OT31: Open Water

This is an experiment to test more frequent open threads. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Six months ago I posted a therapist recommendation open thread. Since there are some new people here since then, and some people have asked for it, I have briefly reopened comments there. If you want to recommend a therapist in a certain area or are looking for such recommendations, go post them there.

2. I am experimentally tabooing the words “neoreaction”, “neoreactionary”, and “NRx” in this blog’s comments effective immediately. It’s emotionally charged and politicized in a way that I think potential substitutes aren’t. I got my first exposure to far-right ideas from the neoreactionaries and so historically I’ve viewed rightism through their lens and spread that to my readers, but I think that this emphasis was a mistake. Also, nobody agrees on what “neoreactionary” means, least of all self-identified neoreactionaries. If you want to talk about monarchists, call them monarchists. If you want to talk about traditionalists, call them traditionalists. If you want to talk about the far right, call it the far right. If you want to talk about HBD, call it HBD. If you want to talk about Mencius Moldbug, call him Mencius Moldbug. First infraction will be punished with a warning, second with burning eternally in the caldera of the Volcano God.

3. Comment of the week goes jointly to a bunch of people who pointed out that I was ignoring the evolutionary angle on prestige (example). Mistakes were made. SSC regrets the error. I still think that it’s probably not either of the two explanations I argued against there, but all I have to go on is vague intuitions I can’t verbalize, and I should have admitted that.

4. When I post a comment, for a while the page won’t let me scroll and instantly takes me back to the comment I just posted whenever I try. Does anyone else have this problem or know a way to solve it?

5. Last open thread a commenter brought up the link to MIT researcher Todd Rider’s crowdfunding campaign for DRACOs, an experimental therapy that is supposed to treat many or all viruses. I’ve heard good things about these in the past, but it seems strange that this guy has to go to crowdfunding, and it seems stranger that the crowdfunding isn’t even doing very well. I’m thinking of donating but I want more opinions first. Do any knowledgeable people (Sarah? Douglas? Anyone?) have more information or any thoughts on whether or not it’s an effective use of money?

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1,500 Responses to OT31: Open Water

  1. sf says:

    Re: “4. When I post a comment, for a while the page won’t let me scroll …”
    Was this solved yet? Not an expert here, but based on similar experiences:

    When you make a comment on some sites, the URL in your address bar (i.e. https://slatestarcodex.com/ etc) changes, adding a random looking code at the end, beginning with a “#”. If you just cut off this code things should work normally, (but you may want to save the URL with code elsewhere, to locate your comment). Also clearing browser history and cookies may solve the problem.

  2. onyomi says:

    Having just watched the GOP debate, I was struck by the following:

    Libertarians, myself included, may be somewhat disappointed by Rand Paul’s failure to really take off thus far, but I think there’s a lot for us to be happy about, even if the GOP candidates are still far from enlightened in many ways.

    Namely, I think we can very clearly observe a dynamic which I think I first read David Friedman describing, which is that the goal of a libertarian party, say, or even of a Ron Paul candidacy, may not be to actually win, but to gain enough traction that other people start stealing your ideas.

    On the stage tonight, I saw candidates other than libertarianish candidate Rand Paul discussing: eliminating the IRS, auditing the Fed, a gold standard, drug legalization, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and many other such subjects which would NEVER have been taken seriously in a GOP debate eight years ago.

    Some would take this as evidence that the GOP has “lost it,” or whatever, but to me it means that libertarians are kind of winning, albeit not by actually having an explicit libertarian candidate win.

    • John Schilling says:

      As has been noted elsewhere and often, pretty much the entire Socialist party platform ca. 1900 is now the law of the land in the United States, deeply entrenched, without any Socialist party member having been elected to major office.

      • onyomi says:

        Good point, and, perhaps, reason for libertarians to now be hopeful even if the number of Americans who describe themselves as such has stalled.

    • Nornagest says:

      At this point I’m starting to think the GOP will be acccused of having “lost it” if it offers anything other than family-values platitudes and weak, easily soothed economic anxieties. Like the conservatives in “The West Wing” that the writers are trying to paint as reasonable.

    • onyomi says:

      Possible negative result of the debate–or, at least, a calling into stark relief of negative thing which already existed:

      Obviously the moderators were bad and antagonistic to the candidates. Ted Cruz later opined that he’d like a GOP debate moderated by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannitty, and, as much as I’m not really fans of any of those three, I can see advantages to that.

      The problem is obvious: we are sorting ever more starkly into two societies with neither side even trusting the journalists of the other side to be even remotely fair. Though I also am not entirely unhappy with a breakdown in US cultural unity. Maybe it can eventually lead to a breakdown in political unity as well.

  3. Troy says:

    Scott: I’m not sure if this article (which is a few years old) has been shared in Links Threads before, but if not you should take a look at it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html

    I just read it and it’s immensely fascinating — it’s about two young twins conjoined at the brain who seem to share certain conscious experiences with each other.

  4. stillnotking says:

    I had an interesting conversation about gender roles with a coworker today, which got me thinking. She’s very much an opponent of “traditional” masculinity, which in her mind basically means “Rambo”. I think that’s a serious, obvious error; the ideal of traditional masculinity in Western culture (for adult men, not escapist teenage fantasies) is much closer to Atticus Finch. Atticus is no wimp — he displays his physical and moral courage in almost every scene — but he does not whip out a gun and blow away Bob Ewell when the latter spits in his face. Nor does he seem the type to go in for honor killings or domestic violence. It struck me that women may not be as attuned to the cultural messages of masculinity as men; feminists may be seeing Rambo but missing Atticus.

    This is also why my response to the proposed abolition of traditional gender roles is “Be careful what you wish for.” I suspect that, if “traditional masculinity” were indeed abolished, the result would be a lot closer to Rambo than we are today, and not what anyone wants!

    • hlynkacg says:

      As Glenn Reynolds observed, Atticus Finch is secretly the villain of To kill a Mocking Bird. He’s a patriarch who accuses a woman of lying about rape.

    • anon says:

      I think John Rambo is a great example for people to follow, and I assume that people who think otherwise haven’t seen the original movie. In First Blood, despite being arrested for no reason, beaten, tortured and almost killed several times, he goes out of his way to avoid killing any of his pursuers, the sole exception being the helicopter, which was a clear case of self defense.

      I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on if this also holds true there.

      • NN says:

        The Rambo sequels have almost totally eclipsed the original movie in pop culture memory, though.

        For the record, I’ve heard second-hand that Rambo is much more violent in the book than he is in the first movie.

        • John Schilling says:

          In the sequels, John Rambo is a soldier serving his country in battle against enemies roughly as evil as Nazis, killing about as many enemy soldiers as did e.g. Audie Murphy and in about the same manner. Still seems like a pretty good role model.

          OK, in #4 he isn’t serving his country. He’s working for a higher authority.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      If you want a film about a lawyer exhibiting physical courage, I recommend the Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

    • hlynkacg says:

      On a more serious note…

      Forgive me if this comes out a bit scatter-shot and nonsensical but there is a lot in your post that I’d like to respond to but am unsure how to articulate.

      Pop culture’s conception of Rambo bears little resemblance to the protagonist of First Blood in much the same way that pop culture’s conception of “Traditional Masculinity” seems to bear little resemblance to traditional masculinity.

      Furthermore, it seems to me that a lot of what I would consider “the canon” of masculinity is not only being de-emphasized but actively disparaged and dismantled. The result is that masculinity is largely being defined by it’s relation to feminism rather than it’s own terms.

      I mean I get that there will be less immediate need things like discipline and physical courage in an affluent society but the degree to which we have retreated from these values does not seem to match the situation on the ground so to speak.

  5. Anon. says:

    How do the “affirmative consent” people view sex between two people who are underage?

  6. Have a cheery thought, though I’ll let someone else run the numbers. What proportion of men and women had early formative experience with the worst-behaved 1% of the other gender? How about the worst behaved 5%? For purposes of this discussion, include parents as well as relationships.

    • hlynkacg says:

      I don’t even know how you’d go about making that determination.

      My ex may be cruel and manipulative but does she really represent the bottom 5% of female behavior?

    • Tibor says:

      I don’t think most people know a large enough number of other people well enough to be make that a representative sample of the general population of the other sex (and of course, you have to meet people entirely at random which you probably don’t). Without trying to go through my life too hard, I would say that 50 is a comfortably high estimate for the number of women I’ve ever known more closely than “a classmate, colleague, neighbour, …” and probably less than 10 than I would say I know well.

      Also, we have no objective scale for judging the “goodness of behaviour”.

    • I don’t think “worst 5%” can be easily defined or measured for individuals, but I think it’s fair to say that there are some very destructive people, both men and women. What’s more, some of them justify what they’re doing by saying that their behavior is normal for a gender and/or because the other gender is so bad.

      What I’m trying to explain is why there are so many people who are in the bitter-to-enraged spectrum about a gender while as far as I can tell, both genders are pretty tolerable for the most part but include some awful people.

      • Matt C says:

        People get hurt in romances, and it’s in a romance that you’re most aware of gender differences. A painful romantic relationship with a woman is going to color your thinking about women-the-gender a lot more than, say, having a cruel female schoolteacher. And intimate relationships often end up painful for someone, even when everyone plays fair.

        Also, not everyone plays fair. Some people turn evil when they get an emotional commitment from someone else, in ways you wouldn’t suspect from the outside. I think this is more common than people acknowledge casually. You are thinking about nasty stuff that happens from the worst 5% of the opposite gender, but my guess is the percentage of people who head-fuck their partners is a lot higher than that. Maybe a quarter, maybe more. Enough to spread a lot of unhappiness around. Enough to go a long way toward explaining the men-are-pigs/women-are-snakes thing you’re talking about.

  7. I think part of what’s going on in affirmative consent discussions is people talking past each other, with one set (mostly women) saying “We want women to be treated decently, and not have their desires overridden” and another set (mostly men) saying “We don’t want men to be at risk of horribly unjust punishment”.

    I think the affirmative consent people think of sex with a drunk woman as her being nearly comatose, and the anti-affirmative consent people think of sex with a drunk woman as her having a drink or three and being quite conscious, but with a few inhibitions down. In general, I wish people would be clearer about the examples they’re bringing to arguments.

    Neither side is completely wrong, and both are talking about a highly emotionally charged issue.

    I’m kind of amazed at the men who say “Of course I (and most men) don’t want sex with a woman who doesn’t want it”. My experience (admittedly some decades ago) was of men who’d slowly escalate the amount of touch, without looking for any sort of response, positive or negative. They would stop and look frightened when I burst into tears (psychological issues at my end which I may or may not write about), but I think I was fortunate that I didn’t drink or like being around drunk people.

    I also know a man who ended up with the first woman who was sexually active with him. They’re happy together (it isn’t her only good quality), but he had at least a moderate number of partners before that. Maybe he just wasn’t good at attracting women who were enjoyed sex with him and were willing to show it, but I suspect it’s more that women who are sexually active weren’t all that common. Things may have changed. Let me know.

    It’s possible the culture has changed, but I’m not sure it’s changed all that much. I’ve been told that (a lot of?) men still get scared off by women who are direct about wanting sex.

    What this sort of thing adds up to is people ending up frequently aiming for sex which is tolerated rather than actually wanted.

    I’m not blaming men in general or women in general. Both have inherited a culture which often leads to bad outcomes.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Here, at least, my impression is that the person pushing for Affirmative Consent isn’t being clear on what it is he or she thinks should be the norm.

      The sane version that was presented here seems pretty much… what all decent people agree should be the case, and there really isn’t any argument about that. The Affirmative Consent I’ve met in the wild is a different creature altogether, with many proponents stating verbal consent is required for every escalation, and in general with an emphasis on what the law should be as opposed to (as the emphasis seems to be here) what should be considered a normal standard for interaction.

      And bluntly, at least some of the people who are trying to specify law are trying to specify a law which is, for lack of a better description, terrifying, requiring proof of positive consent for every act, and allowing rescission of consent without even verbal warning – so even a contract agreeing to sex, and videotape of it, wouldn’t be sufficient evidence of consent.

      So, from the perspective of somebody who is dubious of the idea – the whole thing feels like a motte and bailey under construction. Here’s this reasonable idea which nobody really disagrees with – and if that’s all there is to it, where’s the argument?

      • gbdub says:

        Honestly I think there is a strong subset of Affirmative Consent advocates who honestly, and with good intent, believe that rape is whatever a woman says it is, and her word should be enough to evoke punishment. Affirmative consent is just a way to enshrine that in law. Sure, “verbal consent for every escalation” is not realistic, no sane person can believe that, but it more or less does away with any he-said-she-said debates (because “she said” will always win).

        Again, I think this position is held in good faith – they honestly believe that rape is such a huge problem that any collateral damage to otherwise innocent men will be rare and too insignificant to matter.

        @ Nancy – I don’t really share your skepticism with “Of course I (and most men) don’t want sex with a woman who doesn’t want it”. As a man, I think this is largely true. The majority of men really do derive a lot of pleasure from the visible pleasure of their partner (for which consent and enthusiasm is required). We WANT to be wanted.

        But we’re conditioned to attempt to escalate until we’re told “no” fairly emphatically (not “not now”, not “slow down”, not “my aren’t we randy”, but NO (or in your case triggering tears)). Having gotten the NO, the vast, vast majority of men will stop (not permanently – we (and women) are also conditioned to believe that a couple of not-quite-nos are an appropriate level of coquettishness rather than an actual statement of feeling).

        If anything good can come from Affirmative Consent its the idea that everyone involved should be open and honest about their desires and comfort levels (this is a responsibility on both partners, in both directions – say what you want, and what you don’t). This would prevent a lot of bad sex. But trying to enshrine that in law is doomed to be a biased mess.

        • The problem is that “a woman who doesn’t want it” is ambiguous. There’s not wanting it in the sense of hating it, and there’s not wanting it in the sense of being more or less neutral. That’s a big range.

          I can easily believe that men generally prefer sex with a clearly enthusiastic partner. However, I’m also inclined to think that a lot of men will settle for sex where their partner is tolerating it.

          The modern world makes accurate communication difficult in a different way.

          • Mark says:

            Sometimes my mum cooks me cottage pie for dinner, and to be honest, I’m not a fan of cottage pie, but I’ll eat it.
            Sometimes, she cooks chicken goujons with sweet and sour sauce. I love that one. We normally have it on a Saturday.

            I don’t like eggs, so she doesn’t cook me omelette.

            Some people say that, as a 35 year old man, I shouldn’t be expecting my mum to cook me dinner every night. But, I tell you what… I don’t care what those people say, I’m still not eating any eggs… and my mother shouldn’t go to prison for cooking cottage pie.

          • gbdub says:

            Well sure, unenthusiastic sex is better than no sex at all. I don’t see that as particularly profound, shocking, or morally depraved (I’ll note here that unenthusiastic sex is hardly limited to women). Should men be expected turn down something freely offerred even if the offer is lukewarm? But even that is not the question. The question is should a man go to jail / get expelled from college if they do accept a “neutral” offer?

            That’s why I mentioned that I think some of the Affirmative Consent rhetoric has a place and has value. That place just isn’t the legal codes.

        • Cauê says:

          This is complicated. On the one hand, I think this conditioning has faded significantly, and I don’t expect this pattern of behaviour.

          On the other hand, in one instance I’ve had a girl tell me that she liked to feign rejection so that I would overcome it – she only told me this out of frustation that I didn’t try, which resulted in less sex than either of us would want. So it’s not always just a question of signaling and communicating intent there.

          And of course I’ve seen women (and men) get very angry at the myth that women pretend not to be interested when they really are…

          Agreed that “trying to enshrine that in law is doomed to be a biased mess”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Caue:

            The thing is, you can’t be a mind-reader or assume that this is why she is reticent. So, if that is what she likes, you have to talk about it be clear on what she wants (and what you want).

            And I can’t help think that some of this wrapped up in what I mentioned in the OP, the conflicted attitude many of us have about sex.

          • Cauê says:

            I agree this assumption is a bad idea, but I’m not sure you’re doing the problem justice. She didn’t want to talk about it, it partly defeated the point. Talking made it Common Knowledge and devalued whatever it was that she wanted from the situation.

            Not that I expect this to be common.

