OT 30: Comment Knowledge

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. These threads tend to fill up pretty quickly. Should I start doing them weekly instead of biweekly?

2. John Sidles is hereby forbidden to use bold text or to speak in a topic-comment sentence structure. He may continue to comment as long as he follows these two rules.

3. Comment thread on autism had a lot of unfortunate definitional issues (are we talking about turning everyone into Perfectly Conformist Jocks/Cheerleaders or about preventing people from being institutionalized/suicidal while leaving everything else intact?) but the stories from autistic people / caretakers were pretty interesting, especially Mai, Helldalgo, Alicorn, Ilzolende, Peter, Murphy, and seebs.

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1,140 Responses to OT 30: Comment Knowledge

  1. Beowolff says:

    I kind of enjoyed the format of John Sidles posts – it was clear that he had put in some thought into them, but I feel that other people didn’t seem to get the format, so it never generated good discussions. Perhaps just eliminate the bolding aspect and keep the topic-comment structure. (I believe too many people were pattern-matching the bolding to “spam” comments)

    • John Sidles says:

      Do discourse restrictions afford benefits?   Hmmm … yes, the Streisand Effect is perhaps one such benefit.

      By the way, who noticed?   Queequeg’s eye-color.

      (aside) Did Scott alter Queequeg’s eye-color?   Not necessarily; I have personally seen blue-eyed blond-haired whaler-descendants among the children of the ultra-remote island of Satawal.

      What lessons are conveyed by blue eyes?   Genes are enterprising, and so are romantic individuals; and cultural memes are pretty enterprising too … even in the face of the strictest sanctions and taboos forbidding innovative elaborations and enterprises.

      What medical lessons might Melville’s Queequeg and SSC’s “It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue” jointly convey?   Scott’s fable authorize sand encourages his readers (well, me anyway) to consider the performative “exact sequence” of (1) utterance, (2) elaboration, (3) proof, (4) theory, (5) simulation, and (6) healing.

      Is there further literature along these lines?   Yes, plenty. Two recent surveys are Thomas et al. “The psychology of coordination and common knowledge” (2014) and Moises Enghelberg “Towards a medical aesthetic and its performative nature” (2014); the former is congenial to rationalists (`cuz hey, Steven Pinker’s a coauthor); the latter to humanists (`cuz hey, Enghelberg references Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic); and yes, these two very different works are fundamentally in agreement (the way I read them anyway) regarding linked performative elements spanning generic STEM disciplines.

      So could a sequel to SSC’s “It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue” shed a brighter light upon the performative sequence utterance → elaboration → proof → theory → simulation → healing (whose natural end is medical transformation)?   Yes, these superficially diverse scientific and literary works, when considered sympathetically and in aggregate, speak to us in chorus, to authorize and encourage us all to exercise our imaginations in regard to performative elaboration.

      Got an à propos finishing quote?   As it happens, yes!

      “There are some novels
      that for a mathematician
      will be worth one hundred books of geometry.”
        — Henri Poincare
          (as quoted by Cédric Villani)

      Apologies are extended to all SSC readers who are offended by bold-face typography, or distressed by “topic-comment sentence structure” (of which the above remarks are scrupulously free).

      @article{Thomas:2014aa, Title = {The
      psychology of coordination and common
      knowledge.}, Author = {Thomas, Kyle A. and
      DeScioli, Peter and Haque, Omar Sultan and
      Pinker, Steven}, Journal = {Journal of
      Personality and Social Psychology}, Month =
      {Oct}, Number = {4}, Pages = {657--676},
      Volume = {107}, Year = {2014}}

      @article{Enghelberg:2014aa, Title = {Towards a
      medical aesthetic and its performative
      nature}, Author = {Enghelberg, Moises},
      Journal = {Journal of Medical Humanities},
      Month = {Dec}, Number = {4}, Pages =
      {439--441}, Volume = {35}, Year = {2014}}

      • PDV says:

        Yeah, it wasn’t pattern-matching the format to spam before, this still seems extremely spammy.

        • John Sidles says:

          For unfettered global access to unbounded quantities of the tastiest and most nourishing of all cognitive spam, thank you Al Gore!

        • I find the mock-spamminess of Sidles’ posts to be rather charming. So long as he isn’t actually trying to sell me anything.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            But, is he actually adding to the discussion?

            I don’t match him to spam. I map him to the writings of bi-polar people in a manic phase. It takes me a while to tell he isn’t making any sense whatsoever. Everything is elliptical. Everything slides off the shell of his General a product hull.

          • John Sidles says:

            Economic and political life on the blue-eyed island of Satawal (mentioned above) is a neoreactionary dream:

              • minimal regulation (none, in fact)
              • minimal bureaucracy (none, in fact)
              • minimal democracy (none, in fact)
              • minimal police, courts, jails …

            The entire absence of money creates an economy that functions mainly by empathic exchange … each individual being only as influential and wealthy as other islanders freely choose to perceive them as being (yes it’s quite like the society of Jack Vance’s The Moon Moth)

            This illuminates a fundamental paradox of the neoreaction movement … the economic and political objectives of neoreaction, once achieved, act to create societies that, in practice as contrasted with theory, are far more concerned with empathetic social justice concerns than with abstract notions of rationality.

            One consequence (needless to say) is that a flexible, robust, liberal, and timeless sense of humor and humanity is utterly essential to survival on the outer islands.

            Perhaps that is why neoreactionaries are not encountered in the outer islands; both anthropologically and economically speaking, they are scarcely equipped to survive there.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Sidles

            (…) neoreactionary dream:
            • minimal regulation (none, in fact)
            • minimal bureaucracy (none, in fact)
            • minimal democracy (none, in fact)
            • minimal police, courts, jails …

            That doesn’t sound like a neoreactionary. That sounds like a particularly ideologically pure libertarian. IIRC my Moldbug, his position on the size of the government and amount of regulations is that it’s irrelevant; the only relevant thing is whether the government and law enforcement and so forth work. If there needs to be a gigantic bureaucratic machine to make it work, so be it.

            Please don’t round off to the nearest cliche.

          • Peter says:

            HeelBearCub:

            Can we have less of the medicalizing people we disagree with, please? I’ve tried to give John Sidles a telling-off for this, so I think it’s only fair I complain here.

            (Although to be fair you could say, “I wasn’t medicalizing him as such, I was just reporting what my pattern match says”, and I’m not sure I’d have a good response to that.)

          • Zykrom says:

            On some level all consequentialist political ideologies are going to be about “what works.” It seems to me that MM’s idea of “what works” is pretty libertarian.

          • Peter says:

            Satawal – population 500. That’s about 2-3 times Dunbar’s number or. So you don’t quite have the everyone-knows-everyone-else-reasonably factor quite so well, so I’d expect to see some social structure to make things manageable. Dunbar does have a larger group size – 500-1000, and Satawal is comfortably inside that.

            A big of googling reveals: this and pages within. On the next page, we’ve got a description of the social structure – there’s eight clans, each with chiefs, and three of those are “chiefly clans” where the adult male members of those clans have speaking privileges at council. The chiefs and council appear to have a substantial role in controlling the economy – among other things you have chiefs collecting and redistributing food.

            This all sounds familiar from the smattering of anthropology that I’ve picked up. Basically Satawal seems to have the social institutions you might expect from something of it’s size.

            It’s a traditional society; I can see why people might think that NRx types might like it. But it’s a traditional society with institutions fitted to it’s size.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Zykrom

            On some level all consequentialist political ideologies are going to be about “what works.” It seems to me that MM’s idea of “what works” is pretty libertarian.

            I think the crucial difference is that libertarians assert that small/limited/weak government = good things. Neoreactionaries meanwhile try to figure out what government = good things. It’s not a point of dogma, even if individual reactionaries have strong ideas on what good-things-achieving government looks like.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Peter:

            That is a fair criticism. I probably should have made it clear that a) I wasn’t suggesting the commentor is bi-polar (or any other diagnosis), b) that people who are bi-polar are somehow “bad” and that therefore, if I tie bi-polar as an association to someones argument, that it can then be discounted.

            I was trying to get at a real point though. Spam is almost always very clear. You can read spam and almost immediately tell what it is that the spammer would like you to do (usually some form of “pay them”). These posts are remarkably unclear. I usually have trouble out even what concept/prior post is being addressed. For instance the comment to me addresses absolutely nothing that either Mea or I side in our comments.

            Maybe it is performance art. I don’t know.

    • Anonymous says:

      Less “spam”, more “Time Cube”.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      The format was the least of his problems. The few times I’ve seriously engaged him I’ve found that the content of his links rarely supported (and in a couple of instances directly contradicted) the argument that they were supposed to be making.

      John Sidles is basically our resident Byronic hero, railing against the horror of enlightenment and the heartlessness of empiricism.

      It’s best not to take him too seriously.

    • AlexanderRM says:

      I’d just like to provide my one data point having looked over some John Sidles comments (from the Autism discussion), I did in fact pattern-match it to “spam” comments and even though I could clearly tell in this case that it was a human actually writing those things and not a bot, I couldn’t quite manage to take it seriously. However I can imagine that if I were used to it it might be interesting.
      I don’t think it’s just the format though, something about the actual content of his posts is pretty weird, involving various relational-thinking-esque tangents, that to some degree pattern-matches to spambot speech (the way they take specific words or phrases and post statements relating to them). I might just be imagining it and it really is the format.

      In any case, I think banning the structure has definitely made it worse, judging from his reply to your comment. I’d say just let him go back to making it explicit.

  2. Bakkot says:

    Comments now* have a link to their parent comment. This link appears at the bottom of the comment, next to the “Reply” and “Hide” buttons.

    Also, PSA, comments have a “Hide” button, which will hide them and the subthread rooted at them.

    This thread is a good place to talk about the comments system, probably.

    *may take a few minutes from the posting of this comment for them to actually show up.

    (Scott, do let me know if you want me to not do this sort of thing.)

    • Quirkyllama says:

      If this is the meta comment thread, can you change the mobile format? Very difficult to read comment threads on phones/tablets due to page format and indenting.

    • Nornagest says:

      Oh, thank god. That’ll take a lot of the pain in the ass out of deep threading.

    • Is there any way to make it easier to comment without losing the current state of your new comment markers?

      I comment in a separate tab, but this means I have to copy and paste the time/date of the last comment in the tab I’m using to keep track of the comments. It seems trivial, but it’s enough of an annoyance that sometimes I don’t comment.

      • ton says:

        I sometimes comment in an incognito tab. Copy the reply link, ctrl-shift-n, ctrl-v,enter, comment, put in name/email, ctrl-w to close. (In chrome).

      • Winter Shaker says:

        I usually find I can right-click the grey date and time info (under the commenter’s name), select ‘open in new tab’, and have it come up right where you want it in the new tab so I can comment there.

        But of course, I often forget to do that – for instance right just now 🙂

      • Anonymous says:

        I write a comment, look at the rest of the new posts, then submit my comment when I’m done.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        To comment without losing my place, I press “Post Comment”, wait a second or two, and then stop my browser.

        The request has gone through and been processed, but I haven’t gotten the new page yet to read, so I’m still on the old page.

        I wouldn’t try to automate this, because if the website gets faster or slower than you expect it will fail. But by doing it manually I’m perfectly fine.

    • fghjk says:

      Hide function would be much more useful if it was at the top rather than the bottom of a comment, then I could use it to hide walls of text when I first see them rather than scrolling to the bottom

      Also thanks for doing useful things!

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      As for weekly vs biweekly open threads, weekly, thus shorter, threads would be easier on my computer. After several hundred comments, it hangs up, even after closing other programs and restarting.

    • Remember to update the code in your GitHub repo, too. I might contribute to it some time.

      • Bakkot says:

        Thanks. It actually is updated, insofar as the code which is running on this page is hosted on the gh-pages branch of that repo, but I should really write a proper readme for it, and properly deprecate the old extension. I’ve at least switched the default branch to gh-pages.

  3. LTL says:

    Can anybody recommend any good social skills advice that focuses more internal stuff (I.e. how to enjoy and feel good while socializing, and feel good about yourself socially, how to set up your social life to make you feel good, how to feel less anxious and awkward during, how to be more trusting, etc.) rather than external stuff (I.e. how to talk to people, body language, etc.), especially from an introverted, non- drinking, socially anxious perspective?

    Most stuff I’ve found focuses on the latter, and/or is for people who are autisitc (I am not on the spectrum). My issue isn’t the external stuff but rather that I don’t enjoy socializing, I often find people irritating, it feels awkward, I don’t feel good about myself afterwards, i find it to be really tiring, I have low tolerance for high energy “fun” sorts of interaction, and so on. You might say that I should just not socialize, but loneliness, desire for emotional intimacy, desire for social support, boredom, and horniness can only be satisfied by building a social circle.

    Sources I’ve already read/checked out: Succeed Socially, Mark Manson, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Captain Awkward, Dr. Nerdlove, and Real Social Skills (too focused on disability).

    • Basiles says:

      I don’t know if this is helpful, but I think I can definitely relate to what you are saying and I could make use of such or similar resources, as well…

      My main issue with socialization is I often feel me and the people around me have too little in common, or if we do have something in common, we appreciate it on rather incompatible levels. So I can talk to them, but I can’t really get much out of it and there’s not enough shared ground for us to feasibly develop anything. And that’s why I don’t really enjoy socializing. I think a lot of socialization feeds on similarity.

      The answer I arrived at is that if you are sufficiently unusual, you will need to find other sufficiently unusual people to socialize with, and there are not too many of those and they do not assemble well. But I’d be happy to hear a different hypothesis.

      • Rodrigo says:

        I think I feel in a similar way about having a hard time socializing with people who are not very similar to me. I am at college right now and pretty much all my friends are in the same major as I am (math), or are at least generally interested in math/science stuff, and have the characteristic “weirdness” of such people. And I think this is not just because I get to spend more time with other math majors (because of common classes). Usually when I meet a new person who is a math major I have an easy time socializing with them and and finding them likable / feeling they like me, as opposed to non-math majors, to whom my interactions are usually pretty awkward.

        I think your hypothesis might be true. But an alternative explanation is that for some reason we are biased to making effort in our relationship with people who are “strange like us”, and hence we feel that these people are a “better match” for us, even though a just as nice relationship could be built if we chose to spend this effort on another arbitrary person. The reason I think this alternative hypothesis might be true is that there have been situations in which I had no option other than making a large effort to socialize with someone who I usually not be friends with (like when being assigned to a team at work), and pretty nice relationships came about.

        In short, my alternative hypothesis is that we don’t “need” people “strange like us” to socialize, but we are biased towards making larger efforts to socialize with them (in my case I think I am biased toward math majors because of the clear advantage of being able to go through classes together, building a community with a common interest, etc.). If this hypothesis is true, though, it means that you can be missing the opportunity of socializing with people that could be good friends with you, just because you are not making an effort to socialize with them. Hence I could also take advantage of similar advice and resources. And I am also very interested in hearing other people’s experiences and ideas about that.

        • Basiles says:

          I feel like “work” is a very significant thing-you-all-have-in-common aspect, though. Everyone at my job is in a vaguely similar field and we often have hobbies that coincide. Same goes for things like sports teams or the military, for instance. And if I develop a friendship at work, it’s often rather hard for me to expand it beyond work unless we do have something else in common, which we sometimes do.

          And even that only works to a point. I’ve been on a few sports teams and things just didn’t work at all. Main issue being that I cared significantly less about the sport compared to the other people on my team, and then I failed on various social scales (I didn’t have the right clothing to go to a party in), which somehow ended up correlated to being on a sports team. This was not the case with my job.

          It’s just different levels of similarity and some of them cast wider nets than others and some of them are more precise than others.

          I don’t really feel like relationships are at all related to effort. In my experience, it’s either happening or you’re forcing it. I haven’t observed any correlation at all between me trying to talk to people more or listen to them more or put myself in more social spaces and getting new friendships. Most of the good friendships I got ended up completely random and had virtually nothing to do with any of my ‘effort’.

        • Jeffrey Soreff says:

          Kipling has said that ‘there is neither East nor West, Border nor
          Breed nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though
          they come from the end of the earth.’ I do not hold with that: I
          profoundly distrust those strong men. But replace ‘two strong
          men’ by ‘two competent electrical engineers’ and though you
          slightly mar the rhythm you considerably improve the content.

          https://archive.org/stream/EricMendozaEd.ARandomWalkInScience_201406/Eric%20Mendoza%20%5BEd.%5D%20-%20A%20Random%20Walk%20in%20Science_djvu.txt

      • bluto says:

        For me socializing got a whole lot easier when I stopped looking for people who had something in common with me and started looking at them as opportunities to learn about something (almost everyone has something they’re passionate about and frequently they’re things that are interesting to learn).

        I’m pretty unusual, but love learning about why something I had previously considered mundane was actually pretty interesting. It can be tricky learning how to navigate the time until you get the person on the subject of their interests, sometimes.

        • keranih says:

          This. When I think of other people as means to make myself happy or to entertain me, the gathering is fairly miserable. When I look at other people as their own thing, and not a means to an end for me, I tend to enjoy it a lot more.

          • LTP says:

            This is something I really struggle with. I struggle to find socializing to be intrinsically rewarding most of the time. Usually when I go to social events, it’s because I’ve been feeling lonely and want to make friends because I don’t want to feel lonely anymore (or, I’m horny and want to build a social circle to meet more women, or I feel like I have nobody to talk to and want to build a social circle to have people to talk about Feelings with, etc.).

            I find socializing in most situations to not be intrinsically motivating enough to do it consistently enough to build closer friendships and find dates, but for these ends that I want. Which, as I said, I realize is a big issue.

      • Nornagest says:

        Don’t define your interests too narrowly.

        To elaborate, the stuff you’re interested in was not handed down from on high on stone tablets. You make — consciously or not — the decision to pursue a certain set of things, and if you’ve constructed that set such that practically no one can contribute to it, that’s on you, not them.

        A lot of people assume that people who’re good at small talk have learned how to suss out shared interests with the people around them. There’s some of that going on, but more often I think it’s that they approach conversations with the assumption that everyone has something to contribute, even if they’ve never thought of themselves as particularly interested in it before.

        • Basiles says:

          I’m not sure why you, and some other people here, are now trying to imply various things about how I socialize and what believe while I merely suggested a hypothesis that I myself said is not definite.

          I didn’t start with that hypothesis, and then attempted to socialize. I’ve attempted to socialize, repeatedly failed to develop friendships or ties where I wanted to develop them, and attempted to create a hypothesis as to why. I’m happy you never felt the need to construct such a hypothesis, but there’s no need for the hostility.

          My interests are not narrow, at least not in any definition of that word I’m aware of. You have nothing to base your view that my interests are narrow on, other than that I apparently hold an opinion you don’t agree with.

          I’m not sure what your second paragraph is supposed to mean. Where did I say that interests are handed down from stone tablets? If anything, the fact that they aren’t further solidifies the problem, since the development of such things makes a person, and thus can make them that much more different. You need to explain to me what a non-contributable set is, as I know a few people who can contribute to it just fine, they just tend to not be people from real life. I never said the situation is on anybody. I do not believe it’s anyone’s fault. It may merely be a thing that happens. A side effect of statistics.

          You’re saying as if I don’t approach conversations with the assumption that everyone has something to contribute. It may just not work as well when the things people contribute are either too far behind or too far in front with each other, or when things are too polarized. Often /I/ don’t have anything to contribute. It’s useless to bring up people good at conversations here since, on average, people are good at socializing, so it cannot be a difficult thing requiring some high moral character to pick up. Much more likely, most people are good at socializing because they’re most people.

          Unfortunately, most material I’ve seen on socialization is non-scientific. If you have links to studies that examined socialization effects and practices I’d be happy to read them. But please lay off the assumptions and what looks like projection.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “but there’s no need for the hostility.”

            Allow me to gently suggest that this might be part of the issue.

            I was reading Nornagest as offering some fairly bog-standard advice (which might not apply, but we have limited information). You read him as being hostile.

            When I was young, up until I was in my late 20s, I tended to over read negative signals and under read positive ones. This really hurt my ability to socialize well. I felt weird anyway, because I found conversations about the explosion of Krakatoa interesting and nobody else did, but I had no interest in going to or describing the latest big-ticket concert event or what have you. But when I read people’s essentially neutral conversations as negative (and about me), this frequently doomed me. I felt like an outsider which meant that I acted like an outsider which meant I assumed I was being treated like one.

            None of this may apply to you, but you did ask, and we can’t rightly know how well it applies.

          • Nicholas Carter says:

            I think the inferential gap R.E. the “stone tablets” is this:
            Some of us have the developed ability of “choosing what to be interested in”. So instead of knowing what we’re interested in and looking for people who are good at it, we figure out what people are good at, and then rewrite our interests to be retroactively interested in what the person is actually good at. So for example, I have no interest in coding, unless I’m also within about 20′ of a CS major, then I *make* myself interested in coding.

          • Nornagest says:

            Exactly. My social skills got about 20x better once I realized that there was no true self that I had to live up to or else be betraying… something.

            It doesn’t feel like developing a skill so much as removing a barrier, though. Why aren’t you interested in, say, fashion? (To pick a common one out of a hat; I have no idea what anyone here is actually interested in.) Because that strikes you as frivolous, incongruent with your self-image as a serious, technical person with no time for frivolities? Congratulations, there’s no XML tag for “nerd” etched on your soul, and if you’re conversing with someone that likes fashion you’re already spending the time; you just have a choice between fashion and awkward silence. Why not learn something about it?

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            Exactly. My social skills got about 20x better once I realized that there was no true self that I had to live up to or else be betraying… something.

            Just speaking for myself, my social difficulties don’t have anything to do with feeling like I’m “betraying” my true self. Mostly I just never know what to say to people.

            Why aren’t you interested in, say, fashion? (To pick a common one out of a hat; I have no idea what anyone here is actually interested in.) Because that strikes you as frivolous, incongruent with your self-image as a serious, technical person with no time for frivolities?

            There’s no “why.” I’m not interested in fashion because I’m not interested in fashion. There’s no value judgment attached. I mean, I like a lot of stuff that other people would probably consider silly and frivolous. (Say, anime.)

            It’s like food; most people can’t control which foods are pleasurable to them and which are repulsive, and forcing yourself to eat things you find gross (or just bland) won’t make you like them more.

            Even if you’re someone who actually can control what you find interesting or pleasurable to talk about, or can train yourself to like something you previously didn’t like, I think it’s unfair to assume that everyone has this ability or that if they can’t do it they’re just not trying hard enough, or something.

            I mean, I guess I could spend several dozen hours of my life watching fashion shows and reading about fashion so I would be prepared to simulate an interest just in case I happened to run into someone who liked it, but obviously you can’t do that with every subject, or you’d end up spending your entire life researching things that you don’t even find interesting, and that strikes me as an unrewarding way to live.

            if you’re conversing with someone that likes fashion you’re already spending the time; you just have a choice between fashion and awkward silence. Why not learn something about it?

            Well, you can certainly listen and nod and go “uh-huh” once in awhile, and most people are happy to just keep talking, so if that’s all you’re after, I guess that’s fairly easy to achieve. But I don’t find that rewarding. And it’s exhausting trying to come up with stuff to say about something that I have nothing to say about.

            I spent too much of my life doing that. I’ve had a lot of acquaintanceships over the years where my primary function was “listener.” It gets old really fast.

            Actual conversations, where there’s a mutual exchange going on and both people are interested and learning from each other, are very rewarding, but unfortunately also kind of rare. And trying to fake it is just draining and leaves me feeling empty.

    • Unicyclone says:

      I like Nick Notas’s blog. His advice strikes a great balance between being friendly and supportive while still challenging you to improve. And you can tell his number one goal is to help you get what you’re looking for, instead of shilling for SJ or Red Pill talking points.

    • Asterix says:

      If it’s severe enough, I heard this, which made sense: make it your task to go to the event. You can then count this as a victory in and of itself. Only stay till it stops being fun, or till your discomfort reaches some level (like your first “I wish I were somewhere else” thought). The point is to avoid having a negative, anxiety-ridden experience that makes you hate social events even more. Instead, you can pat yourself on the back for reaching your goal of going in the first place.

    • BillG says:

      My best advice is the unfortunate, really– fake it until you make it. Find something you’re interested in and people you’re likely to have similar patterns with, and then jump into it. As someone suggested, make it an assignment to do X number of social activities per week. And then just be open for related options.

      When I moved to a new area two years ago I had a lot of lonely weekend nights (work makes sure I have few weekday, unfortunately). I joined a couple groups and made a real effort to go to them reliably. Over time I gained friends that fit into particular interests I had, and then a small group of them are close enough that they’re types I like to spend time with regardless of the activity.

      It was not always fun going to these activities. I mostly chose things I was interested in, but I’m naturally pretty introverted and often just did not want to go. But two years in, I’m really glad that I did because it has been a success.

      • Anonymous says:

        >fake it until you make it.

        This is it, really. From the outside view, pretending you’re good at socializing is no different from being good at socializing. Most of my social behaviors started off with me just pretending to be sociable as a sort of game.

        Socializing somewhere alcohol is consumed helps too.

        • unsafeideas says:

          “This is it, really. From the outside view, pretending you’re good at socializing is no different from being good at socializing. ”

          That is simply not true. If you are good at socializing from outside view, then you are already good at it. People who are bad at socializing not only feel unsure about themselves, they also come across as not-so-pleasant-to-be-around to the people they socialize with – and those are either ignoring them as result or become hostile.

          Being lonely in your room is bad. Being in a room full of people who clearly dislike you or completely ignore you is worst.

          • Bill G says:

            I don’t know that I agree with you. I very often act in ways that mimic those who I see as good at being social. While I’m doing this I often initially feel insecure and am exhausted by the “performance”. But over time I start to gain comfort and enjoyment in it.

            I think many who are now “good at socializing” are filled with these uncertainties all the time, to different degrees. I can tell you that in my experience, pretending I didn’t have them for periods of time allowed me to develop comfort with a group in which I now do not.

          • CatCube says:

            As I’ve gotten better at socializing, it hasn’t necessarily gotten more fun, but I’ve gotten better at not letting impatience show. I was talking to a senior guy in our organization once, and he confessed that he finds socializing tiring, too. He’s just good at faking it. I’d suspect that a fair number of the people you are saying are “already good at it” are just successfully faking it.

          • Anonymous says:

            @unsafeideas

            Bill G and CatCube said what I meant. There is a difference between being good at socializing, and pretending to be good at socializing, much in the same way one can care or pretend to care. By forcing these socializing actions, you can practice and eventually do it without effort (be good at it). Just because others might think you’re good at socializing doesn’t mean you’re not sweating and frantically anticipating how to handle every word and movement.

    • ThrustVectoring says:

      I’d recommend reading “The Inner Game of Tennis.” Possibly also “Improv” by Keith Johnstone. These aren’t really about socialization explicitly, but reading them lead me to make the kinds of changes you’re looking for. I habitually over-think things and get inside my own head, and socialization is much more enjoyable when you’re not doing that.

      Specifically, I’d recommend using paying attention to someone’s facial expressions or posture/positioning changes for much the same reason that The Inner Game of Tennis recommends looking at the seams of the tennis ball or counting “bounce hit”.

    • Yrro says:

      This is anecdotal, not a list of sources… but the biggest things that helped me personally were:

      1) Practice. This sounds painful, but if you are *expending* massive amounts of energy on socializing/small talk then it will be exhausting and not fun. The less you have to consciously think about how to run your human emulation programs, the less tiring they will be. This is the real point of “fake it until you make it.” Eventually it becomes less work, and you can move on to #2.

      2) Find the things you like in other people’s interests. Football, believe it or not, is an *incredibly* complex game, both in terms of physical technique and strategy. Cars, fashion, politics, even entertainment stuff — there is a complex history behind all of it, hidden patterns to discern. And the more you learn about how *that* stuff works, the more you can understand humanity in general.

      3) Learning to enjoy making people feel good. If you make someone laugh, or find just the right conversation topic to make them really engaged and happy for a it… it can just feel good. And there’s an art to it. Even most social people go to a party wanting to have a good time, but don’t necessarily find it. Working to facilitate that good time can be rewarding for a bit.

      Honestly, some of the be practice for me was trying to play a high-charisma DND character. I still wear out/can’t really do it when I’m not in the mood, but *trying to play the game* is still a better way to spend a party than sitting in a corner feeling self-conscious and thinking about the dumb things you said/might say.

    • Matt says:

      Check out “The Blueprint” a PUA product by Real Social Dynamics.

    • Charlie says:

      Hanging out with the right people goes a long way to helping me feel trusting, happy, comfortable, etc – and I assume you have people who do that for you too. But the right people are not always wearing big signs on their back alerting you to their Rightness, so one may have to fish for people who show hints of righteousness. Why hello, human, you seem to be moderately witty. I wonder what’s hidden under your hard coat of scales.

    • Logan says:

      I’ve actually gone from introverted to extroverted over the last two years, though I’m sure I didn’t perceive all of the causes and mechanisms. I’ll present my findings, biased though they are, and I’ll use the second person though really I’m talking about my own experience. One of the keys was drinking. It makes it much easier to relax with people. But the other component was taking a more utilitarian understanding of what friends are for.

      Social interactions seem unpleasant because they are someone else’s space. Make them your own. You should constantly act in a way that you enjoy, and you should seek only those friends around whom you can act in this way. I’m not saying you should disregard all social convention. Just like you can walk around naked at home but not at someone else’s house, and you shouldn’t rent a room where you can’t walk around naked if that’s important to you; similarly you need to be nice to your boss but you shouldn’t invest in close friendships with people you can’t be naked around, if that’s important to you. Act how you want to, see if people start to avoid you. My experience has been that they don’t.

      Do only those things that you enjoy, and allow others to join you if and only if being with them is better than being alone. Don’t feel bad about finding people irritating, or being awkward. These feeling stem from expectations about what you think social interactions should be. It’s folly to think a person wouldn’t irritate you, you probably irritate them. I find much of the actual irritation comes from the cognitive dissonance of hating someone while being nice to them. Acting like they aren’t an idiot when you have no respect for them right now. Once you accept that these things have no real causal relationship, that cognitive dissonance is resolved, and you can just ignore their irritating habits.

      If a situation is awkward, take solace in the knowledge that the other person notices it too, and is equally impotent to stop it. Awkward moments shouldn’t be uncomfortable, it’s simply an inefficiency of the interaction. An awkward silence is like when someone at the DMV knows what you want and wants to give it to you but can’t find the right form. It’s no one’s fault, and ideally it wouldn’t happen, sometimes good things are just hidden behind pointless forms. But it’s worth it because you obviously need something you can only get at the DMV. In fact, try to think of all social interactions in terms of economics. Mutually beneficial exchanges, which are inherently symmetric, both parties giving something up and gaining something. One person has to invite, the other has to say yes.

      Once you understand what you are gaining and paying, you can 1) shave off those relationships that honestly aren’t worth it, and 2) to maximize the utility you extract from existing relationships.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      Mr. Cynical says: “Humans are overrated”.

      You know that gene that programs humans to want to form tribes and interact socially? Apparently that one was somehow lost when I was created, perhaps a stray gamma ray destroyed it at the moment I was still a single cell.

      Don’t like humans? Get a dog.

      But I jest, kind of. One day I was channel surfing and I noticed just how many shows were talking heads or were people, people, people. Maybe 90+%. Invariably I would unconsciously always stop at the ones about science, nature, etc. So why are humans so obsessed with themselves? I don’t know. I’m not.

      I guess I’m not sure how this comment could possibly be helpful. Perhaps you could examine why you really want what you want. Some introverts may be that way because they simply don’t like people very much, and this is seen as a “defect” in our social construct, and this is a defect that requires fixing. Maybe not.

      Social skills have value. But that value is what you give it, not others. Don’t fall into a trap that it is somehow a measure of your worth. This is easy to say but hard to execute. Maybe what I am saying in a round about way is that I found it a lot easier to socialize when I stopped caring what (almost) anybody thought about me. Fear of not being liked, being ridiculed, or being relegated as an out group person is a pretty powerful force.

      One good friend is infinitely better than zero friends. That may be all you really need.

    • nope says:

      I know exactly where you’re coming from, OP. I’m the exact same way. I satisfy my minimal social needs by finding 1 person I really like and spending most of my social time with them. Usually it’s the person I’m dating. The greater the amount of time spent with a person, and the deeper the connection, the more all the bad stuff like awkwardness and anxiety will melt away. If you feel a need for contact with more than one person, but not very often, and not obligatory, make sure this person is an extrovert so you can lean on their social circle when you feel like it.

    • For some reason this community seems to have an unusually high median IQ. If this includes you, and from the eruditeness of your comment that sounds likely, basically your problem is simply that lower-IQ people bore you. This is perfectly normal. You can struggle through it, but by 40 or so you will give it up anyway and find the time invested a waste. You will sit through it, with a fake friendliness on your face, chatting, and yet thinking all the time inside “Kill me now. Why can’t they talk about something interesting?” Ultimately this has to be given up.

      The traditional way to deal with this in Christian and Buddhist countries was to put the high-IQ crowd into monastic communities. They tended to refer to non-monks as the stupid ones.

      The point is, you have to find an activity, any activity, with a sufficiently high IQ filter. You will find the people interesting there and it will basically solve your inner problems. When you are actually curious what someone has to say, these problems melt away.

      It does not have to be typically geeky activities. For example I caught one rumor that contract bridge players tend to be really, really bright. Obviously, go to LW meetups as well. And go to whereever else those folks go to.

      • Mark says:

        I’m not especially intelligent, but most of my favorite people are even less intelligent than me.
        At what point of intelligence does other people’s high intelligence become their most attractive feature?

      • Creutzer says:

        It is a common fallacy to reduce the dissatisfaction of intelligent people to boredom with their less intelligent peers. Not to say that this is never a problem, but I have experienced similar issues to what the OP describes while living in a social world where my intelligence is probably about average. What he (probably) describes seems more related to the craving for intimate connection that certain (apparently predominantly introvert) people have, and which is very hard to satisfy (and to which many cultures are also hostile).

        • But intimate connection sounds like a less-intellectual (read: less probably for OP or for anyone around here really) and less-introvert thing to me. Depends on what it means. For example when my best friend, piss drunk at 3AM gave me a bear hug roaring how I am totally his bestest friend ever and basically an adopted brother, that to me counted as one – and it comes across as a less intellectual (more emotional) and not every introverted thing?

          • Creutzer says:

            That… is not an intimate connection. That’s just weird. (I’m kidding here, but I trust you understand what I’m trying to convey.)

            The kind of “intimate connection” I have in mind involves talking about your emotions and experiences to a single person in a private setting. It can very well happen at 3am, though the amount of alcohol involved tends to be limited in my experience.

          • LTP says:

            Creutzer, you got what I was saying right. That is exactly what I’m talking about.

    • Max says:

      Be genuinely interested in people. Think about it this way – even if 99% is crap there is 1% which is gold. Every person has some gold in them, some truth they discovered, some life experiences worth knowing. Getting this gold can be hard but is worth it. More social experiences you have easier this task of uncovering gold becomes and it enriches you.

  4. TheFrannest says:

    First off, I would like to express my gratitude for autism and pro-psychiatry posts. Albeit I am schizophrenic and not autistic, despite all the external suffering this has brought me, despite my near-death due to misapplied Haloperidol, despite the long-lasting damage on my psyche, my general allegiance with antipsychatry, despite the constant mockery and condescension, I still have no good things to say to people who claim that mental health issues are easily remedied by people being accomodating instead of neurotypical bigots and that those who seek mental health for their children just don’t try hard enough.

    Unrelated, but here’s a topic that has been bothering me for a while, as I prefer to adhere to the principle of charity and it is in its direct opposite.

    Has anyone else but me noticed this strange effect where the offensiveness of an argument is equated with its validity? Affirmation of a pre-existing stereotype, oversimplifying reduction of a social phenomenon that puts someone to blame, cynical disparaging of someone else’s idealistic views and such. It commonly, but far from always, gets paired with memetic sentences such as “calling a spade a spade”, “telling it like it is”, “the truth hurts”, “tough love”, or an apology for the statement being offensive that follows the old joke about the kid who calls a girl a bitch and then when told to apologize says “I’m sorry you’re such a bitch”.

    It is commonly reduced to being an edgy teenager or something to that extent, but, barring the group of people who think political correctness exists to hide the truth and therefore politically incorrect statements are likely to be true (which is not fallacious reasoning, but might be based on a faulty premise), everyone is doing it – the left and the right, the teenagers and the old people. Why is this? What forces are in play?

    • Basiles says:

      > Has anyone else but me noticed this strange effect where the offensiveness of an argument is equated with its validity? Affirmation of a pre-existing stereotype, oversimplifying reduction of a social phenomenon that puts someone to blame, cynical disparaging of someone else’s idealistic views and such. It commonly, but far from always, gets paired with memetic sentences such as “calling a spade a spade”, “telling it like it is”, “the truth hurts”, “tough love”, or an apology for the statement being offensive that follows the old joke about the kid who calls a girl a bitch and then when told to apologize says “I’m sorry you’re such a bitch”.

      Oh, God, yes.

      I think it’s just some kind of logic error, kind of a reactionary to a known issue where people want things to be true so they believe them to be true (i.e., people who deny climate change). So the reaction is that something you want to be true must be false and something you do not want to be true must be true. A crude, crude way to go too far in the other direction to combat a certain style of bias.

      As well as, of course, a cheap trick to discredit a position you don’t like if it happens to be more positive/idealistic. How well something feels or sounds should have no bearing on the perception of its validity. The tactic, especially used aggressively, doesn’t really add much to the discussion especially when the phrases used are canned…

      …and this is coming from someone who has some cynical and negative positions.

      • Anthony says:

        The logic of the phenomenon is something along the lines of “I understand that saying offensive things carries a social cost, so I won’t say things which are offensive and untrue, but truth has its own value, and therefore if something I say is offensive, it’s because it’s true.”

        • Taradino C. says:

          And when phrased like that, it becomes clearer that the person isn’t assuming it’s true because it’s offensive, but rather emphasizing its truth to counter the objection that it’s offensive and untrue.

          • TheFrannest says:

            I am not completely buying the offense = social cost thing, to be quite honest.

            Many offensive and cynical statements are not even controversial in a casual setting, for example, political discussions taking the form of reductionism “politicians are evil and dumb”. If it’s a genuinely offensive statement (specifically denigrating a social group) then there are many circles in which making such a statement will not hurt, or will even improve, your social status.

            Methinks it is somehow closer to some sort of a twisted analogue of cutting yourself shaving with an Occam’s razor, where you see multiple explanations for things and you pick not just the one that seems the most simple to you, but also the one that is overly cynical and grim.

            Note that “simple to you” here mostly means “less words” rather than “actually a simpler explanation”. For example, what is the explanation for homosexuality? “Actually, it’s a combination of various factors that-”

            “It’s a type of perversion promoted by Jews so that whites would breed less.” Never mind that it raises more questions than there are words in that sentence.

            And, finally, social costs do not matter when we’re talking about people deciding which PERSONAL opinions to hold.

          • Creutzer says:

            Not everything that denigrates some social group is automatically offensive. “Politicians are evil and dumb” is not even remotely offensive in most social contexts.

          • Nornagest says:

            “Politicians are evil and dumb” is a cynical statement, but it’s not remotely an offensive one. Even if you’re saying it to a room full of politicians, I suspect — having known a few — that most would just assume you’re talking about those other politicians.

            It’s not a profession that selects for self-consciousness or humility. And it’s not uncommon to campaign on a promise of screwing the politician class, a trick that’s a lot easier if you actually believe what you’re saying.

          • TheFrannest says:

            Offensive in the sense that you are making offense. Additionally, you are making the point for me, yes? The idea that a group of people is inherently malicious and extremely stupid should be offensive, but in this case the statement has become so normalized that people do not even view this as offensive any more.

          • Creutzer says:

            What do you mean by “make offence”? Also, whether you think that denigrating a whole class of people should be offensive is quite disconnected from whether it actually is.

          • Nornagest says:

            Offense is about “is”, not “should be”. You can go looking for neat symmetrical rules here if you want, but at the end of the day people are actually going to get pissed off at one and not at the other. You’re not doing yourself any favors if you ignore that.

          • TheFrannest says:

            Quite honestly: the claim that priests are all evil, rapist, lying scum is offensive, yes? People are offended by it, no?

            Well, it was not very offensive in the Soviet Union. It is a question of time and society. I can find you a group of people who unironically uses the term “mudslimes” in political discussions. You’re helping me too much.

            >What do you mean by “make offence”?

            The claim that you are not special and not unique and will not accomplish anything in your life is not offensive per se, it is a value judgement, but it does put you down.

          • Nornagest says:

            Yeah, what’s offensive will vary between times and cultures. That’s because what people take offense to varies between times and cultures. You can’t separate the former from the latter. If nobody’s going to take offense in your cultural context, it’s not offensive, however contemptuous or stereotypical it might be.

            That doesn’t mean that there has to be someone in earshot to take offense, but it does mean there has to be an expectation that someone might. Let’s say I say that — to pick a group entirely at random — all !Kung people are assholes, and let’s further say I’m talking to my asshole friends who are all, for some reason, violently racist against the !Kung. It’s still an offensive statement, because we’re all aware that there’s a more general norm mandating offense when met with ethnic slurs. But in the politician example, I have more information about actual politicians’ preferences (viz. they don’t care), and there is no norm in my culture against putting down powerful professionals.

            (I suspect you’re overestimating how offensive the priest example is in the contemporary US and underestimating it in the Soviet Union, though. Soviet state atheism didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of Christians running around or that they didn’t respect their priests.)

        • Basiles says:

          That’s true right up until the point, as TheFrannest has noted here, that it stops carrying a social cost and actually makes the argument stronger. Now we just get a bias towards cynical arguments.

    • Anonymous says:

      I think it happens at least as often as the opposite case. How often do you see “that’s offensive” or a variant used as an argument against a position?

      The person defending the position can of course take steps to phrase their points in as inoffensive a way as possible. On the other hand, this often seems to require such defensive phrasing as to make the point impossible to make.

      • TheFrannest says:

        When people discount an argument because it is offensive, that is easily explained: in some way, it goes against their moral values.

        My father going on these tough-love, pseudo-motivational rants about how I have never amounted to anything and my suicidal tendencies are lies for attention obviously assumes that I am hurt by them because they are true and the truth deeply resonates within me.

        • keranih says:

          @ TheFranniest –

          I have no clue if this is going to help at all…but your father is almost certainly frustrated and ranting because he is deeply concerned about you and feels that your current path is not one which will end with you being happy and healthy. He probably would do anything in his capability to change the world (including you) so that you are happy and healthy.

          His toolbox for making those changes is not well equipped, hence him trying to use a hammer on the exposed bits instead of a wrench on the buried ones. It doesn’t make you any less bruised, from having been hammered on, but it might help you if you understand that he *is* trying to help.

          Try to guide him by articulating as frequently as possible when he does something that you appreciate or find helpful. No matter how old you are now, you will eventually become an adult who will need to interact with your father as an adult, and being clear on what you like about another person is one of the ways that adults bond and smooth social interaction. Practicing now may help.

          • Basiles says:

            I’d be much more concerned about TheFrannest here keeping their mental state intact than worrying too much about the future relationship. The mental damage from this sort of parental treatment can be quite immense. And it’s not a simple task at all to make such a party cooperate, and complimenting them may actually feed some of the nastier adaptations.

            Some relationships are not worth keeping, and being able to cut bad influences out of your life is a key to healing in certain situations.

          • keranih says:

            [snipped short-ish comments on the grounds that this is not my field]

            Given that TF is apparently not under professional care, I am disquieted by the suggestion to cut an important family relationship.

          • TheFrannest says:

            >but your father is almost certainly frustrated and ranting because he is deeply concerned about you

            Yeah, that’s a great point. Let me give you an example. I once mentioned, after yet another rant about how I’m a failure, to my mother in passing that I’m having suicidal urges again. Her obvious first decision was to call my father and complain about this.

            Ever since, he and his wife have an in-joke that whenever they see a hankerchief lying somewhere they give it to me so that I can have something to wipe my baby tears with.

            This is my life.

            >Given that TF is apparently not under professional care

            I was under professional care, I spent some of the worst months of my life in an asylum. There is a reason I am an adherent of antipsychiatry now. I did not just read some cute Wikipedia articles by fashionable leftists.

          • TheFrannest says:

            >being able to cut bad influences out of your life

            I am 24, and I am working fucking tech support for christ’s sakes. I’m not going to live alone any time soon, and I was told in no uncertain terms that if I don’t keep the house in pristine condition I’ll be kicked out, so I’ll have to be dependent.

          • nil says:

            Or he is cruel because he enjoys cruelty. Sure, no doubt with some rationalization attached, but only that. There are plenty of those sorts out there, and they’re perfectly capable of having kids.

        • Mammon says:

          “My father going on these tough-love, pseudo-motivational rants about how I have never amounted to anything and my suicidal tendencies are lies for attention obviously assumes that I am hurt by them because they are true and the truth deeply resonates within me.”

          This resonates with my experience. A close friend did something like this to me when she learned I was using antidepressants to control my depression. I think those people are enforcing the stigma against asking for help; they’ve always felt that a person should deal with their shit without looking for the “easy way out”, so they chastise you for not being able to 100% deal with your shit without accommodation.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I’m afraid you can blame psychiatry for this too. In psychoanalysis there’s this idea that you know you’re hitting something important if the patient gets angry about it. The classic example is if you just offhandedly mention a gay friend or something, and the patient jumps up and says “I’M NOT GAY! HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST I’M GAY!” then maybe there’s something going on there. But like everything in psychoanalysis, it’s infinitely easy to misapply and probably even worse when done by nonprofessionals.

          EDIT: Or maybe not original to psychoanalysis; even Shakespeare had “methinks the lady doth protest too much”

          Sorry to hear about your crappy family situation. Anything we can do to help?

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      It’s analogous to the path Ayn Rand went down.

      0) Genuinely seeks truth.
      1) Builds a reputation for deep-insights/socratic-edginess.
      2) feelsgoodman.jpeg
      3) Contrarian identity becomes more important than truth.
      4) Time Cube.

      Relevant: Scott’s signaling hierarchy.

    • Andy says:

      Has anyone else but me noticed this strange effect where the offensiveness of an argument is equated with its validity?

      I’ve seen exactly what you mean among some books and blogs marketed to American paleo-conservatives. Political incorrectness becomes part of the advertising sizzle for a book about Islam or economics or history written from a blatantly conservative viewpoints. I think of it as the old angry Republican equivalent of a hipster teenager’s spiked green hair and wince-inducing piercings – a “hey! look how shocking and contrarian I am!” signal.

      It’s a tendency that’s been passed on to some neoreactionaries: “I am spewing crimethink all over and your pathetic crazy liberalism can’t cope with my realness.” I’ve never, however, seen it attached to any argument with evidence, scholarship, or sense.

      • Echo says:

        You know what it does do? Fend off the kind of people they don’t want to associate with.
        Just like refusing to tag the colour blue and pomegranates as gore on tumblr.

    • Helldalgo says:

      “Has anyone else but me noticed this strange effect where the offensiveness of an argument is equated with its validity?”

      I believe I’ve come across this somewhere while reading about biases and fallacies. LessWrong Sequences, maybe? It was recent.

      In the interest of clarity, would the phrase “Of course a [whatever] would say that!” be grouped in with this phenomenon?

    • HlynkaCG says:

      For what it’s worth I honestly do think that political correctness exists to hide the truth. Or at least make it into something fuzzy an homogeneous enough that no one will recognize it. Otherwise there would be no need to distinguish between “politically correct” and “correct” in the first place.

      That said, I don’t think that it is quite as one sided as you seem to be assuming. For instance, people will say that a argument is offensive/racist/sexist/etc… without ever refuting the argument. I think that the perceived validity of “offensive statements” tied to the old saw about how “if you’re catching flak, you’re over a target.”

      • Andy says:

        Otherwise there would be no need to distinguish between “politically correct” and “correct” in the first place.

        How many people who advocate political correctness actually make this distinction?

        • HlynkaCG says:

          A fair portion in my experience, it’s the inevitable re-joiner in any case where inconvenient reality runs into ideology.

        • Nornagest says:

          People who advocate political correctness don’t think of it as political correctness — but they don’t think of it as factual correctness either. They think of it as a moral obligation; I hear phrases like “basic decency” a lot.

          • brad says:

            I don’t see it as much different from avoiding Anglo-Saxon four letter words in most settings.

            I’m not trying to hide anything by not saying “fuck this shit” at work. Nor am I trying to hide anything by not saying “spic” anywhere.

            When someone says “PC is destroying America” I hear “I want to be able to call people spics”. And my reaction is — you certainly free to do so, but other people are going to think of you and treat you like the guy who goes around doing that.

          • Nornagest says:

            When someone says “PC is destroying America” I hear “I want to be able to call people spics”.

            May I suggest that this might say more about you than them?

          • TheFrannest says:

            @brad

            >When someone says “PC is destroying America” I hear “I want to be able to call people spics”.

            And that is an example of the very effect I am noting here! You’re cutting yourself shaving by Occam’s razor.

            Political correctness negatively influences science by flat out discarding race as “social construct”, ostracizing and even getting rid of people who research differences between genders. There’s a push towards chucking out the concept of IQ despite it being very useful.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Brad – “When someone says “PC is destroying America” I hear “I want to be able to call people spics”.”

            Large-scale immigration may have significant costs.

            The wage gap may not actually exist, and efforts to close it may be harming society or merely wasting effort.

            Ditto for the women in STEM crisis.

            Society’s current approach to race relations may make the problem worse, not better.

            At some point, social safety nets probably become unsustainable, and we need to have a plan for what we do then.

            If we are aiming for diversity, at some point we are going to have to accept the fact that some groups want nothing to do with other groups, and changing their minds involves unacceptable levels of coercion or violence.

            …I don’t firmly believe all of the above. I am pretty sure all of the above are currently politically incorrect. I’m pretty sure all of the above are at least open questions. Could you explain why questions like the above amount to, as you say, “calling people spics”?

          • JBeshir says:

            A more charitable interpretation might be that they don’t think those things constitute slurs, they just don’t think those are the main things the people advocating for the end of political correctness want to be able to say.

            This is likely an artefact of the reporting around the matter selecting for extreme positions, like “I should be able to say whatever slurs I want about any groups I want without anyone thinking worse of me, no one is allowed to judge anyone else”, rather than moderate positions like “People are allowed to judge you if they think you’re defecting on norms against trying to dehumanise groups to enable their members to be treated as lacking moral worth, but there shouldn’t be mass throwing of abuse at people you deem violators, or absurd oversensitivity hitting innocents, and academic debate in particular should be inviolable.”

            There do seem to be a fair number advocating the extreme position; people who do want to dehumanise tactically exist and so are naturally going to advocate that they should be allowed to do that, and people also seem to have a natural predisposition to support extreme positions in order to protect the moderate position they actually want, or as a means of revenge against people they don’t like.

            The thing to do seems to be to just hold a more nuanced position, probably avoiding phrases like “political correctness” entirely as being too vague. A bonus is that when you express things in clearer terms, you can call to rein in dehumanising or unpleasant behaviours on both sides rather than just encouraging one or the other.

          • brad says:

            @TheFrannest

            Political correctness negatively influences science by flat out discarding race as “social construct”, ostracizing and even getting rid of people who research differences between genders. There’s a push towards chucking out the concept of IQ despite it being very useful.

            1) I don’t think what you are describing is the core of political correctness — which I understand to be socially mandated contextual speech norms. Like my example of not cursing at work, or the impropriety of discussing slavery at a dinner party in DC circa 1830.

            2) Even if we take what you say as completely accurate and PC the culprit you still haven’t gotten anywhere near “destroying America”.

            I’m in favor of unrestricted science and knowledge expansion for its own sake, but you go way overboard on the importance of these subjects.

            Take IQ, you say it is highly useful. It isn’t. Some people eagerly await IQ research, not because society will make use of those findings to optimize (it won’t) but because they want to shove unpleasant truths in the faces of their enemies. As I said if it were up to me there wouldn’t be taboos on scientific research but providing an opportunity for schadenfreude isn’t exactly curing polio or discovering the Higgs boson.

            @FacelessCraven
            Other than perhaps the women in STEM, none of those IME put you outside the bounds of polite conversation in an appropriate context in Blue America. And they sure as hell are okay to discuss in Red America. Which in turn means that they can be debated in Congress and have a chance of becoming official policy.

            Even if all those things were 100% radioactive to discuss at a scifi convention or the pages of the Oberlin student newspaper, so what? Where’s the existential threat? I probably couldn’t go to rodeo in Texas and wearing a shirt that said “Babykillers out of Afghanistan” with a picture of the army logo without suffering some severe social sanctions. Is that political correctness too? Is that also a sign of our imminent destruction?

          • Cauê says:

            The US had a very strong Schelling fence protecting freedom of thought and speech. It also serves as a powerful focal point influencing the debate in other countries. Your courts are still very good in that respect (well, the higher courts, at least), but the existence of a powerful movement (maybe “trend” is more apt) bent on bringing the fence down is honestly scary.

          • JBeshir says:

            A little under a century ago, the US was imprisoning people for distributing anti-war leaflets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrams_v._United_States) and having it upheld by its Supreme Court. In the 1950s, it upheld imprisoning Communist Party leadership (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States).

            People also used to be incredibly prone to censorship of books, movies, and television, at least if you ever wanted anyone to distribute or see what you’d made.

            Since then, speech has become gradually more free, not less, throughout Western society. The linked court cases are widely denounced, their precedent reversed, and you could hardly imagine such things being done in any Western nation nowadays.

            The extent to which norms against speech that dehumanises limit speech is something worth serious consideration when deciding how far they should go- but there’s no long-standing schelling fence against such norms existing, and so no irreparable harm from countenancing them.

            On my part, I’m alarmed people want to undo the long-standing negative social consequences to being obviously selfish, or obviously calling for some group to be thrown outside of the circle of concern. The extreme “no one is allowed to judge anyone for anything” advocates, whether they understand it or not, are asking for a lot more than undoing recent changes, and the expected level of empathy in politics is already too low.

          • Cauê says:

            Maybe fifty years appears to be a longer time in real life than it looks on paper, or maybe the contrast between what I see in the US and what I see and experience in not-the-US is driving my perceptions, but I was aware of the points you mention when I made my comment, and I stand by it.

            Other than that,

            On my part, I’m alarmed people want to undo the long-standing negative social consequences to being obviously selfish, or obviously calling for some group to be thrown outside of the circle of concern. The extreme “no one is allowed to judge anyone for anything” advocates, whether they understand it or not, are asking for a lot more than undoing recent changes, and the expected level of empathy in politics is already too low.

            I’d say this is strawmanning (maybe only weakmanning), but I think you’re just failing an ideological Turing test here.

            My instinct is to list examples of things I and others are actually bothered and worried about when it comes to PC, in a link-filled parade of horrors, but I don’t think it’d be worth the effort, in the sense that I don’t think they would be things you’re actually unfamiliar with (although of course this, 7th paragraph onwards).

          • JBeshir says:

            It’s predictable that the positions that I’d find most concerning would be the most extreme, and that the most extreme would be the weakest, so it’s not surprising they’re especially poor ones. They certainly exist; they dominate the *chan communities and are fairly popular anywhere on the wider Internet that dehumanising a group would be tactically convenient.

            The more moderate arguments can well be good ones, I think, so long as they don’t then end with “and thus we need to adopt the most extreme position of no norms against selfishness, no norms against throwing people out of the circle of concern, no judging at all, as a bulwark to ensure the moderate position is never touched”.

            Such a bulwark’s never been needed before or existed before and establishing it means tearing down too much that’s important, I think.

    • barring the group of people who think political correctness exists to hide the truth and therefore politically incorrect statements are likely to be true (which is not fallacious reasoning, but might be based on a faulty premise)

      I think political correctness is a tool to prevent discussion of a topic, which may or may not be a tool to hide the truth. It can be an attempt to silence a persistent lie in some cases, but erring on the side of discussion seems like a better approach most of the time.

      The reasoning you mention does appear to be fallacious though. Just because a cat is not pink, that does not make it blue. As the full set of possible statements contains more falsehoods than truths, then individual politically incorrect statements are not neccesarily likely to be true, even in the unlikely event that all politically correct ones were false.

      • Echo says:

        “This is why horrible STEM engineers like Scott shouldn’t be allowed to talk about the social sciences, except by checking the privilege and retweeting everything I say.”

        “Actually, he’s a psyc–”

        “Shut up and don’t mansplain to me, sexist”

        • Susebron says:

          Someone pointed out that there’s a phenomenon of engineers thinking that their knowledge generalizes better than it actually does. Someone else pointed out that Scott is a psychiatrist. The first person responded that a similar thing happens with doctors. Your characterization of the situation is wholly uncharitable and seriously incorrect.

          • TheFrannest says:

            According to whom? Salem hypothesis has already turned into “he is an engineer so he is a crackpot” and in many cases into “he is a STEMlord so”, but the person flat out substitutes “engineer” for “doctor” here when called out.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I didn’t need any more of that “everyone who disagrees with my hateful and narrowminded take on gender relations is a misogynist” crap in my life. It’s sad to think that metafilter has become a worse echochamber than tumblr.

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Do you not think that feminist theory’s foundations are as solid as heliocentrism’s?

        What is this metafilter place, anyway, what is its stated purpose?

        • birdboy2000 says:

          Very old guard part of the internet – contemporary of places like Something Awful and FARK, which not coincidentally went on a similar decline. Was always liberal leaning, but at some point (wasn’t a regular, so don’t know exactly when the shift came – but I definitely notice the difference from clicking links) they banned everyone who rejected identitarian ideology, and this is the sad result.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Surely WE can’t be wrong about them. This is, after all, the most open minded and enlightened community since the invention of abstract thought.

        • Phil says:

          Metafilter is a (very old school) link blog, with comments to each from post from site members.. Like Fark, a token entry fee ($5) keeps away random crap & active 24/7 moderaters keep things pretty civil.

          It’s always swung more left/liberal than not; in recent years that’s become a bit more pronounced, but you’ll find a mix of views nonetheless. Certain things are going to get moderated to oblivion however & those tend to include topics that SSC loves to chew over, so the two comment communities are probably not going to get on…

          (I am entirely unsurprised that Mark doesn’t like it. (Hi Mark: you may or may not remember me from bofh back in the day.))

          • PGD says:

            not much of a mix of views any more if a discussion touches on any of the metafilter sacred cows (transgender issues, feminism, race, identity politics in general).

        • PGD says:

          Metafilter is a disaster zone, it’s entirely made up of the most extreme trans/feminist/white guilt people me-tooing each other and blowing up if anyone disagrees with them in the slightest, let alone in some material way. It’s actually impossible to have much of a discussion there as mods will swoop in and delete posts that diverge from the consensus too much. Given Scott’s ability to maintain a comments section that allows for genuine diversity, as opposed to Metafilter’s efforts to make itself a monoculture, it’s pretty funny to watch them criticizing him.

        • >It’s everything bad about smug Tumblr-enas, with the worst of cane-shaking old farts, and none of the passion of the first or the insight or practical wisdom of the other.

          There is a certain internet stereotype of the male-feminist neckbeard fedore type who is mainly trying to signal “gentlemanliness”.

          I don’t really know if the stereotype is true (don’t waste my time in such places) or if it has anything to do with MF but your comment strangely reminded me of this meme – feminist combined with cane-shaking old-fart sounds basically like a “m’lady gentleman”.

          Here is a test: lot of atheism of the snickering look-how-stupid-they-are type? If and when finding a religious commenter, is there a certain tone of over-exaggerated, clearly show-offy “gentleman and scholar” pretentious politeness in the debate? Because that is what I would imagine as a good marker of this.

      • Matt C says:

        Worth noting that ask.metafilter.com is a somewhat different story than the blue. It’s a lot less political, though questions that relate to gender do sometimes get flooded by people with an agenda. (Not always. Haven’t figured out the pattern there yet.)

        Ask MeFi is most of the reason I have a MeFi membership. I have gotten good answers to several questions there, put in my $0.02 on others, and mostly enjoy the place.

        Also, the blue is useful when you want to get the thoughtful progressive take on a piece of current events. There is a lot of noise, but on something big there will be informed discussion too.

      • BBA says:

        Part of why I started hanging out here is that this is one of the few places where I saw disagreement with the “everyone who disagrees with me is a misogynist” crowd that wasn’t actually misogynist.

    • TheFrannest says:

      metadiscussion on metafilter is hilarious in a Pierrot-ish way. “We are not an echochamber, we are just an enlightened internet forum that solved ethics and our ideas are correct, that’s why we chase contrarians off”

      yes, the literal words enlightened forum have been used more than once

      also i don’t understand how this even works

      “here’s an analogy between antisemitism and nerd-dom and this is why i made it”

      “oh, it’s the guy who uses neo-nazi caricatures in his discussions on jews why are you reading this disgusting reactionary”

      • Murphy says:

        It’s easier to make fun of someone and try to associate them with the enemy than to actually honestly look at it.

        Most of them are too lazy to actually read anything that isn’t posted on metafilter so that “griphus” person complaining about how Scott obviously thinks that feminisms has an “explicit political structure” will never ever bother to actually read Scotts “ecclesiology for atheists” post or even consider that their statement perfectly mirrors many of Scotts own statements about feminism.

        And since it costs money to reply it’s unlikely anyone will tell griphus and griphus will continue spouting uninformed nonsense . (After all, who needs to get any information outside “the most Enlightened Forum on the Web”)

      • Nicholas Carter says:

        They reject the validity of the parallel, and view it as a cold-prickly applause light. So of course they view it as a cheap attempt at manipulation.

    • names are path towards namecalling says:

      I got completely lost when they started discussing dog whistles.

      • Technically Not Anonymous says:

        I think that term lost all meaning a while ago.

      • brainiac256 says:

        As I understand it, a dog whistle is like the converse of a shibboleth. Where a shibboleth can serve to mark outsiders by their different pronunciation, a dog whistle is designed is attractive to both outsiders and insiders at the same time, in a way such that both in-groupers and out-groupers are supporting the same thing in principle but only in-groupers have the *gnosis*, so to speak. The recent example I saw was the movement to repeal civil rights legislation in the South, which all in-groupers are meant to know is so that they can return to being racist as much as they want with no legal recourse against them, but for the out-groupers it’s all phrased as ‘small government’ and other related things.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Ah yes, those infamous right-wing dog whistles that are somehow only ever audible to people on the left. One starts to wonder who the dog actually is when that happens.

      • Zorgon says:

        “Dog Whistle” originally meant “coded applause lights”. And it wasn’t actually a bad term, since all ideologies have those.

        Unfortunately, it turns out that once people have a good term to describe the phenomenon of The Evil Bad Outgroup possessing Special Coded Language that they use to communicate their Evil Bad Outgroup Ideas, then it becomes in-group to constantly invent new potential “dog whistles” that the Evil Bad Outgroup are apparently using.

        That way you get to accuse the Evil Bad Outgroup of saying… well, anything you like! At all! They could say “We are in favour of fluffy puppies and infinite happiness!” and normally you have to jump through the hoops of saying “Well, they might say that but what about the NON FLUFFY PUPPIES, huh?” which runs the risk of making you look like a complete idiot. But with DogWhistles(TM), you can simply say “fluffy puppies is an Evil Bad Outgroup dog whistle for feeding arsenic to children” and job done! Even if the Evil Bad Outgroup denies it, they’re still on the back foot and you’ve managed to attach kiddy arsenic dinners to them without any effort at all.

        So unfortunately what was originally a reasonable term somehow mutated into an 80-gigaton semantic superweapon which is generally wielded with about as much discretion as one would expect from a 6 year old with an Ion Cannon. Like all of them.

    • Siah Sargus says:

      I saw this earlier on the subreddit. It’s basically “oh he’s so reasonable and well-read most of the time, except for this one topic I’m very emotionally invested in, so he probably just doesn’t *understand* that one topic.” It’s like the reverse of news amnesia. Also he presented multiple criticisms towards feminism, so he hates women, because that’s how that works, right?

      • Douglas Knight says:

        What’s news amnesia? Gell-Mann amnesia, where you keep forgetting that the news is wrong about things you know about?

        How is that the reverse? Isn’t it exactly the same? Agreeing with most of the source and disagreeing with one corner? Maybe it’s the of reverse of the conclusion of the analysis of news amnesia, that one should not believe any of it, but it’s the same as the phenomenon of news amnesia.

        Is the difference whether the corner is what one knows about rather than what one is emotionally invested in? But that’s hardly the opposite. Maybe if one is emotionally invested in something, one should worry about being biased and defer to outside sources, but this putative metafilter reader also observes that Scott is emotionally invested, restoring symmetry.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Yeah, the difference is exactly the difference between knowing and feeling, which is a distinction these sorts of people are not always very good at making.

          • TheFrannest says:

            That is the danger of overemphasizing stuff like “lived experiences” and condescendingly dismissing attempts to exercise rational approaches to arguments as “stem circlejerk” or whatever is the meme these days.

            Also noted: people who use expressions like “[group] tears” and “what, your [group] feelings are hurt?” are also the ones overwhelmingly likely to use “this makes me sad, and I do not wish to be sad” as an argument for or against objective matters.

          • lunatic says:

            I think “you’ve gotta take people’s experiences seriously” is a good point along similar lines to the LW-sphere idea of the typical mind fallacy. Other people know what their world looks like better than you do, that sort of thing.

            In the contexts where I’ve heard the literal phrase “lived experience” used (as in “you’ve got to consider lived experience”), I suspect that the person using it regards it as a defence against getting eulered, which is a fine thing to have (has anyone ever explicitly discussed it along these lines?).

            So I think the idea has some fine foundations. It’s important that you trust yourself enough to be resistant to a bit of clever bullshit, and it’s also important that you are trying to be right and not just certain. I feel like, as you say, overemphasizing the “lived experience” angle can neglect the second part.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @lunatic:

            Why do I feel like the broad arc form of your comment is too rare?

            Why do so many want to make things simple, when they are clearly not? Lived experience is an example of pushing back against typical mind fallacy. Lived experience is also an example of typical mind fallacy. Both of these are true.

            For a space that is supposed to be attractive to people who want to be “less wrong”, the frequent desire to not recognize that swords have two edges is … depressing.

          • Cauê says:

            The problem with “lived experience” when it comes to the fashionable politically charged topics is exactly the same as when it comes to, say, people who have spoken to dead relatives through psychics. There’s what you experienced, and then there’s how you are interpreting it and what conclusions you are drawing from it.

            100% of the arguments I’ve had about “lived experience” have been about the latter, mostly with people who didn’t seem to notice there was a difference.

          • Dan T. says:

            “Lived experiences”, as this catch-phrase is used by the social-justice crowd, seems to be yet another of the things that have been termed “motte-and-bailey” on this blog. (I never can keep it straight whether the “motte” is the one that’s easily defensible and the “bailey” harder to defend or if it’s the other way round.)

            In its reasonable, easy-to-defend usage, it simply means that one should not be quick in dismissing the first-person accounts of somebody else who is directly affected by something in a way you’re not, merely because that account doesn’t happen to fit your own ideology or chosen narrative.

            But, once it’s in the hands of ideologues, it is weaponized into an insistence that certain “disadvantaged” groups have “lived experiences” that trump all else, while for others not considered disadvantaged, their own lived experiences are irrelevant. That’s seen in the linked Metafilter thread, in which people started picking apart Scott’s personal anecdote of getting in trouble in college for publishing something unintentionally politically-incorrect in the school newspaper. Scott isn’t in a protected class, so his own experiences are subject to being nitpicked, or even dismissed outright, if they clash with social-justice ideology.

          • Montfort says:

            Dan T.: Perhaps a visual will help.

            The problem you will run into, reading more about medieval fortifications, is that apparently people will also use “bailey” to refer specifically to the wall enclosing the area, rather than the area itself.

            You can also try motte/moat as a mnemonic. Though of course the two are different things, moat did descend from (the Old French) motte, for the obvious reason of their close association.

    • Lyle Cantor says:

      This is what I posted regarding this on the subreddit:

      Regarding some of the comments, I continue to find it strange how much people refuse to believe in biological determinism – despite tons of solid evidence. One thought I have is some countries and locations have a memetic comparative advantage. Parents polled in Asian countries are all for genetic engineering and embryo selection. Because of this, there may not be any point in arguing for such things here. This memetic comparative advantage will apply pressure eventually in the form of economic competition. So it may not be worth the status hit – though it would be worth the hit if the whole world shared our madness on the topic.

      On another note, I think Scott should work hard towards monetizing his writing in the form of eBooks or traditional publishing – as I could see this hate going uncomfortably far. These people have that terrible thing, a sense of moral justification. As Scott ascends in status their temptation to throw him to the twitter dogs will become increasingly irresistible. It would be nice to get an independent income stream before this happens.

      It’s already happening at a low-level. See David Gerard’s slanderous edits to his Rationalwiki page. This is a pretty typical paragraph:

      >Alexander explicitly states that he is not a feminist or an antifeminist (apparently saying things like “the sane 30%-or-so of feminists”, i.e. the ones who would not reject neoreactionaries and pick-up artists as reasonable intellectual discourse partners[5]), and gets annoyed that people repeatedly assume that just because he is not the knuckle-dragging ignorant variety of racist, he must be a feminist.

      Compare this to the previous wording:

      >Alexander explicitly states that he is ”not” a feminist or an antifeminist, and gets annoyed that people repeatedly assume that just because he is not a knuckle-dragging ignorant racist, he must be a feminist.

      “He is not the knuckle-dragging ignorant variety of racist.” Classy, David.

      David Gerard is the fellow who Scott is relying on to not attach his real name to that article. David will do this as soon as he feels morally justified. So about two minutes from now.

      This comment from MetaFilter also caught my eye:

      >It’d be nice if–since people seem so desperate to use us in their arguments–trans women could be asked about this stuff occasionally. Y’know, instead of having our words taken out of context and our anger packaged up and displayed as an example of what’s wrong with social justice.
      If, say, Scott Alexander has asked me, I could have told him exactly why using us as his example was shockingly hamhanded, insensitive, and damaging.

      It brought to mind my biggest problems with this whole privilege thing; it makes arguments like Bitcoin: not quite fungible. If the provenance of an argument starts to matter, meaningful exchange becomes very difficult.

      • Anonymous says:

        Again with the handwringing over not getting RationalWiki’s approval. Please, please, can someone enlighten me – why does anyone here care what RationalWiki says? It is, so far as I can tell, a left-wing Conservapedia – existing to push a viewpoint through whatever means necessary, rather than to seek the truth, or even to honestly promote the good arguments for their favored position and point out the problems with the bad.

        This is a very uncharitable guess, but does it have anything to do with the fact that they have ‘rational’ in their name? Do you think you would care as much if they were called LiberalWiki, for example?

        • Lyle Cantor says:

          RationalWiki is ridiculous and unfixable. However, it gets very good google results. If Scott’s True Name were attached to that article it would be very bad news.

        • DrBeat says:

          Because “Rationalwiki expresses contempt for you!” is used as a conversational bludgeon in a lot of the places that a lot of us folks like to go to, so we would like to minimize the ability to be bludgeoned by it?

          • Anonymous says:

            I would have to question whether it’s worth caring about the opinions of people in those places as much as you do, then. Or, alternatively, if they really are smart sensible people, whether it’s worth pointing out to them why RationalWiki is a partisan hatchet job and not a reliable source of information.

