But there is a threshold of gas sales lost that you have to reach before the oil market would even register the loss. I’m afraid that threshold is far above the ceiling.
Trees are, in fact, a “renewable resource.” We can grow new trees. In particular, the paper industry does grow new trees. It grows trees as fast as possible, taking as much carbon as possible out of the air. It uses young trees, so it quickly reaches equilibrium – it really is harvesting trees that it planted.
@ Douglas Knight
>>trees go down and stay down
>Trees are, in fact, a “renewable resource.” We can grow new trees.
Unless the land they grew on has been cleared for some other use, in a project made possible by cheaper gasoline.* Even if new trees are planted there, the site will lack comparable trees for a couple of decades.
* Or possible without it, of course.
@Houseboatonstyx:
I don’t think that is the way to look at it.
You really need to look at long term sustainable use.
I believe that once a tree matures, it has done most of the carbon capture it will do. So, given a plot of land that is in use by the paper industry and harvested every 35 years, if you then don’t harvest at 35 years, I think the net carbon in the atmosphere goes up over harvest and replant.
There are plenty of other environmental costs of timber harvesting, but assuming the land is replanted and can grow the trees naturally sustainably, I don’t see why carbon cost would be one.
And the idea that the thing stopping your neighbor from chainsawing their trees is the high price of gas seems a little bizarre to me. If you live on a residential street, its just not true. If you neighbor is a timber grower, then the cost of fuel is almost surely a very small part of the overall cost of production, carry costs on the land and labor would dominate, I think.
Edit:
And also the idea that construction or development is limited by fuel cost also seems wrong. Broadly, economic growth drives development. If fuel prices are high enough to kill growth, sure. But I don’t think that is the argument you are making.
@ HeelBearCub,
Yes, we seem to be looking at quite different things, and quite different neighborhoods.
There are plenty of other environmental costs of timber harvesting, but assuming the land is replanted and can grow the trees naturally sustainably, I don’t see why carbon cost would be one.
I was not addressing carbon or tree farm harvesting, but erosion, loss of habitat, of bio-diversity, etc etc – whether in acres or in a single big tree in someone’s yard.
@ Harald K
But the crude oil you don’t use will reduce aggregate demand ever so slightly, which will reduce price ever so slightly, which will eventually make some extraction unprofitable that would otherwise be profitable, leaving slightly more carbon in the ground. Not much, but I would guess about a tank’s worth.
To the alternate universe where US bike riding now might influence* mining practice eventually, I prefer the universe where there are some marginal projects in which fuel cost for bulldozers and chain saws is a non-neglable consideration, and consequences will occur (or hopefully not occur) immediately rather than eventually.
Untangling the double+ negatives, I prefer to keep driving my car (to worthwhile destinations) rather than possibly seeing more trees cut now.
* Directly, rather than by signaling for other action.
Environmentalism isn’t about reducing X in the environment, or saving Y. It is purely and totally puritanical self-flagellation and conspicuous consumption for status whoring. Riding a bike sends a signal. “I am better and more moral than all these car-bound clowns, and healthier to boot!”
Recycling pretty much anything other than metal is environmentally damaging. The Prius is more carbon-intensive than gasoline powered vehicles, and so are large pets like dogs. None of the totems of the environmental religion actually help the earth in any way, shape or form. They are just a way to signal to one’s co-religionists via tasteless food and expensive-but-shoddily-made-and-itchy clothes that you are one of them.
>Riding a bike sends a signal. “I am better and more moral than all these car-bound clowns, and healthier to boot!”
But someone who rides a bike instead of driving actually is healthier and morally better than you.
I ride a bike pretty much every day; I reject the claim that it makes me morally superior to anyone else.
Not only are us bikers healthier (than we would have been driving), we’re richer (than we would have been driving).
What good is money if you’re not going to buy a cool sportscar with it?
Who ever said anything about not buying a cool sportscar? I’m just going to use it to make Justin Bieber parody music videos, not drive (Unless gas prices go up.)
Only 1/3 of the wealth generated comes from the price of the car, don’t you know.
Your point with recycling may be valid (but also add glass to the metal), I am not entirely sure though. I believe it almost definitely holds for paper, because the costs of collecting it separately and most importantly chemically cleaning it before further use (which is limited anyway) is something that seems rather expensive, while paper is a renewable resource (true, not all paper is being made from industrial forests but then one could simply switch to those paper products that do and that do not harvest rainforests for example). I am less sure about plastics, since it uses oil in its manufacturing and it is unclear when alternative to plastics which do not use oil will be available. You actually need glass shards to produce more glass today in the usual industrial production, plus the fact that beer bottles come with a deposit even in countries where it is not required by the state is some evidence that this actually pays off. Biological waste also seems relatively sensible to me, you can burn it or use it as fertilizer without any special treatment.
Funny thing is, that I actually only sort out paper (mainly out of habit, I guess it does not really help much), because in Germany you usually have to get plastic bags from the city which are for plastics and then you just leave them in front of your house (whereas there is a container for paper…never understood why it is done differently for plastics – in Austria or the Czech republic there are containers for that as well) and I don’t know exactly where to get those bags (although I also have not really made much effort in finding them).
Your statement about bike riding is just utter nonsense, sorry to say that. I have both a car and a bike and currently live in a small town (130 000 inhabitants). I can get anywhere in 10-15 minutes by bike, I don’t have to worry about finding a parking place and I save money while doing that. Bikes are simply more practical here (most of the year, winters are not so bad here, but still I tend to go around either by car or by the city bus in January and February). There are also bike tracks around which make it safer (they are not everywhere, but they are along the biggest roads so you don’t risk getting hit by a car). Also gasoline is way more expensive here than in the US (but not prohibitively so…1 liter costs about 1.4€ , so about $1.5.)
Of course, if you live in a big city without bike tracks and with huge distances (or even live in a suburb and commute to work in the city every day), then riding a bike becomes impractical and those who do either do it because they like biking, they like to save gas money, they want to exercise regularly on their way to work or they actually do it for status signaling (but notice that there are many alternative explanations as well).
Of course, if you live in a big city without bike tracks and with huge distances (or even live in a suburb and commute to work in the city every day), then riding a bike becomes impractical [….]
That describes much of the US, and bicycling replacing auto use is even more impractical in our rural or semi-rural areas. Perhaps I should have shown my US colors earlier in this sub-thread. 😉
As for recycling, and what use is made of the materials, I’d suggest asking one’s own local recycling center what they do. This varies greatly in different areas at different times, and new ways to use the materials (and better ways to process them) are constantly being developed.
The deposit on beer bottles is for reusing not recycling. That is, just washing them out and filling them again with beer. In some sense this is very efficient, but no one does it any more.
houseboatonstyx: Yeah, the distances in the US are much bigger than in Europe and more people live in the suburbs and commute to work. Also, probably parking is not such a problem there? Most cities in Europe have a lot of parking restrictions in the city centres, so that you either have to pay for parking or it is not possible at all (unless you are a resident in that area). So unless your company has its own parking place or unless you work outside of the centre, driving gets pretty complicated and it is faster to go either by public transport or by bike. In southern countries like Italy or Spain people also use scooters a lot.
Douglas: Nobody? Well, at least in (parts of) Europe it is pretty common (although only for beer or milk if it is in glass bottles, not for wine or hard liquor for some reason). In Germany, even some plastic bottles come with a deposit – this is however something artificially imposed by the government by legislation pushed by the Green Party and did not use to be the case before. You are of course right that this is for reuse, but it is weak evidence for recycling of glass as well since it is worth collecting old glasses and washing them as opposed to making new ones. I doubt chemically treating the bottles and sorting out the damaged ones is much cheaper than making new ones, so that suggest that it is especially the material that makes them worth collecting…I could be wrong of course, which is why I am saying it is a weak evidence.
Tibor, do they really reuse the bottles, or just put a deposit on them?