    • Cauê says:

      It’s possible the culture has changed, but I’m not sure it’s changed all that much. I’ve been told that (a lot of?) men still get scared off by women who are direct about wanting sex.

      Now, I live in an adjacent culture, not the US, but every person born after 1980 that I ever met who believed this was a woman, often a young one going by what she’d been taught by older women.

      Culture is so important in this subject… I have a friend who lived in Japan for a couple of years. He says he had trouble having sex with Japanese women, because they would just kinda lie there and make those little [yelps?] that we can see in japanese porn, that to us look like at least discomfort. He would stop and ask, and they’d say that no, nothing was wrong, they wanted it and were enjoying it. He says that eventually he refused to do it, unless they, well, I don’t remember what he said, but my description would be “unless they behaved more like the women in western culture”.

      On talking past each other, I agree with you, and also with Orphan Wilde above.

      • Tom Richards says:

        I kind of suspect that it stems from a misinterpretation of the reaction of men to women who they do not want to have sex with being direct about wanting to have sex with them. Being propositioned by someone you want to have sex with is I’m pretty sure generally a positive experience, for men and women. Being propositioned by someone you don’t is often, for men or women, to widely varying degrees depending on the individuals and circumstances, an actively unpleasant experience and consequently apt to prompt negative and avoidant reactions. It’s a causation confusion.

    • stillnotking says:

      I think the affirmative consent people think of sex with a drunk woman as her being nearly comatose

      I don’t think they do think that, because: a) sex with a “nearly-comatose” (i.e. unconscious/unresponsive) person is already illegal everywhere, and b) they consistently write affirmative-consent laws and policies using simply the word “intoxicated”, which no reasonable person regards as a synonym for “nearly-comatose”.

      I think the affirmative-consent people think, with some justification, that juries are reluctant to convict for sexual assault by impairment unless the victim is nearly comatose, they believe the standard should be much looser than that, and they are consciously attempting to “move the needle” socially by writing laws which they know to be extreme and liable to abuse.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @stillnotking:

        Elsewhere, I already agreed that issues around intoxication are not clearly spelled out and that I think this is an issue. How much intoxication is required before consent cannot be given, mutual intoxication and “blackout but functional” intoxication all throw “spanners in the works.”

        Nonetheless, I don’t think what you are saying is correct either.

        From the SUNY policy I linked earlier:
        “Consent cannot be given when a person is incapacitated, which occurs when an individual lacks the ability to knowingly choose to participate in sexual activity. Incapacitation may be caused by the lack of consciousness or being asleep, being involuntarily restrained, or if an individual otherwise cannot consent. Depending on the degree of intoxication, someone who is under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or other intoxicants may be incapacitated and therefore unable to consent.

        My emphasis added. I believe the language in policy documents is almost always something like that. Nonetheless, I do see people on the affirmative consent side saying you can’t consent when you have had anything to drink, and I think some universities will actually say that to incoming freshmen (even though the actual policy is worded differently).

        Question: Where does “stumbling and slurring their words” fall on the acceptable/unacceptable spectrum for you?

        • Nornagest says:

          I do see people on the affirmative consent side saying you can’t consent when you have had anything to drink, and I think some universities will actually say that to incoming freshmen…

          I can confirm being told that in high school sex-ed class, back in the Nineties. It (and particularly the case where two drunk people hook up) bothered me enough that I actually went and looked up the relevant section of the state code, which turned out to use words like “incapacitation”. It doesn’t take much to convince high school students that they’re being bullshitted at the best of times, and that episode certainly didn’t help.

          I don’t think I got the affirmative-consent talk when I was entering college, but the moral panic around campus rape hadn’t ramped up to present-day levels back then (though not for lack of people trying to foment one).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Honestly, in the 90s, I really think the issue was around liability and alcohol policy. There was a broad institutional panic around intoxication and how liable institutions were for damages if there members imbibed and then did something wrong.

            The reasoning went something like “drunk person causes fire which kills 500; institution ceases to exist due to lost liability suit”. This was all institutions, not just colleges. Major corporations, etc. Much of it was pushed by the insurance companies who would refuse to write a liability policy unless institutional policies were changed.

        • stillnotking says:

          @HBC: I’m a fan of letting juries and prosecutors decide how a given point on the spectrum of intoxication should be treated. If I, personally, were on a jury, I would be very reluctant to convict someone of rape if the other party had been aware enough to converse, slurring or no. I would not rule out the possibility in a specific case, though.

          However, after some searching, I found that almost all affirmative-consent policies do use the stronger “incapacitated” language. Only a few outliers like Antioch use “intoxicated”, and no state-wide bills. I was being unfair to the affirmative-consent movement, and I retract my previous post.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @HeelBearCub – “Incapacitation may be caused by the lack of consciousness or being asleep, being involuntarily restrained, or if an individual otherwise cannot consent. Depending on the degree of intoxication, someone who is under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or other intoxicants may be incapacitated and therefore unable to consent.

          …It seems to me that the bold part doesn’t actually say that incapacitation consists of loss of consciousness? It lists lack of consciousness, sleep, or “if an individual otherwise cannot consent”. It then says that intoxication can invalidate consent, without specifying the actual level of intoxication required. How is that in any way inconsistent with the “one drink” rule?

          I’m not a lawyer, so maybe the subtleties are eluding me, but that looks like a “one drink” ruleset. Or at least if the administration chooses to enforce a “one drink” policy in some or all cases, nothing in that policy stops them, with the additional problem that the students may not realize that’s the rule they’re living under.

          [EDIT] – “Incapatication” = unconscious, asleep, or other. Other includes intoxication, but makes no further specification for HOW intoxicated. I’m intoxicated after the first beer, right?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            I do not believe you are intoxicated after the first beer, unless it is a large beer with high alcohol content and you are of low bodyweight.

            DWI (driving while intoxicated) requires a BAC (blood alcohol content) of 0.08% (or significant signs of impairment). Even then, the consent standards don’t say intoxication does prevent ability to consent, only that it can.

            Edit: For example, this page calculates that 150 lb woman would need to consume 3 drinks in 90 minutes to reach a BAC of 0.097%.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Faceless Craven:
            Also,
            I have already conceded that the lack of a clear guideline for what “incapacitated” means in the context of intoxicated but not unconscious is a valid issue.

            But, I think we should be ble to say that if someone was alternating between barely conscious and possibly unconscious that this would be incapacitated. I think, if we are being homest, we know it is a spectrum. The key question is can they form coherent thoughts and express them clearly. Certainly in that state of barely conscious this is not true but even shy of that you tend to get people who seem “crazy”.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I do not believe you are intoxicated after the first beer, unless it is a large beer with high alcohol content and you are of low bodyweight.”

            As in, that’s the legal standard? If intoxicated is actually a legal term and has a specific definition, that policy is somewhat more comforting. Then again, it’s not like we’re actually having people blow breathalyzers at parties, are we?

            “I have already conceded that the lack of a clear guideline for what “incapacitated” means in the context of intoxicated but not unconscious is a valid issue.”

            Yeah, sorry, didn’t mean to pile on. Part of my frustration is, if we concede that the campus rape epidemic is as bad as the current narrative says it is, why are we still allowing/encouraging social drinking and party culture on campuses? It seems to me that if we need to back the “incapacitated” line much from actually unconscious/unresponsive, there’s not much of a clear guideline to go by, and the whole social drinking/hookup business becomes sufficiently harmful and dangerous that it’s better to just ban the whole thing. Not doing so seems like an attempt by the schools to not lose students who want to party, at the expense of a significant minority of women getting their consent violated and men getting brought up on dubious charges. That seems pretty unacceptable to me.

            Then again, I don’t drink and am not sexually active, so I have no real skin in this game. The whole scene has always seemed like a horribly bad idea.

            “I think, if we are being honest, we know it is a spectrum.”

            then there really isn’t any choice but to stay entirely outside that spectrum, is there? The only safe rule is the stone-cold sober one.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Mark Atwood:
            You don’t appear to be reading or responding to what I have actually written.

    • NN says:

      It’s possible the culture has changed, but I’m not sure it’s changed all that much. I’ve been told that (a lot of?) men still get scared off by women who are direct about wanting sex.

      This is empirically wrong, as shown by repeated experiments that find that an attractive women approaching random strange men and directly asking for sex will receive an affirmative answer about 40-60% of the time, and a polite decline the rest of the time. This idea is also contradicted by the observed behavior of prostitutes, strippers, camgirls, etc.

      I suppose that it’s possible that some men who are looking for a long term partner instead of casual sex might be put off by a woman who is too direct, but that’s another issue.

    • John Schilling says:

      What this sort of thing adds up to is people ending up frequently aiming for sex which is tolerated rather than actually wanted.

      How do you tell the difference, in a culture where people of all genders are strongly encouraged to lie about the extent to which they want sex and the extent to which they enjoyed the sex they just had?

      We can imagine a culture in which these things aren’t so, but I’m not sure we can build one. And until we get there, aiming for sex that is tolerated[*] will at least get sex that one person enjoys and sometimes get sex that both people enjoy. So long as No still does mean No, that may be the best that can be realistically expected. It is almost certainly the best that can be enforced.

      [*] or more precisely, aiming for sex that is wanted but having a large allowable miss distance.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      The more discussions I see about affirmative consent, and the more legal maneuvering I see arising from it, the more I am reminded of a quip from Ann Althouse in response to a “Consent Contract”.

      Paraphrasing: “Isn’t this just marriage??”

      http://althouse.blogspot.com/2015/07/i-suddenly-realized-whats-happening.html

    • Anonymous says:

      Regarding the culture issue, I would point out that it’s worth considering whether this is, not some culture that has been foisted on everyone by Moloch’s evil machinations, but something people actually want and approve of. Specifically, it seems plausible that women might tend to prefer to be indirect in the escalation to sex. One possible reason: women prefer men to be confident and take the lead, these are relative factors i.e. what matters is whether the man is more confident than the woman in question rather than how absolutely confident he is, so by letting the man take the lead you are making him more relatively confident and therefore more attractive in your eyes.

      Possibly this is an unlikely reason, but it seems to be taken for granted by some people in this discussion that this cultural norm is clearly a mistake that ought to be done away with, which I don’t think is a fair assumption to make.

  8. daronson says:

    I’m late to the comment thread, but wanted to throw out a request for a post/guest post on this site about Russian politics. The reason I’m asking here is that modern Russian politics is basically monarchist-dominated.

    Thing is, there’s a very sizable population of intelligent Russians (both in Russia and abroad) who see that journalists are being killed, opposition is being squashed, the state-controlled media has lost all pretense of honesty, but who still support Putin’s government for reasons very close to (what I understand of) Moldburg and the monarchists. (There’s also the more legitimate complaint that Russian politics is misunderstood and trivialized by the West, with our magical belief that democracy works everywhere always).

    In some (not very accurate) way, you could say that Russian political thought is becoming the opposite of ours, with far-right quasi-monarchist views becoming mainstream and what we consider moderate liberalism moving onto the fringe.

    Since your blog is good at wading into pools of icky thought and analyzing them honestly, and you’ve already sketched out some basic tenets of neo-reaction (SORRY! SORRY!), I wonder if you or someone who knows more about Russian history and geopolitics could sketch out 1. What are the honest pros and cons of totalitarian Putenesque government for Russia and 2. How and to what extent can things (honestly) change in the near-future?

    • gbdub says:

      I’m curious about this as well. I don’t really know what the answers to your questions are, but it does seem to me that the history of Russia has very much been monarchist, even (especially?) during communism. The times when they have not been ruled by a strongman have mostly sucked. How much of pro-Putinism is just a longing for the prestige etc. of the communist era? Or a backlash against the capitalist oligarchs that filled the void of the Soviet collapse?

      I think the biggest thing is that Russia has just never had a sentiment for liberal democracy, so really we’re the weird ones for expecting them to.

  9. Anonymous says:

    Late last year, some very brave people fucked around with blobs of fire ants

    http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4450.html

  10. Deiseach says:

    Are the vegans feeling vindicated and heartened? According to the WHO, that Saturday morning fry-up will kill us meat-eaters all stone dead!

    Sausages and rashers are as bad as tobacco, we may as well throw ourselves under a bus as eat bacon and cabbage, and don’t think hamburgers, steaks, or lamb chops will get away scot-free either!

    Nothing about poultry or fish there yet, but if cow, pig and sheep meat is so dreadfully awful, can fowl be far behind? Goodness knows what kippers and pickled herrings are doing to the Scandinavians!

    It is a dilemma for me: mackerel is an oily fish which is good, but smoked mackerel is smoked which is carcinogenic which is bad. Oh what can I eat (aside from rain water and moss)? 🙂

    • stillnotking says:

      So is this a good time to post my recipe for tofu and Brussels sprouts with a moss-and-rainwater garnish?

      • Deiseach says:

        I actually like Brussels sprouts, which means that any day now, some study will show that some constituent of them is horribly bad for you 🙂

        Although! Looking them up on Wikipedia to see what is in them, I note that “Brussels sprouts, as with broccoli and other brassicas, contain sulforaphane, a phytochemical under basic research for its potential anticancer properties”.

        And since cooking them with bacon is a popular recipe, this may be a way to have our cake and eat it (so to speak). Just make sure to consume plenty of green cabbage, sprouts, cauliflower or broccoli with your joint of bacon or rashers or other tasty but potentially lethal processed meat, and the cancer-causing chemicals will be cancelled out by the anti-cancer chemicals! 🙂

    • Anonymous says:

      I think this news is to some extent being exaggerated. Specifically, “likelihood that this factor increases risk of cancer” is being conflated with “extent to which this factor increases risk of cancer” in some articles. In other words, processed meat almost certainly increases your risk of cancer by a fairly small amount. This is unlike smoking, which almost certainly increases your risk of cancer by a fairly large amount.

      • Nornagest says:

        If this pans out — and announcements like this in the field of nutrition should always be taken with several grains of salt — then the odds ratio for bowel cancer relative to processed meat consumption is something like 1.2. Compare to around 100 for smoking and lung cancer.

        Wouldn’t surprise me if the absolute risk was a lot lower too.

        • Anonymous says:

          “and announcements like this in the field of nutrition should always be taken with several grains of salt”

          Which, ironically, is probably bad dietary advice.

    • Technically Not Anonymous says:

      Meh, “eating red meat regularly might kill you” isn’t new information.

    • keranih says:

      Sausages and rashers are as bad as tobacco

      D, I get that you’re exaggerating for effect, but this is effectively the message being driven by the media. I knew that “preserved meat products are linked with cancer” was likely coming at some point, as the data’s been out there for some time showing that getting calories/protein from preserved meats was associated with more bowel cancers than getting calories/protein from fresh red meat or other sources.

      (2005 study, 2009 study, 2011 study)

      However, I did not expect the level of distortion and exaggeration that has plagued the media broadcasts over the last few days. “Sausages are as bad as smoking” is a horrificly poor way of explaining the issue.

      In particular, as the option is not “eat preserved meat or don’t eat preserved meat” but “get some portion of nutrients from preserved meat or get all nutrients from some other source”, with the variety of upsides and downsides from all options. (You want to decrease the utility of slaughtering an animal for food, you reduce the amount of food one can get from each animal. Easiest way? Stop preserving the extras and scraps into sausage and hot dogs, and instead just chuck that stuff into the landfill.)

      (I could go into more details, but I get rapidly tedious.)

      If people are replacing preserved meat with a variety of fresh veggies, that’s one thing (although truck crops like veggies are very bad in terms of using pesticides, fertilizers, fossil fuels, and hard labor) but frankly, that stuff’s expensive. Even more likely is that people will substitute carbs, sugars and grains – which are of less nutritional value than meats or veggies – which is already linked to metabolic disease/heart attacks/diabetes.

      I have no problem with making people aware that eating preserved foods raises the cancer risk (although I really wish we understood better *how* this happened). I am far less happy that we are saying this without going into the risks of the alternatives.