            I too go to places where people trust sources I think are obviously not worth trusting, and hold strange and odd ideas. It seems to me that the correct response is to let them have their views, and stop talking to them if they get so far out as to have nothing useful to say anymore.

          • DrBeat says:

            Internet communites are not totally fungible. Like, if you like role-playing games, your options are either to go to a forum where you will be bludgeoned with partisan hatchet jobs like RationaWiki, or go to a forum that gets like five posts in a week. I can’t make my own where people don’t do that and have anyone actually there, no matter how many people would like it. I think that’s the Facebook Effect. Or if it isn’t called the Facebook Effect, it should be.

          • names are path towards namecalling says:
          • Greed of Gain says:

            @DrBeat

            Have you considered 4chan’s /tg/?

          • Trevor says:

            What you are talking about is network effects. The more people use a forum the more desirable it becomes to use, so you end up with an equilibrium where you have one or a few dominant sites and many small decrepit ones for people with very strange preferences.

          • DrBeat says:

            Well, by Facebook Effect I meant specifically when the network effect is the only thing giving it value and everything else about it is hated, and everyone (or just “a lot of people”) hate using the service and would love an alternative that isn’t garbage, but none of those alternatives can exist because everyone using the service they hate gives it too much network-effect value for anyone to compete with.

          • Anonymous says:

            @DrBeat

            I have a feeling that is less true of Facebook than you say it is, at least for most people.

            What is it that you hate about it?

          • Echo says:

            Just cite their articles at people. A ’13/’15 comparison of Julian Assange’s article would be useful, tracking his status from “left-wing hero” to “unperson who must be no-platformed and sent to a literal CIA gulag”.
            Just bash the idiots constantly on every forum.

          • DrBeat says:

            People who decided “just bash the idiots constantly on every forum” was a good way to get what they wanted are how we got into this mess to begin with!

          • @DrBeat

            “Internet communites are not totally fungible. Like, if you like role-playing games, your options are either to go to a forum where you will be bludgeoned with partisan hatchet jobs like RationaWiki, or go to a forum that gets like five posts in a week.”

            Good point, but a place where such bludgeons are used haven fallen to the SJW Weaponized Sacredness anyway or are pretty close to, so even if you would broadly agree with leftie views it would be a huge timewaster because content then get crowded out by runaway holiness signalling arms races. ( see: http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/hating-the-daily-mail-is-a-substitute-for-doing-good/ )

            It has fairly simple technological solutions. To keep yourself from engaging in this, recycle your username every 3 months. For a community, simply write the software so that users have to recycle their username every 3 months, starting with 0 karma again and there is even a minimal Levenshtein string difference so pielover cannot come back as pieLover, maybe as p1eluvvver yes, but that is a big enough difference to divest people from seeing their accounts as identity and thus to discourage signalling.

          • TheFrannest says:

            Or you can just go the way of the anonymous imageboard.

          • Dirdle says:

            @Greed of Gain, TheFrannest: You can lead a horse to an ocean of piss, but you can’t make them swim in it. The desire for a good, charitable, identity-presevering set of online communities should be addressed – if only we knew how to do that. Apart from “Scott for God-Emperor 2016,” I mean.

            I recall seeing the comment “gb2/ssc/” on /tg/ once, which I found very amusing.

          • Peter says:

            An SSC board on 4chan. Now there’s an idea.

            Perhaps it’s part of Scott’s inevitable migration – the part that comes in between signing up for GetStungByMillionsOfWasps and signing up for RationalWiki.

        • TheFrannest says:

          To the outside observer, Rationalwiki is this cute place where descriptions of fallacies, arguments against creationism, homeopathy, bad science, etc. go, so if we reject that place entirely citing its bias over the feminism thing, we will not actually be distinguishable from the people who made conservapedia. RW also has excellent google hits and is still used as an end-all-be-all for many skeptics. We already suffer from being hitler-ate-sugared to the actual Nazis, let’s not make this worse.

          …And yes, the same machine that says “feminism = women, you hate feminism = you hate women” will say that “well, rational is right there in the name”.

        • Peter says:

          Indeed, RationalWiki is not only a left-wing Conservapedia but was founded by people who had previously been trolling Conservapedia. I was deeply puzzled about RationalWiki until I found that out.

          • Zorgon says:

            It was an early casualty in the Atheism+ wars and never recovered.

            Before then it was surprisingly good, which is probably why it still gets trotted out as though it has any credibility at all; those who have updated don’t bother, and those on the same team like to pretend it still has it.

        • RationalWiki made me (wrongly) dismiss the rationalist movement as just pompous, self-congratulatory leftists before I started reading this blog and saw the light. It’s really hurting the brand.

        • Nicholas Carter says:

          The fear posted upthread is that one or more users of RationWiki (David Gerard is the example) knows Scott’s real name, and could at any moment Dox Scott to his political enemies.

      • Urstoff says:

        David was my favorite Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback. Shame to see that he’s fallen so low.

      • “Regarding some of the comments, I continue to find it strange how much people refuse to believe in biological determinism – despite tons of solid evidence. ”

        It’s taboo. Isn’t that obvious?

    • Jordan D. says:

      I found it interesting to compare and contrast that thread to the first time Scott was linked on Instapundit (http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/196002/). Obviously there’s some substantive criticism, some nonsense, but one type of comment attracts my attention-

      ‘This guy is clearly very intelligent, but he is preventing himself from seeing the light and joining my side because internet rationalism has been wholly captured by the balance fallacy and don’t realize that >other side< is WRONG.'

      I'm having a really hard time recalling any time the balance fallacy has been invoked where I didn't come away feeling more inclined towards the middle.

    • Murphy says:

      Wow, that user “ead” is an utterly intellectually dishonest.

      I usually try to assume the best of people but wow.

      ead read this

      “To many people, libertarianism means the belief that over-regulation is a greater danger than under-regulation and therefore the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks a problem can be solved with more regulations. I agree with this form of libertarianism one hundred percent, and if that is how you define the philosophy, I am a libertarian.

      But to other people, libertarianism means that politics must be seen solely as a cosmic battle between the State and the Individual, and that the only solution to this dichotomy is to oppose the State in all its actions. That any concession to “statism” is a betrayal of humanity liable to end in Soviet communism or worse, and that proposed regulation can be immediately dismissed as either a plot to seize power for the dark forces of Statism or as the idiotic fantasies of bleeding-hearts with no grasp on reality.”

      on the anti-libertartian FAQ page and and quotes just the bolded text.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yikes. I see everybody here talking about how Metafilter is a monoculture of people with a particular view that likes to put down every other view, and I’m sure it’s true, but this thread is pretty strong evidence that we’re also a monoculture and we also like putting down other communities.

      What’s the point of talking about how bad Metafilter is for disagreeing with us in some context where everyone probably agrees and they won’t see it?

      Also, I figured my views were weird enough that I couldn’t accrete a monoculture around them, but I guess I was wrong 🙁

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        Well, people are getting called out on it here, at the very least, so this whole “hand out cookie points for contrarianism” scheme seems to have some positive side effects.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        The monoculture isn’t around your views- it is around you. Congratulations about being made a tribal totem. Being uncharitable to Scott is enough to invite scorn- after all, everyone here understands you enough to see if someone is talking nonsense (I suspect osmosis or possibly Ireland based mind control lasers).

        • Anonymous says:

          Agreed. Reading that Metafilter thread is irritating, but not because I agree with Scott on everything – I don’t, I probably disagree with him more than I agree. It’s irritating because Slate Star Codex is, to a small extent, my tribe, and seeing people putting down the leader of your tribe provokes feelings of irritation and dislike.

          • Murphy says:

            I think a few of the criticisms are fair but the ones which piss be off are the people saying “OMG he’s so misinformed, obviously he thinks [insert view which Scott has spent many many posts attacking]” or “OMG, he’s so misinformed, he doesn’t even realize that [insert exact copy of statements Scott has made many times]”

            Because they’re lazy. Too lazy to spend 30 seconds with google trying something like “inurl:slatestatcodex [keyword]”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous/@Murphy:

            Put the shoe on the other foot and spend some time in these comment threads looking for people who would irritate you if you were pro social justice.

            You will find plenty of them.

            So, what I see on that meta-filter is a few users arguing one way, and other users pushing back. The mere existence (even if it is a plurality) of users who you disagree with/find irritating does not mean that you can right off the site or the commentariat.

          • dndnrsn says:

            The tribal thing is part of it but reading a lot of those comments was irritating to me because some of them share content with criticisms I would have, but still bug me in various ways.

            Eg, I have recommended SSC links to more than one friend along the lines of “here’s a guy who writes some really interesting stuff and has some really good ideas but he has a blind spot when it comes to feminism and you have to take that into account”. I mean, it is not that hard to spot this flaw.

            But some of the people in that thread seize on that one flaw and do stuff like:

            -conclude he’s a misogynist, etc, because nobody could hold the positions he holds without that
            -use a lot of jargon while stating that not using or not respecting the jargon is clear proof that someone is an autodidact trying to reinvent the wheel when there’s all this perfectly good jargon already
            -take the position that nobody could possibly be informed and still disagree with them, so he must not be informed (one commenter seems to be saying something like “well even if he read, that doesn’t mean he read and learned”)

            And so on. I guess what bothers me is that they deal with the problems in some of the articles involving feminism by just sort of shutting everything out.

            Also, the dual charge (admittedly not all by the same poster) of “ignores lived experiences of others” and “he must be reporting this traumatic event he says he suffered wrong” is kind of bizarre.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:
            I think if you spend time noting the the user who is commenting, you will find that you are mostly annoyed with 4 or 5 specific commentors.

          • dndnrsn says:

            A few more than that, but you are right – without avatars or anything like that it is kind of hard to differentiate commenters I’ve never seen before.

            The general tone seems more to be leaning towards them, though. More people are attacking Scott Alexander than defending him, or at least the ones attacking are posting more. And the attacks tend to be rather less honest than the defences, at least to me. You’re right that it’s not 100% “this guy is awful” – or at least that’s how it seems to me.

            The overall impression I get is a pretty classic mote/beam situation, though, with the added fun of “actually here’s why the beam in my eye isn’t a problem at all, and you’d understand if you weren’t horrible”.

            It’s kind of like a username-based version of why I don’t often get into Facebook arguments with people I went to university with: even if I agree with them on 95% of the actual stuff being argued about, the ways they tend to support their views tend to trouble me, and it’s hard to disagree with them a little bit or correct them when they’re factually wrong without getting typecast as an opponent. At least if I argue with a right-winger they’ll be accurate when they identify me as having different views.

          • onyomi says:

            Funny, I read Scott and think “here’s a guy with some really great ideas but a big blind spot in regard to utilitarian ethics.” Yet I think he’s just about right on with regard to feminism. It is very rare to find any commentator you agree with 100% of the time, and when you do, you should be suspicious, since it might mean you are more tribally aligned than thinking aligned.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            >I think if you spend time noting the the user who is commenting, you will find that you are mostly annoyed with 4 or 5 specific commentors.

            While that might be the case, these comments are getting the most “favourites” (which I assume are kind of like upvotes).

            To be fair, though, none of them has a high enough number that one could extrapolate and clain this is a community wide issue, having an opinion on Scott seems to be, in itself, a niche thing.

          • Cauê says:

            People saying Scott has a blind spot when it comes to feminism seem to be a lot more common around here than are people arguing against his points on feminism.

            Maybe this is because of his soft ban on race and gender discussions, but this situation could be improved.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Cauê:
            I don’t perceive this community as fertile ground for productive conversations about feminism. Nothing that I say seems likely to survive the uncharitable interpretations of my arguments.

            I perceive that this would especially be the case because I do have issues I have with some of the tactics and (to my mind) muddled aims of some feminists.

            If I bring up, say, affirmative consent, and how it is the model on which essentially everyone should want relationships built, I have no confidence that the conversation would stay in any sort of productive place.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Cauê: It is hard to discuss someone’s opinion of feminism without discussing feminism without discussing gender, yes.

            People seem to get around it to some extent by discussing “SJ”, but Scott doesn’t seem to have the same negative reaction to all social justice stuff as he does to feminism.

            Some of the commenters in that MetaFilter thread seem to want to boil it down to “well-off white man doesn’t empathize with those the system has screwed” but I think they are wrong in that regard: his writings about working in the hospital do not betray a lack of empathy towards those the system has screwed – quite the contrary (his writing betrays a great deal of sadness that he can’t fix the system, all he can do is write prescriptions). If he didn’t feel empathy he might sound more like Theodore Dalrymple.

            By “blind spot”, I am not discussing object-level stuff. Rather, it seems pretty obvious (as in, others have observed this, and he has himself said it) that feminism freaks him out, because of stuff in his past. His writings on feminism are less charitable: the tone is different, regardless of whether you agree with his actual opinions or not.

            The MetaFilter commenters err, in my opinion, in trying to make this into a moral failing, and especially in trying to make it evidence of a larger moral failing. It’s quite nasty how they pick apart his explanation of what happened in his past – and it is definitely uncharitable of them to refuse to accept his explanation of why he feels a certain way, preferring to cast him as ideologically wrong, ignorant, just plain bad, etc.

          • Cauê says:

            HBC, I don’t know what a good defense of affirmative consent would even look like. I’d probably gain something from reading what you have to say. On the other hand, this place would probably be your best shot by far at having decent-quality criticisms of your idea (unless you’re more fortunate than me in your IRL circle of friends), which also seems obviously useful. I’m not sure what you think would happen, but it can hardly be less productive than not talking about it.

            dndnrsn, I’m not managing to read this focus on his previous experiences rather than his arguments as anything other than textbook ad hominem. For what it’s worth, I think Scott has been close to 100% correct in everything I read of his about feminism. I also don’t think he’s noticeably less charitable about that than anything else. Maybe I’m wrong, but people do seem to assert this a whole lot more often than they argue it.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Affirmative consent seems like a policy proposed by an economist. So in a way I’d agree that it’d probably be a good thing if everyone supported it, but most don’t (either explicitly or through actions), and it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s going to change.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Cauê: I’m not attacking his positions, nor am I defending them, so it’s hardly a textbook ad hom (which would be “he’s wrong about xyz object level things for personal reasons”). His positions, or anyone’s positions, can’t really be discussed, due to the no race/gender in the OT rule. I am merely conveying my impression that a blind spot exists, in regard to charitability (not a word).

            You seem to be taking what I am posting as an attack on his object-level opinions on feminism. All I posted was that it’s a caveat I present to people I recommend links to, because the social bubble in which I live IRL (similar, I think, to a lot of people here) a left-wing one in which a lot of people have a hard time differentiating between a critique of something and a major attack on it.

          • brad says:

            As a topic affirmative consent has the unfortunate quality of being trivially easy to weakman in a mocking fashion (i.e. hurr durr filing forms in triplicate), which seems irresistible to many. On top of that everyone seems to have one or more specific scenarios from their history that they want to make sure is on one side or the other of the line, but they (reasonably) don’t want to share the details — so you end up with people talking past each other.

            The best discussion I’ve seen was in a law professor blog, and even there one of the posts in the series was linked from a law blog aggregator read by outsiders and went totally to shit.

          • Cauê says:

            dndnrsn, no, I was complaining about the lack of attacks on his object-level positions on feminism. It was also a general complaint, not specifically directed at you.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Cauê: In that case, I apologize; I misunderstood you. Are you talking about here, or on MetaFilter? Because while here there is, after all, the gender-discussion ban, if you mean over there I would agree. They don’t really bring up any of his actual beliefs or stated positions (for instance https://slatestarcodex.com/ssc-on-feminism/).

            It seems sadly common that people will assume someone is on the opposite side of the fence not just for disagreeing, but for agreeing in the wrong way.

            (EDIT: Which is to say that as far as I can tell, on the object level, based on his most recent statements on the subject, Scott Alexander is hardly an anti-feminist, and seems to agree with a lot of feminists. But he criticizes certain meta level things, has criticized some feminists and some things they’ve done, and has fallen afoul of some sibboleths, and is thus read as a misogynist, etc).

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I think that saying “affirmative consent is the model on which healthy relationships should be built” is different than saying “anything less than affirmative consent is full-blown rape and the law should reflect this.”

            I agree with the former; I’m not so convinced on the latter. And I think (though I could be wrong) that the latter is what most people are talking about when they complain about affirmative consent.

        • Deiseach says:

          Ireland based mind control lasers

          Curses, my day job has been discovered! I humbly grovel in apology, Master Scott, and be assured the mobile platforms for the mind-control lasers will be moved to An Even More Secret Secret Location even as you read this,

          Your humble and devoted Irish minon 🙂

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Surprised you’re still proudly declaring your Irishness after today’s world cup result!

          • TheFrannest says:

            Yeah, did you see that ludicrous display?

          • Zorgon says:

            Yeah, did you see that ludicrous display?

            Have 20 points for that reference.

          • Deiseach says:

            Yes, we got hammered by Argentina. And prior to that, the soccer team lost to Poland and are now facing Bosnia-Herzegovina in the play-offs for Euro 2016.

            However, my brother is the rugby fan (not me so much) so I wasn’t part of the rugger-buggers’ wave of enthusiasm about Ireland can do it and besides, what counts in all these competitions is “Did we do better than England?”

            And the answer to that one is “Yes” 🙂

            (Also, while Liverpool under Klopp’s first match did not end in a victory, neither did it end in a defeat. 0-0 draw with Spurs may not sound like anything to cheer over, but the memories of the 6-1 defeat by Stoke are still sufficiently raw that ‘not getting beaten’ is now looked upon as progress!)

          • tcd says:

            Deiseach:
            You guys were fortunate to land Klopp, he is an exceptional manager. Personally, I was hoping he would hold out (maybe go on a year and a half vacation or something…) and come to Arsenal. He is going to have it rough at least until the January window, not a lot to love on Liverpool’s current roster.

          • Anthony says:

            and besides, what counts in all these competitions is “Did we do better than England?”

            While I’m not much a sports fan, I do root for my local San Francisco Giants and 49ers. I recently saw a posting which captured the spirit perfectly:

            World Series Winners:
            2010 – Giants
            2011 – not the (LA) Dodgers
            2012 – Giants
            2013 – not the Dodgers
            2014 – Giants
            2015 – not the Dodgers

      • TheFrannest says:

        >but this thread is pretty strong evidence that we’re also a monoculture

        Not so. Like, disregarding the fact that the only people who comment on this are people who will be hurt by Metafilter’s insults towards you and your reader base, this thread is pretty strong evidence that metafilter is a monoculture so bad that people with literally opposing views agree that it’s a horrid circlejerk.

        Like, some of the content on this website obviously filters people, but people don’t unironically say “oh, that’s one of the local contrarians, we kick those guys out”

      • PGD says:

        repeating what Samuel Skinner said because it bears repeating — the only monoculture here is around loyalty to the site and to the effort you put into it, and to the idea that you are worthy interlocutor who doesn’t deserve to be demonized even when we disagree with you. This comment section accomodates a very impressive range of views. Everyone from near-communists to libertarians, from mainstream feminists to people who really do verge on misogyny, and manages to do it in a way that respects civility and exchange of views. Very rare on the internet these days. Sadly.

        • Yes I mostly agree with this. The SSC community has above average rationalism, well above average political pluralism, below average amount of name-calling, and a host that can write well with interesting ideas and somewhat neutral, limited but effective governance. I’m totally ok with there being an in-culture here of rationalism, political pluralism and politeness. I think the main thing is that no object-level group sets up camp and starts chasing others off.

      • suntzuanime says:

        You’re not as bad as they say. You are a good and reasonable person, and they have succumbed to the Blight. Take heart, don’t let yourself be consumed by darkness.

      • Zorgon says:

        Every culture is a monoculture. ESPECIALLY those that claim not to be. Only thing to do is try to make it as accepting a monoculture as you can.

        I’ll leave whether you’ve succeeded in that more or less than Metafilter despite having a fraction of the userbase as an exercise for the reader.

      • Anonymous says:

        Seriously Scott, like the others have said, the monoculture these responses highlight isn’t one of ideas, it’s one of respecting you as our host. And one of being able to have a discussion without telling each other how stupid we are. I’d be surprised if most readers agreed with most of your posts.

        P. S. I’m not supposed to bring up us all being crypto-reactionaries, right?

      • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

        From the linked metafilter post:

        All arguments that fail to recognize the structural nature of gender oppression are misogynistic, regardless of any protestations by their authors.

        Scott, there are only two cultures to begin with: those who recognize the structural nature of gender oppression; and the misogynists. By the way comrade, it seems your comment forgot to recognize the structural nature of gender oppression. It’d be a shame if someone were to call this blog misogynistic, wouldn’t it?

        (If laughing at this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.)

      • Being a moderate isn’t really that unusual. It is a popular enough attitude to have merited its own canonical burn: https://xkcd.com/774/

        Not saying your are like that, but it sort of sounds obvious that you easily attract lots of “secretly feels superior than both” moderates.

        Worth noting. A few years ago I was having beer with a bunch of 40+, 50+ American expats somewhere in Germany if I remember right. One of them, a history professor doing research here mused: “When we were young we were 100% liberals and socially, culturally I am still so, but economically… after a few decades of dealing with sh*t like the rules regarding renting out your apartment, you can’t help but find yourself economically at least in the center. And then you feel weird because you don’t have a political home anymore, you just have your own views on your own then.” And the others seemed to agree. Moral of the story: perhaps far more aging Blue-Tribers are secret disgruntled moderates than you think.

        Actually the only thing somewhat weird about you that while you are a doctor, you have classic Silicon Valley programmer sensibilities: you find it far harder to criticize capitalism than to criticize religious social conservative values. This is IMHO a classic Valley thing… where even radical lefties think being a radical leftie means more women CEOs, and they would be entirely weirded out if someone reminded them being a radical leftie a few decades ago meant no CEOs at all, or at least oppose them all cuz they are all evil kinds of attitudes. Of course it could be that it is more a general demographic. Hippies turned yuppies? Bohemian bourgeois?

      • Urstoff says:

        Isn’t every online community a monoculture to some extent just by virtue of self-selection?

      • Bugmaster says:

        Don’t worry Scott, there will always be people like myself around, who disagree with about 50% of what you say (minus your articles on psychiatry, which I don’t know enough about to agree or disagree with). Unless, of course, we all end up getting banned 🙂

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        “Instead the community that has accumulated here is attracted to the methods and styles that you permit and encourage differing views to be discussed. Sort of a metamonoculture[…]”

        This is the draw for me as well. I don’t agree with many of the views, but know that my views can at least be heard and analyzed without dismissal.

        This goes both ways. I know I can get views I disagree with here, and they won’t get categorically chased off by my “buddies”. They get a fair shake, too.

        Only the metaculture opponents (bad faith arguers, browbeaters, intellectually frivolous, etc.) get run off.

        “smugness in the metaMF discussions about how the views uniformly expressed there were uniform because they were, of course, the completely correct views.”

        “Reality has a liberal bias.”

        • FacelessCraven says:

          “This goes both ways. I know I can get views I disagree with here, and they won’t get categorically chased off by my “buddies”. They get a fair shake, too.”

          This. I can check the validity of my own positions by making strong statements and letting the other commenters try to take them apart if so inclined. So far, this has resulted in several significant revisions of my opinions, and a wealth of contrary evidence that I probably would have never seen otherwise.

        • John Schilling says:

          To be fair, it wasn’t just the SJW contingent chasing themselves off, there was some external chasing going on as well. And they were, in some cases still are, among the most reasonable and discourse-worthy SJWs I have met. But it’s a fine line between honest discussion of the worst sort of SJW in the wild, and fair treatment of the better sort in this carefully cultivated garden.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Mark Atwood:
          “I do wish the SJW-apologists hadn’t chased themselves off, tho.”

          This is a very different kind of wishing. You wanted them to stick around so that you could continue to mock them. You didn’t want to engage in the arguments.

          You probably think I am being a jerk, here. That is unfortunate as it is not my intent. I just really think that adding those kinds of comments to discussions almost always is an impediment to actual learning and I wish people would acknowledge it and watch for it in themselves.

        • Nornagest says:

          Eh. I miss some of the discussion of social justice that we had in the early days of this blog, but I think I know why it’s gone and I don’t see any real way we could have avoided it. We did a pretty good job of civilly explaining our thinking to each other, but knowing the structure of an argument does no good when it turns out to be based on axioms — or not even axioms, but personal fears and formative experiences — that you don’t share. Once those differences became clear, talking about it further just made all sides frustrated that the other guys Just Weren’t Getting It, I Can’t Even.

          It’s like the oft-repeated observation that “we need to have a national conversation on $ISSUE” actually means “I need to talk, and you need to listen”.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          > You wanted them to stick around so that you could continue to mock them.
          >You didn’t want to engage in the arguments.
          >You probably think I am being a jerk, here.

          Whoa, easy there, Bob Cassidy.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Whatever Happened to Anonymous:

          I’m not reading minds.

    • 75th says:

      Hello, everyone! I thought you all, as the preëminent local wolf den, would be very interested in a BEAUTIFUL deer I’ve discovered! Its movements are full of grace and its coat is pristine! It’s the most aesthetically pleasing deer I’ve ever beheld, and best of all, you can see it yourself! It lives RIGHT OVER THERE!

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @75th – completely aside from the object-level issue, this comment pleases me for purely aesthetic reasons.

      • Cauê says:

        Are you sure you didn’t get the deer and wolves mixed up there? But bravery debates, etc.

        • 75th says:

          The wolf/deer metaphor was not actually about judging who were the Good Guys or Bad Guys, but rather just pointing out the naïveté of the one person who thought “I have a great idea! I’ll post about Slate Star Codex on Metafilter!”

          In fact, maybe you thought I was actually addressing SSC’s audience, when I was really parodying the original Metafilter post. I originally had quotation marks around it, but deleted them when it briefly expanded to two paragraphs and didn’t restore them when it contracted back down to one.

    • Spaghetti Lee says:

      Man, it’s not like this place is above criticism, but some of those people aren’t remotely pretending to be fair. That guy ead arguing that the author of the Non-Libertarian FAQ is totally a hardcore libertarian, that’s like something you’d get in a “name that fallacy” high school philosophy course.

    • edsq says:

      “The moral seems to be that in some fields, it is best to judge the validity of the results by examining the methods; but in social justice, it seems better to judge the validity of the method by examining its results. Transporting the one standard to other field may not achieve the ends of justice.”

      “‘Judge the validity of the method by examining its results’ does not mean ‘the ends justify the means.’ It means that in some fields the desired end goal is not in question: Social justice is not a scientific hypothesis which is falsifiable. Subjecting it to some parody of a dispassionate rhetorical inquiry is offensive.”

      Two comments which give voice and body to a nagging feeling I’ve had for a long time about the social justice movement. Its members are either simply convinced beyond reason of their truth or are only interested in ideas which help them construct a model that fits their worldview, as opposed to being right. The end result is that anyone who wants to work with the possibility that their views are incorrect is disagreeing with axiomatic truth, and bam!, welcome to the outgroup. What response does rationalism have for such ideology? I worry that the principles of rationality cannot possibly be effective when its core tenets are so wholeheartedly rejected.

      • Dan T. says:

        Obviously it’s a terminal value for them, rather than an instrumental value:

        http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Terminal_value

        If that is the case, it’s pointless trying to convince them that “social justice” (however they define it) is an “invalid” value to have, just like it’s pointless to try to convince a hypothetical “paperclip maximizer” artificial intelligence that increasing the number of paperclips in the universe is a silly value to have. You’ll have better results convincing them that helping you fulfill whatever your terminal value happens to be will also help maximize social justice (or paperclips).

        • JBeshir says:

          Yeah, I think this is a case where people more or less define “social justice” as “the part of my values relating to the wellbeing of other people”.

          You’d have a better chance convincing people that the particular behaviour they’re doing that defines social justice as you understand it doesn’t provide social justice as they understand it than outright convincing them that social justice as they understand it is bad, because social justice as they understand it is a reference to their terminal values.

          • Cauê says:

            I didn’t go back to check, but I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of disagreements Scott expressed with SJ was about facts, not values.

            And, while I often point out that my main problem with SJ is their tendence to assign moral value to beliefs about facts, I’m not quite ready to accept that some people have taken factual beliefs as terminal values and it’s therefore pointless to argue. I mean, not because I don’t see the problem (it’s basically a situation we already have with [other] religions), but the stakes are too high.

  5. Franz_Panzer says:

    Since I for once got on an open thread early enough so that I might be noticed, let me ask a (maybe stupid) question.

    When Neoreactionaries say that we should bring back monarchy, one argument against them is always: we tried monarchy, doesn’t work.
    When people on the left want more state control, one argument against them is always: we tried communism, doesn’t work.
    If you want to talk about e.g. eugenics anywhere that isn’t this blog, people will tell you that some people (Nazis) tried that in the past, didn’t really work out that well, no need to do that again.

    Now my question is why does this never come up when we talk about the free market? Because I thought there was a period in the 19th century when capitalism was in full stride with little state intrusion. And what we got is horrible working conditions in 7 day workweeks, child labour, a wage that was barely enough (if at all) to feed yourself and your family and so on and forth. This only ended after public uprisings, which were sometimes violent, and the creation of unions which gave workers enough bargaining power against the industrialists.

    Now, have I got my history completely wrong? Obviously the above paragraph is only an incredibly crude summary from stuff I remember hearing in school more than 10 years ago, but is it wrong that these things happened?
    Is this something that is frequently brought up, but at places I don’t visit?
    If no to both, why are libertarians, who want to disband unions, abolish minimum wages, and suspend regulations that deal with terms of emplyments, not immediately confronted with the same argument as all the other ideologies, namely: we tried that, doesn’t work.

    (P.S.: not saying that it is a good argument, not at all. Just wondering about the discrepency in its use)

    • The changes that Libertarians ask for are separable and don’t *individually* have catastrophic consequences. We don’t argue about imposing every libertarian goal but just a few. Abolishing the minimum wage doesn’t have Nazi/Communism-level issues. Disbanding unions same thing. Regulations does have some evidence of really bad consequences and I think has seen this argument (“Isn’t deregualtion how we get another great recession?”).

    • P. George Stewart says:

      Yeah, thatsense of history is kind of wrong. The period of most unrestrained capitalism was the period in which ordinary human beings saw the greatest rise in the standard of living ever (i.e. up till that point). The very concept of “progress”, so sniffed at today, was born in that time, because that was the first time people had seen actual, tangible progress in their lives.

      Obviously bad things also happened, but on balance, and when you look at it in context of life up to that point, capitalism in that period was absolutely a net positive.

      In that period, you see working people organizing themselves into self-help groups like unions, educating themselves and their children for the first time, etc. So much so, that some of the initial propaganda against capitalism at the time came from the Right (the real Right, the Right pertaining to the maintenance of privilege) – capitalism was leading to the peasants getting uppity.

      The trouble with all these debates is that not everyone makes a distinction that needs to be made: between “capitalism” as a technical term meaning “private property in the means of production and the habit of capital accumulation”, and “capitalism” as the historical fact of “what we’ve got”. But what we’ve got has never been wholly unmixed with attempts to steer the economy centrally. Not even in the 19th century. But on the whole, 19th century government tended to be more hands-off the economy than times subsequent (it was too weak to do otherwise).

      When people argue for their political ideas, they tend to argue in a way that makes their preferred ideal shine in its pure form, and juxtapose that with actually-existing aspects of what they oppose. Communist utopia all sounds lovely, certainly much better than any actually-existing capitalism we have. But actually-existing Communism has always been really, really shit compared to actually-existing capitalism. So what about ideal capitalism? Maybe that would also be better than ideal communism? 🙂

      • Agreed. That history is simply wrong. 7 day work weeks and child labour were bad—compared to today. Compared to the other options available at the time, or at any previous time in history, these things were a huge improvement! Peasants flocked to the cities in droves to be “exploited.” And what ultimately killed child labour was that living standards rose to the point that people could afford to put their kids in school. Anti-child-labour laws were only passed after most children weren’t in the labour force anymore.

        • keranih says:

          And what ultimately killed child labour was that living standards rose to the point that people could afford to put their kids in school.

          Plus the rise of the power of adult-only labor unions who wanted to protect the income of the adult workers. Forcing the employer to hire adults at adult wages (instead of kids at kid-level wages) was the goal. Any sort of advantage to the kids was secondary at best.

        • unsafeideas says:

          “7 day work weeks and child labour were bad—compared to today. Compared to the other options available at the time, or at any previous time in history, these things were a huge improvement! Peasants flocked to the cities in droves to be “exploited.””

          That is simply not true. It was better then starving unemployed on the village at the time, but it was far from better then “at any previous time in history”.

          It had both winners and losers, but 7 day work weeks workers and child laborers were both losers. If nothing else, just check out child delinquency rates, criminality rates, mortality, life expectancy and other social ills – people were breaking down.

          • “If nothing else, just check out child delinquency rates, criminality rates, mortality, life expectancy and other social ills – people were breaking down.”

            What are your data and what are they relative to? My impression is that the U.K. had an expanding population, which at least suggests increases in life expectancy.

            Life expectancy was low by modern standards, but that’s partly because of the improvements that occurred during the relatively laissez-faire 20th century. What is the evidence that it was lower than earlier?

            Life in the U.S. was sufficiently attractive to pull in about a million immigrants a year by the beginning of the 20th century, despite the very considerable difficulties of getting here.

        • “Agreed. That history is simply wrong. 7 day work weeks and child labour were bad—compared to today. Compared to the other options available at the time, or at any previous time in history, these things were a huge improvement” No, lifespan and health declined under early capitalism. Enclosures meant that meany didn’t have a choice about leaving the countryside.

          • John Schilling says:

            Can we taboo “Enclosure”, and anything else specific to the United Kingdom, in our discussions of why the Industrial Revolution was so horrible?

            More generally, in a pre-industrial nation there’s never enough farmland – except in the immediate aftermath of one of the catastrophes that leaves you with not enough farmers. There are always people who have to leave the farm or starve, and sometimes there is no place for them to go. The specific mechanism by which people settle the question of who gets to use the existing farmland and who has to leave or starve, even if it is less than ideally efficient, is irrelevant. Pick a nation, pick a century, I’ll show you the millions who are starving after being forced off their farms or trying to make a go of marginal ones. Those are the people who, if someone is building factories and cities, will line up to join.

            Somewhere else in that nation are the people who won the competition for good and adequate farmland, and are living well in the country at least for the time being. Probably they did something we would consider unfair to ensure that outcome. So what?

          • Cycles of starvation aren’t inevitable, you just need an ethos that keeps population to a sustainable level.

            Can we not taboo “enclosure”, because it is part of a wider point politically neutral, and generally ignored things like population density, are actually very important to the outcomes of political systems.

          • “No, lifespan and health declined under early capitalism.” I was taught that in school, too, but it doesn’t fit the facts. Life expectancy rose gently (or at least stayed flat) during the early period of the industrial revolution before radically increasing. It’s hard to quantify health that far back, but the population history of the UK shows a dramatic increase in the rate of population growth around 1800. If people were so unhealthy during the industrial revolution, how did they manage to pump out so many more living children than ever before?

            I think that the illusion of falling living standards during the industrial revolution comes from the fact that the growth of cities made poverty more visible to the writers and thinkers of the day. When a subsistence farmer starves to death, and nobody literate is around to document it, the event is lost to history. The industrial revolution brought the poor into contact with the literate on a large scale, and so that’s when we got the Charles Dickenses and Karl Marxes writing about poverty.

          • Svejk says:

            Can we taboo “Enclosure”, and anything else specific to the United Kingdom, in our discussions of why the Industrial Revolution was so horrible?

            Why would we taboo discussions of the specific social circumstances in the first nation to industrialize and the nation upon which most study of initial industrialization has been carried out in a discussion of the effects of the industrial revolution? That would be like tabooing a discussion of sedentary hunter-gatherers in the Levant in a discussion of the agricultural revolution.

            Also, while I agree that there was more heterogeneity in quality of life during industrialization than can be captured by presuming a universal decline in health, the mortality data reported for the era may be less affected by observer bias than we presume. For both cities and rural areas, much of our mortality and morbidity data comes from parish burial records – which for the north of England can be surprisingly comprehensive over centuries – and from direct pathological observation of human remains. The greater attention paid to the poor in the literate cities may have had social consequences , but did not necessarily lead to a streetlight effect in historical demographic data. Additionally, it is entirely possible for sedentary humans to experience a decline in overall health and nevertheless observe an increase in fertility(although it is far from clear that this happened universally during the industrial revolution); fertility is surprisingly robust to a number of biological insults, while height appears to be more sensitive .

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Is everyone using the same definition of “taboo” here? (I assume we are talking about this.)

            It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about whatever it is. You just have use the definition and not the word.

            @John Schilling: Are you trying to avoid use UK examples at all? Or you actually want people to simply spell out what the actual policy was that they were discussing?

          • John Schilling says:

            I want people to spell out the general, enduring, transnational policy of which they think the UK’s Enclosure Acts are a representative example.

            The Industrial Revolution happened in many places; eventually in pretty much all places. Even if we claim that all of the other places were just copying the UK’s example, which is false, they couldn’t have done it if the Enclosure Acts were a necessary part of the recipe. Every nation that ever industrialized, found a way to convince people to move from farms to satanic-mill factories, and almost all of them did it without Enclosure Acts.

            I think that the closest you will come to a general truth is, nations generally had policies which didn’t let the farmers of the first industrial generations have the use of as much farmland as their fathers had, such that some of them had to become not-farmers. But this is true of most of the other generations as well, because your father probably had more than one surviving son and outside of Holland he didn’t create any new land. The details of how this was managed in different times and places don’t seem to me to matter very much.

            If there’s a difference that does matter, if there’s a subset of “Yes, your father was a farmer and didn’t starve, but we’re not letting you have that option because someone else is going to be using the land you’d need” policies that is particularly favorable to industrialization, that’s something worth talking about. But the answer can’t be “Enclosure”, because that’s too narrow, and at this point I think it’s not helpful to say “Enclosure and stuff like that”, because it isn’t clear from the one example what constitutes “stuff like that”.

            And then there’s the pesky example of the United States, industrializing with a frontier full of unclaimed farmland and homesteader-friendly laws and customs.

          • The argument that “if industrialisation was so bad, why did people volunteer for it” is terrible on multiple grounds, not least the fact that people didn’t exactly know what they were geting into.

          • Svejk says:

            I have to admit that most of the time, I don’t understand the problem the rationalist taboo is trying to solve. For most use cases, I think ‘unpacking’ is more appropriate and as a bonus does not create confusion with a very useful colloquial meaning. In this discussion, I think it is appropriate, within certain bounds, to focus on England and its specific circumstances, using the words we have at hand, unpacked if necessary. The leading edge of a revolution is often different in character from the tails.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @TheAncientGeek:

            terrible on multiple grounds, not least the fact that people didn’t exactly know what they were getting into

            When do we ever? What are some of the other grounds?

            You surely don’t mean that we can’t draw conclusions by seeing what people do. Lots and lots of people — if one guy falls in a pit of quicksand, we don’t assume it’s a great place, but if a million people do, one has to wonder.

          • nil says:

            @Doctor Mist

            “What are some of the other grounds?”

            The biggest one that comes to my mind is that the approach cuts both ways. The people who moved to the cities to work in the factories undoubtedly had their reasons and (given the numbers and the fact that they had an access to facts on the ground that we, seperated by a century, don’t) I think Schilling is right to say that those reasons were probably rational under the circumstances. I also don’t see any flaws in his recognition of the fact that there were always going to be some surplus people in agricultural societies regardless of how land ownership is organized.

            But if you’re arguing to give the benefit of the doubt to our great-great-grandfathers’ employment choices, then I think you need to also take their political choices seriously… and this was a cohort that embraced unions, socialism, and other forms of labor radicalism to a degree rarely seen before or since, to say nothing of the fact that they in large part wrote the very narrative that is being questioned here!

          • Jiro says:

            nil: When someone moves from the farm to the city, they immediately know whether they’re better or worse off. When someone supports a political group, the political group can promise something in the indefinite future or can ignore a bad effect of their policies that would come in the indefinite future. So trusting their judgment to work in factories isn’t really the same as trusting their judgment to support socialism.

          • nil says:

            @Jiro That would be valid enough if we were talking about polling questions or votes. But we’re talking about people who put their money where their mouths were, risking their livelihoods and safety in illegal strikes and sometimes their lives in violent action. That strikes me as a little much to attribute to the sweet nothings of outside agitators.

          • John Schilling says:

            The decision to move from farm to factory is necessarily made before one has first-hand knowledge of how bad the factory is, and once made can be difficult to reverse, so there’s not really a qualitative difference there. People anticipated that factories would make their lives better, they anticipated that unions would make their lives better, and they anticipated that socialism would make their lives better, in all cases based on foresight and educated guesswork rather than personal experience with the new plan.

            With the farm->factory decision, you don’t have to look as far into the future and relevant eyewitness testimony is more readily available, so there’s a quantitative advantage in the reliability of that decision at least.

          • Lupis42 says:

            @nil,
            But we’re talking about people who put their money where their mouths were, risking their livelihoods and safety in illegal strikes and sometimes their lives in violent action. That strikes me as a little much to attribute to the sweet nothings of outside agitators.

            You prove a little too much there – after all, that would be an excellent argument that all religions are true too.

            Past people had better knowledge of their current situation, and their immediate alternatives, than we do. That doesn’t mean their understanding of long run impacts was any better than ours is.

            ETA: @John Schilling
            With the farm->factory decision, you don’t have to look as far into the future and relevant eyewitness testimony is more readily available, so there’s a quantitative advantage in the reliability of that decision at least.

            For my money, there’s a much more relevant feature: people got the factories – it didn’t seem to change their priorities much, and other people sought to emulate them. People got the unions, and that didn’t seem to change their priorities much either, though there were fewer other people trying to emulate them. People got socialism, and millions died, while others risked torture and execution, and climbed over barbed wire fences trying to get away.

          • nil says:

            @Lupis42 Show me a person who is willing to fight and die for their religion, and I’ll show you a person who is deeply dissatisfied with the current situation. That doesn’t mean materially, as our contemporary middle-class Islamacist friends are happy to demonstrate–but it does mean you need some level of distress or at least anomie to set people off. It also proves out in the inverse–we live in an era where millions of people believe that we will see a serious worldwide climate catastrophe in their lifetimes. But only a tiny minority of people are willing to even spend an afternoon demonstrating to stop it, and now that the FBI has quelled ELF literally no one (at least in America) is building bombs or credibly fomenting revolution. Why? IMO, because you can’t make comfortable and content people into bomb-throwers just by telling them about the future.

            No, I think there’s two conclusions to be drawn from the actions of that era: the conditions of urban industrial labor were better than the alternatives, and they were sufficiently nasty to cause thousands of people to devote their lives to changing them and millions of people to support them in their efforts. Enough to rebut anyone who thinks the Industrial Revolution was bad for working people (which, to my understanding, does not include Marx himself, who consistently considered the transition from feudalism/aristocratic rule to capitalism/bourgeois rule to be a positive development) and enough to at least raise one argument against anyone who considers that era to be a model for the present.

          • Lupis42 says:

            @nil

            @Lupis42 Show me a person who is willing to fight and die… and I’ll show you a person who is deeply dissatisfied with the current situation.
            I agree – but, as you point out, some organizations, such as ISIS, are still having some success. I think that Koresh and Heaven’s Gate both provided examples that people can be surprisingly willing to undertake crazy risks for nebulous future gain if there’s a persuasive salesman.
            In modern America, the salesmen mostly seem to have decided to go after wallets rather than uprising, and hence we see megachurches rather than Socialist demagogues, but frankly, I think that’s got more to do with the attractiveness of the televangelist lifestyle relative to the political revolutionary lifestyle, an increase in justifiable cynicism given the consequences of utopian movements.

            and they were sufficiently nasty to cause thousands of people to devote their lives to changing them and millions of people to support them in their efforts. [trimmed] and enough to at least raise one argument against anyone who considers that era to be a model for the present.

            I think that era was the best model we’ve ever seen for raising the long run prospects of humanity. It almost certainly involves trading some present aggregate utility for future aggregate utility – though how much, and over how much of a time horizon, are highly debatable. But to my mind, the consequentialist, case for that model is, first and foremost, the incredible difference in how much more numerous and better off are the descendants of places where it was pursued.

          • “You surely don’t mean that we can’t draw conclusions by seeing what people do.”

            If two groups of people are in different locations, and don’t have electronic communciations, and aren;t literate, then there are a number of barriers to “seeing”. A lot of people got a nasty shock on joining the army, and so on, as well.

      • Patrick Spens says:

        “Yeah, that sense of history is kind of wrong. The period of most unrestrained capitalism was the period in which ordinary human beings saw the greatest rise in the standard of living ever (i.e. up till that point). The very concept of “progress”, so sniffed at today, was born in that time, because that was the first time people had seen actual, tangible progress in their lives.”

        This is wrong. And I’m not talking about on the margins here. The beginning of industrialization is awful for people to go through. From 1730 – 1840 the average height of a British 20 year old dropped by 4 cm, and that didn’t recover until 1900. That’s not happening because the standard of living is going up.

        It difficult to overstate just how bad it was in the cities during early industrialization, so I’ll just mention that Liverpool had a life expectancy of 25 in 1860, and leave it at that.
        Now obviously things got better, and capitalism was a huge part of that, but there’s no reason to pretend that the beginning of industrialisation was anything other than objectively worse for most of the people involved.

        • keranih says:

          It would not be completely accurate to discuss the Industrial Revolution in the UK (and elsewhere) without including the co-mingled Agricultural Revolutions that proceeded the rise in factories and continued along with the urbanization of the population. Probably of major note was the increase of grains as dietary staple (as opposed to more fragile greens and fruits) and the population shifts, which pushed young people towards the towns, and left older people in the countryside. This change in demographics would be reflected in the vital statistics.

        • Svejk says:

          Patrick makes a good point. Additionally, there is a lot of evidence from economic history that there was a great loss of leisure time concomitant with industrialization. You get a sense for how the pace of life might have changed when you look at an old calendar or almanac and note all of the feast days and holidays that didn’t survive, or even when you look at some of the traditional European regional (not federal) holidays.
          To follow on keranih’s point, the experience of the agricultural and industrial revolutions suggest that ‘increases human happiness’ is not a necessary condition of a robust and expanding social system.
          The initial period of industrialization may have been a necessary evil to accommodate the demographic problems set in motion by the agricultural revolution, and the mode and pace of industrialization may not have been optimal.

        • Is Liverpool the right sample? The people working the most productive farms weren’t the ones migrating to the cities, it was the marginal subsistence farmers. The industrial revolution provided people who would have died after a single bad harvest with an alternative means of earning a living. Perhaps the choice was between living to 25 in Liverpool and not living at all?

    • Anon. says:

      The emergence of unions came at a time of increasing TFP growth, I think it’s extremely difficult to disentangle the two effects.

      In any case, the role of unions then and today is completely different, as is the basic economic organization of society. The situations aren’t really comparable. You can’t blame the industrial revolution for poor people; they were basically subsistence farmers before they were factory workers. Standards of living didn’t go down, the only debate to be had is about when they started going up.

      Also, I don’t think libertarians want to “dismantle” unions, they want to remove government-enforced union monopolies and compulsory membership.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I don’t think your premise is correct. It might not come up in *your* libertarian-friendly social circles – but it’s a routine refrain in both the liberal and socialist criticisms of libertarianism I’ve seen. For instance, there was a very long and popular series on daily kos on how regulation came to be, and it was a pointed rejoinder at the “the market will provide” argument.

    • John Schilling says:

      And what we got is horrible working conditions in 7 day workweeks, child labour, a wage that was barely enough (if at all) to feed yourself and your family and so on and forth.

      You know what we didn’t get? We didn’t, for the most part, get capitalists sending thugs with guns to drag people away from their comfortable, bucolic farms and force them to work in the Dark Satanic Mills(tm). The capitalists sent their recruiters to farming communities and, without waving guns about, asked “Anyone here want to go work six long days a week in a factory for slightly-better-than-starvation wages and a chance of having their arm ripped off in the machinery?”

      To which the answer was pretty much always, “OH, GOD YES, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN THE PAST TEN THOUSAND YEARS, SIGN ME UP, PLEASE!”, repeated a million times over. Still is, in Africa and Southeast Asia and rural China, wherever capitalists are building horrid sweatshops to “exploit” the picturesque natives.

      You’ve been raised on grossly exaggerated views of how horrid nineteenth-century factories were, and equally exaggerated views of how pleasant nineteenth-century farms were. In the real world, pre-industrial farming isn’t the Shire, it isn’t Walden Pond or even Little House on the Prarie, it’s mostly a six-and-a-half day workweek (including the children) under horrid conditions with a good chance of being maimed and always being one drought or blight away from having to decide which of your children get to starve.

      The only path anyone has ever found that actually works to get from there to here, runs through a couple of generations of Dark Satanic Mills. Which tend to be worse when they are run by communists, but even then they are probably better than the farms.

      • birdboy2000 says:

        Poverty coerces as well as guns, and policy often played a huge role in creating that poverty – and the people who flooded into factories were the desperately poor.

        Then again, direct coercion into a wage labor system (quite often, as in the Congo, in producing raw materials for those early factories) and destroying the possibility of self-sufficient peasant farmers was a feature, not a bug, of imperialism.

        Ultimately, even Marx praised capitalism for raising the standard of living overall – and industrialization certainly did that, although as a socialist I do not see why industrialization requires billionaire industrialists, any more than agrarianism required nobles.

        But the road there involved no shortage of coercion, even if the story of enclosure and imperialism is told far less often than that of the gulag, and rarely connected as explicitly to the 19th-century factory.

        • John Schilling says:

          The people who flooded into factories had always been desperately poor. Except for rare and transient circumstances, e.g. the initial European settlement of North America, it is the natural state of preindustrial agrarian populations to be desperately poor for reasons quite accurately described by Thomas Malthus and valid from the dawn of civilization to the industrial revolution.

          Capitalism was not the cause of this, it was the escape from this. There is no policy for alleviating this sort of poverty other than building factories to build the stuff that will eventually make people less poor, and even that takes a good long while.

          • Zorgon says:

            “The people who flooded into factories had always been desperately poor.”

            Not actually true; see above notes about the agricultural revolution and population dynamics that were the actual thing driving marginal agricultural populations into the cities. People upped sticks to the cities in their millions because there wasn’t enough work for them in the countryside and they’d undergone decades of grinding poverty as a result. The problem wasn’t that being a farm worker was an awful life (it wasn’t), it was that most of them weren’t able to be farm workers.

            Besides that… “Desperately poor” is a relative term. Most working agricultural families were surprisingly well-off, especially compared to second-generation industrial urban families. Yes, they were very much dependent on the harvest for their wealth, but the Monty Python & The Holy Grail imagery of dirt farmers eating lice to survive is very inaccurate.

            I grew up in Merseyside and I don’t much appreciate people whitewashing the unbelievable levels of shit the industrialists inflicted on my ancestors. There are still skeletons at the bottom of the Mersey from people trying to get onto boats to get away from the “escape from poverty” you describe. I’ll accept the argument that the Industrial Revolution was necessary, but you’ll never convince me that it was good.

          • MichaelM says:

            Zorgon, the right way to think of it isn’t to look at the lifestyle people were coming from in the countryside, it’s too look at the lifestyle they would have had if they’d stayed. The industrial revolution happened concurrent with a period of demographic expansion, where brothers and sisters who would have died young survived on a marginal wage in the new factory economy. Agricultural populations had bumped up against Malthusian limits frequently in the past: It usually ended in famine, plague, and warfare reducing the population below those limits for a few generations until it all happened again.

            The change that happened in the late 18th century was that, suddenly, you DIDN’T see these periodic, mass generational die-offs. You had people who went from having ZERO quality of life (read: dead) to having very low quality of life.

            The broader point of, “We tried free markets they didn’t work!”, is best met with the same answer the communists have: No, we really didn’t. Say what you will about the USSR, but it definitely wasn’t communist, and 19th century Britain was only a free market in comparison to what we’ve got today. In reality the British state was very happy to interfere with markets when it meant favoring politically powerful constituencies (See: Combination Acts) or pursuing influential ideological goals (See: Peel’s Act).

            A libertarian might contend that they are not in favor of these kinds of things and that life would have been better for 19th century Britons if they had been able to form unions freely or freely enter the banking business.

            There’s a reason seriously committed libertarians will talk about how rare libertarian governments have been, and how even the most libertarian experiments have quickly gotten away from the original goal.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ birdboy2000
          Poverty coerces as well as guns, and policy often played a huge role in creating that poverty – and the people who flooded into factories were the desperately poor.

          I’ve seen the same argument about current logging and fishing in the Pacific Northwest: “Loggers and fishermen are leaving in droves to get away from those outdoor, dangerous jobs and work in the cities. Here are the figures.” Living here for over two decades, I’ve seen what the loggers and fishers are saying; they are trying hard to save their outdoor livelihood. They leave for cities when there are not enough fish and not enough trees.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            I think analogizing forestry policy in a functioning democracy (and hard environmental limits) to land use/rights policy in a country run by its oligarchy is a significant stretch, and I am far from convinced the move to the cities was a simple matter of malthusian limits.

            The limits on the European peasant in this period – let alone the African or Asian one under imperialism, subjected to forced labor or made to pay cash taxes (as opposed to taxes in kind, which could be met through agricultural labor) – weren’t natural. The land may have a carrying capacity, but policies like enclosure, the reaction to the Irish famine, and the Highland clearances – and that’s just some of the best known examples in one country – significantly reduced said capacity.

          • Zorgon says:

            As is mentioned above, the most pressing cause of UK population shifts in the period in question was the increasing change in farming methods. The enclosure acts and the rather twisted nature of land ownership didn’t help, but that was more in the sense of reducing the ability of the agricultural system to absorb the changes than anything else.

            People fled to the cities because it became impossible to be farm labourers. Within a generation or so, the rural UK went from having significant communities of permanent and/or transient farm labourers to one where you were a landowner or a primary tenant, or their family, or a secondary farming tradesman. Or you didn’t work.

            All at a time when increasing agricultural output was upping the population across the board. What choice was there but the cities?

          • John Schilling says:

            I’ve seen what the loggers and fishers are saying; they are trying hard to save their outdoor livelihood. They leave for cities when there are not enough fish and not enough trees.

            Same as the farmers, then. Human nature being what it is, people born in a pastoral environment will mostly chose to keep it so long as it isn’t too much worse than it was when they were growing up. And human nature being what it is, it will almost always be much worse than it was when they were growing up. Human populations, particularly preindustrial ones, grow in a way that the supply of real estate doesn’t. There are never enough trees and enough fish to maintain the Good Old Days; things keep getting worse for every generation until some great catastrophe resets the clock. Or, every once in a long while, a new opportunity arises.

            All at a time when increasing agricultural output was upping the population across the board. What choice was there but the cities?

            The same choices as always – slow starvation, or joining the army and going off to war. The growth of the industrial cities was one of those rare new opportunities. And for that matter, so was the opening of the American frontier, making the early United States doubly blessed in this regard.

      • Anonymous says:

        You know what we didn’t get? We didn’t, for the most part, get capitalists sending thugs with guns to drag people away from their comfortable, bucolic farms and force them to work in the Dark Satanic Mills(tm). The capitalists sent their recruiters to farming communities and, without waving guns about, asked “Anyone here want to go work six long days a week in a factory for slightly-better-than-starvation wages and a chance of having their arm ripped off in the machinery?”

        The enclosure acts sort of did this.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          That was landowners. They were a different group than the factory owners (and had done such actions before in the 17th century as well).

        • John Schilling says:

          The Enclosure Acts were also limited to the United Kingdom, in a way that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t. In particular, there was extensive industrial development in the 19th-century United States, even as good farmland was being handed out for free to anyone willing to actually farm it.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            The United States was also able to use peasants forced off their land through various acts of state coercion as their workforce, though – though the coercing states were the European ones and the workforce the immigrants migrating from those European states.

          • John Schilling says:

            Except that those dispossessed European peasants had the opportunity, through about 1890, to claim a plot of empty farmland at least as good as anything they had in Europe and homestead it. Which many of them did, quite successfully, and in so doing produced e.g. my mother. The ones who instead went off to the factories (and in so doing produced my father), did so by choice and with “landholding farmer” as one of the other choices.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            Yes, that was a part of it, but generally, before they would go to factories and work as an industrial workforce to get money for resources they would need for their life as farmers.

            Of course, the availability of good farmland in United States was quite dependent on state violence of the other kind – namely the sort where the original inhabitants of that land would be forced off and the new settlers protected against their retribution.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Tatu Ahponen:

            Of course, the availability of good farmland in United States was quite dependent on state violence of the other kind

            True enough, but not relevant to the original question, which was “If city life was so horrific, why did people leave the farms?”

            they would go to factories and work as an industrial workforce to get money for resources they would need for their life as farmers

            If that were significant, you wouldn’t see the explosive growth of cities (in the U.S.) — the inward flow of people would be balanced by the outward flow of people who have got their grubstake and move on to sodbusting.

            To argue that the farmer’s life was superior to that of the exploited industrial worker, it seems you would have to posit some force that traps people in the city once there. I don’t say there isn’t one, but it’s starting feel like whack-a-mole here:

            Cities were hellholes!
            Then why did everybody go there?
            Enclosures: they had no choice!
            Not in the U.S.
            They went to the city to finance their farms.
            Then why didn’t they leave?

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            Well, to draw it all together: You have immigrants leaving Europe for various reasons, one of them being a variety of policies making farming in European countries harder (one of them being the enclosures and other similar policies in other European countries.) While many of them move to European cities serving as an industrial workforce for European countries, others move to United States, attracted by the availability of farmland. Coming to America empty-handed, they usually work as a part of the labor force of American factories in the cities of the East Coast, but, again, for a variety of reasons, many of them do not eventually end up making the original planned trip eastwards, instead staying at the cities.

            Maybe they find love and their spouse doesn’t want to move, maybe there’s some other reason, maybe they’re only after wages (which are already higher than in Europe, because the labor has more power to negotiate their wages, one of the reasons for this being their possibility to actualize their move westwards – in other words, do the thing that was less possible in Europe due to, among other things, the Enclosures and the similar operations in other European countries which, according to Perelman, were intended to keep the urban wages down.)

            So, it’s a complicated affair, but my original point was that it’s not at all obvious that United States can be used as a counterpoint to the effect of Enclosures (etc.) on industrialization.

      • Tatu Ahponen says:

        “You know what we didn’t get? We didn’t, for the most part, get capitalists sending thugs with guns to drag people away from their comfortable, bucolic farms and force them to work in the Dark Satanic Mills(tm).”

        Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism begs to differ. https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Invention-of-Capitalism/

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      Have you never been told to move to Somalia?

    • Echo says:

      I’ll let other people dissect the agrarian utopia argument, but people flocked to the cities because they were tired of 7 day workweeks, universal child labour, and not-being-able-to-grow-enough-to-feed-yourself in subsistence agriculture.

      The old myth that pre-industrial civilization was better is used as an argument, but it’s so easy to refute that only agrarian socialists are foolish enough to use it.
      Basically: “we tried it, and it worked really well!

      • “We tried it and it worked really well!” is the correct answer. We can (and many researchers have) debated exactly when the industrial revolution turned into a fantastic bonanza for everyone at all levels of society. But the bonanza is undeniable, and it would be a pretty big stretch to say that what meager regulations and taxes existed were in any way responsible for it.

        In fact, it’s pretty clear that if we time traveled back to 1700 and convinced the world to adopt today’s regulations and tax rates, this whole industrial revolution thing would have been neatly nipped in the bud.

    • Patrick Spens says:

      “Is this something that is frequently brought up, but at places I don’t visit?”

      This argument is really common throughout the moderate left blogosphere, to the point where I’m so familiar with it that I had trouble understanding your question.

    • stargirl says:

      “Now, have I got my history completely wrong?”

      Yes your history is basically wrong. For a time following the Industrial revolution many countries had what you would call “unrestrained capitalism.” During this time living standards for the average person were increasing at a dramatic rate.

      It may be useful to look at the recent history of China. After Deng liberalized the economy in regions of China the jobs that appeared were often brutal. Even today working in a Chinese factory is no joke. Yet living standards in China rose by an incredible amount after Deng allowed capitalism in some regions.

      It is good to eventually instate some level of regulation and a social safety net. But you cannot do this until a country has industrialized. The wealth is not there to support such measures.

      A warning: Certain methods of “liberalizing” economies can be catastrophic. For example the “liberalization” of the Russian Economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. In practice liberalizing an economy is going to involve taking government owned assets and giving some of them to well connected people for a tiny price. Some amount of such nepotism can be endured. But if the liberalization is sufficiently nepotistic it is better to remain centrally planned.

      • Jason GL says:

        Two thoughts on industrial revolutions:

        (1) The fact that an economic change was good for a society does not prevent that change from being horrible for thousands of individuals in that society. NAFTA was great for the US economy as a whole, but if you were one of the thousands of US factory workers who lost his high-wage, high-dignity job and had to switch to working as a part-time cashier at a big box store, NAFTA really sucked. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution was great for Britain’s economy as a whole, but if you were one of the thousands of shepherds or small farmers who was pushed off of her land by changes in the nature of property or changes in the supply and demand for crops, and you had to switch from working long, moderately dangerous hours with your family in the countryside to working long, extremely dangerous hours in a cramped, smoggy boardinghouse full of strangers, then the Industrial Revolution was bad for you. It’s tempting to assume that each individual peasant would have suffered an equally bad fate even without the Industrial Revolution, but waving our hands in the general direction of Malthus isn’t enough evidence to support that assumption: there’s very little econometric data to back up Malthus’s conjecture that farming yields only improve at arithmetic (as opposed to geometric) rates. In the 1700s, Britain was making rapid improvements in the quality of its roads, sailing ships, breeding, crop rotation, civil order, and colonization. These improvements might well have been able to sustain Britain’s population growth indefinitely even if there hadn’t been a boom in coal and iron and mechanical cotton looms. It’s even more likely that these improvements would have been able to sustain Britain’s population growth for a couple of generations so as to allow for a more gradual, less disruptive industrialization process that eased the transitional burden on individual workers and families. If you think that a few hundred thousand people having a markedly worse quality of life is a totally acceptable price to pay for ushering in economic progress at the maximum possible pace, that’s fine, but we shouldn’t act like it’s *impossible* to save those 300,000ish people from having their lives ruined unless we actually have some evidence to that effect. I think it’s our responsibility to at least *try* to get things right so that a rising tide really does lift all boats, instead of just noting that the tide is a net positive for the economy as a whole and stopping the analysis there.

        (2) I frequently hear assertions that economic safety nets have to “wait” until a certain level of wealth has been achieved, but no one has ever been able to explain why. It’s obviously true that you can’t spend wealth that you don’t have, but for any given level of wealth, it seems like society ought to be able to funnel some reasonable fraction of that wealth into creating a more or less robust social safety net. Across many states and many centuries of the medieval era (presumably pre-industrial, no?), ordinary people could count on receiving a certain measure of what today we would think of as insurance or welfare from their churches, guilds, villages, and extended families. It’s not obvious to me that increasing the depth or breadth of this social safety net would have brought the medieval economy to a standstill; surely some of the wealth that the nobles spent on importing peacock feathers and nutmeg and fashioning gold and silver jewelry and hosting lavish balls and tournaments and so on could have been diverted toward feeding and sheltering people who were crippled or violently ill. There’s no particular reason to think that the level of social insurance that prevails in any given generation is “optimal” in the sense that it maximizes any kind of social utility function — the level of social insurance is probably selected politically, via processes that only dimly and imperfectly reflect what ordinary people actually want.

        • HlynkaCG says:

          @ Jason GL, in response to (2)

          I think that you are overestimating the amount of surplus a pre-industrial culture could reasonably count on. Ending up with literally “too many mouths to feed” was a serious concern until very recently in human history. Yes the elderly and the infirm could depend on a certain amount of succor from the community, but only so long as the harvest was good.

          Long story short, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to actually have something before you can give it to someone. The issue with social safety nets is that the productive class needs to produce enough to feed both themselves, and the non-productive if the population is to survive.

        • John Schilling says:

          surely some of the wealth that the nobles spent on importing peacock feathers and nutmeg and fashioning gold and silver jewelry and hosting lavish balls and tournaments and so on could have been diverted toward feeding and sheltering people who were crippled or violently ill

          The only thing on that list that is remotely edible is nutmeg, and I don’t think that makes for a healthy diet.

          If you have farmland that produces enough food for one million people but requires only eight hundred thousand people to farm, and you have one point two million people, two hundred thousand people are going to starve to death. At the same time, two hundred thousand people are going to have nothing better to do than to make luxury goods to enjoy, or maybe weapons to enforce a consensus decision as to exactly which quarter of a million people are going to die. A few people are going to live very well, while the masses starve. And the not-starved subset of the masses will produce another 1.2E6 people for you to deal with in the next generation.

          Nothing any of those people can possibly do, will stop two hundred thousand people from starving to death. No austerity or asceticism will change the end result, nor tearing down the rich nor any possible “safety net”. Making luxury goods and sending them off in trade for more food might, likewise making weapons and sending your excess young men off cattle-raiding or the like, but if the neighboring countries are in the same situation that just shifts around the starvation.

          Before the eighteenth century, pretty much all the nations of the world were in that situation. And if you see where they had set up some sort of a safety net, look for the fine print that says it only applies to people on the right side of the established starve/don’t-starve divide and some people aren’t invited in.

          • Jason GL says:

            “If you have farmland that produces enough food for one million people but requires only eight hundred thousand people to farm…”

            I think that’s the wrong model of agricultural productivity. Land doesn’t generate some fixed amount of food regardless of how intensively you cultivate it; rather, the more you work at improving the land, the more food it produces. Granted, you get diminishing marginal returns, which is why it makes more sense to put ten farmers on one 100-acre farm and ten farmers on the next 100-acre farm instead of all twenty farmers on the same 100-acre farm. Theoretically, the returns could diminish so much that a marginal farmer is burning more calories trying to work the land than he’s generating from it, so that the farmland would be 100% saturated with labor, but I’ve never seen any evidence that farmland in early modern Britain or Europe or America was anywhere near the saturation point.

            I’m not suggesting that the nobles should have shared their nutmeg with the peasants; I’m suggesting that the food that was used to feed the sailors and carpenters and merchants whose work was needed to import the nutmeg could have instead been used to feed additional farmers, because increasing the number of farmers would increase total food production, allowing society to feed (some more of) the indigent. Yes, some people still would have starved, especially during bad harvest years. I’m not claiming that earlier eras could have had a *perfect* social safety net, only that (a) they did in fact have a social safety net, that (b) it could have been a thicker net if the powerful people of that era had made social safety nets more of a priority, and that (c) an ultra-rapid pace of industrialization is neither necessary to nor helpful for increasing the thickness of a social safety net.

          • John Schilling says:

            I think that’s the wrong model of agricultural productivity. Land doesn’t generate some fixed amount of food regardless of how intensively you cultivate it; rather, the more you work at improving the land, the more food it produces.

            This is basically just wrong, at least for preindustrial field crop agriculture. There’s a bit of truth to it if you consider the transition from low-labor but low-productivity grazing to more labor-intensive but productive field crops. But once you’ve got the fields plowed and sowed, where is this “more you work, more food it produces” bit? One farmer can till, sow, and harvest X acres of farmland. X acres of properly tilled, sowed, and harvested farmland can produce enough food to support Y farmer. Values of X and Y depend on the type and quality of farmland, local climate, and the level of agricultural science and technology. But not on labor availability. As the first farmer is tilling, sowing, and harvesting the crops on his X acres, what is it you imagine the second farmer doing that will provide more than a tiny increase in productivity?

            If the first farmer nominally owns 2X acres, you might see a doubling of productivity when he takes on a hired hand, but that’s because you used to have one farmer working X acres and leaving another X idle, but that’s a fairly uncommon circumstance in a mature agrarian society. And a temporary one, because the farmer will probably have two sons.

            With preindustrial agriculture, food production is capped by land availability, or in some cases by water availability, no matter how much labor you throw at the problem. And almost all preindustrial civilizations pressed up against that limit almost all of the time.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            I think that’s the wrong model of agricultural productivity. Land doesn’t generate some fixed amount of food regardless of how intensively you cultivate it; rather, the more you work at improving the land, the more food it produces.

            Improve it how? I think you are assuming a level of industrial and social development that did not exist at the time.

          • nil says:

            @John Schilling If this were true, mechanization (and its antecedent, harnessing animal power in farming) wouldn’t have made the differences they did. The goal of growing crops in a temperate climate is to get your crops planted as soon as possible but not so soon you catch an late frost, and to harvest them as late as possible but not so late they catch an early one. Making hay has a very similar dynamic play out throughout the summer, as you want the cut grass to have sufficient time to dry, but if it gets rained on it loses most or all of its value as food. More labor means less time harvesting/sowing, which means you can navigate those challenges much more effectively.

          • John Schilling says:

            More labor means less time harvesting/sowing, which means you can navigate those challenges much more effectively.

            Where this is the limiting factor, and it usually isn’t, it’s an argument for migrant farm labor that follows the seasonal variations. There’s still a hard limit on productivity per acre, and a hard limit on the amount of labor that can be profitably devoted to an acre. Most pre-industrial economies were clever enough to allocate their resources so as to approach both limits at the same time, including the use of migrant labor where appropriate.

            And while my comments were explicitly limited to pre-industrial agriculture, mechanization per se mostly reduced labor per acre rather than increasing productivity per acre. If that were all there was to it, then the balance would shift from 800,000 farmers plus 200,000 luxury-goods craftsmen plus 200,000 starving in the streets, to 200k/800k/200k respectively, for a huge net gain in luxury goods with no increase in starvation (avoidable or otherwise).

            As it turns out, mechanization came hand in hand with e.g. artificial fertilizers and mechanical irrigation pumps, things which cause an absolute increase in productivity. Partly because the category of “luxury goods craftsmen” is broad enough to include various scientists and inventors, which we now had four times as many of.

          • nil says:

            @John Schilling Ah, I misunderstood you–I was just trying to note that farming is a lot more complicated and labor intensive that your synopsis indicated, but reading upthread your level of abstraction was appropriate for what you were talking about. I’m not nearly as sure that premodern societies routinely abutted the limit as you seem to be (what about the topsoil!?), but that’s a little more outside of my expertise.

          • Jason GL says:

            @John Schilling re:

            “There’s still a hard limit on productivity per acre, and a hard limit on the amount of labor that can be profitably devoted to an acre…But once you’ve got the fields plowed and sowed, where is this “more you work, more food it produces” bit?…With pre-industrial agriculture, food production is capped by land availability, or in some cases by water availability, no matter how much labor you throw at the problem.”

            I respectfully disagree with your logic. As I’ve acknowledged, there is at least theoretically a limit on the productivity of agricultural land, but I believe there were all kinds of things that Europeans using 16th-century technology could have done to radically improve their total agricultural output.

            For starters, the acreage under cultivation is not at all constant over time — when demand for food goes up, people start cultivating more mediocre farmland that would otherwise have been used as pasture or even left wild.

            If water is a limiting factor, you can build wells, canals, cisterns, terraces, aqueducts, etc. to help get the water where it needs to go, and you can employ more people in literally carrying water in buckets to help irrigate high-value crops.

            If fertilizer is a limiting factor, you can be more careful about recycling human and animal waste, and you can employ more people in transporting urban ‘night soil’ to rural farms.