My understanding is that beer bottles all used to be identical, so they got reused between bottlers. But now people want custom bottles, if only a glued-on label, so they don’t reuse them. Milk is a different matter, because people usually only buy milk from a single seller. And if you have a milkman, he can pick up the empties when he drops off the fulls. Even in America, I know people who return fancy milk bottles to the store.
It’s not terribly uncommon to reuse growler- or half-growler-size beer bottles, at least if you frequent brew pubs or craft breweries; IME it seems most common in the Pacific Northwest. I think this is a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and if you try to do it at a grocery store or a corner liquor store they’ll look at you like you’ve grown a second head.
Looks like Nick Land has gotten into seasteading.
The Vance article is more about the moral hazard of need based financial aid than about sketchy collection. She doesn’t really get into collection tactics. Seems more rant than rational.
I was really excited to take the CSI bet against the AGW position, until I realized the terms of the bet were totally contrived. They are NOT looking at next year’s temperature alone – they are looking at a moving 30-year average. That’s mathematically equivalent to a bet that next year’s temperature will be hotter than the temperature 30 years ago.
Why would anyone ban bottled water, or even want to? And, if the despot in control has the power to ban bottled water, why doesn’t s/he have the power to ban bottled soda pop too?
The argument presumably went that as resusable water bottles and free tap water are everywhere, people would just stop drinking bottled water and drink tap water.
The flaws in this argument are obvious to anyone who knows anything about how people work. So….not college administrators.
Power is always subject to legitimacy; I suspect that any school administration (besides BYU’s) that banned bottled soda would find its legitimacy called into immediate question.
I suspect the “ban” in question consists merely of not selling bottled water in vending machines or campus stores.
Still stupid, though.
JRPGs usually only have four Crystals, for Fire, Water, Earth and Air. They are indeed in themed temples, though.
(FFIV had 8 crystals, but the other 4 were Dark Crystals that were mirror counterparts of the base 4, so that doesn’t count)
Now, Chaos Emeralds, on the other hand…
What about Secret of Mana? It had water, fire, earth, air, dark, light, moon, and tree elements.
And if your theory of temporal mechanics doesn’t account for Secret of Mana, your theory is wrong.
Huh. You know, I remembered the Mana Spirits (Dryad was my fave), but I forgot they had crystals too.
I think Secret of Mana was, and this may sound strange, too much FUN for a Squaresoft game. In more traditional JRPGs where the gameplay is all selecting menu options, you get used to reading the textboxes carefully, so you have an easier time following the story, which is good, since the story is the reward. In more action-focused games, you don’t do as much reading during gameplay, and the gameplay is itself more of a reward in itself, so it’s easier to lose track of the story. Does that make any sense?
If you want a cure for the Toxiplasma blues I’d recommend this one minute interview with his the Charlestown shooter’s black friend:
http://bossip.com/1157939/charleston-shooter-dylan-roofs-black-best-friend-says-i-still-love-him-video/
I mean what a breath of fresh air! Meanwhile NYT, the New Yorker, are cranking out opinion piece after opinion piece (like Roxanne Gay’s) designed to turn man against man. Preaching resentment, fear, hatred. Meanwhile, you never see anything like this video do you? Something that makes you deeply sad, but filled with hope for the living.
But if you find yourself floundering without that Toxiplasma rage, just go straight to the video’s comments.
For those who like this idea, there may be an experiment in the near future:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dutch-city-of-utrecht-to-experiment-with-a-universal-unconditional-income-10345595.html
Well Scott,
The contagion may be limited to academia, but not to California!
http://www.uwsp.edu/acadaff/NewFacultyResources/NFSRacialMicroaggressions_Table.pdf
This one is even better, it is the considered opinion of the University of Wisconsin that even to deny that one is racist is a microaggression (for whites only of course)! Simply staggering.
@Tarrou:
The examples of specific micro-aggressions on race are:
You may not like the idea of framing things as micro-aggressions. But if I switch the context, I’ll think you’ll see how nonsensical the statements are.
“I’m don’t hate Red-Tribe. I have several Red-Tribe friends.”
“As a person working in tech support, I know what you go through as a farmer.”
And the Motte goes up!
Perhaps you’d care to justify the rest of them?
“There is only one race, the human
race.”
Asking an Asian American
to teach them words in their native
language
Asking an Asian person to help with a
Math or Science problem.
“I believe the most qualified person
should get the job.”
Oh man, I had a Chinese-American maths professor once! I microaggressed the SHIT out of him! I needed so much help!
@Tarrou:
Well, of course some of these statements are clearly contextual. But, if you accuse me of hating Red-Tribe, then in context:
There is only one race, the human
race.–> There is only one tribe, the American Tribe.
And in the context of you saying “It’s been shown there is a hiring bias against people with Southern accents” then responding “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” as a counter-argument is, again, ridiculous.
For the others:
Asking an Asian American to teach them words in their native language –> If all of your great-grand-parents are from Texas (but you live in NYC and so did your parents and grandparents), asking you to speak in a Southern accent or sing The Yellow Rose of Texas.
Asking an Asian person to help with a Math or Science problem. –> Oh, you’re from Alabama, how do you cook chitlins?
Finally, could I ask if you could be a tad less aggressive in your replies? Whatever dialogue you are trying to have gets a little lost.
There is nothing malicious or condemnable about “There is only one tribe. The American tribe.” other than that it doesn’t make sense if they are talking about the whole world. It’s a legitimate sentiment that people in America should stop backbiting each other over factional differences. What is wrong with that?
“I believe the most qualified person should get the job” was not specified as only bad in a certain context.
Asking an Asian person to teach you a word in their native language is not like asking a Texan to speak in a Southern accent or to sing. Asking for someone to convey information is not like asking someone to make a performance for you.
It also doesn’t specify “saying Oh, you’re Asian, you are good at math, help me with this.” And this is not an accidental omission. It says “asking an Asian person to help with a math or science problem”. So it’s more like saying “Hey, I am cooking chitlins, can you give me a hand?” to the nearest person, who happens to be from Alabama.
“Microaggressions” are clearly “anything that might hurt the feelings of a person who has self-modified their feelings for maximum hurtability.” This is how they are used, again and again and again. That you can invent a context in which some of these “microaggressions” might be regarded as actually bad doesn’t matter, because they have never and WILL never be regarded as microaggressions only in that context — the entire point of codifying microaggressions is to try and make them seen as bad outside of that context.
@DrBeat:
For argument, let’s suppose I say something negative about (coded words for people in Red-Tribe), then you call me on it by saying “You are just saying that because you hate Red-Tribe”, and then I counter with “There is only the American tribe.”
Would that not be an infuriating response? It’s not the statement itself, it’s the context. It’s simply a distraction from the actual argument. Even in the context of you merely asserting the tribes exist, it’s not a counter-argument, but a statement of desired utopia.
The context in which the statement “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” is shown in the theme.
“Asking an Asian person to teach you a word in their native language”
Not an Asian person, an Asian American person (it’s right there in the sentence). The micro-aggression is assuming that someone who looks Asian must not have been born in the US and/or must be a native Chinese/Korean/Japanese speaker.
Why do you assume that someone from Alabama must know how to cook chitlins? Can’t you identify with the idea that it grates to have people assume so much about you based only on one piece of knowledge?
I think the “assuming Asian American speaks Chinese/Japanese/Korean” thing is a legit, if minor, offense.
But I think it’s pretty Orwellian to say that statements like “I think the job should go to the most qualified person” are inherently offensive, though they could be, depending on the context. This is because it assumes a whole frame of reference which is not shared by everyone, or even close to everyone. A reasonable percentage of Americans, right or wrong, think that race is no longer a major obstacle to success in this country. A reasonable percentage of Americans, right or wrong, think that affirmative action-type programs are unethical and/or ineffective.