    • Svejk says:

      This study has been widely mis-interpreted. The WHO study establishes that there is sufficient evidence to consider processed meat carcinogenic, and enough evidence to consider red meat probably carcinogenic. That is a statement about the strength of the evidence, not about the effect size The increase in relative risk of colorectal cancer associated with consuming a 50 gram daily ‘dose’ of processed meat is estimated to be around 18%. The increase in relative risk of colorectal cancer associated with consuming a 100 gram daily ‘dose’ of red meat is estimated to be around 17%. When you take into effect that the lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is very low (~4.5% in the US and ~3.5% in Europe), eating several rashers of bacon every morning will increase your cumulative risk of bowel cancer to ~5.3% in the US and ~4.3% in Europe. In comparison, smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by about 2,300%

  11. darxan says:

    Apparently Michael Anissimov is now a /baphomet/ mod. They had an opening because one of their mods was shot by the FBI.

  12. About the taboo: the problem is that the alternatives suggest that critics of modernity necessarily have a replacement goal, a solution, a different political idea. As for me, I simply see it as trying to wake up from the Matrix of Modernity, and trying to gather truths from outside it. Not necessarily replace it with another ideology which could just be building another Matrix. Monarchism e.g. could easily evolve into one i.e. people busily pushing all monarchs are total awesome and superior divine beings. If you simply try to discover ideas that are perhaps true and clearly unfashionable, it is hard to put this activity into a category. One could say that we are trying to put a nice big rationalist taboo on the whole propaganda machine of Modernity and seeing what is left. If you have a political goal and want to achieve it, you could say you are acting upon that goal. If you simply want to hinder a goal you find harmful and simply want to hinder it without necessarily pushing anything else, you could say you are not acting but rrrrrrr…

    When you try to cure a depressed patient who doesn’t enjoy anything, but you are not trying to tell him what should he be enjoying, you just want to make him able to enjoy anything, would you say you are r….ing to the illness?

    Maybe I should just take a clue from Nick Land and call it Outsideing.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Note that Scott is tabooing “neor…”, not “r…”. I’m not sure that affects your main point (which I like a lot) though it does tend to sap the strength of your analogies. What you’re really saying is that there isn’t another good word for the inchoate, multifocused criticism of modernity you’re describing; A, B, and C may not agree on what’s to be done, or even necessarily agree 100% on what’s wrong, but it seems that there is some central collection of ideas that are pretty widespread among the writers who have used the term “neor…” to describe what they are talking about. If I read the taboo right, you’re entitled to call that central collection “r…”, but that term has connotations that make it seem a bad fite.

      On the other hand, I don’t have any principled, etymological reason to prefer the term “neor…”. The prefix could serve to distinguish it from plain old r… — except that Moldbug, for instance, seems to revere Carlyle, whom no one would mistake for neo-anything. And I guess that vagueness about the term is at least part of Scott’s point.

      Maybe, for the purposes you are concerned with, “criticism of modernity” would suffice? Granted, it’s a little longer and doesn’t yet have a snappy abbreviation. 🙂

      • I find modernity and the opposition to it a big vague question. What do people mean by modernity? What do they want to do instead? I realize there will be a bunch of answers to both questions.

        • I agree it is not easy. I could just call it The Narrative, but that would not solve the question.

          A very simple approach is to make a diff between ideas popular now and ideas popular centuries ago, and remove everything science / fact based. Basically what should be left is the space between philosophical, speculative argumentation and cool sounding slogans – and how they are actually put into practice. But again this would not be a perfect definition.

          One can try to make it people-based, not ideas based. Modernity as the road of intellectuals to class power. But again I would rather remove natural scientists, doctors, engineers from this definition of intellectuals as their power is clearly useful and merited.

          It is an ongoing challenge to try to pin it down. My current favorite idea is modernity as a process of trying to replace dominance-status with prestige-status and it failing regularly because dominance-status has more teeth.

          Maybe the best definition is still that there are many things we don’t really know facts about, so we could have many different opinions of them, but The Narrative suppresses all but one, and exactly what opinions about various things are promoted has a tendency in it.

      • Zykrom says:

        lol…… does anyone have thoughts about “n30r3@<710n" then?

  13. A says:

    I would like to know if group selection is a thing in human history, or if moral change is driven by a combination of economics, whimsy, and maybe other factors. So, holding economics constant, I am looking for situations where one group’s morality sucked, and this led to an existential disaster, like (1) starvation or being conquered and converted to another political or moral system. We could also include (2) most of the members just deciding to disband and join some other group with a different morality. The Abrahamic religions beating paganism seems mostly like 2-is anything mostly like 1? Some claim that Catholic morality made Europe more hospitable to development, so what happened to the Native Americans or some African tribes might be 1 in a very slow but valid way, but I don’t know whether morality (Catholic or otherwise) was really the cause or the effect. Ideally I’d like an example of groups at similar wealth levels where one group’s lack of organization or general incompetence (but not sheer bad luck or, e.g., a stupid move by one guy) drove its being taken over and permanently ended, or a single group that imploded. Maybe the Soviet Union qualifies as the latter. How about the former?

    • Chalid says:

      I think Jared Diamond’s Collapse had various examples of environmental devastation that might be similar to what you’re looking for? i.e. lots of Polynesian island tribes short-sightedly destroyed their local ecosystems while seeking immediate gains and thus their descendants ended up in terrible straits. But a few deliberately adopted policies that let them survive sustainably. One example that stuck in my head was a particular tribe that realized their pigs were causing too much trouble and eradicated all of them from their island, even though they were of course a delicious luxury.

      • A says:

        Those tribes seem like some good examples of single groups that imploded-thanks. It would also be good to know a group that got conquered by others.

        With 14 minutes left to edit this, I now realize that the Axis Powers (as conquered states) make a good example. They were just too violent for their own good.

    • NN says:

      I’m pretty sure what happened to the Native Americans had very little to do with “morality” and everything to do with European diseases devastating their population, and to a lesser extent to the Europeans’ technological advantage. I haven’t researched what happened to sub-Saharan Africans in detail, but my first guess would be that the root cause was relative geographical isolation resulting in them ending up technologically behind Eurasia. Disease actually helped the Africans out for several centuries, by preventing European colonization until effective anti-malarial drugs were developed in the 19th century.

      Well, I guess you could make a case for the Aztecs, since their oppressive policies made it easier for Cortez to find allies among their subject tribes. But that probably just sped up the inevitable. Even if Cortez had failed and no one had attempted to conquer the Aztecs again for a century, the Mesoamerican civilizations would have collapsed due to European disease epidemics just like the Mississippian “mound builder” cultures did.

      • Echo says:

        “collapsed due to European disease epidemics just like the Mississippian “mound builder” cultures did.”
        Wait, what? Weren’t their cities abandoned a century before Europeans even got here? I know it’s trendy to blame them for everything bad that ever happened in the world, but is there a cite on it?

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          “Looks at wiki”

          It is unclear. Looks like they didn’t build as many mounds, but still had plenty of villages at the time de Soto arrived.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          They were declining for centuries before 1492. Some cities, like Cahokia, the biggest, were abandoned by 1400. But there was a lot more ruin in the nation, probably due to European diseases.

          • Echo says:

            That’s the one I was thinking of!

            Wasted a lot of time checking wiki references. A lot of the softer stuff reads like Ancient Culture Fanfiction, but the archeologists make it sound like trade breaking down made the cities unsustainable, with possible impacts of climatic changes on agriculture contributing.

      • A says:

        To clarify, I was saying that some folks claim that a certain moral system or political order led to the European technological advantage, not that moral superiority led directly to their conquering Native Americans (which is absurd)

        The fate of the Nazis, by contrast, is an example of the direct case.

      • DrBeat says:

        Well, you say that it counts for the Aztecs because of how easy it made it for Cortez to find allies, but wasn’t that how the American frontier expanded pretty much all the time? Whichever tribe was closest to the US’s border, they’d be fighting troops and settlers and stuff, and every other tribe in the region said “Good, I fucking hate those guys” and helped the settlers out because, seriously, fuck those guys.

    • Anthony says:

      It’s possible the Xhosa cattle-killing qualifies as your category 1.

    • Anonymous says:

      The Christian takeover of ancient Rome is a lot like 1), if you allow a demographic implosion to count as a disaster.

      By the time it happened, the Roman Pagans were engaging in a lot of deficient behaviour (such as widespread infanticide), which lead to demographic depletion. Couple that with nomad invasions and the government’s inability to stop them (during the Punic Wars, the Romans utilized attrition tactics that the Soviet Union would find impressive, which inspired Roman modus operandi for centuries – despite the later inapplicability in their circumstances) due to lacking manpower, overtaxation of the populace and various welfare measures that address the symptoms but not the causes (bread and circuses), and you’ve got a situation where the highly decadent Pagan elites don’t have very much moral authority, and the Pagan plebeians aren’t in much better. The Empire’s slowly crumbling. Enter a weird sect spreading like wildfire among the ethnic minorities (Hebrews), whose practitioners are very obviously willing to die rather than transgress on their beliefs in accordance with Roman law (burning incense for the deified Emperor). Due to their rejection of infanticide and various other non-reproductive sexual practices, their numbers grow quickly despite being suppressed by the authorities. Eventually, even the Roman elites are infested with sect members (Christian women being attractive wife candidates, due to their rejection of premarital and extramarital sex), and when the Emperor becomes one, it’s effectively over for the Pagans.

      • Deiseach says:

        “Infested”? Nice choice of words there!

        A lot of noble/rich Roman women seem to have converted to Christianity; the reasons for this, if Christianity was associated with slaves, aliens and the poor, are interesting to speculate about.

        Certainly noble Roman women taking up foreign cultus was not new (witness the Isis craze), but there does seem to have been an element that women felt it protected or valued them more (e.g. bans on infanticide and exposure of unwanted children, who would have been daughters mostly; what St Augustine mentions about the ban on suicide, where this was taken as one more example of the bad influence of Christianity on good traditional morals, women who had been raped not committing suicide as proper Roman women should do, etc.) A lot of the martyrologies emphasise how women were standing up to/defying their male relatives and those in authority over them, from fathers and husbands to governors.

        You could make an argument that, unlike the pop culture idea of repressive Christianity driving women back into the home and making sex dirty (and I’ve seen this idea getting peddled all over again with the new series about King Alfred), women found Christianity liberating because it gave them the means of finding value in themselves as souls to be saved.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I think the idea of Christian oppression comes mostly from people who (usually unconsciously) take modern liberal morality to be the default state of affairs, and therefore assume that Christianity, insofar as it is opposed to liberalism, must represent a departure from the norm. From this it follows quite naturally that before Christianity came along everybody was nice and liberal.

          Of course, such a notion couldn’t survive one day’s study of pre-Christian society, but then again I suppose historical literacy isn’t exactly one of modern pop culture’s distinguishing features.

        • NN says:

          Even today, women are overrepresented in the lay membership of most Christian churches, to the point that Christian websites frequently run articles with titles like “How can we get men back in the pews on Sunday?” It would seem that some women find Christianity appealing even in comparison to modern secular society, so it isn’t surprising at all that many would find it more appealing than Roman society.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Any good sources on ancient Roman birth rates / demographic collapse? I haven’t seen birth rate mooted as an explanation for why Christianity took over Rome before.

      • Christianity now isn’t necessarily all that much like early Roman Christianity, and modern societies aren’t all that much like Rome of that era.

  14. Anthony says:

    Being drunk makes you more utilitarian.

    “The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making,” said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject’s level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.

    This “really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation,” said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, “The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas.”

    • Linch says:

      This just sounds like drunk people are more likely to break social norms.

      I’d like to see a control trial determining the correlation “between each subject’s level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch” when it’s sacrificing the many for the sake of the few, or to push many orphans in front of a trolley to save a fat man.

      Sacrificial dilemmas are kinda silly anyway:
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714002054

      From the article: “‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good.” Is anybody really surprised?

      • Anthony says:

        Sacrificial dilemmas are kinda silly anyway:

        The article actually noted that, though they didn’t use the word “silly”.

        I’d also question whether the particular questions test more for utilitarianism or sociopathy.

      • Deiseach says:

        Does anybody take the trolley problem seriously, though? Get me drunk and I’d go “Hell, yeah, I’ll push the guy in front of the train – whee! spluuush!” or “Nah, I wanna see the six people get splattered all over the rails! Go go, runaway train!”

        Trolley problems are silly. In future, whether drunk or sober, I’m going to go for maximum DEATH CARNAGE BLOOD’N’GUTS SCRUBBED OFF THE LINES FOR DAYS in my answers 🙂

  15. Doctor Mist says:

    Scott, your taboo announcement spurred me to go back and reread your Planet-Sized Nutshell, which I stumbled on after reading a bit of Moldbug. I still consider it the best exposition I have found, despite reading all the way through Unqualified Reservations, Anissimov’s book, and a fair bit of the top-level stuff at the Hestia Society.

    By “best”, of course I mean “most agreeable”. Arriving at the brink of [you know what] via libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, I was naturally put off by some of the more authoritarian and religious threads I sometimes saw, and I think your vaguely utilitarian steelmanning was a better match to what I was coming to suspect if not yet believe.

    I of course also read your rebuttal, because in those days I found it all unsettling enough that I was eager to read somebody who would explain how I was being misled. The combination of the two was what got me to reading SSC regularly in general, even when you perversely insist on talking about something else. 🙂

    Even at the time, though, I could not help noticing that your rebuttal tears into Moldbug and Anissimov (with some success) but nevertheless is pretty thoroughly tangential to what I thought was the strongest and most convincing theme of the Nutshell: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

    Has enough time gone by that you could give the Nutshell a thorough fisking?

    If not, how would you feel about my using “Nutshellism” to replace the taboo word in future?

    • Aegeus says:

      I’m not Scott, but the main rebuttal I would give to “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” is to point out that “stop digging a hole” is very different from “clone James II and put him on the throne.” Those “stop digging” changes – restricted immigration, traditional gender roles, tell the PC police to get lost, use a brute-force foreign policy, give Israel carte blanche to stomp out Palestinian resistance… they all sound like mainstream Republican ideas. So it’s not really an argument for James II, it’s an argument for Donald Trump.

      Imagining a Trump presidency should suggest another problem with Nutshellism – how do you implement it without dragging along a lot of other baggage that we don’t want? Even if immigration controls, traditional gender roles, and American culture are all totally awesome, that’s not an argument against Progressivism in general. There are plenty of other places – the economy, abortion, health care – where I don’t want the Republicans in charge. And I certainly don’t want to roll the clock back even further, to the era of slavery or segregation!

      So yes, if we find ourselves in a hole, stop digging. But let’s not pretend that Progressives are the only people holding shovels.

      • Anonymous says:

        Are you saying that, roughly speaking, you are socially conservative and fiscally liberal (in the modern sense of the word)? If so, that’s an interesting perspective. Can you expand on that at all? I’m intrigued.

        • Aegeus says:

          …huh. I suppose it does look that way. I’d say that my viewpoint was a little skewed from usual because I just got done reading a gigantic spiel about Why Social Conservativism is the Best Thing Ever (while not making any similar claims about the economy). I’m normally a lot more liberal – I’m personally traditional from my upbringing but I don’t care much about who else is. My point was more that even if you believe everything that the Nutshell post says about the flaws of progressivism, it’s not by itself an argument for Monarchism, or even Republicanism. You’re looking for good policies regardless of which umbrella they fall under.

          And also, I just really don’t like the Republican candidates we’ve got on offer, hence the jab at a Trump presidency.

        • anon says:

          I think it’s the perspective of most Catholic or Christian Democratic parties, several of which are quite mainstream in their respective countries

      • Doctor Mist says:

        @Aegeus:

        Heh. I couldn’t help noticing this:

        Those “stop digging” changes … they all sound like mainstream Republican ideas.

        Then your conclusion:

        So yes, if we find ourselves in a hole, stop digging. But let’s not pretend that Progressives are the only people holding shovels.

        The whole point is that current Republican and Democratic policy disagrees only on how fast to dig!

        I certainly don’t want to roll the clock back even further, to the era of slavery or segregation!

        Please review the Nutshell, which takes great pains, over and over and over, to disavow the notion of reinstituting slavery or segregation or colonialism.

  16. zigzag says:

    How about an open thread with commenting disabled? Like the sound of one hand clapping.

  17. Mr. Eldritch. says:

    I don’t find Todd Rider’s crowdfunding not doing well to be surprising at all. I have a strong gut reaction that, if it actually worked as claimed, it wouldn’t need crowdfunding. The whole idea of “Support my Kickstarter to cure all viruses!” sets off every single “do not crowdfund” alarm bell.