            You can build fences that deter the deer from eating your vegetables, you can hunt down the wolves that are preying on your sheep, you can tinker with different strains and seeds to get crops that are better-adapted for your particular soil, you can set people to work breeding and feeding larger and stronger oxen so that your plows get pulled more efficiently, and you can invest in better forges and mines and blacksmiths’ shops so that your plows get built more efficiently. You can build houses and lodges that are more conveniently located to the various places where laborers have to do the farmwork so that they don’t waste so much time hiking back and forth, and you can build the houses up sturdier so that they keep out the cold better and you don’t waste so many calories shivering. You can tend orchards and groves that take a hundred years to fully mature so that you have apples and peaches and figs to eat, and you can build smokehouses and saltworks so that you can preserve some of the (cheaper) food grown in the summer and eat some of it during the more expensive winter.

            The Malthusian idea is that you will do *very nearly all* of these things, and then press up against the hard limits of agricultural productivity, and then start a war that kills off the surplus population *because* you can’t afford to feed all your teenagers.

            Adam Smith’s idea is that no society ever gets a chance to do even half of these things, because humans are intemperate, passionate creatures who will start *economically unnecessary wars* on a regular basis because of religion or ethnic pride or just sheer bloody-minded aggression. Plus you’ve also got all kinds of plagues and earthquakes and floods and so on that just happen to wreck society all by themselves, irrespective of the land’s carrying capacity. I’m with Smith.

      • “During this time living standards for the average person were increasing at a dramatic rate.”

        Judged by income rather than QALYs presumably.

        • HlynkaCG says:

          By QALYs as well.

          See micheal M’s comment above…
          https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/18/ot-30-comment-knowledge/#comment-247167

          • It’s well known that adult health declined in the early industrial revolution, so MichaelM’s point can only work in infant mortality is factored in. However, high infant mortality in the country doesn’t imply low infant mortality in the city.

            “The urbanisation which accompanied the industrial revolution of the 19th Century accelerated the spread of these contagious diseases. Epidemics thriving in the squalor, malnutrition, and overpopulation of slums and prisons radiated out across towns and cites meaning that life expectancy in the Victorian metropolises became especially dire. Disease was a large factor in Manchester’s 60% death rate for working class children under 5, while in London the average life expectancy for a labourer was just 22. Even in the 20th Century, pandemics could spiral out of control. The 1918 flu pandemic for example is thought to have killed up to 50 million people, or 3% of the world’s population at the time.”

          • To TheAncientGeek: Poor health is not synonymous with declining health.

    • blacktrance says:

      The Gilded Age wasn’t a time of laissez-faire – there were significant government interventions that helped Big Business: tariffs, subsidies, and so on.

      • MichaelM says:

        And the 800 pound gorilla that was government involvement in money and banking. The dramatic swings in financial and economic conditions in the United States during this era weren’t natural, they were the result of policy-makers designing a monetary system that was really good at funding the state and federal governments and not so good at adjusting to private swings in the demand for money.

        For all that the US can be held up as a free market utopia in its first century and a half (something that is difficult to do in any fine grain detail, granted), the US has NEVER had free market banking and money provision. The state governments got involved right from the get-go in the late 18th and early 19th century and the Federal government just followed the trend in during and after the Civil War.

        We’ve gotten rid of regulations just recently in the 1990’s that had otherwise been around since the very beginning of this country’s history when it comes to banking.

        • “We’ve gotten rid of regulations just recently in the 1990’s that had otherwise been around since the very beginning of this country’s history when it comes to banking.”

          I think the laws you’re referring to are unit banking laws, correct? For the uninitiated, these laws prevented banks from opening multiple branches (or in some cases, from branching across state lines). They were basically laws against diversification. We had no such laws in Canada, and the Canadian banking system has been much more stable as a result. Canada had a whopping zero bank failures during the Great Depression.

          Nonetheless, America’s success during its first 1.5 centuries shows us that a stable banking system isn’t a necessary condition for rapid growth. But maybe it would have been dramatically better without frequent bank panics? Counterfactuals are hard to construct.

    • Saul Degraw says:

      What I’ve noticed about liberals and libertarians is that they will argue differences over why things changed and will do so until blue in the face.

      Let’s look at child labor. There are not many people who say that child labor is good anymore except maybe a few people on the ideological extremes. The big difference is about how people constructive the narrative of why child labor ended.

      Liberals like me argue that child labor ended because of public outcry and government regulation and a growing sense of morality and ethics that children belong in school and not working in dirty and dangerous factories for 10-14 hour days for very low wages.

      I’ve known libertarians who will argue that child labor is morally wrong but insist that it only ended because of technological changes and advancements that made it no longer economically necessary or economic sense to employ children at low wages.

      Maybe they are right or maybe they are acting with a high amount of motivated reasoning so they don’t have to admit that government law and regulation can have a positive effect on human life. Maybe both. It seems to me that humans are endlessly capable of saying “Event X happened or did not happen because of my preferred ideological reasons” rather than being able to admit “Maybe the liberals were right about this one.”

      • Anonymous says:

        An argument for the libertarian side: isn’t it funny that child labor existed for the entirety of history before the Industrial Revolution, and that it being outlawed just happened to coincide with the rising wealth and living standards afforded by this new technology? If it were just down to morality and ethics, why didn’t these come into play centuries or millennia before to prevent children from having to work in agrarian societies?

        • unsafeideas says:

          “If it were just down to morality and ethics, why didn’t these come into play centuries or millennia before to prevent children from having to work in agrarian societies?”

          A child working on family lawn in an agrarian society is learning things he or she will need as an adult. The child is growing into healthy normal adult with bright future.

          The child who is working 10-14 hours a day in a factory is learning one simple task (sew buttons) and will grow into illiterate adult with no trade or special skill to keep himself employed as an adult. That is a problem in a world where illiterate adults with no trade have future practically only in criminal system.

          It is not just a wealth or morality and ethics. It is also “how does that child fit into society we are likely to have 10 years down the road” and the answer for 10-14 hours factory working child is “it does not fit in at all and gonna be a trouble”.

          • John Schilling says:

            If that’s the standard, then what’s the problem with child labor again?

            In an agrarian society, children are forced to spend ten hours a day doing hard boring stuff because, in addition to getting some useful work done on the farm, they learn the skills for the job they will likely hold for the rest of their life. This is considered tolerable if not laudable.

            In an early industrial society, children are forced to spend ten hours a day doing hard boring stuff because, in addition to getting some useful work done in the factory, they learn the skills for the job they will likely hold for the rest of their life. And they get paid for it.

            In a late industrial society, children are forced to spend ten hours a day doing hard boring stuff, none of it at all useful and for zero or negative pay, in order to learn the skills for the job they will likely hold for the rest of their life. This is considered laudable.

            So the one unambiguously evil plan of the three, all else being equal, is the one where the kids are doing something useful and getting paid for it? I’m thinking, if this is really the standard we are going to use, the definition of “labor” is looking mighty arbitrary, and all three paths are laudable iff you have correctly determined what the child is likely to be doing for the rest of its life.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            How is learning simple tedious repetitive tailoring tasks in a factory less relevant to general adult life than learning simple tedious repetitive farming tasks on a farm?

          • Jiro says:

            In a late industrial society, children are forced to spend ten hours a day doing hard boring stuff, none of it at all useful and for zero or negative pay, in order to learn the skills for the job they will likely hold for the rest of their life. This is considered laudable.

            In the late industrial society, precisely because spending hours in school and doing homework is not useful, a conflict of interest that is present in the earlier cases is missing. Factory owners profit from making things worse for the kids. Schools don’t (except to the degree that school administrators get paid for running schools at all–they don’t profit on a per-homework-page basis.)

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        “There are not many people who say that child labor is good anymore except maybe a few people on the ideological extremes.”

        http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/agriemp2.htm

        The current minimum age is 9 (Oregan for berry picking), with 10 being the lowest for general labor (Illinois). So depending on where you draw the line it is technically still allowed (especially with illegals).

        Really young kids aren’t used anymore, but some of the jobs they did no longer exist (since we don’t need to have them open doors in mine shafts and the like). It is possible there are jobs were it would still be useful to hire them, but outside of acting, I can’t think of any that pay better than just using an adult.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      I wouldn’t say that you have your history completely wrong, but I do think that you are underestimating just how bad it was before.

      Those horrible working conditions, 7 day workweeks, child labour, etc… still represented a massive improvement over being a serf. As P. George Stewart said: The period of most unrestrained capitalism was the period in which ordinary human beings saw the greatest rise in the standard of living ever (i.e. up till that point)…

    • I can vouch that people sometimes ever make the “been tried and didn’t work” argument against Libertarians, because I do.

    • I haven’t seen it made often, but if you’ll excuse a little self-promotion I basically do make this argument – all the big ideologies have failed when applied in a purist sense. Probably you’d have to say capitalism has the smallest body count of the three twentieth century big guns, but its still failing to prevent fairly catastrophic environmental damage, or prevent monopolies with close ties to state interests. I think we should be looking for creative new political ideas and trialing them in a cautious way. For my own two cents I write a little about applying stricter market forces to a form of cooperativism, and more recently I wrote an article calling for applying a detailed separation powers to the economic sphere (instead of just the political separation of powers we have now). I think in more mainstream quarters something sort of like this is expressed in the skepticism about “ideology” in general in conventional centrist and centre-left politics, but I can’t remember seeing it as a detailed historical argument.

  6. FacelessCraven says:

    So, Most people here are familiar with the phrase “Cthulhu always swims left”. It’s an interesting and scary idea, and thinking of examples that lend support to it seems pretty trivial. What I’m curious about is, what’s the best counter-argument? What’s the best evidence available that the shift leftward is localized, situational, or counterbalanced by other shifts to the right?

    • TheFrannest says:

      I am not. I googled it. I am still not. What does it mean? Does it just equate leftism with Cthulhu? Lovecraft of course would agree but I don’t see the point of the analogy.

      • OldLamps says:

        Basically it just means that leftward shifts in politics aren’t constant or dramatic, but they’re irreversible.

        • TheFrannest says:

          Well, the division into left/right is oversimplified to begin with. Was the Soviet Union left or right socially?

          Communism is of course leftist, and the Soviet Union spearheaded no-fault divorce, abortion, equal rights for women. On the other hand, the Soviets condemned homosexuality as perversions of the bourgeoise, an argument so prevalent that it is entrenched in Russia even today, oppressed various ethnicities, and after defeating an empire built on antisemitism immediately switched to being the world’s main antisemites.

          As for social liberalism, people just aren’t likely to go back to hatred of groups they stopped hating, there needs to be some sort of a reason for this to occur, additionally, people are extensively memetically innoculated against intolerance due to handy examples of one German hobbyist artist.

          Methinks that people will swing more rightward due to the refugee crisis.

          • Phil says:

            IIRC Soviet society might have claimed sexual equality, but was in reality incredibly sexist nonetheless, more so than (say) the US of the time was.

          • Viliam says:

            I guess the Soviet version was more or less “both men and women are equally slaves of the system”. 😛

            Some of that was coincidentally aligned with some Western ideas of equality. For example, the system required both men and women to work as much as possible; no stay-at-home moms were allowed. Of course if you need someone to work, you also need to educate them, therefore equal education.

            Essentially, those forms of sexism which were seen as a burden on economy were removed. (Women were allowed to study and work.) Those forms of sexism which were seen as helpful for the economy remained. (Women were told it’s their duty to reproduce… after they return home from the factory… and then they were told to put their kids in the kindergarten and hurry back to the factory.)

          • TheFrannest says:

            @Phil:

            Not quite so. Many outside accounts of Soviet gender inequality come from seeing people work physical labor and thus concluding that Soviets overwork women.

            @Viliam:

            Nonetheless, the USSR provided very good maternity leave, for example. That is on top of the guaranteed 24 day-long paid vacation.

            Women WERE told it’s their duty to reproduce because the population was devastated by wars and internal struggles.

          • Phil says:

            Attitudes to pain relief during birth (which appear to have mostly boiled down to: no you can’t have any) also implies that women had very little real political power in the Soviet system.

            (Admittedly my source for all this is mostly Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty“, so may be biased, but it fits with bits and pieces that I’ve read elsewhere – that the Soviets liked to talk about gender equality, but women still had to do all the child rearing & the housework in addition to the expectation that they held down a full time job.)

        • Ciarán says:

          Aha! Okay, I think a lot of whether or not policies are irreversible depends on the specific kinds of institutions in place, as well as public opinion. The leftiness or rightiness of a policy doesn’t seem to matter.

          The United States in general has a hard time repealing any bill of any kind, once there is a slice of the population that benefits from it. A sufficient chunk of Senators opposing something pretty much leads to a roadblock, that’s as far as you can go. Same thing with the House or the President… If anyone has reason to oppose change, it won’t happen. Badly designed welfare program that benefits the poor? Unneccesary military base that employs a bunch of folks? Both are equally devilish to get rid of the States.

          A lot of this stems from the US’s philosophy of the vetting of bad laws. The founders wanted to keep bad laws/any laws down by preemptively vetting them: Having a strict constitution, and having various different veto players act as checks and balances.

          That doesn’t hold true for all democracies, pretty much just republican ones. Parliamentary governments operate under an understanding of retroactive vetting of laws. In Canada or Britain, if you want to pass a law, you just kinda… Do. Even if the government is a minority, the number of veto players is very small. This seems to be a better system, in larger part because a lot of the dumb parts of policies only become apparent once they are put into practice.

          While the US has been stuck with badly implemented policies that eternally accumulate forever and ever, even under normative spending-slashers like Reagan, parliamentary regimes have been able to consistently and effectively trim fat. Not talking about whether Thatcher’s reforms were good or not, just looking at her ability to implement them… Holy shit, that woman got things done. Something similar happened in the 90s in Canada. With the left of centre government in charge, there was a massive reduction in the government spending that had accumulated back in the 70s.

          http://www.amazon.com/The-Once-Future-King-Government/dp/1594037930 (How do I format links? I’m a bit of a newbie for comments here.) F.H. Buckely’s The Once and Future King is a really great look at the differences in political institutions can create, looking at Canada, the UK and the US, and with data from around the world.

          The big exception to a political institutionalist analysis of it would be ‘sacred cows,’ policies that are broadly popular enough that even governments that aren’t subject to veto actors don’t want to mess with. But if a policy is sufficiently popular, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to get rid of anyways.

          So, a summary: It’s not necessarily that moves to the left are irreversible, it’s that most policies end up being irreversible in the US. This doesn’t hold true for places that have different institutions.

          Edit: Minor change in wording.
          Edit 2: Added a summary.

    • OldLamps says:

      I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone dispute it directly — but if you’re a leftist, all that means is, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Leftists think Cthulhu is inevitably swimming toward Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they’re thrilled about it.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        I remembered having read that, but looking at it again, I’m pretty sure I never made it all the way through. Thanks for pointing me back to it.

    • Anatoly says:

      Typical examples of Cthluhu moving rightward cited in the US are the Clinton welfare reform, the deregulation of banks, the rising income and wealth inequality.

    • BD Sixsmith says:

      From a cultural perspective, no. Women’s lib, civil rights, gay rights, abortion, sex lib – all areas in which the left is triumphing. From an economic perspective, though, one could argue against it. The British Conservatives have privatised Royal Mail, for example, which was publicly owned for hundreds of years.

      Neoreactionaries tends to be enthusiasts for capitalism and often seem to skirt around the fact that people at the forefront of advancing cultural progressivism are closer to Milton Friedman than Karl Marx.

      • TheFrannest says:

        My observations are that neoreactionaries are not generally for anything, they are against.

        • Anonymous says:

          Expound, please?

          • TheFrannest says:

            Basically, NRs believe that the left is wrong, therefore the converse of anything they perceive as the left is right. That leads to not having consistent policies on anything and being a really weird mix of authoritarians and hardcore libertarians. Authoritarianism is good, but despite that free healthcare is bad because it is leftist. Political correctness is bad and censorship because someone’s sensibilities are offended is bad, but Putin’s laws against gay propaganda are pretty much what we need to do. They extensively flip-flop on Israel v Palestine in any audience where they cannot afford to say “Why don’t we drop a nuke there and kill ALL the stinky brown people in the area?” We must discard all emotion and build our society according to the findings of science… oh, wait, what are these? Not that! That is where science was infiltrated by leftism and that science is wrong, tainted science.

          • Anonymous says:

            Basically, NRs believe that the left is wrong, therefore the converse of anything they perceive as the left is right.

            Can you provide any actual examples of any NRxer stating something to this effect? I’ve not encountered such a viewpoint there, but rather a) that the opposite of insanity is still insanity, and b) anyone being wrong on *everything* is incredibly implausible.

            That leads to not having consistent policies on anything and being a really weird mix of authoritarians and hardcore libertarians.

            No consistent policies is a result of neoreactionaries being people from all over the place who found that the dominant elite viewpoints diverged markedly from observable reality. They don’t have any unified leadership, or dogma. Most are busy picking away at their particular bone in the leftist skeleton closet that they know most about.

            Consider the case of the traditionalist Christians and the red-pill pick-up artists. They hate each others guts, but are under the same neoreactionary umbrella. They have different goals, certainly, and very different ideas on what they should be doing, but they’re united in their overlapping area of interest (human sexuality and courtship mores) and their agreement in how things actually work (as opposed to the common leftist view).

            Authoritarianism is good, but despite that free healthcare is bad because it is leftist.

            What?

            Political correctness is bad and censorship because someone’s sensibilities are offended is bad, but Putin’s laws against gay propaganda are pretty much what we need to do.

            How is “you shouldn’t censor THIS, you should censor THAT” inconsistent? AFAIK, neoreactionaries are basically in favour of Singapore-style censorship to keep peace and quell social unrest.

            They extensively flip-flop on Israel v Palestine in any audience where they cannot afford to say “Why don’t we drop a nuke there and kill ALL the stinky brown people in the area?”

            Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even relevant to leftism/non-leftism?

            We must discard all emotion and build our society according to the findings of science… oh, wait, what are these? Not that! That is where science was infiltrated by leftism and that science is wrong, tainted science.

            If you mean social science, then yes, it is heavily infiltrated, barely replicates at all, and should be distrusted by default (as Scott does a great job of irregularly pointing out in his analysis of studies). Hard sciences are still doing pretty well.

            Like John Sidles, I think you’re rounding off to the nearest cliche without properly considering the overall matter. If nothing else, you should read Scott’s own anti-reactionary FAQ; Scott thinks, at least, that the neoreactionaries have plenty of valid points, even if he disagrees with them in the end.

          • Basically, NRs believe that the left is wrong, therefore the converse of anything they perceive as the left is right.

            Can you provide any actual examples of any NRxer stating something to this effect?

            “2. Right is right and left is wrong.”

            http://www.moreright.net/principles-of-reactionary-thought/

          • Anonymous says:

            “2. Right is right and left is wrong.”

            http://www.moreright.net/principles-of-reactionary-thought/

            That’s not exactly what I meant. I know the general heuristic is that the left is wrong, and the right is right. This is subtly different from TheFrannest’s statement:

            NRs believe that the left is wrong, therefore the converse of anything they perceive as the left is right.

            Unless we’re talking about some Platonic Ideal of Leftism/Rightism.

          • Jiro says:

            Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even relevant to leftism/non-leftism?

            In the USA, yes, and elsewhere, it’s often “no” only because everyone in the country has the same view on it, rather than because they have different views but the views are not distributed based on politics.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            >In the USA, yes, and elsewhere, it’s often “no” only because everyone in the country has the same view on it,

            And unless the country’s name is Israel, it’s usually a Pro-Palestine position.

          • Anonymous says:

            @TheAncientGreek

            Anissimov has been disowned by the other active big names in neoreaction. I am not familiar enough to tell you whether his VIEWS are still similar or identical to neoreaction.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @TheFrannest,

            Although Anonymous already addressed the bulk of your post, I it necessary to address a critical point of order.

            Free healthcare isn’t bad because it is leftist. Free healthcare is bad because TANSTAAFL. This also explains NRx opposition to wealth redistribution schemes in general.

          • Is there anyone who really thinks free healthcare is free in some platonic sense, and not in some cost-spreading sense?

          • Asterix says:

            Ask yourself if the people you’re speaking for would say, Yes, that’s it, that’s what we’re about.

            If not, you aren’t describing them, but something you’ve constructed to take their place. In this case, a more repulsive and easier to loathe version.

            Nobody on the right (or left) has proposed that we nuke Israel.

            Try Scott’s principle of charity. Not just nicer, way more likely to be accurate.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @BDSixsmith – “From a cultural perspective, no. Women’s lib, civil rights, gay rights, abortion, sex lib – all areas in which the left is triumphing.”

        For me, the cultural shift leftward is the scary part of the argument, and thus it’s the part I’m looking for counterexamples of. It seems pretty obvious to me that abortion and gay rights are here to stay. On the other hand, gun control seems to be pretty dead, and while public education still enjoys massive government largesse, it seems likely to me that it’s going to have to change drasticly and soon. Neither resulty would, I think, be predicted by an unbounded leftward creep.

        Most of what makes the Leftward Shift such a scary idea is a fear that it never stops, which implies either a dystopian future or social collapse. If it stops at a reasonable point, and I find myself increasingly convinced that it does, then winding down the culture war is possible.

        • TheFrannest says:

          Gun control being dead heavily depends on the country. I mean, most of Europe successfully disarmed themselves, to varied results. The US is a unique case because of the right to arm bears.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            I’m mainly thinking of the US here, since it’s where I live… but gun control is pretty dead in Canada as well, it seems to me. A national regiustry was attempted, met with mass civil disobediance, and abandoned. I’ve seen no indication that any further measures have been tried since. Likewise, it seems to me that unless you have complete abolition or are making active progress toward it, gun culture can adapt and grow. I would not be surprised if it recovers in Austrailia, for instance.

          • Echo says:

            I was actually going to mention the cancelled registry. It was the first example that came to mind of a left-wing policy that was successfully fought against and repealed, despite the usual “it’s-inevitable-and-you’re-on-the-wrong-side-of-history” rhetoric.

            I think the counter-argument is that “sometimes the left overreaches, and has to wait a few years”.
            The idea being that conservatives are fighting an eternal rearguard action without any realistic goals of their own. So the only outcomes are “slow defeat” and “fast defeat”.
            Someone please correct me if I’m misinterpreting their theories.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Echo – “I think the counter-argument is that “sometimes the left overreaches, and has to wait a few years”.”

            At what point does it stop being a few years? If Canada attempts registry again, why would things go differently the second time around? It seems to me that the trends are against them; black rifles are normalized now, even in Canada, and the long-term decline in violence seems pretty lethal to the core gun control position.

          • Echo says:

            It follows if you see the resistance to gun control as a localized one that will be surrounded and swallowed up by left advances in other areas.
            In twenty years it will be a lot harder to defend owning guns when you’re not allowed to drive your own car or print unapproved items on your 3d printer.

            My counter-argument’s basically just question begging, because inevitable leftward swimming is in the premise.

            Hmm, gonna have to do some thinking to get to the root of it.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Echo – “In twenty years it will be a lot harder to defend owning guns when you’re not allowed to drive your own car or read chemistry books without a permit.”

            …We can’t drive our own cars without a permit now. And do you think permitting for chemistry books is at all likely?

            Another thought: It seems pretty obvious that Academia has had a powerful effect in pushing society toward the left. Do you think Academia will still exist in its current form in, say, twenty years?

          • Echo says:

            Sorry, I changed the second example to avoid an in-joke and possible confusion about the “permit” bit.
            I meant “you can’t drive your car at all, because it isn’t allowed to have a steering wheel”.

            And have you seen the fights on wikipedia about including technical information about weapons/explosives? Or the recent “technical drawings of guns count as arms for committing ITAR felonies” issue? “Dangerous information” isn’t going to last long on the modern internet.

            The 3d printer example is a lot more direct, since it’s already happening.

          • J says:

            @FacelessCraven re Chemistry books

            I think Echo was referring to the clampdown on things like round bottom glassware: https://theboard.byu.edu/questions/67365/

            And the tendency of officials to raid home chem labs:
            http://makezine.com/2008/08/11/home-science-under-attack/

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Echo – “The idea being that conservatives are fighting an eternal rearguard action without any realistic goals of their own. So the only outcomes are “slow defeat” and “fast defeat”.”

            Again, I think the evidence is against that. Concealed carry has swept the nation. Full-auto capability is now cheaply and easily available, and suppressors are well on their way to being normalized. The idea that the NFA might be dramatically revised is starting to look politically feasible in a decade or two. The supreme court has ruled in favor of a personal right. None of this seems compatible with slow defeat.

            “I meant “you can’t drive your car at all, because it isn’t allowed to have a steering wheel”.”

            I think we’re at least a few decades off from that point. Moreover, I’m not sure it’s actually a bad idea. Car crashes kill a TON of people.

            “And have you seen the fights on wikipedia about including technical information about weapons/explosives?”

            I haven’t, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Internet as a whole routes around censorship of that type very, very easily.

            “Or the recent “technical drawings of guns count as arms for committing ITAR felonies” issue?”

            Never heard of this. more information/link?

            “Dangerous information” isn’t going to last long on the modern internet.”

            Really? I find this pretty difficult to believe.

            “The 3d printer example is a lot more direct, since it’s already happening.”

            Last I saw, people were printing AR lowers, complete single-shot guns, and even a laser-sintered 1911. What progress has been made in controlling printed weapons? Is 3D-printing control a thing now?

            @J – “I think Echo was referring to the clampdown on things like round bottom glassware”

            …well, those links fulfill my outrage quota for the day. Still, that “clampdown” seems pretty directly related to the war on drugs. How confident are you that the WoD is still going to be a thing in another two or three decades?

          • Kevin C. says:

            To support Echo’s position, I point to this in the Washington PostThe NRA will fall. It’s inevitable.

            To sum it up, being pro-gun-rights is basically a (rural) white thing, so given our demographic trajectory, it is inevitable that gun control supporting non-whites (and urbanites) will come to outnumber and politically overcome those dwindling bitter-clinger rednecks.

        • LTP says:

          I think this is a misleading phrase. What is “right” and “left” socially is always relative and changing, and those terms don’t even really mean much prior to the enlightenment. Besides, prior social norms seem to be retroactively defined as “right” given enough time no matter what, giving the mere illusion that we are always to the left of the past (even though cross-temporal comparisons of right and left are somewhat dubious in my view).

      • Anonymous says:

        “people at the forefront of advancing cultural progressivism are closer to Milton Friedman than Karl Marx.”

        Are they? Really? Really?

        • Echo says:

          Of course they are. Don’t you remember all Friedman’s quotes about the evils of liberal bourgeois markets?

        • Spaghetti Lee says:

          To tease that out a little, I think he meant something like “The ruling liberal/neo-liberal/capitalist class is perfectly fine with gay rights, women’s rights, and other anti-discrimination-rooted leftist goals, because they don’t interfere with the production of capital. If anything, they benefit it by creating a larger worker pool and allowing for the illusion of egalitarianism. Left-wing economic goals like the overthrow of the ownership class and worker self-determination do interfere with profits.”

          This isn’t exactly a new idea. One thing that’s always bugged me about neoreactionaries is they rarely distinguish between white-collar professional urban elite liberals and economically radical working class proletarian liberals. Like they’re either the same, or one group is a puppet of the other, or Jane Doe who listens to NPR and drinks her latte with extra milk is as hardcore communist as Karl himself*. It’s all just part of that big Cathedral. In my experience, the latter group hates the former group and wants to topple them just as badly as they do the capitalist class. I don’t blame the NrXers, though, because anything close to an actual communist is an endangered species in America.

          This is where America’s conflation of liberal and leftist really shows the stretch marks, in my opinion. And the lack of a homegrown landed aristocracy probably distorts the ways American conservatives think about class and society relative to their European counterparts in more ways than I can imagine.

          *-To the extent that those sorts of people have an economic agenda, it appears to be “We should help the poor, but not in a way that’s inconvenient for or guilt-inducing to me.” So the right-wingers harp on them for the former, the left-wingers for the latter, and both claim that Latte Jane is an emblem of the other side’s cultural hegemony.

          • Echo says:

            I think they just write off all ten to fifteen economically radical working class proletarian liberals as insignificant, and lump “decent hard-working trade unionists” in with all the other groups betrayed by our ruling elite.

          • BD Sixsmith says:

            Thanks. That was what I meant. (Though I should be clear that by “people” I don’t mean “all people”.)

          • Anonymous says:

            @BD Sixsmith

            Even so, to me it seems that this only works if ‘at the forefront of advancing’ is taken to mean ‘indifferent to’.

      • Jon Gunnarsson says:

        I think the very fact that capitalism is today seen as a right-wing idea is evidence for the tremendous left-ward shift that has occured over the last two centuries. Two hundred years ago, liberals (i.e. proponents of something close to free market capitalism) were on the left of the political spectrum, while people on the right were in favour of traditional aristocratic privileges, monarchy, etc. and looked down on the money-grubbing merchants. People who hold these same classical liberal positions on the economy today are considered to be on the right, while people who still hold the old right-wing positions are now beyond the pale.

        people at the forefront of advancing cultural progressivism are closer to Milton Friedman than Karl Marx

        Something like half the demands that Marx and Engels made in the Communist Manifesto have been realised throughout the developed world. Most people today, even on the right, unquestioningly accept the existence of progressive taxation, central banking, or universal and “free” schooling. Compared to that, what major demands of Friedman have been realised?

          • Jon Gunnarsson says:

            That is a good point. However, you also have to consider that American men still have to sign up for selective service, and a draft might be reinstated at any time. Since the US hasn’t fought any major wars since then, it is difficult to say whether the absence of the draft will last.

          • John Schilling says:

            The only significant support for military conscription in the United States, and it is small, comes mostly from the Blue side of the fence on fairness, social engineering, and maybe-this-will-get-you-warmongers-to-stop starting-wars grounds. The actual US Army is pretty clear about not wanting draftees ever again, on account of draftees weren’t exactly the recipe for victory in Vietnam and war has become much more of a technical specialists’ game in the decades since. There’s no “…unless it’s a really big war” exception to that, either. At any scale, conscripts are an impediment to the US Army’s warfighting doctrine.

            And the vestigial selective-service registration system, is essentially irrelevant. It contains almost none of the information necessary to actually select people for military service – probably by design, because it was created in 1980 by a Democratic administration and congress as a way of playing a “yes, we are serious about national defense” card at essentially zero cost. It will remain in place for decades more to come because removing it would mean sending a (weak) “OK, so now we are soft on national defense” message for essentially zero gain, but it is inconsequential. In the extremely unlikely event that an actual draft is reinstated, we’d have to compile an actual selection list from other databases that actually include relevant data.

          • brad says:

            I agree. It is remarkable how fast we come to a broad national consensus against military drafts. Though you do from time to time see people float ‘national service’ proposals.

        • “I think the very fact that capitalism is today seen as a right-wing idea is evidence for the tremendous left-ward shift that has occurred over the last two centuries.”

          Only where “capitalism” means something like “pure capitalism” or “continually deregulate the markets” or “there is a free market solution to everything”. If it means “you have to have a private sector” or “the state can’t do everything” or “there is a free market solution to some things” then “capitalism” is now standard doctrine on the left, to the extent hat anyone who disagrees with any of the previous three claims advertises themselves as a dangerous radical…eg Corbyn.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I easily get frustrated with the left’s naive view of capitalism, but the left is much more accepting of market forces today than they were 50 years ago.

          • Jon Gunnarsson says:

            I was specifically talking about classical liberalism, which typically is in favour of some state institutions and a little bit of regulation, but is for the most part in favour of laissez-faire. That position was considered left-wing two hundreds years ago and is now considered right-wing.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      Neoliberalism.

      Although admittedly, the people making statements like “cthulhu always swims left” tend to be far less concerned about privatization or worsening economic inequality than about… I guess what they’d call maintaining a traditionalist mode of non-economic social relations, although I’m not familiar enough with NRX thought to know exactly the words they would use. (My own terminology for their priorities would not be kind, and I can’t say for sure if it’s true, so I will bite my tongue there.)

      • Which is a nice way of saying that it is based on selective evidence.

      • Jiro says:

        Although admittedly, the people making statements like “cthulhu always swims left” tend to be far less concerned about privatization or worsening economic inequality

        “Cthulhu swims left” means that political opinion moves to the left. Worsening economic inequality is not a political opinion. What to do about worsening economic inequality is a political opinion, but that has indeed swum to the left after all.

    • Viliam says:

      First, we should have a working definition of what kind of change is a “shift”, and what is “left” and “right”. Then we should choose some space-time boundaries in human history, collect all “shifts”, classify them as “left” or “right” and compare the numbers. That would be a proper research.

      Otherwise we are just cherry-picking; two sides building two heaps of cherries. Even if one heap is larger, it doesn’t necessarily prove anything beyond that the group who collected them worked harder.

      • Jaskologist says:

        I think the definition problem is a major hurdle, which nobody seems to bother trying to jump. So much depends on what you decide to call right-wing and left-wing.

        Are eugenics left-wing? It was certainly Progressive, endorsed by no less than John Maynard Keynes. Prohibition was also a Progressive project at the time, and that was repealed (and is modern prohibition of marijuana left or right? What about cigarettes? What about big gulps?) What do we make of the left’s so-far failed push to normalize pedophilia in the 70s? How left-win are former communist countries compared to back when they were communist?

        • Anonymous says:

          Despite some objections I received last time I said this, which I found helpful in defining my position but did not persuade me of it being wrong, I continue to assert that the main difference between left and right is that left-wing is about being outwardly and obviously nice, right-wing is about being mean in the short term to bring out beneficial side effects and/or long-term consequences that outweigh the short-term meanness for a net gain. When a left-wing idea is wrong it’s wrong because the idea has negative consequences which more than outweigh the niceness of it. When a right-wing idea is wrong it’s because it is very mean and the beneficial side effects it produces are small or nonexistent. The right’s usual complaint about the left is that they’re naiive, stupid, self-destructive do-gooders. The left’s usual complaint about the right is that they’re evil, selfish, hateful monsters.

          This is not the whole story but I think it’s a significant part of it. Another big part of it is tribal affiliations. Some things can probably be seen as left-wing or right-wing, but once they get branded as one side then they are stuck there. Scott has made this latter point before explicitly; the first bit of my post is my attempt to find the common ground between what Scott has described as optimizing for a zombie apocalypse versus optimizing for a utopia, what Robin Hanson calls farmer versus forager mindset, and what mainstream people call being okay with inequality versus opposing inequality.

          • Me says:

            I’m pretty sure your first definition only works if you are willing to cherry pick quite hard. I’d even say that things are tilted in the opposite direction from what you said, when all relevant examples are considered.

            Take, say, gun control. The left holds that by being slightly mean to people no, by making them go through a while song and dance before they make their purchase, we can gain the overall future benifit of reduced gun violence.

            Similarly, take affirmative action. The left claims that if we distort things like college admissions, deny places to more qualified people in favor of less qualified people with the right skin color, we can reap the future benefits of diversity.

            And so on and so forth.

            The second definition you give, however, is a pretty spot on. I fully believe that this is the cause of the true divide, uncomfortable as that makes me feel.

          • Anonymous says:

            As I said, it is not always obvious which side is which. But I think both your examples work under my definitions. Allowing guns is mean – guns are scary! Guns are for shooting and killing people! The justification from the right is that yes, alright, guns are scary and kill people, but they protect us from tyranny and from criminals.

            Stopping people from having guns is a bit mean in the short term. But guns themselves are really really mean and scary in the short term. On the other hand, reducing gun violence is not a side benefit or a long-term goal. It’s a very nice obvious immediate upfront goal.

            On affirmative action, again I don’t think the left defends it by saying that yes, alright, some qualified people will suffer, but the side benefits make it worth it. They say that having more women and minorities in college is a great and worthy goal. Which it is – it’s a big immediately obvious nice kind good goal. The possibility of college graduates being less qualified is not an obvious upfront mean thing but a troublesome side effect.

            To an extent it probably sounds like I’m arguing nonsense here – that you could phrase any position in a way that makes it belong to either side. Indeed I remember Scott wrote a great description of global warming as a right-wing issue in one of his posts I mentioned.

            And yet I really do think there is something to this. It seems to me that guns really and truly are mean nasty scary things, and that if you’re going entirely by what’s the most outwardly nice thing to do, obviously what you want is no guns. Similarly, being okay with there not being enough women and minorities being let into college is a nasty position. That colleges ought to have to let more of them in is the nice position, the one that doesn’t need justification with “but when you take into account all the implications…”.

            If it came down to nothing more than tribal affiliations, I don’t think you’d see so many trends like society moving leftward, like people becoming more right-wing as they get older, like the right calling the left naiive and the left calling the right evil, that all seem to match left and right being down to something more definite and concrete.

        • onyomi says:

          “the left’s so-far failed push to normalize pedophilia in the 70s”

          Whoah, seriously? I mean, I was not alive in the 70s so I wouldn’t actually remember it, but really?

          • NN says:

            I don’t know if it happened everywhere in the Western world, but this was definitely a thing in Europe.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Scattered anecdotes because I’m short on time:

            Foucault, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvior all petitioned the French government to eliminate ago of consent laws.

            It was decades before anybody even thought about the implications of the Kinsey Report’s data on orgasm in pre-pubescent boys.

            More recently, one of the stories in the Vagina Monologues was about an older woman seducing a 13 year old girl. “If it was a rape, it was a good rape.”

      • Chalid says:

        Exactly. The definition of “left” seems to basically come down to “stuff that is different from a piece of history that Moldbug likes” and then of course march “leftward” because we keep changing.

    • Sastan says:

      Depends on the time frame. Last two hundred years? Cthulu swims left. Last two thousand? There are cycles.

      My theory is this: : “Leftism”, however we define that, is a product of plenty, peace and general good times. When people are relatively comfortable, and have few threats, they tend toward leftist politics. When threats are many and existential, people shift right, and fast.

      For a localized example, consider the case of Israel before and after the Second Intifada. Before, the legacy of the martyr Rabin had guaranteed a permanent Labor government……until the nation was under threat. The result? Fourteen years of Likud.

      For a historical example, the crumbling of the Pax Romana should do nicely. The liberal policies of the late empire both lead to its downfall and were replaced by the most reactionary form of monarchy, the local robber baron and feudalism, in most of Europe. The outside threats, from the Huns to the Vikings, guaranteed “right-wing” government for a thousand years. As Europe became an economic and military powerhouse, the policies begin to drift back. Once the Moors are driven from Spain and Vienna finishes the Turkish invasions, Europe is already in full swing toward the Enlightenment.

      • Saul Degraw says:

        Israel is also the story of changing demographics and a sign that left and right mean different things. Israel is still has a strong welfare state including a ministry of housing that is very popular. I don’t think a GOP style economic plan would fly there. Just like getting rid of NHS is dead in the water in the UK even if Brits do lean Tory these days. David Cameron is not and can’t be Scott Walker. From what I’ve heard, liberal Democratic people in the USA would swoon for the Tory platform largely.

        Yet Labour in Israel is seen as the party of the old Ashkenazi elite, largely Germans. Likud and the right-wing parties are largely the parties of Jews who came from Middle Eastern countries. Menachem Began came from Poland but his supporters came from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc.

      • nyccine says:

        There wasn’t a USA 2000 years ago. There wasn’t “Western Civilization” either. It’s not a reference to humanity at large, from the rise of homo sapiens onward, but to individual civilizations.

        Moldbug’s point about Cthulu always swimming left is just an easier-to-remember version of Spengler’s comments about “the City” overtaking “the Country” in The Decline of the West; at some point, as the Culture grows, eventually “the City” (identified with cosmopolitan liberalism) overtakes and seeks to destroy “the Country” (identified with traditionalism/conservatism). Although there is a reaction by traditionalists, it is doomed to failure, as at this point *everyone* accepts the basic tenants of liberalism; even if they feel that something is grossly wrong, they are unable to articulate why (at least, enough to convince anyone).

        • Saul Degraw says:

          Arguments about the “city” vs. the “country” and moral superiority are as old as human civilization. They are certainly a long part of American history and culture. I have yet to hear an argument about why the country is more morally pure and superior than the city.

          1. Prohibition was a last grasp of the country to control the much large cities politically. Prohibition was one of the most unsuccessful political programs in the United States and created a lot of vice and crime and arguably made things more socially loose.

          2. Julian Bond famously pointed out that a lot of Afrrican-Americans are pretty socially and culturally conservative but tend to vote Democratic because the GOP is completely tone deaf when it comes to speaking to African-Americans and they also choose the Southern strategy.

          3. There are a lot of people who the country was unwelcoming and dangerous especially religious and ethnic minorities. I’m Jewish. Why should I be easily convinced that things were better when Jews were a people apart and treated as second-class or third-class citizens? Interestingly the first professional code of legal conduct was created to keep “those Russian Jew Boys out.”

          4. Where neo-Reactionarism really fails for me is that all the holders seem to think they will be among the elite/monarchy/aristocratic class because of their talents and intelligence. How can they be so sure? Maybe they will be serfs who happen to do engineering as part of their serfdom? Or court doctors until they curry disfavor and then are offed?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            2. Julian Bond famously pointed out that a lot of Afrrican-Americans are pretty socially and culturally conservative but tend to vote Democratic because the GOP is completely tone deaf when it comes to speaking to African-Americans and they also choose the Southern strategy.”

            Under Nixon? The same man who instituted affirmative action in federal employment?

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Where neo-Reactionarism really fails for me is that all the holders seem to think they will be among the elite/monarchy/aristocratic class because of their talents and intelligence

            I see this criticism levied generally to many ideologies. People supporting NRX must imagine they will be Lords. People supporting Libertarianism must imagine they will be rich. Etc.
            The implication seems to be no one would support an alternative to our current multi-party liberal establishment if they thought there was a chance of failure. Rawls “Blind-Womb” test or whatever it is called.

            Personally speaking, I do not imagine I will rise in the social ranks of any alternative social hierarchy and would fare far worse among quite a few, like Puritan New England. I do think that my quality of life and those of many others will improve under certain alternative political and social arrangements: say that if we abolished this ridiculous obsession with educational credentialing, I would be in my exact current job with an associates degree instead of a full-time degree, and my Wife would not have accumulated a quarter million dollars of student debt for 8 year PharmD, when my sister’s 6 year PharmD that was regulatory standard just a few years earlier was deemed sufficient in the murderous drug calamity that was mid-2000s America.

            This would mean several extra years of manpower for the economy, and several extra years of income for my family, and tremendously less death. This is a win for almost all parties.

            I do not, however, think this would turn me into Lord A Definite Beta Guy, Protector of the Realm, and Leader of the Chicago Freehold.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Saul Degraw:

            Where neo-Reactionarism really fails for me is that all the holders seem to think they will be among the elite/monarchy/aristocratic class because of their talents and intelligence.

            I don’t. Of course, I’m not a full-fledged neoreactionary yet. Being told that I would have to be in charge after the NRx revolution would be more than enough to make me oppose it.

            In fact, I have to say I doubt your assertion in general; my impression of NRx is that it has quite a lot of people like me, to whom its main attraction is the observation throughout life that you get better results when there is somebody responsible for those results. Popular sovereignty smears out responsibility so widely that nobody is accountable, and tacking a huge unfireable bureaucracy on top of that just makes it worse.

            Maybe they will be serfs who happen to do engineering as part of their serfdom?

            Why do you think that having a king means everyone else is a serf? We know now there are much better ways to structure an economy.

          • Nicholas Carter says:

            Because if you country does not have a feudal economic system, it does not have a King (or a Queen, regardless of what the British and Canadians will tell you).

          • Nornagest says:

            Because if you country does not have a feudal economic system, it does not have a King

            That’s, uh, really wrong. Feudal economic systems are historically pretty rare; you could call Japan prior to the Meiji (or possibly later Edo) period feudal without glossing over too much, and maybe Ethiopia too, but aside from that you’ll only find them in Europe between the Migration Period and the Renaissance (in some places the early modern period). That’s not a big fraction of the civilizations that’ve been out there, so the evidence points to feudalism taking some fairly specific conditions to evolve.

            Kings, on the other hand, pop up all over.

          • Nicholas says:

            The very core of my argument is that we have applied the term “King” to people who are not good examples of what a King is, because the term “hereditary sovereign” while more accurate, is a mouthful. Those people (including the Canadians, as already mentioned) are incorrectly labeling their leaders as kings, but I think that they aren’t kings.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Nicholas:

            hereditary sovereign

            Well, I was using “king” as shorthand, since Saul used “serfs”. NRx folks sometimes explicitly suggest a hereditary monarch, but that’s not a terminal goal, and there are lots of other alternatives.

            Nevertheless, I don’t quite follow the claim that a hereditary monarch is fundamentally feudal. There were thousands of years of kings before there was feudalism.

          • Nornagest says:

            The very core of my argument is that we have applied the term “King” to people who are not good examples of what a King is, because the term “hereditary sovereign” while more accurate, is a mouthful.

            Yeah, I get that, I just think you’re wrong — at least about the necessity of feudalism. The very word “king” predates feudalism: it’s from the Proto-Germanic kuningaz (probably late first millennium BCE). Even at that point it seems to have meant hereditary monarchy; it’s etymologically related to “kin”, as in family, as in that one important family.

            You could make an argument that Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden is not a proper monarch, but I don’t think you could do that for, say, Beowulf, or Tarquinius Priscus. Neither presided over a feudal society, and both are conventionally called kings and have been for centuries.

          • At a slight tangent to the “king discussion,” I think the “king implies feudalism” claim is almost backwards. The kings who most closely fit our image are absolute monarchs, rulers of post-feudal societies. The feudal king was more nearly a coalition leader than an absolute monarch, because most of the knights belonged to the nobles.

            I saw a figure somewhere that at one point the feudal levy of Normandy was larger than that of France.

      • birdboy2000 says:

        Counterpoint: Some of the periods of sharpest left-wing changes in history (the French and Russian revolutions, notably) came as a direct response to bad times. Peace, land, and bread was a Bolshevik promise, not something peasants were already experiencing!

        • Sastan says:

          A fair point. I suppose I’d argue that the revolution didn’t happen against the really hardcore monarchs, but under relatively “liberal”, progressive monarchs. Ivan the Terrible and Louis the Sun King don’t get revolutioned, but Nick the Second does.

          It is when the country is shifting already, but not fast enough, that left wing revolution tends to happen. And, of course, there are always definitional arguments (I’d say that the left wing revolution in both those nations became right wing pretty fast, but YMMV).

      • “The liberal policies of the late empire”

        The Empire..that’s “empire” was more liberal than the republic?

    • Asterix says:

      I think the best response is that recent events always seem to overwhelm the rest of history. In the late 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, Cthulhu was swimming right. Maggie Thatcher’s Tories displaced Labour and stayed in charge for some time, breaking power of the coal union (definitely a rightward shift) and privatizing government housing. Deng Xiao-Peng introduced free trade in the People’s Republic. Gorby wouldn’t do that, but he allowed what Communists used to call “bourgeios freedoms.” Then he let Eastern Europe go, and most of it set straight way to establishing democracy and privatizing industry.

      In the 70’s, it was the Republicans that were proposing price controls, and nationalizing industry was something countries around the world did. By the 90’s, the former were unthinkable and the latter was being reversed. The Third World was dropping its plans for socialism and going for market economies. Clinton got elected by promising to get with the conservative program on economic issues. Then the Republican Revolution, the GOP grabbing the House for the first time since Truman, made him keep that promise. Welfare programs had been expanding, then shrank in the 90’s with prosperity and new rules about limiting benefits, and are now expanding again.

      Things don’t last. Now we see a trend to the left, so people say we only ever see trends to the left. A better description is the proverb about mankind being a drunk that, after falling off its horse in one direction, gets back on and promptly falls off in the other direction.

      • Skaevola says:

        I think this is the best answer.

        If anybody is interested in reading up more on a recent time in history where things took a definitive shift rightwards, check out the book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl. He talks about several “counter-revolutions” where the revolutionaries were reactionary rather than progressive, including Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiao-Peng as you mentioned. He also talks about the Iranian Revolution, where a proto-liberal democracy was replaced by a conservative theocracy, radical Islam in Afghanistan, and the Catholic religious undertones in anti-communism in Poland.

        The world is complicated and unpredictable, but people still try to tell the future using linear estimation.

        • semiautorabbit says:

          I personally subscribe to a weaker form of the hypothesis: If you look only at the range of acceptable opinions among the cultural elite (especially the academic-media elite, what NRxniks call the Catherdral), then “cthulu swims left” looks a lot truer, IMO.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      I hear that the hip new thing in EvoBio is Pathogen Stress Theory. It posits that high levels of disease beget more conservative cultures, and that the type of diseases suffered directly determines the cultural landscape.

      From this, it follows that leftward drift is contingent on increasing levels of cleanliness. So if the first world were to ever experience an epidemic, we’d probably experience a sudden rightward shift in politics (like Nazi Germany after the Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920).

    • Spaghetti Lee says:

      I wonder how much mileage that belief gets out of the gay rights movement, which…might be an unprecendented example of public opinion reversal in human history? From shameful mental defect to loud-and-proud melting pot ingredient in just 50 years. Even comparing other left-wing social issues, the abortion rights movement isn’t doing so hot, the gun control and environmental movements have been consistently losing ground. The anti-racism/anti-sexism movements are at a boil right now, but I think there’s far far more light than heat there. Economic issues, changing technology might soon throw a wrench into things, but the Western non-communist leftist ideal of a strong, financially soluble working class bolstered by organized labor and worker protections is not doing so hot at the moment.

      So I wonder if neo-reactionaries think “the march of leftism is unstoppable; look at gay rights!” and then they focus on that and don’t put it in context with anything else.

      • Reporting in 🙂 The problem is confusing highly politicized “issues” with how the “Zeitgeist” moves. Inner vs. outer view, zoomed in or zoomed out. Guns for example. Sure they the anti-gun crowd is suffering some setbacks in the US, but they won everywhere else. Without even a fight. You think a political movement restricted to one country only can hold out indefinitely?

        But take even more of a step back and ask yourself this question – is the Zeitgeist moving towards the idea of a man defending his family on his own, so towards a sheepdog attitude, or more towards a typical civilian attitude where the average man is considered generally peaceful and relies on the police? Is the Zeitgeist trending towards hero-worshipping self-defense with deadly force? If your next generation man is 100% up to feminist standards, is he going to be his family’s hero, fighting and possibly dying for it? Are feminists teaching girls to shoot rapists? How is this looking in the longer run?

        So try looking at the broader view, the Zeitgeist is more than just issues.

        Of course the broader you look at it, the less accurate data you have to work with. I understand stats like % of people supporting gun control are at least accurate but simply not relevant enough.

        • multiheaded says:

          The vast, vast majority of rapists can be deterred without escalating to actual physical violence.

    • The Anonymouse says:

      People think Cthulhu always swims left because that’s what most of us have personally witnessed within our lifetimes. Cthulhu does swim left in times of peace and lack of (absolute) want, and Western civilization is enjoying one of those times right now. But the world seems to correct rightward–jarringly–when the perpetual human ills of conquest, war, famine, and death return.

      History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

      It’s like the old joke about academia, that the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. We get to worry about remembering the correct snowflake pronouns precisely because we don’t have to worry about the burst radius of a 155mm shell, whether those men outside with machetes are from our clan or the other one, or whether the wheat crop is going to fail. From our perspective, Cthulhu is swimming left. History tells us there will be a reset.

      • “People think Cthulhu always swims left because that’s what most of us have personally witnessed within our lifetimes.”

        If you are under 35 and a US citizen. See Asterix’s comment above.

    • Anonymous says:

      I don’t know if it’s a counter-argument, per se, but just as Cthulhu can be set back, so can be leftism. If you look at history, there are recurring events where leftoid movements rise and fall after creating substantial disturbance (follow the gnostic/Bogomilist/Cathar heresies, for example), quelled by agents who rightly see them as an existential threat (the orthodox Christian churches, medieval kings, respective to the earlier example). Cthulhu swims left; he can be banished from the physical realm for a while, but he’ll return again and again.

    • James Vonder Haar says:

      The simplest counterargument is that the United States won the Cold War. More broadly, the state of the world has shifted significant rightward in regards to economic policy for the past two or three decades.

      There’s also lots of examples of leftist stuff that just never caught on, even though at the time someone of Moldbug’s persuasion might be saying “yep, that’s where we’re gonna be in 20 years.” Some leftists of the sexual revolution were in favor of pedophilia, but the taboo against that is if anything stronger now than it was before the sexual revolution. People living in leftist communes in the 60s and 70s probably felt like they were the avant garde of a new way of living, but things didn’t work out so well for them. On the whole, most of the change has been leftward, but the vast majority of out there leftist ideas don’t get adopted.

    • One piece of evidence is that the world’s two largest countries (population) have been moving in the other direction, although in neither case as far as I would wish. It’s been a huge shift in the case of China, associated with an enormous increase in per capita income–twenty-fold from Mao’s death to 2010. It’s much slower in India, but a country that has been officially socialist through its entire history now has a president who favors moves in the direction of deregulation and privatization.

      I think forms of leftism collided with reality in two contexts. One was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fifty years ago, a lot of people believed that while the Soviet Union was not a free society, it was doing a better job of converting a poor country into a rich country than capitalist economies. Paul Samuelson’s textbook, the leading econ text in the country, claimed for something like twenty years that the USSR was catching up to the U.S.—despite the fact that each edition showed about the same ratio of GNP (accepting the Soviet figures) as the previous edition. After the collapse it became very hard to believe that that particular economic model was a successful one.

      The other was the experience of developing countries. Some, most obviously India, tried to develop on a model based on central planning and foreign aid. Others, such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, on a relatively free market model (again, of course, less so than I would want). The former stayed poor, the latter got rich. Eventually the contrast became sharp enough so that the old view went out of favor.

      At the same time, of course, there are always new arguments coming up, and in some ways existing developed societies are becoming more left. Some of those are ways that I, as a libertarian, approve of, others—the shift away from freedom of contract towards “you can only decide who to deal with if we approve of your reasons”—not.

      • Jiro says:

        The reason that China isn’t moving leftwards is the same reason that Japan has managed to keep the death penalty: many leftist ideas spread mainly by spreading rather than by arising spontaneously. And it’s really hard to spread ideas to a country that is on the other side of the world and speaks a language that you don’t.

  7. I seem to have particular failure mode socially understanding how to get from point A to point B and so never even attempt. I.e. It seems like relationships go from meeting and doing things together and talking about meaningless stuff. *Magic*. We understand each other very well and feel comfortable sharing nearly everything with each other.

    More details:
    My parents are going through a divorce. The scariest thing is not the divorce but the lack of people to talk about it with. I have a good number of acquaintances but no real friends. I am perfect comfortable sharing that my parents are divorced but don’t feel comfortable burdening them with anything and it seems it would be out of place and I don’t think I would receive too out of it.

    I feel like I am missing out on something happening between acquaintance and friend. It feels like magic. The issue is partially that I feel like there isn’t anything that *needs* to happen. Like I feel like if someone I felt I was close enough to in inferential distance was just like: “You can tell me anything, and I hope I can tell you anything. I trust you” I think that would accomplish this magic. Maybe I don’t understand the way communication of common knowledge works and that is the magic. I have the same issue with attraction, like how do we go from hanging out at the movies and getting dinner every week (being platonic friends) to kissing/snuggling/fucking.

    • Paul Torek says:

      I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of friends become friends because 1 of the acquaintances had a burden and shared it. I think one friend is worth quite a few acquaintances, so, I’d say go for it.

    • Echo says:

      You’re not alone in feeling that way.
      Some people supposedly have actual plans for the relationships. The rest of us just wake up one day thinking “wait, when did we start saying “I love you”?”

      It’s more of a crutch than a solution, but a socially adept Bro is worth his weight in gold for people like us. Workout buddies > romantic partners for meeting your basic “oh god I’m lost in a freakish hipster city and have no close friends” socialisation needs.
      Plus bro cuddles are the best.

      • When my first marriage ended, I was teaching at VPI, living in Blacksburg, VA. It occurred to me that I might be better off looking for a wife in a larger population, so I did a rough calculation—how many women were there in Blackburg who I would have to go out with at least once to eliminate as candidates, how rapidly was I searching that population. I concluded that the limiting factor was not the population but the search strategy.

        I also concluded that one way of improving it was to aim more at friends then at girlfriends, in order to spread a larger social net. One of my friends was a colleague whose wife suggested that there were a lot of nice girls at folk dancing. She was correct.

    • 27chaos says:

      ME TOO! I think maybe people just pretend that they are actually good friends once they reach the point where friendship is ambiguous, and if both of you are pretending at once then it happens?

    • onyomi says:

      I think what you may not be seeing is that, in most close friendships, one, if not both participants has, at times, gone out on a limb and said something that seemed awkward/beyond the normal bounds of the friendship. This is why most of my close friends are very outgoing people: they overcome the barrier I have to being the awkward one by themselves coming on “too” strong. I’ve learned through experience that my idea of “coming on too strong” is probably still more withdrawn than your average nun, so I intentionally try to avoid worrying about that and just say what I want to say.

      This is more obvious in romantic relationships where, at some point, someone has to make the first move of some kind, but I think it’s even true in friendships to a lesser extent and perhaps more in terms of what’s allowed, conversation-wise, rather than what’s allowed physical contact-wise.

    • Leo says:

      I don’t know either, but I’m happy to talk to you about your parents’ divorce. I have some experience with that situation and no burdens to unload. Message Leo on irc.hackint.org, or tell me how you prefer to be contacted.

      • I feel like the ability to have opt-in private messaging enabled on SSC would go a long way to making it feel like a community of friends rather than a debating/academic club. Then if we people got along well they could move to casually mesaging eachother without too much weirdness. I admit I haven’t considered whether that might undermine the culture in some unexpected way though…

    • LTP says:

      Have you considered seeing a therapist to talk about the divorce with? Even if it is only for a couple months to deal with this specific issue of the divorce, it could be helpful if you feel like you have nowhere to turn.

      • I eventually talked to a friend and it went pretty well, but they are accross the country so that is a bit unfortunate. Like the divorce is a major non-issue. The issue is more of that it makes me worry that if it wasn’t ok or if something else happens that I need someone to talk to with, I wouldn’t really have anyone.

    • Murphy says:

      I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this about friendship but I do remember having the same vague grey area re:romance until I finally got into a real long term relationship.

      There’s not some magic line it’s just one of those vague “becomings”. At some point someone is just someone you like to talk to a bit more than others and you occasionally hang out, a couple years later you’re going cycling/running with them regularly or doing some other activity, later you’re helping them move, later you’re helping them out when they’re in a bind or helping cover for them when they need to keep something important secret, later when something terrible happens in your life they’re there to help and a few years later you’re best man at their wedding. Each stage just implies a little more sharing and/or trust.

      Romance…. I can’t talk about so much because I’m pretty sure I just lucked out getting my SO but it’s similar to the above process only instead there’s a step something like “you’re hanging out after an evening out and leaning against each other and you’re talking and looking at each other and at some point start kissing” followed by a similar gradual process where the later steps involve looking up the costs of wedding venues(where I am now) and daycares (hopefully not soon).

      If you feel like you’re missing out my advice would be to invite the other person out some time rather than passively hoping that they’ll do all the legwork. Often people are quite happy to go for coffee or a few drinks etc with someone they’re a friendly acquaintance with. Be willing to help people out, share food and accept other peoples help when offered.

    • pdan says:

      There’s strong evidence that friendships develop partly from gradually increasing the level of vulnerability. Moving from small talk to real talk can enhanced by asking specific sorts of questions:
      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html?_r=0

      Some of my favorites are things like:
      “If you could give one piece of advice to your 18-year-old self, what would it be?”
      “What is a belief that you hold, which many other people don’t?”
      “What is one of your proudest moments?”

  8. eqdw says:

    Recently I’ve become aware of the fact that I’m very sensitive to noise. Specifically high levels of background noise. Think bar, restaurant, or office. I can’t enjoy going out and socializing, because it’s too noisy. I get to work every day already pissed off and stressed out because the subway is crowded. This has even started affecting my ability to do my job, because our office is overcrowded and open-plan. This is severely hampering my quality of life.

    I know that Scott is also hypersensitive to sound, and I think I’ve seen other people here mention that too. How do you all deal with this? I’ve taken to wearing high quality earbuds everywhere, just as stealth ear-plugs, but this is not always socially acceptable. Are there any other practical tactics? Mental exercises? Medications? Hearing aids that make things quieter instead of louder?

    • Gamer Imp says:

      Meditation under progressively more distracting/loud conditions worked well for me. I still have trouble focusing on occasion, or going to sleep, but I’m no longer getting angry or anxious about ambient noise.

    • arjan de lumens says:

      I used to have a quite severe variant of this problem, to the point of frequent half-psychotic dissociation. Things like MP3 players and similar sort-of-work for short-term situations where social interaction is not expected (assuming sufficiently loud and noisy music), but gets tiresome after a while.

      I was eventually put on olanzapine for this problem, which actually worked really well. I was, after about three or so years, able to go off the drug without the problem reappearing; not sure why, whether this represents a form of habituation or organic change to my brain I do not know; I don’t particularly care.

    • 27chaos says:

      There’s a bit in an Eoin Colfer children’s novel, The Supernaturalist, where a character breaks their nose, and in order to function despite the pain they focus on the pain and try to feel its center, rather than trying to ignore it. I am somewhat sensitive to sound, but I use a tactic like this when I’m in crowds and it works well. Let the sound overwhelm you, so that it becomes noise rather than meaning.

      Sorry, I know that this sounds very woo, but I don’t know how to communicate this idea otherwise.

      • eqdw says:

        I tried something like this the other day, in a particularly noisy restaurant. It…. well it didn’t make it worse. I’ll try it again

    • Helldalgo says:

      The earbud thing is great. Personally, I’ve had luck with propranolol. No, medication is not a solution for everyone, but propranolol is a cool little beta blocker that lowers your pulse. It’s fast-acting and the effects wear off after about five hours. I take it when I having a very sensitive day, and know that I’ll be around noise.

    • Kiya says:

      I’m also noise-sensitive; large groups of people all talking over each other are the worst.
      When it’s socially acceptable (like in a subway or office, although my open-floor-plan office somehow isn’t loud) I put in earbuds and play music—despite it being equally as loud as the background noise, playing a song I know doesn’t bother me. Feels more coherent.
      My most effective strategy for dealing with excessive noise in social situations where one cannot wear earbuds is by leaving said situation, permanently or temporarily (take a break to walk outside, then come back if I still want to). I don’t go to bars, and I avoid popular restaurants on weekends. I can stick it out in noisy places for a while by making extraordinary effort, although I get hyped-up on adrenaline, which is not the best mental state for most purposes. It helps to have something else to focus on, like a conversation, a game, or a task I’m working on.

  9. Doctor Mist says:

    As a contributor to the Steve Johnson thread that puts me at risk of banning, I was interested in the cognitive dissonance I felt between “Jeez, that’s not fair” and my conviction that as owner of the blog Scott can manage it however he wants. This conviction is also what leads me to believe that in general a business (like, say, a bakery) should be able to decide whether or not to do a particular commercial transaction.

    I’m curious whether anybody of a reddish hue, like me, had a similar reaction. (Perhaps my personal involvement explains the dissonance.)

    I’m also curious whether anybody of a bluish hue who applauds Johnson’s banishment sees any parallel with, say, a bakery making decisions about what customers it wants to serve.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I’m of a very reddish hue… but of the red flag, not red tribe, variety, if you get my drift.

      The eagerness of many blue tribers to support blacklists and purges if the private sector is responsible and the right people suffer them was a major factor in my break from the blue tribe over the past year, of which I was formerly an enthusiastic member (if to the left of most of them).

      I’m very uncomfortable with moderation as a concept (it’s hierarchical and authoritarian by design, even if the moderator themselves is an anarchist, and therefore moderation is very much not in agreement with my political principles) and wish we had a better way to enforce civility and remove spam on the internet – heck, I wish I could complain about this stuff online in a place without a moderator!

      Then again, I’ve been banned from enough places that bias plays a role, too.

      • Adam Casey says:

        What do you think about reddit-style up/down voting as a way to produce civility? It doesn’t work well, but it can work well enough, and avoids the need for formal mod.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          It also encourages echo chambering, or at the very least the shutting down of people that are kind of out there. Like, I’m not a fan of John Sidles’ unintelligible posting style, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want his replies to be hidden-by-default because a lot of people think the same.

        • stargirl says:

          How much do you think in-civility even correlates with downvotes? I think if you are in-civil to unpopular people you will get more upvotes than if you are civil to unpopular people (within a wide range). The reverse holds if the target of your post is popular.

          This does not seem to solve the problem.

        • birdboy2000 says:

          As practiced on reddit, it’s a poor idea that enforces hiveminds at the expense of genuine discussion. Downvotes get rid of thoughtful things people strongly disagree with (and are too lazy to rebut) as easily as easily as actual spam/trolls, upvotes often mean “I agree with this”.

          I actually think hide ratings (ala dailykos or to a lesser extent slashdot) that rotate between regular users and strong norms against abusing them are a better idea – seemed to keep things in check much better than reddit does and my problems with those sites came from the maintainers, not the community mods. To be fair, however, my favorite fora don’t use either, and with all its incivility I still spend most of my time on 4chan.

          (Also, regarding community moderation, I don’t know any sites which use it *without* having fulltime mods with veto and ban power on top of that – so to me it seems like yet another imposition, and while community moderation fixes the hierarchical aspect I think bans and post deletion or hiding are an evil at *best*, if sometimes a necessary one.)

    • keranih says:

      I think the banning of Johnson was heavy handed and not done optimally. (Ie, there should have been a frank warning that he was getting on Scott’s last nerve first.)

      I also think it’s Scott’s blog and he can use whatever banning method he likes. I will think less of him if he continues to use non-optimal heavy-handed methods, but it will always be a balance with things I respect Scott for.

      I feel very comfortable in the area of “I can think, feel, do and say whatever I like, in an unlimited fashion, but my ability to force other people to say or do, much less think or feel, anything at all is very very limited.” I wish more people agreed with me on this.

      PS: Red Tribe. ‘MERIKA!

      • malpollyon says:

        Scott publicly stated several times before it happened that he was extremely eager to find a way to ban him. How much more of a warning do think he needed to give?

    • Adam Casey says:

      So, it’s kind of reasonable and inevitable that the person posting the banned thing would think it’s unfair to ban the post. If you thought it was reasonable to ban you for it you wouldn’t have posted it.

      So you cognitive dissonance is utterly reasonable. The general argument is clearly correct. These threads are clearly more like a private member’s club than they are like civil life. Banning someone is simply a reasonable execution of the implicit background rules of the club rather than an act of ostracism in need of a trial and the rule of settled law.

    • Spaghetti Lee says:

      As a blue-hued individual, I think there are a few important distinctions that allow me to support the former but not the latter.

      Action vs. behavior. Steve wasn’t banned for who he was, he was banned for how he treated people. Like, I guess an analogy would be if (every) gay person this business served loudly and obnoxiously accused the proprietors of homophobia for every action or non-action. Then I could sympathize with them saying “You know what, fuck this.” And it would have to be every gay person for the analogy to hold because…

      Individual vs. Group. If you want to ban one guy for acting out, he brought it upon himself. If you’re banning an entire group of people sight unseen, just because of who they are, that’s less defensible in terms of “they were making it impossible for me to run a business” (and I think that was Scott’s rationale; the biggest, most ban-worthy problem was that Steve’s presence was making calm polite discussion impossible, and that’s what this blog is supposed to be all about. Consequentialism!)

      Public vs. Private. I think businesses that avail themselves of public property and (indirect) public funding in commercial areas designed to serve the public don’t get to say that they won’t serve a particular subset of the public, for private (religious) reasons. Blogs, even big, widely-read ones like this one, are more analogous to homes, and I think people do have the right to keep whoever they want out of their own house. I am still quite skeptical of claims that someone’s personal ethics about gay marriage or birth control or abortion should trump the fact that we all still basically have to interact with each other in the public sphere. Not that those personal ethics are foolish or meaningless necessarily, but we need some sort of system that allows for the resolving of disputes, independent of who happens to have more power at a given time, and “interpersonal conduct in the public sphere should be governed by civic law, not personal belief” seems as workable as any.

      • “I think businesses that avail themselves of public property and (indirect) public funding in commercial areas designed to serve the public don’t get to say that they won’t serve a particular subset of the public”

        What does “public property” mean here? In U.S. law and politics, “public” routinely means “choosing to serve lots of people,” as in “public accommodations,” not “functioning on government property.”

        It’s true that any business is relying on indirect public funding in the form of police protection–but also paying taxes for it. If that counts, than your home counts as public too.

        I can see the argument that things run by a government, such as a public school, ought to have very limited freedom of association. But I don’t see your version in which, if I understand you, a bakery that sells to lots of people is punished for refusing to sell to people for reasons that you (and the government) don’t approve of.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      I think you’re dissonance is reasonable and to be expected. I’ve been in similar spots in the past and all I can really tell you is “them’s the breaks”. It’s Scott’s blog and thus his call.

      The trick to getting over the dissonance is simply to do exactly what you’re doing now, recognize the source, and work around it.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      After seeing a few comments, I feel I must clarify a couple of things.

      First, I’m not whining about Johnson’s banishment, or about my own threatened banishment. So I didn’t mean to elicit discussion of the merits of the banishment.

      Second, I’m not asking for help in resolving my cognitive dissonance. I’m an old man, and long accustomed to my mind not being unitary, and always interested when it does a surprising thing. My feelings were hurt, a little, but I would be in a sorry state if my ethics were required to never result in my feelings being hurt.

      Spaghetti Lee’s response was the most like what I was looking for. I can’t say I’m convinced by it, but I appreciate the thought that went into it. 🙂

    • Bugmaster says:

      I think that this is Scott’s blog, and he can do what he wants. If someone attempts to stop him from doing what he wants, I’ll argue against this. However, if Scott wants to do stupid things, then I will attempt to persuade him to stop doing those things. The two concepts are completely independent, as I see it. The same applies to bakeries.

  10. Gwen S. says:

    So how bad is adrafinil for your liver, really?

    • jeorgun says:

      If I can piggyback on this, are there any possible issues with using modafinil and/or adrafinil in conjunction with SSRIs?

  11. Anatoly says:

    Assume for the moment that the rise in Autism Spectrum diagnoses reflects a real rise in the condition (broadly considered) and not just better diagnostics.

    This rise broadly corresponds with the onset of “helicopter parenting”. In the last 30 years, parents in the Western world have been more protective of their kids than ever before. Children no longer have unsupervised access to the outside (“free-range parenting” is a minor backlash to this). Parents are more gentle with their kids’ feelings than ever before. Harsh discipline is rarer than ever.

    Is it possible that some of the rise of ASD is due to more kids than ever, already in the toddler phase, not getting enough negative emotions, enough tough parenting, and enough healthy parental neglect? Think by way of analogy of the theory that the rise of allergies is due to us being too sanitary in everyday lives, and toddlers not getting enough dirt on themselves and in their mouths (I remember reading that this theory hasn’t done well, but anyway). Here, by analogy, some kids would have trouble with emotional skills because they weren’t exposed to a wide enough range of emotions coming at them, including negative ones; trouble with the theory of mind because they weren’t getting enough of other people’s decisions antagonistically enforced on them; etc. etc.

    Has this been considered/written about/supported/refuted? Any personal opinions?

    • Oscar Cunningham says:

      I would have thougt that autistic parents would be least likely to helicopter parent (because they prefer to interact less with people in general, and so in particular will interact less with their own kids). So under your hypothesis you might expect autism to be anti-hereditary, which it ain’t.