To say “it is offensive even to express those opinions because they imply a world view that clashes with my own” is just a way of shutting down whole swathes of the population from ever speaking their opinion. “Not all Asians in America grew up in Asia and speak Asian languages” is not a controversial statement. “American meritocracy is a myth” is a very controversial statement.
Discourse hygiene that demands that a controversial position be accepted as a prerequisite for polite discussion is intellectually dishonest.
HBC, you can’t make policy that relies on context to the extent you’re defending here.
Once these examples become codified as “microagressions”, people will just pattern-match, and defending the “aggressor” on the grounds that the context was different (or whatever grounds, really) will be both draining and dangerous.
btw, I’ve seen leftists who hate conservatives – “I don’t, I have many conservative friends” would actually be very informative, especially in certain academic contexts. I also disagree with other of your assessments, even the “ridiculous” one. This is not clear-cut. I can’t imagine how this policy wouldn’t hurt innocent people for innocent thoughts.
@Cauê /@onyomi:
First let met start be simply reiterating that the specific comment I was replying to was a complaint that “even to deny that one is racist is a microaggression”. Broadly speaking, I think this is weak-manning the argument about micro-aggressions.
I see people here point out that Blue Tribe – Red Tribe interactions are frequently based on bias, and that one, as a member of Blue Tribe, assuredly has biases against Red Tribe which color (see what I did there) their thought patterns. This is the the subject of reams of writing on both Less Wrong, SSC, and other places.
If I deny that those biases exist and that they effect Blue Tribe broadly, you would laugh and find this to be complete non-sense. But even if I asserted that I, as a member of Blue Tribe, had no biases against Ref Tribe and therefore my arguments, emotions, thoughts were not affected by them, you would also rate this as highly dubious.
I think that Louis CKs monologue on “mild-racism” covers some of this in a much more palatable way when we stop talking about Blue-Red and start talking about racism.
Everyone has xenophobic tendencies.
@onyomi:
“A reasonable percentage of Americans, right or wrong, think that race is no longer a major obstacle to success in this country.”
50 years ago, a reasonable percentage of Americans thought that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Surely you can see that this is not a sufficient condition for not paying attention to the problem that these types of internal biases cause?
Cauê :
Can these types of policies be misused and lead to harm? Yes. Does that mean that they assuredly will be misued and lead to harm? Yes.
But, a policy of ignoring the problems caused by othering different races also leads to harm. These things are in tension with each other.
Using the microagression principle as a cudgel to beat people for innocent statements is wrong. There are certainly people on the left who have been pointing out the excesses, and I think it is right to do so.
But that doesn’t invalidate the original argument that microagressions actually exist and are problematic.
To me, the question is not whether microaggressions are a problem, but whether they’re a problem that can or should be solved with the intervention of official power structures. I feel strongly that they shouldn’t, for a lot of reasons, the most obvious of which is that selective enforcement potential is so high as to be guaranteed. HBC, you as much as admitted this yourself when you said “everyone has xenophobic tendencies”. Applying official sanction to something everyone does is a bad idea. The cure would be worse than the disease.
@Mark Atwood:
See Jonathan Chait here and the follow up here
In the second article, you can see links to two other left-leaning authors protesting the excesses of the current PC culture.
@stillnotking:
If the government was specifically banning microagressions in broad society, I would agree with you.
But that isn’t what is happening. What we have are a host of organizations attempting to set policy only within themselves. Certainly that is complicated by the broad requirements under the Civil Rights Act, but I would need some citation to say that the broad excesses of these policies are caused by government.
But, if your manager at the drive through says, “Don’t engage in political chit-chat with the customers, it infuriates half of them” this would not be the kind of restriction of speech that is concerning.
I thought we were specifically discussing campus policies here. I’m not talking about the government at all; I’m quite sure any such law in the US would be struck down on First Amendment grounds. Colleges, OTOH, can get away with deeply illiberal, unfair, and selectively-enforced policies without coming to national attention, and their victims usually have little recourse.
@stillnotking:
Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by –
“whether they’re a problem that can or should be solved with the intervention of official power structures”
HR exists at almost every business in the country. They almost always have policies that cover this sort of stuff. They almost always go well beyond what the law requires. The kinds of things that are officially verbotten by HR happen fairly routinely, but this is much like the speed limit being 55 but most people driving 65.
Colleges and Universities are unique institutions, and they do have some unique challenges. But they will still have HR policies. Saying that HR policies should not deal with these kinds of things seems fairly naive.
HR has policies about harassment and discrimination, which are very different things from microaggression. Again, as you admitted yourself, everyone says something mildly xenophobic from time to time. Not everyone discriminates or harasses. Huge difference.
Give college administrators the power to discipline students or faculty just for making some mildly or inadvertently insulting remark, like assuming an Asian is good at math, and I guarantee you will not like how it turns out. I speak from long and dire experience with the breed. (Administrators, not Asians.) Ironically, the selective enforcement could even be applied in racist ways.
I don’t really think “American meritocracy is a myth” and “blacks are not inferior to whites” are analogous statements for all sorts of reasons.
But even if they were, if we were living in a world in which a large percentage of people still believed in white racial superiority, would it be the best strategy to just try to shut down any discussion of that question as inherently offensive? Of course, ostracism, disapproval, shame, etc. can be powerful weapons, but for reasons stated in “In Favor of Niceness…” I’d rather say that “bad argument gets counter argument, not bullet. Always.”
Nowadays we rarely need to present arguments against white supremacy because people rarely present arguments in favor of white supremacy outside of scary little corners of the internet where most of us would fear to tread anyway. But if 50% of the population still believed in white supremacy, then we’d need to make the case to them, not just tell them to shut up.
“American meritocracy is a myth” may be a case worth making, but those who think it’s correct need to make the case. They shouldn’t just assume they’re correct and proceed to treat disagreement as a social faux pas.
I think a better comparison would be if I, as a libertarian said, “free markets and capitalism have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the greatest systems for alleviating human suffering of all time; therefore, for anyone to imply otherwise is inherently disrespectful, hurtful, and obscene.”
*I* actually think that free markets have proven their value beyond a shadow of a doubt and am baffled by people who think otherwise. But the fact remains that I still live in a society where a decent %age of people would disagree with me on that. Is it more helpful for me to engage with them and keep making the case for free markets, or to just say “well, given that free markets are obviously the best, only rude, mean, stupid people could imply otherwise, so I’ll just ignore them.”?
@stillnotking:
Corporations, I believe, generally ban offensive conduct. That includes, but is not limited to harassment or discrimination. In an “at-will” employment state, HR can fire you for literally anything they feel like, but certainly if you offend someone frequently enough, are asked to stop, and don’t, they will fire you.
@onyomi:
“I don’t really think “American meritocracy is a myth” and “blacks are not inferior to whites” are analogous statements for all sorts of reasons.”
I think the proof that they are analogous is within the statements themselves. There once existed a time when blacks were presumed inferior to whites, both as a point of law and as general sentiment. No matter how meritorious the black person was, they would not be afforded the benefits commensurate with that merit.
We certainly can’t look at the distribution of benefits across the races and say that blacks are in their position today, broadly, solely based on merit. There are plenty of people still alive who were subject to Jim Crow laws, let alone the accumulated weight of 400 years of slavery.
@Heelbearcub
See, but now you’re arguing the case. My point is not that the case can’t be persuasively argued, but that it can’t be assumed. The fact that there exist good arguments for a position does not justify consigning all contrary statements to the realm of “micro-aggression.” They could just be wrong and in need of correction by a better argument.
If I say, “racism is not a big barrier to getting ahead in America today,” and you disagree with that idea, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “but what about the legacy of Jim Crow? What about examples x, y, and z of institutional racism?”
I do not think it is reasonable to react by saying “how dare you?! That’s a hurtful opinion! I’m deeply offended and will report this to the student committee on speech and expression.”
@onyomi:
I really don’t know what to say. You said they weren’t even analogous, I showed they were equal (actually antithetical, as you framed it).