    I’m not saying he’s a liar and that it doesn’t actually work. I’m just saying that crowdfunding donations require a judgement of “will this pay off or not?”, and I suspect most of the crowdfunding public has a roughly similar set of heuristics.

  18. I took a bit of a gamble, and it hasn’t blown up in my face– I posted a link about police murder of a white man as Police Brutality Matters. It’s been shared, and no one has complained that I’m appropriating Black Lives Matter.

  19. anonymous says:

    The one thing that was seemingly missed in the otherwise excellent thrive/survive post is the distinct element joy-of-anticipation element that’s tied in with the belief in the impending zombie apocalypse. It seems very much like fresh troops looking forward to their first battle (at least in movies).

    It’s hinted at in the second to last paragraph (“purest expression of rightist wish-fulfillment fantasy.”) but I think it deserves a more prominent place, at least as a means of describing the unbridgeable gap. If it were just a matter of pessimism and optimism that gap might be bridgeable but when one side both expects and wants utopia and the other expects and at least sort-of wants dystopia that’s not bridgeable.

  20. Jaksologist says:

    One of the recent threads derailed into environmentalism, which reminded me of the 1990 Earth Day Special. Bask in the glory of nostalgia, all you old folks; basically every celebrity from back then is in that thing. It is every bit as glorious as I remembered.

    This was shown to me in public school when I was young and impressionable, and sent me into a bit of a panic. My parents, deconverted college environmentalists themselves, talked me down, and I’ve never trusted the doomsaying crowd since.

    Some choice quotes:

    “In the year 2057, the last of the last rainforests will be gone.”

    “How long can the Earth survive?” “Maybe as little as 100 years”
    (Note: we’re down to 75 years now)

    “By the year 1991, 1/3 of the nation’s landfills will be full. Garbage overload is a problem we have to be able to solve.”

    • Urstoff says:

      Kid ‘n Play! Murphy Brown! Oh to be in 1990 again…

    • Deiseach says:

      And things like that is why I am cool about the whole Climate Change/Anthropogenic Global Warming flap. When you’ve lived through a selection of “the sky is falling” we’re all gonna die! end of the world! scenarios that are just around the corner, it’s a bit much to be slapped over the head with “Denialist!” if you’re not wetting your knickers in panic about This Time For Sure Really Gonna Kill Us All Dead!!!!

      Are humans having an effect on the environment? Of course. Should we cut back on pollution? Absolutely! But are we all science hating science deniers if we’re not running around waving our hands in the air in a panic? I am not so sure on that last.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I don’t even notice average Blues running around waving their hands in the air in a panic. I saw more panic over Kim Davis during her 15 days of fame (or whatever) than about AGW, which is occasionally talked up as so bad that agriculture will cease to work and we’ll die off to HG population densities or worse.
        What’s up with that?

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Probably in-group/out-group dynamics have something to do with it. Fighting against some hypothetical future extreme weather might be important, but it doesn’t give quite the same visceral thrill as getting into a scrap with a member of the out-group.

      • Tibor says:

        I think that the climate debate is such a mess that I prefer to ignore it most of the time. Also for two other reasons:

        1. Whatever one country does (as long as it is not China or India) has a tiny effect on the global warming anyway. Save for creating a world government, there simply does not seem to be a good way to make sure you actually cut down emissions in a meaningful way even if it is a problem. And I am talking countries now. As I private person I cannot influence anything at all.

        2. I can influence other things though. I heard someone say the other day “let’s concentrate less on global warming and more on local pollution”. There is a lot of stuff one can improve there and see actual results. It also seems to be much more clear and far less politicized. Of course local does not have to mean in your town but the point is that you do not have to convince dozens of countries to achieve your goal.

        • Note that while you, or a country other than a very large one, can have almost no effect on the cause of AGW, you can have an effect on the consequences. Holding down emissions is a public good and faces the public good problem. Diking your bit of coastline is a private good, at least at the national level and sometimes the individual, as is irrigating against drought in your fields.

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/03/dealing-with-climate-change-prevention.html

          • Tibor says:

            There still seem to be some consequences you cannot (at least not in a way known to me) turn into private goods though. If global warming turns Amazon into a desert, I would personally consider it a loss. If nothing else it is a place I would like to see one day, there seem to be global benefits in terms of air filtration as well and if one considers extinction of a multitude of species as a cost, that too is something one has to consider. How much I value it however, that I don’t even know myself.

            At the same time, making parts of Antarctica habitable for creatures other than penguins and polar explorers seems quite exciting (though hopefully, the Shoggoths who reside there in the depths beneath the ancient cities of the mountains of madness would not manage to escape :))

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @Tibor: The way to defend your personal interest in Amazon preservation in a private goods sort of way, AIUI, would be to purchase a share in the Amazon from whoever has them. This assumes, of course, that the Amazon rainforest has been designated a publicly traded resource. (Initial shares would probably be provided wholly to current inhabitants.) Once you had a share (or more), you would then have a vote (per share) in any economic decisions made about usage of the rainforest, including development and research.

            In addition to money you could raise by selling off parts to developers, would be revenue from tourism, and exploration rights to prospectors and naturalists (minus deductions for any interest you might have in their findings).

          • Tibor says:

            Paul Brinkley: That does not seem to work. You can buy land, you cannot buy weather. What you propose is a good way to fight deforestation, in fact one quite successful Amazon preservation charity seems to be doing in a way exactly this. They do not buy land themselves, but they lobby for the ownership rights of the natives. There seems to be evidence that (not so surprisingly) when the land is transferred to them, the deforestation is dramatically reduced. Also, at least if you (as most libertarians…I see it as a kind of good rule of thumb but there are also problems associated with it) acknowledge that the proper way of acquiring new land is by homesteading, then the land belongs to those people (I guess that in this case, pretty much everyone would agree that it belongs to them, not just libertarians).

            It is these guys http://www.rainforestfoundation.org/

            I am actually considering regularly donating some money to them but I would first like to find out whether there are no other charities that do the same thing more efficiently (also, they do not seem to be accommodated to donors from Europe so that one has to either use Paypal or wire transfer to the US, which is a bit annoying since it creates needless costs). I think those people are not libertarians, but the way they do it, they might as well be.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Converting publicly owned land to private is not really my proposal; in fact, I’d say it borrows heavily from similar proposals I’ve seen David Friedman make in at least one of his books or talks, and he’s likely borrowed such ideas in turn.

            I assumed your concern over the Amazon in particular was wrt deforestation, so I ran with that.

            As for weather, it can work, although I certainly admit that it would be more difficult. In that case, people would be owners of the atmosphere over their land, say, and perhaps initially, they would be assigned partial ownership over atmosphere over neighboring land (meaning *all* atmospheric ownership would be partial, in fact). Then they start exchanging controlling shares. Over time, people who trade their interests in airspace would tend to acquire more interest in space upwind from them, just as people with water interests would trade for control over rivers upstream.

            A brief skim of Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom turns up a scheme for addressing air pollution that centers around suing for damages, but it assumes government control of air rights (in most of the book, he discusses ancap methods). It also describes the structure in terms of cost of cleanup, rather than allowances driven by property ownership, which I think is reasonable.

          • Tibor says:

            Paul: My problem is not as much with pollution, which can perhaps be reasonably controlled locally as with temperature. If the temperature increases to a point where the tropical forest turns into desert because the trees cannot withstand the high temperature. Temperature cannot be influenced locally at all. I don’t know how realistic that is and how durable the rainforest is (so would +2 degrees of average temperature turn the rainforest to a desert or would you need +5 or +10 ?), but if we assume that the change is strong enough to kill it, then we are back where we were and where there are no easy ways to convert this into a private good.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Ohh, sorry. I didn’t see your global warming point because the rainforest got in the way.

            Although… I think my argument still applies here. Temperature, for your practical purposes, will still be local; you’re not really caring about the global average so much as you are about the temperature where the Amazon is.

            Temperature *is* subject to local influence, as any A/C unit will demonstrate. Okay, okay, less facetiously: I suspect the temperature over the Amazon will be more influenced by the temperature of the Caribbean and central Atlantic Ocean, and less by the central Pacific due to the Andes, and less still by the weather over New York. I think the exact extent isn’t known, despite much research and interest, due to a profusion of confounding factors. Nevertheless, if personal interest is on the line, then proximity is how I expect people will estimate primary effects.

            Given that, I would expect an insurance structure to emerge – some agency sets odds, and interested parties buy premiums in return for the insurer’s subsidy of various measures to repair any damage incurred by temperature extremes in nearby locales.

            Of course, proving damage will itself be potentially expensive. Meanwhile, it might even be unnecessary; note the evidence of large amounts of vegetation over the earth’s surface during the Mesozoic, when temperatures were noticeably higher. You might have plenty of rainforest to visit when the time comes.

        • ” Save for creating a world government, there simply does not seem to be a good way to make sure you actually cut down emissions in a meaningful way even if it is a problem.”

          Doesn’t nuclear non proliferation stand as an example of successful international co-operation?

          • John Schilling says:

            The number of nations which have acquired nuclear weapons outside of the international non-proliferation regime, is now equal to the number of nations which have acquired nuclear weapons within that regime. At least two more nations would probably have joined that club save for the unilateral military action of one of the non-proliferation regime’s conspicuous dissenters. Only one nation has ever given up a nuclear arsenal, and that for purely domestic political reasons at a time when the international non-proliferation regime wasn’t even aware that they had a nuclear arsenal.

            This is about the level of “success” that the United States has had in keeping out illegal immigrants.

          • Chalid says:

            I’d pick the Montreal Protocol (which essentially saved the ozone layer) as the best example.

          • Buckyballas says:

            I also disagree with the quote from Tibor for another reason. One fairly simple (in principle anyway) way to reduce emissions is to make low emitting energy cost preferable to high emitting energy. If you’ve looked at a photovoltaic cost curve recently, you’ll know that solar costs have halved since 2010 (halved! in 5 years!). Grid parity (without subsidies) is already here in some geographies and will be here soon in others. The whole intermittency thing is still a big issue, but $/kWh is getting close to even with gas and coal.

            I happen to be one of those people who is nevertheless in favor, in principle, of political action (at the local, national, and international level) to incentivize emissions reduction, but even the libertarians among us can get behind the cost argument.

            disclosure: I work in solar R&D. Happily, I am one of those private citizens who actually can “influence anything at all”!

          • Evan Þ says:

            ” Only one nation has ever given up a nuclear arsenal”

            Are you talking about South Africa, Kazakhstan, or Ukraine? (It might also be relevant that the one of those three is probably wishing now it still was a nuclear power…)

          • John Schilling says:

            The Ukraine and Kazakhstan never had nuclear arsenals. They had for a time physical possession of parts, but only parts, of someone else’s nuclear arsenal, but the same can be said of e.g. Canada, (West) Germany, and even Belgium. The parts they possessed, did not in and of themselves constitute a nuclear arsenal. They had the technical expertise to have constructed a nuclear arsenal with this hardware, if they had chosen to steal it from its legal owners. They did not chose to ever create a nuclear arsenal from the resources available to them.

            South Africa chose to build a nuclear arsenal, did build and possess a nuclear arsenal, and then chose to permanently destroy its nuclear arsenal.

            And while I can’t speak to what the Ukranians might wish for, actually owning a nuclear arsenal would have been worse than useless for them over the past twenty-four years.

          • Tibor says:

            Buckyballas: OK, good point. You can invent a more efficient solar/wind/nuclear/cold fusion (that would be awesome) power plant as a private citizen. I guess inventing more efficient solar plants is much easier than inventing cold fusion. You might also invest money into power plant research. You also might be more interested in that if you believe that global warming is on net a cost and a high cost. The incentives are still against you though. Say you can invest into a research of a more efficient coal power plant which makes you twice as much money in return than a more efficient solar plant. The coal plant is producing pollution which is a public bad (although possibly one possible to privatize in some way) and contributing to global warming (which is a public bad that is hard to privatize). As far as incentives go, you would go for the coal plant.

            But you made a good point nevertheless – I said “I cannot do anything about global warming as an individual”, you suggested that I can invest into more efficient power plants which, being cheaper, convince people quite easily. But while the electricity bill cost part of the benefit from them is private, the warming cost is public and therefore they are likely to be underfinanced. But your comment still weakens my statement.

    • A says:

      If the “doomsaying crowd” is saying at least a 1% chance of global warming reducing our GDP by over 50% by 2300, I’d go with the doomsayers.

      • Sastan says:

        And if the non-doomsaying crowd says there’s a 1% chance adopting the “solutions” set out by the doomsayers will reduce our GDP by 50% by 2050?

        I mean, if we’re just making up numbers, and the standard is “whatever sounds worse”, what’s to stop us?

        As I’ve argued many times before, this is a common fallacy I’ve seen among people who should be too smart to fall for Pascal’s Mugging.

        • A says:

          a 1% chance adopting the “solutions” set out by the doomsayers will reduce our GDP by 50% by 2050?

          If the doomsayers are wrong because they’re just picking bad solutions, then point out problems with the solutions. If no solution is possible-well, is anyone claiming that?

          The 1% figure is from Weitzman and the year 2300 is from here

      • I don’t think any such estimates as far out as 2300 should be taken seriously, with the possible exception of asteroid strikes, which can be predicted that far out if the orbit is well established. We have no good idea what humans will be like, whether they will still exist, what they will be doing, what powers they will or will not have, that far into the future.

        To get some feel for the magnitudes, consider that if world economic growth averages three percent, a reduction in GNP by 50% by 2300 means that GNP will be only somewhat over two thousand times as high as it now is instead of somewhat over four thousand times.

        I also think that people who worry about whether storage of nuclear waste will be secure for a hundred thousand years or only fifty thousand have a weak grasp on reality.

        • A says:

          About the only things we can plan for on such a timescale (or for that matter, any timescale over, at the most, 30 years-a figure you mentioned!) are based on an assumption of scientific stagnation. Yes, we have to reduce the value of the plans by a factor reflecting the chance of something other than stagnation happening. But stagnation could occur, so we should still plan somewhat.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I find it funny that the same people who are afraid open borders will doom us all call global warming a silly panic.

      They both seem to be cases where under certain assumptions a gradual process can eventually erode a lot of useful things, probably not dooming civilization but possibly making things much tougher.

      To say that we absolutely need to be concerned about immigration (which we can’t model) but not global warming (which we sort of can) seems really motivated.

      • Anonymous says:

        Personally, my concern about immigration is with regard to those who would, under your Archipelago thought experiment, choose to live on an island with a strong, unified culture. If you’re someone who prefers that kind of society as your personal bubble, as opposed to, say, a personal bubble of intelligent people of mostly grey tribe affiliation that you interact with through the internet, then immigration plus laws designed to prevent isolated native communities from forming (and indeed preventing isolated non-native communities from forming, which is why I have more sympathy for gentrification opponents than other libertarian-leaning folks probably do) hurts your attempts at forming an archipelago while leaving others untouched. At which point those others might well wonder what you’re complaining about and what kind of ignorant racist wouldn’t want people from all cultures of the world coming into their community and changing it for the better, before returning to their own community that excludes everyone it wants to, either because it exists in a different environment where it can do that, or because the factors it excludes for are not on the list of forbidden factors that one must not exclude based on.

        I’m not sure there is any good reason to consider realspace communities any more harmful or monopolistic or anything else than online communities. To take one example, I expect that a regular SSC commenter would suffer far more from being banned from here than a gay couple would from being unable to buy a cake from any one bakery – unless that bakery happened to be one of the best bakeries in the world. That latter example obviously isn’t immigration, but it’s a violation of the kind of separate communities that I think most immigration opponents want, even in spite of immigration restrictions probably not being a very good way to go about achieving that.

        • brad says:

          There are places you can go and form a separate community. People throughout American history have done so. If you pay whatever taxes you owe, don’t stockpile too many guns, and people that leave don’t have stories of child sex abuse or the like — no one will bother you.

          Even if you technically couldn’t exclude anyone (which you probably could if you set things up correctly) no foreign immigrants are going to want to move to Great White Hope Ranch, Idaho.

          If that’s not good enough because it just gets under your skin that there are people out there sharing the same country as you that have a different culture, well I think you’ve already lost that battle. Maybe look into seasteading.

          • Anonymous says:

            Probably true, but I think in many cases there are legal factors that make doing this prohibitively costly.