      • Anatoly says:

        Perhaps the autistic-spectrum qualities can arise due to both hereditary and environmental factors, and the hereditary influence could both be the stronger and the rarer one.

    • It would correlate with a lot of other trends as well, though, and we could probably come up with semi-plausible explanations for many of them. For instance, video games have gone from non-existent to ubiquitous in the past 30 years. Perhaps too much time staring at a screen with no interaction with other humans causes autism.

      Obviously this is an absurd analogy, but that’s my point: the two phenomena are probably totally unrelated, but if you look hard enough you can find a potential connection.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      No, it’s the satanic kindergartens.

    • LTP says:

      Doesn’t autism present itself very very early in development?

      I think people are conflating things that should not be conflated. Socially awkward/nerdy/shy/introverted does not imply autism (though many autistic people are those things too).

    • NN says:

      So, basically the opposite of the refrigerator mother theory?

    • alexp says:

      I thought it had something do with older parents (including fathers). Though I recall that the age of parents only explains a part of the increase in autism diagnoses.

    • Autism is typically diagnosed by age 3, have people ever let children that young play unsupervised? Also I wouldn’t assume that the rise isn’t due to increasing diagnosis, quality research indicates it does.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Anecdotal counterevidence: At least inside kids’ books written in the 1960’s (and presumably intended to be realistic), mothers would routinely leave their babies in charge of kids as young as eight years old. Presumably, those kids would be significantly less attentive than the average modern mother.

    • Maware says:

      I don’t think so, because it’s not really a learned behavior.

      My own guesses are the increased age of the parents, and darkly, the possible effects of many drugs or past drug use on parents. Prozac, marijuana, Ritalin, etc. No proof to back this, but recreational and therapeutic drug use has increased and I can’t help but wonder if there’s some effect due to it.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Drug use has gone up and down. For example, amphetamine/ritalin use today is about the same as at the previous peak in 1970.

        • Maware says:

          Kind of find that a bit hard to believe as ritalin wasn’t promoted therapeutically in the 70’s. While recreational use might go up and down, therapeutic use has exploded. I don’t know enough about the subject to do more than idly speculate, but the therapeutic use of anti-depressants is a lot more common than back then.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Yes, of course ritalin is a new drug. But it is quite arbitrary to propose it has magically different long-term side-effects than amphetamine. I am talking about amphetamine produced by drug companies. That’s not quite the same as therapeutic use, but it’s pretty close. There was probably more diversion in 1970 than today, but even so, there was more therapeutic use in 1970 than in 2000. I am talking about mg per capita, which is the relevant metric for your comment. Have a source.

            Yes, SSRIs are new. Marijuana has gone up and down. It is probably still below peak usage.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      I have no idea if this has been considered/written about/supported/refuted? but it certainly seems plausible.

    • Nicholas Carter says:

      If there is any grounding to an anti-immune response in the development of Autistic symptoms then I would expect this to correlate outside of any psychological effects, because helicopter parents also have a tendency to keep their children insistently clean.

  12. Arthur B. says:

    The problem isn’t how frequent the OT are, the problem is that the comment system of this blog isn’t suitable to them. You should point those to the subreddit exclusively, or upgrade the commenting system.

    • Anonymous says:

      The absence of a comment voting system is one reason why I find this place much much more pleasant and interesting than LessWrong, despite the two sites apparently sharing contributors to a considerable extent.

      • Arthur B. says:

        I also don’t particularly care for the comment voting. This is more about how readable the threads are. Either you go fully threaded, with no limit: then I would suggest running a NNTP server, or you go flat, like the XKCD fora for instance.

        • Anonymous says:

          One argument in favor of the way threads work currently is that it’s an implicit way to say “your sub-sub-argument has gone on too long now, you’re probably not saying anything useful anymore and are just derailing the thread”.

          I’m not sure I am entirely won over by that argument, but if I were defending the status quo that is the way I would do it.

    • Echo says:

      Who moderates the subreddit?

    • James Vonder Haar says:

      Yeah, following these threads can be kind of a pain.

      I really want an SBNation-style commenting system. It tracks which of the posts are new and you can zoom down to the next unread comment by pressing “z.” Would make these much easier to follow

  13. Oscar Cunningham says:

    Sometimes I worry that we’ll find a pre-natal cure for autism, but that it will affect the entire autistic spectrum and then the number of really good mathematicians will sharply decline. I’m not sure if the suffering of autistic people outweighs the advances made by high-IQ autistics.

  14. John Schilling says:

    Is it common knowledge that the photo heading this thread is of the narrator from the last one? Or do we need a stranger to point that out for us?

  15. Douglas Knight says:

    Why do you have both open threads and link posts? You could switch to weekly posts with a few links each. You once complained that one of the links draws all the attention; if you spread out the links, they are less likely to be overshadowed.

    • switchnode says:

      Yes, this. Link posts always end up half open thread anyway. (And there are so many of them in the existing link posts that I keep accumulating tabs.)

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think a lot of people would feel intimidated posting non-like-relevant things to link threads. Also, my link collection speed can be kind of uneven. Also, it’s harder to prominently announce things that need announcing in links threads.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Don’t call them link threads. Call them open threads, which happen to be prefaced by your links. Would someone be intimidated from posting if the thread began with the same instruction this one begins with? It can do that even followed by links. Just dump your accumulated links on open/link day, regardless of how many or how few. But if you have an announcement, just post the announcement, holding the links for the next week.

  16. Anonymous Regular Reader says:

    High IQ autistics: What advice do you have for a parent of a profoundly gifted autistic child? What do you wish your parents knew when you were, say, 9-12 years old? The child enjoys SlateStarCodex, lives in an upper middle class American home, and can pass for mostly neurotypical (except for the high intelligence) to a non-expert.

    • Anthony says:

      Posting to follow. My older daughter is very smart, but has serious social deficits which pattern with some level of autism. (Reading Baron-Cohen’s test for childhood autism really sounded familiar, too.)

    • Murphy says:

      It depends on the person and it depends on how much it affects their life.

      Being around a few more people with the same internal experience can be worthwhile, if you’re in a big city looking up a local hackspace could be fun. The first one I ever went to felt like coming home and I’ve heard similar sentiments from others when I’ve shown them round.

      If they have some central interests or obsessions don’t be afraid to encourage them, they’re often useful in later life since specialisation is rewarded in this economy even for quite unusual things.

      Any specific questions or concerns?

    • Anonymous says:

      What is her personality like, and how does she feel about her schooling? I did fine socially, but my middle and high school years were characterized by constant and increasingly bitter tangles with teachers and administration, in a way that has had long-lasting repercussions. At the time I blamed myself (OK, at the time I blamed them—shortly afterwards I blamed myself), but in retrospect I’m inclined to say that the adults involved didn’t really live up to their responsibilities.

      Causative factors included being very bright and loathing perceived inefficiency (which I would not be surprised if your daughter shares), but also a total self-direction and lack of instinctive respect for authority (which I couldn’t guess as to either way). If that sounds like her I’d be happy to say more, but if not any advice I could give probably wouldn’t be relevant.

      • Anonymous Regular Reader says:

        School is incredibly boring for him but he has two good friends and has so far faced zero bullying. He gets in minor trouble at school for talking back and questioning authority, but the school’s Vice principal is understanding. Very bright, loathing perceived inefficiency, lack of instinctive respect for authority: YES for these, self-direction to a moderate extent for things outside of special interests. I want him to skip one or more grades but my spouse and son don’t want this for social reasons. I hate that the school is (for the most part) not intellectually challenging him and that with almost zero effort he can be the best student in all of his academic classes. (I don’t blame the school for this. As he could literally handle the academic work of a child six years older than he is.)

        • J says:

          I hated public school and did much better once I started at the community college at 16. And I was fortunate to get a job at a local internet company at 15, which was an amazing way to start my career. Only knew a few other techies until I went away to university at 18, then had an “OMG these are my people” moment, so I like the “find a hackerspace” idea above. I also ended up hanging around with the local ham radio community as a young teenager, and got along great with the old grandfatherly types.

          A local genius mathematician gets by by tutoring young prodigies, which sounds pretty great for them.

        • Murphy says:

          Skipping grades is a good academic status signal but I’m not so sure it actually helps people in other ways. For one I’d want to avoid distancing him from the couple of good friends. Also it can sometimes be better to be the high flying one at the top of the class with kids your own age vs middle of the class with older. It’s more satisfying to put in lots of effort to maintain your place at the top than struggling to maintain your place in the middle.

          In any special areas of interest I’d suggest looking into what’s available outside of school, if there’s classes offered by local collages for gifted teens etc it might be worthwhile or if you can afford it a few tutors to go through the more advanced versions of things he’s interested in depending on his level.

        • Have you considered unschooling? For my view of the subject, see:

          daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=unschooling

          I went to college at sixteen. At least in my case, I would still have been socially retarded if I had gone at eighteen, and sixteen got me a little closer to an age appropriate intellectual environment.

        • Another Regular says:

          (PG but non-autistic)

          …over a century of research says to skip grades, not just for educational but also for social reasons.

          Here’s one of the more recent ones. AFAIK this study is still ongoing.

          Young People Who Have Been Radically Accelerated…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universities in Australia or overseas…. In every case, the radical accelerands have been able to form warm, lasting, and deep friendships. They attribute this to the fact that their schools placed them, quite early, with older students to whom they tended to gravitate in any case. Those who experienced social isolation earlier say it disappeared after the first grade skip. Two are married with children. The majority are in permanent or serious love relationships. They tend to choose partners who, like themselves, are highly gifted.

          Two-Year Accelerands…. In general, they have enjoyed satisfactory personal and love relationships. However, those who were retained with age peers until fourth grade or later tend to find socializing difficult. Exceptionally and profoundly gifted students should have their first acceleration in the early years of school before they experience the social rejection that seems to be a significant risk for such students retained in mixed-ability classes. The skills of friendship building are first learned in the early years of school, and children who are rejected by their peers may miss out on these early and important lessons in forming relationships.

          Subjects Accelerated By One Year. The five young people who were permitted a single grade advancement are not deeply satisfied with their education. Their school experience has not been happy, and they would have dearly loved to have been accelerated further. After the euphoria of having new, challenging work, school became just as boring as it had been before the acceleration…. It is with this group that a serious dissatisfaction with friendships and love relationships starts to appear. Two have had severe problems with social relationships.

          Subjects Not Permitted Acceleration. The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling, in a lockstep curriculum with age peers in what is euphemistically termed the “inclusion” classroom. The last thing they felt, as children or adolescents, was “included.” With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of lack of ability but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating. These young people had consoled themselves through the wilderness years of undemanding and repetitive school curriculum with the promise that university would be different—exciting, intellectually rigorous, vibrant—and when it was not, as the first year of university often is not, it seemed to be the last straw.

          Some have begun to seriously doubt that they are, indeed, highly gifted. The impostor syndrome is readily validated with gifted students if they are given only work that does not require them to strive for success. It is difficult to maintain the belief that one can meet and overcome challenges if one never has the opportunity to test oneself.

          Several of the nonaccelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships. Six have had counseling. Of these, two have been treated for severe depression.

          When I was nine I was offered what Gross calls a “token grade skip,” but I was afraid to skip grades. At the time I officially had a “best friend,” as well as other good friends at school and in scouts, but the reality was that I was very different from all of these kids, and in effect was socially isolated as described. I was afraid it would be even worse trying to deal with those intimidating older kids. My parents should have discussed the research with me and helped me gain the confidence to go ahead. (Actually, ideally they should have homeschooled me for a year and then sent me to high school.) Instead they turned it down. (I later arranged early college.)

          My beginning to read the research right at the cusp of adolescence–research my parents had lying around the house but had “never bothered to read” (well, not thoroughly and with attention)–resulted in two decades of recriminations. I’m talking repeated screaming fights continuing into my young adulthood. The issue is *still* somewhat touchy in our family.

          You see…my parents *had Stephanie Tolan’s book in the house*–the one with the famous “Open Letter”–and they let the damn letter go “in one eye and out the other.”

          You know…when *I* read the “Open Letter”, I cried. That’s how accurate it is.

          Have you read it?

          Did you allow yourself to empathize with the children described there?

          [Jason’s] parents have decided that next year they will try a new tack, in a new school, with whatever combination of radical subject-matter acceleration and out-of-school learning they can arrange. It has taken a long time to be finally convinced that [a profoundly gifted] child is so different that minor alterations of normal school methods can’t be enough.

          My parents very deliberately refused empathy for the children described in the research (not just the “Open Letter,” the longitudinal studies too). (Teen!Me would bring them passages from the research that especially reflected my experience, hoping for understanding…but…)

          If they’d allowed themselves to empathize, they’d have had to face that I had been hurt in the same way, and because of choices they had made.

          My parents went to school at a time when grade-skipping was routine. Each skipped a grade, and they are only discovering now, when reading former classmates’ obituaries, how many of them had skipped grades too. They never knew what they’d been saved from, so they never knew what a strong negative effect failing to skip grades tends to have.

          They say that now, in their old age.

          I consider them a cautionary tale of what happens when you never let your kid experience how bad inappropriate placement can be: He never *understands* how bad it can be (or, sometimes, what it even is), and therefore inflicts it on his kid(s).

          OTOH…dude. Over a century of research says to skip grades. Listen to the damn research.

          (I chose to rant a bit in the above because I wanted to illustrate the kind of, ah, bad parent-child relationship that you may be sowing by failing to take responsibility for securing radical acceleration. Over a century of research, my friend.)

          BTW, I don’t exactly disagree with Murphy’s comment. It’s just that (as I think you know) the issue for a PG kid isn’t “put in lots of effort to stay at the top” vs. “struggle to stay in the middle”; it’s “put in lots of effort to stay at the top” vs. “*don’t* put in any effort and stay at the top.” I actually am the type who’s happier to “work hard to stay at the top” than to “struggle to stay in the middle.” PG kids who liked to “struggle to stay in the middle” have graduated from high school at age ten. A PG kid who, like me, only needs the work to be just barely “hard” (complex) enough that they can focus on it at all…ideally *I’d* have *started* high school at age nine or ten.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      This may or may not be relevant, since your daughter may be an only child, but..

      .. Please, for the love of GOD, try not to make spur-of-the-moment decisions when shit happens, which I suspect it will.

      Like every other person on this blog pretty much, I’m on the spectrum and have a very high IQ, but social situations are things my two non-autistic younger brothers will trump me in constantly. As a result, to this very day, every time I get into even the slightest altercation with one of my brothers, whether it’s the most minor of fights or something verbal, our mother, and to a lesser extent father, will decide I did everything wrong and my brothers are paragons of virtue, constantly.

      The above paragraph is, of course, hyperbole, but the crux of the matter is that autists are bad at generating sympathy. In my case, it’s bad enough that I’ve given up on having parents who are going to understand me or care about my point of view most of the time, simply because they seem wildly uninterested/unable to comprehend such things a lot of the time. This is something I’d rather not see happen to other people, NT or not, so.. Please. If your daughter seems upset or off somehow, ask her what’s up, and try to be understanding even if her reasoning seems outlandish. The(an?) alternative to this is ending up with a daughter who disconnects with you on an emotional level to the point where she won’t even try appealing to your understanding anymore, which is something I doubt you’d enjoy.

      • “Like every other person on this blog pretty much, I’m on the spectrum and have a very high IQ”

        As best I can tell, I am not on the spectrum. I suspect a lot of other people here are not. The contrary appearance is, I think, the result of threads on autism which naturally pull people with first hand experience.

      • grendelkhan says:

        I also am not, so far as I can tell, on the spectrum. I was an unlikeable child, and I’ve had plenty of moments where I really wished that that could be followed by “because of something people would recognize as being outside of my control”, but so far as I can tell, I just liked trains and math, strongly disliked playing with figurative toys, and remain at least moderately introverted. So, regular nerd, not special nerd.

        Hm. I’m more bitter about my youth than I had thought.

    • US says:

      (Hi again :))

      I felt slightly guilty about disengaging during our last exchange as abruptly as I did, but I didn’t really feel I had any more to add and besides I’ve recently been trying to revive my habit of not giving people advice, ever. I figured I might as well tell you that rather than just ‘maintain radio silence’/’ignore you’.

      For what it’s worth, if I had a child like that I’d probably worry about social isolation and loneliness in adulthood. But I’d have no idea how to address that risk – my parents, especially my mother, tried, and failed (though I’m not comparable to the child you describe, as I was definitely not a ‘profoundly gifted’ child) – and it’s far from clear that this is even the most relevant problem to address.

    • Helldalgo says:

      I’m not sure what my IQ is, because my parents won’t tell me and I don’t have any interest in knowing as an adult. But I definitely got the “gifted kid” treatment. I started passing as neurotypical in high school, so I went through my middle-school years as a social pariah.

      My parents handled that age poorly for me. Not due to any real malice or ignorance, but because that’s when they started taking in foster children. I went from the oldest of two children, with a large amount of parental involvement, to homeschooling with a lot of autonomy in a nine-person household. My parents’ focus was on the foster children and their special needs. I was articulate, fairly responsible, and well-behaved, so my parents left me alone or had me operate in a parental role most of the time. I wrote, did math, and read my history books at a rate much higher than my peers, so my academic progress was mostly unmonitored. I never learned study skills, because I stopped working on things when they became hard. I never finished projects for the same reason.

      For a long time, this was fine. Things got difficult for me long after I’d surpassed my peers’ averages. The lack of structured homework and grading left me ill-equipped for high school and college. Even so, my “giftedness” got me by until about tenth grade.

      If I have on piece of advice, it’s to ensure that your child works on sufficiently challenging projects, through to the end, even if the end product is not perfect. I’m not saying to force the kid to do something they hate, but encourage them to power through the hard things. Eventually, giftedness will fail to be enough, and they’ll have to rely on effort.

    • Charlie says:

      In my hometown there was an “advanced” high school that taught science, math, and computer classes half-day. There may be similar options near you that would be a similarly good idea. Ditto taking intro college classes while in high school. I would guess it’s possible for their friends to do all this too.

      One thing I learned too late was that I could go to the library (or bittorrent), check out a textbook for something I was interested in, and read the textbook.

    • nope says:

      I’m not autistic, but I did test in the profoundly gifted range as a kid, and I also have ADHD, which has an incredible amount of overlap with autism symptomatically (particularly executive dysfunction, sensory issues and some of the social issues, but in a different way than autists). Don’t think that your kid can create their own structure to function in just because they’re smart and act independent. Autism involves varying degrees of executive dysfunction, but as far as I’m aware, it’s always present in the condition to some degree. This is perhaps the most important thing for you as a parent to learn about and accommodate, because it will probably have a bigger impact on your kid’s life than the social aspects of autism (especially if he can pass for NT).

      If he’s profoundly gifted, he won’t need much structure or accommodation to skate through middle and high school effortlessly, even at challenging schools. But you shouldn’t take his high grades at face value. This is the age at which people with executive dysfunction have to learn coping mechanisms or they will fall apart when they end up in a less structured environment, as college often is. I know from experience – I was undiagnosed and untreated in grade school because I got perfect grades in the most challenging courses my schools offered, so everyone thought I was a bit cavalier but fine. Then I went to college and and fell apart, and within a year lost my scholarship and flunked out. I had relied on outside structure that was ripped from under my feet as soon as I became a legal adult, and lost a lot of opportunities as a result. (If tech weren’t so non-credentialist, I’d be pretty fucked right now.)

      Thomas Brown does research on high IQ people with ADHD specifically, and while your kid isn’t diagnosed with ADHD, I would recommend one of his books for you in particular:
      http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=bf1ed1e02a4c4166e60a58988719eb2f

      Also, be aware that ADHD and autism are highly comorbid – several studies I’ve seen have found that up to 50% of autists also meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It may be useful to read up on the subject in case your son falls in this category, and if he does, I urge you to start pharmacological treatment sometime before he leaves home.

  17. Loquat says:

    Public service announcement:

    If you or someone you care about is an American on Medicare, the annual enrollment period has now started and will run through December 7th. And since Medicare plans with prescription drug coverage are (a) allowed to vary significantly in what drugs they cover and what copays they charge, and (b) allowed to change what drugs they cover and what copays they charge from year to year, I strongly recommend that anyone taking much medication use the plan finder on medicare.gov rather than trying to find a whole list of medications on every individual plan’s formulary. The plan finder will tell you what plans cover your meds, what the copays are, and what if any restrictions your meds may be subject to, and it will do this for all the plans available in your zip code. I can even post a tutorial on how to use it if anyone wants one.

    (Yes it’s true, the US government set up the Medicare prescription drug benefit in such a way that it’s actually fairly challenging for any senior who really needs the drug coverage to find the best plan without recourse to an online resource like the plan finder. Foreigners from countries with saner healthcare systems may feel free to point and laugh.)

  18. Chris Thomas says:

    Note: Not sure if this is right, but it’s a perspective on gun violence I haven’t seen. Just trying it on for size.

    Violent Crime: Beyond Gun Prevalence

    Libertarians tend to be a pro gun lot (Lott?), reflexively resisting the claim that more guns lead to more crime. They may be right to do this, but it’s important to realize that there is no compelling a priori reason to take a stand one way or the other. Libertarians often point out that criminals don’t wish to prey on armed targets, and so an armed population, especially a population known to be armed, will be prayed upon less often. This is reason to think more guns will reduce crime, for the simple economic reason that widespread gun ownership raises the costs of predation. But this is not the whole story. Owning and having access to a tool will make its use less costly, ceteris paribus. Said another way, when a criminal owns a gun, the cost to her of escalating a crime to the point of drawing and firing it goes down. This is reason to believe more guns will increase crime. We are at an impasse.

    The reality, of course, is that these are both nothing more than tendencies, and there are many more besides. The question of which tendency or set of tendencies is the strongest is an empirical problem, and not an easy one. So why the libertarian hostility to claims that more guns lead to more crime? Is it because they understand the empirical literature in this field, and it all points to the title of John Lott’s book, “More Guns, Less Crime”? This is certainly possible, but there is another reason, and one that affects more than just this issue.

    Libertarians often conflate claims like “Guns lead to crime.” with claims like “We need more gun control.” This happens in many public policy debates, especially ones where non-state solutions are not obvious. The assumption seems to be that if someone opposes x, especially in the context of a public debate, they must wish to outlaw it. But notice this: if someone were to complain that there are too many lawyers, as opposed to too many guns, most libertarians could see through to the heart of this problem and say, “Yes, there are too many lawyers, and this is because the state artificially increases the demand for legal services with its Byzantine cornucopia of laws, laws which ordinary people could not hope navigate on their own. The solution, therefore, is not to outlaw or regulate legal services, which would only be treating the symptom, but to remove the laws which give rise to their need.” This, or something like it, is the appropriate response to many such complaints. The difficulty is in identifying the specific patch of dirt where the rulers have planted the diseased seed.

    The gun debate fits this pattern quite nicely, and it is baffling that more libertarians do not see it this way. Rather than joining the chorus of the establishment right in praising guns in all there banging glory, libertarians should be doing what they do best: pointing out the common mistakes and omissions of both left and right, and pointing a unique way forward.

    If this were a debate about smoking, for instance, libertarians would be pointing out (hopefully) that tobacco farmers (indeed, most large scale commercial farmers) are heavily subsidized. This is done directly as “farm income stabilization”, and indirectly through a variety of other means, including subsidized water for crops. So why on earth is nobody pointing out that the weapons industry is similarly subsidized? Indeed, how big could major weapons suppliers have become if it weren’t for the guaranteed patronage of police departments all across the country, as well as federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (saving America from guns with, what was it again?)? And this is to say nothing of the military industrial complex. Would it be a stretch to say that the Garrison State abroad, and the Police State at home have artificially stimulated the weapons industry? And isn’t that fact important in the gun debate?

    How else might our political betters be artificially stimulating gun ownership? One way would be by increasing the threat of violence. People who feel chronically threatened will be more likely to seek protection, and one avenue to protection is owning a gun. This will be especially true if other avenues to protection are closed off, as, for instance, with the monopolization of police services. If this noble monopoly doesn’t live up to its official mission statement, alternatives, however imperfect, will be found. And if we accept, as libertarians surely do, the standard picture of a monopoly as having chronically high prices and low quality, then isn’t this another way the state artificially encourages gun ownership?

    And this isn’t the whole story either. What kinds of things does the state do to increase violent crime? While it may come as a shock in mainstream political circles, libertarians, economists, and those on the anti-authoritarian left will not be surprised to see the finger pointed at the War on Drugs. Black markets encourage violence for a variety of reasons, and as Jeffrey Miron puts it in Violence, Guns and Drugs,

    …black-market producers of a good cannot use the legal system to adjudicate commercial disputes such as nonpayment of debts. Black-market employers risk legal penalties themselves if they report their employees for misuse of “company” funds or property. Purchasers of black-market goods cannot sue for product liability, nor can sellers use the courts to enforce payment. Along a different line, rival firms cannot compete via advertising and thus might wage violent turf battles instead. Thus, in black markets, disagreements are more likely to be resolved with violence.

    In addition, a meta study from the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, which reviewed the English language scientific literature on the effect of drug law enforcement on violent crime, found that “…existing evidence suggests that drug related violence and high homicide rates are likely a natural consequence of drug prohibition and that increasingly sophisticated and well-resourced methods of disrupting drug distribution networks may unintentionally increase violence. From an evidence-based public policy perspective, gun violence and the enrichment of organized crime networks appear to be natural consequences of drug prohibition.” On the other hand, Firearms and Violence, a meta study from the National Research Council on the effects of gun control, found that “…answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods, however well designed. For example, despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime [emphasis mine], and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children’s behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms. The committee found that the data available on these questions are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements.” So it seems as though drug prohibition is a much more robust predictor of violence than gun prevalence; and yet this issue is rarely mentioned in the gun debate.

    The point here is not that gun availability is an unimportant factor in determining levels of violence. It is rather that libertarians need not feel defensive at the possibility that guns might encourage crime. Even if true, such a fact would not count as an argument for gun control, or for any broader justification of the state. It could even count as a greater indictment of the state. After all, the state artificially encourages the weapons industry in various ways. It does this by being the largest customer of the major weapons producers, as well as by stimulating the demand for violent solutions through drug enforcement. These are artificial, state induced problems, and it may be that the tendency in a freer market would be toward far less guns, if only the state would get out of the way.

    • Anonymous says:

      The reason I don’t find the argument that guns cause crime convincing is because, so far as I can tell, what a criminal needs to be able to commit a crime is not a gun but a way of being more powerful than their target. Whatever weapons citizens can carry for self-defense, criminals will get the cheapest weapon that puts them at at an advantage. If citizens can carry fists, criminals will carry knives. If citizens can carry baseball bats, criminals will carry guns. If citizens can carry guns, criminals will carry – wait, there’s nothing that can beat a gun. So in this case criminals carry guns too, but it’s the only one of these situations where the citizen, not the criminal, has the advantage – since the law is on the side of law-abiding citizens and against criminals.

      This is, of course, an oversimplification, but the basic point is that ability to commit crime does not depend on availability of a particular tool so much as availability of any tool that makes the user more powerful than those they want to victimize – which depends on what the latter have. For uses of guns that do not depend on what anyone else is carrying, I would certainly expect cheaper guns to make these activities more prevalent. A connection such as “more guns, more shooting ranges” or “more guns, more hunting” is one I would expect to be true.

      • John Schilling says:

        If you are slandered in the New York Times, is the rational course of action to simply say that you don’t care what the editors of the NYT think and if there are any sensible people in the readership you’ll go about convincing them that the NYT is a partisan hatchet job, etc?

        RationalWiki is not the New York Times, but it is disproprotionately influential among the people we here might fruitfully interact with in the future. In part because at least half the time it does live up to its name, in part because even when it isn’t being rational it speaks the lingo, in part because it was in the right place at the right time to fill a niche. If it slanders Scott, or SSC, or all of us generally, that’s not something that can be addressed by writing off everyone who happened to stumble across RW before SSC, nor really by trying to persuade them all after the fact.

        I don’t have an answer for what to do about this, save that do nothing / ignore it is an unsatisfactory and ultimately expensive answer.

        • Dude Man says:

          One response would be to document all of RationalWiki’s misdeeds and write up a response that makes it clear what RationalWiki is and why it should not be trusted. I seem to recall Scott doing something similar in a post he had here, but he had since taken it down.

      • John Schilling says:

        There are really two arms races at work, and one of them is pretty stunted.

        Criminals vs. unarmed civilians usually stops when the criminals have knives. Almost everyone will yield to a knife, almost no one will prevail unarmed against a knife-fighter, and knives offer more control over exactly how much violence is being delivered. If someone ever invents a true SF-style “stun gun”, this race will take a new and possibly uglier turn.

        The more important arms race is criminals vs. other criminals, because criminals are in many respects each other’s ideal prey – dealing in cash and compact valuables, unable to turn to the law for assistance, etc. This almost always ends when criminals have the best portable or concealable weapons available, though some societies have managed to maintain an at least quasi-stable equilibrium where only the criminal bosses and their top-level enforcers have guns.

        There’s no real arms race between armed criminals and armed citizens, because almost all criminals would rather just back off and try the next hopefully-unarmed citizen. The few exceptions tend to strongly overlap the criminal-on-criminal predatory class.

        And except in failed states, there’s rarely a criminal-vs-police arms race, because the police can always just whistle up the army if it comes to that. If the weapons kept at hand to deal with other criminals also overmatch the average beat cop’s sidearm, they might be used opportunistically in that role, but almost no criminal has this as their master plan.

        Introducing gun control, unless it is done very carefully, shifts the balance of power against armed citizens, has little effect on the threat to unarmed citizens, and encourages criminals to add everything from cheap pistols to state-of-the-art military rifles to their black-market dealings.

        • Spaghetti Lee says:

          Here’s the thing though. It always seems like a weird non-sequitur to me. We have these mass shootings, the pro-gun-control crowd demands political action, the anti-gun-control crowd responds that banning guns will not solve problems, but they always map their statistics and scenarios onto muggings, not mass shootings, even when it’s mass shootings that people are angry about in the first place.

          If I were a criminal looking to steal someone’s wallet, yes, of course I’d scope out unarmed people. But the Chris Harper-Mercers and Adam Lanzas of the world aren’t out there to steal wallets, they’re out there to kill as many people as possible before dying themselves. They always use weapons that are designed for mass murder, not self defense, and they always buy those weapons completely legally. It seems odd to me given how many of these shooters point to crippling social isolation as a justification for what they did. Like, I’m supposed to assume they’d go find a street level connection for a semi-automatic if they couldn’t buy one legally? Doesn’t that not add up to anyone else? So I’m not sure how much I buy the argument that every shooter who uses a legally-purchased gun could have and would have also gotten one through illegal means.

          I happen to support the right to carry a weapon for self-defense. I don’t do it myself because I feel the costs outweigh the benefits, but if other people want to I don’t really care that much. But the type of guns that get used in mass shootings, the type that get talked about most often in terms of bans, are above and beyond what you’d need to scare off a mugger.

          It’s like, if some medieval king tried to ban the use of cannons because random rebels were using them to attack villages and people responded by defending how a good dagger could scare away your average highwayman. Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t seem to follow.

          • Anonymous says:

            I think the relevant responses are:

            – Mass shootings are a very small proportion of all murders. If what you care about is stopping mass shootings, you might well be right. If what you care about is stopping murders, going after mass shootings is a bad way to do it.

            – What you say might not be as true as you think – last time this topic came up, someone, I think John Schilling, pointed out that there are alternative methods of mass killing such as arson. Would wannabe school shooters grab a can of gasoline instead of a gun if the latter were unavailable? I don’t know. Maybe.

            – It’s worth mentioning that mass shootings almost always happen in gun-free zones. My take on this is that if it’s really important to have a gun-free zone, you should probably search people entering it more carefully. A country that has banned guns is, in effect, a very large gun-free zone, and they keep it so by taking steps to prevent guns from coming into the country. It is probably not that practical for all schools, colleges, cinemas, and so on to take the same precautions. On the other hand, maybe not all of them need to be gun free zones after all.

          • Spaghetti Lee says:

            Well, I think that stopping mass shootings being more important than stopping ‘regular’ street crime is kind of an unspoken truth in the gun control movement, one that I personally agree with; I may be wrong, but it seems far more likely that innocent people, especially children, are likely to be caught in a mass shooting. I think it goes unspoken because it hides some fairly ugly assumptions, especially by left wing standards, about who deserves to die and who deserves to be safe, but I think if you gave people the option to magically eliminate all school shootings, keeping everything else about gun crime the way it is, lots of people would take it.

            People may also focus on it because it’s far more politically feasible than any sort of blanket gun ban (i.e. still damn near impossible) or because pro-gun-rights arguments about personal freedom and a defense against government tyranny hold less water.

            I think the problem with gun-free zones is that they’re largely a rhetorical concept. Either, yeah, actually enforce them, or do away with the polite fiction. I personally think that a society where a significant number of people were carrying weapons of a caliber that could stop a mass shooting would be less safe, because accidents happen, and people are way too confident about their ability to calmly and efficiently assess a crime scene and dispatch the shooter. You here stories about cops who have been through years of training screwing up often enough, so I frankly don’t so the argument that good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns as anything more than a just-so story. At least, I think turning the real world into a testing ground of that hypothesis would be a poor judgment call.

          • NN says:

            But the Chris Harper-Mercers and Adam Lanzas of the world aren’t out there to steal wallets, they’re out there to kill as many people as possible before dying themselves.

            No, they aren’t. If they wanted to kill as many people as possible, they’d be using explosives, or if they lacked the means to acquire or create explosives they’d be using gasoline and matches. The average mass murder with guns kills about 5 people, the average mass murder with fire kills about 7 people, and the average mass murder with explosives kills about 21 people.

            These people use guns because they want to attain as much infamy as possible, and for whatever reason mass shootings get way more media attention than arsons. Case in point: you’ve probably never heard of this deliberately set apartment fire in France last month that killed 8 people, an act of mass murder by any definition that killed more people than the Isla Verde killings.

            They always use weapons that are designed for mass murder, not self defense, and they always buy those weapons completely legally.

            No, most mass shooters use handguns, which are absolutely designed for self defense. The rest generally use hunting rifles, which are designed to kill single animals from a long distance. Only a handful have used machine guns, which are the only type of personal firearm that can even be remotely be described as being “designed for mass murder,” and which are already banned for civilian ownership.

            EDIT:

            Would wannabe school shooters grab a can of gasoline instead of a gun if the latter were unavailable? I don’t know. Maybe.

            Note that there is at least one known case of exactly this (apart from the fact that it didn’t happen at a school) happening: the Happy Land fire was started when a guy attempted to acquire a gun to shoot up the club where his ex-girfriend worked, but he failed to acquire a gun and decided to set the place on fire instead. The resulting fire killed 87 people, which is as far as I know more than any civilian mass shooting on record.

          • Spaghetti Lee says:

            Well, I don’t live in France, so that might be a confounding variable in terms of whether I’ve heard of it or not. Also, it would seem to make sense that arson is less-discussed given how uncommon it is relative to other crimes: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2009/01/2007arrests.png

            You’re right that I should amend “while making sure everyone knows it was them” to “kill as many people as possible”. But I don’t think the focus on guns comes from the media so much as the murderers themselves. Opening fire in a crowded building is a much easier and less disputable way of saying “It was me! I did this!” then setting something on fire or biochemical terrorism or what have you.

            If your claim that mass murderers often place more value on attention and ego than on body count holds true, and my claim that mass murderers who acquire guns illegally would not necessarily do so illegally also holds true, wouldn’t it hold that keeping them away from guns specifically would reduce the number of mass shootings, since they wouldn’t, for various reasons, just turn to gasoline and matches? I’ll stay away from ownership bans because that’s a conversation killer, but would you object to more stringent laws on who is allowed to own a gun and what requirements they have to meet?

          • J says:

            Chances of dying in a shooting spree are ridiculously low. I don’t see good stats on it, but this page claims 383 deaths from mass shootings in the US in 2014: http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015

            Looks to me like that includes things like gang-related drive-by shootings, rather than just “crazy guy walks into a mall and starts shooting” cases.

            So that’s a bit more than a 1 in a million chance per year, or perhaps 1:10,000 lifetime, making it less likely than dying from a plane crash, tornado or heat stroke, according to this chart:
            http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Images_Corporate/odds-of-dying-graphic.jpg

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            The mass shooter is also trying to act out a certain narrative in their head, a common one in the modern society – the one where the hero, at some point, solves a problem by blasting a number of people with guns. (The end of Breaking Bad or that infamous Matrix hallway scene come to mind). Of course, the school shootings – and the reporting of them – have created a narrative in itself, one which attracts some people to try to play it out themselves.

            There’s not a similar heroic arson narrative. Arson seems cowardly and sneaky.

          • SUT says:

            The problem for the Pro gun-control side is that they’ve announced their intentions and agenda too publicly.

            I would say 99% of US would have no problem with a database for the purchase of an item that could be used as a deadly weapon. For example large fertilizer orders.

            But even Canada rejects a simple and useful proposal like that because it’s very clear what the next step from that gun database will be: complete disarmament. You can’t mutter about half the country “clinging to their guns” and then be like oh, we’re just trying to stop .00001% who are mass shooters

          • Anthony says:

            Another factor in school shootings (and similar events, like the movie-theater shooting) is that lots of these guys are suicidal or close enough, and if you can’t get the cops to kill you, shooting yourself seems a better way to go than throwing yourself into the fire you started.

        • DES3264 says:

          I don’t have a strong view of my own, but it seems to me that you are missing the category of gun crimes where the gun control case is strongest, and which were in my experience the primary argument of gun control advocates until mass shootings started getting so much media attention in the last five years or so.

          European level gun confiscation should significantly reduce impulsive murders. In a world where drug dealers, abusive spouses and just plain people with short tempers didn’t have guns in their person/home/car, these people’s disputes would be much less likely to escalate to lethal violence, because attacking someone with a knife or your bare fists is a much scarier prospect.

          It seems to me that, for consequentialists, the question is how many murders are of the above kind, versus how many are preplanned commercial endeavors. (Mass shootings being so small that they should just be ignored.)

          • Berna says:

            European level gun confiscation should significantly reduce impulsive murders.

            Also accidents. You never see news like ‘5-year old accicentally shoots 3-year old sister’ over here (the Netherlands).

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @DES3264 – “European level gun confiscation should significantly reduce impulsive murders.”

            It doesn’t, though. Gun control or the lack therof has no measurable effect on murder rates. Research claiming to show an effect was produced by a clique of medical researchers in the 80s and 90s, but collapsed under scrutiny from the criminological field in the mid-late 90s. Since then, research has broken clearly and consistently against the gun control position. That’s why gun control shifted their focus to spree shootings in the early 2000s. The emotional appeal is the only option left to them.

            http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html#fn*

            http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6854&context=jclc

          • HlynkaCG says:

            DES3264 says:European level gun confiscation should significantly reduce impulsive murders.

            If this were true one would expect to find stronger evidence. Great Britian implemented their Gun Confiscation scheme in 1997, but a review of archived crime statistics turns up no correlation. You’d also expect murder rates within the US reflect the rate of gun ownership within that particular state/city/region but they don’t.

            For what it’s worth, my own experience as a paramedic would seem to indicate that the majority of aggravated assaults and “impulsive murders” are committed by hand or some other “weapon of opportunity” like throwing rocks or hitting someone upside the head with a frying pan.

            Hell, even in a country as gun-happy as the US good-ole-fashioned fisticuffs and blunt force trauma still accounts for close to 20% of all murders committed.

            Edit: Ninja’d by FacelessCraven

      • Wrong Species says:

        Most gun consumers are private citizens so the idea that the military-industrial complex is the problem isn’t very convincing. I think you are really overestimating the effect of these “state induced problems”.

      • “. If citizens can carry baseball bats, criminals will carry guns. If citizens can carry guns, criminals will carry – wait, there’s nothing that can beat a gun”. There’s plenty that can beat a handgun.

        “ability to commit crime does not depend on availability of a particular tool ” Ability to kill someone does. Killing someone with fists is harder than killing someone with a knife is harder than killign someone with a gun..

        • HlynkaCG says:

          TheAncientGeek says:Killing someone with fists is harder than killing someone with a knife is harder than killign someone with a gun..

          …and predators prefer easy prey so…

    • Echo says:

      It was hard enough to introduce that kind of logic into the drug debate, and the gun argument is even more hysterical and soundbitey.
      One side is going to call you a coldhearted monster who doesn’t care that thousands of babies are being massacred every minute, and the other will listen for about ten seconds before kicking you out for not signalling political dedication.
      (And also being a smarty-pants who’s probably up to no good.)

    • Sastan says:

      So your argument is that libertarians should be pro gun, but agree with and amplify the propaganda of those who are anti-gun? Or am I reading you wrong?

      As a semi-libertarian (National Minarchist?), my defenses of the right to bear arms are on three levels.

      1: Practical, which you seem to be addressing. Will a given law have the intended effect, will there be unintended effects, is there an end in sight?

      2: Legal. Here’s where you get constitutional arguments etc. The rate of crime has no bearing here. It doesn’t matter if 50k people per day are murdered, the law says what it says. If you can get enough people to agree with you on the practical aspect, you might be able to change it, but until then…..

      3: Moral. Here’s the final barrier. I believe people have an innate right to self defense. This implies a right to the tools of self defense. Now, this does not mandate firearms necessarily, but given the restrictions of practicality (back to #1) it’s the best we have now. If we had 100% reliable stun guns which were as effective as firearms, I could see supporting a ban on (most?) firearms, so long as the stun guns were readily available to citizens.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Overall, I see the novelty in this essay as being its attempt to argue in terms of incentives from a free market libertarian POV. However, I also noticed some missing key RKBA viewpoints in it.

      1. Libertarians don’t actually conflate claims like “guns lead to crime” with claims like “we need more gun control”. Rather, they’re hearing the first claim and expecting the second claim to follow, from past experience. Gun control advocates have indeed used claims like the first to move the Overton window closer to claims like the second. In some cases, they’ve even stated that this is what they’re doing.

      This is bad news for anyone who wants to only make the first claim while actively denouncing the second, but if there were truly enough people in that group to make their frustration known, I think I would’ve run across it by now. (As it is, I occasionally see someone convince me they’re genuinely pro-RKBA, but call for a narrow restriction, and it suffices for me to analyze the restriction on its own terms.)

      2. Libertarians – or rather, gun rights advocates – do in fact ponder out loud how to reduce crime; I’m surprised the author hasn’t seen this, as it appears rather routine to me. The proposed solutions primarily center around legalizing drugs, and reducing the obstacles to civilian gun ownership. (Training is of course encouraged, but almost no one seems concerned that citizens are being stopped from getting firearms training. Meanwhile, the NRA is probably opposed to *mandatory* training, even though their non-ILA component would likely make a great deal of money from it, which ought to tell you something.)

      3. To my knowledge, gun manufacturers are not significantly subsidized. On the contrary, the government tends to try to make their livelihood harder.

      The guaranteed patronage of LEOs is opposed by libertarians in principle, but this is already covered by general aversion to police states. “Police state” arguments tend to be much more compelling than “monopolistic force agency distorting the market” arguments, so American libertarians go with the former, even though I think they’d also agree with the latter. Especially since more guns are probably owned by US non-LEO citizens than by US LEOs and US military put together.

      • I agree with you that whether more guns cause more or less crime is an empirical question. As you may know, the Lott and Mustard article on concealed carry set off a lengthy statistical controversy, with some scholars confirming their result, others disagreeing. Quite a long time it got above my level of statistical sophistication, so I can’t offer an opinion on which side is right.

        But it is worth noting one point I think you miss. Laws against gun ownership or against concealed carry can be expected to have a much larger effect on potential victims than on potential criminals, because criminals are less likely to obey such laws.

        So far as your specific examples …

        A high level of violence due to the war on drugs and/or poor policing does indeed increase the demand for guns. On the other hand, I doubt U.S. military and police demand has much effect. Firearms are sold on a world market, and with or without U.S. government demand I expect world demand is quite large enough to fully exploit economies of scale.

        With regard to tobacco, subsidized irrigation lowers the price. But price stabilization schemes in agriculture are usually designed to hold prices up, not down, so probably make tobacco more expensive, not less.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I agree with this… but it looks like it’s written as a reply to the original comment. Which makes me wonder if the latest comment software update has a bug.

          Bakkot, what do you think?

    • Have you considered unschooling? For my view of the subject, see:

      daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=unschooling

      I went to college at sixteen. At least in my case, I would still have been socially retarded if I had gone at eighteen, and sixteen got me a little closer to an age appropriate intellectual environment.

  19. I finally got around to reading Scott Aaronson’s post on common knowledge. I feel like I have some intuitive grasp of his explanation of the agreement theorem, but I don’t understand the proof; specifically, this part:

    OK, but what does it mean for information to be common knowledge? It means that I know that you know that I know that you know, and so on. Which means that, if you want to find out what’s common knowledge between us, you need to take the least common coarsening of our knowledge partitions. I.e., if the ground truth is some given world w, then what do I consider it possible that you consider it possible that I consider possible that … etc.? Iterate this growth process until it stops, by “zigzagging” between our knowledge partitions, and you get the set S of worlds such that, if we’re in world w, then what’s common knowledge between us is that the world belongs to S. Repeat for all w’s, and you get the least common coarsening of our partitions.

    Could someone explain this to me in a simpler manner?

    • ton says:

      Let’s say we’re in w. What can we both agree on? I know whatever evidence comes my way in w, and you know whatever evidence comes your way in w. My evidence tells me that certain worlds are not possible, and your does the same. I ask “what worlds is it possible for you to consider possible”? If there are 5 worlds possible given what I know, then in each of those worlds, I calculate which worlds you’d consider possible. You then do the same for your evidence. Eventually we get to the set of worlds that are common knowledge between us. So, for instance, were I to say “we belong in S”, you would learn exactly 0 new information.

      Imagine we both see X together. Then S will be a subset of the set of all worlds where X happened.

  20. A Troubled Person says:

    Of all the weird corners of the internet, this place is the most pleasant and the most therapeutic for me. So, if you don’t mind, hear me out as I blog my story in this comment. It’s about personal problems that are difficult to talk about with… normal people.

    I used to be extremely into leftist politics, so I made a lot of lefty friends and talked a lot about lefty stuff with them. I also did some volunteering and was part of the environmentalist movement for a while.

    Then somehow, over the past two years, my perception gradually changed until today when I instantly feel cosmic horror as soon as I ready any remotely lefty stuff (with some exceptions, I can read Scott’s forays into The Left without issue, but the MetaFilter thread linked to above is exactly the kind of stuff that triggers my cosmic horror sense). This correlation is completely done by my brain and completely against my will. It’s getting to the point where I find it really difficult to bear hanging out with my friends because they always bring up something at least vaguely relating to politics, and most of them are very lefty. What’s keeping me sane is probably that among my group of friends is also one guy who is some kind of hard to define slightly-apolitical-but-occasionally-conservative-leaning-moderate, and I have come to appreciate him a lot more even though we weren’t that close before.

    I have very few real, intellectual objections to most of the policies my friends talk about. However, I have started noticing all the other stuff that they say and do that makes things so uncomfortable. Things like jumping to conclusions, always assuming the worst about their political opponents and assuming the best about their political allies, generalizing from one example, generalizing from fictional example, etc. It may sound lame when I mention it like this, but the magnitude of these problems are terrifying to me, and I worry about how much I have committed the same mistakes and spread misunderstandings and poor interpretations in the past – as well as how much I may or may not still do it. I am starting to feel like humanity is just – plainly put – doomed.

    I have almost obsessively buried myself in either work or reading about rationality lately. Work – because productivity is a good excuse for avoiding social events while also feeling rewarding, and rationality – because I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to BEAT my brain into submission with the full arsenal of rationality.

    So, here I am and it feels really tough to not have anybody to talk to about these things. I’ve exhausted the old Less Wrong sequences, too. That besides, I still keep an eye on SSC and some other rationalist blogs as well as Less Wrong. I wonder what’s next. Where do I go from here? Has anybody had similar experiences and, if so, how are issues like these resolved?

    Also, yo Scott, your blog’s amazing.

    • Phil says:

      At least some of those are “people things”, not ”leftish things” though: In/Out-group dynamics are pretty universal.

      Find a better in-group, but don’t abandon your principles?

    • FacelessCraven says:

      I went through a similar crisis last winter. It sucked for a while, but has gotten a lot better since. Talking to people here helped a lot. Hopefully it does for you as well.

      I will say that the bad part of the crisis came from suddenly recognizing the nasty behavior of people in the blue tribe, without having a long-term record to give a sense of scale. As time moves on, I’ve become more confident that it’s a self-correcting problem. People are always quick to demonize outgroups that they have limited contact with, but when it gets down to it decency generally wins out.

      • Anthony says:

        Maybe it’s a Bay Area thing, but I have seen friendships ended and people ostracized for having the wrong politics in circles that center around activities which aren’t politics. So I’m not so confident it’s a self-correcting problem on a decently short timescale.

    • Echo says:

      The group stuff is just in-group signalling. Your cosmic horror reaction is just good self-preservation, especially if you’re in Innsmouth-but-for-hipsters.

      Have you tried talking to friends one-on-one about this? Tactfully bring up how frustrating it is without blaming them individually?

    • Martin says:

      I am in the middle of a similar situation. I just ended up drifting away from my more vocal left-leaning friends and hanging out with the friends who were less political. They are funnier anyways, and it turned out they didn’t like the left-leaning friends either so it all worked out.

      Maybe you could try hanging out with your slightly-apolitical-but-occasionally-conservative-leaning-moderate friend one-on-one. As I get older I’m realizing that having lots of friends isn’t all as great as I thought it would be. Quality over quantity. Life’s too short to spend hanging around people you don’t really like.

      I also find that throwing myself into my work/studies has helped.

    • Emily says:

      I remind myself that what they are engaging in is just normal human behavior. People are, as Jonathan Haidt, fundamentally groupish – and that’s not a bad thing, even though we may not love all of its manifestations. Those of us who aren’t are the odd ones out, and that’s ok. You can still enjoy people who are very caught up in this stuff, particularly if you find other stuff to engage with them about.

      • onyomi says:

        Yeah, I just don’t talk about politics to most of my work colleagues, even the ones whom I’d consider friends outside the context of work. I have a few close friends whose politics I strongly disagree with, and every once in a while we’ll get into a long debate of some kind, but mostly I just avoid the topics, except with people I know are already at least sort of inclined to agree with me (I can more easily discuss domestic policy with Republicans and more easily discuss foreign policy with Democrats in the US). And that’s why I talk about politics with strangers on the internet.

    • Zorgon says:

      I had a similar issue over the last couple of years. It’s improved significantly recently, as the most prodigious thought-policer left the area and while she’s predictably been replaced, her replacement has a lot less built-up social influence and many people in my social circles actively dislike her, including but not solely because of her constant crusading. My immediate social circles are still not a safe environment for anything resembling rationality, but it does improve over time.

      And, of course, given another decade the whole thing will flip once again and we’ll be back to fighting off the right wing instead.

    • Beating your brain into submission is not a good idea. It is your friend and ally. These new emotions may be your response to becoming aware of something you weren’t aware of earlier. Instead of ‘beating’ them, or denying or repressing the experiences that brought them about, or trying to get rid of them, listen to what they’re trying to bring to you attention. You may reflect upon it and judge it incorrect; or you may integrate it. In either case, the act of listening non-judgementally, calmly, open-mindedly and seriously to what these emotions are pointing to shall (almost always) suffice to quiet them down. They are the means by which your mind is attempting to bring something to your attention, and having done their job, they shall dissipate on their own.

      I’d suggest the methods mentioned here instead. (I am personally familiar with, and can vouch for, the power of meditation to let arise, and let dissolve naturally, unskillful emotional responses. I have not worked with the particular technique mentioned in the linked post, but have worked with others, and seen their effects.)

    • Peter says:

      I’d been having issues like this, I’d had a bit of a crisis last winter, there’s been something of a recovery, but not complete. As people say, finding people to talk to is good, especially in person. My personal benchmark is “can I read Facebook without a filter”, and currently it seems the answer is “yes” as my filter isn’t working with the latest version of Firefox. But other times it hasn’t been.

      Possibly “beating your brain into submission” isn’t quite the right approach, as Freedom and Compassion says. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, what you need is healing and growth. Take the opportunity to pick up a variety of perspectives, and to find some additional social groups to split your social time between.

      I keep coming back to broken elbow metaphors; when you’ve had a broken elbow, in the short term the thing to do is to keep it away from anything that might jar it. In the longer term you need to deliberately move it in an uncomfortable-but-not-painful way to make sure it stays flexible.

      One thing that may or may not be an issue; how much is your sense of purpose, self-worth etc. invested in your political positions? Mine wasn’t hugely, but even then, losing a fair part of my sense of “being on the right side” feels like a loss. It might be an issue.

      Anyway, good luck. It’s not a pleasant thing to go through.

      • A Troubled Person says:

        Sense of purpose and self-worth? I suppose a part of it was my political position, at least a few years ago. Maybe more so was my identity as a humanist, but in the end I couldn’t stomach the continental tradition of my university so I ended up changing fields completely. It’s possible that part of my breakdown is related to that change as well.

        Also, I want to thank everybody for their comments. They were kind and reassuring, and Freedom and Compassion’s idea in particular seems like it might be useful (also going to keep in mind the idea to deliberately expose myself to equivalent doses of right-wing idiocy).

        This was my first comment on here, so it’s very much a relief that my first impression of the community ended up being as nice as it looked from the outside.

        • Peter says:

          A change of fields might well stir a whole bunch of stuff up. I can trace a lot of my current woes, many of them political, to roughly the time when I moved from academia to industry (a fair amount of it was when my move was in the pipeline but yet to actually happen), although that said there were interesting things going on in broadly-construed-political-discourse at the time too.

          If we could do the scientific method on the things that affected us in life, changing just one thing at a time and comparing against controls, we’d know a lot more than we do.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        …would you be willing to sketch out, in general terms, what the crisis consisted of?

        for me it was a general parting of the ways with Feminism, precipitated by UVA, Listen and Believe, and GamerGate.

        • Peter says:

          I think there are two things here – the “ongoing” crisis that’s been going on since 2009 or so, and last winter’s flareup.

          The general trajectory on feminism/SJ stuff has been from “yeah, there are some crazies, but they’re rare, count me as a vague background supporter” -> “what? why are people linking to this stuff with approval?” -> “actually these people are right and I need to learn this stuff” -> “there’s this thing I can’t reconcile” -> “ok, that is _it_, the most recent thing I read is the last straw, no more unconditional support” -> “hmm, the problems seem more widespread than I’d thought” -> “the more I learn about the contemporary movement, the less I like it” and the later phase has stretched on for quite a bit. Oh yeah, and there were at least three identity crises during all that, and somewhere around the “there’s this thing I can’t quite reconcile” there was a panic attack related to one of the identity crises closely followed by my first packet of SSRIs – I’m still on SSRIs for GAD… The things I’ve learned in the aftermath of those crises haven’t exactly endeared the shouty-activist party lines relevant to those identities to me.

          By the time the UVA thing rolled around, I was pretty confirmed in my views and the eventual collapse of the case felt like something of a vindication for my way of thinking, although really I didn’t pay too much attention to it.

          The recent crisis, the one of last winter – well, I think some of it was fluctuations in rhetoric coming from friends in various places. To be honest I’m finding it hard to pin down an exact cause, part of it might have been other stuff in my life and my general state of mind being fragile. I think I’d spent a while feeling socially unsafe and in terrible danger of being ostracised. Largely… largely I was able to say in fairly general terms that I was afraid, and do a few things like name-dropping SSC, and after a few months of the sky failing to fall in I think I’ve been recovering from that one.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          my trajectory was pretty identical, actually, but happened a lot quicker. “Actually these people are right and I need to learn this stuff” was my takeaway from the Dickwolves controversy, and I went into GamerGate more or less convinced that Feminist dogma was 100% accurate. Listen and Believe was too big a pill to swallow, though, and it gave me a nasty crisis and ultimately drove me out of the movement a week or so before the truth came out about UVA.

          Hanging around here (and Thing of Things, for a while) has done a lot to diminish the feeling of immediate threat, as has the sudden decline in horrible social justice outrages since spring or so. Also, living in Texas, the social climate is a lot more insulated from that sort of thing…

          • Peter says:

            I suppose there’s an element of “full circle” in my journey. The “some crazies”[1] – I suppose by benchmark issue was what they thought about the burden of proof in rape trials. A lot of the sticking points – but not the definitive breaking moment – were on similar themes. Sometimes I wish I could go back to having the sort of attitudes I originally had, but as I say, some of the problems turned out to be more widespread than I thought.

            [1] Also I’m PC enough to worry about using such terms these days. Ho hum.

          • Vorkon says:

            That’s interesting, because I always assumed people who took the feminist side in the Dickwolves controversy were more or less doing it for tribal reasons, not because they were being convinced by the argument. To me, Dickwolves was the final nail in the coffin that shocked me into realizing that, “wow, there’s something seriously wrong with the Social Justice movement” in the first place. The absurdity of the complaint about the original comic strip was self-evident from the beginning, and I kept noticing that the sheer act of defending it against such an absurd attack kept being rolled out as evidence that you were somehow supporting rape culture. The sense of “accept this ideology no-questions-asked or you will be unpersoned” was palpable, and more than a little unsettling.

            Admittedly, Mike’s escalating responses to the attacks got out of hand quickly, but that doesn’t demonstrate that his critics were right, so much as it demonstrates that mocking and meanness isn’t always the best response to being attacked. Demonstrating that “two wrongs don’t make a right” is a far cry from demonstrating that “not being on-board with feminism means you are supporting a culture that condones rape.” (Also, I hate to admit it, but “of course I know about Rape Culture, I’m pretty sure I went to one of their concerts last year,” or whatever the exact quote was, is one of my favorite comebacks of all time, mean or no.)

            I apologize in advance for bringing up such a mindkilley topic, and my intention was never to restart the debate about Dickwolves, or anything like that. It just stuck me as odd, seeing somebody describe it as their starting point toward feminism, when I thought the tribes were already pretty clear-cut going into it. Was it something along the lines of it being the first time you had heard of Rape Culture being discussed on a large scale, and you used it as an excuse to find out more about the subject, irrespective of your stance on the Dickwolves controversy, itself? I suppose I can grok that. I was already familiar with the term when Dickwolves sprung up, though the controversy certainly led me to research a bit further, so I can definitely see how it might have gotten other people looking further into it, even if it’s a little hard for me to put myself into that headspace.

          • Cet3 says:

            That’s interesting, because I always assumed people who took the feminist side in the Dickwolves controversy were more or less doing it for tribal reasons, not because they were being convinced by the argument.

            This is a false dilemma. Finding an argument convincing is commonly a matter of ‘tribal’ reasoning in the first place.

          • Vorkon says:

            This is a false dilemma. Finding an argument convincing is commonly a matter of ‘tribal’ reasoning in the first place.

            Oh, certainly, that’s a big part of why I made the assumption that the tribes in that situation were already predetermined, in the first place.

            I only made that comment because FacelessCraven’s personal story (namely, being introduced to the concepts during that particular debacle, and coming to agree 100% with the dogma, before becoming disillusioned with it by later events) seemed atypical, and didn’t match my own assumptions, and wanted to see if it was an example of a wider trend, or something unique to them, or if my assumptions were just plain wrong.

            Basically, I’ve seen people cite Dickwolves as an example of Rape Culture and/or the Patriarchy in action, and I’ve seen people (like myself, above) cite it as the point at which they realized Social Justice was going too far, but until today I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone cite it as the point at which they started getting into Social Justice in the first place. It struck me as interesting.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            I think it was my first real in-depth introduction to the “rape culture” concept. I was very, very leftist at the time, and considered myself a proper, decent feminist, but that one was new to me. Seeing one part my tribe attacking another part of my tribe was devastating. I read up on everything I could find from the people leading the attack, and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t that they were bad people, it was just this issue was SO IMPORTANT that something had to be done right away, so even if it was handled poorly, the attackers were still in the right.

            Abuse victim logic, basically.

          • Vorkon says:

            Like I said, that’s interesting.

            Thanks for sharing!

    • James Picone says:

      Hang out with politically-inclined right-leaning folks for long enough to get an equivalent dose of opposite-charged existential horror.

      I feel what you’re saying, though. Facebook memes about feminism and articles about rape have started grating on me a lot more since I’ve started reading SSC, although part of that was probably a conversation about feminist-adjacent topics that went extremely sour.

      One thing that’s accidentally made me feel a lot better was seeing right-of-centre people here defend positions that still look utterly ridiculous to me. Makes it more obvious to your hindbrain that yep, occasionally they really are wrong.

      • Peter says:

        Oh yes. Another accidental remedy which has worked for me from time to time is to catch sight of the headlines on the Daily Mail (for those not in the know, a lower-middlebrow right-wing UK newspaper). Getting annoyed by the Mail can oddly be an immense relief as I’m meant to be getting annoyed by it, and thus all is right? with the world. At any rate, no cosmic horror, just the Mail being the Mail.

        • Susebron says:

          Reddit’s /r/forwardsfromgrandma is a good way to get a large dose of low-quality conservativism, although the comments are exactly what you would expect from a place dedicated to mocking low-quality conservativism.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        It’s funny – James’ observation about the right would probably, likely, grate on me, as someone who apparently often leans right… except that I’ve seen actual examples of right-wing screed text that grate on me, too.

        Which I take as an indication that I’m probably doing okay.

        This’ll sound wishy-washy, I’m sure, but: I almost never conclude I’m correct on anything short of mathematical theory. Rather, at best, I conclude that I’m either correct so far, based on the evidence I’ve seen, or that I *was* wrong and I can point to the specific information I was missing, or that my correctness is unknown and it’s currently too much energy to find out for sure.

        A Troubled Person: I think your heuristics for noticing bad arguments are looking pretty good. I think a good thing to check at this point is whether you’re sufficiently sensitive to bad arguments in defense of things you currently agree with, and not just things you agreed with in the past. (Notice how James is conspicuously mute on whether there are left-leaning arguments that look utterly ridiculous to him. 😉 )

        • James Picone says:

          (Notice how James is conspicuously mute on whether there are left-leaning arguments that look utterly ridiculous to him. ? )

          Well I did note that certain left-aligned memes tended to grate on me…

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            You did, and I noticed, and it’s to your credit. And I’m suggesting that it’s not sufficient; you also have to turn that eye to arguments you still hold dear. And it’s not specifically you (although your “utterly ridiculous arguments” remark did raise a yellow flag); I believe most people find this really hard to do, in large part because I find it hard to do myself.

            For example, I now have a nonzero emotional attachment to free market capitalism, such that I have to remind myself to buck that and approach collectivist arguments on their merits. It’s easy enough to avoid the trap of saying “this guy is nuts because he’s collectivist”; the trick comes in internalizing the assumption that “this guy is genuinely trying to make things better for everyone”, and seeing where that takes me.

    • Mirzhan Irkegulov says:

      I was a Marxist for 3 years. Then I read the Sequences. It was painful to finally throw away all my beliefs and identities, but it was worth it. But I still don’t feel any cosmic horror at all. I still consider myself super-duper left-wing, but the confidence of most of my political beliefs reduced significantly. Most people I hang out with are either of Labour/Green variety, or Marxists. Right-wing people of any kind are either extremely boring, or utterly insane, and I still can’t talk to them about politics without facepalms.

      I no longer treat my left-wing ideas as truths, but as good heuristics. In other words, I tell myself: “When it’s time to figure out politics and economics, I’d rather start with reading Naomi Klein, Ha-Joon Chang, David Harvey, etc, than reading Hayek or Alex Tabarrok”. For now, if you ask me about any policy, I would shrug and say “dunno, but vote Jeremy Corbyn/Bernie Sanders”.

      I don’t feel cosmic horror, but I am confident that almost everyone who talks about politics (including everyone on LW or SSC) have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Marxists are wrong, libertarians are wrong, neocons are wrong, Social Justice people are wrong. Politics is hard, and the sanity waterline is extremely low as of now. Which is worrisome, because if we don’t figure out politics rationally in 21st century, the existential threat becomes too freaking high.

      I have zero idea how to improve political discourse. But one step that I’m definitely sure of is reading Death Spirals sequence.

      It’s much, much, much easier to stop worrying, once you become a rationality padawan. Because you can always remind yourself that from now on you won’t be mind-killed. If something is true, I desire to believe that it’s true. Therefore if through rationality and science I suddenly find out that some absolutely abhorrent right-wing ideology was actually correct all along, I would happily join it. But I don’t believe it’s plausible.

    • daronson says:

      I think we all live in religious communities, whether we want to or not. It’s human tribal nature. Most of the people who read this, probably, for reasons of socio-economic correlation, live among people who are religious lefties (religious in the not-so-good sense of believing high-placed people in their in-group not very critically). This is certainly the case for my friend group. Now the question that you ask yourself is, basically, “is this horrible”. If I lived in nazi germany and everyone around me was a national socialist, the right thing to do would be to say, “this is seriously wrong” and do something, despite people around me potentially telling me to chill out. But if I lived in a country that I believed had slightly sub-optimal economic policies, I’d probably just stay out of politics and vote for politicians who have views closer to mine. It’s your call whether you need to “do something” because you’ve recognized that the people around you are uncritical about some of their political beliefs.

      If you ask me, we don’t have any reason to worry at the moment. Here are a few things to keep in mind. (1) The world has survived much worse religions (seriously — what’s the worst thing that would happen if one of your friends came out as a conservative? Do you think they would get burned at the stake or just sent to the vice?) (2) Your friends are less liberal than you think. Very frequently, I’ll have a one-on-one conversation with someone in my friend group and it comes out that they are actually even more moderate/BS-averse than me. Your impressions of the beliefs of your friend group are probably based on people who post news articles on facebook and talk about politics at parties.
      (3) It might happen that someone ostracizes you because your revealed political views are not “pure”. They might also ostracize you because you’re the wrong height or you stutter. We have a word to describe these people across the political spectrum: “jerks”. Weed them out early.
      (4) (And this is the big one): When I really think about it, I trust that a critical mass of my friends are *reasonable enough*. A friend might hold a few uncritical beliefs, but if someone they consider an authority suggests something crazy (e.g. “castrate all homophobes!”), they would have enough cognitive dissonance to say, “wait… that’s not ok.” Moral/social progress is much more unstable and noise-prone than medical or scientific progress, but I believe that such a thing as moral progress exists, and that we’re still on track, even if the people who are most visible on either side make you a little uncomfortable. This is my point of view of course.

    • I’ve had some similar experiences (particularly relating to agreeing with environmentalism in many ways but being really worried about some odd stuff they said or did) when I was younger, though I’ve almost always had some right wing friends and apolitical friends along with the lefties to keep things somewhat balanced. These days I reject much of what both the left and right (and sometimes centre) like to push, and found myself getting fairly philosophical and into rationalism, which in turn allowed me to express my own version of politics that, while being on average centrist or centre-left, picks and chooses from all over the shop. Sadly being a bit of a contrarian doesn’t help a lot with fitting into an in-group based on a political position, so I tend to chat politics with individuals I meet along the way in life (eg. SSC) and build friendships around other commonalities. Having a pretty diverse set of friends is a good thing in many ways imo.

      Regarding humanity appearing doomed, I definitely get your concerns. I personally try to translate my perception of the grim outlook for us all into attempts to come up with new ideas (read my blog if you’re bored) that might contribute in some way to solving the ER that seem to be looming quite large. Seems like a lot of people online feel the same way generally, so that’s kinda nice.

  21. ton says:

    One of the other Scott As seems to have read a lot more of SSC recently: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2494

    • Cauê says:

      Thanks, this has made my day – in that satisfying, definitely-not-virtuous “This very smart high-status person is pleasantly reinforcing my biases and saying the things I say in a smarter, higher-status way than I can” sort of way. At least I feel kind of guilty about it, for what that’s worth.

  22. keranih says:

    I would be interested in anyone in the EA lot has read Angus Deaton (esp The Great Escape) and if they have thoughts.

  23. onyomi says:

    I think weekly open threads would be a good idea. Sometimes I think of something I want to talk about and forget about it by the time the next OT comes around. Of course, I could always post it in the last OT, whenever it happened, but once they are more than a week old, people tend to stop looking at them. Also, it might encourage derailers (among which I count myself, if usually not meaning to do so) to take their pet issues to the OTs if there were more of them.

  24. onyomi says:

    As a libertarian/capitalist, I am constantly arguing that it’s better for the poor to be better off in absolute terms even if it means being worse off in relative terms. I still think this, but I also agree with the psychology described here:

    http://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/the-70000-minimum-wage-experiment-reveals-a-dark-truth.html/?a=viewall

    One of the biggest obstacles to laws mandating higher minimum wage, etc. is, I think, peoples’ notion of justice: I can stand the indignity of working for less than I’m worth at my crummy job, but not if other people dumber, less hard working and less educated than me are getting the same money for doing an easier job. This is a bad, but very powerful reason to support what I think is the correct policy (not increasing the minimum wage).

    • Anonymous says:

      It seems to me that that’s also one of the practical problems involved with the minimum wage: to the extent that wages are determined by ability, i.e. a higher wage job is more difficult and a lower wage job is easier, a raise in the minimum wage ought to cause some people doing jobs that were previously paying what is now the new minimum wage to switch to those easier jobs that were previously paying the old minimum wage, outcompeting the workers in those jobs with their higher level of ability.

      Also, regarding the relative/absolute distinction. It seems to me that this has an odd implication: that people in Third World countries aren’t actually doing as badly as you might think, because while their absolute level of wealth is very low, much lower than that of the poor in First World countries, their relative wealth is probably similar, if not possibly higher, because they are comparing to people in their own society, who are also (absolutely) poor.

      Has any impartial utilitarian here (i.e. people who believe they have a moral obligation to maximize aggregate utility) heard this argument before? Has it persuaded you that you might gain more from donating to, say, homeless people in your own society, or that open immigration might be a bad idea?

      • Linch says:

        Hmm…I think it’s objectively false that all people in absolute poverty are as poor as each other. This argument will seem to imply that all people in say Kenya (or better yet, “Africa”) are equally poor, whereas Americans are unique and special and have great income inequality. This is false for at least 50 countries:

        https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/2014_Gini_Index_World_Map%2C_income_inequality_distribution_by_country_per_World_Bank.svg

        Indeed, GiveDirectly’s operating model is to look for very poor people *even in their own communities* for cash transfers.
        https://givedirectly.org/operating-model.html

        I guess it’s theoretically possible that donating to the American homeless could generate more utility. However, your $$ just goes so much further overseas that I find this unlikely.

        The point about open immigration is interesting. A lot of the gains from immigration aren’t reaped by the immigrants, however.

        • Anonymous says:

          “Hmm…I think it’s objectively false that all people in absolute poverty are as poor as each other. This argument will seem to imply that all people in say Kenya (or better yet, “Africa”) are equally poor, whereas Americans are unique and special and have great income inequality.”

          It doesn’t imply that at all, only that the standards of what is poor and what is rich are both lower in poor countries.