Now you are off arguing something else.
It’s feels to me like poor form on your part.
@Heelbearcub
I was responding to:
“We certainly can’t look at the distribution of benefits across the races and say that blacks are in their position today, broadly, solely based on merit. There are plenty of people still alive who were subject to Jim Crow laws, let alone the accumulated weight of 400 years of slavery.”
I probably should have quoted the part I was responding to in the first place. Sorry if it wasn’t clear. I was not responding to your contention that those cases are analogous. I could respond to that, but for me, at least, that would be getting off topic, as it is not the meta issue I’m interested in here.
That’s some nuanced context you got going on there, but allow me to attempt to elucidate myself.
Please correct me if I am misrepresenting your argument, it is the first step to be able to formulate the opponent’s side.
-Given that racism exists-
-Given that college professors are known to be hotbeds of deep-south conservative racisms, especially in California and Wisconsin-
-Given that it is the responsibility of college professors to often engage in wild hypotheticals for the purposes of teaching-
-Given that college students and college administrations have Never, not Once overreacted and suppressed speech that was innocuous or merely political-
-Given that minorities are so famously delicate in their sensibilities that any bland conversation which accidentally reminds them that they are not white males is so distressing as to deny them equal opportunity to an education!-
-Therefore, it should be HR policy that anyone who says any number of anodyne statements which could be wildly misinterpreted out of context by grievance-mongering shitweasels shall henceforth be considered that worst of things: a White Racist Oppressor! And until they get tenure, this will be reason to get them up in front of the hiring committee.-
I think, on balance, Socrates would probably counsel against the “shitweasels” part. I hang my head.
On a scale of one to ten, how racist are you?
it is the considered opinion of the University of Wisconsin
Hey, University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Not that UW Madison isn’t batty, but this isn’t on them
Oh man! What a terrible oversight on my part! It is not the considered opinion of Wal-Mart that we discovered a hateful plan to exploit the workers of Marysville! It’s only the opinion of Wal-Mart Marysville!
Seriously dude, we’re now drawing distinctions between two campuses of the same college? Your criticism is that I didn’t specify down to the franchise level in my short executive summary? Well, I find your criticism meritless, because you quote Tarrou and not Tarrou-Saginaw.
There are states that have extensive networks of U of State schools, with more than one of them being significant (California being the most extreme example). Some states have no particularly impressive U of State schools at all, of course. Another common pattern is to have exactly one flagship campus in the U of State system that is of real significance, and a number of other small U of State schools scattered about geographically which may have strengths in narrow specialities, but in many respects barely outrank community colleges. University of Wisconsin is of this last type; University of Wisconsin at Madison is a serious institution, and any other school with the University of Wisconsin name is a very minor deal. In pretty much all cases of multiple campuses of the U of State type, when there’s more than one campus, the different campuses have considerable independence and autonomy from one another, a lot more than in your Walmart analogy. To take an example likely to be more familiar to many people, the difference between Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara is a very big deal, even though California is an outlier among such systems in that even the “minor” University of California campuses like UCSB are still fairly substantial schools.
Still not getting the point mate. The whole UC is propagating this microaggression stuff, and I’m merely noting another data point, far, far away from California, to add to Scott’s “contagion” metaphor.
UC is the biggest and most prestigious state school system in the nation. UW isn’t, and I’m certainly not claiming that UW-SP is Harvard. I am claiming that UW-SP is UW, and that this demonstrates something of the reach of this sort of ultra-sensitive whinging.
His point is factual. If you want the narrative it represents, rather than alarm it is that the SJW stuff tends to be pushed the most by people who aren’t institutionally high status.
@ Tarrou:
Saginaw, Michigan? If that’s your town, awesome.
It is, and it is! Awesome in a hide-your-kids-hide-your-wife kinda way, but nonetheless. 😛
Esteemed and worshipful readers and commenters of this parish: let me take this opportunity to tell you how much I appreciate the quality of contribution on here (yes, even when we veer dangerously close to “You’re a poopyhead!” territory).
Because, although my eyes may glaze over at the mathematics involved when ye start digging into the statistical analysis, by Crom Cruach and his sub-gods twelve, at least ye understand and appreciate nuance and that there are distinctions and subtleties and above all reasons for the holding of positions other than “Are they merely stupid? Or evil as well?”
Because ye can make an argument for why “You are a poopyhead!” and the degree, quality and origin of poop involved.
This brought to you courtesy of a Tumblr blogging of a sequence from some TV show which ended up with “So go fuck yourself, Aquinas” (not a sentiment calculated to win my heart) where the writers were striving for Deep but only came up with Propaganda. If you don’t understand the difference between “pride as a sin” and “pride which means self-esteem and a true valuation of your worth”, please don’t. Just don’t.
4 * 5 = 30
5 * 6 = 32
0.002 + e^{i \pi} + \sum_{i = 1}^\infty \frac{1}{2^n}
Deiseach is a poopyhead
(-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 – 4sc}) /2 /s
Why, I’ll….eyelids growing heavy…think I’ll take that lying down?….can’t…stay…awake…mathematics…zzzzzzzz
🙂
Thanks you two, that was fun.
Any forum that can bring together neoreactionaries and social justice types without immediately degenerating into poopyhead territory is something pretty special.
Yes. As someone who believes in The Usefulness of Dialogue among People of Good Faith Who Disagree, I think Scott is providing an instructive example and an important counterweight to the General Tenor of Internet Dialogue circa 2015, with the help of many commentators. Amen.
Who would the social justice types be? (I know there used to be a few, but they don’t seem to be commenting much anymore.)
+1
veronica d maybe?
Anyway, I’m guessing they mostly either got converted to anti-SJ or driven away.
Or got tired of the echo chamber.
Mark, what I personally look for is disagreement that is 1) interesting and 2) offers new information. That’s been getting harder to find.
(P.S. The comment can be judged on its merits, regardless of what pseudonym I choose.)
Try to engage substantively instead of, well, instead of what you’re doing today, and see what happens.
I may be in error here, but my own understanding was that Aquinas condemned as sinful any misestimation of one’s proper worth/place (though he did draw a distinction between pride and pusillanimity, considering them related, and sometimes the latter stemming from the former… the one being overestimation and the other underestimation of one’s self).
It’s a puzzling confusion: his definition of pride literally opens by defining it as overestimation of what one is, which by definition could not be a true valuation of one’s worth.
Well, Aquinas of course stole a lot from Aristotle, and Aristotle didn’t have the idea of a “sin” of pride. For Aristotle it was entirely good for someone to be proud if they had something to be actually proud of; misestimation was the only thing that was a problem. This may be a place where Aquinas gets confusing because he is serving two masters, the Christian ideas about pride, and the very not Christian Aristotle.
I think the modern confusion is because nowadays they very much do believe in the sin of pride, except (a) they don’t have the notion of sin and (b) it only applies to people/causes of which one disapproves. Pride is otherwise considered a healthy self-esteem or reclamation of slurs or the like, a reaction to past mores where thinness/whiteness/maleness/intelligence/being from the West/conservatism/heterosexuality/cis gender/neurotypicalness/abledness etc. were considered desirable and superior, and those not possessing those traits were considered lacking.
So White Pride is an awful terrible bad thing because racism (I’m not talking about neo-Nazism or the like, but could anyone imagine going around saying “I’m proud to be white!”). But Gay Pride is a great wonderful thing because LGBT!
Any distinction between the two is considered hair-splitting, and any intimation of “pride is sinful” is “Oh, you want me to be ashamed of myself and you’re only trying to put me down and keep me down, yeah?” The idea that anyone, even the persons of superior social causes, can suffer from the poisonous kind of pride is not considered.