            “If that’s not good enough because it just gets under your skin that there are people out there sharing the same country as you that have a different culture, well I think you’ve already lost that battle.”

            Absolutely. But I would argue that this applies equally to people on both sides. For example, to people who don’t want anyone in their country having gay sex as much as to people who don’t want anyone in their country making cakes for straight couples but not gay couples. Inasmuch as there are opinions that ought to be changed, I am strongly of the view that the opinions this applies to are ones that require everyone else in the country/world/universe to conform to one person’s preferences.

            Being homophobic is mean, I would not deny that for a moment, but unless it is of the “nobody should be allowed to be gay in my country” kind, it is at least a preference that can be reasonably satisfied by those that hold it isolating themselves, just not interacting with people they don’t like. Being upset that there is anyone in the country who would not bake you a cake if you wanted them to is a preference that cannot be satisfied without making everyone else in the country do what you want, and in the conflict between these two views I would quash the latter over the former, in spite of thinking that people holding the first view are probably unkind.

          • brad says:

            If you are on Great White Hope Ranch baking cakes in exchange for vegetables and help putting up your barn ( Heck even if you are taking gold — I’m sure GWHR isn’t going to use government fiat money) no one is going to sue you under public accommodation laws, even if Idaho had laws like that, which it doesn’t.

            What you can’t do is go to Oregon, Maine, New York, New Mexico or one of the other ~20 states that have LGBT public accommodation laws, start a business open to the public at large, take part in the many subsidies and advantages our society offers to formal businesses and then decide that the rules that come with those many benefits don’t apply to you.

            As compared to many western countries we are pretty tolerant of people that want to go off and do their own thing — the Amish, fundamentalist Mormons, white supremacists, hippie communes, and so on. But you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too. Nor should you.

          • Cauê says:

            take part in the many subsidies and advantages our society offers to formal businesses and then decide that the rules that come with those many benefits don’t apply to you

            What those rules are and what they should be is what’s under dispute.

            I’m also not moved by the assumption of unrelated moral obligations for “taking part” in things one can’t choose and can’t opt out of.

          • Anonymous says:

            Seconding what Cauê said. When we’re discussing what we think the law ought to be, saying “that’s against the law” is a very lazy cop-out.

          • onyomi says:

            “As compared to many western countries we are pretty tolerant of people that want to go off and do their own thing — the Amish, fundamentalist Mormons, white supremacists, hippie communes, and so on.”

            Except you still have to pay the same taxes as everyone, even for services you never use, and you still have to follow all local, state, and federal laws, even if you are living in a commune in the woods. Remember, growing grain on your own farm for personal consumption affects interstate commerce.

            Also, the assumption behind this sentiment makes me angry: we, as a society, have a right to be in everybody’s business, but because we’re so nice, we let people be weird and do their own thing. The better assumption to start with would be that we need a good justification to be in others’ business, not that we are incredibly nice and enlightened not to do so.

          • brad says:

            @Cauê
            Of course you can opt out, most obviously by not incorporating and assuming full personal liability. More extensively by moving to GWHR instead of trying to open a business in e.g. Portland, Oregon which is such a great place to open a business precisely because of all the nice things provided by people whose culture they want to opt out of.

            As for the rules being under dispute, certainly they are. But you haven’t convinced me that there’s anything wrong with the one ~20ish have picked.

            The argument seems to be that public accommodation laws make it impossible for people that want to reject mainstream culture and form their own bubble to be happy. But as I’ve pointed out they have options. They just would rather have all the things they consider benefits of our culture while opting out of those they don’t like. To that I say, too bad.

            @onyomi
            It’s not Somalia, but the freedom of action is fairly high, even more so de facto than de jure.

          • onyomi says:

            “They just would rather have all the things they consider benefits of our culture while opting out of those they don’t like. To that I say, too bad.”

            Wanting to benefit from trade and the division of labor and living in a society without simultaneously agreeing that all your property and labor and fruits of labor belong to that society, a majority of which members can arbitrarily vote to tell you how to use them? What an outrage!

            Next you’ll suggest that the guy who sold me my car has no say in what I name my first born child.

          • brad says:

            @onyomi
            Typical libertarian hyperbole. Next you’ll be telling me taxes are theft.

            I don’t think we have enough axioms in common to make discussion fruitful. Cheers.

          • onyomi says:

            But I can always go live in the middle of the ocean. Oh boy, what great options our tolerant society allows to me.

            Also, there is a difference between reductio ad absurdum for consideration of underlying principles and hyperbole for pure rhetorical effect. Above, I was engaged in the former. Re. living on the ocean, it is neither, since you actually suggested seasteading, which, while it might be a good option some day, is certainly not a viable alternative right now.

            Also, the very fact we have to consider seasteading in a world with so much uninhabited, unused space on land just goes to show how all-encompassing and intolerant governments really are today.

            I mean, it’s an interesting idea, and I’m glad people like Patri Friedman are working on it, but it’s also a little sad and pathetic that we even have to suggest it. I suppose in 200 years when all the good ocean space is claimed by various governments, we’ll have to move to outer space or other planets.

            Yeah, the US government won’t send me to a re-education brain-washing camp like the Chinese might, but that’s a pretty low bar.

          • Cauê says:

            Typical libertarian hyperbole.

            Same level as yours, only different sign.

            This “rejecting mainstream culture” is a very weird way to slice the problem, and you’d have to start by convincing us it makes sense at all.

            It would also be interesting to examine if you think it applies to all rejections of all aspects of mainstream culture, in particular where and when “mainstream culture” isn’t currently dominated by your tribe’s morals.

          • Anonymous says:

            @brad

            “all the nice things provided by people whose culture they want to opt out of.”

            But so far as I can tell, all those nice things are only provided if the people providing them want to do so. If there are subsidies, cut the subsidies. Trade, on the other hand, is something that only happens if both parties agree. So I’m not sure how you can argue that those who want to opt out of the culture are claiming any benefit without giving anything in return.

            Your argument that these people can opt out if they want to would probably look weaker if you turned it around: “People can set up businesses if they want to, but in doing so, they’re agreeing to the rule forbidding gay sex, as agreed by a majority vote in their state. If they want to run a business AND have gay sex, they can do so by going to the wilderness and starting a homestead.”

            More generally, my argument is that the kind of preferences that demand everyone in the state, everyone in the nation, the world, agree to follow one person’s morality, are not good preferences to have or to try to meet. Quite aside from whether you agree with them or not, there is no mechanism by which they can be satisfied well, and they require upsetting a whole lot of people whose preferences can be satisfied by a system that does work and doesn’t require everyone else to want the same thing.

          • brad says:

            @Cauê
            Rejecting mainstream culture was Anonymous’ frame in his original response about wanting to live on an island with a strong unified culture.

            I pointed out that he could in fact come pretty close to that by forming a separate Utopian community as groups have done often in American history. It was in the sur-reply that s/he brought up they anti-gay bakery.

            @Anonymous
            We drew a line at places of public accommodation because of actual experience with genuine hardship caused by discrimination by places of public accommodation. This isn’t about forcing everyone to follow consensus morality. It is a specific regulation of public economic activity of businesses holding themselves out as open the public. Only doctrinaire libertarians refuse to see that distinction as relevant.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            In the interests of brevity I suggest that the rejecters of mainstream culture be referred to as “deviants”, and the place Brad wants to confine them to as “the closet”.

          • Anonymous says:

            @brad

            My understanding is that the laws in the US went from “the government requires you to discriminate” to “the government requires you to not discriminate”, at least with regard to race, which I presume is the context you mean when you talk about genuine hardship. Is that incorrect?

            “I pointed out that he could in fact come pretty close to that by forming a separate Utopian community as groups have done often in American history.”

            I did mention early on that, while this can technically be done, because of various laws it requires incurring a high cost, namely moving to somewhere far enough away from civilization that nobody will bother you. I think that’s a bad thing, because I don’t think there’s any good reason for one group’s preferences to be imposed on everyone in the state. This is not because I don’t think those people genuinely hold those preferences, aren’t genuinely upset that there might be any baker in the state who wouldn’t serve them a cake if they wanted, but because I think the mechanisms for satisfying those kind of preferences are bad enough, and the mechanisms for meeting alternative local-scope preferences that they prevent from being realized are good enough, that prioritizing the first over the second is a bad idea. If pretty much everyone agrees on the issue, such as that pollution is bad, then there’s certainly a good case to be made. Not so much when it’s one group against another, where one side’s views can be satisfied by market institutions while the other side’s views can’t.

            I’m also not sure what ‘places of public accommodation’ is supposed to suggest. We are currently communicating somewhere that seems to me to be just as much a place of public accommodation as a bakery is. Scott pays for the servers, but this is a public website. As I said above, I highly suspect that the impact on someone who viewed SSC as part of their community of getting banned from here would be far greater than the impact on a gay couple of being unable to buy a cake from any particular bakery. We aren’t required to excommunicate ourselves from civilization to post here; I don’t see any reason that someone who wants to do their careful selection of who they do and don’t interact with in realspace ought to be either.

            Two more points: I do not consider myself a doctrinaire libertarian, so there’s at least one counterexample to your statement. And I might not have made this clear enough, but I am not saying that I personally want to isolate myself from my realspace community in a way that would upset those who share your viewpoint on this issue. I sympathise with those that do because as far as I can tell, my preferences for who I interact with are no more provably morally correct than theirs.

          • brad says:

            My understanding is that the laws in the US went from “the government requires you to discriminate” to “the government requires you to not discriminate”. Is that incorrect?

            That happened in a few cases, but the bulk of the discrimination that inspired by Title II of the Civil Rights Act was not required by state law. For example if you read the Heart of Atlanta Motel case that upheld the constitutionality of Title II it says the motel had a “practice of refusing to rent rooms to Negroes” and intended to continue to do so.

            I’m also not sure what ‘places of public accommodation’ is supposed to suggest. We are currently communicating somewhere that seems to me to be just as much a place of public accommodation as a bakery is. Scott pays for the servers, but this is a public website. As I said above, I highly suspect that the impact on someone who viewed SSC as part of their community of getting banned from here would be far greater than the impact on a gay couple of being unable to buy a cake from any particular bakery.

            Certain websites would qualify, I don’t think facebook could legally bar black people from joining, but SSC would probably be okay. Still, If I were him, I’d consult a lawyer before contemplating a “no blacks” policy.

            If effectively everyone agrees on the view, such as that pollution is bad, then there’s certainly a good case to be made.

            Effectively everyone does agree. The debate is about which groups qualify for non-discrimination in public accommodations, not the underlying policy. That debate was already settled 35 years ago.

            I don’t see any particular reason to hold off on adding more groups to the list because there’s only 60% support rather than 90%. What ever absolutist property rights argument there is on the other side already lost when we reached consensus for race based discrimination.

            We aren’t required to excommunicate ourselves from civilization to post here; I don’t see any reason that someone who wants to do their careful selection of who they do and don’t interact with in realspace ought to be either.

            You can limit your interactions to whomever you like. You just can’t run a public accommodation and discriminate against protected classes.

            That doesn’t seem like such a harsh or unreasonable imposition to me. No more so than requiring stores to pay minimum wage or restaurants to have food inspectors.

            FWIW while while I think Hobby Lobby got the Religious Freedom Restoration Act right the law itself is a bad one, and the Employment Division rule is a much better one.

            If you Christian precepts require you not to pay for contraception for employees that work for your fairly large corporation then maybe being a business owner isn’t what jesus wants you to be doing with your life. Just as if your Christian beliefs required you to not charge for goods you couldn’t practically run a crafts store. Some strongly held beliefs come with consequences, that’s on the believer not everyone else.

            I sympathise with those that do because as far as I can tell, my preferences for who I interact with are no more provably morally correct than theirs.

            Are you more certain about the immorality of murder? Do you worry about imposing your morality in passing anti-theft laws? What makes this particular law a bridge too far?

          • hlynkacg says:

            I second Paul Z’s motion.

          • Anonymous says:

            [Warning: long. Sorry about that.]

            “Still, If I were him, I’d consult a lawyer before contemplating a “no blacks” policy.”

            Okay, but why only consult a lawyer rather than “this is obviously wrong”? Morally speaking, what makes SSC different than realspace with regards to exclusion? I would continue to argue that being banned from here would be much worse than being banned from any realspace restaurant, bakery, whatever. This is far, far more unique an environment than any of those places. You have much more to lose out on than you do from not having Generic Bakery #15 bake you a cake.

            I would also point out that the more bakeries refuse to bake for you, the more demand is going unmet, the more the market will respond and create Gay Bakeries that specialize in gay wedding cakes. There is a clear feedback mechanism that would prevent your demand from actually going unmet – so long as your demand is just “I want a cake” rather than “I want every bakery in the world to be prepared to make me a cake”.

            “For example if you read the Heart of Atlanta Motel case that upheld the constitutionality of Title II it says the motel had a “practice of refusing to rent rooms to Negroes” and intended to continue to do so.”

            Okay. Was this the genuine hardship you referred to? Do you think it’s a genuine enough hardship to overturn what seems to me to be a reasonable rule of “prefer institutions that work (re: allowing people to satisfy their preferences) over institutions that don’t”? Because I don’t think I do.

            In fact I will point out an interesting discovery I made: with some assumptions that seem to me to be not unreasonable, you can model this kind of problem – satisfying preferences that must apply to everyone versus satisfying local preferences – and the outcome suggests that prioritizing local preferences will tend to lead to greater satisfaction.

            I’ll explain: take a grid of 100 squares, and 100 individuals, some of them yellow, some of them purple (to choose colors that I don’t think have any strong political affiliation), each of which sits in a different square. Yellows’ satisfaction is determined by the percentage of squares on the grid that are yellow. Purples are 0% satisfied if they are in a yellow square and 100% satisfied if they are in a purple square. What colors should you paint the squares in order to maximize total satisfaction?

            The interesting answer is that, even if there is only one purple and 99 yellows, the answer is still to have one purple square (with the purple individual in it) and the rest yellow. If you think the assumptions this model involves are stupid, please let me know, but I’ve thought about it a little and I don’t think they are, at least not as a baseline for understanding. This seems to suggest that all else being equal, local preferences ought to take priority over preferences that require unanimous application. This is a second argument for prioritizing this kind of preference, alongside the point I’ve already made regarding the institutions that serve to satisfy local preferences working much better than those required to satisfy preferences that must be unanimously applied.

            Back to your arguments: that this debate was settled 35 years ago is far from clear, given the recent disagreement over gay wedding cakes that served as the initial example for this discussion. I think that there is far more consensus that pollution is bad than that every business ought to serve everyone who wants to be served. Not only that but I mentioned pollution specifically because it causes an externality. The analogous situation re: businesses would be not just that everyone thinks businesses ought to serve everyone, but that people will be hurt if they don’t and yet would prefer to discriminate with their own business, meaning the rational choice for each of them would be to discriminate even if they preferred that everyone didn’t. I think you will find even less consensus for that than for the weaker claim that everyone prefers businesses to serve everyone and is happy to go along with this themself.

            “What makes this particular law a bridge too far?”

            I would require a strong reason to think that doing this (i.e. letting people choose who they serve) was very harmful before I would support the prevention of it using the institutions that would be required to do so, since those institutions work much less well than the ones that allow those people to satisfy that preference. I don’t have any such strong reason. So far as I can tell, not wanting to serve certain people based on dumb reasons makes you an asshole, but I don’t think the harm created either by assholes not wanting to associate with people they don’t like, nor by people being in the same country as an asshole doing such, is strong enough to pass my requirements.

          • brad says:

            With intending to cause any offense: are you American? Or familiar with the history of the civil rights era in the US?

            You can go read about concrete hardships that occurred which lead up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Congress held extensive hearings (primarily intended to show that it affected interstate commerce) and the Supreme Court cited this testimony. The magic hand of the free market did not work in the way you describe. Your model is all well and good, but I refute it thus.

            As for the debate being settled, obviously it isn’t with respect to gays but it is with respect to black people. Once that’s conceded I don’t see how you can say that adding another group violates some sort of deep principle.

          • Anonymous says:

            @brad

            “With intending to cause any offense: are you American?”

            No.