          • Linch says:

            I realize that I should have phrased it better. I think the most important takeaway from my comment was that 1)Gini coefficients are higher for at least ~50 other countries than the US and 2)if relative poverty is roughly the same in the US and a far absolutely poorer country, it becomes trivially obvious (from an impartial utilitarian’s perspective) that you should devote resources to places where your $$ goes much further, simply because of the way numbers work.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      “As a libertarian/capitalist, I am constantly arguing that it’s better for the poor to be better off in absolute terms even if it means being worse off in relative terms. I still think this, but I also agree with the psychology described here:”

      Part of this seems obviously true, but I like reading old-timey stories from shtetls and stuff, and they always involve the village’s one Old Rich Guy who’s really smug and full of himself because of his wealth. And whenever they describe what in particular the Old Rich Guy has, it always sounds like a less than the average poor ghetto dweller today (obviously dependent on how many cows one car is worth)

      I have constant trouble reconciling “Everyone today is richer than even the pretty rich people of the past” with “The pretty rich people of the past were pretty happy, but today’s poor are miserable.” There’s a lot that could go into this – higher cost of living now, for example – but I can’t help but think a lot of it has to be positional.

      • Anonymous says:

        Scott – did you see the post I made directly above yours? What are your thoughts on the question I raised?

      • Saul says:

        I was pretty deep in the libertarian camp on utilitarian grounds, but I came to accept that relative wealth is much more important to happiness than absolute wealth and this changes the util calculation to be indifferent towards redistribution. This seems to square pretty well with the hypothesis that happiness/unhappiness are just rewards/punishments to get us to obtain food/sex. But we can’t permanently be in a higher state of happiness, because then we’d stop trying to compete for food/sex. Since we have mostly solved the food part, I think our happiness reward system is mostly pushing us to acquire higher status (which feels good in itself, but usually leads to sex/better sex).

        Hence, it seems like if I gain wealth, it’s almost zero sum. The extra services/products I’ve created aren’t really important to anybody’s happiness. But I gain status at the expense of people around me. This doesn’t necessarily mean that redistribution is good. +1 status to Bill Gates might be -1 status from the rest of us collectively. But +1 status to the rest of us with -1 to Bill Gates doesnt seem better. And still, wealth generation is *almost* zero sum, not exactly zero sum. So perhaps we have some small reason to prefer more wealth over status quo wealth.

        I’m also not sure why nobody talks about the other endowments in life like being pretty or intelligent. These seem to boost quality of life (by improving status), but in most political debates, it’s completely irrelevant. I actually feel kind of like a loser to even bring it up most of the time (“But some people are prettier than others!” responded with “what are you, in high school?”)

        • Anonymous says:

          I’m not seeing why this is an argument against libertarianism – although maybe I’m sympathetic toward libertarianism for different reasons than you (were). My point is, if you’re correct, the conclusion seems to be to find ways of organizing society such that the people we compare ourselves to are of similar status to ourselves – or preferably lower status. Why do you expect government to make a good job of doing this, any more than you would expect them to make a good job of doing anything else?

          Also:
          “I’m also not sure why nobody talks about the other endowments in life like being pretty or intelligent. These seem to boost quality of life (by improving status), but in most political debates, it’s completely irrelevant. ”

          I too have noticed this – that a trait being really important and conveying large disadvantages to the people who lack it does not at all guarantee that social justice people will notice and start caring about it. Perhaps it is analogous to the observation that the industries that develop powerful unions and manage to get the things they want are generally not the industries whose workers are actually poor and most arguably deserving of special privileges?

        • Wrong Species says:

          Lets assume that the government decided to get involved in raising the status for some people. What would be the best way to go about it? Maybe the government could pay for plastic surgery or teach nerds how to talk to girls.

        • Murphy says:

          That sounds correct once people are pretty much tapdancing on the tip of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you’re not gaining additional food, shelter etc and it becomes a contest for scarce status which implies that significant utility could be gained by tinkering with the system since there’s large portions of the world where people are still worried about things like food and shelter.

          Imagine a compassionate gift economy where the developed world is still competing over scarce status but the ultimate status symbol was your personal “averted dead child” count instead of the latest Ferrari.

          http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html

          If keeping up with the Joneses meant constantly trying to improve the lives of the worst off then I’m pretty sure we could get a hell of a lot of utility points scored.

      • onyomi says:

        Even as I agree with Helmut Schoeck that envy is a destructive social force that should be suppressed, I do certainly agree that human happiness does seem to be, at least partially positional. This seems at first to be an argument for more redistribution, but if, in fact, redistributing financial rewards results in better well-being for the poor due to primarily relative improvements rather than absolute improvements, then we have to face the fact that we are also detracting from the happiness of the more successful, whose happiness, presumably, derives in some measure not from their absolute comfort, but in feeling better than other people. And there is also the utilitarian problem with reducing the rewards of success and hard work while taking away from the unpleasantness of the opposite (the decision to turn the food stamps into what looks like a debit card, for example, for the seemingly innocuous reason of it being more “dignified”).

        That said, I think when contemplating the plight of the seemingly intractably miserable poor of developed nations today, one tends to underestimate just how miserable the poor used to be. Of the American poor people I’ve met (and there are quite a lot of very poor people living in my general region, which is quite rural) other than those who have say, drug problems or who are criminals–problems which presumably are absolutely bad, rather than only bad in comparison to others–most seem, if not happy, then at least not miserable.

        For comparison, look at what Taiwanese peasants looked like 150 years ago:

        http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/john_thomson_china_03/ctgallery2/pages/ct2020_1128766.htm

        Note that these are not miserable, poor peasants. These are not peasants who have recently suffered a famine or plague. These are peasants who are probably doing okay as peasant life goes. Note how some of them live in conditions that are one step up from what we might expect of stone age life–and this part of, if on the periphery of, what had, at one point, been one of the richest civilizations on Earth! And in one of its more fertile areas!

        The fact is the conditions we associate with civilization were the preserve of only a privileged few until quite recently. And when I look at these peasants I don’t see people who are about as happy as the American poor. I see people who are probably working a lot harder than most American poor yet enjoying life a lot less.

        Yes, they are almost certainly happier than WE would be living in their conditions, but I don’t think they are as absolutely happy as us, or even as happy as the average very poor American.

        And even for the very bottom, compare
        http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/26/article-2223626-15B34CD7000005DC-634_964x580.jpg

        to

        http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/john_thomson_china_03/ctgallery3/pages/ct3035_1128843c.htm

        • SUT says:

          1. Alienation – it’s more soothing to work the land for even a meager living as opposed to kissing your boss’s ass all day for tastier food. Now there was always a steep power hierarchy in primitive society, but it seems people just accepted it more: e.g. a squire considered himself more like an executive assistant then someone’s bitch.

          2. A rising tide lifts everyone’s minimum-expense: I don’t mean this in the classic inflation sense where steel gets more expensive as more people do construction starts. I mean this more in what’s the minimal viable car you can get on the road? Car could run fine, but if the exhaust’s a little dirty there’s another $800 repairs or a Rejected sticker. Then there’s the liberal traffic citations, registration, etc.

          These are all things the average-income citizen in the U.S. can easily afford and most would say they’re willing to pay for catalytic converter to not breathe heavy smog. But for below average-income person, driving vs clean air are mutually exclusive, and they would probably prefer driving. In this way, poor people “pay” dearly for regulatory creep into essential activities.

          If you remember the NewYorker’s profile on Ferguson, this is exactly what was happening with people going to jail or minor vehicle citations they couldn’t pay.

      • Emily H. says:

        I don’t know whether this counts as “positional” or “higher cost of living,” but there’s also an issue where the amount of stuff you need to maintain a good standard of living rises — like, in the 1920s, a car was a fantastic luxury. But now, there are lots of jobs that are just not open to people who don’t have cars — and it’s not just jobs that involve driving; it’s jobs that are located in areas where public transportation is bad, or jobs that need you to be available for late-night shifts when the buses don’t run late enough. (It may be possible to get by with Uber now, but if you’re taking ten Ubers a week that starts to get as pricey as owning a car.) If you do a lot of freelance work or have a job that uses just-in-time scheduling, you’re going to be at a big disadvantage if you don’t have a cell phone. If you want to apply for a job, you’d better have an email address and access to a computer. It’s that much harder to get a job if you don’t have a permanent address. None of this is about envy — it’s about the world shifting to the expectation that of course everybody has one of those and it’s not going to accommodate the people who don’t.

        • onyomi says:

          I do think there is a very strong tendency for business and government to gang up against people ever feeling financially secure because, if people can be taxed more without getting really pissed, the government will tend to tax more (or covertly tax through inflation) up until that point where people get really annoyed (this is also made more subtle through withholding).

          Similarly, businesses produce stuff to a budget they perceive their clientele can afford. When living in poorer countries I always enjoy the fact that the food is so cheap. This is partially because of lower labor costs, but also because they are genuinely putting cheaper stuff into the food–less meat, for example. If you opened a TGI Fridays in Bangladesh with the same food and pricing as in the US, it would fail not so much because the Bangladeshi might not like to try American food, but because they couldn’t afford it.

          This is the same dynamic which works to keep you from ever having a super fast computer: every time the processing speed and memory capacity goes up, they invent fancier operating systems and bigger files.

          Of course, I am less pissed about the private business aspect, because, while they may be failing to offer cheaper options which I might perceive as “good enough,” they are still providing better stuff in exchange for the greater wealth they are taking.

        • Sastan says:

          I’m kind of with you, but the problem is less severe. Part of it is that we as a society in the US have become used to quick motorized transport.

          I’ve biked twenty miles one way to work for a while. It can be done. Took a bit over an hour, but plenty of people wait that long in traffic. It’s just that walking for an hour or two, or riding a bike for that long is “unthinkable”, while sitting in traffic for that long is perfectly normal.

          In related news, obesity is a problem these days.

          • Emily H. says:

            There are lots of jobs that just outright won’t hire you if you don’t have a car, though. (I’ve been on the job hunt for a year. I’ve seen a lot of these jobs.) And there are disabled people, people who have to pick up their kids from daycare… I mean, I’m not saying everyone has to have a car; I don’t; but our cities are, in general, built around the expectation that people will own and drive cars.

      • Anonymous says:

        Also, one notable piece of evidence against this: my observation is that people do not tend to move to places where the people they will be comparing themselves to are lower status than themselves – they do the opposite. People strive to move to richer neighborhoods from poorer ones, strive to enter more elite and prestigious social circles, strive to migrate from poor countries to rich countries. “Let’s buy the most expensive house in the poor part of town, so we can look down our noses at all the lower-class peasants!” said nobody ever.

        Perhaps this is because they are irrational. Perhaps it’s because they are actually comparing themselves against the entire world, not just those they are most closely acquainted with. I don’t find either of these counter-arguments entirely convincing, though.

        • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

          I continue to believe that people mostly compare what they have at the moment to some combination of what they’re accustomed to having and what they expected, at an earlier stage of life, to have now.

          • JBeshir says:

            I think “what their friends have” is also a big deal, along with “what people they grew up with have”. Which makes a certain level of sense.

        • Wrong Species says:

          There are public schools and safety issues so it’s definitely not irrational.

          • Linch says:

            Yes, but the point is that those public schools and safety are (arguably*) not locally positional, which strengthens the “deprivation is more important than relative poverty” argument.

        • onyomi says:

          I think there is also the “big fish, little pond,” versus “little fish, big pond,” effect. Both can make you feel good about yourself depending on your mindset. Like, I think most New Yorkers subtly think they are somehow better than everyone just by virtue of living in the biggest pond in the US.

      • JBeshir says:

        One potential non-positional element that could be a factor in explaining this, aside higher cost of living, that’s come to mind when I’ve thought about this question to mind is stability; the extent to which your present quality of life can persist through bad fortune or poor performance.

        The poor nowadays often seem to be running pretty close to a short-term fall, potentially losing their employment if they lose their means of transport or it suffers an expensive failure, or if their employer decides to replace them with one of the dozen other people lined up to take their job, whereas the well-off can tolerate fairly major events with minimal hit to quality of life, and being harder to replace can have more slack between their best performance and unemployment.

        And while things have changed here too over the course of history- a bad harvest no longer means potential starvation for the poor in any civilised country, health is now much less of an immediate risk, for everyone- the improvement could still be small enough to enable an ancient rich guy to be better off than a current poor person, especially if the focus is on short-term stability.

        I find it intuitive to think that maybe people put a really high priority on stability when being happy, because I dislike a sense of being at risk myself, so my prior would have been to think this likely to be a major factor.

        That said, if people did strongly value stability I’d predict lots of effort to save in preference to increasing quality of life with any spare money, high demand for lots of insurance products, an extremely strong abhorrence of at-will employment, and I don’t see those things anywhere near as much as I’d expect them. *I’ve* not got those behaviours, so whatever is making me inconsistent might be making everyone else inconsistent, but that’s a pretty weak case.

        You’d also expect people to love subsistence farming most of the time. People do not seem to love subsistence farming, even in the good times, although they are prone to get weirdly utopian ideas about it.

        The idea that it’s mostly positional seems to run into some problems with predictions, too- as far as I can see it predicts that you’d expect communist efforts to put people on the same pay whatever they were doing to be hugely beneficial to happiness in a way we didn’t seem to observe. Could have just been drowned out by other things going on, though.

        • onyomi says:

          I think this is a very good point. I think a lot of what sucks about being poor in the US is not the absolute standard of living you are enjoying, or even the absolute standard you would expect should you lose your job, have your car repo’ed, etc. but rather that the poor are more likely to be teetering on the cusp of a bigger negative downturn.

          Like, if a wealthy person makes 20% less next year than he did this year, it may not effect his lifestyle much at all, but for a poor person that could be the difference between keeping their apartment or not.

      • Yes and it has a time-tested solution: don’t just have one hierarchy of rank/status, but multiple ones. The middle ages had three – money, holiness, and legal status (noble etc.)

        The weird part is this – while the American poor may feel pain due to low comp. monetary status, many blog posts say the American middle-class is largely engaged in signalling holiness status. Don’t you see a gap there? Shouldn’t be a group of people rather happy with their monetary status, but not wealthy enough to find that too unchallenging and thus engaging in holiness status games?

        Anyhow – basically figure out how to lionize / give a lot of status to the good kinds of poor folks without having to have it cost a lot of resources and you can reduce this suffering with it.

        Military style medals are obviously an idea, but today ideas like the government handing out Heroic Mother Medals sound kinda Soviet. That is, they are based on the idea that people actually respect government and that they can share this respect, but nobody actually believes that anymore, and the Soviets were the last people who at least pretended that people respect the government and will not laugh their ass off if other people boast about their government gave medals. Perhaps the reason government is so expensive these days is that it has no respect, it cannot give respect, it cannot give anything but money. Hm.

      • nope says:

        Eh, I don’t think poor people are more miserable because they’re poor, I think they’re poor because they’re more miserable. Or rather, what keeps them poor is stupidity and mental illness, and while intelligence doesn’t seem to be very related to lifetime happiness, mental illness definitely is. Which is one of the reasons pharma is so evil – it’s making sure the people who need help the most are the people with the least access to it.

        • onyomi says:

          Good point. I think this is the reason why the miserable poor are miserable. Hence my contention that the American poor–other than those of them who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or recidivist criminals–are not really that miserable. The fact that the mentally ill, the drug addicted and the criminal are much more likely to be poor may create a false impression that it was poverty that caused those things, when, in most cases, it was probably the reverse.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Do really believe in the just world hypothesis as much as this comment makes it seem?

          • onyomi says:

            No.

            Would you feel better if I said “many cases” instead of “most cases”?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            What is the incidence of drug addiction among the poor? What is the incidence of disability causing mental illness among the poor? What is the incidence of criminal conduct (not arrest, prosecution, or conviction) among the poor? How do they compare to the incidence among those who are not poor?

            Now, what is the improvement in outcome for each of these conditions induced by “income/wealth/class status”?

            I’m not sure I have the answers to those questions at hand, but it seems like you need them in order to make what is, essentially, a comparative statement that assume causation.

          • onyomi says:

            I probably could find a bunch of statistics supporting these contentions, but in the area where I live, at least, there is no question: there is a huge correlation between poverty and drug use (crystal meth, mostly).

            I’m not saying all poor people are drug users; I am saying that I think many of the same factors which lead to drug use also lead to poverty, including prior drug use itself. I’m also saying that the poor people I’ve met in the US mostly don’t seem very miserable to me, unless they are drug users, alcoholics, or criminals.

            I’m saying that neither the absolute nor the relative level of material deprivation experienced by poor people in the US is sufficient to provoke significant misery in a vacuum. Sure, even healthy poor people with good habits are probably not as happy, on average, as people with higher incomes, but I think they are a lot happier than the poor of third world countries.

            And if I believed in a “just world,” then I wouldn’t expect the third world poor to need to work twice as hard or harder to achieve one half or less the level of material well-being enjoyed by the American poor–which they do.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            I’m not sure we are using the same definition of just world hypothesis.

            I was saying it sounds like you think those who are miserable deserve to be so.

            You aren’t saying (much) here about whether those who are poor deserve to be so, but it is a not infrequent tenet of libertarian philosophy.

        • Why does everybody from the English-language internet talks about the poor as if they were an aliens from Alpha Centauri – a group of people to form abstract theories about, but apparently there is no personal experience whatsoever? Don’t many people have the equivalent of a bum cousin? I suspect there must be some really rigid class and even racial barriers at play.

          At the very least, taboo “poor”, because that is merely an outcome, and talk about groups of people as:

          – the mentally or physically disabled
          – the illegals or even legals but at any rate people who even have language barriers at getting a job
          – those who work but still struggle
          – the perpetual criminals who never really intend to make a legal income
          – the multiple-gen welfare clients with no learned work ethic
          – school failures
          – single parents

          • grendelkhan says:

            You know, that’s a great point. In my earlier years, I knew burnouts who were incapable of doing well in the regular job market, I knew at least one very bright guy who spent years living pretty marginally because he couldn’t stand school, and I knew people who lived in that falling-from-the-middle-class limbo of service job after service job, mostly barista’ing, but weren’t really poor, no, of course not.

            As an adult doing reasonably well for myself, few of the people in my social circle are poor, and none are the multiple-gen welfare-client or severely disabled type. Class barriers are impressively rigid here.

    • At 40hrs/week, the minimum wage of $15/hour works out to $30k/year. That seems like an awfully low wage for a chemical engineer to me.

    • Deiseach says:

      How much is the owner paying herself or drawing from the company in the form of salary, and is it the same as she’s paying her newly hired chemical engineers? I can’t see how a relatively small increase in minimum wage for the lowly staff doing the grunt work means they’ll be earning as much as the technically qualified ones, unless she’s really squeezing the lemon until the pips squeak (and possibly relying on new grads to do the work because she can bedazzle them with the “This is art, not tawdry commercial sell-out stuff” and “Sure the pay isn’t that great, but it’s a foot in the door of the business and if you can put on your CV that you worked here, you can get a job anywhere on the strength of that!” kind of talk to make them think they’re not being exploited and we’re all bohemian artists above grubby profit in this together).

      • Spaghetti Lee says:

        Lots of people seem to be catching onto that “who needs wages, you’re artists” dodge, though, especially in the high-falutin’ cultural criticism industry that is stereotypically most susceptible. An empty fridge is an empty fridge, no matter how meaningful your unpaid internship is. Not saying that there’s actually a mutually agreeable endgame in sight, but I don’t think that particular feint has much life left in it.

        • onyomi says:

          The unpaid internship thing really does seem to be a case where it’s hard to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” so to speak. Because people whose families can support them during the apprenticeship period have a big advantage over those who need to actually pay for their own food and lodging while learning the skills of the trade.

          Good reason for fewer people to go to college and more child labor: do the unpaid or low-paying work while you’re still living with your parents.

        • roystgnr says:

          My favorite example of “catching on” is the rejoinder to “it’ll give you more exposure”: “Exposure is what artists die of when they don’t get paid!”

    • Saul Degraw says:

      I agree with the comment about 30,000 being low for a chemical engineer. The logic seems self-serving. I do have some questions about the psychology of wealth though. Money is time and time is money. The very wealthy people I know are always working even their hobbies seem to be related to money and making more money or networking.

      I like to listen to music on long car rides. I was once in a car with some guys who were dreaming of big times in start up land. The car ride was long and they wanted to listen to podcasts on business and working.

      This week for work (I am a lawyer). I had to go off-sight and oversee the scanning of documents on a case. The guy said that the scanning department started in house at the firm to lower costs (instead of hiring third parties) but the boss spun it out as its own business so he could collect money from non-cases and outside clients.

      Is this smart? Yes and it is a lot of work. I wouldn’t do it because it seems like more work and I value the free time of a lazy weekend afternoon and reading a book on my couch. I find this to be a form of wealth. But I wonder if there are people who think that time spent reading a novel is wasted because you can be doing something more practical. So do people with different definitions of wealth just have contempt for each other.

    • but not if other people dumber, less hard working and less educated than me are getting the same money for doing an easier job

      For me this is an overwhelming argument for meritocracy as orthagonal to the rich-poor gap (even if you feel like I do that strongly progressive taxation is advantageous). I personally feel neither the left or the right puts a serious effort into meritocracy anymore, instead ridiculuously arguing either that wealth is an automatically valid proxy for merit, or that everybody is somehow equally meritorious. For me we should be focusing more on ethics, ensuring hard work and innovation is identified and rewarded (and not exploited by others), and cheating/greedy/dishonest behaviours are gradually weeded out using sensible, safe policies. That way, you don’t screw up the incentives for economic excellence or good morality, and can safely have a system that rewards people a bit more proportionally than they are now (or safely not have it, though I’d disagree with that).

  25. onyomi says:

    Re. “wireheading,” has anyone considered the possibility that, if it became possible, some people might use it to become super productive rather than just blissed-out vegetables?

    For example, if I could attach some wires to my language students’ brains that made them feel like they had an orgasm every time they learned a new Chinese vocabulary word, pretty soon they’d be better than me at Chinese.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      …Shit. Do we need to go to the hospital for this, or can you just get the black&decker and hook me up right now?

    • onyomi says:

      Related is an impression I’ve formed now in my second year of full-time teaching: especially in this age when almost all of human knowledge is freely available on the internet and/or through your interlibrary loan system, figuring out how to motivate students isn’t just one part of the job of a teacher; it’s seemingly almost the *entire* job of a teacher (the remainder probably being providing feedback).

      • Kiya says:

        Teachers are also important as curators of what, from the set of all information one could find on the internet, is accessible to a student now and will be useful to them later.

      • Saint_Fiasco says:

        Teachers are personal trainers for the brain.

    • Dude Man says:

      The problem with this analogy is that, presumably the person getting wireheaded would choose what the effects would be while your example is one where you are choosing the effects that other people would feel.

      • LTP says:

        Indeed, and if it was an awesome orgasmic feeling that you could control, you would probably be quickly be tempted to just make it happen with no effort at all.

        • onyomi says:

          Sure, some, maybe even most people would be tempted to set it up such that they could have the awesome feeling constantly or with a flip of a switch or a thought; I’m just saying it’s conceivable that *some* people might use it to become super productive, as it seems it would be an unbelievably powerful tool if used that way.

          And it’s also possible the wire heads would switch things up periodically: “uh oh, my body is atrophying from laying on the couch all day having orgasms! This has the potential to reduce my lifespan for lying on the couch having orgasms. Let’s temporarily rearrange the motivator so that jogging and eating vegetables makes me have orgasms.”

          And then there is also the quasi-dystopian example where the wires are, indeed, controlled by someone else, who rewires everybody’s brains to get orgasmic feelings from being a good citizen-soldier, or making paper clips, or what have you.

          Now that I think of it, I think Frank Herbert sort of explored a version of this in the later books of the Dune series with the Honored Matres: basically sexy Bene Gesserit gone to the dark side who have somehow created sexual techniques so powerful that they can motivate anyone to basically be their slaves through the providing/withdrawal of the sex.

          • LTP says:

            Maybe, I’m not sure if that would work in practice, but perhaps you’re right that some could do so.

            To be honest, though, if we lived in a society where we had that degree of control over our own brains, I’d rather do something like make it so I would grow tired of the feeling if I sat on the couch having orgasms for too long (much like how you feel full if you eat too much, or grow bored of even your favorite entertainment of choice for the day if you do it long enough in one sitting), and then stimulate a part of my brain to give myself above average, but still in the normal range of current human experience, motivation to exercise and eat healthy foods and socialize and so on. It would seem difficult to do those things if they caused orgasmic euphoria, and I wouldn’t even be experiencing them if I did but just gunning for the euphoria, I think.

          • onyomi says:

            The other thing people don’t so much seem to consider is the possibility that the constant orgasm chip inserted in your brain might make you simply enjoy other stuff more.

            For example, ecstasy is a drug which makes you feel super happy; it also enhances the experience of things like dancing, listening to music, and cuddling. That is, just because ecstasy can make you feel good in a vacuum, doesn’t mean you would just lie on the couch feeling good even if you had a non-serotenergic neuron-destroying IV of ecstasy hooked up to your veins. You might just use it dance all the time (and possibly die of thirst or something, but that’s another problem one could adjust for–presumably the sort of mental state most would chose if they could choose would not be one of constant mania, but rather one which alternated appropriately from really good active moods to really good relaxed moods).

    • Scott Alexander says:

      https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/19/can-you-condition-yourself/

      Doubt you could do it to yourself. Another person might be able to do it to you, but do you trust your Chinese teacher with the key to your soul?

      • onyomi says:

        I agree you couldn’t do it to yourself if it were as simple as “let me press the orgasm button every time I do a pushup and that will make me like doing pushups.” I agree that would not result in you liking pushups any more than you do now (and it’s funny you should mention it, because I just recently saw a strange article with some guy claiming he lost weight by masturbating every time he felt the urge to snack, the idea being that he would associate the virtuous dietary behavior with the pleasure of masturbation. If it really did work it’s probably just because it reduced eating by distracting with another activity, not because he conditioned himself somehow).

        I’m talking about a more fundamental rewiring of reward mechanisms such that doing the pushup is the proximate cause of the orgasm. I don’t think this would change me such that I’d like doing pushups in the absence of the artificially induced orgasm feeling, but I could imagine voluntarily choosing to install the “pushups give you orgasms” chip in my brain because a. I like orgasms, and b. I like the results of doing a lot of pushups but don’t normally find the reward immediate or intense enough to make me do a lot of them.

        The end goal would not be “I like pushups qua pushups”; it would be, “I like having a great physique because I did a zillion pushups because I had a chip in my brain that made doing pushups feel really good.”

    • Deiseach says:

      they had an orgasm every time they learned a new Chinese vocabulary word, pretty soon they’d be better than me at Chinese

      I don’t think it would necessarily be so; they’d maybe learn the equivalent of a dictionary full of vocabulary pretty quickly but would they understand how to put it together? How to speak in grammatical Mandarin or Cantonese, or to read it as well as speak it? Would they recognise it spoken with a different accent or regional intonation?

      I can see you getting a classroom of parrots who could learn to rattle off a spelling list of words for you in no time at all, but with little to no idea what they meant.

      • onyomi says:

        Switch the wires so they only get an orgasm when they communicate in meaningful, full Chinese sentences? Or maybe create a ratchet effect, where, at the beginning they get an orgasm from saying “ni hao,” but they have to keep producing new and more nuanced Chinese sentences to get the same effect until they need to comment intelligently on politics in flawless Mandarin to get the orgasm feeling.

        • Sylocat says:

          Well, then you have to decide what it means to “comment intelligently on politics” in flawless Mandarin…

          But overall, I agree.

        • Nate says:

          Portal 2 went into this. I’d have to ponder this a bit more (the two wireheads are very different), but you could get meth-junkie behavior from someone who was trying to get better at Chinese and failing.

    • Murphy says:

      OK I loved that book but for the life of me I can’t remember this. I remember references to some military-tech method of learning things really fast which one of the characters is supposed to have used far too heavily but I don’t remember it mentioning wireheading.

    • Same discussion in 1948: has anyone considered the possibility if people will not just use this sexual revolution thing to just have fun but also as a reward for productivity? Same discussion in 1968: has anyone considered the possiblity if people will not just use this new(ly fashionable) lsd thing to just have psychedelic fun, but also as a reward for productivity?

      It seems actually productive people are kind of ashamed to get or give these kinds of rewards. Even something some traditional like “Son if you pass your math exam you and me will drink a bar dry and I will pay the tab!” sounds a bit “off”, doesn’t it?

      I suspect the reason is that productivity requires a mood of delayed gratification. In order to keep that mood going, you need to work with delayed-grat rewards. “after the exam we go get piss drunk” is too not-delayed. “here is $100 towards the summer holiday you are saving up for” is more delayed. of course “we will get piss drunk and drop acid and enjoy hot dolphin sex 3 months after the exam” is sufficiently delayed and yet feels “off”, but again it is not so much about the timescale but about the KIND of gratification that usually tends to be delayed or not and thus seen as wholesome thing or irresponsible hedonism…

      In other words, productivity goes hand in hand with a bit of a puritanical mood where you are trying not to have too much fun.

      Or at any rate propose any theory why mothers don’t promise their daughters expensive deluxe sex toys if they manage to get into Harvard and that theory will work the same way as with wireheading.

      • Nate says:

        I heard one of my old classmates got regular trips to the titty bar paid for if he kept pulling straight As. Seemed to work.

    • Sylocat says:

      Exactly.

      This ties in to one of the most common arguments against Basic Income: “But if we give people money, won’t they just sit around all day doing nothing?”

      Boredom is almost as primal an urge as lust and hunger. People LIKE to feel like they’re doing something. I don’t think most people would make the conscious decision to make themselves enjoy feeling like a useless drain on society (and when we’ve worked out how to assign reward-circuit activity to specific physical/mental actions just by typing on a keyboard, I think that you WOULD have to make a conscious decision to do so in order to wind up as one). Especially since the first people to sign up for wireheading will probably be the ones who have been thinking about it long enough to know the common risks.

      And if someone does decide to turn themselves into a blissful vegetable? Well, far be it from me to prevent them from altering their terminal values into something I find absurd. Forgive me for doubting that it will lead to a horrifying dystopia where a tiny beleaguered minority of Doers are running around subsidizing the hordes of useless Parasites.

      And of course, a relevant xkcd.

      (minor tangent, this is also why I laugh at people who complain that “giving kids Participation Awards makes them assume life is too easy and/or takes away their motivation to succeed” and so on. Have you ever asked an actual kid whether getting a Participation Trophy makes them feel like a winner? Spoiler alert, it does not)

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @Sylocat – “Boredom is almost as primal an urge as lust and hunger. People LIKE to feel like they’re doing something.”

        “feeling like they’re doing something” != “actually doing something productive”. I feel like I’m doing something when I debate people here, or when I torp fat BBs in Warships, or when I play KanColle.

        I could be wrong, but I think the argument they’re making is that people on GBI might see no need to do anything productive, and the system collapses without a certian percentage willing to do the hard work necessary to keep it running.

        “minor tangent, this is also why I laugh at people who complain that “giving kids Participation Awards makes them assume life is too easy and/or takes away their motivation to succeed” and so on. Have you ever asked an actual kid whether getting a Participation Trophy makes them feel like a winner? Spoiler alert, it does not”

        Then why give them to the kids at all? Is the idea that subtle cruelty will encourage them to achieve more than regular failure?

        [EDIT] – okay, sorry, trying again with a bit more charity: surely the people suggesting the awards think that they can be given in a way that the kids won’t hate? And surely the people objecting to the awards think it’s still a bad idea assuming they succeed?

        • Sylocat says:

          “feeling like they’re doing something” != “actually doing something productive”. I feel like I’m doing something when I debate people here, or when I torp fat BBs in Warships, or when I play KanColle.

          True, which makes me wonder if people might use wireheading to find their way around such shortcuts. It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.

          But then again, I think the whole metric of “productive” is kind of broken.

          As to the systemic collapse thing, well, for the aforementioned reasons, I just don’t think that’ll happen. If I had a normal 9-5 job with shifts (as opposed to part-time supplemented with freelance work), I’d certainly want to work 20 hrs/week instead of 40, but I’d also want to work 20 instead of 0, and that’s not exactly a rare sentiment.

          Saying “but all people (except me) are lazy stupid cheats who just want to sit on their bloated asses and bilk the system” is a fun way to signal how edgy and cynical one is (and lest you think I’m taking potshots at anyone here, I will admit right here that I used to spout the same lines myself), but I’m increasingly skeptical that it’s true of, like, >50% of humanity.

          Now, whether this is because people are inherently good/ambitious or rather just because people have had puritanical fun-is-evil messages drilled into them since infancy (which isn’t likely to stop happening if BI becomes a thing) I will leave to the philosophers, but I don’t think the effect is appreciably different either way.

          Then why give them to the kids at all? Is the idea that subtle cruelty will encourage them to achieve more than regular failure?

          Well, I didn’t say I thought Participation Awards were a GOOD idea, just that the “They make kids think that there are no losers which doesn’t prepare them for the dog-eat-dog world of adulthood” argument against them is nonsense.

  26. US says:

    In the previous autism post Jeremy asked some questions about autism and writing in response to Peter’s comment linked above – I figured I might have something to add to that one.

    Some context from Jeremy’s comment:

    “I am always surprised by how little autism shows through in writing. […] while I would expect autistic people to be just as distinguishable in writing as in any other form of social communication, I have found to my surprise that I totally can’t see the distinction.

    Would you agree with my assessment that you don’t feel at a disadvantage or even out of the ordinary in the way that you communicate through writing? How does writing feel to you vs spoken communication? Is it really just the body language that’s different?”

    I have an Asperger’s diagnosis and I read/write a lot so this is my kind of question.. Some belated observations on these topics:

    a) I like to be precise when I use language, regardless of whether I’m talking or writing. Precision takes time. In some social contexts such precision-related (‘excessive’) time expenditure is not a problem, whereas in other social contexts it is. In a blog’s comment section it doesn’t matter that you spend an hour formulating a response to a question because no-one will ever know how much time you spent, and simultaneity is not a requirement. If you spend too much time formulating a response when interacting with others in person, the discussion will have moved on by the time you’re ready to contribute. I have tried to become more ‘pragmatic’ about my behaviour during verbal exchanges than I used to be, but this is difficult.
    b) In online interactions like the ones that take place in a comment section like this one, group size tends not to matter very much, whereas in face-to-face interactions group size will matter a lot. If I’m interacting with one other person, I can usually track both relevant non-verbal behaviour and the content of the discussion. If I’m interacting in group of five people, I’ll probably give up on following/trying to interpret non-verbal behaviour and stick to the verbal content. So group size is to me a potentially important variable that will affect my behaviour in face-to-face interactions but will not necessarily influence my behaviour during written interactions.
    c) The time expenditure involved when engaging in written interactions means that for me written interactions can be fatiguing and draining, just like person-to-person interactions often are. This is a similarity, not a difference, but one perhaps worth mentioning in this context.
    d) Most of the time I prefer to interact with other people in writing to interacting with them in person. ‘US in writing’ is in my mind superior to ‘US in Real Life’, in part because a lot of ‘irrelevant’ hurdles are removed from the equation, especially when using the so-called information-poor media. That said, I’d also much rather exchange messages on Skype than talk to someone on Skype, so it’s not just body language.

    It’s easier to hide your difficulties interpreting body language when there’s no body language to deal with. Information-poor media at least to some extent levels the playing field.

    • Megaburst says:

      Neurotypical here. I like talking about sensitive issues in person because the pleasantries of face-to-face interaction help me empathize with the other person’s perspective and help them empathize with mine. I think internet conversations are uniquely dysfunctional because of the lack of empathy. Also the faster back and forth of in person convos is nice for clarifying stuff.

      • Murphy says:

        I’ve found that a lot of people who struggle to open up talk find it easier to sit next to someone typing, best of both worlds. Face to face reactions, clarity of text.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        Yes. This is very well put.

    • Kiya says:

      credentials: not diagnosed with anything; I’m a noise-sensitive introvert who likes math and had a lot of social trouble when I was a kid.

      I think in-person conversations are useful in some situations, for example brainstorming in a group of ~5 people. With the fast pace of talking and low cost of nodding or saying “yeah,” it’s easier to arrive at a sense of group agreement than in a text-based forum.

      I prefer text for conversation where I feel uneasy and want to be very precise and in control. If I start saying something in person, there’s a chance my conversation partner will interrupt or ask a question I wasn’t prepared for. In high-stress conversations I am highly likely to be misunderstood, or to end up defending a position I don’t hold by mistake. I can’t be stressed, think clearly, and talk fluidly all at the same time, though I can do any two of the three. Being stressed and talking fluidly without thinking clearly is not a good recipe for arriving at the truth. I found talk therapy at my middle school highly unhelpful for this reason.

      A strategy I invented in my teenage years for recovering from fights with my parents is to type up everything I want to convey to someone coherently, sit next to them while they read it, refuse to resume free-form conversation until they have finished reading it, and then talk. This gives me time to think about what I actually want to say and lets me express it clearly. It’s rather unusual, and I wouldn’t try it with people who don’t know me very well.

    • Rachael says:

      I agree with you and the previous commenter.

      Sometimes my mother and I have disagreements. When we do, she wants to meet up face to face to talk it over, and she thinks that’ll make it better. I prefer to talk it over by email, because I can take time to choose my words and clarify my thoughts, and express myself calmly and reasonably. Face to face, one or both of us is likely to get upset. When she’s upset, she’s angry and shouty and I still find it scary. When I’m upset, I cry and become withdrawn and inarticulate.

      (I’m nerdy with slight sub-clinical aspie-like traits, like most here; she’s very non-nerdy.)

  27. Oleg S says:

    Hi! Could anyone recommend a good rational charity that prioritizes space exploration? Something that resembles GiveWell but focused on the best bet to get interstellar.

    • Zippy says:

      I’m afraid I don’t. But I am interested in knowing why you want one.

      … Also– with the requisite intellectual humility, I assure you– I’d conjecture that “a good rational charity that prioritizes space exploration” is an oxymoron.

      • Linch says:

        The obvious argument is that you want a back-up drive for existential risk. An asteroid, pandemic etc, aren’t likely to strike both Earth and Mars simultaneously.

        The less-obvious counterargument is…well, actually I don’t want to get into that one.

        • Anonymous says:

          “The less-obvious counterargument is…well, actually I don’t want to get into that one.”

          Now I’m curious.

          • 27chaos says:

            If it’s Dust theory I’ll lol.

          • Murphy says:

            My guess would be that for almost all cases you’d get almost all the advantages from building a huge tough self sufficient underground vault in the arctic or somewhere else very hostile and inaccessible.

            Pandemic? Wait it out. Nuclear war? wait it out. Environmental disaster? Wait it out. then repopulate the earth.

            It would be far far easier/cheaper than building the same on Mars and you wouldn’t need a space program on mars to re-populate the earth.

            At this point people start pointing out how it would be almost impossible to build such a vault in the arctic even with lots of water and oxygen easily accessible and come up with lots of practical objections, every one of them applies 100x to a huge tough self sufficient underground vault on mars.

          • suntzuanime says:

            It’s easier to run a solar panel array on Mars than underground, and people have further to fly if they want to root you out, loot your vault, and put you to the sword.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            Colonization.

      • Oleg S says:

        I think the good test for rational charity is whether its goals are suitable for a superhuman AI. There are conceptual troubles in making an AI that would try to reach some traditional humanity-oriented goals, such as happiness for everyone, elimination of poverty, elimination of wars etc. Rationalization of such goals lead to concept of QALY, which is employed in regulatory decisions and prioritizing donations. However, if one allows for negative QALY, the reasonable QALY optimizer would eliminate of large part of humanity, which is scary. Restricting QALY to positive values makes way for equally scary scenarios when trillions of human beings live miserable lives cramped together like chickens on chiken farms. I don’t see another option for a QALY-optimizing AI of superhuman intelligence, and being unable to make rational choice myself, I frequently give in to charities that just resonates with me.

        Building von Neumann probe, on the other hand, looks like a safe option, because in the worst scenario I could imagine it would be just another life form, prone to all shortcomings of life forms. I’m not bothered with potential extinction of humanity as long as we have a fleet of automatic self-replicating probes, rapidly populating the Galaxy. These consideration are true if super-human AI is substituted by humanity (which in a sense is sort of a super-human AI). It may be a fleet of generation spaceships piloted by brave astronauts, or robotic probes with primitive instincts to replicate – I don’t really care, as long as resulting galactic structure is sufficiently complex.

        The motivation for a space exploration as a backup for existential risks is ok, but not the primary one since there almost always is a cheaper options for known threats (deep underground bunkers etc). And I can understand that refusing a dollar to a sick child to give it to space exploration may be a hard choice to make. But at some point I have to ask myself “How helping all these people make humanity closer to stars”?

    • Megaburst says:

      You could donate your time and try to get a job at SpaceX?

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Step 1 is to not engage with the people trying to stop you from colonizing space, or telling you that your preferences are wrong for trying to do so.

      Step 2 is to figure out the most immediate danger for space colonization and work to lower it. If you wanted to go to Mars, for example, lots of people would want to bug you about radiation, but the real worry is failure of your launch vehicle.

      You don’t have to make things pleasant. You have to make things survivable enough that people looking for a challenge would go do it.

  28. Anybody with knowledge of statistics have any thoughts on a recent paper analyzing “hot hand” phenomena. NYTimes coverage, and the paper itself.

    The basic idea is something called the “hot hand” effect, which is the belief that if somebody is on a winning streak they are likely to continue. Obviously this is a fallacy for games of pure chance (ie roulette), but for sports it’s entirely plausible that it could exist. There have been many studies done over the years, mostly finding a small but non-zero effect, this paper basically says everybody has been doing their stats wrong and underestimating the size of the hot-hand effect. I was having trouble wrapping my head around intuition for what they were saying, although the math looks solid.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I was having trouble wrapping my head around the math, although the intuition looks solid. Basically what they’re saying is that people are incorrectly treating all observed cases as having the same evidentiary value, even though some cases have more because they give more opportunity to observe the phenomenon in question. In particular, a case where a winning streak occurs provides more chances to observe “streakiness”, because there will be more wins that are able to be followed by another win (or not). If you treat this case as equally informative to a case with an equal smattering of wins and losses, even though the winning streak contains twice as many chances for a win to be followed by a loss, you are giving the observations in the case half as much weight as they should have. And since you’re giving reduced weight specifically to the observations where streakiness occurs, this will bias your results away from streakiness.

    • switchnode says:

      Your first link 404s for me. Also, hasn’t this paper (or some other coverage) been linked on SSC before?

    • Douglas Knight says:

      As a stylized example, suppose that each day a stock index goes either up or down, according to a random walk in which the probability of going up is, say, 0.6. A financial analyst who can predict the next day’s performance on the days she chooses to, and whose predictions are evaluated in terms of how her success rate on predictions in a given month compares to that of chance, can expect to outperform this benchmark by using any of a number of different decision rules. For instance, she can simply predict “up” immediately following down days, or increase her expected relative performance even further by predicting “up” only immediately following longer streaks of consecutive down days.

  29. Nombre says:

    To what extent, if any, is the argument “Why are you protesting X, when you should be protesting Y, because Y is more important/evil/etc.” legitimate?

    My thoughts:
    It seems to me that this argument is justified, at least some of the time: Imagine some people were protesting a new mosque being built in the local town, arguing that it would snarl traffic. At the same time, a humongous new church is being built in a way that would be worse to traffic than the mosque, and the protestors are silent. In this case, it seems reasonable to me to ask the mosque-protesters why they are protesting it rather than the church.

    At the same time, I worry this could ham-string activists. Specifically, imagine an activist protesting against X, something that is very bad. Someone else could bring up Y, at which point the conversation would devolve into questions of whether X is more important/evil/etc than Y or vice versa, and there would be no, or less, protest against X, even though X is very bad.

    • Dude Man says:

      Maybe it’s legitimate if:

      1. The type of bad thing Y causes is the same as X, but the problem is worse for Y than X.
      2. The person you’re talking about cares about X but doesn’t care about Y.

      If both of those criteria are true, then you could argue that the person should be focusing elsewhere if he really wants to prevent the bad thing he’s complaining about. However, if the problem is that X and Y are both bad for different reasons, then you can say that there is no reason to hold off on fixing one problem until you fix the other problem.

    • stargirl says:

      In theory the Mosque can be evaluated on its own merits. Either the benefits outweigh the costs or they don’t. (property rights and such are another issue). The Church has nothing to do with the Mosque (few people frequent both). The reason you want to bring up the Church is because you want to accuse the protesters of being biased and possibly racist.

      I think it is almost impossible to have good discussion norms for when it is ok to accuse someone of bias. Once you accuse someone of being biased in this way you have declared the assumptions of polite discourse do not hold. You are claiming the other side is either delusional or acting in bad faith. Of course people often are racist, deluded and/or acting in bad faith. But since everyone is biased to some extant it is hard to figure out what norms should apply to such accusations.

    • TheFrannest says:

      In its core, it is a bad argument, as it can be countered with “Well, why are YOU not doing anything about that, instead of arguing with people about doing it?”

      I also limit myself from using it even if doing X or Y is technically mutually exclusive. Why did I donate $1000 to an animal shelter, as opposed to DWB? The answer is actually that I feel like it.

      This argument is really valid in my opinion when X and Y are not exclusive as such as people who do X WILLINGLY exclude Y.

      Now I know feminism is a bit of a dead horse here, but bear with me. Feminists very commonly use lives of middle eastern women as talking points. From sweeping global statistics about illiteracy, FGM and honor killings that are supposed to make first world men personally guilty to sharing haha look at the crazy patriarchy stories about women being banned from riding bicycles, etc. And yet… we see a bunch of twitter chatter about men spreading their legs a couple degrees too wide on subways (I had the honor of being photographed for such a blog by a lady who occupied an extra seat with a bag), and when people bring up perhaps the core issues that lead to this occuring – namely, islam and the culture that is built around it – they are accused of islamophobia.

      So why talk about women’s rights when you exclude solving the islam issue?

      • Anon. says:

        > “Well, why are YOU not doing anything about that, instead of arguing with people about doing it?”

        This assumes that the interlocutors have the same preferences, but that’s not necessarily the case.

        Ex:

        A cares about animals. Charity Z saves 10 puppies per dollar donated, while charity Y saves only 1. B does not care about animals so she donates to neither, but she can still tell A that it’s better to donate to the superior charity.

        • TheFrannest says:

          Yeah, well, not caring about animals and yet expecting other people to care about animals can qualify as concern trolling here.

          • Anon. says:

            If A donates to Y they demonstrably care about animals. Revealed preference is a wonderful thing!

            If A donated to neither and B told A she should be donating to Z then you have a point.

      • Spaghetti Lee says:

        On that specific issue a large part of it is that they don’t want to come off as Islamophobic or racist towards people of Middle Eastern descent, because that’s what conservatives do. Refusing to agree with your enemy on ANYthing, even when doing so wouldn’t violate any of your other moral principles (and failing to do so arguably would), is a helluva drug.

        Also, results-based activism. In this corner, we have millennia of cultural norms in countries halfway around the world you’ll never even set foot in. In this corner, we have a fellow subway-rider who can be photographed, memed, identified, and doxxed. Place ya bets, place ya bets.

      • Linch says:

        “Well, why are YOU not doing anything about that, instead of arguing with people about doing it?”

        Because it’s a more effective use of my time to change your mind than protesting right now?

        I feel like by that logic we can never talk about charities, since the most directly optimal thing to do is to make lots of money and donate to the best charities, instead of doing indirectly optimal things like figuring out what the best charities are, or convincing other people to donate. This seems like a relatively absurd position to take.

      • Murphy says:

        Hmm, I don’t think this is quite right.

        I see someone wearing a “save the trees” t-shirt, I talk to them and ask them what their main goal is. They say “I want to save as many trees as possible everywhere in the world!”

        They then reveal that their main occupation for the last 3 years has been sleeping in a particular tree in a nearby town to prevent it from being felled to make way for a restaurant.

        I may not care about trees very much but I might reasonable ask if perhaps they might have saved more trees if they’d let the tree be cut down and spent their time/money on charities which defend rainforests since even a few hundred bucks could save far far far more than one tree.

        At which point the most likely reaction is the person going into a huff.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      0) If X is more evil than Y, then protest X.
      1) X is more evil than Y.
      -----------Therefore------------
      2) protest X.

      Let X = large church
      Let Y = small mosque

      Therefore, protest Church.

      Why are you protesting X, when you should be protesting Y, because Y is more important/evil/etc.

      What you’re doing is modeling their thought process and recognizing a contradiction. As Robin Hanson once said, “One man’s Modus Ponens is another man’s Modus Tollens.” That is, there’s several ways this can play out.

      A) The argument is sound: the protester acknowledges the correction and changes their behavior. If the protester genuinely cares about traffic congestion, then they will realize that protesting the church is more effective.

      B) Proposition 1 is false: the protester disagrees that the church is more evil than the mosque. E.g. perhaps the protester was simply rationalizing their dislike of the mosque. Perhaps their behavior is driven by a different metric of evil than dislike of traffic congestion, such as islamophobia.

      C) Proposition 0 is false: in which case, “minimize the most evil thing” is not the decision making algorithm the protester implements. E.g. perhaps their decision making is governed by warm fuzzies and status cookies. Or perhaps they’re following an algorithm modified for triage: the successfully protesting the church (though a little bit more evil) would require a lot more effort compared to successfully protesting the mosque.

      D) Both Proposition 0 and 1 are false. This is self-explanatory.

      ————————————————————–

      At the same time, I worry this could ham-string activists.

      It sounds like you additionally wonder whether changing the protester’s behavior is generally productive irl.

      In a recent thread, Ozy mentioned that it’s really hard to have a conversation about female rape victims because some bro always steps in and says “but what about the menz?” (and vice versa for conversations about male rape victims). The problems men and women experience may share similarities but are ultimately distinct, which makes it difficult to talk about each problem simultaneously. So it’s possible that the anti-mosque protest is being held this week, while the anti-church protest is being held next week.

      There’s also an argument for diversity of activism. Stargirl says we ought evaluate the mosque on its own merits. But I disagree since economically, society’s scarcity of attention and resources entails opportunity costs. If the Ministry of Truth decides that cancer is objectively worse than heart disease, does this mean we should repurpose all available heart disease funds towards cancer research? Each cause is likely subject to diminishing returns. Maybe cancer research is a black hole because no cure actually exists. Putting all our eggs in a single basket is a losing strategy. Therefore, I’d expect there exists an equilibrium somewhere between “invest everything in cancer” vs “invest everything in heart disease”.

      Also, you run the risk depicted in xkcd: Charity anytime you criticize the efficacy of someone’s goodwill.

    • I think the argument is on the face of it legitimate, but I think we can also balance it with the fact that the marginal value of your engagement on an issue is probably much higher for issues where fewer people have engaged with the topic. For example, if you’re doing research and examining all sides of the story, as I think activists sometimes neglect at the moment, you are more likely to identify and argument or something else that nobody has thought of before.

      Also, I wonder even if the above wasn’t true, if it would be really that bad if we comprehensively solved the biggest ten problems in the world (or biggest ten solutions, cost-benefit etc.) and perhaps neglected the less important stuff for a while. Then we’d probably be more prosperous, less threatened and generally in a stronger position to solve the small stuff too.

  30. Dude Man says:

    Am I wrong for thinking that the tech industry hasn’t done anything innovative in the last five years? All of the examples of Silicon Valley innovation are either older than that or is a potential innovation if some more technological breakthroughs happen. On one hand, we don’t realize things are breakthroughs until after they revolutionize things, so this time frame may be too short to judge what we view as important in the future. On the other hand, tech has a nasty habit of over promising and under-delivering, and many of the promised benefits of technology never materialize (this is an industry that insisted their products would make geography irrelevant yet almost all of the most noteworthy companies are in the same metropolitan area). If innovation comes in waves, is the ICT revolution slowing down?

    It seems telling that the most talked-about tech company that began after the release of the iPhone is known for their relationship with regulators and not their technological innovation.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Yeah I think “is a potential innovation if some more technological breakthroughs happen” moves pretty smoothly to “older than that” without much intervening time. When things explode into reality, they have generally had the groundwork laid for them for some time. Like, clickbait has been around almost as long as clicks, but it’s in the past 5 years that people have really refined it and set it up to devour the internet. Or, electric cars have been around for a while, but they only really got to the point where they were feasible as a consumer product in the past 5 years. Or, looked at the other way, there’s innovation going on in self-driving cars, and there has been for over 5 years, but it’s not ready to overturn society quite yet. Once it is, it will be easy to say “oh, self-driving cars are more than 5 years old”. Also, the online gambling market is being revolutionized by fantasy sports derivative products, but once those fully burst out into the main stream it will be easy to say “Hell, I was doing a fantasy draft with my buddies back in the nineties, where’s the innovation?”

      Even your example of the iPhone is just a PDA in a shiny case. Those had been around for a decade. Not seeing how it’s really more innovative than the Uber you sneer at.

      • Dude Man says:

        I concede your point that the groundwork is laid over a large period of time and by the time something explodes it has been around for a while. However, nothing that Silicon Valley has produced that has exploded in the last five years is really impressive. Innovation can’t simply be “thing has changed,” but also has to be “thing has changed and changed society as a result.” What has Silicon Valley produced that has exploded recently have the level of societal impact as what exploded ten or fifteen years ago, much less compared to some of the highlights of other waves of innovation. The stuff you describe in your paragraph that has already happened (clickbait, fantasy betting) isn’t all that impressive. Quite frankly, if the best Silicon Valley can do is sports betting but it still wants to fellate itself for revolutionizing the world, then I’m going to sneer at it for woefully under-delivering.

        As for your points about technology that will explode soon; let’s not count our chickens before they hatch. Tesla and self-driving cars could revolutionize transportation but there are still technological breakthroughs that need to happen for those technologies to revolutionize transportation and we shouldn’t assume that those breakthroughs will happen. A lot of promising technologies just never make the leap.

        • TheFrannest says:

          Are you implying that we should have come up with new physical theories and then put them to good use within the five-year window? That is a lot to ask, and for most of history science doesn’t really operate like this. It’s a series of improvements to existing technology.

          Of course Apple and other companies like it stifles innovation significantly: android had NFC years ago, no one cared, it was adopted by iphones, now it’s groundbreaking technology, what was the point of developing and implementing it first?

          Off top of my mind, computational devices become more powerful and smaller. Typical “my phone is smaller than the tower sized computer I had X years ago” thing.

          Electric cars. Self-driving cars. VR tech. Consumer-grade 3D printers. Those are things that will have wide adoption in the future. Remember, there was a road to go from Wrights’ first flight to consumer airlines.

        • suntzuanime says:

          “I concede your point that we wouldn’t expect to see innovation even if there was some, but still, I don’t see any innovation!”

          • Dude Man says:

            Let me put it this way: if we see innovation after a certain lag time, then what does it mean if we haven’t seen any in the last five years. Does it mean that 2005-2010 was shit and we’re just finding out about it? At what point can you say, “hey this revolution seems to have stalled?”

          • suntzuanime says:

            It’s not just that you only see innovation after a certain lag time, it’s that you only recognize it in hindsight. It’s hard to know what nascent technologies right now are the ones that are actually important. By the time the technology is indisputably important, it’s usually old. We can never see any innovation in the last five years, because we can only recognize innovation by looking at the effects it’s had over the course of five+ years.

            Maybe self-driving cars won’t matter. Maybe they will. Maybe gene-editing won’t matter. Maybe it will. Maybe sports gambling derivatives won’t matter. Maybe they will. We can’t know yet, so it’s impossible to identify recent important innovations.

    • NZ says:

      Where are you looking? It could be that lots of innovative things are coming out of the tech industry but they are business-facing innovations rather than consumer-facing. (I work in the tech industry for a company that makes innovative business-facing software, but I don’t feel qualified to say one way or the other.)

      What I wonder is, do we really want more consumer-facing technological breakthroughs? I don’t think I do.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Wikipedia was started in 2001 but didn’t get big until around 2006 or so. It will probably be easier to figure out the major innovations from this time period a few years down the road.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      5 years is probably too short of a time to identify a major change, until 10 years from now. It’s probably happening, but very difficult to see at the moment. Self driving cars, the ubiquity of smart phones to all people, etc. It’s pretty embarrassing to admit technically, but Twitter appears to actually be a real innovation.

      I grew up in the 1970’s, and have been an EE for 30 years. The internet didn’t just pop out of nowhere in a 5 year period. But looking back there is no doubt in my mind that this period of time will be seen as a revolution on equal with the industrial revolution, the computer revolution. It has been an amazing experience to watch it happen. It’s hard to imagine that there were barely roads and cars 100 years ago, the first airplane, ever, in 1903. Think about it. Humans have been around 10,000+ years and look what happened in just the last 100.

      It’s possible things may have slowed down, but that would only be because the exponential curve of innovation is hard to stay on forever.

      So, get to work millennial generation, you have a pretty high bar to meet, ha ha.

    • brad says:

      Tyler Cowen has a great stagnation theory that (basically) asserts we have squeezed most of the good stuff out of the fundamental scientific advances from the late 19th and early 20th century, and in the west we no longer have vast pools of uneducated and/or underutilized people (i.e. rural people and women) to get huge boosts from allowing to reach their full potential.

      For reasons to be optimistic he points out the possibilities for new scientific breakthroughs and the vast potential of the populations of India and China.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        The Great Stagnation roughly corresponds to the productivity slowdown that begins in the 1970s. This is observed across nations.

        The influx of women into the workplace comes after that and accounts for many dozens of millions of people across the Western world. We’ve also scaled up the average education level since then, not just in the West, but Asian nations as well (see Japan, South Korea, Singapore).

        We’re still stuck in the Great Stagnation. Which would be measurably worse, if not for the productivity gains in China.

        Not sure how additional Chinese and Indians will power INNOVATION to get us out of the recession. Though we have a lot of opportunity for capital deepening, or mundane scaling like irrigation and fertilizer in Subsaharan Africa.

        • brad says:

          US labor force participation rate for women was at 32% in 1948 when the BLS started keeping track. By January 1970 it was 43.3% and 51.6% in January 1980. It peaked at 60.% in early 2000 and is now down to 56.4%.

          Women entering the workplace straddles the start of the stagnation somewhat, but if anything more of it occurred before than during. There’s also some reason to believe that it was a front loaded in terms of ability.

          If you can’t understand how billions of people in Indian and China having the ability to contribute to their full extent of their abilities will power innovation, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe, check your assumptions?

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Maybe, check your assumptions?

            I did. My initial assumption is that increasing the pool of potential innovators will increase innovation. The evidence post-1970 suggests that is wrong.
            Proportionally speaking, we increased the number of women in the labor force between 1970 and 2000 by nearly 40%, according to your statistics. In the same time period, we’ve moved from around 15% of the population completing tertiary or higher education to close to 25%, so we’ve upskilled as well. And we have more minds if just because our population has grown dramatically.

            Still no end to the Great Stagnation, in fact that’s precisely the period OF the Great Stagnation.

            I see little reason to assume the addition of Chinese and Indian business expertise will fundamentally alter the equation, particularly as China has a non-stable social and political model where 1/3 of urban workers are not even legally allowed to live in cities and India is still extremely poor on a per-capita basis.

  31. alexp says:

    Are there any fans of the Expanse series by James SA Corey here?

    I’d highly recommend the newest novella [/i]The Vital Abyss[i] even if you’re unfamiliar with the series. There would be some major spoilers in there for the first book and I guess the upcoming tv series as well, but includes a lot of themes this community likes: Basic income, brain modification, experimental ethics, etc.

  32. Saul says:

    I think several people have already made comments similar to this one, but I don’t have time to sift through all the chains at this time. I want to mention some developments in my life that may feel familiar to some of you.

    I go to a large state school in a state far away from my home. I’ve never had trouble making friends, but I found it actually quite difficult now. I know many variables changed: the state, my peers, school workload to name a few. But these changes seemed to have caused me particularly to fail to make friends in college.

    I did make a few friends as time went on. These people happen to also follow SSC and have interesting ideas to discuss along these lines. Over the last 2 years though, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to even have a conversation with people outside of this bubble. I thought my social skills completely atrophied.

    But I was wrong. When I went to a LW/SSC meetup, I felt comfortable joining every group and making conversation. Moreover, I was stimulated in every conversation, and I wanted them all to continue. This is quite different from my normal party interactions where nothing is I say is interesting to the people around me, and nothing they say is interesting to me. I thought parties were entirely pointless because of this (and because of the typical mind fallacy, I had a hard time believing anybody else was having fun). Now I know that it was my personality becoming extremely unusual and cemented. Kind of like when you watch more and more bizarre porn to the point where normal naked women fail to do anything for you.

    I am not autistic, and I’ve had pretty normal friends in the past. I was never extremely social or popular, but I was enough so that I could just hangout with people on most days and have a girlfriend/romantic interest most of the year. I think my current life is incredibly alienating. My lack of a social life even hinders me from doing my schoolwork. To add to this, it’s hard to feel good about yourself when not many people have anything good to say about you (or really anything to say at all).

    So how do I fix this? Have any of you fixed this? Any and all advice is appreciated.

    • Murphy says:

      I found something similar after Uni, suddenly it felt a lot harder to make friends but it’s been going better since I realised what habits I’d changed.

      Nothing big, just things like suggesting hanging out or doing things with people. I’d become very passive.

    • Linch says:

      I’m not 100% sure what your biggest social problem is. It can be alternatively read as a) “I don’t have enough (irl) friends” and b) “I don’t have enough “normal” friends.”

      I will interpret your statement as primarily a function of a (possibly typical-mind fallacy, but I have never felt a need to optimize for b).

      Possible ideas/Things that work for me:

      1) Join student groups! Particularly the nerdier ones. In college, I was involved in sci-fi club, Chess&Games, martial arts, as well as a few organizations I attended less regularly. They have definitely been useful in meeting people I like hanging out with. Also, join or start an effective altruism group if you’re into that. It’s a great way to meet/forge people who’re One of Us. 😛

      2)Try interacting with people in smaller groups/one on one. I’m personally a huge fan of board games, but meeting up to chat about homework over coffee, or just grabbing lunch or dinner at the school cafeteria could be fine ways to interact (I’m also inclined to suggest dnd). I’ve always found parties pretty alienating in that it’s very difficult to carry a sustained, intelligent conversation. Smaller groups are annoying in the sense that you might find it difficult to detach yourself if the conversations are boring, but other than your time cost, they have the advantage of letting you shape the conversation into mutually interesting topics*, or, if none exists, to definitively realize that you should hang out with other people.

      3) Make yourself more interesting conversationally*! This is easier said than done. I’m not a naturally funny person, but I found utility in taking note of the funniest jokes I’ve found online/heard on standup comedy, and practicing the delivery. (Note that I find this intrinsically enjoyable. I don’t know how effective jokes are if you have no real interest in them). I’ve also found utility in memorizing interesting quotes, anecdotes, synopsis of scenes in books/movies that can be used to illustrate interesting points, etc. (eg, Lake Woebegone, 1970s Spanish Christmas lottery). Not sure how much time you’re willing to invest in being a good conversationalist. It’s definitely not cheaper in terms of opportunity costs…

      Also, I noticed that people seem to like me more after I increased my expressiveness: deliberately exaggerating the range of my facial emotions, hand motions, and tones of my voice; however I do not know how much of this is just correlation.

      4) Make friends with philosophy majors. Seriously, I find as many as ~1/3 of philosophy majors to be capable of fairly novel insights, or at least the ability to creatively regurgitate books I have never read. Sure, they have crazy beliefs like virtue ethics or deontology, but a surprisingly high number of them are charitable with alternative viewpoints. In addition, philosophy majors are more likely to be both capable of the higher levels of abstraction/”meta” that readers of this blog are familiar with instead of being stuck on object-level ideas, and (unlike many STEM majors), a large percentage of them can communicate to laymen effectively.

      *All of this assumes that you have the general intelligence of people at this blog and at least average social intelligence.
      **While I like myself as a person socially, I have not been successful romantically. YMMV.

  33. Alphaceph says:

    Slatestarcodex should really have a slashdot style system where all comments other than top level ones are collapsed by defualt, and you have a slider to slide to expand the levels gradually.

    Surely someone would step up to the plate and implement this if our illustrious host asked.

    • The public source of the JavaScript code that adds the Hide links on comments is at github.com/bakkot/SlateStarComments. The code hasn’t yet been updated with the new “↑” link-to-parent on that site, but after it’s updated, perhaps the creator, Bakkot, would accept a pull request that implements that feature.

      I agree that such a feature sounds useful. If anyone thinks this feature is not worth the screen real estate, or would have negative effects on the quality of the discussion, they might want to explain why here, to nip any implementations in the bud.

      • I suggest implement so that the comments are visible in the basic markup then Javascript hides them immediately, so if people have Javascript turned off for some reason they can still view comments.

        Kinda related – it would be great if we had some way off identifying the best comments on a article in case people were in a rush and didn’t have time to read all the comments, and so gems didn’t just get lost in obscurity, though I know of no fair or reasonable way to do this.

      • Alphaceph says:

        I would go even further and replace each *top-level* comment with a 3-line summary that you can click to expand, and order the top-level comments by number of children rather than chronologically, possibly with some priority given for newness so that stuff doesn’t get buried.

        I get that ordering comments by votes is problematic for free discourse, but there are better ways to order comments than nesting level+timestamp.

    • Katherine says:

      That sounds tedious. How do you find the new comments?

  34. VintagePepe says:

    Please nuke if this skirts the gender/race ban, but is the prejudiced norm theory with regards to humour(summed up pretty neutral in this post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2013/05/01/does-sexist-humor-matter-a-review-of-the-research/ ) on the same level of shakiness as the stereotype? Possible confounders I can think of is limited replicability and self-selection among the participants of the research, but I am not trained in spotting confounders at all.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      1. The Viki et al. paper, the only one I’ve looked at, is flawed in the usual ways. I quote:

      This finding indicates that the highest levels of self-reported rape proclivity were in the sexist
      joke-acquaintance rape condition (M = 2.45, SD = 1.24), followed by the other conditions (i.e.
      nonsexist joke-acquaintance rape condition; M = 1.96, SD = 1.20; nonsexist joke-stranger rape
      condition; M = 1.54, SD = 0.7; and the sexist joke-stranger rape condition; M = 1.42, SD =
      0.61)

      In other words, the subjects who read sexist jokes before being given the stranger-rape story had (non-significantly) lower “rape proclivity” scores than the subjects who read non-sexist jokes. Worse, if the researchers had combined the two sexist-joke conditions (as they almost certainly would have had the study been pre-registered), the highlighted effect would have largely vanished. I also see no correction for multiple tests. This all reeks of after-the-fact cherrypicking to guarantee the hypothesis or a suitable reformulation thereof is confirmed.

      2. External validity (i.e. whether the results generalize from the laboratory to the real world) is going to be the biggest issue here, if the results in the other two studies hold up to scrutiny. To compare, social psych experiments have pretty consistently found that playing violent video games makes experimental subjects more aggressive, at least in the short term; meanwhile, crime rates have been plummeting ever since the release of the SNES. The lesson seems to be that the effects of playing video games on our psyches, whatever they may be, are small, fleeting, and ultimately swamped by everything else that goes into our decision-making algorithms. I would not be at all surprised if something similar was the case here– a small but replicable result in the laboratory with no plausible connection to real-world trends.

      3. I know this is a pipe dream, but they should have performed a gender-swapped experiment on women.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        It appears as though the Romero-Sanchez et al. study did not in fact “replicate” the Viki et al. study, as the freethoughtblogger claims– the relationship between reading sexist jokes and “rape proclivity” in their experiment was positive but not quite significant. This time, though, they were clever enough to only use acquaintance-rape scenarios– you don’t want a counter-intuitive result getting in the way of scientific progress, after all.

        Also, since you asked about confounds, the main confound here would be that men in the sexist joke condition are no more likely to rape than the men in the nonsexist joke condition, but are more at ease admitting to their antisocial urges because they just read a bunch of sexist jokes. But there’s really no need to worry about confounds until you have an effect, which they don’t.

        To sum up: you have a transparently p-hacked study with (roughly) an interaction but no main effect, followed by a non-significant “replication” which only goes after the interaction. By social psychology standards, that’s… pretty typical, actually.

        • VintagePepe says:

          Holy moly, that’s worse than I estimated. Thanks for the detailed reply!

        • Earthly Knight says:

          One more thing, from the Romero-Sanchez et al. study:

          Rape proclivity shown by participants exposed to the sexist
          joke condition (M = 1.73, SD = 0.70) was higher than that shown by those
          exposed to the nonsexist condition (M = 1.51, SD = 0.54)

          This is on a 5-point Likert scale. Even if the effect had reached significance, it would still be trivial.

          • Peter says:

            Ah excellent, we can calculate Cohen’s d (roughly, difference in means divided by standard deviation, with a twiddly bit for differing standard deviations), and with it, various other measures. 0.35. I think in “T-Shirt sizes” that counts as “small”, or as I like to say, “small even by social science standards”. We can go on to calculate R2, which works out at 0.03.

            So, 3% of the variance in answers to the Rape Proclivity Scale (which may or may not be a good measure of the thing you’re actually interesting) is explained by the sexist joke condition. Maybe. Plus or minus quite a lot. This is binary-variable vs. likert scale, but if it was a scatterplot, you’d have a big splodge which you might see some ellipticity in maybe… nah, just a trick of the light.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Cohen’s d assumes that the two populations have the same standard deviation. The fiddly bit is combining the data to estimate that joint deviation. It is for differing measured deviations assuming equal actual deviations.

  35. JRM says:

    SSC minor changes to my life:

    1. At Scott’s general request, I didn’t send him money, but donated to charity. Won’t quite be a record this year for charity donation for me, but a strong year. Including a car. A crappy, crappy car.

    2. Scott’s nutrition posts sent me on a scientific quest, and I quit Diet Coke cold turkey. (Gone to iced tea. Lots of it.) That and contributions from other sources (notably Penn Jillette’s advice to decrease exercise as a hunger-reduction device during weight-loss start-up) has led to losing 40 pounds, though the biggest clarity from the research is the battle is not won in the losing but in the staying-lost. Also, in the long-term, exercise or die.

    3. Scott’s posts abate much of the anger I have for the stupid stupid stupid political meme pics on my Facebook page. I don’t agree with Scott on several things, but the process is what’s important – if Scott and I had a political discussion, it would be with the same goals, same processes, and same fealty to truth. People can discuss politics with fewer biases and more caring about the actual better answer. Yay.

    These were nudges; some stuff would have happened anyway. But these are real contributions. Thanks!

    • Saul says:

      Where are Scott’s nutrition posts? I’m sitting in front of 3 empty cans of diet Diet Dr. Pepper and one half empty one I’m going to drink.

    • Echo says:

      Decreased exercise for weight loss? If you want to lose all your muscle weight, sure. If you want to lose fat, not so much.

      • JRM says:

        Echo:

        I’m not the only one for whom exercise reduction served as an appetite suppressant. I would suggest I have not lost 40 pounds of muscle. This isn’t an unalloyed good, but I am at least a datum that it works. (Muscle reduction from low-cal, low-exercise plans is an issue and means that returning to base weight is a significant downgrade from prior health status.)

        Saul:

        Google “Diet Soda Weight Gain.” You’ll get the morass of stuff there is, some of it contradictory. I have come to these conclusions:

        1. Diet soda may cause appetite gain and therefore weight gain. But it might not.
        2. Drinking half a gallon of diet soda a day is a bad idea. (I was doing this.)

      • Glen Raphael says:

        The Ray Cronise program is to lose the fat first (mostly via changes in diet), *then* exercise to regain lost muscle mass.

        When you are substantially overweight, exercise is really unpleasant and prone to cause injury and prone to increase appetite. After you lose a few dozens of pounds, exercise starts to become more fun and easier and safer.

    • Note: Low-content post.

      Also, in the long-term, exercise or die.