Oh, well. Times change and we have to change with them, right? And I was more irritated that the writers were trying to be Clever and Edgy but only came off as mouthing the pious platitudes of the day. If they hadn’t felt the need to insult Aquinas, I’d have simply scrolled past it without comment. But you insult the Dumb Ox and I take it personal like 🙂
I am most encouraged not by Scott (who does an admirable job here) but by the commentariat taking up the ideal as well. One man being admirable is relatively easy, though rare. His being able to influence so many others to up their internet-commenting game is something else entirely.
@Tarrou:
I wish you would enter the commentariat who has taken up the ideal…
unseriousness begets sarcasm
Ideas interest most of us more than rage. This is not the case for most people, who seek easily digestible feelings much like the 11 year old in that new Pixar movie. My general thought on the matter.
Indeed, but Scott has gotten some pretty far-reaching coverage, he gets linked on very popular (and some very partisan) sites. This brings a lot of people who aren’t necessarily old LW folks or serious skeptics. I’m impressed that the community self-polices so effectively.
Have we been descending into increasingly impenetrable jargon? That would be one obvious policing method.
you drunk?
for reference, I am very much like this when drunk
Bad news Scott, the euphemism treadmill caught up to you. You’re gonna need a new word for “content warning.”
Wow, that’s pretty ridiculous. The article you linked to is 2tribalist4me though. Just because a feminist blogger said something doesn’t mean it’s a universal declaration of the Official Feminist Opinion on the issue.
The article itself looks more reasonable (to me at least) than the weird editor’s note that precedes it.
I actually consider the terminology change a slight positive development, since ditching “trigger” moves things out of the faux-medicalization gutter and should encourage… I was going to say “better dialogue”, but that’s far too optimistic so I’ll just say “fighting fairly.”
Still demonstrates the futility of the supposed principle involved though: there is no circumlocution of sensitive topics sufficient to prevent discomfort, the warnings function entirely as a yellow star marking the speaker out for future assaults.
Iceland did move to a primary government surplus … primarily by raising taxes. Is this the model Tyler Cowen wants to shout from the rooftops?
And then there’s Iceland’s treatment of creditors of banks. The Guardian reported (Oct 2013):
More details from the EC (pdf):
(Math on federal+regional taxes omitted because formatting)
That document also mentions that the corporate tax rate increased from 15% in 2008-9 to 18% in 2010 and 20% in 2013.
I’m not sure that you really understand what the economic argument is about. Fiscal austerity is fiscal austerity in Keynesian economics, regardless of whether it’s done through tax raises or spending cuts. Scott Sumner has made this point quite often in particular.
Cowen primarily believes that Europe’s (and America’s) problems are structural and that the Keynesian AS/AD framework is not the relevant one to use. So he highlights an example of a country getting a very different outcome to what the Keynesian framework predicts.
Sumner on the other hand is still pretty much on board with AS/AD but thinks that monetary effects render fiscal policy irrelevant.
Both are low-tax favouring libertarians, but for both men the argument over the correct economic framework is much bigger and more important than the tax rate.
Cowen also makes clear that he doesn’t believe the Icelandic experience is generalizable. He doesn’t believe what worked for them will necessarily work elsewhere. That’s the trouble with Cowen. He tends to reject broad rules so its hard to find contradictions in his thinking.
And lo and behold, Scott Sumner with some serious love for Scott Alexander:
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29739
Austerity does mean raising taxes, it is known by every European, because it is faster to squeeze both ends (higher tax, lower spending) to repay the debt than just one. This also means that the anti-tax American Right have never really considered austerity.
As far as Iceland goes, Sumner is at least partly right because monetary effects at least have traction:
http://icelandicecon.blogspot.com/2012/07/interest-rates-and-indexation.html
And since basically no neo-Keynesians deny that monetary policy matters, and since real interest rates in Iceland quickly went negative, Cowen’s argument is radically incomplete at best. Iceland followed (net) expansionary policies, a Keynesian can argue, and got expansion.
But my previous comment wasn’t about the economics argument, I’m just saying nyah nyah and calling Cowen a poopyhead. Because Iceland did its (merely-fiscal) austerity the “wrong” way from his POV.
FWIW, I applaud Cowen’s cautiousness about economic generalizations.
Oops, this comment was supposed to be threaded under Nathan’s 6/27 10:41pm.
Our local monthly magazine runs a “fake ad” in each issue for readers to find. In the latest issue, the fake ad is from “The Partnership for a Gender-Free America”.
Obviously this is a parody of a real anti-drug organization, which visualizes and works toward a future America in which literally no one uses illegal drugs, openly or secretly.
I mean, isn’t that what “drug-free” means?
To be really parallel, then, the “gender-free” organization’s goal would be to completely wipe out any expression of gender in America, even in private.
As John Lennon might have put it: “Imagine there’s no gender / I wonder if you can.”
Gender abolitionism is an actual thing some really out-there radical feminists support. I have no idea how they plan to accomplish it or what it would look like, though.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog?
Well, I can’t speak for “really out-there radical feminists”, but here are some things I would like to see (as a person without a strong internal sense of gender who’s sick of the forced genderification of literally everyone and everything):
– people can wear or refuse to wear skirts, trousers, boots, heels, make-up or jewelry without being berated, mocked or harassed for it;
– those who want to perform a particular gender role (i.e., look and act like “a man” or “a woman”) can still do that where appropriate, just like goths, eco-hipsters, butch lesbians or tech geeks dress and act according to their social identity today;
– gender of pronouns and names either disappears or is rendered as semantically irrelevant as the grammatical gender of nouns in German or Spanish;
– toys and clothes for kids come in orange, yellow, green, purple and red as often as they do in pink or blue.
Certainly a workable plan if the modes of refusal are sufficiently conspicuous and expensive.
0/10
I’ve never understood what the harm of pink/blue is supposed to be.
@walpolo:
It strongly enforces a paradigm wherein toys cannot be played with by both genders.
In a world where toys are just toys, boys who like playing with trucks are perfectly willing to play with a pink truck. Girls who like trucks are perfectly willing to play with any colored truck. But a pink/blue divided world, toys stop being just toys, they are either girl toys or boy toys. Then the absence of “pink” toys of a certain type, or “blue” toys of a certain type strongly enforces that a child should not play with that particular toy.
There are follow-ons to that in terms of what sort of harms come from it, but that is the basic objection.
So if all toys were available in both colors, it would be fine?
@walpolo:
No. It still implies that certain toys are only for boys and certain toys are only for girls. I’ll quote myself:
“In a world where toys are just toys, boys who like playing with trucks are perfectly willing to play with a pink truck. Girls who like trucks are perfectly willing to play with any colored truck.”
The, every toy available in either color seems lik a “separate but equal” argument.
I have a harder time seeing what the harm is supposed to be in that case, though. I can understand how it’s harmful to reinforce a concept like “Trucks are for boys.” But if trucks are equally available in both pink and blue, you don’t get that effect.
I am given to understand that mid-century civil rights activists were concerned about “separate but equal” because it was often a smokescreen for very unequal differences in the quality or availability of services, not because they preferred a different paint job.
@walpolo:
I’m not sure you are actually engaging with “separate but equal” claim I was making. The issue is that it enforces the idea that boys and girls are so different that they can’t even play with each other’s toys. That there is something inherently wrong with a boy touching something that a girl might touch, or vice-versa.
The idea that blacks and whites couldn’t drink from the same water fountain can’t be rationalized merely because “they both had water fountains”. Separation implies that there is something wrong with sharing the water fountain.
edit: @Nornagest, hopefully that answers your query as well.
The toy example would probably be more persuasive if toy trucks weren’t overwhelming yellow and red.
@Alraune:
If a truck was pink, do you think, in our current society, it lowers the probability of boys playing with it? What estimate would you place on the percentage reduction?
edit: And I don’t think there is a pink/blue divide, really. It’s more of a “pink badge of girlie”.
I think I’d be more inclined to frame it in terms of preference. Give a young boy the choice of a pink truck or nothing and he’ll play with the pink truck. But give two boys a pink and a blue truck and they’ll fight over the blue one, and give them a pink, a blue, and a black and the pink one will rarely get used. Unless it has oversized wheels or skulls or something else that boys consider uniquely cool.