            Regarding hardships, I’m sure they did occur. I would point out though that, during the time they occurred, they were presumably widely accepted, up until the point at which there was pressure to change the law. These things occurred together but it is not clear to me that the legal change prevented the hardships, rather than that the cultural change which ended the hardships also caused the legal change.

            I will thus make three points. One, that government requirement of non-discrimination would not have been politically possible at the time when the view that it was acceptable was widespread. Two, that in such a situation, allowing property owners to make these choices is highly likely to lead to a more equitable outcome than having the government decide. I’m sure there were situations in which a black person was refused entry to a restaurant, but it seems likely that many business owners would have chosen profit over principles – certainly more than would have in the places where the government required business owners to discriminate. Three, we are talking about today, in a culture where racial discrimination is not widely accepted. Hence I find it highly unlikely that it would occur anywhere other than a few isolated places.

          • onyomi says:

            “The magic hand of the free market did not work in the way you describe.”

            It was not allowed to work. The whole point of Jim Crow laws was to prevent profit-minded businesses from defecting against the “prevent race mixing in public spaces” political consensus, which, by the way, was what “we” civic-minded Southerners had “decided” was going to be a prerequisite for enjoying the benefits of trade and civilization in our society.

            Above, you imply that it was mostly private businesses voluntarily choosing to discriminate that was the problem, but if most private businesses were already voluntarily enforcing segregation, why, then pass laws like:

            “It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.”

            If, living in the time and place when this law was in effect, I had attempted to open a restaurant which served whites and blacks in the same room, and yet to continue to enjoy the other benefits of civilization and trade, your same democratic logic would have accused me of wanting to have my cake and eat it too.

            And since you brought up minimum wage: it has a racist history too: preventing white workers from being undercut by minorities and immigrants willing to work for less.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            “Infringing people’s freedom of association is an evil which can only be justified to prevent an even greater evil” is a deep enough principle for me.

          • @Brad:

            It’s a least arguable that the reason the free market didn’t work to provide hotel rooms for traveling blacks in the South was that the local governments wouldn’t let it work. A local government has lots of ways of making life hard for a small business under its authority, especially a public accomodation such as a restaurant or hotel.

            I don’t know enough about the history to be confident of that explanation. But it was, as I remember, the reason Richard Epstein offered for being in favor of public accommodation laws—using the federal government to prevent oppression by local (or state) governments.

            That argument depends on a situation were the local governments are solidly under the control of one side of the controversy, the federal of the other. I find it unlikely that it works for bakeries baking cakes for gay weddings.

          • brad says:

            While I’m not prepared to do a full survey, I searched through a codification of the Code of Laws of South Carolina as of 1952 and did not find any law requiring motels or restaurants to be segregated. Inasmuch as at least one state existed without de jure public accommodation discrimination that nonetheless had pervasive de facto public accommodation discrimination (to the point where it made traveling salesmen an extremely difficult profession for black people) that’s a strong counter to the magic of the free market story.

      • Jaksologist says:

        Can’t we model it? The math involved in extrapolating from immigration rates and birth rates seems pretty straight-forward to me.

        (Granted, everything depends on what you predict the future rates will be, but that’s true of most models.)

        • onyomi says:

          Who is this “Jaksologist” and what has he done with “Jaskologist”? I’m so confused.

          • Jakologist says:

            People mistyped my name a lot, so I figured why not accommodate them?

            Plus, it’ll make the job of the SJWs that much tougher when I’m hauled before the Revolutionary Tribunal and they try to google my problematic past.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “To say that we absolutely need to be concerned about immigration (which we can’t model) but not global warming (which we sort of can) seems really motivated.”

        What does this even mean? The problems with Islamic immigration are empirically known by people of the host countries. Under what epistemology do we need a computer model to know that it makes the risk of violent crime higher, e.g. no-go zones, Rotherham-style rape gangs, random terrorist attacks, rational fear of death for blaspheming Islam while blaspheming Christianity is protected speech…

        Furthermore, immigration policy proposals are pretty clear, while there are dozens of possible ways to deal with AGW, and the debate is too confusing at this point to rationally evaluate them. I mean, if the Settled Science says there’s a 90% chance of current trends leading to a 6 degree C increase that will make agriculture stop working, could you make a utilitarian moral argument for the US government rapidly decommissioning all its coal plants and bombing China and India back to the Stone Age if they don’t do the same?

      • Tibor says:

        Well, I think this is not true overall. I think that at least in Europe you will find people (my father for example) who are strongly opposed to open borders while being concerned about global warming, sustainability and ecology in general. Even though I disagree with it, I find this sort of conservatism more consistent than the kind you find funny. It is basically “let’s keep everything the way it is”.

      • At a slight tangent … . One big difference between immigration and climate as issues is that, at the national level, one can hope to control immigration. The U.S. hasn’t done it very effectively, in part because we are (fortunately) unwilling to use the measures it would require. But countries can guard their borders, especially countries much more densely populated than the U.S.

        At the national level one can do very little to prevent AGW, since one country’s output of CO2 is a small part of the total–negligible except for a few large countries. That’s one argument for adaptation, which can be done at the national (or, sometimes, individual) level over prevention. Another is that adaptation lets you reduce the bad consequences of warming while keeping the good consequences.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @David Friedman – “The U.S. hasn’t done it very effectively, in part because we are (fortunately) unwilling to use the measures it would require.”

          Could you elaborate briefly on this, or provide links? Specificly, do you think a global carbon market would be a measure we’re fortunate not to have tried?

          • I was talking about restricting immigration, not controlling AGW.

            The measures that would be required for the U.S. by itself to substantially reduce warming would be either geoengineering, supposing there is some version that works, or compelling India and China to sharply reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, probably by the threat of military force–which does not strike me as a good idea.

            If all countries agreed on a global carbon market and were willing and able to enforce it and prevent cheating, which strikes me as very unlikely, it would be a reasonable way of reducing CO2 output. But since I’m not convinced that AGW has large net negative effects, I would not be in favor of such a policy.

      • Glen Raphael says:

        I find it funny that the same people who are afraid open borders will doom us all call global warming a silly panic.

        Some of us manage to simultaneously think those are both silly panics. 🙂

        But if I had to steelman that particular combination of views, an easy way to do it would be based on having a short time horizon. The people who are afraid of immigration think there’s pent-up demand which could lead to millions of new immigrants RIGHT AWAY. If there are negative effects, you’d start seeing them within a decade. Whereas any negative effects from AGW are going to take a LOT LONGER which automatically makes them more speculative.

        So maybe conservatives are just using a different discount rate than liberals?

  21. Mammon says:

    Dear Scott – after the latest MetaFilter hatefest, you went and edited a few articles, adding disclaimers here and there. I really like the one at the top of the Untitled post; it’s definitely a polemical piece.

    On the other hand, you’ve stricken out the “literally Voldemort” bit from Radicalizing the Romanceless, and added a bit of through-the-fourth-wall yelling at people. I’m a bit sad about that. Radicalizing the Romanceless is an immensely powerful piece, and it’s the only piece I’ve seen tackling romancelessness with unqualified empathy. Your edit is understandable, but it sort of kills the flow of the piece.

    I understand why you’ve done it, but I feel like you’re trying to appease people who would despise you no matter what you did. Those folks have a lot of hate in them for you, me, each other, and the world at large. You should treat them like the outliers they are, because caring even one bit about what they have to say is going to degrade both your writing and your emotional health.

    I’m not saying you should stop listening to criticism; I think one of the things that make you inspiring is how respectfully you handle criticism. But I also think that, when someone is that blatantly malicious, giving them even an ounce of power over you is letting them win.

    That MF thread was a distributed hatchet job. I saw it more as the manifestation of what new lows some feminists were plumbing than as a cogent criticism of your writing. Feminism is mind-killing, and this is the result.

    For context – I’m not someone who hates feminism or anything, I just think a lot of the feminist ideology is misguided. Feminists can still be lovely people, and a lot of them subscribe to the same “niceness, community and civilization” motto you and me do.

    • Peter says:

      The formatting on Untitled appears to be broken. The bit at the top is good though.

    • PGD says:

      Well said.

    • Pku says:

      Yeah. This seems like the same problem Aaronson was talking about in the first place – That with this sort of feminism, trying to appease them just makes them attack you more.

    • Echo says:

      Rolling over and playing dead does get a pack of jackals to accept you, from a certain point of view.
      The only way to make them look at the real you and see what’s in your heart. And liver.

    • stillnotking says:

      I think it makes sense to clarify those posts and moderate some of the language. The problem with bits like the “Vogons” line is that they lend themselves too easily to gotchas of the “Scott secretly hates women” variety, which translate into excuses not to engage. Feminists should read “Romanceless”, whether they agree with it or not, just like we non-feminists should read feminist literature — but I’d be hesitant to read a feminist piece, however well-regarded, that didn’t make a basic effort to be civil to men.

      • Mammon says:

        Scott’s pieces tend to me extremely respectful to feminists. The “Literally Voldemort” thing is one quip in a ten page essay.

        • Linch says:

          Some feminists do not seem to see it this way:
          http://www.benkuhn.net/welcoming#comment-1198

          • Echo says:

            “It just seems to me like if Scott is the edge of the EA Overton window, such that people threaten to walk out if people in the community express support for his posts, then I don’t think we can really wonder about whether we’re welcoming to conservatives or people with diverse views.”

            Faith in humanity temporarily restored by whoever Anonymous3 was.

          • Linch says:

            Yeah that comment was just really crazy. :/

            However I think we can tentatively conclude that giving mean people one-liner zingers to use against you is a pretty poor idea.

          • Mammon says:

            Reading Ben Kunh’s comments, I feel like we’ve been reading a different Scott Alexander.

            “I said I thought most conservatives […] would be more able to have a calm and levelheaded discussion about feminism than Scott is.”

            “Scott is unusually bad at having such calm discussions”

            “maybe one in every ten of his posts he ends up getting really pissed off and going wide of the mark”

            …We’re talking about an immensely charged topic, a topic whose discussion turns into 95% shit-flinging pretty much every time. Scott is about as calm and levelheaded as you can be while still making an emotionally relatable criticism of feminism.

            I find Scott’s texts on feminism to be hugely therapeutic, and yes, those quips are a part of the reason why. I’ve been hurt, *we*’ve been hurt, and Scott is one of the few people who acknowledge our pain.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I find Scott’s texts on feminism to be hugely therapeutic, and yes, those quips are a part of the reason why. I’ve been hurt, *we*’ve been hurt, and Scott is one of the few people who acknowledge our pain.

            + 1,000 to that.

        • stillnotking says:

          Right, and I’m saying that having one disrespectful quip in a ten-page essay is much like having one weak point in the Death Star.

          • Echo says:

            So you’re saying the moral is “build lots of star destroyers instead, and just nuke stupid Alderaan”?

    • Jeremy says:

      I think Scott made the right decision to cross out that line.

      The only thing that line does is cause people who already dislike feminism to go “yeah, I knew feminists are like Voldemort!”, and people who already like feminists to take him less seriously because “How could a reasonable person compare feminists to Voldemort!”. It’s not going to change anyone’s opinion or enrich anyone’s understanding.

      It’s the same concept as “framing for light instead of heat”, and I think it makes sense that he would realize that.

      • Stezinech says:

        +1

      • Vorkon says:

        Editing the line to say something different would have made sense, perhaps with a footnote telling people what it used to say and why he changed it, down at the bottom. However, crossing it out, and adding an all-caps rant about people taking the line out of context? As the OP states, that is not in keeping with the tone of the post, and only serves to support the people accusing Scott of not being able to handle these topics rationally, and weakens the argument being made in the post as a whole.

        I can certainly understand WHY Scott would be upset at all the people taking that line out of context, but that particular edit reads like a temper tantrum. That’s not the right way to respond to an attack, unwarranted or otherwise.

        As everyone else has said, though, the new introduction to Untitled is certainly well done. I do wonder whether or not it will help dissuade anyone who reads it intending to be offended, which is where most of his criticism of that post comes from, but if anything could help people consider it more charitably, it would be a line like that, not one like the edit in Radicalizing the Romanceless.

        (Speaking of which, though, wasn’t there already a different introduction to Untitled, which said something similar, but less forcefully? I may be misremembering that.)

        • Cauê says:

          Rereading from the start, I think the edit is in keeping with the tone of the post, and in fact complements it nicely (in a QED way).

  22. It seems to me that age of consent laws are determined by whoever is most emphatic about what the law should be.

    If you wanted to find out what the age is below which sex is probably a bad idea, how would you do it?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Well, first you need to rigorously identify the good. lmao

    • I don’t think you can–it depends too much on the person and context.

      To take one famous example … . Mohammed married Aiesha when she was six, the marriage was consummated when she was nine, which seems awfully young to us. Our information is obviously heavily filtered, but such as it is suggests that it was a happy and loving marriage. And, once one steps back from the fact that it violates our taboos, it’s hard to see any reason to be confident that it wasn’t.

      • A says:

        First, you ask what ends are served by the age of consent in different societies at different development levels. Then you can answer Nancy’s question for cases.

        Also, even for pre-industrial civilizations, a very low (or nonexistent) age of consent for certain groups seems to occur with lower social status. For males, the only major historical example of very low (under 10) “ages of consent” is slavery. For females it’s less clear but obviously women were lower status in medieval Islam than men, and I’d guess even lower status than women in medieval Europe, where such a low age of consent never happened.

        • That got me curious. Looking at an Islamic book of law, I found no statement about minimum age for either men or women but one reference to “boys and girls” which looked as though it implied that a minor of either gender could under some circumstances be married.

          There are references in the Quran and Hadith which get interpreted as implying a minimum age either at puberty or perhaps at the usual age of puberty. I found two different explanations of the apparent conflict between that and the case of Aisha:

          1. She was married before that part of the Quran was revealed, so the rule did not yet apply.

          2. She wasn’t really that young. There are arguments, I think only dating from the 20th century, that try to prove on various textual grounds that she was actually considerably older than the traditional accounts made her. I can’t evaluate the evidence offered, but I find it mildly suspicious that the argument only seems to come up at a point when Muslims might have been concerned that their practices looked bad to non-Muslims.

          Jewish law is a good deal clearer. Age of majority is twelve and a half for women, thirteen and a half for men, I think in both cases with the additional requirement of evidence of puberty. A woman could be married younger than that but, if she was, had the option of canceling the marriage when she reached her majority.

    • Anonymous says:

      This is a fun one, because my answer breaks a lot of people’s brains. We start off with widely-believed premises, and deduce a possible conclusion that is rather repugnant to general Blue tribe sentiments.

      The first premise is that a consent-only theory of sex is correct. That is, the moral permissibility of sex turns only on the question of whether the parties have given valid consent. We have to do a little legwork to show how close to this standard we can make *legal* permissibility be, but for the most part, we can get pretty close. This is why we have nice Blue tribe conclusions like “homosexuality is acceptable”, “the marital rape exemption is bad”, and “BDSM is acceptable.”

      Most authors adopt two or three prongs for determining whether consent is validly given (and will sometimes use slightly different words to describe similar ideas), but when it comes to children, there is a pretty clear prong that they are likely to fail – knowledge. Authors like Wertheimer avoid any real conceptual discussion of what the knowledge prong really consists of, but in doing so completely abandons our idea of a consent-only theory. He appeals to a hypothesized empirical measure of ‘harm’ that can determine when we should allow children to consent. Obviously, this breaks our first premise.

      A better route will be to actually determine what the knowledge prong consists of, and then to determine how (and when) children actually fail it. Westen seems to embrace something like this as a possibility, but doesn’t embark on the difficult project of actually doing it. Nevertheless, we can quickly approach a possible repugnant outcome. If it is the knowledge prong that children fail, and if things like early sex education are actually successful at providing children with the knowledge required to have sex, then things like early sex education may be key enablers for reducing the age of consent.

      • Mark says:

        I think you’d have to consider the capacity to process knowledge, and to make decisions independently of social pressure as well.
        So, perhaps 25 would be appropriate?

        • Anonymous says:

          make decisions independently of social pressure

          Depending on how expansive a view of social pressure you take, this may never be achievable.

      • Anonymous says:

        The marital rape exemption fits perfectly well within the consent standard. To argue that it is bad in fact requires a rejection of the consent standard, specifically the view that someone is unable to consent to giving their partner unlimited future access to sex with them.