      Actually, it’s even simpler than that…

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Well I recently acted on Scott’s advice from a couple of years ago and got one of those Iron Gym contraptions … only to discover that there were no doorframes anywhere near my room that it would fit (it’s an old-ish house). Not willing to accept defeat, I got one of the ones that you actually screw into the sides of the frame instead. Yet to see how much I’m able to stick to doing much exercise long term, but at least I’ve cut out one trivial inconvenience.

  36. Alphaceph says:

    I recently noticed that I have suffered a lot in terms of social connections for not conforming to what we call “blue tribe” beliefs around here. In particular a lot of people who I meet in all kinds of social situations (from dinner with family friends to college reunions to parties I go to) hold beliefs like:

    – Human genetic engineering (eugenics) is inherently evil, even if it is used to cure a terrible hereditary disease, and I am a bad person for daring to think otherwise. One long term friend openly said “Alphaceph, I’m beginning to wonder whether we should still be friends” over this issue.

    – Government spending on benefits is an unconditional good, and (for example) the government should pay for people in council houses to have spare bedrooms, at taxpayer expense, whilst people (like me) who work can live in one tiny bedroom of a houseshare. In the UK, people express this by saying that austerity is evil, and I am a bad person for thinking otherwise.

    – In the great gender wars, piping up and saying something like “sexual consent is a blurred, gray concept at the boundry, because any kind of question of consent or true volition becomes blurry at the boundries.” is considered utterly evil. The dominant idea of the time is that consent is simple, “like offering someone a cup of tea”, and if you question this rather glib argument, you are an evil rape apologist.

    – Immigration – even unlimited open border immigration is obviously a great thing, and if you question this you are a bad person and a racist, or at the very least irrational in the extreme for not being immediately compelled by the “place premium” argument.

    – the idea that different races or genders could have different innate average skills or g-levels or IQs or interests is evil, racist/sexist and also incorrect. By magic, evolution happened to exactly match all these properties across subsets of humans, and if you believe otherwise you are evil.

    – On democracy: I believe that democracy is a bad way of running things but that other ways are worse (thanks Churchill) and that the establishment/elite having more say than the average person in running a country could plausibly be a good thing, up to a certain extent (thanks Bryan Caplan). This is considered pretty heretical.

    I feel that I am taking a skill I excel at compared to the average person (rationality) and unintentionally using that skill to actively destroy my credibility in social circles whenever I express an opinion. This is a failure mode that I would like to find a permanent and general solution to. Obviously I am a questioning and intelligent person and I cannot simply unbelieve these things. I also cannot live a lie and try to forge deep connections with people based on a “front” persona that I have constructed specifically because I think it will be popular.

    The obvious solution is “get rid of your blue tribe friends”. The problem is, blue tribe is rampant, especially amongst people who are young and unmarried/without children.

    As a result of this trilemma, I feel that I am actually quite a lonely person – I have a lot of people who I can have a laugh with or socialize with, but very few people who I can actually let my guard down around. I was wondering if anyone else has had any similar experiences.

    ======================

    EDIT: And by the way, I don’t particularly think this is a problem along the lines of “oh Alphaceph, you’re just SO right wing”. If I were swimming in a demographic that was very red tribe, I would have the same problem but with different specifics. I’m an atheist, I’m pro choice, mostly anti war, pro gay rights, in favour of doing something about global warming, in favor of a basic income guarantee eventually (the question is when not if), anti gun ownership, etc etc etc. The red people would haul me over the coals just as much as the blue people. Ditto classic libertarians – I think that ordinary people benefit a lot from “nudges” to do and believe the right things, and in some cases (cost/benefit pending) the government should stick its nose into peoples’ business.

    I think the basic problem is that “map-territory rationality” is fundamentally an anti-skill for normal people – unless you are running a billion dollar business or something, conforming to incorrect but socially advantageous beliefs is worth more than having true beliefs.

    • Echo says:

      Expressing opinions in social circles just means saying “I am part of the in-group and agree with everything good people think”. Expressing disagreement means you’re in the outgroup. Rationality doesn’t matter.
      Stop saying rational things if you want to have blue friends.

      • Dude Man says:

        Do you think the Greys are somehow immune from this?

      • Izaak Weiss says:

        Let me give a little more nuanced advice here: If you’re interested in talking with your friends about politics, do it one on one, and learn to couch it in terms of blue memes. For instance, the rape question; ask if it’s possible for two people to rape each other (while both incredibly intoxicated).

        Also, the “stop saying rational things if you want blue friends” applies to all colors of friends.

        • Alphaceph says:

          > and learn to couch it in terms of blue memes

          if you have to filter what you’re going to say and try to do a PR job on it, you’re not really connecting with somebody, you’re marketing and presenting at them. I have zero desire to convince random people of any of these points of view by trying to do a great PR job, so if it comes down to “well you could try and couch it like this and choose your words carefully”, then just not saying anything on the subject is much better. But then one ends up being that awkward person in the group who’s trying to hide what they really think, and that shows. People can tell, and it’s not how you find true friends – it’s how you would behave at an event you are forced to attend and your main goal is to get out without causing offence.

          • suntzuanime says:

            if you have to filter what you’re going to say and try to do a PR job on it, you’re not really connecting with somebody, you’re marketing and presenting at them.

            Welcome to interpersonal interaction, lol.

          • Alphaceph says:

            Not all interpersonal interaction is “really connecting with somebody”. A lot of it is, in fact, marketing and presenting.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Yeah. In fact, all of it. Your problem is that you’re making a principled refusal to play the game, then complaining that you’re losing. Oh, boo hoo, people won’t connect with the “real me” just because my opinions are abhorrent to them and I refuse to politely moderate myself in interactions with them. You aren’t entitled to friendship, get over yourself.

          • Alphaceph says:

            > principled refusal to play the game, then complaining that you’re losing. Oh, boo hoo,

            It has been a long time since I’ve been criticised for being too principled. Feels good!

          • suntzuanime says:

            No, go ahead and be principled. Just don’t complain.

          • Alphaceph says:

            > people won’t connect with the “real me” just because my opinions are abhorrent to them and I refuse to politely moderate myself in interactions with

            seriously though, people need to find good, trustworthy friends and a life partner. Do you want to have a life partner who you get married to and have children with but have to politely moderate yourself around? I find it hard to believe that you think that is a smart idea.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I think a lot of people manage it pretty well. But no, I personally maintain a principled solitude, I just don’t whine about it like you.

          • TheFrannest says:

            We are all liars, the trick is to carve a good-fitting mask and wear it well.

          • Alphaceph says:

            > no, I personally maintain a principled solitude, I just don’t whine

            I’d rather be the person who whines for 5 minutes on the internet than the person who makes suboptimal life choices for 5 decades, but maybe you are right and authenticity is fundamentally lonely.

          • suntzuanime says:

            oh no, suboptimal life choices, lmao

          • Alphaceph says:

            > We are all liars, the trick is to carve a good-fitting mask and wear it well.

            So you also want to spend your life lying to your closest friends and husband/wife/partner? uuuuum ok…

          • Jaskologist says:

            Do you really expect to have a marriage where you don’t politely moderate yourself? Good luck with that.

          • Alphaceph says:

            @suntzuanime: there’s no need to be an asshole.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I’m just trying to forge a real connection with you by not filtering what I say and doing a PR job on it, lol

          • Alphaceph says:

            > Do you really expect to have a marriage where you don’t politely moderate yourself?

            What, on everything? Construct a fake persona and set of beliefs to impress your partner like some kind of coached mail order bride?

            I mean this is something that can be a matter of degree, obviously. Any two people will need to compromise, agree to disagree or remain silent with each other on some things. But when it becomes “basically everything”, I think you have a problem.

          • Alphaceph says:

            @suntzuanime: no, you’re being an asshole, which is a shame because earlier you had some interesting things to say. Oh well.

          • blacktrance says:

            Do you really expect to have a marriage where you don’t politely moderate yourself?

            Do you not? If so, I’m sorry. No wonder so many people are miserable in their relationships.

          • Hari Seldon says:

            Signalling… it’s all signalling.

            Political discussion is not a safe game to play in today’s society. Having the wrong (non-blue) views doesn’t just make you different, it makes you a pariah. You can either toe the line or be an outcast. It doesn’t mean you have to lie, but self editing is a good idea.

          • Wait, what? In whose society is this not safe? By what qualification do we call having opinions on the Internet unsafe?

            I mean, I talk about all sorts of stuff in all sorts of fora, under my real name, and I can’t say I’ve suffered for it at all in my real life. Can we think seriously about what the actual risk profile is for saying controversial things on the Internet, and get some actual numbers around how supposedly unsafe it is?

            I mean, either this is a wrong assertion to be making, or I really need to adjust my online presence sharpish. I’m kind of motivated to find out the truth on this issue.

          • Spaghetti Lee says:

            @Robert Liguori yeah, like I said below, I don’t want to assume anyone’s being dishonest, but I can’t help but wonder about this idea that if you offend the left you’re done for, that it’s both indisputably true and a major threat to us all. Isolated incidents, sure, but you can find isolated incidents of anything. Remember Scott’s cardiologist post?

          • TheFrannest says:

            @suntzuanime

            >I’m just trying to forge a real connection with you by not filtering what I say and doing a PR job on it, lol

            I have a post above where we discuss the obsession with linking offensive and true. Can you share thoughts?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Seems like a pretty ordinary statistical effect. Even if truth is, in the space of all possible statements, uncorrelated with offensiveness, once you get people optimizing their statements for truth and inoffensiveness, you’ll get a correlation between the two.

          • Alphaceph says:

            @Hari Seldon: “Having the wrong (non-blue) views doesn’t just make you different, it makes you a pariah”

            Yup, well put.

          • brad says:

            You don’t need to agree or even talk about the interaction between race and IQ to have a long, fruitful loving partnership. You do need to agree on the role of debt in household finance, whether or not children ought to be forced to go to church, and roughly how often to have sex.

            Or at least that’s how the vast majority of people see it. If you do have the need to see eye to eye on every theoretical debate that will have zero impact on your life … good luck.

    • Mark says:

      Ah… cool parties.
      If you want to be cool, then that is image, isn’t it.
      You’re trying to be genuine in the wrong places – plenty of normal working young people have non- blue tribe views.

      • Alphaceph says:

        perhaps I should reword that part of my post because it gives the wrong impression. One second.

        EDIT: there, done.

        Parties was the first context that came to mind, but thinking through my life it is totally unexceptional – this problem just applies everywhere.

        • Mark says:

          I say just let rip.

          Grumpy old men with integrity, but no friends, have a kind of faintly obnoxious glory to them.

          And isn’t it better to be glorious than merely popular?

          • Alphaceph says:

            I think that people who forge deep connections with others usually do it whilst maintaining their integrity. That’s what makes it a connection rather than a con.

          • Watercressed says:

            Piously and sincerely arriving at beliefs acceptable to your social network is just playing the con on a higher level and about more important things.

          • Spaghetti Lee says:

            Steve Albini, Harlan Ellison, Gore Vidal…you’d be keeping some mighty classy company, that’s for sure.

    • Anonymous says:

      While blue tribe support is indeed rampant among young people, I don’t think it’s quite as much so as you imagine. Remember that being left-wing is nice and being right-wing is nasty. If you are 100% convinced that a particular right-wing idea is correct, you might say it in public. If you are 30% convinced that a left-wing idea is correct, unless anyone will confidently argue against you then you might as well say it – you will get points for being nice, and even if your case seems weak and/or someone corrects you, at least you were only trying to be nice. Compare this to what will happen if you make a weak case for a right-wing idea. What person would support a nasty right-wing idea unless they were absolutely certain that it was correct?

      My point is that I believe much of the left-wing sentiment is driven by a vocal minority, with the center-ground majority staying quiet or going along with the left because it’s a much safer option than voicing any right-wing thoughts.

      • Alphaceph says:

        Hence Cthulu always swims left… interesting.

        Also, rather appropriate given the previous post about common knowledge.

      • BBA says:

        Also note the “Shy Tory”/”Bradley effect”, which leads to a leftish skew in opinion polls as people are embarrassed to admit their rightish views to pollsters. I’ve seen this in numerous recent elections, and it appears to be universal – for instance, polling in tomorrow’s Canadian election shows a tossup but I bet it’ll be a clear Conservative victory when the votes are counted.

        • BBA says:

          This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong, won’t be the last either.

          • Chalid says:

            At least in the US, the Bradley effect is seen to be mainly about race, and most people think it vanished quite some time ago, well before 2008 and Obama. Also, I don’t think published polls have any systematic bias in the US, where the polling industry is quite competitive. I don’t know anything about the rest of the world though.

            I wonder if some people’s views about the strength of SJ and the like would have predicted an increasing Bradley effect.

            +1 for making a public prediction!

          • BBA says:

            The Bradley effect was about race, but so is American politics, to a much greater extent than elsewhere. (Or is that just my lingering SJ tendency showing?)

            The Shy Tory effect was very visible in this year’s British elections. Polls predicted another hung parliament instead of the Tory sweep that actually occurred. Also, in Israel this year the polls had a tie between right-wing Likud and centrist Zionist Union. Instead Likud won a decisive plurality…well, 23% to 19%, which is about as decisive as Israel gets.

            The common thread is that people say they’re leftish or undecided, but when the chips are down they’ll vote for the right-wing party. So it surprised me that Canada went the other way – polling showed a Liberal-NDP coalition government with the Tories in a close second, but it appears the Liberals won an outright majority.

    • alexp says:

      Honestly, if you’re at all worried about keeping friends you might start with your own self congratulatory attitude towards your ability to think rationally.

      • Alphaceph says:

        I’m not really sure what to say to this.

        Are you seriously suggesting that I am a Dunning-Kreuger victim or are you just trying to score points against me?

        It it’s the former, realise this is a fully general criticism of anyone, at all, who tries to accurately estimate their own cognitive skills and traits, and use that to plan their life. Can you point to more specific tests or attributes that distinguish between smart people realising they’re smart and irrational people falling into the trap?

        If it’s the latter, I really have nothing to say to you.

        • Alexp says:

          The former, sort of. I actually agree with you on most of your points, but everybody, including myself, could due with more epistemological humility.

          But that’s not exactly my point. From social standpoint, regardless of your internal beliefs, it’s best not to be so certain in a seemingly insufferable manner when it comes to even slightly controversial beliefs.

          Well, it’s best not to even bring things up. I live in Texas and have a lot of friends who have beliefs I disagree with. If I ever feel like I need to bring up anything controversial or contest a statement (and I usually don’t), then I certainly won’t due so in a manner that suggests I’m a paragon of rationality and they are all mindless, Alex Jones/ Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck following sheep.

          • Alphaceph says:

            > everybody, including myself, could due with more epistemological humility.

            It would be hard to even pose my question if I was deliberately lowballing my own rationality for the sake of humility. How would that read “hey, I’m pretty irrational and wrong about a lot of controversial things and people ostracise me… but I can’t just stop being wrong because um..”

    • I think the basic problem is that “map-territory rationality” is fundamentally an anti-skill for normal people – unless you are running a billion dollar business or something, conforming to incorrect but socially advantageous beliefs is worth more than having true beliefs.

      What, because some people in your social circle are using mild-to-moderate social pressure on you for having dissident opinions the same shape as Those Bad People Over There?

      I mean, I’m not claiming that you haven’t suffered, but the examples you’ve given seem a little weak. Sometimes you can find yourself in a generally unhealthy social group, or a healthy social group that just isn’t compatible with your own beliefs. But we live in the most connected era in human history; now, we can find new communities with the push of a button. Now, when we decide to leave a group for being too X-ist, we can find the community of disaffected former Xers almost instantly.

      If you truly feel that you are suffering because of nonconforming social beliefs, I recommend that you go on Meetup.com, find three meetups in your area that look interesting, and attend a few meetings each, while making an effort to be sociable, meet new people, and make friends. Then, if even one of those meetups is something you feel like continuing, you’ve got a redundant backup social network, and you can say back to your current social circle “Funny, I was wondering that same friendship question myself.”

      In my experience, it’s very easy to fall into a completely interconnected social circle. But it’s also easy to cultivate a bunch of smaller less-interconnected or in some cases even directly oppositional social circles. If you set things up right, you can diversify your social circle like an investment portfolio, so a sudden loss in the bond prices of one group pushes up your social stock in a negatively-correlated group. You can be authentically you, and have people who disagree with you still respect you; not everyone will, but you should never fall into the trap of fearing that you must always seek their respect.

      • Alphaceph says:

        > you’ve got a redundant backup social network, and you can say back to your current social circle “Funny, I was wondering that same friendship question myself.”

        Sure, you can do that, I think it’s basically a sound strategy though selection based on random meetup groups is likely to leave you a bit overexposed to “politically correct blue tribe risk”.

        I think it has just become de rigeur for young middle class people in the UK to be blue tribe. It’s how you signal you’re not lower class.

        • Linch says:

          Hmm…I think my general advice about advocacy applies here. Presumably you aren’t optimizing for “hit rate”-making the highest percentage of friends among people you meet- but some mixture between quantity-total number of new and interesting friends and quality-meeting the absolutely most interesting and genuine people. The more people go through your filter, the more likely some of them match your desired characteristics.

          Whether you’re optimizing for numbers or an extremum, this is a decidedly more optimal strategy than meeting a few people in high hit rate places.

          • Alphaceph says:

            I’m just not optimising at all, I think that’s my problem.

          • Linch says:

            Yeah, I think the general advice of meeting new people and not being too offensive/obviously political in the first meeting is probably a good one. If them not being blue tribe is important to you, consider bringing up subtle tribal markers that blue-tribers are less likely to prime on than grey ones (Bitcoin, famous libertarian/conservative novelists like Heinlein). If they get upset, just say you like good writing.

            Note that I live in the US and my own political views are somewhat blue in affiliation (mainline EA), so I’m not sure how useful my advice would actually be.

          • Alphaceph says:

            > If them not being blue tribe is important to you, consider …

            Yeah, I think I need to find good ways to actively filter these people out.

            I have started doing this on Facebook actually, if I see a few Guardian posts from someone, hit the unfriend button.

    • stargirl says:

      You should probably consider being more dishonest. In “public” I just pretend to be very blue. I have lots of disagreements with the blues and the reds. So I just emphasize my disagreements with the reds.

      I think you should only explain your true beliefs to people who you know to also have “Deviant” beliefs. Usually finding someone like this requires a process of slowly revealing more or your beliefs. If people you know are libertarians you should consider talking to them more. Some libertarians are closed minded, other are open minded. But anyone who is openly libertarian is already in the black hole and very unlikely to socially punish you for saying crimethink.

      TLDR:

      Please, please do not bring up either rape policies or racial difference in general company. This is a very, very bad idea.

      • Alphaceph says:

        It is amazing how much this discussion is touching on the common knowledge post.

        > anyone who is openly libertarian is already in the black hole

        true, that’s interesting.

        > Please, please do not bring up…

        The problem is, the ever-growing list of things not to bring up seems like an ad hoc way of dealing with the problem. If you have to carry around a huge self-censorship list in your head when talking with certain people, maybe you should find different people instead of adding another item to the list.

        > I just pretend to be very blue

        Hah. Maybe we should start the rational/grey underground.

    • tcd says:

      A few observations post-graduation:

      1. Over time when interacting with someone, if you turn out to be reasonably correct about both common and obscure things, then regardless of disagreement you will be desirable to be around. Admit ignorance when you do not have a reasonable answer, call out suspected ignorance when you see it. Like everything there is a balance here, but in my experience over time other people value consistency and honesty over hearing the same old shit every day.

      2. Actually be honest.

      3. Self-deprecation is one of the most powerful forces in the social universe. In situations where you value the person in question, it buys you chances to call them out/possibly offend them.

      A few things I am less confident of:

      4. Depending on where you are situated, you might find couples (or individuals in committed relationships) a better source of social companionship. People who do not have to play a persona (genuine or forced) in the mating game seem on average much more willing to talk (argue) about controversial subjects.

      5. Some people are not interesting. Now, there are interesting facts about any person, and there are interesting experiences that any given person might go through, but if you can consistently emulate the person in your mind (or in real conversation by cutting them off), then it may not be worth your time. All relationships are reciprocal, why have a conversation with yourself.

      • Alphaceph says:

        > but if you can consistently emulate the person in your mind (or in real conversation by cutting them off), then it may not be worth your time

        A lot of people fail this test on anything political, there are standard “cached” blue trube arguments.

        Though sometimes more extreme blue trube people come up with something so extreme and ridiculous I haven’t heard it yet.

    • blacktrance says:

      Contrary to what some others have said, I recommend just being honest. Who knows if there are others like you, who are being quiet and hiding behind a mask of respectability? Make your dissent public knowledge, and you’ll attract them. I’m speaking somewhat from personal experience – I went to a heavily Blue college but had mostly Grey friends partially because I expressed views unacceptable to dedicated Blues.

    • Pku says:

      Point one: If you express disagreement in a reasonable way (e.g. “I’m not sure government spending on X is fair/efficient” as opposed to “STOP ENTITLEMENT SPENDING”), a lot of people will treat you reasonably, especially if they like you – they won’t want to pattern-match you to “evil red tribe”, so if you act reasonably they’ll probably put you as “reasonable person who disagrees with me”. (I’ve had some success with this approach, with some people. There are some people it absolutely will not work with, so it’s not a universal solution, but even having a few people on your side can really help with feeling surrounded.)
      Point 2 is that a surprising amount of people are reasonable non-extremists who are willing to question dogma (though OTOH, I mostly hang out with mathematicians, so I may be biased here). If you’re willing to give random people a chance, you can learn new ideas from people you wouldn’t expect to. (Again, this doesn’t apply to everyone, particularly the people who are loudest and most dogmatic, but it works surprisingly often).

      • Jiro says:

        PKU: Acting according to point one means that you are being a “concern troll”. although the actual term will probably be used less in real life than online.

        • Alphaceph says:

          Yeah… it’s a form of PR/spinning. As I have said earlier in the thread, at some point of doing this you’re like “why the f*ck am I doing this, I’m not getting paid commission, it would be easier to just not talk to these people”

          • Chalid says:

            You’re trying to convince people to change their minds, but you don’t want to do PR? PR is just framing your message in the way that makes it most likely to be successful – if you’re not willing to put in the work to make your message a high-quality one then you might as well just grunt and change the subject (which is what most people do when controversial stuff comes up).

        • Hyzenthlay says:

          Man I hate the term “concern troll.” It’s become the go-to excuse to dismiss anyone with a dissenting point of view.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            “Concern troll” is a legitimate problem, although I concede the term can be misapplied.

            The best way I know of to tell the difference, is to look at how much trouble the candidate put into their concern. “I like free markets as much as the next guy, but…” is a really easy thing to write, and might indicate a concern troll. “I realize this spending will raise our debt and make it harder to pay off, but…” is a much stronger signal that the speaker is not concern trolling.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            I guess it’s the use of the word “troll” that bugs me. Your first example sounds like a case of someone who doesn’t actually like free markets much but is giving lip service to the idea in order to appear more agreeable to the person they’re talking to (who, presumably, actually does like free markets). That’s disingenuous, but it’s really not what I think of as “trolling,” it’s more a case of someone who can’t commit to their own opinions.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            In the old days we called these people “crypto-*”. Like cryptosocialists or cryptofascists or cryptolibertarians.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I live in a red state and the problem doesn’t seem nearly as bad. I can’t imagine losing friends over lack of red tribe affiliation.

      • Spaghetti Lee says:

        In “I can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup” (still the best thing I’ve ever read on political tribalism, I must say) Scott talks about how concepts like America and American are identified with the Red Tribe–by both of the major tribes. Reds feel like America belongs to them, literally and conceptually, Blues feel like foreigners in their own country. So maybe a liberal discovering one of their friends is conservative is like finding a assassin sneaking into a safehouse, and the opposite is like, I don’t know, a hobo wandering into a sprawling city. The Blues panic, but the Reds don’t mind, because they both know whose turf they’re on. Just a thought.

        Even speaking as a liberal I’d say liberals are probably pettier and cattier on the balance, but I would doubt that’s because of the liberalism itself and would predict that it’s derived from a third factor that contributes to both of the other two.

        • HlynkaCG says:

          As a Red Triber that sound like a fairly apt analogy.

        • Sastan says:

          Reds are concentric in loyalty, which means that blues are opposing, but closer than foreigners or opposing nations/ideologies. Blues are thought of as misguided (sometimes infuriating) relatives.

          Blues are inverse in loyalty, which means the worst thing you can be in the world is a heterosexual white conservative American. Reds are thought of as Pedophile Hitler.

    • Tatu Ahponen says:

      Are they saying you’re a bad person? In those words?

      I’ve noted a number of discussions where left-wing people attempt to go the extra mile to try to disagree with a right-wing person *without* saying that the right-wing person him- or herself is bad or evil, and the right-winger still going on about how he or she is being victimized by the lefties who are trying to paint him or her as a bad, evil person. Often you see this in the form of pre-emptive self-victimization – “Now, people are probably going to call me a horrible huge Nazi racist for saying this, but…”

      • Alphaceph says:

        Well as I said, one long term friend who I dated at college and who is now married to a good schoolfriend openly and pointedly asked whether we should still be friends …. over the subject of positive eugenics, which I originally had not even brought up, this friend had simply overhead me talking about it to another friend, and I was being extremely careful and cautious in that discussion. The first friend started grilling me on it, I didn’t push the subject, I just answered their questions honestly.

        • Tatu Ahponen says:

          And the other subjects?

          • Alphaceph says:

            On austerity, I have had people tell me that I’m “ignorant” and a “total arsehole” for questioning spare bedrooms for people in council housing when me and my taxpaying friends live in small rented rooms in houseshares.

            On gender wars, I have been called a rape apologist for suggesting that consent is not always a simple, black and white question. And worse.

            On immigration I have been called an Idiot in a fairly private conversation with an intelligent person.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            Those are still individualized examples apart from the austerity thing.

            Incidentally, when it comes to bedrooms, isn’t the debate more about the fact that the unoccupancy penalty system does not take into account things like the needs of the disabled people?

          • Mark says:

            I don’t think we should build social identities based on politics anymore, it is unhealthy.
            Let’s stop naming these groups, it just gives them credence. Everyone stop talking about tribes.

            Base our social identity on something uncontroversial and then we’ll be free to discuss the contentious stuff without all the baggage.

            I am a chocolate eater.

            I think that immigration is potentially dangerous.

          • Phil says:

            On austerity: have a little empathy? The bedroom tax is one of the stupidest implementation of a sensible policy (that benefits should be proportionate to need) that I’ve ever seen & the costs have been huge for very little actual financial gain. By signing up to it, you’re holding up a giant sign that says “I favour policies that signal my attachment to conservative goals, even if they don’t actually achieve those goals & cause great harm along the way.” This is unlikely to win you friends in the centre or left of UK politics for obvious reasons.

            Can’t help you much with the genetic engineering thing: If people are willing to break friendships over it then they’re a lost cause, although it might help to at least acknowledge that eugenics has had a long and awful history & that therefore considerable caution is both understandable and probably warranted.

            The immigration question is a rabbit-hole of ethical head-fucks that I have yet to emerge from myself, so I’m not touching that one 🙂

          • Mark says:

            @Phil
            I must admit I thought the bedroom tax sounded like a good idea, but reading what you’ve written it reminds me of the no-spousal-visa-unless-you-are-rich (but EU citizens are free to bring their spouse into the country with no restrictions) thing that I fell foul of, which was so popular with so many people. And which obviously completely failed to reduce immigration but made life miserable for an easily ignored minority.
            That is the Conservative modus operandi – make the policy around a one sentence headline, don’t worry about the details. Unless you are particularly interested in the topic you’ll generally just find yourself nodding along…. “100,000 apprenticeships… great!…What? Apprenticeships in being a social media expert!?”

          • Alphaceph says:

            @Phil: “The bedroom tax is one of the stupidest implementation of a sensible policy”

            – you may well be right, and if the facts support that point of view I would agree with you. However when I have talked about this with people, they have not used the “bad implementation” line of reasoning. In fact, they usually just don’t have any reasoning: “you’re an ignorant, selfish arsehole for even questioning left wing doctrine” is all they need. It is literally ad hominem attacks as the opening move.

            In fact I am not really committed to supporting it, I have just put out the point of view that it might be trying to solve a legitimate problem.

          • Alphaceph says:

            @Tatu Aphonen:

            “Those are still individualized examples”

            Most of them have happened several times, with different people, and there are other examples too.

            How much data do you want?

          • Phil says:

            @Mark To give one example of the stupidity of the bedroom tax, it expected councils to cut the rental benefits of people living in larger properties than they strictly need, *even* when it costs the council more to find a 1-bedroom property to house that individual when they inevitably default on their rent. (Nottingham council apparently tried to re-classify a large proportion of their council flats as being 1-bedroom, even though they actually had two bedrooms in order to get around this problem. I don’t know whether they were successful or not…) There are areas of the country where there are *more* empty 2-bed properties than there are 1-bed ones! Enforcing the bedroom tax in these areas is completely nuts.

            @AlphaCeph I think perhaps the wider social point that you are missing re: the bedroom tax is that precisely because it has been used by the right as a signalling device without concern for actual outcomes on the ground, the left ends up using it in exactly the same way as it makes a good counter-signal: if the right is determined to do something transparently stupid, opposing it is a cost free way to signal your leftness. If you don’t hold that in the forefront of your mind when you enter into a discussion on the topic and use an appropriately nuanced approach then you’re likely to be surprised by the strength of the response to anything you say, because people are just going to assume that you’re signalling your “rightwingness” rather than entering into any kind of honest discussion.

          • Alphaceph says:

            @Phil:

            > the left ends up using it in exactly the same way as it makes a good counter-signal… …If you don’t hold that in the forefront of your mind when you enter into a discussion…

            If you believe that something is entirely about signalling allegiance, why would you even enter into a discussion about it? Football hooligans don’t “discuss” whether their team is better or worse, they just know to chant the right song and they know who to beat up or insult.

            But, you know, I am getting the impression from this and other responses in the thread that most people don’t do discussions, they do allegiance chanting dressed up as a discussion, and that I need to update strongly in favour of the Hansonian interpretation of life.

          • Jiro says:

            To give one example of the stupidity of the bedroom tax, it expected councils to cut the rental benefits of people living in larger properties than they strictly need, *even* when it costs the council more to find a 1-bedroom property to house that individual when they inevitably default on their rent.

            As someone who is not in the UK and has no skin in the matter, that isn’t necessarily wrong. Sometimes a policy to do X when Y can cost more if Y actually happens, but can also create incentives that reduce the occurrence of Y, and thus be beneficial even if in every visible case it seems harmful. It’s plausible that it costs the council more money to house such people, but the savings from the incentives not to take too large apartments in the first place exceeds this cost.

            (It’s the same reasoning as to why we punish murderers even if they are unlikely to murder again. Punishing such a murderer costs money and helps nobody, but it also discourages other murder, and that invisible benefit has to be counted.)

          • Alphaceph says:

            OBJECT LEVEL DEBATE DETECTED

          • Zorgon says:

            Quick note: “Object level debate” doesn’t mean “the part of the discussion I want to talk about”.

            The effect of the bedroom tax on the people it hits, the effect it has on social housing uptake and the potential increase in housing waiting lists and homelessness (all very much not about to be studied by the ONS, lest the results anger Our Dear Leaders) are all object-level subjects in this discussion. As is the incentive system you describe.

            That said, personally I’d suggest that the meta level debate in this case is significantly more interesting, being as it is the discord between:

            A) “People should be left alone as much as possible and not unnecessarily put through tumultuous housing changes” and
            B) “If government pays for your housing it should get to determine what kind of housing you get, to the point where it is permitted to effectively force you to leave your home if the size of your family drops.”

            It’s a strange situation we’ve ended up in, given that the right wing are supporting option B, which historically would have been a very left-wing authoritarian concept indeed.

            (Disclosure: I live in supported social housing in the UK and receive the rent relief in question, although my family are not subject to spare bedroom subsidy withdrawal.)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Zorgon:

            Yes, this is a common tension among those who are opposed to the welfare state.

            On the one hand, we don’t want the government micromanaging people’s lives. We also don’t like needless bureaucracy.

            On the other hand, we want to cut these programs as much as possible. If there isn’t sufficient political support to simply get rid of government housing, limiting it based on need or moral character (see: welfare drug testing) becomes an attractive option. Similarly, if you make them really complicated and difficult to use, you will discourage people from using them casually.

            In my opinion, a balance has to be struck between these two alternatives.

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            @Mark:

            I don’t think we should build social identities based on politics anymore, it is unhealthy.
            Let’s stop naming these groups, it just gives them credence. Everyone stop talking about tribes.

            While I think the world would be better if people didn’t feel the need to identify with a tribe at all, humans lumping themselves into categories seems to be a pretty universal phenomenon, even if the categories change from place to place. Not naming the tribes doesn’t make them go away, it just allows people to pretend that they’re totally neutral and unbiased even when their beliefs match to a clear pattern.

            I think it’s healthier to acknowledge them; it makes people more aware of their own biases.

      • HlynkaCG says:

        My personal experience as a “rightie” is that I’m going to be accused of being racist, sexist, heartless regardless of anything I actually say or do. So it goes

        It actually kind of annoys me to see fellow Red Tribers trying to preempt or get outraged over the outrage machine. It seems passive aggressive, and feels a bit like playing into the grievance-mongers’ hands to me. Playing the victim card is supposed to be the leftists’ thing and the only appropriate response as far as I’m concerned is amusement.

        • Alphaceph says:

          I don’t think I’m particularly right wing, as I said at the end of my OP, on issues like guns, abortion, atheism, basic income guarantee, etc.

    • JBeshir says:

      In my particular circles in the UK, the norm amongst my less than close friends, family, and co-workers has been something like “don’t evangelise, don’t bring up politics”. People in those circles share all kinds of stuff on Facebook continually, but don’t consider politics a thing suitable for polite company with acquaintances in RL. Usually I encounter them on a 1:1 basis, discussed cautiously and insofar as you expect the other person to be receptive, and often I’m the one bringing them up there.

      If someone does make an off the cuff political remark in such a group environment, the thing to do under such norms is politely ignore it, especially if you don’t agree with it, because the alternative is to have political arguments disrupting the pleasant socialising, and everyone is far more annoyed by disruptive political arguments than they are any particular position held by people who have no power to do anything anyway.

      If your friends are very politically inclined and keep starting political discussions, often, then you might want to try to find people who are not so much less blue as they are less inclined to talk politics all the time.

      On your part it might be useful to try to find other areas of study outside of general theorising about society, social justice, politics, that you can have interesting conversations about that are more suitable to politically mixed company, giving you things to talk about, and avoid initiating talk about politics yourself.

      In terms of closer connections I think you are going to need to find people who think your views are, at the very least, compatible with basic decency and believing that you’re honestly *trying*. I think the politically apathetic, “I don’t do politics” crowd are a more likely source for this than the politically engaged in any direction also, but I’ve really not enough experience with attitudes to right-wing views to know.

    • Anonymous says:

      One of the useful things I have found when confused by something my brain does is to ask what it is *for*. For example: I get angry, the anger is counterproductive, but recognizing that doesn’t make it go away. What is anger *for*? Maybe it is to cause me to plausibly signal violence by making my body ready for violence or some such.

      Similarly, when I ask myself what moral/political discourse among friends is *for* I get back something like “signal what sort of ally you would be/broadcast what sort of people you want to ally with.” This makes disagreements more sensible. They are trying to signal things about distribution of resources, I am trying to signal things about truth value, others are trying to signal things about what the tribe should hold sacred etc. Feeling strong emotions is just a way of signaling strong precommitments to these positions (i.e. I will follow the morality I am signaling now because I will be wracked by guilt if I do not. I am a reliable/predictable ally.) They aren’t mad at your positions. They are mad that you are signaling that you would defect when push came to shove about things they think are important.

      • Alphaceph says:

        Probably the most insightful comment in the thread.

        So basically, few people care about signalling how valuable truth is. Since I have learned “map territory rationality” through SSC and other online resources, I am now sending out signals in favor of a value that few people care about (truth), whilst simultaneously sending out signals against the two most commonly held values (redistribution and purity).

    • Government spending on benefits is an unconditional good, and (for example) the government should pay for people in council houses to have spare bedrooms, at taxpayer expense, whilst people (like me) who work can live in one tiny bedroom of a houseshare.

      And there’s no issue about lack of fluidity in the housing market, so that people can’t just move somewhere smaller, and end up topping up their HB out of their food money?

      In the UK, people express this by saying that austerity is evil, and I am a bad person for thinking otherwise.

      Austerity meaning “we’rer in a recession, everyone tighten their belts” or austerity meaning “wer’re in a recession , the poor tighten their belts,m the rich get tax cuts”.

      • Alphaceph says:

        > And there’s no issue about lack of fluidity in the housing market, so that people can’t just move somewhere smaller, and end up topping up their HB out of their food money?

        *On the object level*: Since I share a house with other people, (I have one small room) and pay them rent for the privilege, why can’t people on Housing Benefit do the same? Of course finding the ideal housemate or lodger is not easy, but I am exposed to that problem too, and have suffered serious consequences from undesirable housemates and from not being able to find housemates. I don’t expect the government to pay for all the other rooms in the house to be empty.

        *On the meta-level*: Maybe your argument is correct, in which case you will convince me. Maybe not. I don’t particularly care – I simply desire to believe what is true. However, I get the feeling that a lot of people desire to believe what is “bluetribe”, and me not wanting to take the quickest (no questions or objections) route to the “bluetribe” is seen as a problem with me.

    • Sastan says:

      People are tribal. When you say things that disagree with the consensus of the tribe, you mark yourself as a potential defector.

      This is more damaging when your criticism is correct.

      This is not a specifically leftist problem. I get the same thing all the time from my very right-wing family. So I went and got myself a trump card in the form of several Purple Hearts. One cannot out-right-wing the proven willingness to take shrapnel and bullets for one’s nation. Think of it as social proof that whatever our disagreements, I will always come down on their side if things go pear-shaped. It is trust.

      My suggestion is to find some way to immunize yourself thus from leftist criticism. I don’t know what is the status trump in leftist politics, but their status seems to be identity/oppression based. Once you hold that card, you have a certain amount of leeway in your behavior and opinions.

      Bill Clinton can be the most terrible feminist of all time, but it’s cool because of who he is! Find the weak spot, exploit the gap, profit.

      • Alphaceph says:

        > I don’t know what is the status trump in leftist politics

        It’s being of a historically oppressed race, gender and/or orientation.

        > My suggestion is to find some way to immunize yourself thus from leftist criticism.

        The red tribe bases status on what you’ve achieved, sacrificed and believe in, the blue tribe bases it on the race/gender/orientation you were born with, that doesn’t work.

        • Sastan says:

          Of course it works, you just have to find it. My example of Bill Clinton stands. He’s a rich white (nominally) christian corrupt southern male politician with a predilection for getting rapey with trailer trash. And yet, he’s one of the most beloved leftists of the last fifty years.

          I don’t know how it works, and I don’t know if it is worth it.

          But I do know it exists.

          • Alphaceph says:

            It probably helped that he was in charge of the mainstream blue party and fought the good fight against the red people.

    • Nero tol Scaeva says:

      Epistemic Rationality: Map/territory alignment.

      Instrumental Rationality: Achieving your goals.

      You may have the first one down, but what about the second? In order to achieve your goals you have to know the rules of the game and exploit them to your benefit. You don’t complain that the rules of a video game don’t conform to the laws of physics if you want to beat the game; you learn the internal rules of the video game to beat it.

      What’s your goal in social situations?

    • Bugmaster says:

      When talking with your Blue friends, you should only voice Blue opinions (on the topics of genetic engineering, gender relations, social justice, etc.), or just grunt noncommittally when someone asks you a direct question to which you do not have a Blue answer. Similarly, when talking with your Rationalist friends, you should only voice Rationalist opinions (on the topics of Cryonics, FAI and the Singularity, etc.) — or just grunt noncommittally when someone asks you a direct question to which you do not have a Rationalist answer.

      That’s how all social circles work.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Many social circles simply say “don’t discuss politics at all.”

        Religion, politics, and money are usually off the table.

        • Bugmaster says:

          Yeah, that is the most obvious solution; I was referring to those situations when the issues of politics/religion/etc. come up despite the taboo.

        • Alphaceph says:

          Topics do, in fact, come up

        • Zorgon says:

          Certain ideological groups have recently begun making a point of forcing politics into discussion, generally under the guise of “safety”. Political ceasefire agreements all went out of the window about 2-3 years back.

          (And I have no idea why I’m being so vague when you all know exactly who I mean.)

        • brad says:

          Ya’ll need to get better friends. And I’m sure they exist in the UK — even among the dreaded young unmarried demographic.

          No one I know is forcing politics into the conversation under the guise of safety, nor does eugenics just “come up”.

          Or maybe the problem isn’t the friends. Not to be unkind but is it possible that some of you are the ones that can’t leave controversial subjects alone and keep picking at them like scabs in inappropriate contexts?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Change the topic to sports.

            I’m not a sports-guy, but this is exactly what sports is great for: you can stake out positions and argue about them, but very few people will un-friend you for liking the wrong sports team.

            If people are forcibly bringing up politics, walk away.

    • SUT says:

      Like you, I have a hard time getting offended by political policies of colleagues / friends, even at the extreme I’d just laugh.

      But I’m trying a thought experiment and finding myself not so thick skinned after all outside of polictics. Say I’m at a party with all startup people. And there’s this one guy who seems gleeful to go against the collective wisdom on most matters:

      “Oh you got VC funding? Hope you become profitable before this whole ridiculous bubble bursts, stupid startups, we’ll look back and laugh at them in ten years…”

      “Oh you have a problem with your appppppp? That’s cute, real engineers have problems with a national telco system. startup problems are soooo trivial, am I wrong?”

      etc.

      So yeah the lone wolf might be more correct/truthful than the group’s groupthink. But he also is very _offensive_ because not only do all these people happen to work at a startup, they have all invested a significant amount of their identity into their own startup and the notion that startups in general are good for (or will save!) society. It’s doubly bad because you’re cheering on doubts they secretly wrestle with internally – “is what I’m doing a trivial use of my talent in pursuit of ego-boost?” On the other hand many people have no problem having their employer/whole-industry relentlessly criticized in social situations – “it’s just what I do for money”. But for people heavily invested into their vocation, this is more intolerable than even a personal attack.

      To map back to your original problem: the blue tribe tends to invest their identity into their political preferences and that’s difficult for the gray tribe to understand.

    • Sylocat says:

      Is “Genetic engineering is inherently evil” a Blue Tribe belief? No one told me that.

      • Jiro says:

        It depends on the reasoning behind the genetic engineering being bad. Genetic engineering being bad because of corporate coverups about people getting sick from genetically engineered food is left-wing. Genetic engineering being bad because we’re meddling in God’s work (also, when associated with human embryos) is right-wing.

        • Sylocat says:

          Good point… though the absolutist “it’s inherently evil, even to cure a horrible hereditary disease, and you’re an evil person for even suspecting otherwise” seems mostly a product of the latter reasoning.

          • AlexanderRM says:

            It seems that way because you’re assuming tribal beliefs are the result of taking a consistent moral framework and applying it to specific cases. You’re forgetting that “Hitler did genocide, therefore genocide is bad” is a valid line of reasoning to most people.

            Now obviously, there *are* some blue tribe people- myself included- who say “Genetic engineered foods that make people sick are bad”, or the like. But there are also people who say “Monsanto is bad, and Monsanto does genetic engineering, therefore *all* genetic engineering is bad”.

            (then of course there are environmentalist Blue Tribe types who say essentially the same thing as the Red Tribe ones but replace “god” with “nature”, but these are really hard to distinguish because as with all humans very few of them have an explicit consistent moral system)

  37. Mark says:

    My primary goal/dream is to reduce global levels of bullshit.
    Other than not saying anything, what can I do to achieve my goal?

    (And what tribe does that make me?)

    • Mammon says:

      Spend your social capital punishing instances of outrageous, highly public bullshitting.

      I don’t think your goal marks you as part of any specific tribe. Signaling and bullshit are close cousins; the entire concept of tribalism relies on bullshit.

    • Zippy says:

      That is the stated goal of all tribes. But I will take a guess that perhaps you are grey tribe.

      We need a grey/gray schism at some point.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        The former tribe drinks tea, and the latter has gray hair?

      • AlexanderRM says:

        I was going to say grey tribe, since I definitely associate “I don’t care if this argument is on my side, it’s bad!” with Grey, but I could see the argument that Grey Tribe usually applies that to Blue Tribe arguments, and Blue Tribe generally attacks Red Tribe BS*. In that case, if you start attacking Grey Tribe BS you’re probably Graey Tribe.

        *A good example might be feminists who criticize Red Tribe interventions as imperialist even if they might help women in an area.
        On the other hand another conclusion from that might be that Grey Tribe views bullshit the same way Blue Tribe views imperialism/violence. By this model Graey Tribe will be people who agree with Grey Tribe ideals, are willing to use Dark Arts/BS to promote them, but on the other hand take issue with some method or attitude that Grey Tribe thinks is fine.

    • Campaign to have strict logical argument / fallacies / bias taught in high school?

  38. Mammon says:

    How common is psychedelic drug use in the rationalist community? I feel like psychedelic drugs gave me the “mental muscles” necessary for dealing with the barrage of casual allusions and metaphors that’s characteristic of Scott’s writing.

  39. Anonymous says:

    Regarding the question of whether robots will or won’t take all the jobs: it seems to me that the fundamental factor in this is ignored. That is – to what extent are the inputs to humans also the inputs to robots? If the limiting factor to creating and maintaining robots is something that isn’t an input to creating and maintaining humans, comparative advantage would surely apply, and questions about whether there is anything that humans can do better than robots would be entirely irrelevant. One candidate that comes to mind immediately is silicon. If robots require silicon and humans don’t, then it seems likely that even if robots were twice as good as humans at everything, there would still be a demand for human labor, for the same reason that there is still a demand for the labor of people in poor countries even if people in rich countries can do everything better.

    If this has been mentioned before then I haven’t noticed it. What I have seen has mostly been people talking across one another. Technological unemployment believers talk about horses – missing the fact that all the inputs to creating and maintaining horses can be put to other, more productive uses. Technological unemployment doubters talk about comparative advantage – missing the fact that it only applies to the extent that humans and robots depend on different resources.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      Silicon is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust. A better limiting factor would be rare earth elements and heavy metals- as a side benefit they are also necessary for things like power plants and solar panels so an increase in robots makes electricity slightly more expensive.

      Of course this depends on how much of the material there is, how cheaply it can be accessed and how long it takes. It looks like the answer to those is currently “we have enough to build all the robots we need”- after all, we haven’t run out of steel or computer chips yet.

      • Anonymous says:

        “Of course this depends on how much of the material there is, how cheaply it can be accessed and how long it takes. It looks like the answer to those is currently “we have enough to build all the robots we need”- after all, we haven’t run out of steel or computer chips yet.”

        True. On the other hand, robots cannot yet do everything that humans can do. If they could, the demand for those resources would presumably rise and mining would be expanded until the cost of expanding it further would not cover the expected return from the extra materials.

    • Chalid says:

      Energy is the big one in the long term. Should sunlight be directed to edible plants or to solar panels?

      Also externalities; is it worth it to the robots to go to the expense to maintain a breathable atmosphere around 25 C on earth?

      • Anonymous says:

        I’m talking about resources that are only inputs to robots or to humans – obviously inputs necessary to both are not going to be the limiting factor for only one.

        • Chalid says:

          I’m saying the (long term) limiting factor for both robots and humans is likely to be energy so comparative advantage doesn’t save humans.

          • Anonymous says:

            Since that would require being able to costlessly convert any kind of energy into any kind of matter and vice versa, I think that’s a long enough term that I’m comfortable ignoring it.

    • Mark says:

      Humans have comparative advantage as empathy targets. I suspect that is where the future of employment lies.

      • AlexanderRM says:

        …I just realize that in economic terms, that does in fact describe precisely my best-case scenario for robots replacing human labor, and probably most proposals for what to do about it (namely some sort of tax system such that when human labor becomes obsolete, we don’t wind up with a handful of people owning all the robots forever). Although generally my assumption/hope is that robots replacing humans will coincide with a post-scarcity economy, meaning you won’t need to “earn” much as an empathy target in order to get basic needs.

        • Anonymous says:

          What makes you so sure that robots will replace human labor, though – have you considered my point at the start of this set of comments? Are robots built from the same inputs as humans? Or are they, as it seems to me, built from different inputs? This might change; perhaps one day we will be able to put farms to use building robots for cheaper than they can build humans. But this does not seem to be obviously the case.

    • Murphy says:

      I suspect humans may struggle in a highly automated economy for the same reason that even if humans had a comparative advantage operating telephone switches humans aren’t going to be getting jobs operating telephone switches.

      If a factory retools daily and has to re-train it’s staff to match every day humans might have a comparative advantage one day but that doesn’t help tomorrow when their competitors have pushed out a software update which changes the market situation.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      comparative advantage would surely apply

      You might be interested in J. Storrs Hall’s Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. It’s a somewhat discursive explanation of why he does not think superhuman AIs are an existential threat — not because he believes they are impossible, but because he believes they will be subject to the same transactional incentives as humans are.

      Having found Bostrom’s book unsettling, I can’t say Hall completely convinces me, and he’s not as fluid a writer as Bostrom, but it was certainly worth the read.

  40. Anon. says:

    Nietzsche on “internet activists”:

    TGS 359

    The revenge against the spirit and other ulterior motives of morality. — Morality — where do you suppose that it finds its most dangerous and insidious advocates?

    There is a human being who has turned out badly, who does not have enough spirit to be able to enjoy it but just enough education to realize this; he is bored, disgusted, and despises himself; having inherited some money, he is deprived even of the last comfort, “the blessings of work,” self-forgetfulness in “daily labor”; such a person who is fundamentally ashamed of his existence — perhaps he also harbors a few little vices — and on the other hand cannot keep himself from becoming more and more spoiled and irritable by reading books to which he is not entitled or by associating with more spiritual company than he can digest: such a human being who has become poisoned through and through — for spirit becomes poison, education becomes poison, possessions become poison, solitude becomes poison for those who have turned out badly in this way — eventually ends up in a state of habitual revenge, will to revenge.

    What do you suppose he finds necessary, absolutely necessary, to give himself in his own eyes the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people and to attain the pleasure of an accomplished revenge at least in his imagination? Always morality, you can bet on that, always big moral words, always the rub-a-dub of justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue, always the stoicism of gesture (how well stoicism conceals what one lacks!), always the cloak of prudent silence, of affability, of mildness, and whatever may be the names of all the other idealistic cloaks in which incurable self-despisers, as well as the incurably vain, strut about.

    Do not misunderstand me: among such born enemies of the spirit there comes into being occasionally the rare piece of humanity that the common people revere, using such names as saint and sage; it is from among men of this sort that those monsters of morality come who make noise, who make history — St. Augustine is one of them. Fear of the spirit, revenge against the spirit — how often these propelling vices have become the roots of virtues! Even nothing less than virtues!

    And, a confidential question: even the claim that they possessed wisdom, which has been made here and there on earth by philosophers, the maddest and most immodest of all claims — has it not always been to date, in India as well as in Greece, a screen above all? At times perhaps a screen chosen with pedagogical intent, which hallows so many lies; one has a tender regard for those still in the process of becoming, of growing, for disciples, who must often be defended against themselves by means of faith in a person (by means of an error).

    Much more often, however, it is a screen behind which the philosopher saves himself because he has become weary, old, cold, hard, as a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have before they die “they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves, become wise.

    What? Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from — spirit? —

    • PGD says:

      The first two paragraphs are highly relevant. The ‘wisdom’ part isn’t.

    • Franz_Panzer says:

      Since we’re already quoting Nietzsche, here’s my favourite bit of The gay science.

      The intellectual conscience.—I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

      Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.

  41. Anonymous says:

    A question inspired by something I read on Katja Grace’s site.

    When considering the disutility of pain, how important do you think the level of the pain is relative to its duration?

    Or to give the more specific question I have in mind, would you rather experience a day of stomach pain, diarrhoea, and vomiting – or five seconds of torture? Whatever your answer, what duration of torture would cause you to change it, whether an increase or decrease in duration?

    • Basiles says:

      I feel like this depends too much on what torture it is.

      Having went through a bout of gastroenteritis, which is essentially three+ days “of stomach pain, diarrhoea, and vomiting”, I would generally take 5 seconds of high pain over that.

      But I believe there are certain thresholds of pain that may cause lasting psychological issues (a certain species of jellyfish in Australia did this according to some article I recall reading), I wouldn’t really take that trade if 5 seconds as enough.

      It’s basically an evaluation relative to how forgettable this high pain is vs the loss of a day to feeling like crap. If it’s forgettable, I’d largely take it. If you could give me a device which would remove the memory, I’d take the 5 seconds every time. I don’t think 5 seconds is enough for the brain to do anything with it.

      • malpollyon says:

        Exactly, for me the answer to this kind of question largely depends on empirical facts about pain. The option I’d pick would be my best guess at which will have the lowest overall negative effect on me.

    • Peter says:

      There are some weird results to do with pain – I think I read about them in Thinking, Fast and Slow.

      Naively I’d expect that the disutility of a painful experience is equal to the “area under the curve”.

      One is the “cold pressor” test where you put your hand in a bucket of painfully cold water for 45 seconds or so (I forget the exact number), then you get a nice warm towel. Later, there’s another version where after the 45 seconds or so, you get another 15 seconds in a slightly less cold – but still painfully cold – bucket, then the towel. People seem to rate the second experience as preferable to the first.

      There’s this idea of the “peak-end rule” – the decision disutility, used in forming preferences, seems to depend on the most painful part of the experience and the level of pain at the end. Adding strictly more pain to an experience makes it seem less painful if the end isn’t as painful. There’s also “duration neglect” which is relevant here.

      There’s also Kahnemann’s “remembering self” and “experiencing self”. Suppose some doctors had come up with an alternative to anaesthesia during an operation, where you take a drug that temporarily stops you from forming memories (or other psychological changes). You’re told that during the operation the patients typically beg for mercy – but afterwards they’re fine, in fact they recover a bit better due to avoiding the complications of anaesthesia. People’s reactions to this hypothetical vary – a few apparently said “sounds like a good deal”, others… sort of saw themselves during the operation as if they were another person, and would feel sorry for that person. Me, it feels like putting “myself” through that would be immoral.

      Plugging things into utilitarianism, it seems to me that the “experiencing self’s” pain is what counts for ultimate disutility, and it seems it should be area-under-curve, but there’s a fair amount of “instrumental” and “decision” disutility that goes for the “remembering self”. (Is it just me or did I really butcher the grammar of that last sentence?)

      Conclusion: pain is strange, but perhaps no stranger than anything else to do with psychology.

      • Anonymous says:

        >Suppose some doctors had come up with an alternative to anaesthesia during an operation, where you take a drug that temporarily stops you from forming memories (or other psychological changes). You’re told that during the operation the patients typically beg for mercy – but afterwards they’re fine, in fact they recover a bit better due to avoiding the complications of anaesthesia.

        Sounds pretty awful. We could cheat a thought experiment against this by increasing the amount of time gradually. Would this be okay for one second? Two seconds? … One minute? … One hour? … Suffering during life is fine because you forget it all at the end.

      • Sastan says:

        Short anecdote which may be relevant.

        I had a traumatic injury which pretty well destroyed part of my hand. I lost a lot of blood, so by the time I got to the hospital several hours later, my blood pressure was too low for them to put me under. I had part of a finger amputated and the bone removed from another while conscious.

        Funny thing is, I was on so much medication later that I can’t remember it that well. I remember it hurt, but I don’t remember the pain, if that makes sense. I remember thinking it took forever, but I don’t experience that time in memory. All in all, that part of the process wasn’t that bad. I remember the physical therapy as being a worse experience.

  42. Josh says:

    This is my first post. I had a question regarding a statement Aubrey de Gray made in a video interview, he said something to the effect that your ability to add years to your life is limited because the data suggest that the difference between the middle 10% of the population (in terms of how old they are when they die) and the top 10% is small relative to the distance between the middle and the bottom. I was wondering if anyone is more familiar with the data, and would love to hear their commentary about it. I personally would love to find out that I can add many years to my life (eating appropriately, exercising, not smoking), but feel this is starting with the conclusion already accepted. So I guess at the end of the post my question is, do people here feel that attempting to lengthen one’s life is worth the effort, and if not how so?

  43. Chalid says:

    I’m sure there are many fans of Vinge’s Deepness In The Sky here. I recently ran across this post by Brad Delong. I read the book over ten years ago, so I don’t remember the book well enough to know what he’s talking about. Can anyone explain it? (Spoilers obviously.)

    In Vernor Vinge (1999), A Deepness in the Sky (New York: Tor: 0812536355). On pp. 699-700, a brief paragraph completely reverses your understanding of the progress of the book’s main plot:

    Sherkaner Underhill didn’t seem to notice. He moved his head back and forth under the [game] helmet’s light show. ‘There has to be reconnect. There has to be.’ His hands twitched at the game controls. Seconds passed. ‘It’s all messed up now,’ he sobbed.”

    When you finish that paragraph, your picture of what is going on in the story is turned upside down.

    http://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-from-11-years-ago-notes-vernor-vinges-a-deepness-in-the-sky.html

    • anon says:

      It actually came up in the comments of the autism cure post

      • Chalid says:

        Was this exact issue addressed? I scanned through and saw discussion of the book but not of this particular quote.

    • Murphy says:

      I get the feeling that Vinge likes to pull similar twists in a lot of his stories though the lurk in Deepness is probably the grandest.

    • roystgnr says:

      Huge spoilers, obviously:

      Delong should have said “when you finish that chapter”, I believe. It’s the conversation between Pham and Sherkaner-via-Trixia a few paragraphs after the quoted text that makes things clear.

      That’s the point at which it becomes apparent that the interspecies data-network-subversion in the book has been going both ways: some of the protagonist Spiders have been using steganography (disguised as crazy “videomancy”) to transmit their own data free of human espionage, while simultaneously beginning to penetrate the human ziphead+computer systems (via sympathetic ziphead translators, IIRC). They aren’t at the point where they can take over unassisted, or even past the point where they feel the humans “know us much better than the reverse”, but they can now at least use a ziphead to initiate direct communication with a human they hope will help them.

    • Can anyone explain it?

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      Rffragvnyyl, gur Fcvqref raq hc cynlvat n abgnoyr ebyr va gheavat gur pbyq pbasyvpg orgjrra gur Rzretragf naq gur Drat Ub nebhaq.

      Jvxvcrqvn bssref guvf fhzznel (juvpu V’z dhbgvat orpnhfr V crefbanyyl nz greevoyr ng fhzznevrf):

      Gur pevgvpny zbzrag pbzrf jura gur Rzretragf nggrzcg gb cebibxr n ahpyrne jne ba gur Fcvqre ubzr-jbeyq va beqre gb frvmr cbjre. Gur pbafcvengbef fhoireg gur Rzretragf’ flfgrzf naq chg gurve cynaf va npgvba, ohg fb qb n fznyy tebhc bs Fcvqref jub unir orpbzr njner bs gur uhznaf naq unir orra jbexvat va frperg sbe lrnef gb fhoireg gurve Sbphfrq nf jryy. Gbtrgure, gur gjb fvqrf fhpprffshyyl qrsrng gur ehyvat pynff bs gur Rzretragf.

      Ubcr gung urycf!

    • Chalid says:

      Thank you for the replies!

      I very rarely reread books but I’m thinking that I should make an exception here.

  44. fghjk says:

    I remember Scott mentioning religous rehab groups that claim amazing success rates but are false, but I can’t find the post with that comment in it. Can anyone help me out?

  45. Pku says:

    Two awesome links I found recently:

    Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8 . (I AM THE MAN WHO ARRANGES THE BLOCKS THAT DESCEND ON ME FROM UP ABOVE.)

    Also, turns out Mikhail Gorbachev recorded a (surprisingly good) song album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmJ9jgXOlJc

  46. Spaghetti Lee says:

    Disclaimer: I’m not trying to argue that Group A has it worse than Group B or vice versa, this is just pointing out a weird parallel I’ve noticed.

    I’ve always been confused at the outright hostility a lot of liberals and libertarians have for religion as an institution, because it was so at odds with my own experience of it. I have a very religious Catholic family that is nonetheless full of doctors, professors, engineers, and so forth, so there was never any connection with me between religion and anti-intellectualism. My church and its priest were decidedly on the “Jesus Loves You” end of the spectrum more than the “You’re Going to Hell” end. We actually literally did have a black kid play Jesus in the passion play, which I find amusing for various free-floating cultural reasons. I have never seen a Chick Tract in real life, no one I know has ever told me they believe that Harry Potter books are an inducement to Satanism, or that dinosaur fossils are a plot to discredit the Church, or any of the other ‘kooky’ sideshow things people talk about when they criticize religion, let alone more things with more serious consequences like religion-motivated child abuse.

    So I admit I thought for the longest time that angry internet atheism owed a lot to “the sheeple don’t recognize my unique snowflake-osity”-style thinking. It’s only recently come to light for me that those sorts of people really are out there, and the people I was previously laughing at really did suffer under their heels as children and young adults to the point that ‘escape’ is a totally appropriate word. Not that they’re everywhere and ubiquitous, but they’re far from a fiction. This hasn’t deconverted me (from the most airy-fairy form of Christian-flavored pantheism possible, I admit), but I do feel bad for being so dismissive. Real people had their friends and parents abandon them, authority figures who they thought they could trust to be impartial betray them, and so forth.

    Well, we’ve had multiple discussions in this thread about how leftism feels like such an oppressive force, not merely abstractly, but in everyday life, to the point where people are asking for advice about how to avoid triggering the attack mode of the leftists by putting even the smallest toe out of line, and how to come clean about your true self without them abandoning you en masse. I’m not (really, seriously, I’m not) accusing anyone of lying, but I am just kind of curious. Who are these people? Where do they come from?

    Theoretically I should be right in the thick of it; I’m an English MFA student at a public university in New England, but just like I’ve never been told by a random street preacher that Satan is in my heart, I’ve never been called a privileged shitlord by a random passerby. I know those people exist, but if I want to see them I have to seek them out. When I see a headline like “College dean says that all heterosexual sex is rape” I file it in the same place as “Republican congressman says all homosexual sex is a sin”. Laughable, embarrassing, not exactly a positive marker of where we are as a society, but certainly not an existential threat either to me or to society. I don’t like Tumblr-style activism, but I do still think at this point it’s a sideshow, and I do still feel like history will vindicate me. It’s all cyclical. In 1993 the spiritual ancestors of these people were riding high, and in 2004 everyone within shouting distance of the left felt that the Permanent Republican Majority was the clearest threat to liberty and human decency.

    Of course, that’s what I used to think about the crazy fundamentalist religious stuff, that it wasn’t really happening, people were just giving it too much attention. So I wonder if I’m heading straight towards a sudden and shocking reversal of opinion.

    • Echo says:

      The usual suspects in charge of all the money at my college tried to get an inter-college party cancelled for having an “ablist” name. The engineering school’s Mad Science is quite problematic, don’t you know.
      Fortunately the sane schools were kind enough to route around the bureaucratic roadblocks and fund it for us themselves, so all it really did was harm our school’s status.
      But most of their energy is spent getting Queer Resource Center employees fired for not being “intersectional” enough.

      Do you know a single non-liberal person at your college? Is there a young republicans club?
      Perhaps you are not their favourite kind of target, and know well enough not to associate with Undesirables?

      • Spaghetti Lee says:

        I think I might have misspoke. I’m fairly liberal, but I’m dissatisfied with the direction the left is taking especially re: social justice and I’m not afraid to say so publicly to other liberals. And so far, this hasn’t really hurt me socially, even though I’m in an environment where, supposedly, it should (admittedly I haven’t been here for very long). Furthermore, I have reason to believe it won’t. I know a lot of people who think like me and none of them have been professionally torpedoed by the left either. Most people pretty clearly lean left, but I haven’t run into any of this burn-the-witch stuff that apparently happens all the time to commenters here. So I read all these horror stories about left-wing spite and hatred and wonder where it’s all coming from, and, yes, potentially, is it exaggerated, though I’m not accusing anyone specifically of lying.

        So I’m tempted to dismiss large chunks of it except, like I said, I used to think the same way about religious fundamentalists, that they didn’t really exist, and that’s giving me pause. My point is more that I suddenly feel ill-equipped to take either side of the argument, and I’m going to wait and see.

        This probably sounds laughably naive to most people here, but up until a few years ago I pretty much believed that pettiness, cruelty, egotism and small-mindedness were almost exclusively right-wing problems. Yes, go ahead and laugh. Thing is, a constant diet of “vaguely-right-wing person does something objectionable” on your favorite blogs will not only harden your mind, it’s just not enough to sustain the soul either. But for a lot of the left-wingers I associated with, there was no infraction so small it couldn’t serve as proof of the right’s moral bankruptcy.

        So eventually I just said “I need to stop basing so much of my self-esteem on political tribalism” (took me long enough to figure out), and then I found SSC and yay reason logic human decency meta-level thinking etc. etc. But I’m noticing a similar trend. “This conservative political figure just said gays aren’t people, civilization is doomed” and “This liberal academic figure just said straights aren’t people, civilization is doomed” are pretty similar on the meta level. A constant drip-drip of only the most outrageous things that the Enemy Tribe is doing is probably the worst way to get your politics fix. So maybe what this or that student union said isn’t the end of the world, just like I figured out what such-and-such Republican state rep said isn’t the end of the world?

        But like I said I still have these doubts. Probably the most important thing I’ve learned (or re-learned) from Scott is that people who aren’t ‘traditionally’ seen as victims can still be such. So these scare stories might be overblown but they’re still evidence of at least one person going through a lot of pain for no reason, and you should be able to speak against them even if they aren’t evidence of a larger social trend. Frankly, focusing on the human side of political philosophy is all that’s let me tolerate it whatsoever. I’m pretty much allergic these days to Us/Them grandstanding.

        I just brought up the religious stuff because it’s uncanny to me how similar the two stories are. “They’re merciless, they’re closed-minded, they hate me and everything I stand for, thank God I got out and found this community that accepts me”. Just swap in religious conservatives or social justice liberals depending on what happened to you. So that’s why I’m trying to make the connection to religion- or conservatism-driven hatred. It’s bad, it shouldn’t happen, but it is perhaps not indicative of the movement as a whole.

        tl;dr liberals tell the same horror stories as you do, but it’s not as bad as they think, so maybe it’s not as bad as you think? And coming out against the left even on their home turf might not be social suicide.

        • Technically Not Anonymous says:

          I realize this is tangential, but I feel like it’s worth pointing out anyway.

          >“This conservative political figure just said gays aren’t people, civilization is doomed” and “This liberal academic figure just said straights aren’t people, civilization is doomed”

          A key difference here is that the conservative political figure is making public policy while the liberal academic is writing some books most people will never read and teaching a few classes most people will never take. Anti-gay bigotry is much more mainstream in the American right than anti-white/straight/etc. bigotry is in the American left.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Technically Not Anonymous – “A key difference here is that the conservative political figure is making public policy while the liberal academic is writing some books most people will never read and teaching a few classes most people will never take.”

            That… does not seem accurate.

            The recent supreme court decision just set law of the land. It wasn’t a win for conservatives.

            The Title IX “Dear Collegue” letter is not an irrelevent document divorced from daily life.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            A key difference here is that the conservative political figure is making public policy while the liberal academic is writing some books most people will never read and teaching a few classes most people will never take.

            Observed reality does not seem to match this assertion.

          • SpaghettiLee says:

            @HlynkaCG

            Whose reality, though? The reality of a loose online community that puts a lot of emphasis on the misdeeds of the SJ Left? Yeah, of course they look scary from that vantage point. But I personally would be very surprised if more than 75% of Americans (let alone the world) as a whole knew what an SJW was, let alone a history of their major victories and defeats.

            I’m not on the SJWs side, but I still just don’t get the sheer depth of fear and anxiety that seems so universal here.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @SpaghettiLee,

            I think that you are seriously underestimating the amount of influence liberal academics wield when comes to things like economic and social policy. See Scott’s own post on Tulip Subsidies or the Title IX kerfuffle mentioned by FacelessCraven for two recent examples.

          • nil says:

            @SpaghettiLee It’s not.. that hard. The commentariat here are nerds with a particular preoccupation towards ethical action. Sloppy feminists accuse them of acting unethically by lumping them in with men who have very little in common with them. Relatedly, a huge part of what drives feminism is “unwanted sexual attention,” a problem nerds rarely contribute to (and typically don’t even come close to contributing to, and who would often have better lives if they came closer to contributing to it in the form of unsolicited but not necessarily unwanted romantic approaches). So right off the bat, you have a group of people who find it important to be good getting falsely accused of being bad, often for behavior that is the exact opposite of their natural inclination.

            On top of that, a lot of non-sloppy feminist critiques rely on subtle and impossible-to-measure social circumstances that many nerds are uniquely ill-equipped to understand or evaluate. Finally, the main offensive weapon of feminists–shaming and mockery by women–while not that powerful in the grand scheme of things, is basically the primal horror of nerds.

            So you have all these barriers to understanding combining with the fact that those who are directly attacked are likely to find it uniquely traumatic (far more so than their attackers likely understand, since they spend most of their time thinking about the kinds of men who wouldn’t give a shit). Makes perfect sense you’d see a lot of angst, hostility, and fear.

          • Will S. says:

            @FacelessCraven — Comparing the dear colleague letters (which requires schools to have a procedure for handling gender/sex related complaints and someone responsible for said procedure) to leftist witch-hunting is beyond inane. Are accountants also in the service of hysterical leftism, because they’re required to make sure universities comply with government regulations?

            @Spaghetti Lee — Speaking as someone whose social circle is largely comprised of rabid leftists (although mostly people who are 25+) I think there are three aspects of this phenomenon, none of which is that it is completely fabricated.

            I think most of the “oppression coming from the left” happens on the internet. People read articles criticizing the white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy and take it as a personal affront. Or they engage in arguments on social media, where people are more upfront and aggressive than they would be in real life. My wife, for example, is very cordial discussing sensitive topics in real life, but on the internet she is much more strident or, if you’re on the receiving end, you probably think she is being mean.

            Second, what “oppression from the left” looks like to an individual differs. The scale runs from “puts you in prison” to “is mean to you,” and IMO most victims of leftist oppression who comment on this blog probably have real life experiences closer to “being mean to you.” For example, people really, really, really don’t like being told either that what they said is racist, what they think is racist, or that they are racist (see AlphaCeph’s comment above). So if we met in real life and had a disagreement and I called you racist, I would see that as being more on the mean end of the spectrum than the putting you in prison end. But you might not agree.

            Finally, I know very left-wing people who would, if given the chance, express deeply-felt authoritarian impulses. I live in an environment where there’s no chance of that happening. And to be clear, I live in a university environment. But I could see the stars aligning at a different university so that these impulses could be expressed, although the worst offenders are so notorious that they can be listed briefly. They are:
            1. Laura Kipnis being investigated (and found not guilty) after a student filed a Title IX complaint against her for an editorial she wrote.
            2. Brandon Eich being forced to resign from being the CEO of Mozilla.
            3. Men getting kicked out of college for false rape accusations. I believe this has happened, but it is much rarer than the opposite (men who rape someone and don’t get kicked out). And if you research this topic, news articles about exoneration are usually misreportings of procedural errors on the part of the university, which doesn’t bear on the actual point of contention (was someone raped?) one way or the other.