I’m almost more interested in the converse, though. Can any of the women here tell us about girls’ attitudes toward male-coded toys? I don’t remember much female contempt for my toys during my own boyhood (though girls definitely had a concept of “cooties”), but, of course, the girls that were willing to play with my stuff would have been much more visible to me.
>>I’m not sure you are actually engaging with “separate but equal” claim I was making. The issue is that it enforces the idea that boys and girls are so different that they can’t even play with each other’s toys. That there is something inherently wrong with a boy touching something that a girl might touch, or vice-versa.
Ah, I see. I can see where this is coming from now, but I’m not sure I agree that this form of “separateness but equality” is necessarily bad.
Here’s a different example. A Jewish person and a Gentile are the same/equal in terms of anything morally relevant. But in our culture, the yarmulke is widely accepted as “for the Jewish person” and not “for the Gentile.”
What makes it wrong to have a somewhat similar sort of arbitrary separation between which colors of things are “for boys” and which colors are “for girls”? It certainly does underscore the differences between the two sexes. But it’s the boys and girls choosing to do so. (Of course they are acculturated to want to do so–but the same goes for the Jews.)
“Can any of the women here tell us about girls’ attitudes toward male-coded toys?”
There were a few–Legos, Construx, and similar–that I would have given my left arm for.
@walpolo:
“But it’s the boys and girls choosing to do so.”
Well, the boys and girls aren’t choosing, the decision is being made for them by the toy industry, and my impression is that it has developed at a rather rapid pace over the last 30 years or so. I don’t recall, the “all pink, all the time” girls toy aisles from my youth or my 8 year young sisters youth. By the the time my kids were born 10-15 years later, it was in full force.
I think boys and girls do some intrinsic gender sorting. I don’t think that needs to be signal boosted though.
Look, if YOU want to choose only pink toys for your daughters, so be it. But I don’t think that is what is actually happening, broadly. Rather, a significant minority preference for very gendered toys, and a relatively “meh” reaction from the vast bulk of the rest leads to the very gendered toy aisles.
As a boy of about 5 or 6, I had a baby doll. It was simply a fairly life-like baby. I loved that doll (Johnny). I fed it the bottles that came with it, carried it around, sang it songs, the sort of things one does with babies. My mom remembers my Dad being relatively apoplectic. When my sister came along a few years later, I carried her in a front pack, read to her, burped her, and generally loved her.
I never got a message that I wasn’t supposed to play with dolls, so I had little issue doing so. But in a world where everything is coded boy or girl, it might have been different.
I’m not saying there’s nothing problematic about the sex divisions in toy marketing. I’m just saying that pink vs. blue is a strange place to object when color-coding toys for children of different sexes doesn’t itself seem problematic. What’s problematic is, as you say, the attitude that toy babies are for girls, etc.
Why stop at boys’ toys and girls’ toys?
Why do we even classify things as toys and non-toys? What about the girls who want to play with empty beer bottles? What about the boys who want to play with CAT-5 cables?
Doesn’t this strongly enforce a paradigm where non-toys cannot be played with? Isn’t this a serious injustice, borne by the unfortunate children with non-traditional play preferences?
Now, this might seem facetious, but if you can answer these questions, you are well on your way to solving the red truck problem too.
Ha, point well taken. Any culture is going to consist of some arbitrary norms that push people in one direction or another without actually “forcing” them to conform, and the notion that we might ever be free of such forces is an anarchist pipe dream.
On the other hand, the notion that such cultural forces need to be carefully controlled by right-thinking moralists is an authoritarian pipe dream. And although I can recognize a lot of the harm done by our present culture, I tend to think that those who strive for the abolition of gender, or similar goals, are dreaming that authoritarian pipe dream.
I think you’re completely overlooking the driving factor here. We don’t get His and Hers of every toy because we have a small selection of toys, we get them because toys are cheaper and more varied than ever, and producing a second model of everything is easy. They’re reflecting specific consumer demands, not the lowest common denominator.
The main customer for toys, though, isn’t children, it’s their parents. And for the parents, having the ability to selectively mark objects Anathema to certain of their children is a substantial positive benefit because it reduces fights over those objects. Particularly in the standard one son+one daughter household, the more segregated the toys, the better: think how many categories of fights are prevented if Billy and Mary utterly refuse to touch each other’s stuff!
Now, there’s obviously there’s going to be some point of diminishing returns here, not all the fights will vanish because sometimes they steal each other’s things to hurt each other rather than because they want the things. And at some point the downstream effects of having created a society where everything must be either floral- or camo-patterned will outweigh the benefits, and so on.
But if you can make fights over toys a third less likely (which would be my guess for the pink truck) by buying toys where, if the wrong kid were using it, they’d be hit with some insecurity rather than just a sense of triumph? That’s probably a win for everyone involved.
@ Alraune
I’m afraid I don’t find your explanation very plausible.
1) “standard one son+one daughter household”? They’re a minority — something like 18% of all households with children.
2) The sheer number of anxious parents asking for advice because their son likes the “wrong” toys or colors (e.g.: one, two), not to mention various articles about it (e.g.: one, two, three, four), contradicts the idea that the ubiquitous color-coding is simply about avoiding conflict between siblings.
> being berated, mocked or harassed for it
Is the idea of traditional politeness or etiquette lost in the US? People berate or mock people i.e. tell their opinion without being asked first?
I don’t find women who dress like men attractive, but the idea of walking up to a stranger and telling it entirely horrifies me. It would be so much against social etiquette.
So, how would people treat a man dressed “like a woman” in your country, where rich people parade in gold chains and mental issues are treated with vodka?
With the same kind of depressed indifference as everybody else. Such as person would be strongly “othered”, and “othering” in this context means simply ignore.
Really? Including the folks who wanted to punish “popularizing” (whatever that means) homosexuality, sex changes, transvestitism and bisexuality with 3 years in prison, and the people who voted for these fine folks?
Some people I know seem to have taken to using gender-neutral singular ‘they’ to refer to everyone, not just explicitly non-binary people who choose it. This is not noticeably silly – there are languages which do not have to use gendered personal pronouns (either because they don’t need to use pronouns at all, or because they have a gender-neutral singular already), and there is no law of linguistics that would prevent English becoming such a language if enough people drop ‘he’ and ‘she’ in favour of ‘they’. I don’t know if there are any languages that lack both gendered pronouns and a baked-in singular/plural distinction, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t some somewhere. There is already a movement to try to do this in Swedish.
Also, you do not need a passport, driving licence etc to specify ‘male’, ‘female’ or other in order to function as proof of identity. I think it’s perfectly possible that one could ‘abolish gender’ in the sense of the government taking no official interest in whether you are male, female or whatever other identity you wish, and with the language you speak containing no structures that assume a priori that you must be either male or female.
On the other hand, lots of people do identify strongly as male or female, and I don’t see that facet of human nature going away. Gender may not be fully modeled by a boolean binary, but it does still appear to be a bimodal distribution, with most people belonging very obviously to one cluster or the other. So I don’t think you could ‘abolish gender’ in that sense as long as we remain recognisably human.
Perhaps ‘abolish gender essentialism’ is the project that most people could compromise on – or at least agree that it is a non-crazy thing to want to do.
Sex does seem to be bimodal: more than 95% of all people belong to the groups {XX, ovaries, vagina, high level of estrogens} and {XY, testes, penis, high level of androgens}.
But gender? Do 95% of people really aspire to be “macho lumberjacks” or “nurturing princesses”?
The most surprising thing I’ve noticed from all the discussions surrounding trans issues is that many people, in fact, don’t strongly identify as either gender, but simply go along with societal expectations for pragmatic reasons.