        • brad says:

          There are plenty of limitations on irrevocably binding oneself. Both for individuals and for corporate entities (in the broad sense of corporate) like legislatures. Perhaps most relevantly, specific performance as a contract remedy is disfavored in general and absolutely barred for personal service contracts.

        • Anonymous says:

          Not necessarily. Prospective consent has not been well-developed (Westen had some good preliminaries for a theory of prospective consent… and they are not favorable to such an unlimited thesis). Whether unlimited prospective consent can survive is not clear enough yet to say that it tears down the entire Moral Magic (TM) of consent.

      • Echo says:

        Repugnant? It’s been promoted for decades in certain circles.

        “As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses. In androgynous community, those impulses would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-realization. The distinctions between “children” and “adults,” and the social institutions which enforce those distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.”

        • Anonymous says:

          I would hardly claim that Dworkin can be used as a stand-in for general Blue Tribe sensibilities today. She’s controversial even in the more radical groups.

          Last time I remember this being discussed here, the prevailing theories were that some ‘supporters’ were duped; some might have been carried away by the sentiment of the decade. Most people agreed that it was unlikely to make a substantial comeback for the general Blue Tribe.

          • Echo says:

            I’m not sure how you can be edge-case “duped” by age of consent law disparities into laying out a complete philosophical justification for a family-less kiddie-diddling utopia, but ok.

          • Nornagest says:

            At the time Dworkin was writing, the whole sexual revolution thing was still being hashed out and it wasn’t entirely clear which sexual minorities would make the cut, or what the philosophical brickwork would end up looking like. NAMBLA and similar orgs were making a real play to be seen as a minority group with legitimate grievances, and a surprising-to-us number of people were listening.

            Dworkin being a radical-minded person, it’s possible, even likely, that she brought on board some of the arguments surrounding that without adequately examining them; when you’re trying to tear down and rebuild an entire culture from the ground up, your ideas about what comes after are necessarily going to be kinda sketchy. That doesn’t make her right, or her prescriptions a good idea, but it doesn’t make her a pedophile either.

          • Echo says:

            Oh, just to be clear, I wasn’t calling Dworkin a paedophile. I know and like several paedophiles, and being one of their few confidants is eye-opening and heartbreaking.
            I’d never in a thousand years think to associate them with Dworkin.

            My point was that the last thread wrote off left support for paedophiles as “they only met on a fringe of discriminatory AoC laws where their advocacy overlapped”. If left-wing icons made philosophical arguments in favour of paedophilia, that obvious blame-shifting excuse doesn’t work.

            I’d be rather more inclined to accept the blues’ claims to having a monopoly on compassionate empathy if they didn’t use both defenses and accusations of paedophilia as weapons, depending on the context of the fight.

            Edit: Did I seriously write “AoE laws”? Getting fireball spells at third level clearly privileges wizards over underrepresented classes…

          • Anonymous says:

            @Echo

            I’m not sure how you can be edge-case “duped” by age of consent law disparities into laying out a complete philosophical justification for a family-less kiddie-diddling utopia

            Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but I had meant for my two paragraphs to be dealing with two different sets; freestanding. Dworkin has probably never been anywhere near central to Blue Tribe (and like I said… is even controversial in radical crowds). Other, non-Dworkin people, who might be considered to be more core to Blue Tribe, have been said to fall in the categories of being duped or carried away.

            The last sentence of my previous comment is really the most important. Regardless of the history, all signs point to negative for Blue Tribe sentiments ‘coming around’ on lowering the age of consent. This is why I was pretty comfortable in saying that the conclusion of combining strict consent theory with early sex education is likely to be repugnant to many Blue Tribe members (..with my hidden assumption being that I was talking about Blue Tribe members today..).

          • Nornagest says:

            My point was that the last thread wrote off left support for paedophiles as “they only met on a fringe of discriminatory AoC laws where their advocacy overlapped”.

            No, that’s false. That is about where the mainstream Left ended up settling, but there was serious advocacy for far more radical positions floating around in the Sixties and Seventies — even into the early Eighties.

            I don’t think this fact amounts to much more than a historical footnote, though. These arguments were sincere and internally consistent, but you can’t treat them as principled arguments from the modern Left, because the principles of the modern Left hadn’t gelled yet. In particular, there was not yet any consensus on the consent standards we’re familiar with.

            Reading political literature from that era, I’m often struck by how chaotic it is. Modern politics are so entrenched, but the Vietnam-era and immediately post-Vietnam political scenes looked more like a chase scene from Mad Max: everyone knows who they’re trying to destroy, but tactics are constantly shifting and there’s no leadership aside from tribal affiliations and the odd charismatic warlord. And everyone’s equipped with ridiculous jury-rigged contraptions bristling with spikes and improvised weaponry, as dangerous to their users as their enemies.

    • My notion is to interview a lot of people, a whole lot of people, about when they started sex, and under what circumstances, and about their lives, and then see what patterns can be teased out. I realize this would be expensive and require human judgement, but sometimes life is hard.

      My initial thought was to interview people over fifty and ask them what they thought about when they started sex, but this may be too limited. One of my friends, who started with sex at fifteen and doesn’t see a problem with it, says that there’s something to be said for seize the day. Missing out on good early sex is a loss in itself.

      On the other side, there’s a belief that early sex is a side effect of sexual abuse, so it would be important to tease out whether there are deleterious effects of abuse but early sex doesn’t make things worse. I’ve even seen a claim that for some abused children, early consensual sex (outside their abusive family) is part of the one good relationship at that time in their lives. I have no strong opinion about that claim since I haven’t seen it as part of anyone’s personal story.

      As a minor part of all this, maybe we could find out something accurate about whether age differences between partners make a difference to quality of life for the younger partner.

      • For what it’s worth, Mencken says somewhere that he lost his virginity at fourteen with a girl of the same age, that she later lost her taste for such activities and is now (when he was writing) a respectable grandmother.

        Casanova mentions some episodes that might be relevant, including sex play short of intercourse with two girls who I would guess were prepubescent.

    • keranih says:

      If you wanted to find out what the age is below which sex is probably a bad idea, how would you do it?.

      1) Identify upsides of 'having sex' that vary by age.

      2) Identify downsides of 'having sex' that vary by age.

      3) Identify the age at which 'having sex' has more upsides than downsides. Confirm that above this age the downsides continue to decrease in relation to the upsides.

      4) Draw the line. Below this age, because of the downsides, sex is a bad idea. Above this age, it's your option and your funeral.

      Along these lines – and I really wish I had the source – the original Western (French, I think, although not sure) line for age of consent was set at ~12 years old, because at that age, the average woman – if impregnated – would likely survive childbirth. It was seen as quite reasonable to forbid sex/marriage below that age, because of risk to the life of the woman. OTOH, setting the age higher, to the average age of marriage (15-15, iirc) was being excessively involved in other people's decisions, including that of the woman involved. All the other risks of sex – disease, emotional involvement with unsuitable people, being pregnant with an unwanted baby, making stupid decisions under the influence of lust – all of those risks were seen as independent of the age of the people involved.

      I’m not at all happy with the AoC being set so low, but it does seem *logical* to me to draw the line there.

      • Anonymous says:

        Why the special procedure for age? If we’re going to just appeal to some auxiliary measure of upsides/downsides, why don’t we just do that for all types of sex? If our magic metric of upsides/downsides (which is surely culturally-dependent and will really just be a product of people trying to sneak in their sexual ethics, anyway) says that the expected value of your desired sex is negative, then No Sex For You!

        • keranih says:

          Why the special procedure for age?

          Because it’s objective, can be measured, and everyone agrees to what it is. Remember that we’re not talking about what what is “best”, we’re talking about what we can enforce.

          why don’t we just do that for all types of sex?

          Well, we do, actually – we (we-the-West, in the form of people who influenced Western cultural thought over hundreds of years, which is a form of “we” that does not include you or me) set up rules for defining marriage, rape, and parenthood/inheritances. So we do have established conclusions about specific instances of sex – mostly in the form of “only do it with people you are married to” and “don’t do it in public” and “don’t do it in a manner that has one person crying and screaming and nine other people enjoying it.”

          But not all of them, because of declining utility. Very few of us think that every potential sexual encounter(*) needs outside judgement on the utility of that interaction, because the upsides of outside judgement are largely outweighed by the downsides.

          Where we run into trouble is when person A assumes that the assessment of the utility of a particular encounter needs outside judgement, and person B assumes that the assessment is a private matter, just between the people involved.

          (*) IE, the number of people who think they need a town hall sign off in order for a husband and wife of ten years to ethically get frisky together tonight is very very small. Compare/contrast the marriages of royals, where everyone had an opinion.

          • Anonymous says:

            Because it’s objective, can be measured, and everyone agrees to what it is.

            Are you saying it’s because age can be measured? That makes no sense. Tons of other things can be measured. Whether you’re married or not can be measured quite easily. Are you saying it’s because the consequences can be measured? I would definitely dispute that… but at the very least, the consequences of other types of sex are probably as measurable.

            Remember that we’re not talking about what what is “best”, we’re talking about what we can enforce.

            We can enforce all kinds of things. We don’t need to appeal to some empirical measure of upsides/downsides to do it, either. We can just say, “People under 18 can’t have sex.” We can just say, “People can’t have homosexual sex.” We can just say, “People can’t have sex out of wedlock.” We have enforced all of these at times. I really don’t understand what you’re talking about here.

            Re: the rest of your comment

            Have you entirely missed all of the theoretical developments in the ethics of sex? The predominant theory at the moment is Consent-Only, i.e., valid consent performs the moral magic of turning an impermissible act into a permissible act. Writers such as Wertheimer trace this mostly to concepts such as autonomy. This is simply not the same type of, “Calculate the upsides/downsides,” that is being proposed here. If it was, we’d have examples like, “Two males want to have sex. Let’s calculate whether, in general, males having sex has more upsides than downsides.” We’d have examples like, “Two people want to have sex out of wedlock. Let’s calculate whether, in general, sex outside of wedlock has more upsides than downsides.” We just don’t. We say, “They can consent, and this performs the requisite moral magic.”

            Now, people do want to say, “A child wants to have sex. Let’s calculate whether, in general, a child having sex has more upsides than downsides.” This is a special procedure which must be explained and justified.

            The only way I can read your comment in context of modern Consent-Only theories of sex is to make it rather useless for the question at hand. You said, “But not all of them, because of declining utility. Very few of us think that every potential sexual encounter(*) needs outside judgement on the utility of that interaction, because the upsides of outside judgement are largely outweighed by the downsides.”

            If this is a sneaky way to say, “For the most part, we subjugate our utilitarian calculus to principles like Consent-Only; but for some parts (like minors), we don’t,” then we’re clearly not explaining anything about why minors are being treated as a special case. We’re just repeating that they are being treated as a special case. That’s not very helpful. At the absolute best, we may be doing something descriptive (saying that people, in practice, adopt these different methods)… but to the extent that we’re trying to do normative ethics for sex, we need to try to do something normative.

            To scope out a bit, I think it’s possible that you might be doing one of the things that I think is really easy to do (and has plagued me for a while)… just turning deontological ethics into utilitarian ethics by fiat. It’s really tempting to imagine a utility function that just gives utility for following certain rules. You can just take the set of rules or duties and say, “Infinite utility for following these; negative infinite utility for not following these.” Interestingly, you can try to convert in the other direction, too! You could say that all utilitarianism is deontology – the only duty you have is to maximize utility. I’ve definitely struggled with this, but I trust that philosophers of metaethics are right when they say that these things are fundamentally different. I wish I had a word to describe this particular issue.

            Anyway, I think that might be the type of thing that’s happening. My understanding is that modern Consent-Only ethics of sex is based in some rules/duties. We must respect autonomy, for example. That includes positive autonomy (the ability to consent to sex) and negative autonomy (the ability to refuse consent to sex). As easy as it seems to say, “Well, that just means that we find utility in consent or autonomy,” I think we’d be torturing the concept of utilitarianism to get there.

          • keranih says:

            @ Anonymous

            Yes, there is a special case for age because physical age – as opposed to mental maturity, soundness of judgement, integrity etc – can be verified. (Which ties into your question re: enforcement, and I don’t understand your confusion. Can you expand?) And that was what the original question was about – how do you pick an age?

            As for the remainder of your comment –

            The predominant theory at the moment is Consent-Only

            Really. Can’t see how I could have missed that. Someone should put that in the news, so the word gets out further.

            It might not be the best thing to assume everyone is on the same page as you are, or that “the predominant theory” of any branch of behavior study has permance.

            When you say “We just don’t. We say, “They can consent, and this performs the requisite moral magic.”” you are using a form of ‘we’ that doesn’t include everyone. There are a number of people who hold that just wanting to do something does not make doing that thing correct.

            In many areas, we-as-a-society have gradually stripped away complex judgement about morality and taken up a binary yes/no metric. IMO, this is an error, because in many – if not most – cases, the right/wrong path is complex.

            As whether we’re treating the case of minor consent different than other issues of consent – I think you largely misunderstand. IMO, we run the upside/downside calculation for everything, and in the case of minors, we find so much downside that the benefits of outside judgement become influential.

  23. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I recently found your post “Why I Am Not Rene Descartes” and it left me confused. Why be a rationalist (Yudkowsky) instead of a rationalist (Leibniz)? Are you convinced by Kant’s argument that innate ideas only tell us about our minds, not reality, and so rationalism is obsolete no matter what the truth value of Chomskyian grammar, evpsych, etc?
    But if that’s it, why identify as a follower of Yudkowsky instead of a Kantian? Is it because you think there are Analytics who have made irrefutable arguments in metaethics against Kantian ethics and in favor of the utilitarianism you prefer?

  24. Echo says:

    So at least some SSC people are very worried about their reputation on “Rational Wiki”.
    To calm those fears, here’s Rationalism+, Colourful Equine Edition https://archive.is/uVvh7

    Your #1 resource for cluing in anyone who made the mistake of thinking that site wasn’t an even-less-funny version of Encyclopedia Dramatica/conservapedia.

    • Nornagest says:

      I don’t understand the hate-on for My Little Pony fandom among…

      …actually, that’s a lie. I understand it, I just wish I didn’t.

      • Echo says:

        Unapologetic fun is the worst form of heresy to obsessive, guilt-ridden puritans?

      • Jiro says:

        Liking My Little Pony is Bayseian evidence for being immature. Being immature is bad.

        Of course this applies to a lot of other things than My Little Pony, as well. (Having the wrong skin color is Bayseian evidence that if you’re hired, you’re going to steal, so an employer should prefer to hire a person with the right skin color). People who think it is okay for employers to discriminate should realize that the same argument applies to MLP.

        • Echo says:

          We discriminators… do realize that?
          I have a boyfriend who wears My Little Pony merch, but I wouldn’t hire him if he came to a job interview in it.
          Unless I was hiring a very niche male stripper/6 y.o. birthday party planner or something.

          I think we’d also be a little wary of people who put thousands of hours into arguing over exactly what kind of people-with-the-wrong-skin-colour they’d refuse to hire, holding passionate debates flame wars over whether ear lobe shape was the most problematic evidence of their innate criminality.

          BTW, does this site not use the sub /sub tags for subscript, or is there something up with my browser?

          • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

            Wait, what?

            If you’re hiring male strippers as 6 y.o. birthday parties planners, I think you’ve got this parenting figured out.

          • Peter says:

            No sub tags. It’s a real pain whenever maths or chemistry or something like that comes up.

        • Nornagest says:

          Lots of things are Bayesian evidence for being immature, including pretty much every fandom. I don’t think that gets you to this level of animosity for this fandom specifically.

          I find MLP kind of cringey in the same way that I find most kids’ media kind of cringey. But I don’t think liking My Little Pony is a significantly worse signal than liking superhero comics (specifically comics, though; superhero movies are thoroughly mainstream), or boys’ or girls’ anime, or all the fandom stuff in my Tumblr feed but especially Steven Universe (which I’ve had to Tumblr Savior for the sake of my blood pressure). It’s being singled out for other reasons.

          • Jiro says:

            Superhero comics’ intended audience is pretty much adults (though non-mainstream adults). Anime’s intended audience is postpubescent teenagers or older, for pretty much all the fan-popular series. MLP’s intended audience is little kids.