            All three of those are worse than being mean, but they are still very far from being put in prison. And just to be clear, your university can’t put you in prison through its Title IX adjudication process. It can only kick you out of school.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            calling it a “kerfuffle” is a bit of an understatement. It’s a blatant violation of civil rights that directly affects a vast number of americans (50 million college students, plus their immediate families). It’s pretty clear that the colleges in question are going to lose some seriously gruesome lawsuits, and the knock-on effects might be considerable. But yes, nothing about this bares any resemblance to “some books most people will never read”.

            @Will S – “Comparing the dear colleague letters (which requires schools to have a procedure for handling gender/sex related complaints and someone responsible for said procedure) to leftist witch-hunting is beyond inane.”

            I beg to differ. Mandating a parallel pseudo-justice system minus all the due process and civil liberties protections of the existing one is a horrifyingly bad idea. The legal activities of students are not the business of the government, and their criminal activities are not the business of the University.

            “I think most of the “oppression coming from the left” happens on the internet.”

            See my above comment, and those of others in this thread. Reading about Brandon Eich is one thing. Finding out the community you belong to and make your living in is now purging crimethinkers is another. The Internet IS real life. It’s where all my friends are, it’s where I work, it’s where I get paid. It’s where I need to find my next gig and my next co-workers.

            “Finally, I know very left-wing people who would, if given the chance, express deeply-felt authoritarian impulses. I live in an environment where there’s no chance of that happening.”

            What is it exactly about your environment that makes purging impossible? Bureaucratic structure?

            “All three of those are worse than being mean, but they are still very far from being put in prison.”

            This is pretty close to the standard Social Justice line that ruining someone’s career, getting them fired, or otherwise rendering them untouchable is fine because “it’s not like we’re putting them in jail”. I am pretty sure I would rather be actually jailed than be branded society-wide as an untouchable.

          • brad says:

            There aren’t 50 million US college students and every college student is only directly affected by the “dear colleague” letter in the most tenuous sense of “affect”.

            Also being kicked out of college — particularly a private college — is nothing at all like being thrown in prison. I didn’t see all this sturm und drang during the many many years when people were being kicked out of college for cheating without resort to full blown criminal trials.

            They hanged the convicted witches. Not metaphorically, they actually hanged them.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Brad – “There aren’t 50 million US college students…”
            You are correct, but I already edited the above. mea culpa. [EDIT] – apparently I didn’t edit it. mea culpa redux?

            “and every college student is only directly affected by the “dear colleague” letter in the most tenuous sense of “affect”.”

            I guess that’s open to debate. To me it pretty clearly looks like making examples of people as a way of shifting social norms.

            “Also being kicked out of college — particularly a private college — is nothing at all like being thrown in prison.”

            I’m pretty sure it’s not worse than a felony, but it’s pretty damn bad. Many thousands of dollars in debt and a couple years of your life wasted, plus a fairly public record labeling you a sex criminal, all without due process? I think that’s comfortably into “this is an outrage” territory.

            “I didn’t see all this sturm und drang during the many many years when people were being kicked out of college for cheating without resort to full blown criminal trials.”

            Presumably because those who ran afoul of the cheating guidelines had a very high probability of actually being cheaters. By contrast, those administrating the college rape tribunals have been quite open that the actual facts are irrelevant.

          • Will S. says:

            @FacelessCraven

            At some point I would like to write a SSC-style sexual violence FAQ, but that’s a lot of work.

            I don’t think you know anything about the reality of sexual violence, and are basing your beliefs on preconceptions you have and some poorly researched news articles or blog posts.

            There are 20 million college students, btw, not 50 million. But that’s not a substantive matter.

            “Mandating a parallel pseudo-justice system minus all the due process and civil liberties protections of the existing one is a horrifyingly bad idea. The legal activities of students are not the business of the government, and their criminal activities are not the business of the University.”

            Title IX was passed in 1972. This system has been evolving for over forty years. The adjudication stuff has been the law since the 90’s, it’s just been applied ad hoc. There’s now an attempt to standardize it and come up with rational procedures and guidelines.

            What you are saying is that if a student is raped on campus, in their dorm, by someone else who lives in that dorm, then they shouldn’t have be able to file a complaint with the university who put them in that dorm. I think (and Title IX explicitly states) they should.

            The US’s legal system is not equipped to handle sexual violence pretty much at all, and Title IX is better than the current alternative, which defaults to no consequences for the accused.

            “Reading about Brandon Eich is one thing. Finding out the community you belong to and make your living in is now purging crimethinkers is another. The Internet IS real life. It’s where all my friends are, it’s where I work, it’s where I get paid. It’s where I need to find my next gig and my next co-workers.”

            So have you gotten fired because of things you said on the internet? Or is it just a worry that you have?

            “What is it exactly about your environment that makes purging impossible? Bureaucratic structure?”

            No, it’s because the campus body is blue-blooded and conservative. I didn’t mean that this campus has figured out how to prevent these things from happening, just that the campus culture is not that of a northeastern liberal arts school.

            “This is pretty close to the standard Social Justice line that ruining someone’s career, getting them fired, or otherwise rendering them untouchable is fine because “it’s not like we’re putting them in jail”. I am pretty sure I would rather be actually jailed than be branded society-wide as an untouchable.”

            This is the standard Social Justice line, and with good reason. No matter how poorly Title IX is implemented, it will not be as bad as those things. And while you can think its bad, to read your (and others’) posts you would think it was one of the gravest threats facing the United States today.A lot of people do actually go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, or go to prison for things like unpaid court fees, minor drug possession, etc. There are numerous and flagrant injustices in the world, and when repeated focus is given to the plight of the falsely accused not-rapist, it sounds like the person (in this case you) is engaged in white male identity politics.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Will S – “At some point I would like to write a SSC-style sexual violence FAQ, but that’s a lot of work.”

            Please do. I’d genuinely love to read it.

            “What you are saying is that if a student is raped on campus, in their dorm, by someone else who lives in that dorm, then they shouldn’t have be able to file a complaint with the university who put them in that dorm. I think (and Title IX explicitly states) they should.”

            Rape is a matter for the justice system, not an unaccountable bureaucracy. What does a complaint to the university accomplish that the justice system isn’t already supposed to?

            “The US’s legal system is not equipped to handle sexual violence pretty much at all, and Title IX is better than the current alternative, which defaults to no consequences for the accused.”

            “Defaults to no consequences for the accused” is a negative formulation of “Innocent until proven guilty”. I am not willing to live under a system that will not grant me the presumption of innocence. I’m not sure why anyone would ever accept living under such a system. If sexual violence is a serious enough problem that the presumption of innocence is being questioned, there are a whole list of other actions we should be taking first. Banning alchohol from campuses, for example, or strict segregation of the genders, or an outright ban on sex. Those would be both less draconian and more honest than undermining presumption of innocence. Oddly, none of the people campaigning on this issue seem to be interested in those steps, perhaps because they impose costs and downsides that are harder to ignore than simply denying basic human rights to half the population while asserting that anyone who objects is a rape apologist.

            Drunken revelry and one night stands are not a terminal good. Universities themselves are not a terminal good. I am a lot more comfortable with doing away with all three than I am with the idea that accusation alone should be enough to brand someone as guilty.

            “So have you gotten fired because of things you said on the internet? Or is it just a worry that you have?”

            No, I haven’t. But plebComics was. Gjoni was. Max Temkin and Wardell got their names smeared. Bain is self-employed, but they made a good effort at ruining him. Holkins and Krahulik begged for mercy rather than see their charities and conventions destroyed. Meanwhile, Kuchera, Alexander and their cohort publicly declared that people who hold opinions like mine should be driven out of the industry.

            So yes, I’m more than a little worried. If I thought my real name could be easily connected to what I post here, I would not be posting here. Does that seem irrational to you?

            “No, it’s because the campus body is blue-blooded and conservative. I didn’t mean that this campus has figured out how to prevent these things from happening, just that the campus culture is not that of a northeastern liberal arts school.”

            That is a fortunate position to be in. I work in the part of the Video Games industry most heavily reliant on the press, and the video games press has declared Listen and Believe to be official policy industry-wide.

            “This is the standard Social Justice line, and with good reason. No matter how poorly Title IX is implemented, it will not be as bad as those things.”

            If the wage gap and women in STEM are national issues without evidence that a correctable problem even exists, I’m pretty sure there’s room on the table for false rape accusations that are both numerous and verifiable.

            “And while you can think its bad, to read your (and others’) posts you would think it was one of the gravest threats facing the United States today.”

            Presumption of innocence is a hell of a thing to lose. Further, if we lose it in the universities, we’re increasing the risk that we’ll lose it in the actual justice system as well.

            For the record, though, I started this thread arguing that concern over Social Justice is overblown, that it is a receding threat and not a growing one. It just so happens that some of the nastiest examples are squatting on my home.

            “A lot of people do actually go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, or go to prison for things like unpaid court fees, minor drug possession, etc. There are numerous and flagrant injustices in the world, and when repeated focus is given to the plight of the falsely accused not-rapist…”

            When repeated focus is given to the plight of those falsely accused of a heinous crime, you see that as a bad thing? I’m sorry, could you clarify?

            “…it sounds like the person (in this case you) is engaged in white male identity politics”

            If identity politics is the only game in town, sign me up. Maybe after Social Justice is a smoking ruin, we can go back to cooperating with each other to make a better world. In the meantime, I will hold out for actual justice.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            Do the SJWs who want us to shrug off any injustice that fails to rise to the level of false imprisonment, and the SJWs who invented the “microaggression”, know about each other?

          • Sylocat says:

            Do the SJWs who want us to shrug off any injustice that fails to rise to the level of false imprisonment, and the SJWs who invented the “microaggression”, know about each other?

            You joke, but IME the answer is largely “no.” And the few of them that do know about each other, utterly despise each other.

        • brad says:

          >> So I read all these horror stories about left-wing spite and hatred and wonder where it’s all coming from, and, yes, potentially, is it exaggerated, though I’m not accusing anyone specifically of lying.

          I think a lot of people go online and seek out horror stories about their ideological enemies. They pass around again and again the same handful of anecdotes while willfully ignoring the denominator for these stories is absolutely humongous.

          Massive confirmation bias, basically.

        • Echo says:

          https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/19/wesleyan-students-will-reduce-paper-wast

          This is what happens when you give the left a gentle nudge on their home turf.

          The easy test is to try it yourself and see what happens to you.

        • TheFrannest says:

          @Cerebral

          Yeah, it’s the same people. “since our sides are unequal in status, me doing thing is okay, you doing thing is not okay”, microaggressions are a thing that exists within the context of structural oppression or something. Like, have you ever replied to the common microaggression of “When I go to a supermarket, I’m confused for a person who works there” with “yeah, me too” while being white? Did it go well?

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            It was sort of a quasi-non-rhetorical question from me really, since I don’t know all that much about the internal structure of the SJ movement. While I figured it was probably all the same people, I wanted to allow for the possibility that the stalwart microaggression hunters in the Straining At Gnats Dept. were in fact acting independently of the dedicated due-process abolishers in the Swallowing Camels Dept.

      • Tatu Ahponen says:

        This is basically like many of the “liberalism is such an oppressive force” posts: liberals or leftists are trying to do something… and failing. You’d think that the “failing” part would loom larger here than “trying”, but often it feels like the commentators think otherwise.

        • PGD says:

          I think leftists (I think of them as ‘anti-liberal leftists’ actually) are in fact having a lot of success controlling the public discourse.

        • Technically Not Anonymous says:

          Yeah. Someone somewhere (I think it was Popehat?) commented that while the far left is influential in academia, they’re never going to get much pull in mainstream politics because they’re obviously full of shit. I agree with the far left on some of the object-level issues, but most liberals aren’t going to buy into the “you can’t be x-ist against [majority group]!” crap. I’m not too afraid of the far left because only the really reasonable and unobjectionable ideas like “be nice to LGBT people” tend to prevail.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Technically Not Anonymous – “Yeah. Someone somewhere (I think it was Popehat?) commented that while the far left is influential in academia, they’re never going to get much pull in mainstream politics because they’re obviously full of shit.”

            …Which is why Social Justice’s last push specifically routed around mainstream politics, and focused entirely on shifting group norms and policy for private organizations. They claimed that “due process” was a concept that only applied to the justice system, not colleges or professional associations, etc etc. Obviously once your views are the de facto standard in the rest of society, bringing mainstream politics in line is a hell of a lot easier, yes?

            I mean, I agree that they do seem to be failing. But the likelihood of that failure seemed a lot less probable as recently as a few months ago.

        • dndnrsn says:

          How does one even count victories and defeats in something like this, though?

          I mean, I’ve seen lots of articles from people with various different political preferences. Someone could write an oral history of the Great Social Justice-Nerd War of 2014-15, in which everyone simultaneously claims victory.

          • Nornagest says:

            Usually how these things end is that both sides declare victory and then the political landscape ten years later establishes who actually won empirically.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m looking forward to Ken Burns’ GamerGate documentary then.

            [plaintive violin music plays while the camera pans across a sepia-toned photograph of Milo Yiannopoulos]

          • Nornagest says:

            Nah, there won’t be any major documentaries — l’affaire du reproductively viable worker ants is too niche. I was thinking of something more like how exposing children to pixelated gore was a huge controversy circa 1993 and now you can’t sign onto a Halo match without some squeaky-voiced twelve-year-old calling you a noob.

            (Or at least that’s how it was four or five years ago, when I last played online.)

          • TheFrannest says:

            “too niche”

            just in case major news publications giving their two cents on the controversy weren’t enough for you, the main figureheads of that debacle spoke in the fucking united nations.

            You can say whatever, it does not matter when the publications control conveying your message to people. In ten years it would be known as some sort of terrorist act, most likely.

    • Chalid says:

      I find it kind of amazing that you’ve never been yelled at by a random street preacher. I think it happens to me at least monthly, possibly weekly, and is occasionally quite scary. Have you never spent time walking around in a big city?

    • Megaburst says:

      I would guess it’s regional. Extreme leftists are more of a thing in the SF Bay area for example. The heavily male-skewed gender ratio also allows local feminists to become arbitrarily virulent with fewer social consequences (and having single guys hitting on them when they don’t want any more male attention gives impetus to this virulence, cue downward spiral as they post about how awful the tech community is towards women on their virulent feminism blogs. It’s a very depressing place to be a single guy.)

    • And I grew up third generation atheist in a mostly atheistic culture and ended up, while staying atheist, developing a significant respect for religion- and not even this airy kind, but the conservative kind. Not the Chick tract conservative, that is basically just a weird historical outlier (“conservative protestant”, i.e. “conservative radical”, a typical weird ‘merican thing), but for the more throne-and-altar stuff. Basically it happened so that I, purely on a secular basis, discovered more and more rot in modernity, and more and more merit in older, medieval, traditional, reactionary etc. thinking and then found its intellectual basis has always been near the church. So either I go towards a generic anti-intellectual conservatism, or I accept Tomism, and if I cannot do either, which I cannot, I stay in a weird limbo where I respect Tomist logic without actually accepting its whole basis i.e. that there is some conscious force behing the universe.

      The crazy fundie stuff from my angle is part of this ‘merican weirdness that people can be conservative and radical at the same time i.e. conservative protestants. This is probably related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world – you will probably notice that the lower right corner, so traditionalism coupled with self-expressionism is the combo that is hardest to explain. I can explain the opposite, such as secular-rational survivalism far easier: for example it makes you anti-gay only in the sense that you want people to use their genitals to make a lot of kids in order to have lots of future soldiers so that your ethny can survive. This is a totally logical view for the top left corner, like Bulgaria. I am something close to being a secular survivalist myself, basically the rot I discovered in morality is basically the rot of big-ego, solipsistic self-expression values. But how does one even explain bottom right corner, USA, Ireland, traditionalism coupled with self-expressionism? Dislike gays but still don’t make many kids myself and probably party with strippers or what? The lower right corner is IMHO far less logical than any other of the three.

      So I think this can be part of the suffering of the demographic you mention that their parents may be traditionalist, but not the small-ego survivalist type but the big-ego self-expressionist type, you know what I am saying? Traditionalist, yet not humble?

      Kinda get what I am driving at? If not read the description. Combining deference to authority (traditional) with subjective well-being (self-expression)? That is a bit crazy, isn’t it? Combining deference to authority with survival and security is totally logical, it is a military mindset, but combining with self-expression values just does not compute for me. So if these kids have parents who expect deference to authority but instead of this “button up, the zombies are coming” attitude they are all like subjective well-being and quality of life… doesn’t that just feel like ones parents are huge hypocrites?

      Another part is that suffering in these things is always relative. It is not like they get beaten or something. If they are generic straight guy, they can probably have a normal life, 1950 normal, like study, read classics, play sports and all that. This is not necessarily a horrible life. It can feel horrible as a comparison with another life if you know what is like. It is when they went to college and realized others had a different life, that is when they blew up I think. I mean for example I suppose some of them had parents who forbade all videogames. My atheist parents didn’t, but we couldn’t afford a PC back in 1991. So imagine how I felt when I saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/688_Attack_Sub at a friend. Totally drooling from the mouth. If for example fundie parents can afford but still forbid this, maybe the child does not even find out what it is like, but he finds out at college and then he blows up.

      • suntzuanime says:

        I hadn’t seen that map before, but my immediate reaction is that any chart that labels Japan as the world high-point in anti-tradition does not pass the laugh test.

        • Does not necessarily have to be taken literally. It is clear they don’t have much in the way of “European Pre-Enlightenment values” which is obviously what a test made by a bunch of white guys will tend to mean under tradition. Whatever “pre-Enlightenment” or “non-Western” values they had of their own timeline was purged by the US post 1945. Now there are things like pressure to conform to community norms, but that is different. That is closer to survival stuff.

          Survival to Self-Expression is pretty universal, but Traditional to Secular-Rational is something not entirely clear outside the Western context: as the graph shows, Confucianism for example is in itself considered Secular-Rational, despite being a kind of a religious tradition.

        • stillnotking says:

          I don’t think it’s that far-fetched. The Japanese modernized insanely quickly after the Imperial era; they didn’t say “Well, time to build some more paper houses, because that’s how our ancestors did it.” In fact, I’d say the “traditional” aspects of Japanese culture have become much more toothless than America’s. Sarcastic or stylized takes on e.g. Shinto beliefs are quite common there, and are not read as statements of protest in the same way that, say, a sarcastic riff on Christianity or the 4th of July would be in the US.

          They are more concerned with cohesion and social harmony than Americans, but that seems like it belongs on the other axis. (I’m not necessarily sold on the schema, just going with it for the sake of argument.)

    • Protagoras says:

      My experience is similar to yours. I’m an east coast academic, so I should be surrounded by this kind of stuff, but I also have not, as you say, “been called a privileged shithead by a random passerby.” I also spent a few years on the west coast, and of course have friends all over the place. It’s possible, of course, that it has gotten worse in most place, and that where I am now is just lucky to have not gotten worse yet (and so my memories of other places not being so bad aren’t relevant because they’re of the time before it got so bad). But one thing I have noticed for a long time (and that I’m hardly alone in noticing) is that people behave worse on the internet. So I tend to assume that most of the stories about how the left behaves so awfully are a combination of those making such claims having most of their experience of the left come from the internet (where people are awful), plus some isolated incidents that are spread everywhere (and not infrequently exaggerated) by the internet, rather than any kind of widespread pattern. But of course I share your concerns that personal experience can be misleading.

      • HlynkaCG says:

        It could also be a case of not being an obvious target or not spending much time in contested territory.

        IE being the one 30 year-old GI biller in the university library when *student action group* decides to make a scene.

    • Sastan says:

      Some of it has to do with how well you handle social situations.

      These days, I’m far more to teh right of where I was at eighteen. But I was dreadfully socially awkward (home schooled in foreign countries by adherents of a weird cult will do that). The social predators of all sides prey on the weak. Feminists don’t go after Bill Clinton, they go after Scott.

      So, when I was eighteen, just left home, at college, I can recall being screamed at by a street preacher for holding hands with a girl on the way to class. I can also remember being screamed at by a young lady for who I had opened a door. No one does that sort of thing to me now. I’m bigger (it’s amazing how much this stupidity matters), more confident, more capable, and more practiced in the various arts of ruining people’s day. I can be far more controversial, and people hesitate to attack me, because I carry the threat of social retaliation.

      This is not immunity, but it is a measure of protection.

      • nil says:

        Hey, could I have you expand a little on your door-holding incident? As a nice Midwestern boy, I’ve always held doors open for everyone, and was very surprised to hear that some people consider it a gendered and potentially sexist act. I’ve also been a little skeptical, since reports of angry feminists always seemed either a “happened to a friend of mine” or coming from a clearly biased position–but I’ve also always assumed there was a nucleus of truth somewhere in there as well. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that they experienced such an event directly who also appeared to be speaking in total good faith. So, like, how the hell did that go down? Were you on a campus? What region of the country was it? Was there anything unusual about the person in question?

        • Sastan says:

          1999, NMU, central campus. UP in Michigan. Rural school, really, not a hotbed of activism like UM-Ann Arbor.

          It was pretty weird. I mean, I’ve made something of a hobby since of tweaking feminists, but at that time I’d have identified as one. Girl was someone I’d never seen before, and never saw again. Mid-morning, walking to class, spotted several girls coming in behind me, so I stood aside, opened the door for them. One in the lead stopped, and asked me (loudly) if I thought she needed someone to open doors for her. I said no, I was just being polite. She did say something after that, but I’m afraid fifteen years and my absolute mortification at the time obscure it from memory. Few things are more embarrassing to a shy young man than to be publicly shouted at by an attractive female.

          In retrospect, I should have insulted her and shut the door in her face. I’d have probably gotten a date out of it. It is my personal opinion that she probably wasn’t motivated primarily by feminism, but was playing some status game, and I looked like social prey. But I don’t know.

          What I do know is it forced me to re-examine my priors regarding feminism. It was the push I needed to think more deeply about the issues at hand. And it motivated me to learn more about navigating social situations. Long term, she did me a favor.

          • nil says:

            Thanks. On the one hand, it is a bizzare and gratitiously negative reaction for someone to have.

            On the other, I was thinking about it, and I realized there is something of a double-bind for feminists. Not with actual door-holding, since again I don’t think the vast majority of people consider that a gendered activity, but with social practices (especially outside the dating world) where women do receive benefits for their gender under traditional gender roles. Like, if they refuse this person who is doing something nice for them they’re bitches, but if they accept it they’re having their cake and eating it too (something MRA-types attack feminists for all the damn time). Seems like a lose/lose.

          • Jiro says:

            They could always refuse without taking offense.

          • Cauê says:

            I’ve had random girls ask me to get them drinks on multiple occasions.

          • DrBeat says:

            The benefits we MRAs attack feminists for receiving are things that are too big and too nasty to say that if they turn them down they’re “bitches”. Those things are on two different scales. Also, we generally attack them not for receiving kindness, but either A: advocating that they are entitled to kindness and men are not and that the only way to not be sexist is to have less empathy for men and think of women as victims more strongly, or B: saying that the kindness they receive is in fact hatred and proof of the hatred of women, while still accepting it.

          • Nornagest says:

            The benefits we MRAs attack feminists for receiving are things that are too big and too nasty to say that if they turn them down they’re “bitches”.

            Sorry, I’m having trouble parsing this. Would you mind expanding a bit?

          • DrBeat says:

            Nobody called a woman a bitch for refusing a scholarship based on gender (there’s way more of those for women even though there’s a lot more women in college), or not participating in other government benefits that reward her based on her gender, or for giving those benefits to other people (like the UN relief effort in… Haiti I think? but don’t quite remember, where all of the aid was meant specifically and explicitly to be given to women). And nobody expects women to turn down things like the ability to use domestic violence shelters (they get those and men get none even though they are equally likely to be domestic violence victims), or to refuse to call the police to get protection from an abusive spouse (men who do this are more likely to be arrested than the women abusing them).

            The benefits women recieve that MRAs complain about, contrary to what some people imagine, are not things like holding open doors. They are “Having a life that is seen as inherently worth something, and a well-being that is inherently worthy of promotion, when men’s lives are completely disposable and their well-being is utterly valueless unless it is used to benefit society as a whole.” It’s completely incoherent to say we would “call women bitches” for refusing this, because well over half the time it isn’t possible or it isn’t something we want ANYONE to have to do, and when it is possible — and they call attention to it — we say “Good, thank you!” or at worst “Okay, you’re where we want average to be.”

            I think the “calling women bitches” narrative is more of the same, seeing something that happens to men and women and concluding it’s proof of how women are hated because men’s well-being is so completely valueless it is invisible. People, regardless of gender, might get resentful or put out when they extend personal kindness to others, regardless of gender, and it’s refused. When a man does it, he’s a stuck-up asshole, and that was just the thing that happened. When a woman does it, she’s a stuck up bitch, and this is proof of how much people hate women and what a horrible bind women are in because look at how people are “calling women bitches”.

          • Cauê says:

            I always find myself agreeing with you until you get to the part about people thinking that “men’s lives are completely disposable and their well-being is utterly valueless”. This is so clearly false on its face that I suspect you mean something else, but in any case it’s hurting your overall argument.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cauê – “I always find myself agreeing with you until you get to the part about people thinking that “men’s lives are completely disposable and their well-being is utterly valueless”. This is so clearly false on its face that I suspect you mean something else, but in any case it’s hurting your overall argument.”

            “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.” -Hillary Clinton

            Think about that one for a bit. Near as I can tell, that’s a prepared remark that staffers signed off on, and Mrs. Clinton herself thought good enough to include in her remarks.

            Similar thoughts can be seen in examples from the various African bush wars, refugee crises, etc.

            Also the general narrative around the 2014 Isla Vista shootings.

            Also the gender gap in suicide rates, versus the gender gap in suicide prevention efforts. Other than the military’s stepped-up prevention efforts for Veterans, when was the last time you heard about how suicide hits the male population? 3x to 10x higher rate, natch.

            Or hey, check the debates over academic accomplishment, where males do significantly worse at every level of education, and that’s just how the way things are, but not enough women in STEM is a crisis.

            The gender gap in pay pretty clearly doesn’t exist, but it gets name-dropped in presidential speeches. The gender gap in workplace injury and fatality, on the other hand, is not only super real, but something like 95-5 male to female. Business as usual, right?

            more money for female-gendered health problems than male ones, massive, obvious bias in family law, obvious bias in the criminal justice system, ie charges, conviction rates, obvious discrimination in actual statutes ie primary offender law…

            And then there’s just straight-up social attitudes, of course. Does that help any?

          • Nornagest says:

            The gender gap in pay pretty clearly doesn’t exist, but it gets name-dropped in presidential speeches. The gender gap in workplace injury and fatality, on the other hand, is not only super real, but something like 95-5 male to female. Business as usual, right?

            As best I know, the gender gap in pay (in its most-cited form of 77 cents on the dollar or whatever it is now; there are more sophisticated ways of looking at it but they give you much smaller gaps) and the gender gap in workplace injury both come primarily from the same place: men, on average, pursuing and gaining higher-paying but sometimes more dangerous and more physically strenuous work than women on average do.

            We could endlessly debate the reasons for that tendency, and I’m inclined to think they’re on the benign side myself, but the statistical jiggery-pokery that gives you both figures is pretty much identical. I don’t see a way you can say the former’s real and the latter isn’t, or vice versa.

            (For brevity, I’m glossing over the contributions of maternity, etc. to the pay gap. Rest assured I’m aware of them.)

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nornagest – “We could endlessly debate the reasons for that tendency, and I’m inclined to think they’re on the benign side myself, but the statistical jiggery-pokery that gives you both figures is pretty much identical. I don’t see a way you can say the former’s real and the latter isn’t, or vice versa.”

            A fair point, and consider me corrected. I suppose a fairer formulation of my point would be to ask why the formulation that privileges men is a national-politics meme old enough to vote, while the formulation that privileges women is a footnote.

            [EDIT] – also, jiggery-pokery is an amazing phrase, second only to BETA CUCKOLD ORBITERS.

          • Cauê says:

            FC, yes, those are things I agree with. But there’s a great distance from this to “completely disposable” and “utterly valueless”. If the argument were that we don’t care as much about men’s lives it would be on solid ground, but from the little I’ve seen from self-identified MRA’s I get the impression that the “utterly valueless” is not always meant as hyperbole.

          • DrBeat says:

            Things that kill men and cause women to feel upset are held up as examples of how bad women have it, how much women are hated, how all of us have failed our obligation to the wonderful, precious women.

            Nobody even notices this. When pointed out, they don’t go “hey, yeah, that is pretty fucked up isn’t it?” they attack the person who pointed it out as being threatening to women and morally inferior.

            Men’s lives have no inherent value; women’s do. Men must constantly earn the right to be actual human beings through performance of the masculine role in a way that is useful to society. So, if you’re thinking this means like “it is always okay for women to murder men”, that’s not what it means. But men’s lives, on their own and without constant action to earn the right to be a person, are treated as valueless. Men’s corpses are never considered as morally compelling as women’s tears.

            It’s really, really not hyperbole. People assume “oh you’re just blowing things out of proportion, it can’t be that bad”, because (unless it is an issue harming women exclusively) people say “it can’t be that bad” about everything — but it is. It really is.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Caue: But there’s a great distance from this to “completely disposable” and “utterly valueless”.

            The focus on a possible 30% wage discrepancy and conspicuous indifference to a 1300% workplace-mortality discrepancy would seem to put an upper limit on the intrinsic value of male lives at a bit under 10% of the intrinsic value of female lives. The incredibly tone-deaf Clinton comment is not strictly quantitative but in the same league.

            Where this sort of thing is noted and not promptly disowned or rebutted, I don’t think it is really that far from “utterly valueless”. Men may have some small intrinsic value, but per Clinton the thing that matters is their utility. To women.

            But yes, in the spirit of quantitative correctness, this brand of feminism acknowledges men’s lives as having maybe as much as ten percent of the intrinsic worth of female lives. Not sure where various sorts of transgender lives fall on the scale.

          • DrBeat says:

            Even that math assumes total parity between “making less money” and “being killed” — in other words, it assumes that (for men at least) the value of their lives is the sum of the money they make performing work.

            In other other words, their lives have no inherent value outside of the utility they provide to society.

          • Cauê says:

            Ok, let’s put it this way: people have fathers and sons, brothers and male friends, and they do value each of their lives intrinsically. We do commit resources to protecting the lives and well-being of men, and to punishing those who hurt men, and that’s without any previous test of whether they’ve earned it (around where I live, I’m pretty sure you’re more likely to get an angry mob for killing a bum than a cop).

            The differences in treatment, concern and outrage about men and women are there, and the discourse around them is ridiculous, but we really need to look for the causes somewhere other than “‘we’ don’t value men’s lives”.

            I mean, come on. The various circuses over women’s issues (and “issues”) aren’t proportional to how much “we care about women” – if they were they’d be about Africa and Asia, not a thin model on an ad. It’s virtue signalling and other interesting social dynamics.

            @John Schilling: I’m not talking about “this brand of feminism”, that would be a different conversation. And I don’t think that’s what Dr.Beat means.

          • John Schilling says:

            Ok, let’s put it this way: people have fathers and sons, brothers and male friends, and they do value each of their lives intrinsically.

            And if I have a black friend, I can’t be a racist. Every man had a mother, most have wives and daughters and female friends, so the Patriarchy is dead and Feminism no longer serves a purpose. Got it.

            But I think it’s more telling how people deal with strangers. And particularly more telling how they deal with strangers en mass, when they are themselves acting as part of a tribe. That’s the part where self-identified feminists keep coming within spitting distance of men suffering horribly, literally violently killed, and conspicuously fail to “do commit resources to protecting the lives and well-being of men” because over there is a woman who is suffering some much lesser harm. Not even an acknowledgement of the discrepancy.

            That’s not the way to convince anyone who isn’t already a feminist to give you the time of day, or to claim any moral authority higher than that of the average MRA.

          • Cauê says:

            And if I have a black friend, I can’t be a racist. Every man had a mother, most have wives and daughters and female friends, so the Patriarchy is dead and Feminism no longer serves a purpose. Got it.

            If that’s how you want to play this, I’m reading “men’s lives and well-being are utterly valueless” as a level of bullshit comparable to “rape is a tool used in the interest of all men to impose control over all women” or “men don’t care about rape because it’s something that happens to women” (to which, by the way, “fuck you, men love our wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and friends” would actually be an apt response).

            I’m not talking about feminists, and I don’t think Dr.Beat was either. I’m not a feminist, or so I’ve been told for the past five years, anyway. The current dominant discourse is ridiculously biased and based on unexamined lies to an astonishing extent. This doesn’t mean people give zero value to men, and it’s not caused by people giving zero value to men. Additional examples of SJWs being SJWs don’t erase the counterexamples of people also caring about men.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cauê – “I’m not talking about feminists, and I don’t think Dr.Beat was either.”

            Feminism didn’t create the Birkenhead Drill. Arguably, the logic behind the Birkenhead Drill isn’t even a bad thing. What it is, though, is deeply, fundamentally incompatible with radical egalitarianism. The problem with the old bullshit about how “feminism is the radical idea that women are people too” is that under the old system, men weren’t “people” either, and Feminism appears to be fundamentally incapable of engaging with their half of the equation. You can’t just take the egalitarian slide halfway down and then stop, and expect that to be a stable end-state. You have to actually go all the way to the bottom, or else try to climb back up to the top.

            [EDIT] – The idea that men’s lives are valueless isn’t a feminist creation. It’s the default assumption of society for pretty much all of recorded history. Feminism is simply blind to the problem, and actively making it worse by treating it as a “privilege” that must be atoned for, rather than removing it in any meaningful way. No, women in combat doesn’t count. It would have if Feminism had pushed for it in 1916 rather than 1996.

          • DrBeat says:

            A man that The Hypothetical You knows has value to The Hypothetical You based on that personal relationship.

            A man You don’t know has no inherent value, but a woman that You don’t know does. A woman’s pain is worth addressing even if she is unknown to someone. A man’s pain, if not tied to something he did that provided utility to society, is “manpain” and is to be mocked and derided. Making unknown women uncomfortable is a horrible thing that makes a person evil; making unknown men uncomfortable is a good thing unto itself.

            I stand by my statement. The lives of men have no inherent value and are utterly disposable. Feminist rhetoric that places the feelings of women above the lives of men is not where this came from; the proof of it, though, is that feminism is such an incredibly powerful and popular movement, that says things like this all the time, and nobody even notices how little value they place on the lives of men because that’s how worthless male lives are.

          • Cauê says:

            Men are protective of women (because [10 pages of inconclusive theorizing]). Men compete in status by being protective of women (idem). This explains the Birkenhead drill. Maybe men compete in status by displaying bravery, and women and children don’t. This explains the Birkenhead drill.

            Maybe people value women’s lives a little more, although they also value men’s lives. Even if only slightly more, this would also explain the Birkenhead drill. The tallest man in the world is orders of magnitude more famous than the fifth tallest, but that doesn’t mean people don’t think the other one is pretty fucking tall. Sometimes you just want to know how tall we can get. And sometimes you want to protect the valuable, but only after the even-more-valuable. And it doesn’t take a large difference to start a signalling game. (to be honest this whole “more valuable” talk already grants more than I’m comfortable with).

            A man You don’t know has no inherent value, but a woman that You don’t know does. A woman’s pain is worth addressing even if she is unknown to someone. A man’s pain, if not tied to something he did that provided utility to society, is “manpain” and is to be mocked and derided.

            Doctors care about male patients. People give money to homeless men. People help male strangers in need. People strive to be polite to men. If you actually mock a man’s pain you’ll be shunned (there are exceptions, but it’s true enough that the “man” part isn’t sufficient to explain them).

            making unknown men uncomfortable is a good thing unto itself.

            What?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cauê – “Doctors care about male patients. People give money to homeless men. People help male strangers in need.”

            In the immediate personal situation, yes. In large abstract groups… Significantly less so than women. Again, suicide rates, educational priorities, medical research priorities, wage vs injury disparities, etc, etc. It’s not one or two examples. It’s freakin’ everywhere, and as far back in history as you can go.

            Check news reports on famines or atrocities or disasters. Check the gender of the adults shown. Does it lean one way or the other? (I actually have not done this, but I predict you’ll get more pictures of women and children, and this will be as true for the Ethopian famine in the 90s as it will for the Irish potato famine).

            Or we could go biblical: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress” vs “This we commanded, that if any man would not work, neither should he eat.”

            Or consider the phrase “Poster Child”.

            Or look at any war propaganda in recorded history, from the Iliad to Destroy This Mad Brute.

            Men’s lives are valued according to the utility they provide. Women’s and Children’s lives are considered to have utility by default. If you want to bring evo-psych into it, there’s a pretty obvious story available for why, but the pattern seems pretty clear.

          • Cauê says:

            Men’s lives are valued according to the utility they provide. Women’s and Children’s lives are considered to have utility by default. If you want to bring evo-psych into it, there’s a pretty obvious story available for why, but the pattern seems pretty clear.

            Not that clear, as I’m not even beginning to see this “men’s lives are valued only for the utility they provide” thing.

            I gave counterexamples, and you say that “In the immediate personal situation, yes. In large abstract groups… Significantly less so than women”. Well, even this “less so” is very different from zero – it implies different causes, and would result in a different society.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Cauê – “I gave counterexamples, and you say that “In the immediate personal situation, yes. In large abstract groups… Significantly less so than women”. Well, even this “less so” is very different from zero – it implies different causes, and would result in a different society.”

            your disagreement seems fairly reasonable, as I have no way to quantify actual units of caring or value. What exactly would you see as the results of a true zero-value for male lives, outside their utility to women or to society?

            Further, what is the difference between “male lives are valueless outside the utility they provide to women or society as a whole” and “male lives are the lowest rung of society’s valuation scale, below even the comfort of women”? Wouldn’t even the minimal potential value to society or to unknown other women result in roughly the behavior we observe? Almost no man provides zero marginal utility to society or to women. Likewise, almost no man’s life has an actual value of zero. The question isn’t whether men have zero value in society, it’s where their observed value comes from, what increases it, and what decreases it.

            …Seriously though, your position seems entirely reasonable, so this is largely a theoretical debate from this point on. Thank you for the insights, though.

      • dndnrsn says:

        OK, side comment, but I’m curious. What exactly are the arts of ruining people’s day?

    • Bugmaster says:

      FWIW, I went to a liberal college, and I got yelled at by a feminist for holding a door open for her (explaining that she was behind me at the time and thus I could not possibly know her gender turned out to be the wrong move). I also get yelled at by random religious street preachers there (though not at the same time). I think both of these proselytizer types are just a lot more common in big cities.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @SpaghettiLee – “I’m not (really, seriously, I’m not) accusing anyone of lying, but I am just kind of curious. Who are these people? Where do they come from?”

      I’m a big fan of the comic Penny Arcade. The creators are personal heroes of mine; I’ve been reading them since their start, and they were a big inspiration to me when I was starting out as an artist. They got hit pretty hard by a completely ridiculous and highly public social justice shitstorm, and had to beg forgiveness on threat of having everything they’ve built destroyed.

      My current job is making video games, and my long-term goal is to be an indie designer. Large chunks of the video game community have just recently suffered an extremely nasty hostile takeover by Social Justice. Considerable effort was expended to destroy those who resisted the takeover.

      Other than video games, one of my main interests is tabletop gaming. The RPG Dev community appears to have been similarly taken over by Social Justice, with those who resisted purged mercilessly.

      I like reading a lot, particularly sci-fi. Care to guess how that’s going?

      And finally, one of my oldest friends, someone I’d known for more than a decade, cut off all contact with me because she concluded that I was a misogynist for disagreeing with Listen and Believe.

      I can appreciate that maybe I’ve just had bad luck, in that the communities I live in are the ones that keep getting invaded by the reavers of Social Justice. Generally, it seems probable that the flareup of late last year was a temporary thing, and the viciousness and toxicity of Social Justice makes it inherently self-limiting. That’s not a good argument for saying it should be tolerated, though.

      • Bugmaster says:

        I don’t think it’s bad luck; I think it’s a pattern. You are involved in many nerdy communities, and Social Justice Reavers have declared a War on Nerds, and thus all of your communities have been affected at roughly the same time.

        Personally, I don’t have the courage to stand tall and face the foe unto my dying breath, etc. I love video games, tabletop RPGs, and science fiction probably as much as you do; but I’ve had to do so in semi-secrecy for the first half of my life, or face social ostracism (and/or beatings). I have the skills now. So, when the Social Justice pressure gets too powerful, I’ll just go back to hiding. Who knows, maybe another Nerd Spring will bloom in my lifetime, but if not, oh well…

      • dndnrsn says:

        I’ve seen bits and pieces here and there about the RPG dev thing. Primarily something about which edition of D&D you prefer being a marker of opinion on social justice issues, or something like that.

        Is there anywhere that has a rundown of what has actually happened that is remotely neutral? I play RPGs but haven’t followed any news or anything involving them in a long time, and don’t buy enough new stuff to really justify that. And unlike GamerGate, whatever has happened with tabletop RPGs hasn’t intruded into non-game media.

      • James Picone says:

        I play a lot of videogames, hang out in videogame-cultural spaces, know several indie game developers, and am on the organising committee for a videogame/anime convention in my city.

        And I really don’t see the infestation of exclusionary jerks you’re talking about. I don’t think it’s because I’m an exclusionary jerk; I’ve had arguments with friends about Adam Baldwin where I’ve been on the side of letting him come to conventions and so on, I’ve never kicked someone out of a thing I have authority over because I thought they were being x-ist, I’ve never stopped being friends with someone because of their political opinions. I can’t be an invader, anyway, I grew up with games.

        I have acquaintances who are into social justice stuff and also games. They have opinions. I’ve argued with some of them about, for example, Adam Baldwin, and they still talk to me. And, well, they grew up with games too. They have a right to their viewpoint. Even if their viewpoint is that Adam Baldwin shouldn’t be a guest at a convention or that comics shouldn’t use the phrase ‘raped by dickwolves’.

        (I agree that the dickwolves thing was ridiculous, but I think some of the secondary firestorms were more justifiable. The commentary about trans issues, for example, was kinda dickish on the part of whichever one the artist is; I don’t recall off-hand).

        When I’ve tentatively discussed this kind of thing, I’ve usually found that the majority of my friendship group broadly thinks that Social Justice Stuff Goes Too Far. I think that is likely far closer to the modal leftist viewpoint than a lot of the social-justice-scary commentary admits. These aren’t conservatives, these are politically-active highly-educated young professionals, and in this environment I can make comments like (not a literal quote, but extremely close) “Feminism is not about bullying people. If you find yourself bullying people in the guise of feminism, please stop” and get a fair amount of support, no comments telling me I’m a privileged shitlord, and nobody blacklisting me.

        I’m not American, so maybe this is a cultural difference and I just have to wait for it to be exported to the other side of the world. We’ll see.

        Interestingly enough, the only friend I’ve ever lost over a political disagreement cut me off because I disagreed with him about worker-ants, and he was hanging out on 4chan and linked to the Encyclopedia Dramatica page on the matter, if you catch my drift. I’d known the guy since high school, described his views on the matter as ‘conspiratorial’, and he hasn’t talked to me since.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Offline, I know multiple people who would probably get stereotyped as “social justice warriors” by the anti-sj types.

          However, only one really fits that mold in a major way, as far as I know, and is outnumbered by others who have expressed frustration with activist communities and individuals in them, and have used “SJW” as a mild pejorative.

          Hardening the camps into “sj” and “anti-sj” or whatever just makes things worse, because people are way more likely to be charitable to someone they are acquainted with.

        • Cauê says:

          Don’t you think there’s some tension between “I really don’t see the infestation of exclusionary jerks you’re talking about”, and the description of discussions about excluding someone from conventions because of his political views?

          (I don’t know what the argument with your friend was like, but ED is often good about having information on internet drama – nose-holding may be required for many, but still)

          • James Picone says:

            A couple of acquaintances does not an infestation make.

            To be clear, this wasn’t something they had any power over (except in the sense that they could refuse to go to the convention if Baldwin was invited as a guest).

            The ‘infestation’ framing carries a reavers-from-the-outside connotation to me, as well, and these people have been gamers for longer than me (by virtue of being older).

          • Cauê says:

            Well, if the precise word “infestation” was that important to your meaning, I’ll point out that the comment you were responding to didn’t include it, using rather “large chunks”.

            And, “couple of acquaintances” or not, it still looks significant that you used the fact that you weren’t excluded by people for disagreeing with them about excluding others as an argument that “exclusionary jerks” aren’t a problem (in that “if that’s the point he chose, what else is out there” kind of way).

        • Nornagest says:

          Saying in the abstract that a movement — any movement — isn’t about bullying is one thing. Actually trying to get it to stop bullying actual people is another.

          I have a lot of friends in the moderate SJ camp — not social justice warriors, but maybe social justice squires or heralds. I generally don’t talk politics with them anymore, because that’s exhausting and usually pointless, but back when I did I noticed a pattern: they’d voice concern over SJ witch hunts abstractly, occasionally even criticize tactics in a kinda weak and incrementalist way (e.g. “#killallwhitemen should not be people’s introduction to social justice”). But when it came to any actual controversy, not just an internal squabble but something pitting SJ against non-SJ, they’d fall in with the party line ten times out of ten. Even when it was grossly disproportionate to whatever its target had actually done, or when it was transparently ginned up as outrage bait.

          I think these people are a lot more common than the stereotypical social justice warrior. But I don’t think that actually does much to make the movement less toxic.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @James Picone – “I play a lot of videogames, hang out in videogame-cultural spaces, know several indie game developers, and am on the organising committee for a videogame/anime convention in my city.”

          I make them for a living. I work for a small studio of less that 10, not one of the big triple-A shops. GameJournoPro seemed pretty relevant to me. The editorial stance of Kotaku, Polygon, RockPaperShotgun, Giant Bomb, and GamaSutra are pretty relevant to me. Those are (or perhaps more accurately were) the channels my company is going to need to promote their game through. Likewise Reddit, and even 4chan.

          When I leave this company, I’m going to probably be trying to make it in the indie scene. The trends in that scene are thus rather important. Phil Fish may be gone, but he was hardly an outlier.

          “When I’ve tentatively discussed this kind of thing, I’ve usually found that the majority of my friendship group broadly thinks that Social Justice Stuff Goes Too Far. I think that is likely far closer to the modal leftist viewpoint than a lot of the social-justice-scary commentary admits.”

          With due respect, I rather think they see it this way now, a year or two or three too late for it to actually make a difference in the incidents mentioned above, and during a lull when no one is actually rousing rabble. Maybe the lesson has sunk in, and they’ll stand against the mob next time. I certainly think that attitude is spreading on the left, which seems a damn good thing; better late than never.

          That doesn’t change the fact that Social Justice is fundamentally corrupt. It may be less of a threat due to acquired immunity on the part of the mainstream left, but the fundamental ideas of Privilege theory, patriarchy, supremacy etc remain toxic.

          ““Feminism is not about bullying people. If you find yourself bullying people in the guise of feminism, please stop” and get a fair amount of support, no comments telling me I’m a privileged shitlord, and nobody blacklisting me.”

          Have you tried saying this in the middle of an actual shitstorm, to the people actually doing the bullying?

          “Interestingly enough, the only friend I’ve ever lost over a political disagreement cut me off because I disagreed with him about worker-ants, and he was hanging out on 4chan and linked to the Encyclopedia Dramatica page on the matter, if you catch my drift. I’d known the guy since high school, described his views on the matter as ‘conspiratorial’, and he hasn’t talked to me since.”

          Irony!

          You probably owe him a bit of an apology. Parts of the story involved actual conspiracy, or at least the closest approximation attainable by a gaggle of west-coast hipsters. ED is of course a cesspit, and the actual media coverage was… about what you’d expect for a fight with journalists on one side and civilians on the other. Wikipedia isn’t much better. Such is information war.

    • Sastan says:

      If my experience is any guide, I grew up in a faith-healing cult with an impressive body count, so I get the horror stories, believe you me.

      I’ve been in on many of the squabbles with the SJWs from the beginning, and I’ll take religious nutjobs any day, twice on Sunday.

      Religious nutjobs feel duty bound to register their moral disapproval, but the goal is to save yer soul!

      SJWs want to destroy you.

      • Chalid says:

        Eh that just means you’ve encountered a better grade of religious nutjob. I’ve encountered religious crazies that made me worry about my physical safety; I have a hard time imagining anything like that from the SJ side. e.g. a few weeks ago I was on a crowded subway car and somebody began shouting that the Lord was coming to punish us all for our sins and we would burn, burn, BURN BURN BURN BURN BURN… I’d take a lecture on door-holding over that any day of the week, thank you.

        And of course if you’re talking about “destroying” people, religious terrorism is actually a thing, SJ terrorism isn’t.

        • Sastan says:

          Hmmm……..be told I’m going to hell or be expelled from university, made unemployable, falsely charged with racism/rape/ableism/whatever is fashionable, be hounded from home and job with the digital Mark of Cain (how many problematics? ALL the problematics!), have people track down and threaten the lives of my friends and family, be excluded from my hobbies and any chance at academia.

          See, religious people have nothing I want. What are they gonna do, not invite me to the potluck?

          SJWs are shitting all over some good stuff. They are injecting politics into goddamned everything, and it is fucking up my world.

          • Chalid says:

            Well fine, if you’re going to go by the highly unlikely worst cases as opposed to just talking about personal experiences, how many people have been killed by SJWs vs religious crazies? Sheesh. This is a rationalist blog, I assume we are all pretty familiar with the evils that are done in the name of religion?

            I mean ok maybe you *personally* don’t particularly fear religious crazies because of your circumstances, and maybe your particular circumstances happen to put you particularly close to some bad aspects of SJ, but it is emphatically not true that in general religious crazies are simply content to register moral disapproval and then leave you alone. e.g abortions in Kansas were subject to a hell of a lot more than just moral disapproval.

          • Jiro says:

            It’s possible for a religious crazy to kill you, but religious crazies can’t use the threat of killing you to intimidate you (unless you’re an abortion doctor, and even that’s pretty much over now.) SJWs ruining people’s lives via college rape trials that lack due process affects more than just the few individuals actually given such trials; the affected population is a lot larger than the population of abortion doctors.

            (This also ignores Islamic extremism, but I would concede that that is an actual threat.)

  47. thewitcher says:

    1/ sparkroot = modafinil right?

    2/ there’s lots wrong with sam harris’s defense of israel right? (first link when you google “sam harris defend israel”) especially regarding muslims’ non-outrage and lack of protests at ISIS etc.

    • Sastan says:

      “There’s a lot wrong”?

      Would you care to elaborate, or are you asking for a full on critique? I’m not a Harris acolyte, but I’ve read several of his works, and found him to be refreshingly honest and thoughtful on most subjects, even ones I disagree with him on. Not unlike our host here.

      As I read his article, I’m wondering what your problem is? Are you upset that he’s noticed that while some college-educated muslims in safe countries have criticised ISIS, you don’t see the so-called “arab street” up in arms? Fact is, most muslims agree with both the goals and the methods of ISIS, if they disagree about anything, it’s personnel. They want their tribe or sect to be the one crucifying infidels and reconstituting the Caliphate, not these new kids in ISIS. I say this from hard experience, from years lived in this part of the world, and from my own extended family, which hails from there.

      Have you read the charter of groups like Hamas? Have you listened to what they say about themselves? About what they want to do? Were you aware, for instance, that both the “moderate” PLO (now the Palestinian Authority under Abbas) and Hamas claim as an Islamic Waqf not only the entire land of the Levant, but also Andalusia in Spain? If you think their insanity is just about the Jews, I can assure you, the matter repays much more study.

      I know it’s fashionable to rave on about how horrible the Israelis are. It is true, they have committed certain atrocities. Some of their citizens have committed acts of terror. But the comparison must have context and scale. And no attempt at context or scale can end with the Israelis on the moral low ground against the Palestinians. I think Harris has this exactly right.

      If you want to compare the two, ask what would happen if each side got their way.

      If the Israelis went just nuts, ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and did terrible stuff, the Levant looks a lot like southern California.

      If the Palestinians got the upper hand, it would be immediate genocide, and the Levant looks like…..well, ISIS-controlled territory.

      I, for one, have no trouble choosing between these potential futures.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        @ Sastan:

        My feelings exactly.

        But I think a lot of it comes down to tribal signaling. Saying you support Israel against the evil Muslims is a Red Tribe thing to say. Saying you support the oppressed Palestinian people who live in an apartheid state is a Blue Tribe thing to say.

        And even then, if you strongly support Israel, you’re liable to wind up getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. Yaron Brook (of the Ayn Rand Institute) complains that he’ll write something giving a purely secular, non-nationalistic defense of Israel and its right to exist—only to get quoted by religious Zionist outfits like Arutz Sheva. They agree with him on the object level (no Palestinian state, Israel shouldn’t hold back in defending itself) but for completely different meta-level reasons (him because Israel is more civilized and rights-respecting; them because they think God promised the land to the Jews).

        • Jiro says:

          And even then, if you strongly support Israel, you’re liable to wind up getting mixed up with the wrong crowd.

          That can happen if you strongly oppose Israel too; you can get quoted by Stormfront or another white supremacist group.

        • Sastan says:

          Oh, I agree. And we shouldn’t let our defenses of Israel or anyone else bleed over into covering up their misdeeds.

          Governments are force, and all governments do bad things. The question is, do the misdeeds of Israel make them somehow illegitimate as a nation? Well, the list of things the US has done pretty well makes that a hilarious foregone conclusion, and that’s before we get to really bad actors like North Korea.

          I know why it is, but it still strikes me as so strange that the left is so reflexive in its defense of the most racist, misogynistic, retrograde religious bigots on the planet.

          Israel, for all its faults, is a pluralistic constitutional republic.

          Hamas executes people without trial for crimes like sitting in a car with a member of the opposite sex.

          And the left likes Hamas……….

  48. Technically Not Anonymous says:

    A lot of liberals seem to be pro-choice but against liberal/consensual eugenics. This seems contradictory. If fetuses don’t have moral relevance, then what’s wrong with aborting one because it’s likely to be disabled?

    • Spaghetti Lee says:

      Examples? Most liberals I know personally who have offered an opinion on such matters say that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to have an abortion. Most of them seem to be the real deal when it comes to “It’s entirely the woman’s choice, not my place to judge.”

      If we’re talking about a eugenics program of any sort, then yeah, there’s more opposition, because then it’s not about choice. For the record, though, most of the anti-natalists I’ve met have been liberals, and a few liberals I know have broadly mused about the government incentivizing people away from having children.

      • Anonymous says:

        How about if the reason is because the fetus is a girl and they would rather have a boy? I expect that even liberals who think that this should be legal will have to fight a little internal battle in coming to this conclusion.

        • Spaghetti Lee says:

          In my experience, most of them would acknowledge how sexist that is while still saying–grudgingly, unwillingly, and with extreme reservation–that a woman’s reasons are her own. I don’t hear much about that happening in America, so I imagine most American feminists don’t think about it much.

          This isn’t news to anyone here, but if there’s some terrible behavior that cannot be primarily attributed to white Americans, lots of social justice activists just kind of ignore it and hope it goes away. This includes gender-dependent abortions, FGM, honor killings, what have you. Even back when Adrian Peterson get suspended for beating his son bloody with a belt, you didn’t hear much about it from the left, because corporal punishment for children is more popular among non-whites in America, so it got a “that’s just how they do things” stamp of approval/malign neglect.

          • malpollyon says:

            What kind of feminists are you reading that don’t regularly decry FGM and honour killings? They’ve been rallying cries for decades.

          • Zykrom says:

            Ironically, I’ve notice feminists/blues are much quicker to condemn gender selective abortion when the context is China vs the west.

          • Protagoras says:

            I recall hearing plenty about Adrian Peterson from the left.

    • Murphy says:

      It’s 2 competing precepts.

      1: Bodily autonomy, right to choose etc.

      2: If you view groups like the deaf/blind/other communities as a distinct culture with their own traditions, their own languages/art etc so that things which might make them stop existing as a group fall afoul of the precepts that say that it’s bad to do things which lead to cultures being destroyed.

      As such personal-level choices to abort a particular fetus get a free pass because 1 but any organized attempt to cure various genetic diseases start to fall afoul of 2 without getting the halo from 1.

      • Technically Not Anonymous says:

        That makes sense. I disagree with it, but it definitely works with many liberals’ value systems.

        • Murphy says:

          From my phrasing you probably guessed that I don’t fully agree with it either but I believe it to be a coherent position with a sound basis.

    • This is not exactly what you’re askingn, and I’m not sure I’m liberal exactly, but I’m centre/centre-left and worry a little that consensual indiviudal eugenics will basically result in a society of idiot charismatic sociopathic fashion models (that’s my understanding of what people will effectively select for) and a vastly less diverse gene-pool (with the unintended health consquences that result – like selective pet breeding). That’s because I think people generally just want their kids to be individually successful, and don’t care about the unintended consequences that come of that. Traditional genetic changes compensate for unintended consequences through various laws of attraction, consensual/fashion eugenics do not. I think we should have strict limitations to disease erradication and cautious intelligence boosting, at least until we’ve thought a bit more about the sociological consequences. Maybe I might support what you suggest earlier in pregnancy, I’m not sure?

      • John Schilling says:

        What actual parents desire and would select for their children, if you ask them, are good health, general intelligence, and physical attractiveness. Generally in that order, and with everything else far behind. Nobody wants idiot children, nobody wants sociopathic children, and nobody wants “fashion model” children except to the extent that many actual fashion models are healthy, intelligent, attractive people.

        Yes, parents want their children to be successful. Approximately none of them believe that sociopathy is the path to success. Approximately none of them believe that idiocy is the path to success. Some of them believe that fashion models are an acceptably successful model for their children to aspire to, but only in the “healthy, intelligent professional” sense of the fashion model, not the “waif-thin airhead” sense. I think you may be, first, exaggerating some of the differences between nerds/geeks like ourselves and “successful” people, and second jumping to the conclusion that these differences are recognized and desired as the path to success by mundanes.

        • Well firstly I think what people say they want in a public social situation and what they will actually select are different. I don’t think intelligence is as high a priority for most people as it is for grey-tribe types. People wouldn’t neccessarily select for stupid, but there’s certain a lot less benefit in terms of “success” in high IQ as opposed to “EQ”, and I observe many nerds have the first in spades but little of the second. I also think good looks are something people will prioritise very highly, especially once selection techniques are available to the masses. Finally, I agree they won’t specifically select for sociopathy, but if it turns out altruism and morality are negatively correlated with success in a business environment, would it be unreasonable to assume people might choose small incremental steps that take the average in that direction?

          Also, I think its worth considering less common selections like genetically disabled parents who decide they want to specifically select for children to share in their disability.

          • John Schilling says:

            Yes, I get that this is what you believe. Do you have any evidence for the hypothesis that parents are lying en mass about what they would chose for their children, beyond a just-so story about what they should want if they think the way you imagine they do?

          • Actually you may notice that I didn’t make that claim. My original “worry”, as I worded it, that parenting preferences might not be as perfect and socially productive as some are assuming them to be (and might lead toward certain negative selections I mention), remains. By all means if you want to bring empirical evidence in to support your claim, which I feel is stronger in claiming to know what people’s parenting preferences are, go for it. Like I said, polling people’s opinions might not be the only or even most reliable source. People’s actual proven choices in how they raise their children and choose partners for parenting, which is an interesting clue, don’t seem to me to reflect the priority set you put forward, so I feel like we need some fairly compelling empirical evidence here.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          How do you know that’s what they’d want? Have you asked them? The best evidence I know is sperm and egg donation. I think CE’s description of what people want is more accurate than yours. But that’s not because their choices don’t match their claims, but because their choices don’t match your claims. (Perhaps it would be better to say that your description is confused than wrong.)

          • Doctor Mist says:

            @Douglas Knight:

            The best evidence I know is sperm and egg donation.

            Elaborate, please? (I presume you mean people choosing donated eggs and sperm; the actual donation doesn’t seem germane to the question.)

            My impression was that people do actually choose “good health, general intelligence, and physical attractiveness” over the alternatives, and in that order; I’m fascinated to learn that I might be wrong and would be delighted to hear where I should go for details.

  49. Wrong Species says:

    I’m trying to decorate my apartment. How should I go about finding what paintings or pictures to use?

    • Megaburst says:

      Rasturbation is always an option

    • Deiseach says:

      Re: decoration – is there any particular style you are trying to achieve or that you like (e.g. pared down minimalism, chintz curtain and fluffy cushion, etc.)? What are the physical limitations (size, light, how much money you have to spend, any hand-me-down furniture from other people you could get)?

      Basically I’d say “Go with what you like”, but if you are trying to convey “I am cool hip and with-it” or “I am a deep-thinking person of serious interests” or “I am up to date with the fashion” or “Effortless, timeless elegance and taste”, then you might try looking for interior design websites (I’m sure there are plenty on the web, both pro and amateur).

  50. James Picone says:

    Pretty consistently, when details of a policy setup or regulatory framework or bureaucratic setup comes up here, and it’s from the US, I look at it and go “WTF? Why is it so obviously screwed up and broken?”

    I get this a lot less from Government Stuff here in Australia, even the bits that I think are wrong or poorly-implemented (example: When the government privatised our publicly-owned comms-monopoly company by selling it off wholesale, rather than doing the obvious thing by splitting it into a network-owning company and a telecomms-services company. This resulted in a private monopoly with an incentive to anticompetitive behaviour the public monopoly didn’t have).

    I feel like this is because the US Government Stuff is broken in really, really terrible ways. Worse than the Australian ones, anyway. I’ve seen this with a bunch of laws and areas of government – environmental regulation, education, health, welfare, etc..

    I’m trying to figure out why I get this impression that the US Government is hopelessly incompetent in ways that other comparable governments don’t seem to be. I’ve got a couple of working hypotheses:

    1) The US government isn’t more or less hopelessly incompetent than others, it’s just that most of the high-quality commentary I see on the internet comes from Americans, who are going to reference hopelessly-broken bits of their government.

    2) A combination of the US’ constitution making it hard for the government to do things and the US having been a democracy for quite a long time and having a terrible electoral system as a result combine to make the US government awful (Voting is relevant because simple-majority over the number of people in the US + all the other stuff significantly weakens the power of voting to drive governmental direction, the constitutional stuff is relevant because it means representatives spend most of their time fighting each other and various constitutional protections, rather than actually thinking about legislation).

    3) The scary one: The US is the largest not-really-obviously-corrupt democracy in the world by population, with India being the only larger country. The US might have reached a threshold population beyond which democracy as a form of government no longer scales.

    Any thoughts?

    • suntzuanime says:

      As an American, I get that feeling about Britain, so it’s probably just idiosyncratic.

      • JBeshir says:

        As someone in the UK I get that feeling about American bureaucracy (pretty much all of my personal interactions with government have been pretty quick and efficient) so I’m suspecting it’s just reporting bias.

        Although I *do* get the impression the UK has more laws which would allow the executive to do bad things, kept in check by risk of backlash against the government, rather than a risk of backlash against the legislature preventing broad laws from being passed in the first place.

        That probably arises out of different attitudes to how governmental controls should work, I think- rather than an attitude that the executive is expected to do anything it wants and the people controlling the legislature have a job to limit it, they’re treated as more or less a single elected entity which is expected to behave decently overall.

        So it might also be a matter of what aspects are being focused on.

    • PGD says:

      I would say much of it is a variant of (2), except that it’s not just length of time, it’s sort of baked into the system from the start. The US Constitution and governmental system make it massively difficult to address even recognized problems. First, it is not a parliamentary system, so the bicameral legislature is (two) entirely separate veto points from the executive — you need to basically have three different election results align in order to have the clear ability to push a single party’s agenda through. Second, government is extraordinarily federalized and decentralized, so even when you get a desire for change at the Federal level, it is difficult to affect state and local laws and administrative practices. FInally, the first past the post voting system leads to lock-in of a two party system, meaning that the parties themselves are massively heterogenous and it’s hard to push something to the top of a party agenda. All of this combined means it is very difficult to do the kind of corrective adjustment to established practices that you would want to do.

      Now, U.S. foreign/military policy is a somewhat different kind of fucked up, stemming from almost complete insulation from democratic accountability.

      I do think that (3) also plays a role.

      • stillnotking says:

        Now, U.S. foreign/military policy is a somewhat different kind of fucked up, stemming from almost complete insulation from democratic accountability.

        That’s an absurd contention; as with so many other critical analyses of US foreign policy, it ignores all the dogs that didn’t bark. It also ignores the Herculean efforts of US politicians to sell the public on their foreign-policy ideas, efforts they would hardly make if they were “insulated from democratic accountability”.

        If there is a military-industrial complex calling the shots of US foreign policy in order to fan the flames of global conflict, it’s remarkably bad at its job.

    • 4. A lot of americans would rather defect (ie use individualistic solutions, like home schooling, gun ownership) than co-operate in finding good solutions to problems, so good solutions don’t arrive, which proves to the defectors’ satisfaction that they were right in despising the government.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Also known as the “wreckers and hoarders” theorem.

        • ..in it’s extreme left-wing form. Forms of defection that right-wingers don’t like include draft-dodging, atheism, and nonstandard sexual/marital/family arrangments.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            …All of which they are pointedly forced to tolerate.

            So I guess left-wingers are just going to have to grin and bear it on the gun culture and homeschooling, right?

            Which does nothing to change the fact that by all available evidence, the good solutions you are claiming *do not exist*. There are a heap-TON of problems with the public school system. It is farcical to claim that all, or even most of them would be resolved if only the private- and home-schooled kids were stuck in the cesspit with everyone else.

          • James Picone says:

            I think TheAncientGeek is claiming that the good solutions exist in other countries. I think Finland is the standard example here? I don’t know much about public schooling in other countries.

            I don’t think his argument is correct – why are Americans so culturally different? What about the ways American government fucks up that aren’t associated with not getting buy-in from significant chunks of the population? – but there are better ways of doing most of the things the US does, because a bunch of other countries do them better (Public health in a lot of the rest of the world, for another example. University entrance mechanisms. Voting is kind of cheating because America is handicapped by the whole 18th-century thing, but, well, voting.)

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @James Picone – I will cheerfully concede that other countries have working public school systems. We do not have their systems, and no plans to adopt their systems are within two decades of being implemented. We have OUR system, which is a combination of federal jobs program for the minimally employable and intellectual abattoir. Until that changes (and I hope it changes soon), claims that sparing your children from Baby’s First Penitentiary are somehow “defection” is a little maddening.

          • John Schilling says:

            FC: You left out one critically important part. The American system includes a great many very good “public” schools, funded by local property taxes in districts where housing prices have been bid up hundreds of thousands of dollars above the surrounding market due to the “free” access to good schools for children living in these homes. Imagine an exclusive (and expensive) private housing development where the homeowner’s association also runs a private school for the residents’ children, except that the US educational system is structured so that you can fit that sort of thing in the corners of the public school system.

            If someone tries to change that, BTW, the parent/homeowners in question will privatize the system on their end, in about a generation and after massive disruption to no good end. In the meantime, home schooling is for people who want a good but idiosyncratic education for their kids, or for people who want a good general education for their kids but can’t afford expensive houses. Both groups are too small to support a network of dedicated public or private schools.

          • brad says:

            @John Schilling

            If someone tries to change that, BTW, the parent/homeowners in question will privatize the system on their end, in about a generation and after massive disruption to no good end.

            We have a natural experiment on that point. In the Southeast because under the desegregation orders many large school districts were created that included urban cores and the surrounding suburbs and students were bused from one to the other. Judges made some sort of tentative moves to putting in place similar districts in the Northeast, which was just as segregated, but the politics of that was very different and integration of de facto segregated cities quickly lost steam. So in the suburbs of northern cities there are these tiny microdistricts that create might-as-well-be private schools as you describe, whereas in many southern cities they do not exist (or at least did not as of 15-20 years ago, things are changing now).

            Do we know if say the suburbs of Charlotte have a significantly higher rate of private school attendance than say the suburbs of Pittsburgh?

            Finally, I quibble with the no good end part. A kid in a most private schools is a win-win for the public — the child is educated with all the positive externalities that implies but at no cost to the public. There may be some private schools whose curriculum is so off the wall that equation changes, but I suspect not very many.

      • Anonymous says:

        Don’t homeschoolers typically band together in groups to ease the burden of the procedure?

      • HlynkaCG says:

        Objection! Presupposing such “good solutions” exist or that decentralization is not one such solution.

        😉

        • “Presupposing such “good solutions” exist ”

          Well, other countries exist…

          • HlynkaCG says:

            The existence of other countries says nothing about the existence of “good solutions” unless it is your intention to argue that the US is the literal worst and that any other country would represent a marked improvement.

          • I only have to argue my case on a solution-by-solution basis. Spree-shootings in particular are an area where the US is massively out of line with comparable countries.

          • John Schilling says:

            Didn’t we just go through this an open thread or two ago?

            The data does not support a claim that “Spree-shootings are an area where the US is massively out of line with comparable countries”, in large part because any signal is lost in a torrent of noise that includes spree killings worse thananything America has ever seen, in countries with stricter gun control laws than America will ever have.

      • Lupis42 says:

        There are an awful lot of debatable assumptions baked in there. Let’s extract a few:
        defect (ie use individualistic solutions
        Individualistic solutions are not automatically defecting. Defecting carries the assumption that the solutions chosen confer individual benefit at the expense of others.
        individualistic solutions, like home schooling
        Homeschooling is typically highly cooperative within a community – indeed, it requires much more co-operation with others than moving to a geography with a preferable mandated public school, or paying for a private school.
        A lot of americans would rather … use individualistic solutions
        I think it’s fair to say that there is a significant minority of Americans that consistently prefers individualistic solutions. If that’s all you need to count it as “a lot”, than the statement is fine, but it doesn’t really drive to the original questions. A politically relevant minority or majority may be found on some issues (e.g. gun rights), but there appears to be little consistency.
        co-operate in finding good solutions to problems
        It is dangerous to assume that co-operation will find good solutions. The Amish have co-operated and chosen a bunch of solutions, yet most of us do not find those solutions “better”.
        Would you consider teacher’s unions to be defecting or co-operating?
        so good solutions don’t arrive
        This assumes that good solutions are discovered through co-operating. Much of the history of innovation suggests that co-operating slows the discovery of new solutions and the rate of adoption of existing solutions.
        which proves to the defectors’ satisfaction that they were right in despising the government.
        I think the chain of reasoning here goes:
        Individualist solution ~= defect, therefore co-operate ~= collectivist solution, collectivist solution ~= government, therefore government ~= good, therefore if people would just stop defecting, it could solve all the problems humans have now, or will ever have.
        Is that an approximately accurate unpacking, or do you have a preferred version.

      • onyomi says:

        But they would rather defect because they have no trust in the government because it has no track record of doing a good job of anything recently because the coalitions necessary to get into office are way too vast because the country itself is too big in terms of geography, population size, and cultural variation to govern effectively. So, no. 3.

      • stillnotking says:

        “Finding individual solutions” is not synonymous with “defecting”. If I want to lose weight, I eat less and exercise more; I don’t sign up for the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, but I am not thereby harming those who do. I imagine home-schoolers have similar feelings about the public education system. Besides, most parents who do send their kids to public school have no particular investment in improving the system as a whole. Their kids’ school, maybe — which opens up even more defection possibilities.

        • ‘“Finding individual solutions” is not synonymous with “defecting”. If I want to lose weight, I eat less and exercise more; I don’t sign up for the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, but I am not thereby harming those who do. I imagine home-schoolers have similar feelings about the public education system’

          I dare say they do, but co-operators feel that if the better motivated and better off jump ship on the public education system (etc), that does result in degradation for everybody else.