I’ve expressed an identical sentiment myself on this page, but I’ve still gotta sanity check you here: of those discussions surrounding trans- issues, did any of them take place outside of, for want of a better word, Math-Person enclaves?
Lumberjacks are low-status. But as a better example most men would like to be James Bond i.e. both masculine and high-status because androgens generaly precisely this type of status desire, to the extent that it was shown that androgens even in women influence stereotype threat levels – they directly influence how much one cares about comparing themselves with others.
Masculine gender roles are all about power, and androgens are all about desiring that.
For women, the princess stuff is pre-capitalist. So not really relevant. The high status woman is more of a Gina Lollobrigida type today.
Also it is a bit more difficult because it is hard to tell if lower androgens or higher estrogens are more important. Nurturing is oxytocin. Estrogen has more to do with high socialization, emotional connections, a classic case is the puberty / teenage girl behavior or early pregnancy where the opinion of others becomes very important and moods and emotions matter a lot.
Estrogen is clearly not about nurturing – after childbirth it crashes through the floor.
I don’t think nurturing is a _ generic_ female gender role as such – do the girls in dance club look like they are being very nurturing? It is a _motherhood_ role which happens after e.g. attractiveness got already reduced by the first birth and normally happens only after marriage.
Nurturing is female only as much as working long is male – not very much, just a marriage role.
But the core roles are male fighting/dominating and female emotional/social.
@ Alraune
That’s an interesting hypothesis. I’d like to see a properly sampled study, too.
@ Shenpen
James Bond and Gina Lollobrigida? I think you might be a little behind the times 😛
More seriously: everyone wants to be respected and admired — or “high status”, as you put it. (Except for people with unhealthy self-loathing issues.)
And you do realize that anger is an emotion and status games are a type of social interaction, right?
@Nita:
My first instinct was to say ‘…that’s an excellent point’, and then I realised that while it’s incredibly easy for me to imagine that’s true for most people, that’s probably in strong part because I identify as androgynous.
Do you have some statistical sources corrected for confounders? I’d be interested, because that sounds like the sort of thing that will shape the way I look at things if true.
It seems like there’s a conflation here between costume and role.
For example, if I quantum leapt into the body of a 18th century French Aristocrat then I would suddenly face the expectation of wearing tights wigs and makeup: failing to dress in a properly masculine way would get me mocked almost as badly as my atrocious command of the French language. And if it had been a leap into a German young lord less than a century later I had better insult someone at my academy quickly or I’d be the only chump without a manly dueling scar. Two millenia earlier in Macedon and I’d be cursing my body hair every day while shaving.
But the masculine virtues, chiefly L’Amor Fati and self cultivation, would be the same in all three as well as in modern times. The fundamentals of “Being a Man” are human universals, and that is what guys identify with rather than a particular costume.
By that standard I would say most guys have a strong sex identity: even if they would prefer nail polish to baseball caps, they still largely aspire to masculine virtues.
@ Ever An Anon
“L’Amor Fati”? Hmm, let’s see…
That, and self cultivation? This combination of virtues sounds a lot like the ideal of a good Evangelical Christian housewife — joyfully accept your lot in life, tirelessly work to improve yourself… And these ladies take their femininity quite seriously — they might take offense if you go around calling their virtues manly!
@ Neike
I would be happy to find any statistics on this, of any quality.
>Also, you do not need a passport, driving licence etc to specify ‘male’, ‘female’ or other in order to function as proof of identity.
True but I cannot really imagine how narcissist one must be to really care about this.
You also can’t imagine a reason, other than narcissism, why someone might care.
@Anonymous
Yes, I cannot. It sounds to me the idea that a person cannot bear that anyone have a different opinion about himself/herself even if that is not really a person but a paper produced by a bureaucratic machine. Not being able to deal with disagreement about ones own self is what narcissism is.
It is not being sure and confident about one’ self / identity so every external disagreement reinforces those nagging doubts.
And my opinion of rationalists (or is it conservatives?) sinks ever lower.
@Anonymous
Conservative (non-American), with a mild interest in rationalism, if you are interested.
But quite frankly I have about zero interest in your opinion. Because I am not narcissistic – I can live very well with the fact that some people have a different opinion about me than I do.
Say something actually interesting, such as what other alternatives exist.
Why should I? If you were open to alternatives, you would have gone out into the world (i.e., other places on the internet) and looked for them. You would have maybe come up with some tentative alternatives yourself, which you could have then tested against reality. (You can still do those things. Absolutely no one is stopping you.)
(And given how you’ve dug in your heels with the single explanation that occurred to you, why would I think that my providing you with an alternative would be anything but futile?)
Anon, you could at least attempt to argue your case(s). I don’t see what kind of contribution you think you’re making here.
@Caue, I see many comments making unsupported assertions, in which the commenter is COMPLETELY CONVINCED that there no other explanation is possible.
I have no hope that any rational argument or evidence will be considered by someone like that. Therefore, I have zero incentive to argue a case in specific terms.
Meanwhile, when thinking of reasons why you would complain as you’re doing, instead of providing the alternative explanation(s) and see what happens, the only ones I can come up with are… less than generous.
@Anonymous:
There is the old saying, “Better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
If you find Shenpen to be foolish, you should incentivize him to speak, not remain silent.
@Cauê:
I will attemp to steel-man @Anonymous’s argument, at least a little bit.
We have all been in arguments where the other side is not merely well-versed in the arguments for their own opinion, but extremely resistant to anything that runs contrary. It’s confirmation bias on steroids (or maybe just confirmation bias).
CJB has a point that he concedes somewhere in this thread about Swedish defense spending vs. US defense spending where he makes the point that in many places, merely to admit error is to show weakness. When one finds oneself in argument in this manner, it becomes exhausting, the debate equivalent of trying to talk to a two-year old who merely says “Why?” to every answer.
To your point though, I would however, hope that on this blog at least, we wouldn’t be so quick to pattern match to that type of argument.
HBC, I don’t how many times one should have to try to argue in good faith with someone before concluding that’s the case and accusing them of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least once.
@Caue, you’ve seen two separate commenters [there’s no charitable way I can put it], and your issue is . . . with the person who points this out to them?
@HBC, the particular quote that comes to my mind is that a lie travels halfway around the globe before the truth has a chance to put on its shoes. No, the situation isn’t quite analogous. However, I think it is perfectly fine to tell someone to go forth into the internets to find the information they’re convinced does not exist. I truly do not have the energy to do more than that.
@Anon – “I truly do not have the energy to do more than that.”
And yet you have the energy to keep sniping with rude comments.
Argue for the audience. Always. The point of view you are representing deserves better than you are giving it.
“Argue for the audience. Always. The point of view you are representing deserves better than you are giving it.”
Thank you, FC. At least we can agree on that!
Cauê says:
“HBC, I don’t how many times one should have to try to argue in good faith with someone before concluding that’s the case and accusing them of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least once.”
Yes, I completely agree with this.
Surely though, one can, after the 4th “Why?” in a row, dismiss the two year old, even if that is all in one conversation? I’m not sure what the polite way to do this is, especially in a manner that does not concede the argument.
@Anonymous:
“the particular quote that comes to my mind is that a lie travels halfway around the globe before the truth has a chance to put on its shoes”
On this blog, in this community, if one makes an assertion, being asked to justify that assertion should generally assumed to be valid and in good faith. If people are making counter-assertions, this does not simply nullify both parties responsibility for justifying their assertions.
Do I sympathize with the general idea that the comment community here, having attracted a predominately gray-red cohort, seems to ignore violations of the 2 out of 3 rule that Scott laid out if they coincide with a gray-red worldview? Yes, I sympathize with that.
But I don’t think the answer is to then consciously engage in that type of behavior.
@HBC, I keep silent 99 times out of 100, even when I see people engage in “that type of behavior.” I don’t read the comments very often, but when I do, I see a definite trend in which comments expressing right-wing views are much less likely to be challenged than those from the left. And that’s all I will say about it.