          • stillnotking says:

            My point is that reasoning is easily susceptible to a reductio argument, where if there exists a government program for X, it is our obligation to sign up for that program, whether we believe it suits our needs or not. I doubt even the most ardent leftist would be down with that. (If they claimed to be, and were religious, I’d ask whether they signed up for GWB’s faith-based initiatives.)

          • I don’t think it follows that everyone has to sign up for everything because a lot of programmes are inherently of minority interest, so most people have “defected” by default. What the co-operators are concerned about is the big three that affect everybody: education, policing/security and health.

          • Lupis42 says:

            @TheAncientGeek

            Would you agree that anyone who hires, rents to, or employs an illegal immigrant is defecting on the policing front?

      • Echo says:

        “A lot of americans would rather use an individually-tailored solution (that I demonize) rather than give their political enemies even more power to hurt them (in ways I approve of).”

        • Humans beings tend not to co-operate by default, so co-operation tends to be buttressed culturally, by praise of co-operators and demonisation of defectors, so demonisation of defectors is pretty standard, and not some idiosyncracy of mine..how does the average Republican feel about draft dodgers, for instance?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Your position is that people who choose to not participate in the public school system are comparable to draft dodgers? That’s a bold statement, but it sounds familiar to me. Is this a fair elaboration?

            http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

          • Lupis42 says:

            Does the average Democrat (or blue triber if you prefer) have strong opinions about the family that moves to a new location to get their kind into a better public school?

          • brad says:

            @Lupis42

            No, I don’t think so. Parents are excused all kinds of reasoning that wouldn’t otherwise be acceptable.

            A symmetrical example might be be driving a large SUV if you are in a very environmentally consciousness peer group. I think it is hard though for anyone without at least a Vietnam era parent to understand the strength of the emotions around draft dodging. Certainly the SUV thing doesn’t come close but it is probably a much weaker version of the same kind of disdain.

          • Lupis42 says:

            But if the argument, above, is that parents who pull kids out of bad public schools in favor of homeschooling/private schools are defectors, and morally comparable to draft dodgers, as suggested upthread, surely those parents who do pull kids out of bad public schools and move to expensive districts with good public schools are also defectors and morally culpable?

    • onyomi says:

      Number 3. America should break up into smaller nations. 100% serious.

    • SpaghettiLee says:

      The US government was roughly designed to be slow and inefficient. Are there other countries out there where a chief executive, two legislatures, a court, and a non-zero number of state governments are all required to agree on a law in concert for it to be effective? Like take the concept of the senatorial filibuster; a single person can hold up a bill just by physically not letting debate end.

      This is probably a good thing on the balance, but it’s a pain when you want to get things done. On the topic of breaking the country up, there’s quite a bit of support on the Left, too. Although I think the majority of people on both sides aren’t attacking the issue from a mechanical standpoint of ‘this just isn’t working, let’s try something else;’ it’s more like ‘once we get free from California/New York/DC/The South, which is clearly holding the rest of us back, we’ll be the freest, richest, most powerful country the world has ever seen’.

      Maybe it would be good long term, but I can’t see the short-term aftermath of an independent South or California being anything but ugly.

      • Nornagest says:

        There’s a few different world governments based on the American model, though the Westminster model might be more common (certainly by population, but a lot of that is thanks to India). Mexico’s government for example is set up almost exactly like Washington, and similar systems are common in South America though often with less state-level authority. South Korea’s also pretty close, although it’s unicameral.

      • JBeshir says:

        One of the downsides of the American system is that it’s virtually impossible to repeal anything or dismantle any public bodies put in place, compared to systems where once a single party “wins” it can more or less reform the entire government however it likes and is held more or less exclusively responsible for everything the government does, and you rely on the party wanting to win the next election to keep things sane.

        This has interesting knock-on effects on politics. You couldn’t imagine a Prime Minister of the UK anywhere decently into their time in office saying “government is the problem”; “government needs to stay out of the way”, “government should be small”, etc, would all make sense, but saying “government is the problem” is tantamount to saying “I’m awful at my job, please fire me”, since they’re responsible for deciding what the government should do and how it should do it and then making those changes.

        But it’s interesting how *little* it changes overall. I kind of wonder how the US would have panned out if the Republicans regularly got complete power to do anything they wanted- at the cost of having to live with the electoral consequences of having done so- and the Democrats got the same. I imagine at the very least there’d be less polarisation between the mainstream parties themselves.

    • BBA says:

      Re #2: Another misfeature of the American system is that a large chunk of the populace tends to attribute anything that happens to the President, even when they’re the responsibility of other branches or not under government control at all. Economy booming? Best President ever! Long lines at the DMV? Blame the President! This is particularly pertinent when the President and Congress are of opposite parties. The 1990s welfare reform was mostly designed by the Republican Congress, yet it’s known as the “Clinton welfare reform”. Likewise on the state level, Massachusetts’s health law, passed by a veto-proof Democratic majority in the legislature, is known as “Romneycare”.

      If we had a parliamentary system we’d be much closer to the elected dictatorship that people seem to think the government is.

    • Chalid says:

      I think there’s a lot of missing the point above. America’s national government is run… ok. Not great, and there are tons of exceptions (as there will be in any huge organization) but not as terrible as you probably expect. America’s state and local governments are the real horror show, and a lot of the terribleness you hear about is likely at that level.

      A left-oriented explanation for that fact would be that a) America tolerates way more regional variation than other countries and b) there is weak democratic accountability below the federal level. Example of a) – people saying that the public school system is horrific. And it often is, if you happen to live somewhere where the locals are either unable or unwilling to fund it properly. If you live in a wealthier area where there are lots of kids your schools are likely fine. (Property values in cities often have huge discontinuities, where houses on the side of the street belonging to a bad school district are worth way less than identical properties on the opposite side of the street.)

      For b), typical voters can hardly bestir themselves to vote in federal elections and can barely name their senators. They have literally zero knowledge of what is going on at state and local levels (which collectively are more important than the federal government), which means there’s little incentive for politicians at that level to do well.

      • Jaskologist says:

        Blaming lack of funding is a common refrain that needs to stop. Newark spends more per-student than most other NJ districts, but is consistently at the bottom in terms of results. Zuckerburg recently threw $100 million at them to no effect. The problem, whatever it is, is much deeper than lack of money.

        • Chalid says:

          Insufficient funding leads to bad school districts, but, as you say, high funding is not a sufficient condition for having a good school district.

          I don’t think the point really is affected by the object-level objection; there is a ton of variation in public school quality and you can substitute a long complex essay for the word “funding” if you like, and/or substitute some other public service for schools.

  51. I really hope it is not Gojko Mitic on the picture.

  52. Deiseach says:

    Scott, what was that you were saying about cardiologists?

    It looks likely that, in part, ‘malpractice’ is driven by money:

    In recent years, federal officials have brought several prominent cases against cardiologists and hospitals, accusing them of performing unnecessary procedures like inserting stents into coronary arteries. While medical professionals say there is no indication that cardiology has more unnecessary procedures than, say, orthopedics, they do note that the specialty has come under increased scrutiny by regulators because the procedures tend to be reimbursed by Medicare and private insurance at significantly higher levels than those in many other specialties.

    “Cardiology, whether we like it or not, is generally a big moneymaker for hospitals,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and the former president of the American College of Cardiology. “We are still a fee-for-service system, and that creates, in my view, misaligned incentives among some physicians to do more procedures and among some institutions, particularly in areas where there is not tight medical supervision, to turn a blind eye and enjoy the high revenue stream.”

  53. Ben Kennedy says:

    In your autism piece, you mention “As best I can tell fetuses have less personhood than cows, and I had a cheeseburger for dinner last night”. In the style you promote of “extremism in thought experiment is no vice”, suppose some people start believing that powdered fetus nose is an aphrodisiac and are willing to pay money for it. And, for the sake of argument, the extraction process consumes the entire fetus except the skin, which can be used to make shoes and jackets. There is no benefit to science. Because of the immense psychic benefit of this new product, people are willing to pay lots of money, so raising fetuses to 8 weeks before harvesting becomes very profitable.

    Would a human fetus-nose farm be approximately as morally acceptable as a current slaughterhouse? This would seem to be a consequence to a belief that cows and human fetus have similar moral agency. I’m not trying to debate personhood, I’m just curious how you are defining moral agency and the process by which you attach it to stuff

  54. Edward Scizorhands says:

    My back hurts. I’m getting up in age. I want to be able to use my back in my 60s and 70s.

    Should I use my back less, because I only have 10,000 back movements left in my life, or should I use my back more, because that exercises it?

    If more, should I use it before it hurts, until it hurts, or continue on through while it hurts?

    If I should exercise, what exercises should I use, and what is the evidence that this is good exercise? I do a 30-minute bike ride 2x or 3x a week, depending on how much yard work I’ve been doing recently.

    • dndnrsn says:

      What part of the back?

    • Echo says:

      You need to strengthen your abdomen and back muscles to stop your spine giving you trouble. Google can help you better than anyone here, but my (80 y.o) dad swears by planks, side planks, stretching, etc.
      Pain is telling you something: stop.

      Also fix your sitting and standing postures.

      Bike riding isn’t really great exercise. It’s just cardio and a combination of muscles used for nothing else, which can cause knee and hip problems if they get disproportionately strong.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      @Edward Scizzorhands:
      Allow me suggest that you find a good physical therapist, someone who has experience with sports related physical therapy. That is is anecdotal and related to having had good results from seeing one.

      I think that back pain is very frequently related to poor core strength and, more importantly in my opinion, reduced flexibility, especially in the hamstrings. There is a really great hamstring stretch where you lay in a doorway with one leg on the frame and the other leg through the doorway. Inch yourself closer to the door frame until you feel the stretch in the hamstring. Lie there a while. Like, 5 minutes or more. Repeat for the other leg.

      Of course, none of that will help you if you have disc problems, which is a totally different thing. I good PT can help you cope with that, but only so much. Surgery can help with that when it is time.

    • Psmith says:

      I recommend reading Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training and making up your own mind. It is also worth noting that everybody’s back ends up hurting eventually regardless of what they do, there are different kinds of pain, and learning when to hit the gas and when to hit the brakes is a highly individualized process of trial and error.

      Contra HeelBearCub, my experience and reading incline me to believe that lots of disc problems are asymptomatic, lots of others hurt for a bit and will eventually get better with appropriate training, and surgery is recommended when the immediate symptoms of the disc problems are things like incontinence or being unable to walk.

      • onyomi says:

        Based on my own experience, I find serious barbell training to be inappropriate for most Americans. They lack the core strength and hip flexibility to do the major movements safely and correctly (can you squat to parallel or lower without taking your heels off the ground, rounding your lower back or tucking your butt under at all? Most people who didn’t grow up squatting on the toilet lack the internal hip rotation and core integrity). They should work up to that gradually.

        I also agree with Heelbearcub that poor core strength, especially of erector spinae muscles are a big contributor to back pain.

        I disagree that back pain is inevitable. If your back is hurting when you exercise, or after you exercise (other than in a good, “tired and sore” sort of way, as opposed to an actual “ouch” sort of way), you are doing something wrong.

        Not using your back is not a good solution to back pain, as in most cases, back weakness is a big part of the problem. The key is in finding a way to exercise it without irritating the nerves further. I suggest swimming and physical therapy.

        • dndnrsn says:

          The question of how to train the erectors is a big one – with a lot of movements, it’s pretty easy to shift the burden onto other, larger muscles.

        • Psmith says:

          “Based on my own experience, I find serious barbell training to be inappropriate for most Americans. They lack the core strength and hip flexibility to do the major movements safely and correctly….”
          My experience suggests the opposite. I think almost everybody can squat, deadlift, and press overhead just fine with a little coaching. When I’ve seen people struggle, it’s been because of poor coaching or because they’re not strong enough to, e.g., squat unloaded or press the bar overhead (and, of course, there are various things we can do about that–have them squat unweighted to a box, press a broomstick, etc.). By way of anecdotal evidence, my dad is 57, fat, can’t touch his toes, works at a desk, and has a wide variety of old injuries from motocross and high school football. It took him half an hour to learn how to perform a textbook squat, including a brief warmup on the rowing machine and some light stretching beforehand. Meanwhile, from a theoretical perspective, the lifts themselves are an excellent way to develop flexibility and “core strength”.

          “I disagree that back pain is inevitable.”
          To be clear, I meant in life, not immediately after or as a result of any particular physical activity. That is, everyone I know over 50 or so deals with back pain from time to time, regardless of what they did when they were younger or, for that matter, of what they currently do. From Wikipedia: “About nine out of ten adults experience back pain at some point in their life, and five out of ten working adults have back pain every year.”

          “I suggest swimming”
          This strikes me as a nice way to get tired and burn calories without making one’s back pain any worse, but a pretty bad way to strengthen the muscles that stabilize the spine. The relevant load is small and not very easy to titrate in measured increments.

          • onyomi says:

            “By way of anecdotal evidence, my dad is 57, fat, can’t touch his toes, works at a desk, and has a wide variety of old injuries from motocross and high school football. It took him half an hour to learn how to perform a textbook squat, including a brief warmup on the rowing machine and some light stretching beforehand.”

            No offense, but I honestly don’t believe your father could do what I would consider to be a safe, proper squat given the physical background you describe. Most Americans can’t even do an unweighted squat without rounding their backs or tucking their butts or using an extremely limited range of motion.

            For reference, this is what someone with the hip flexibility for a safe squat looks like

            http://www.dalianmitmita.com/yblog1966/images/DSC00248.JPG

            I am not saying you would actually go *that* low with weights on your back, and even most third worlders will tend to round their backs a little at the very bottom of a deep, unweighted squat like this, but most Americans are not even close.

            Also, swimming does exercise your back muscles, along with most of the other muscles in your body. By contrast, I don’t think most people doing squats in the gym today are actually engaging their back muscles because they flatten or round their backs as soon as they get close to parallel because their hips are too tight. Don’t get me wrong, squats can be a good back exercise, but not as most people I see in the gym are doing them.

          • Psmith says:

            “I honestly don’t believe your father could do what I would consider to be a safe, proper squat given the physical background you describe.”
            I think that this is absolutely right, and that this is because your model of the squat (and barbell training in general) is wrong. I’m not going to try to convince you of this, because I have seen a lot of Internet arguments about squat mechanics and not a one was worth the pixels it was displayed on. However, I will say this: there are a lot of American adults, many of my personal acquaintances among them, who have spent their entire lives sitting in chairs, shitting in toilets, and wearing shoes just like the rest of us, and who train safely and productively with barbells. None of the trainees I know did physical therapy in preparation for barbell training, and most of them spend fewer than twenty minutes a week on dedicated stretching, “mobility”, “prehab”, etc. Some of these folks are even…old. Regardless of his eventual decision, OP ought to be aware of this before he decides that barbell training is an elaborate and subtle arcanum that should only be approached after years of wobble boards and brightly colored rubber bands. You ought to be aware of it, too, if you aren’t.

            “I don’t think most people doing squats in the gym today….”
            Most people in commercial gyms do not know how to train with barbells, yes.

            “swimming does exercise your back muscles”
            OK. What forces must the muscles that stabilize the spine resist, in swimming? How do the trainee and the coach know when those forces have been successfully resisted? How is resistance added as the trainee gets stronger? How is resistance reduced for very weak trainees?

          • onyomi says:

            Every time you pull through with your arms or kick with your legs in swimming your core muscles activate to stabilize. There is no need to lower the resistance for the weak because the advantage of swimming is that it’s very low impact and also low-gravity (means your spine can decompress just by virtue of you being in the water, relative to being on land). To make it more intense, kick harder, swim faster. It can be a pretty intense workout–certainly intense enough for someone who’s older or recovering from an existing injury. Is it going to make you hugely jacked? Probably not, but that’s not most people’s goal. Most older people would be very happy with a swimmer’s physique.

            I agree you don’t have to spend a lot of time on wobble boards or whatever, but most Americans are simply not flexible enough or aware enough of their posterior chain to do squats and deadlifts safely and effectively. These should be simple movements, yes, but for us sitting in chairs, etc. they aren’t.

            And if I dissuade people from barbell training by making it sound more complicated than it really is, then I think that is to the good: because I think for most people the risks outweigh the benefits. Most people can safely train their muscles on machines (the medex low back trainer is especially good if you can find one), swimming, walking, etc. without having to learn how to do barbells safely, so what is the point if you’re not a powerlifter or something? If you’ve got effective forms of exercise like swimming and most machines which don’t injure you if you do them wrong, and then you’ve got barbell training, which, while effective if done properly, can also injure you horribly if you do it wrong, why would you chose b, especially if we’re talking about older people whose primarily goal is usually just to be pain free, not to get huge muscles?

            If it sounds like I’m a bit pissed about this subject it’s because I am: I bought into the whole Rippetoe “serious lifters don’t use those pansy machines and anyone can easily do the major barbell lifts” thing, and, for me, at least, it was a big waste of time. I did the barbell lifts to the exclusion of machines and cardio for a few years and ended up in worse shape than I started. Now I mostly swim, use machines, and do some very light squats with very careful form and high reps and I look better and feel better by far.

          • dndnrsn says:

            The posterior chain is weird. It took me quite a while to get the whole “not rounding the back” thing down. Luckily, in that time I managed not to explode my lower back doing squats or deadlifts.

            I think a lot of people might be smart to go with stuff like goblet squats. The upright posture requires flexing of the core, but there isn’t the same risk of rounding, and weights tend to be light enough that if something does go wrong it’s unlikely to be catastrophic.

            You mention the MedEx machine: are you acquainted with Arthur Jones’ obsession with finding a way to isolate and train the lower back? He spent some ridiculous amount of time and money on that machine. Rippetoe is unfair to Jones, painting him as some kind of huckster. If he was a huckster, he was a pretty ineffectual one: Jones made his money outside of the exercise equipment arena, and then proceeded to blow a lot of it in that arena. His life story is … interesting, to say the least.

            On the subject of Rippetoe: I started out doing Starting Strength, and while I’m hardly an expert, he has a rather unpleasant combination of presenting himself as the only real-talking non-huckster, while making claims of improvement that are pretty wild (he makes it sound like getting to a bodyweight x1.5 bench press and double bodyweight squat is something that any shmuck can manage in a few months, and if you don’t, any fault is on your end).

            If I was going to choose a straight-talking non-huckster fitness guru, Dan John would be my man.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:
            “he has a rather unpleasant combination of presenting himself as the only real-talking non-huckster, while making claims of improvement that are pretty wild”

            It may be unpleasant, but it is hardly rare. For one thing, that is the standard mode for almost every actual huckster.

          • Psmith says:

            “Every time you pull through with your arms or kick with your legs in swimming your core muscles activate to stabilize.” Stabilize what? How can you tell when you’ve successfully stabilized? “Intensity” is not the same thing as force production, and physical activity can be as subjectively intense as you like without being useful for anything whatsoever.

            You seem to think that people do not get hurt using machines. This has not been my experience. Meanwhile, barbell training is useful in that it is trainable to an extent that machines are not, and trains ordinary movements as unified wholes where machines cannot. (This is also useful for rehabilitating injuries, in my experience.). By way of example, if somebody has trouble picking up and carrying a bag of mulch, squatting and deadlifting will develop the ability to stand upright with a load in a way that no machine or group of machines can replicate.

            As for the rest…all I can say is that none of this has been remotely true in my experience or the experience of anyone I know IRL. I’m glad you found something that works for you. Peace out, and best of luck to the OP.

          • onyomi says:

            @Psmith,

            You don’t know anyone IRL who has injured themselves doing barbell lifts? I do know some who have injured themselves using machines, but it is generally a repetitive stress kind of injury not too hard to fix, whereas I know people who have suffered much more serious injury using barbells (Crossfit is the extreme example of throwing people into doing a ton of barbell lifts without adequate preparation or focus on form).

            Regarding training whole body movement: I agree it’s useful to be able to do the motions correctly: if you can do a deadlift correctly you can pick something up off the ground correctly, but this is a reason to learn to do the movement without weight first. Only once you can easily do the movement correctly with no weight do I see it as safe to try adding more weight, and I don’t see any real point in ever using a very large amount of weight unless, again, you are a powerlifter or something.

            And to clarify, I’m not saying it isn’t good to develop the flexibility and form necessary to do a good squat or deadlift; I am saying that I don’t think it’s safe for most Americans to jump into doing weighted squats or deadlifts without a significant period of developing the right kinds of flexibility and practicing those movements correctly without weight. If one can’t touch one’s toes without rounding one’s back, for example, how on earth can one safely do a deadlift?

            And while I do think learning to do a safe deadlift or squatting motion is useful for everyday life, I don’t agree with the notion that compound movements are inherently superior. Firstly, there’s no guarantee the person squatting is actually engaging all his muscles like he’s supposed to rather than just letting most of the weight fall on his joints and the muscles which are already strongest.

            Second, it’s demonstrably false that if, for example, you train your hamstrings and low back separately, that the strength they thereby develop will not transfer to a compound movement. It does–which is why baseball pitchers and hitters do so much weight training now: if you needed to train the motion you’re doing, then they’d need to throw a lead baseball or something, but that isn’t what works.

          • onyomi says:

            @dndnrsn

            Yeah, I have a theory that, while our upright posture and head orientation make it natural we should focus, to some extent, on movements in front of us, modern life has amplified this to an unhealthy degree, to the point that, unless we are a ballet dancer, almost all our attention and movement is directed forward: driving, typing at a keyboard, sitting to watch TV, etc. As on the Simpsons:

            “Dr. Hibbert: Your spine is more twisted than Sinbad’s take on marriage.

            Homer: So? Just give me some drugs and surgery.

            Dr. Hibbert: Oh, I’d love to but, uh, to be honest, modern Medicine has a lousy record of treating the back. We spend too much time on the front.

            Homer: Yeah, there’s some neat stuff in the front.”

            This is another advantage of swimming: you are moving in a very 360 sort of way.

            And yeah, I used to buy into Rippetoe’s pov, but now I’m a much bigger fan of Jones, who does, indeed, have a very weird and interesting life story.

          • dndnrsn says:

            onyomi:

            1. How do you practice the deadlift without weight? Even doing it with less than a 45 on each side requires putting the bar up on blocks to get the right distance to the bar.

            2. The bar for a set-up deadlift is nearer than your toes, and you don’t start with straight legs.

            Edit:
            3. Yeah, modern life is nasty for the back (and shoulders). I’ve done more damage to myself sitting, reading, and typing/using a mouse than I have in the gym.

            4. Interestingly, Jones and Rippetoe both have a very similar persona, when you read their writing – “gruff old guy who doesn’t have time for any of your BS”. Jones has been misrepresented both by his detractors (he was hardly a machines-only proponent) and his supporters (Darden hates on protein intake above RDI, but Jones recommends a primitive protein shake as a supplement that would probably contain close to RDI by itself for a normal-sized man).

          • Psmith says:

            Oh, hell.

            “You don’t know anyone IRL who has injured themselves doing barbell lifts?”
            Of course I do. “Safe and productive” does not mean “will never ever get hurt.” However, 1) I’ve gotten hurt quite a bit less lifting than I have running, wrestling, or riding bikes, and most of the people I know who have done anything physical other than lifting can tell pretty much the same story, 2) it has been my experience that most lifting injuries do not interrupt productive training, 3) it has also been my experience that injuries from other shit generally do interrupt productive training and are therefore more annoying than lifting injuries, 4) most (maybe all?) of the people I know who have gotten hurt lifting weights were training for reasons other than health alone, and 5) the injury rate of everyday life, or even everyday life at a healthy weight plus some yoga and brisk walking, is not zero either. I also don’t know very many Crossfitters.

            “there’s no guarantee the person squatting is actually engaging all his muscles like he’s supposed to rather than just letting most of the weight fall on his joints and the muscles which are already strongest.”
            The guarantee is that their form is correct. Muscles move the skeleton. If the limb segments are moving the way they should, the muscles are being engaged.

            “Second, it’s demonstrably false that if, for example, you train your hamstrings and low back separately, that the strength they thereby develop will not transfer to a compound movement.”
            It’s an empirical question whether Nautilus circuits or whatever will transfer better to performance at any given task than squatting and pulling. I know where I’d put my money.

          • onyomi says:

            @dndnrsn

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u47LEyRT2gQ

            Once you can do that, lose the bar, go further and touch the ground in front of you. If you can lean forward and touch your feet without rounding your back at all (okay and appropriate to bend the knees somewhat, of course), and then come back up maintaining the same back position the whole while, then I’d say you have enough hamstring flexibility and lower back awareness to do a deadlift, but not otherwise.

            For most Americans just doing this motion correctly and repeatedly would be quite a challenge. Then they can move up to picking up gallons of milk or light kettlebells this way. No need for them to pick up an actual barbell until they are way stronger and more flexible than, on average, a life of sitting at a desk has made them.

            And yeah, I don’t think I’d want to be friends with Rippetoe or Jones, but I think Jones contributed a lot more to the field.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Onyomi:

            1. But what’s the point of waiting to deadlift until you have more flexibility than is needed to set up the deadlift? Your toes are at the floor, while the bar is half a 45 closer to you. If someone couldn’t reach halfway down their shin without rounding their back, that would be a problem.

            2. A lot of people basically say Rippetoe just repackaged Bill Starr’s stuff, while reading Jones’ old stuff I ran across things I hadn’t heard before. So, you may be right. A fair number of people who hate on Jones echo things he said.

          • onyomi says:

            I mean, yes, you only need to get 2/3rds of the way down your shins to actually reach the bar, so technically one doesn’t have to be quite that flexible, true. But most Americans I know are not even close to being able to reach that point without compromising their back position.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Really? Geez. I thought I was inflexible.

            I guess Romanian deadlifts might be a better way to go for someone that inflexible. I know I started with them and they might have helped. The strain on the lower back is less than with a barbell deadlift, and it comes on in a way that is less potentially hazardous. Plus it will stretch the hamstrings.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Psmith:
        I was trying to indicate that if the problem (which appears to actually be symptomatic) is, in fact, a disc problem, that the advice I am giving is not necessarily the right advice.

        Surgery would only be indicated after you have gone down the “can I get more or less permanent relief some other way” route.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Dang, my comment got ate. Responding to a bunch of different comments here.

        The spot on my back is the lower thoracic. I had trouble placing it until I went about my day and tried those planking exercises (http://darebee.com/workouts/five-minute-plank-workout.html). I took it easy but I can still feel it. My form may suck.

        I know I’ve lost flexibility. If I have to crouch or sit cross-legged for a period of time, it’s pretty tough getting back up. Stretching may be more appropriate than exercises but I’ll give HBC’s stretches a shot later today.

        I don’t know much about squats.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Edward Scissorhands:

          Should that be “I don’t know squat about …” erm, nevermind. 😉

          The key to the stretch I am describing is that should allow you to stretch the hamstring without exerting anything. “Easy does it” is good advice.

          Just get your leg up there and feel the stretch. If you stop feeling it, scoot towards the wall some. It should not hurt (i.e. don’t over do it, I don’t know how tight your hamstrings are).

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Wow, that whole side conversation about lifts is totally over me. And I used to lift (under a coach’s instruction).

            Over the past two days I’ve been doing hamstring stretches (like this http://i.ytimg.com/vi/y1cVQARo8iI/maxresdefault.jpg but slightly higher) and some ab exercises (the planks and lying leg lifts) and I’ve been sore, which is what I want because I can tell something’s working.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Note that soreness can be deceptive: when your muscles get used to working, they will get less sore. It’s more a sign that your body is doing something it’s not used to than anything else; there’s overlap with improvement, but it’s not proof that strength is improving or hypertrophy is taking place or whatever.

            It’s also kind of individual: My upper back tends to get sore even when I’m used to the exercise, while my quads and hamstrings don’t.

  55. Wrong Species says:

    I wish people would stop making the argument that “X is going to happen regardless of whether the government bans it, so we should legalize it” where X is either guns, abortion, immigration or drugs. Replace “X” with “murder” and see why that argument doesn’t work.

    • nil says:

      That’s not really a sufficient description of the argument. The real argument is “the costs of banning this item or practice outweigh the benefits;” the fact that people will attempt to and sometimes succeed in evading the regulatory scheme is just evidence of high cost and/or low benefit. You’re cuing in on the latter, I think, but it’s the comparison of the two that makes the argument work (when it works, which isn’t always of course). In the cases of drugs or abortion (or prostitution), you’re talking about black market externalities; in the case of guns, you’re talking about depriving law abiding people of non-harmful/beneficial use. Then, especially with drugs or guns, you’re saying the costs outweigh the benefits because the benefits will be mitigated by people evading the law.

      • Wrong Species says:

        The problem is most people don’t make that argument. Maybe they implicitly believe what you said but I don’t hear people make that kind of cost/benefit analysis. They usually just say something like “the war on drugs is a failure. Might as well legalize drugs”. So maybe my problem is that people talk about the costs of prohibition without discussing the benefits.

        • nil says:

          Certainly there’s going to be differences of opinion regarding the actual costs and benefits, and people being what they are the ones with the more extreme opinions are going to be loudest. Gun control advocates who see no utility whatsoever in gun ownership; pro-life folks who don’t see any positive aspects to abortion. The funnest ones have both, simultaneously–anti-prohibitionists often do ignore the costs of drug use or prohibitions inhibitory effects, while pro-prohibitionists basically never admit that there are also positives. Ditto sex work. And that’s not even starting on the great many people who don’t feel it’s their responsibility to mention evidence supporting the position they oppose.

          But in all those cases I think you’re basically seeing funhouse-mirror reflections of more serious arguments by more serious people who do see both sides. In cases like that (and assuming you have the grit/time/desire to do it) I think it’s best to try to bring out the platonic form of the argument.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      In the particular case of drug policy, it’s more that there has been, as far as we can tell, no noticeable correlation on average between punitiveness of policy and levels of drug use (as well as all of the well-known harmful externalities of prohibition). Though what you describe has two possible senses: did you mean “No matter how much we crack down on X, there will always be some amount of X that we cannot stamp out”? Or “No matter how much we crack down on X, it will not make any difference in the rate of X”? It would be silly to argue against punishing X in the first case, but not obviously silly in the second.

      Indeed, I will bite your bullet and say that if robust tests were devised and carried out showing that criminalising murder made no difference to the murder rate, I’d certainly be skeptical of the value of continuing to do so.

      [Edit – you’ve clarified a bit in your response to nil. Well, I think that if you just ask them to spell out what they mean by ‘failure’, they’ll usually be happy to do so. And if someone believes that a policy has failed to achieve its stated goals, or is causing more harm than a plausible alternative policy, then I don’t see what’s so unreasonable about wanting to end that policy.

      Of course, in the instant case, there is a wide span of what ‘not having drug prohibition’ could look like, and most of the sensible advocates are in favour of some sort of public health focussed regulation that can include the option of criminal sanctions for certain particular high-harm behaviour (such as dealing to minors, DUI etc), but simply assumes that the sale and use of a drug should not by default be a crime. See for instance Transform Drug Policy Foundation with their Blueprint for Regulation. ]

    • Nornagest says:

      It’s a bad argument on its face, yeah. But there’s a good argument behind it, and that is this: good policy works with the grain of people’s incentives, and bad policy works against it.

      Rule 1 of small-scale leadership is “never give an order that you expect not to be followed”. This can’t be transposed directly into policy, because once you scale up enough you stop being able to take individual circumstances into account, but the same principle applies. Make law that lots of people have rational reasons to route around, and you’re undermining your own legitimacy for no good reason. Once your legitimacy is gone you have nothing left but force, and you really don’t want to be using that on the regular.

    • John Schilling says:

      Every year, about fifteen million Americans buy guns, two million American women have abortions, one million foreigners immigrate to the United States, twenty-five million Americans use drugs, and about ten thousand Americans commit murder. Most of the Americans who commit murder are caught and punished; almost none of those who partake of illegal drugs, immigration, or guns are ever caught.

      One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong…

      When you hear arguments of the form, ““X is going to happen regardless of whether the government bans it, so we should legalize it”, understand that there’s an implicit “…a whole lot” right after the “happen”. People’s opinions of gun control, immigration, and the war on drugs would change dramatically (and not necessarily in the same direction), if it were at all realistic that number of violators could be reduced to ~10,000/year and most of those locked away in prison shortly after.

      At the other extreme, if after a couple of centuries of trying to enforce laws against murder we were still seeing literally millions of murders per year, I’d be looking favorably at proposals to maybe tax and regulate the wergild instead.

      So, since murder doesn’t really work in your analogy, what does? What’s the thing that’s going to happen millions of times a year even if it is made a felony crime and the focus of a czar-level enforcement effort, that you still think ought to be illegal?

  56. TeMPOraL says:

    I wonder what the Fine Ladies and Gentlemen of Slate Star Society think about issues of privacy and surveillance. Most people in my environment (tech industry, don’t confuse with adtech industry) seem to be of opinion that privacy is a basic human right and needs to be maximized. Personally, I have some issues with that position, which I usually tend to summarize as “privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one”.

    My primary observation is that discussions about surveillance and privacy tend to focus on negative uses of data collection – evil governments, bad advertisers. There are however many possibilities to use similar mass-collected data for good, that don’t get mentioned in those discussions. Some random, obvious examples – simulations of disease spreading, determining individual health problems in advance and aggregating that to predict dangers on a city level, optimizing traffic, energy use, enjoyability of urban environments. Incidentally, those are the same things we used to market cloud computing and big data with before Snowdengate broke out. I’m not convinced that any individual’s right to privacy is worth sacrificing all the potential for global optimizations.

    I start to feel that if we want to continue to grow as a society, beat Moloch and ensure prosperity, we need to get closer together, and the current drive towards maximizing individual privacy seems counterproductive.

    • brad says:

      Maybe I’m just a typical American, but I can’t really understand Europe’s notion of a fundamental right to privacy. I can certainly see complaints about the NSA or what have you, but Facebook is storing things that you thought you deleted? Well first no one is putting a gun to your head and telling you to post things to facebook and second what’s the big deal exactly? Then things like the so-called right to be fogotten not only don’t seem like anything close to a fundamental right — or even a good idea — but directly contrary to the right to free speech. Which to my mind, Europeans are entirely too cavalier about!

      • ” I can certainly see complaints about the NSA or what have you, but Facebook is storing things that you thought you deleted?”

        You’ve almost answered your own question. If the white hats aren’t respecting your privacy. that just makes things easier for the black hats.

        • brad says:

          So don’t use Facebook, find someone that has a deletion policy you like better.

          I’m not a hard core libertarian by any means, I’m all in favor of food safety regulations for example, but I really can’t see the government coming in and saying you need to follow this exact privacy policy. It looks like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer to me.

    • Bugmaster says:

      I think the Privacy/Surveillance battle has been won by the Surveillance side so decisively that having opinions on the subject is now pointless. You have no privacy, and you never will (unless you take fairly drastic steps like moving into a mountain hut and refraining from all electronic communication). So, at this point, we might as well attempt to extract some collateral benefits from all this data collection.

    • I think as interesting as those optimisations might seem, ensuring your country doesn’t fall to either terrorism/espionage (argument for less privacy) or big-brother authoritarianism (argument for more privacy) is a far far far more important set of concerns. I think we systematically underestimate the risk from these things because most people here live in countries that have been free from both evils within our lifetimes.

      I think one of the best things we can do, given the battle for privacy is being lost pretty comprehensively, is find new ways to achieve the same things privacy used to give us. For example, protecting people with contrarian politics, activists, or whistleblowers, or just unusual views, from bullying. Or, having much greater transparency in business and government processes, budgets etc. so there’s much less of a power imbalance. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how we’re not heading for a much more conformist, unpleasant and less free society.

      • Kevin C. says:

        But I see no evidence of any “new ways to achieve the same things privacy used to give us”, and enough personal experiece to make me fairly confident that so such substitutes for privacy are possible. I’m pretty sure that the “burn the heretic” instincts are imbedded too deeply in human nature, and libertarianish “live and let live” attitudes so rare, atypical and WEIRD, that “a much more conformist, unpleasant and less free society” is (barring civilizational collapse) pretty much an inevitability of technological determinism.

        • What about, for example, proportional deterants against people that bully individuals with unusual beliefs (provided those individuals are not attacking anyone)? I’m not calling for that neccessarily, but I feel there might be some sensible measures we can take but haven’t thought of because we’re too busy being completely horrified at the destruction of privacy.

          • DrBeat says:

            Any such deterrant would instantly be repurposed so it became another means of bullying individuals with unusual beliefs, by redefining all terms involved until their beliefs became bulllying themselves, justifying the use of the deterrant.

            Everyone loves actual bullies. People will bend over backwards to justify the behavior of bullies, to enable their bullying, and to reward their bullying. You cannot rely on any sort of scheme in which we punish bullies for being bullies, because nobody wants to punish bullies, they want to brand the victims of bullying as bullies so they can punish them some more.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @Citizensearth

            DrBeat beat me to my general reply, so let me just second what he said.

            Though I do note that you said not that you think there may be solutions not yet tried, but that you feel so. How much of this is like that bit from the movie Awakenings: “Because the alternative would be unthinkable”?

          • Both your generalisations are completely different to my perception of humans, and as this isn’t a very specific empirical discussion I’m not sure how to take that further. I hate bullying and many people I know appear to hate bullying. My experience is that around half of peole, not specific to one political faction, hate bullying, and there is an ongoing struggle between bullies and their sycophants and other people who dislike bullying. In my experience some groups do attract (online SJW, far-right) or repel (moderate libertarian, non-identity driven social democrats) a higher rate of bullies, but there are many exceptions and variations.

            @Kevin.C
            One reason I think this is that I see little evidence of significant efforts to do so, and a relatively short time frame in which its been something people are likely to put effort into. It seems very important and I feel like it would be bizarrely defeatist not to consider it? Sort of like wanting the bad effects to happen?

  57. Lorxus says:

    For reasons that would be mildly complicated to get in to (but that I will gladly explain), I am trying to do some of what I think might be original complexity class reduction research for a tabletop roleplaying game. In essence – how much can you abuse the ability to send single bits of information back to yourself in speeding up decision and function-evaluation problems? I /think/ that you can decide problems in O(1) and that you can achieve some kind of speed-up on function-evaluation, but I’m not sure. Any help?

  58. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    So… anyone here a fan of video game music? I recently (re?)discovered Over Clocked Remix and I’m like a kid in a candy store!

  59. Wrong Species says:

    Are there any known instances of depression in hunter gatherer societies?

    • HlynkaCG says:

      Are there even psychologists in hunter gatherer societies?

      • nil says:

        In a lot of pre-modern/non-western societies, mental illness often was/is treated as a spiritual malady by spiritual specialists. One classic example (and relevant, since it basically seems to be what we’d call depression, possibly comorbid with PTSD) is Susto.

    • Lorxus says:

      I think so? IIRC the argument was made that depression doesn’t hit nearly as hard in hunter-gatherer societies because there’s enough surplus gathering to let depressed tribe members sit around miserable for a little while before being able to return to work, as well as increased social ties to make sure they don’t stay that way for too long.

      • Bugmaster says:

        I would imagine that selection pressure is also a lot higher in hunter-gatherer societies, which would cause all the depressed people to die off pretty early in their life (which also applies to diabetic people, disabled people, people whose immune systems are not strong enough to ward off pneumonia, etc.)

    • rsaarelm says:

      You might want to look at the high suicide rates in Greenland and whether they only showed up after the move to modern society. There was a theory floating around that they are an old adaptation to living in tight family units with many periods of semi-starvation, where one less unproductive mouth to feed might mean higher odds of survival for the rest of the family.

    • I assumed this would be an obvious and extensively studied thing, but I couldn’t find much on the topic. Assuming suicide is an objective proxy for depressing which would be extremely difficult to objectively compare between societies, I did find this:
      http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/00332747.1969.11023585

      It’s REALLY old and its mostly paywalled, but basically it suggests the norm of academic understandings is that suicide rates are lower, but there are multiple instances where it is higher. It would require much more reading. Based on this and my intuition, I VERY tentatively guess depression is not specifically a symptom of the modern lifestyle, but I think the modern world creates conditions that cause depression at a more consistent rate than tribal societies which only sometimes go wrong.

  60. NA says:

    Heh, just wanted to answer to a reply (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/05/ot25-obon-thread/#comment-224021)
    in an earlier open thread. If you let companies know about this you might actually be doing them a favor – my partner (in the software industry as well) will refuse to apply to any jobs with websites with that kind of picture featured prominently. She gets good reviews at work consistently, and never fights with people there – indeed, she often makes friends with them, just dislikes forced socialization. So knowing that this is going on might help the company avoid putting off applicants who would be perfectly capable employees.

    Also, sorry for stating the obvious, but there are many options between what I dislike and what you mentioned in jest. Like a picture with some people enjoying leisure time together, some people working together, some people working alone, and some people enjoying leisure time alone. Or a picture of cool technology, which is, after all, what drives many people to work for technology companies.

  61. John Sidles says:

    HeelBearCub wonders  “Maybe it [comments upon social justice concerns] is performance art. I don’t know.”

    A central concern of much recent STEM research (including mine) is not the narrow category of the “performance arts” but rather the broader category of the performative arts (especially in medicine); specifically the role of the performative arts in establishing what cognitive researchers call common knowledge … said common knowledge being (of course) the central theme of Scott Alexander’s recent Blue Eyes essay here on SSC.

    The cognitive foundations of common knowledge are admirable surveyed in an (above-cited) article — which is coauthored by Steven Pinker — “The psychology of coordination and common knowledge” (2014).

    Pinker and his colleagues do a terrific job of explicitly enumerating the performative elements of language and cognition (which include eye contact, blushing, crying, and laughter). And yet, it is a striking feature of Pinker’s article that the words empathy and affection never occur in his analysis.

    Whence this absence of empathy and affection?   It is natural to wonder,

    Even more strikingly, a Google Books search seemingly establishes that precisely none of the STEM articles that Pinker has collected in his recent opus Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles ever use the words “empathy” or “affection” … not even once.

    SSL readers are invited to comment upon this remarkable STEM lacuna.

    What can we conclude from all this?   It is tempting to speculate that a Pinker-style empathy-free, affection-free STEM literature cannot naturally accommodate the eminently plausible notion that “It all Turns on Affection” (as was so ably argued by Wendell Berry in his NEH Jefferson Lecture for 2012).

    Neorationalist SSC readers are of course free to hint (or even loudly proclaim) that Wendell Berry’s emphasis upon the crucial roles of affection and empathy — roles whose crucial importance is common knowledge (in Pinker’s sense) — exposes Berry and his colleagues as sluggishly schizophrenic agents of Cthulhu, such that their works may be rationally disregarded.

    And yet Steven Pinker’s writings, considered in aggregate, compose a strong argument against the empathy-free affection-free tenets of neorationalism, and more broadly compose a strong argument against an empathy-free and affection-free STEM literature and culture … equally by what Pinker’s scholarly works say and by what Pinker’s scholarly works never say.

    • stillnotking says:

      Pinker is an empathy skeptic, as I recall — he sees it as unimportant, even harmful, beside the dispassionate understanding gained from the scientific “view from nowhere”. Empathy unmediated by the intellect is dangerous. The Nazis were very kind to animals, and trumpeted that fact in support of the unprecedented humaneness of their regime. Marxism also can be seen as a disastrous triumph of empathy over reason, although one could argue whether empathy and fairness are quite the same thing.

      I think he has a point. The moral emotions are dangerous — as prone to burn the house down as to keep us warm at night.

      • John Sidles says:

        stillnotking says   “The moral emotions are dangerous — as prone to burn the house down as to keep us warm at night.”

        The house-warming/heart-warming analogy reminds us that, for house-warming furnaces, the odds-ratio (warm house)/(burn house) is of order 10^5. That’s why (essentially) all houses have furnaces.

        For similar reasons, heart-warming empathic capacity is strongly weighted by women in mate-selection. Namely, empathic capacity is far more commonly beneficial than harmful.

        Although moderation is advisable … even in empathy.

        • Nornagest says:

          Even if you buy into the analogy, which I’m not sure I do, we have no particular reason to think that the risk/reward setup for hearts resembles that for houses.

          And what’s the deal with the YouTube links? I get that you’re trying to go for illustrative rather than authoritative, but still… romantic comedies are to real-world romance roughly what porn is to real-world sex. Bad porn.

          • John Sidles says:

            Nornagest opines: “Romantic comedies are to real-world romance roughly what porn is to real-world sex.”

            More realistically

            “Romantic comedies are to real-world romance roughly what condensed matter physics is to quantum field theory.”

            Namely, condensed matter physics and romantic comedies alike grapple (successfully!) with performative realms that are not feasibly accessible to computational elaboration (aka “rationality”).

            In other words, rationality alone (aka computational elaboration) suffices to predict the dynamics of individual electrons and individual humans. But when larger numbers of humans and/or electrons begin interacting, then pure rationality fails, and other (more ancient) modes of cognition come to the fore.

            It’s no wonder that the most-cited articles in physics and the most-appreciated works of romance alike rely more upon inspiration and affection than upon rationality and computational elaboration.

            After all, what fraction of SSC readers are the progeny of an unbroken chain of successful attempts at reproduction that extends through millions of successive generations?

            That question is easy to answer.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ll believe it when I start seeing citations to Meg Ryan movies on arXiv.

          • John Sidles says:

            Seen among our mechanical engineering library’s new books this week: Sentiment Analysis.

            No, it wasn’t a typo.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Yeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, not actually helping your cause, in my mind.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      And yet Steven Pinker’s writings, considered in aggregate, compose a strong argument against the empathy-free affection-free tenets of neorationalism, and more broadly compose a strong argument against an empathy-free and affection-free STEM literature and culture … equally by what Pinker’s scholarly works say and by what Pinker’s scholarly works never say.

      Map vs territory?

      A gentleman is one who does not use the word.

    • Paul Torek says:

      Rationality does not consist in discarding the insights of System 1 , including empathy, in favor of calculations done in System 2. The failure of some self described rationalists to grasp this notwithstanding.

  62. tgb says:

    I just have to hand it to Scott again for the cleverness of the “comment knowledge” title and the blue-eyed savage punning off the previous post. Took me a second time to get it, which makes it all the sweeter.

    If you enjoy puns too, you might like Order of the Stick webcomic (giantitp.com) which has some of the best puns I’ve ever seen in the titles that most readers probably never even see (you have to view the lists of comics to see them). Comic 999 recently had a particularly good one. It’s also the webcomic I’ve stuck with the longest and hasn’t declined in quality in the least bit, but updates painfully slowly.

  63. The is-portal divide is the philosophical idea stating that there is no logical argument that be used to derive what is a door (‘portal’) from premises that only state what is true (‘is’). Lack of awareness of this problem has plagued many authors to make fallacious arguments about what is a door, without noticing that they’re implicitly assuming portal-statements such as ‘boards attached with hinges are doors’. Such assumptions are highly dubious once you consider pop-up picture books.

    Some philosophers have used the is-portal to argue that doors don’t exist at all, and that sentences involving doors are meaningless. Other philosophers dispute this conclusion, say that although the is-portal divide makes it difficult to reach any definite conclusion about doors, if doors didn’t at all it would be impossible to move from one room to another.

    PS. Technical problem: The first time I tried posting this, there was some technical problem and the post didn’t appear. I tried reposting it, but that made a notice appear saying that I already posted that. Hopefully adding some more text will make the notice disappear.

    • Psmith says:

      Following Hume I might say to my grocer: ” Truth consists in agreement either to relations of ideas, as that twenty shillings make a pound, or to matters of fact, as that you have delivered me a quarter of potatoes; from this you can see that the term does not apply to such a proposition as that I owe you so much for the potatoes. You really must not jump from an ‘is ‘-as, that it really is the case that I asked for the potatoes and that you delivered them and sent me a bill-to an ‘owes ‘.”

      -G. E. M. Anscombe, “On Brute Facts” (and see also her “Modern Moral Philosophy”)

    • I really like Hume, but I find your uncharitable parody of one of his main ideas to be hilarious for some strange perverse reason. I take it this is some sort of argument for moral realism? Can you point us to the details?

  64. Linch says:

    Hi Scott,

    I was crawling through your tumblr the other day while procrastinating (Bad Linch, I know), and I came across this:

    http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/131311804321/hey-scott-when-people-talk-about-saving-a-life

    You said: “I’m not totally sure, but based on http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness#Thecosteffectivenessfiguresweuse it looks like they are talking about preventing one fatal incident.”

    This is somewhat inaccurate. In fact, GW was criticizing Sachs’ lax use of logic there. It makes little difference to save somebody from malaria if they die of polio a week later.

    GW figures for eg., the AMF are based on RCTs where “The summary rate difference, which expresses how many lives can be saved for every 1000 children protected, was 5.53 deaths averted per 1000 children protected per year.” In other words, the population effect on the treatment group has 5.53 less deaths than the control group. So we can expect eg., that a village with 3000 children to have ~16 less dead children if they had malarial nets than if they did not (of course, very large error bars, etc.).

    This is somewhat distinct from “preventing 1 fatal incident”. Eg, if 32 children were protected by insecticidal bednets, but 16 of them died of malnutrition/in a car crash, the RCT (and GW’s figures) will only be able to capture the effects of the 16 who on net (hah!) survived.

    I think their figures actually understate “number of lives saved.” If I was to start a charity evaluator from scratch, I would probably use QALYs as the gold metric to measure the effect of every intervention, and “a saved life” / “averted death” would just be an undiscounted point estimate* over a “normal” lifespan.

    Eg, if a “normal” person lives for 65 QALYs, I will say that a health interventions “saves a life” for every 32.5 QALYs it increases.

  65. Kabi-run-run says:

    https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-end-viral-diseases-with-dracos/#/story

    Nice to see this guy getting some crowdfunding love, but I suspect that he’ll probably end up piddling along to around $20,000, whereas if he was promising some new and improved intergalactic digital dress-ups (with hyper-realistic pew-pew sounds) the sky (as his slogan would tell us) would not be a limit.

    And *that* is why we can’t trust important decisions to consumers.

    • Murphy says:

      huh.

      I was following this with great interest a while back but then it all went silent. This crowdfunding seems absolutely bizarre.

      It appears extremely patentable, it already got media attention and if it works it should be easy to get funding from universities and companies to develop it into a marketable product yet now I see it on indiegogo? WTF?

      What information do the academic and corporate funding sources with a vested interest in supporting it have that we do not. Did half the test animals in the early safety trials curl up and die or something?

      • Kabi-run-run says:

        From what I understand, there isn’t really much private funding available for new, experimental technology.

        (For example, in the field of communications/computers most of the basic work to prove concepts is funded by the military – there isn’t really a similar body funding radical medical technology.)

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I’ve consistently heard good things about DRACOs as a concept. It’s not a total scam. I don’t know about this guy in particular.

        This seems important enough that I’ll highlight it on the next Open Thread and see what other people think. Especially interested to hear from Douglas Knight or Sarah Constantin. Might be a good donation opportunity.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          This guy is the main DRACO researcher. I think his lab is the only one ever to work on them.

        • grendelkhan says:

          Thank you so much for signal-boosting!

          I’d just run into the IndieGoGo announcement (I do a search every month or two to see if there’s been any more recent news; this is a hobby horse of mine), and I’m going to be throwing a chunk of my charity budget at this (I’ve been saving up for something just like this) and escalating to anyone I can think of in a position to do something significant.

          I know at least one person who works in biology; I sent him the original PLoS ONE paper and the SENS 6 presentation, and I’ll paste the reply in here within the next day or so. (I’m in transit at the moment, and short on internets.)

    • James Picone says:

      How excited should I be about this?

      If the pitch is correct in general and the research works out, I interpret this as being nearly as big a deal as penicillin. Kind of broad-spectrum, easy antivirals, yes?

      But the presentation, the presence on indiegogo, and a general too-good-to-be-true thing make me suspicious.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        Yes, this is a new one on me.

        I note this text from the website:

        Currently, DRACOs are in the Valley of Death–the financial and experimental gap between the previously funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) proof of concept experiments and the threshold for convincing major pharmaceutical companies to advance DRACOs toward human trials.

        I don’t actually know if this “Valley of Death” is a real thing, but it seems plausible. If it is real, does anybody know more traditional ways of getting through it?

        • Linch says:

          I don’t know if the Valley of Death applies to this project in particular, but I’ve definitely heard of it in reference to other work as well.

    • onyomi says:

      Sounds very promising, but the video editing is SUPER annoying. Also, I expect we’ll all have some horrible new autoimmune disorder if this treatment ends up wiping out viruses, but maybe that will only be as bad as the way antibiotics mess up our intestinal flora (i. e. worth it in serious cases).

      • Matt says:

        DRACOs don’t persist indefinitely, so even if this became a problem it would be trivial to inoculate the patient with harmless viruses.

        I’m more worried about bacterial infection due to elimination of bacteriophages. Maybe it won’t be possible to apply it to chronic viral infections?

  66. onyomi says:

    Was reading Scott’s anti-reactionary FAQ, and the point about how some people thought the Victorians felt incredibly safe, and yet we also have news stories of them living in terror of “garroting,” made me think: maybe news reporting is somewhat responsible for some of the perennial sense that “things were better in the day.”

    Consider: as is known (good Dothraki citation practice), the news media thrives on sensationalism: they can turn a blip in murder rates into a big story by making it sound like blood is running in the streets. Therefore, people always have a tendency to feel that *right now* things are going to shit.

    But everyone also remembers when they were growing up, presumably not reading a lot of newspapers before the age of 14 or 16 or so, and everything was not, actually, going to shit, even if newspapers were reporting that they were.

    Maybe a shift from judging the state of the world against one’s own lived experience to, as an adult, judging it by sensational media reports, could be partially responsible for every adult’s sense that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket *now*–not like when I was a kid.”

    • Kabi-run-run says:

      There was quite a long period of time (50s-90s) where things actually were getting worse.

      Now, I don’t know if it’s just my contrarian instincts coming out, but I actually *feel* as if things have got better – when I was 14 ish there was a feeling of danger (and just general unpleasantness) that just doesn’t seem to exist to the same extent now (twenty years later). Young people seem far more sensible and considerate than they used to be, too.

      • BBA says:

        I used to hear people talk about their childhoods as an idyllic past when things were “simpler”. Well, all the complexity and nastiness was still there, but if you’re a child you can’t see it or your parents keep you sheltered from it.

        Myself, I’m with you. I remember the world being a scary place when I was young. It’s a lot less scary now. But then I live in New York, and it really was a hell of a lot scarier here when I was young.

    • Nornagest says:

      Of course it’s the news. Jack the Ripper isn’t famous because of his body count (there were far more lethal killers both before and shortly after), he’s famous because he had the good fortune to be a serial murderer operating in London, the center of Victorian England’s media, at a time when the modern concept of a news cycle was first taking off.

      His exceptionally grotesque methods probably didn’t hurt, either.

    • John Sidles says:

      Kabi-run-run opines “There was quite a long period of time (50s-90s) where things actually were getting worse.”

      It is the considered opinion of Friendly historians that the period in question (1950s-1990s) witnessed substantial improvements in regard to traditional Friendly concerns; these improvements are surveyed in the concluding chapters of Friends for 350 years; the History and Beliefs of the Society of Friends since George Fox started the Quaker movement (2002, updated second edition).

      These traditional Friendly concerns are commonly mnemonized as SPICES:
         • Simplicity
         • Peace
         • Integrity
         • Community
         • Equality
         • Stewardship
      Can we reasonably hope for, and even foresee, further SPICES gains in coming decades?   Only if Cthulhu keeps swimming!

      • Nornagest says:

        Reminds me of Bhutan’s “gross national happiness” index.

        I regret to say that I find it about equally impressive.

        • John Sidles says:

          Yes, there’s no doubt that people (and cultures) who seek to be “held in the dark” nowadays have somewhere to turn.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not a neoreactionary, if that’s what you’re trying to imply. But given the choice between neoreaction and unaccountable feel-good metrics, and nothing else, I’d be first in line to be darkly enlightened.

            (Do you get a Dark Mark with that?)

            Fortunately, I’ve got the whole Regular Enlightenment tradition as an alternative.

          • John Sidles says:

            Historians are well-aware that Enlightened sympathies naturally accompany Friendly sympathies … beginning 350 years ago, and continuing through and foreseeably beyond the present era.

          • Nornagest says:

            One can be sympathetic to a goal without endorsing it as an optimization objective for your civilization. I like order and stability, for example, but some seriously bad shit tends to happen when you try to maximize them.

            Besides, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the linked article says.

          • Nornagest says:

            This is starting to remind me of a neoreactionary I used to spar with, ironically enough. Whenever I said something he couldn’t immediately counter, he’d link me to a bad Gutenberg translation of some 17th-century political science tome — or, for some reason, the Song of Roland — and tell me all my answers were within.

            I finished one of them before I realized he was doing a Gish gallop on me. Call me dense.

            But to get back to the point, it’s usually a mistake to focus too hard on taxonomy. It can be helpful if you want to understand something’s history, but it throws up a lot of false equivalances when you try to take it beyond that: political libertarianism shares a lot of its pedigree with certain parts of the radical left, for example, but now they hate each other.

          • John Sidles says:

            Cthulhu speaks …

            “Insofar as radical really does mean a return to the radix, or root, every radical must trace their history back to its source — for no branch is nourished by the roots except through the other branches and through the trunk.”

            Witnessed in this light, the study of history becomes performative, enlightening, and creative.

            And scientists agree …

            I strongly believe that any self-respecting physicist should learn about the history of physics, and the history of quantum field theory is among the most fascinating. […]

            In all previous revolutions in physics, a formerly cherished concept has to be jettisoned. If we are poised before another conceptual shift, something else might have to go.

            Lorentz invariance perhaps? More likely, we will have to abandon strict locality.

            The pace of the resultant merging of enlightened empathic understanding and enlightened scientific understanding is accelerating … with medicine as the 21st century merging-ground … and the path of the enlightened minions of Cthulhu is illuminated thereby.

          • Nornagest says:

            This isn’t the kind of community where you can get cheap authority points by quote-mining some dude and then saying that it’s what scientists believe.

          • John Sidles says:

            Scientific history-mining has worked for me.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            Nornagest says: Besides, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the linked article says.

            You’ll find that this is pretty much par for the course with him.

          • John Sidles says:

            Isn’t a lively respect (even a liking) for historical ambiguity and cognitive diversity essential to appreciating what singing and dancing and laughing is all about?

            That’s the problem with today’s young whippersnappers … vanishing respect for operatic diversity as an unbounded source of cognitive diversity.

            Not for nothing is it called opera … of which Cthulhu’s fellow-swimmers are big fans!

          • Nornagest says:

            Cthulhu speaks […] enlightened minions of Cthulhu […] Cthulhu’s fellow-swimmers

            Why are you still talking about Cthulhu? No one in this thread takes that metaphor seriously.

            Let me be explicit: neoreactionaries are a tiny minority on this blog. I’m not one, onyomi’s not one, Scott’s not one. I don’t know if Kabi is but they’re not talking like one. If you’re trying to score points against them, you’re tilting at windmills.

          • John Sidles says:

            For many (including me) NRx-ers play the same vital role in political discourse that Squidward Tentacles plays in SpongeBob SquarePants (note the ten million views).

          • Nornagest says:

            What vital role might that be, and how does it make the Cthulhu metaphor relevant?

          • John Sidles says:

            SpongeBob/Squidward plays the vital role of avatar of 21st century extra-rational cognition (to use ultra-prestigious mathematician Michael Harris’ language).

            Admittedly, Harris’ writings and lectures make mine seem laconic!

          • Nornagest says:

            How about you use your own language, preferably with a minimum of rhetorical questions and pop-culture free-association?

  67. Santoculto says:

    Rational is a human ”thing”, logical is just the ”things” that work in the nature ”and” universe. All systems are logical, but almost systems are predominantly irrational, even those created by human beings.

    Also there is difference between rational reductionism and rationality.

    But rational may can be described as logical because works, works in a genuine human way.

    Higher power of influence of phenomenologic interactions recquire good moral/rational discerniment.

    Human beings should start by this premisses but ”we” are as social systems more as masterless train. ” We ” we build the train, but we have no real drivers.

  68. Jeffrey Soreff says:

    Did anyone else react to the photo by humming aotearoa?

  69. AlexanderRM says:

    Something I’ve been wondering for awhile now: As I understand it, in economic terms, corporations are a social interaction between laborers, investors, and consumers, arguably counting managers in some sense although in others they’re laborers. The stereotypical corporate model is that stockholders (the investors) elect the managers and thus control the company; is there anything stopping a corporation where laborers (or perhaps consumers) do that instead? Essentially, a bunch of workers get together, decide to start a corporation, and… probably sell bonds?
    Is there any economic writing on the subject someone could link to? Could be this actually *does* happen all the time but it’s just named something else.

    (another model obviously would be for workers to own shares themselves- build the factory with their own money or whatever- but unless wealth distribution is precisely equal, that’s an inefficient arrangement for everyone to do)

    I’m not sure it would actually help the workers that much overall- the economic competition should even it out so corporate profits are similar- but it’d be a very interesting and useful model to discuss corporations and econoics in (the thing that made me ask about it was having just had a discussion with several of the sort of Blue Tribe people who shout “corporations!” and “profits!” as arguments against various economic systems, or various corporations or the like).
    Regardless of whether or not it happens, is there any easy term for that model to convey that sense of “what if corporations were instead run by workers, would that change your opinion of the issue”?

    • BBA says:

      The word you’re looking for is “cooperative.” The customer-owned form is more common than the worker-owned form, and both have become pretty rare since once you get above a certain size the management will have effective control just like a stock corporation. The largest ones are insurance companies, and if there’s much of a difference between mutuals like State Farm and for-profits like GEICO I haven’t seen it, the ads are just as annoying either way.

      A variant form is seen in the “food coops” – grocery stores where the customers, employees and owners are all exactly the same people. I.e., you can’t shop there unless you’re a member, and you can’t be a member unless you’re willing to work there a couple of hours each month.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      There is a theoretical analysis of cooperatives: the worker-owner wants to maximize the average profit per worker, while the pure owner wants to maximize the total profit. If there are diminishing returns to scale, additional workers will increase total profit but decrease the average. Thus, the analysis predicts that optimally run cooperatives will not expand as much as optimally run capitalist enterprises, which will dominate the economy. I don’t know if cooperatives actually behave that way. (The analysis probably also predicts that cooperatives will invest more in automation, which I’m pretty sure is false.)

      • Afaik in some cases they do, but it probably should be balanced with the fact that for-profit employees have greater incentive to defect from cooperative behaviour in their work (secretly being lazy etc). The psychological effect of being a partner in a business is quite significant up to a medium sized scale. My effort to research the topic led me to believe they are rare primarily because they’re difficult to get started because starting a business is risky and cooperative rewards aren’t high enough (most people are mildly altruistic/cooperative not very).

        Personally I’m a fan of small business over big business anyway, not in the least because I think small business is generally much more innovative and less often rent-seeking, so in my mind cooperatives allow a good alternative for more altruistically minded people to still remain effective in the marketplace environment. However, sometimes they’re fairly entwined in left-wing ideology, which doesn’t worry a pluralist like me who skitters across different factions comfortably, but probably would put many centre-right business-minded people off a bit.

    • As others have mentioned you’re looking for cooperatives. I’ve not had personal experience, but I’ve read up quite a bit on them and can tell you a few things. Firstly, they’re not exactly common but they exist in larger numbers than you might think in a number of places. The largest and most successful group to my knowledge is Mondragon, which employs upwards of 70,000 people, based in Spain but also in other places. Cooperatives are also quite popular in many third-world nations including parts of India and Africa. There are also various member-owned businesses in the West including the Anglosphere, particualrly in finance and some still remaining in agriculture.

      The empirical information I was able to gather was that cooperatives fail at a rate that is a lower than regular businesses (still high but better than for-profit small business). However, they don’t generally scale that well beyond medium size, and there may be a poor incentive structure for founding them that cause far far less to be founded (which is the main reason they are rare afaik). Some also find that once they are very successful the temptation to become for-profit leads them to transition to a regular corporate model rather than sharing that wealth with new entrants. Mondragon found that they had to increase their highest (managers) to lowest pay gap within the company from I think 3-1 to 5-1 or something like that, in order to attract professional management talent that they at first lacked. Coops that are founded perform far far better than those created where workers buy out a failing business structure to save their own jobs (no surprise, but common). Generally I’d emphasise that they’re quite successful but not especially popular or common. The reddit sub /r/cooperatives is quite good run by a nice guy but be warned its fairly leftist.

      My own work on the topic has involved trying to drag cooperative concepts a bit towards the centre by looking at creative ways they can scale and be better subjected to business principles, market forces and price mechanisms, if possible without losing their idealism too much. However I’m told my work on that particular topic ends up sounding very leftist despite my efforts to move the concept to the centre, so I now currently prefer to focus on other more recent ideas I’ve had on economics that you can see in my blog if you’re interested.

  70. Carinthium says:

    Requesting life advice on significant stuff. Trying to summarise as much as possible because I don’t want to be boring.

    (Refresh for those who don’t know. Superflous for those who’ve followed my requests for help:
    I was frustrated by my parents pressuring me to be a Roman Catholic when my actual beliefs are atheist and wanted to be a person who could date more effectively. I was advised I wouldn’t be able to get out of Roman Catholic pressures without moving out, so I made plans to. I have almost fully deconverted, as we have agreed I can stop going to Church after December if I still don’t want to be Catholic.

    Bad train luck thwarted my first speed dating and I had an emotional breakdown on the day. I’ve recovered, and have plans to move out to housemind a friend’s place with a roommate in December, fully approved by Mum&Dad.
    )

    In addition to the agreement I can deconvert after December, I’ve achieved the symbolic step of been driven to Church to go myself a different time on Sunday than my parents (so I don’t have to take Communion though Mum&Dad don’t know that, plus I loiter around the back where I can move around without being noticed). I could take advantage of Mum’s rationalization that if my frustration is high enough I am “ill” mentally and so can just do readings in bed, but don’t want to push it. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken the ‘truce’, but I was having a genuine breakdown from uni stress and Mum offered.

    But my main problem right now is living costs. I failed to realize until now (incompetent I know), but Melbourne is very expensive. Mum suggested selling the house, but before Dad was even asked I pointed out I couldn’t bring myself to accept that (stems from my philosophical views*). Dad suggests renting, but I really hope there is a better option than accepting my parent’s money (around $12,000-$15,000 a year) to live on my own.

    A family friend has suggested I can live with them post-December. But it’s a place I visited often in my childhood with a major adulthood presence, so I worry that even after December I’ll be at risk of falling back into old habits.

    Without the status symbol of living on my own one way on another, I won’t be able to get a date. Living with my parents I am at greater risk at being pressured back into Catholicism (though that’s relatively low right now). Finally, it is psychologically a lot more difficult to become and stay independent if I stay in an environment where I am used to passive dependence.

    I need advice.

    *: I’m almost a metaethical emotivist, in that I think morality in practice is just a subset of desires, and that choices of ethical “right” are nothing more than clashes of preferences, some of which can be broadly called moral preferences. People do not intuitively believe this (I’m not fully emotivist), but it is the truth.

    (Minor Notes:
    -My frustration had gone down a lot because I felt a subjective sense of momentum and progress. Now I’m starting to worry again.
    -AMAZE turned out to be useless.
    -Tried a prostitute. Felt nothing. Think it was symbolically worth it, but may be rationalising.
    -Plan to get back to speed dating after University is over, so about two weeks before I make arrangements)

    • keranih says:

      I’ve only been lightly following your story. Did you say that you are employed?

      To me, it sounds like you’ve made a lot of progress towards your goals. Getting your parents on your side is good. (And as a Catholic, I agree – if you are struggling with faith to the point of rejecting the existence of God, it’s not ethical to take communion, *particularly* if it is your intent to continue moving further from God & the church community. So if that’s your intent, I agree with your choice to not take communion (although I find it regrettable.)

      I’m going to leave the dating thing be, hopefully others will add good advice.

      Regarding your living situation…it seems you have three options (so far) – stay in your parent’s home, accept financial assistance from your parents, or accept the offer of the family friend. There is the possibility for another option to arise, but perhaps your best path is to pick one of the options and run with it for now.

      Some thoughts for consideration of each:

      Parent’s home: Strongly recommend that you set an internal deadline 3-6 months post December, by which time you’ll have either found another option, or else will pick between accepting parent money, or family friend home. Knowing that you have these other options may take some pressure off.

      Parental money: What sort of obligation to repay your parents do you think you would entail, following the loan? Do you have a plan to pay interest, or make a mental commitment to help your parents as they grow older? No man is an island, we all help each other, etc, etc, but I think it might help you if you formally define the obligations that this would put you under (even if it’s just to yourself.)

      Friend’s home: What exactly are the accommodations there? How will this mesh with your plans to date? What will be your obligations in return for lodging? Frankly, this (to me) seems the best option for the planet, you, family, etc – you’re sharing living space that would otherwise go unused, you’ll not be borrowing from your parents and you might be helping the Friend, and your parents are likely to be far less tense about the situation if they can get third hand confirmation that you are still alive, eating, etc.

      (PS – if you’re going to leave the Church, what will you be doing with your time on Sunday mornings?)

      Hope this helps somewhat.

      • Carinthium says:

        I’m not employed- I’m a Melbourne University Arts Student, going half-time, all because of parental pressure to go and yet not do what they think I can’t handle. Because of a psychological need for control, I intend to take at least a semester off.

        Also, one of the things I resent is parental pressure which up until very recently has been to go to Communion. At a time in my youth they knew I had doubts (I genuinely changed my mind then, though for reasons I think silly now), yet they still pressured me to take Communion regardless of my own thoughts.

        On Sunday, probably just more gaming time. Overall in my life I’m torn between being sick and tired of work at all (from university) and thinking it’ll be better when I’m finally independent making some work worth it.

        I’ll try Friend’s Home until I can think of a better option, but as I mentioned it has it’s flaws.

        • keranih says:

          Everything has downsides. Paradise on earth, imo, is not a place w/o downsides, but one where you both know all the downsides of all options, and can make a choice without significant regret at what you’ve lost.

          Re: communion – if a person is having doubts and questioning the group, having them participate in group rituals will help strengthen their ties to the group, and so help them through the doubtful period and into a full return to the group. Permitting you to drop Communion while you were doubtful rather than committed to leaving would have been counter to your parents (and my) best wish, which would have been that you stay with the Church. Hopefully if you understand your parents goals/best wishes for you, it will help you be less resentful of their methods. (Again, given that participating in communion is an outward sign of inner desire for commitment to the church community, you are quite right, imo, to forgo participation when you have decided to deconvert.)

          I encourage you to find a thing to do, regularly, where you have a task (physical or mental activity, and physical might be the better option, if you can pick only one) and people who have some expectations of seeing you. 4-6 days a week would be best, but even just one afternoon a week of sweeping floors at the local dog rescue place/shelving books at the library/picking up cans at the park/whatever might be helpful.

          (Scott has linked before to studies which show a significant benefit to work.)

          I think choosing to take a semester off and spend your time as only you see fit would be sub-optimal. Most people don’t do well in that kind of unstructured setting.

  71. I love breakfast says:

    http://cepuk.org/
    I’d like your thoughts on this Scott. They seem plausible + horribly biased and political at the same time. Should we be restricting long term psychiatric prescribing? Where are the priorities? If you were in a position to look at the prescribing for a medium sized city what would you do first? (No there isn’t time to read ALL the research or a budget to pay for that)

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