I feel I should perhaps say, once in a while, that I agree with Anonymous; I have gotten a bit frustrated at the build up of right-wing talking points and abuse of liberals in the comment threads of late. I only rarely respond, because when I do it generally seems that either the inferential distance is too great or there’s too little interest in actual rational discussion on the other side for it to be productive, and I don’t consider making the comment threads a scene of tribal warfare to be a desirable outcome either. But count me as a left winger who still loves Scott’s posts, but is much less thrilled by the comment threads of late.
@Protagaros:
Oh, I certainly agree with that. Except, I’m fairly young here, so I don’t think I ever saw the halcyon days you are describing.
Several months ago I saw a thread where some seemed to be bemoaning the lack of liberal/left-leaning commentors as detrimental to the back and forth dialogue that was desired. I didn’t comment at the time, but my initial reaction was that the general tenor is not welcoming to liberal commentors, but rather, fairly hostile.
I think 3 weeks or so ago, veronica d tried to make that point and ended up having her point attacked either semantically or in a weak-man (depending on how you want to see it). Not many gray or red-tribe members seemed to jump to her defense.
This last point is particularly what I am trying to get at. Unless we want to things to devolve to some sort of echo chamber (or dual echo chamber), we have to particularly guard against accepting/not challenging weak arguments from people we broadly agree with.
“The quality of this website’s comments has gone to hell” is probably the most common sentiment I’ve ever seen at any time on any website. I wouldn’t be surprised if those weren’t the first words ever transmitted electronically.
It used to be almost exclusively Blue-state “I’ve never met a real-life Creationist” progressives and bleeding heart libertarians here, and there were people complaining about the comments then too. And back then we had actual death threats, albiet all from the same commenter afaik.
After that NRx was a big thing and there still weren’t any regular Red-state conservatives but everyone was flipping out over whatever thing Jim had said that milisecond. And 100% of it was more offensive to liberal sensibilities than anything posted in recent memory.
Having a half-way mindkilled debate about gun control or global warming isn’t as fun as listening to communists fantasize about putting lower middle class white folks against the wall as class traitors or hearing surprisingly well-sourced race realist arguments that black people not being able to swim is a public health risk, but it’s not anywhere near as disruptive either. Doomsaying now of all times is silly.
‘Things used to be better here’ is arguably the oldest human sentiment, and was certainly held as early as we have samples of narrative writing. Earlier, if we trust their recording of oral histories.
I’m generally against fantasies of executing kulaks (though perhaps I should not be: sometimes fantasies substitute for action more than they incite it), and I don’t even understand why someone would make a well-sourced argument for… subsidized swimming lessons for black people? Voluntary associations gathering to address the grave threat of lack of swimming technique? Probably this is because I don’t see how it ends up as a public health problem.
Anyway, setting aside these examples of a more colorful commentariat which, the vagaries of the internet permitting, may yet return… there’s a positive value to trying rational argument here, even for Anonymous.
Perhaps more relevantly, there’s a strong negative value to despairing of rational argument and going straight to sniping.
The former helps reinforce the norms of rational discourse here; the latter actively tears them down.
Worse, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: perhaps rational argument on a given subject, with a given interlocutor is futile. Certainly it becomes so, if sniping is the standard of discourse.
If such despair helps hasten what you dislike about the comments, as I think it would, then consider taking the opposite course — not as a favor to those unwilling to listen, but as your attempt to give the PoV for which you argue the representation it deserves.
Or, less rationally:
Welcome.
Stay awhile.
Bring forth the arguments your causes deserve.
The public health problem is that it (in conjunction with various amplifying effects?) means there’s a 3x disparity in the rate of drowning.
Steve Sailor still reads and comments here; I don’t know about the communists.
Jim and most of his imitators got permabanned, IMO correctly; I’m basically okay with having neoreactionaries floating around, even the ethno-nationalist kind (whom I find the least politically interesting and the most ethically sketchy), but Jim’s style was way too abusive no matter how good his sourcing.
The commie murder fantasy perpetrator received a few temporary bans and largely mellowed out; they’re still around occasionally. I’m not gonna name them here, because they might prefer it that way and they’re actually a pretty good commentator when they’re not fantasizing about having people shot.
(Also because I may have dreamed of feeding annoying people to sharks, Blofeld style.)
Expanding on my above reply to Nita, I think that, yes, 5% is the right magnitude of exceptions there, but that the number is substantially higher within nerd circles. Partly because there’s a tendency towards identifying primarily as your mind and having far-flung hypothetical interests that makes the question “if you were [other gender, other race, a robot blimp on Jupiter, etc. etc.] what would things be like?” seem more interesting and less repulsive than most people seem to find that class of question, but I think there’s also a more fundamentally gender-specific portion. Being male or female in the social/gender sense is largely about what type of status games you naturally take to and bond by playing, and nerds are quite infamously bad at the normal status games, preferring to play their own. And nerd status games, though not really unisex, are sufficiently outlying that the male and female versions are closer matches to each other than to their corresponding normal games. When all your close friendships are of the nerd-bonding sort rather than the gender-bonding sort, gender identification falls by the wayside.
On the average, the more intellectual a person is, the more neutered they look. Unfortunately I am not an exception – I would like to be far, far more masculine but it feels like every time I jump into an intellectual interest, my testosterone drops.
A number of religious traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism associate androgyny with enlightenment and completeness, so maybe you just have the best of both worlds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardhanarishvara
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41298758?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The Left Hand of Darkness, I guess?
Which is an indirect way of saying “Not gonna happen without major and fundamental revisions of human nature.”
>but what makes it for me is the claim that Swedes in the US have the same poverty rate as Swedes in Sweden
Is there any use of data that have equally loud left and right wing interpretations?
L: because there is no racism against them
R: because better culture / genes
I mean you can throw this bit of data into the usual political mosh pit and still both sides feel their views reinforced.
Lead? What lead? It could have been air conditioning that reduced crime:
> When it gets really hot in Baltimore, people in poorer neighborhoods spill out into the streets. This is because they don’t have air conditioning. Because crime goes up when the temperature goes up, the police department sees hot temperatures and people in the streets as a recipe for violence. So they respond by sending scores of cops into these neighbors to clear out the corners. The city ends up spending thousands of dollars on overtime just to basically harass the people in these neighborhoods for trying to keep cool. What if instead of spending all that money on police overtime summer after summer, one year you just bought air conditioners for poor people? Would that work? I don’t know. But it would help relations with the community. And we know that what we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
> I’ve had a pet theory that part of the reason for the crime drop of the last 20 years is the proliferation of air conditioning. I’ve yet to see any studies on it. But it makes some sense.
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/06/25/an-interview-with-the-baltimore-cop-whos-revealing-all-the-horrible-things-he-saw-on-the-job/
That’d be the absolute risk reduction theory. Never go outside, and you won’t get mugged.
I suspect that giving poor people air conditioners would lead to them losing food stamps and similar benefits because of the increase in “income” from getting the air conditioner. If they make enough money that they pay taxes, they may instead find themselves forced to sell the air conditioners to pay the income taxes on the air conditioners. And even if not, they may have to sell the air conditioners simply because they have a greater need for money than for air conditioners. Also, you’ll find poor people being burglarized for their air conditioners. And you’ll find those who sell things to the poor raising their prices to capture the surplus from the poor people getting sellable air conditioners, same as colleges raise their prices when you make it easy for students to get loans.
(For that matter, can the poor people even afford the electricity to run the air conditioners?)
I think the electricity is probably the biggest issue; AC uses a huge amount of that. But I can’t imagine burglarizing air conditioners becoming big business. They’re too heavy and not valuable enough for that.
An article that Scott and others might appreciate:
On the problem of normative sociology
This is an excellent article. I recommend it to everyone here, and hope Scott at least adds it to his next links post.
How did you come across it?
It was recommended on Marginal Revolution: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/06/normative-sociology.html