            Also, fandom tends to sexualize things and sexualizing a show for prepubescents is really creepy.

          • Echo says:

            Are superhero comics really for adults? When did that change? They used to be all about the 95lb teenage weakling getting his own back thanks to mail order Super Alpha Serum.

            Also re. “animosity”, I think that’s just a regular feature of… “that culture” these days.
            Sorry to trigger you with Steven Universe tumblrism, but https://imgur.com/a/USROb
            Money Quote from social justice warriors bullying artists:
            “I felt like we were leading a discussion – opening up talk about how she could improve. We all definitely THOUGHT she could improve as a person. But she didn’t. She treated our blog and all other zamii blogs as jokes. She didn’t care about us.
            And that’s why I feel no guilt over her suicide/suicide attempt.”

            I need to look up this “tumblr savior” thing.

          • Jiro says:

            When did that change?

            Around 1986?

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not talking target audience (though superhero comics’ intended audience is twelve-year-old boys or adults indistinguishable from them); I’m talking the degree to which liking something as an adult implies that you’re immature. A lot of popular anime these days is aimed squarely at the otaku pervert demographic, but I think that’s a stronger signal of immaturity than liking a kids’ show that apparently has some crossover appeal.

            Also, fandom tends to sexualize things and sexualizing a show for prepubescents is really creepy.

            Like Adventure Time? Or Steven Universe? Or Frozen? Those all have enormous fandoms (which produce all the disgusting fanwork you’d expect). They’re all aimed at young children. But they haven’t become a byword for “manchild”.

          • Nornagest says:

            “She treated our blog and all other zamii blogs as jokes. …”

            I may regret asking this, but what the hell is a zamii?

            I’d just google it, but I’m at work.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nornagest – Zamii is the fan artist in question. Zamii blogs were blogs dedicated to how much Zamii sucked as an artist and a human being because of the problematic nature of their artwork. Things like using the wrong colors for characters skin tones, not drawing noses big enough, and other blatant examples of racism.

          • Nornagest says:

            Charming.

          • Jiro says:

            Nornagest: In claiming that superhero comics are for twelve year oldas, you’re around 20-30 years behind the times.

            And the otaku pervert demographic is at least postpubescent and it is assumed that liking things they like is not as bad as liking something normally watched by 7 year olds.

            Also, Frozen is a family movie, not a children’s movie; those are different.

          • Nornagest says:

            This is all kind of a sideline from the point I was trying to make, but no, I just have a low opinion of the mainstream in comics. I have read some recent stuff, although I haven’t followed anything seriously since I was a twelve-year-old boy (in the mid-Nineties, well after the transition to grimdark everything was under way).

            There is some genuinely mature storytelling in comics of the last thirty years. But not a lot of it. Nine times out of ten, it purports to be aimed at adults but that mostly hashes out to… how did Calvin and Hobbes put it? Making your superhero a psychopath, drawing gut-splattering violence, and calling it a “graphic novel”? I know exactly who that appeals to, and it isn’t emotionally mature adults.

            (Granted, I think Watterson was alluding to Watchmen there, and I would have called that one of the brighter spots of the era. But the phrase still applies to a lot of other stuff)

          • DrBeat says:

            Are you trapped in the 1990s? Because that age is over, dude. There’s a lot wrong with comics, but it’s not the same stuff as in the Dark Age.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not married to comics as an example, but it’s seemed to me that they’ve shed some of the worst excesses of the Nineties but still have a lot of the same problems. Were you involved in that conversation about The Authority we had a few threads ago? That would be an example of what I’m talking about.

            What would you say is wrong with it?

          • Echo says:

            Not as bad? Are you serious, Jiro? Given the choice between someone spreading a rumor that you watch Saturday Morning Cartoons vs, I don’t know, Strike Witches, is there any doubt about which you’d pick?

            “They send their secret weapon, an American hillbilly named Seth whom they turned into a monstrous superhuman stated to have over a thousand super powers, to attack the Authority.”
            What.

      • Held in Escrow says:

        What’s weird about it? It’s an extremely loud evangelical group about something that it is generally considered odd to form a large group around, often with what are seen as completely inappropriate sexual aspects. That’s pretty much the perfect formula for a hated group; they’re annoying, weird, have terrible social skills, and are perverted in an obvious manner.

        • DrBeat says:

          They aren’t much louder than most other fandoms, and have a similar level of inappropriate sexual content as those same other fandoms. They are also far, far, far more responsible with said sexual content and making sure minors don’t come across it than any other fandom.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            The issue isn’t how loud they are in their own suicidal circles but that the MLP fandom brings it into everything on otherwise non-MLP environments. There is not a single other fandom with that sort of evangelical volume nor has there been since furries (which is pretty much an exact model for the backlash against MLP fans).

            And the issue with their sexuality content was that even if it is policed now it wasn’t in the beginning so it’s stuck.

          • DrBeat says:

            Not a single other fandom with that sort of evangelical volume? Counterpoint: Homestuck.

            And even when the sexual content wasn’t policed, there was no more of it than there was for any other fandom that has ever existed. Every fandom is filled with porn. People just chose to notice it in the case of MLP, and chose not to notice it in every other case, because they perceived MLP fans as male (and thus their sexuality was inherently threatening, shameful, and degrading) and other fans as female (and thus their sexuality was wholesome and harmless).

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Homestuck didn’t have the inappropriate sexuality out on the open (webcomic vs children’s TV series) and it was far less obtrusive. There’s no male/female dichotomy here.

            Basically HS fans tended to keep to their general threads on most sites while MLP splerged in unrelated topics. You ended up with MLP perfectly matching onto ye old furries, so is it any surprise they got so much hate?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Homestuck fandom is probably 5 times as cancerous, but it’s way less widespread, exposure is what matters. MLP has close to mainstream exposure, none of my relatively internet savvy siblings could tell you what homestuck is (except maybe one, by secondhand exposure through tumblr).

          • Jaksologist says:

            Nobody outside of your bubble has heard of Homestuck. Everybody with a little girl knows MLP. And people get very protective/freaked out when start sexualizing things in the vicinity of their little girls.

          • NN says:

            Homestuck didn’t have the inappropriate sexuality out on the open (webcomic vs children’s TV series) and it was far less obtrusive. There’s no male/female dichotomy here.

            I find it really hard to believe that there’s no male/female dichotomy here, when there were never any similar complaints about the female-dominated Harry Potter fandom, which is based around a children’s book series, has an enormous amount of porn (mostly focused on underage characters, to boot), and during its peak was one of the most obtrusive and evangelistic fandoms in recorded history.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Harry Potter maps onto classic Trekkies and Star Wars fandoms in pretty much every facet. You have plenty of sex stuff for it, be it Snape or Draco slash a la Kirk and Picard or waifuing over Leia a la Hermione

          • NN says:

            Harry Potter maps onto classic Trekkies and Star Wars fandoms in pretty much every facet. You have plenty of sex stuff for it, be it Snape or Draco slash a la Kirk and Picard or waifuing over Leia a la Hermione

            Apart from the minor fact that most major Harry Potter characters are underage, which makes a lot of Harry Potter fandom material legally questionable (to put it mildly) in ways that are far more serious than the typical copyright issues with fanfiction and fanart. In 2007, Livejournal came very close to banning huge parts of the Harry Potter fandom over this issue.

            But no, it’s the Bronies who are freaks and perverts.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Yet once again, look at what everything maps onto. Harry Potter is dorky cool mainstream like how Star Trek, Star Wars, and LotR. MLP is seen as a cartoon for young girls. Bringing up how Emma Watson grew up to be hot is a normal topic of conversation among teenage boys. Going on about cartoon ponies is not. Nobody worried about their conversations on message boards being sidelined into talks about Harry Potter because the fanbase tended to be much more sociable and less likely to be inappropriate in public venues.

            Seriously, think about it; if you had made a Harry Potter reference back at the height of it’s popularity most people would get it and chuckle along. Hell, colleges still have popular Quidditch clubs. If you made an MLP reference people wouldn’t get it and probably assume you were weird. There’s a massive difference of scale here, don’t try and turn this into some weird gender wars bullshit.

            If you go out in public with something that strikes others as wrong and probably perverted or pedophilic (as grown men nerding out over a cartoon aimed at young girls will) you should expect social backlash. When you toss on the porn and set off the internet’s collected furry alert alongside the birth of the fedora meme (which the MLP fandom ran smack dab into and has been linked with since) you’re going to have problems. Best I can suggest is follow the same route as furries and just batten down the hatches and keep to safe zones until people move on, because the internet is made of assholes.

          • DrBeat says:

            The fact that grown men being interested in something for young girls is seen as pedophilic and threatening, while grown women being interested in something for young boys is morally neutral, is the problem we are talking about and you are denying.

          • Echo says:

            “while grown women being interested in something for young boys is morally neutral”

            I think South Park is covering that particular topic next Wednesday, if their request for yaoi fanart is any indication.
            It seems to be considered “fapping up” when a primarily female audience writes about sexy 12 year old boys (in leather pants) having sex with their potions teacher.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Harry Potter is completely gender neutral in terms of target fanbase. A young boy oriented media franchise would be something like Transformers or GI Joe.

            So no, your argument doesn’t hold any water there.

          • DrBeat says:

            Transformers also has a shitload of female fans, who write shitloads of porn for it.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Ask your random internet goer if they know that. Quite frankly I’m skeptical of it and it’s certainly never penetrated the public consciousness

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Held in Escrow – “Quite frankly I’m skeptical of it and it’s certainly never penetrated the public consciousness”

            My tanking buddy’s sister got her fandom from drawing transformers yaoi.

            The operative term, I believe, is “clang clang clang”.

        • Echo says:

          Hello neighbor! You seem troubled. Could it be that you’ve been missing out on the Good Word of our Lady and Saviour, Princess Sparklehorse?
          You’re more than welcome to join us for a little get-together to celebrate all the wonderful things Sparklehorse brought to our lives. There’s cookies and punch by the door, and our good book contains a wide variety of uplifting fetish pornography.

      • BBA says:

        As an outsider to the fandom, I find them quite obnoxious. Specifically their habit of injecting themselves into any discussion distantly touching them, no not everything is about you dammit! They’re like those sea lions in that Wondermark cartoon, except the term “sealioning” has already been appropriated to mean something else.

        (I, ah, may be projecting my own neuroses here, it’s a pattern of behavior I’ve noticed and tried to suppress in myself.)

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I don’t know how much discussion of My Little Pony goes on on Conservapedia.

    • Cauê says:

      “We don’t know the age of consent in Equestria” is not a valid counterargument.

      I don’t know why, but I love this.

  25. Cereal Crepist says:

    I’d like to hear what an actual psychiatrist thinks about this study that seems to show antidepressants are prescribed to everyone who visits a psychiatrist regardless of actual need:
    http://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/article/Pages/2015/v76n01/v76n0106.aspx

    Method: Using data from the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study Wave 1 (1981) through Wave 4 (2004–2005) (N = 1,071), we assessed lifetime prevalence of common mood and anxiety disorders according to DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria, based on 4 interviews, among participants who reported current antidepressant use. Furthermore, we examined factors associated with current antidepressant use.

    Results: Thirteen percent of participants at Wave 4 reported currently using antidepressant medications. Among antidepressant users, 69% never met criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD); and 38% never met criteria for MDD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social phobia, or generalized anxiety disorder in their lifetime. Female gender, Caucasian ethnicity, recent or current physical problems (eg, loss of bladder control, hypertension, and back pain), and recent mental health facility visits were associated with antidepressant use in addition to mental disorders.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Their list of conditions tested doesn’t include Persistent Depressive Disorder or Unspecified Depressive Disorder, nor Unspecified Anxiety Disorder which is also a potential indication for antidepressants. For all we know everyone in their study who got an antidepressant without having MDD in fact had PDD or UDD.

      I’m taking an easy out here, and there’s a lot more to say, but maybe I’ll have more energy to write the whole thing up later.

      • Echo says:

        To an outsider, “Unspecified Anxiety Disorder” sounds horribly like “patient has problems we can’t treat without impractical lifestyle interventions”.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I GUESS THIS MEANS WE HAVE TO DO THIS THE HARD WAY.

          Consider two different paradigms of psychiatric disease. In one, we have well-defined entities with specific unique causes, and drug treatments that are magic bullets for those causes. For example, “depression” is a real thing caused by serotonin deficiency, and lucky us, we have drugs that increase serotonin. This is the dream, but I don’t know anyone who thinks we’ve fully achieved it.

          In the second, psychiatric diseases are vague collections of symptoms that probably happen for a bunch of reasons – “depression” is no more specific than “leg pain”. Probably something causes depression, just like something causes leg pain, but it’s not always the same thing and we don’t always know what it is. Drug treatments are symptomatic relief for psychiatric conditions in the same way morphine is symptomatic relief for leg pain.

          If you subscribe to the first paradigm, then it’s a huge disaster if somebody who doesn’t really have the entity called “depression” gets an antidepressant. Antidepressants are magic bullets for the Specific Cause Of Depression, and since they fail to meet the diagnostic criteria they must not have that specific cause! That means we’re wasting our magic bullets for nothing!

          If you subscribe to the second paradigm, then anybody who pays the money to see a psychiatrist and tells them “I feel depressed” and isn’t lying is, in some sense, depressed. Either they qualify for our nice specific research entity “Major Depressive Disorder”, or they have some vague collection of symptoms that don’t match the textbooks and we call it “Unspecified Depressive Disorder”. This is kind of important. If somebody comes in and says “For the past six months I’ve hated my life and wished I was dead and nothing at all has made me happy”, they’ve technically only checked three or four boxes out of the five you need to diagnose MDD. But you wouldn’t want to send this person away with “Good news, you’re not depressed!”. Although you can always do psychotherapy with these people, I don’t think there’s any evidence that psychotherapy > pharmacotherapy for unspecified depression particularly. So you do the usual and offer them the choice between psychotherapy and drugs. And some of them take the drugs. Which often work.

          A *lot* of these people come in, a lot of them get antidepressants, and although life would be easier if everything conformed to the textbooks it’s not obvious that this is the wrong thing to do, especially if like me you lean toward the second paradigm of mental illness.

        • Stezinech says:

          @ Echo: The fact that some uncontrollable environmental circumstances are involved in psychiatric disorders doesn’t mean that the disorders can’t (or shouldn’t) be treated.

          To give an example of difficult things that often precipitate depression:

          “stressful events significantly predicted onset of major depression in the month of occurrence, four of which predicted onset with an odds ratio of >10 and were termed “severe”: death of a close relative, assault, serious marital problems, and divorce/breakup”

          http://focus.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/foc.8.3.foc459

        • Echo says:

          I understand and sympathize. I’ve read your previous posts about diagnosing patients, and it’s heartbreaking to learn about the problems everyone involved has to deal with.

          But comparisons to treating “symptomatic relief for leg pain” is a huge… I hate to use the word “dogwhistle”, but it makes ears perk up.
          To a lot of us, it pattern matches to stories of Crossfitters saying “I’ve been taking twenty ibuprofin a day, and some steroids, but my knee just keeps hurting more every workout!”

          I’m not saying that’s the case with prescribing antidepressants. In a lot of cases, you make drugs sound like… bailing out the lifeboat to give people time to patch the hole?

          But since most of us are more familiar with physical medicine, it’s easy to end up being biased against treating symptoms under broad categories.

  26. sweeneyrod says:

    It occurred to me today that the anti-democratic sentiments of the Dark Enlightenment aren’t too far from the mainstream in the UK. The second chamber of our Parliament (the House of Lords) is completely unelected. Unsurprisingly, many people are opposed to this, but it isn’t at all taboo to support.

    • Cereal Crepist says:

      I think this is just status quo / trend bias. Almost nobody in the US thinks 17-year-olds should be allowed to vote or that Supreme Court justices should be directly elected, but anyone who suggested going back to the 21-year age limit or appointment of Senators would be considered crazy.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        And since the status quo has been marching left since at least 1914 (God bless and keep you, Klemens von Metternich), with the big exception of state ownership of property, it’s dangerous to ignore politics and just hope that verbally agreeing with the status quo of your youth won’t eventually get you fired or worse.

      • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

        Wait, so I am crazy for thinking that appointed Senators would result in a less bad government (I’ll make no claim about optimum) than we have now?

        Part of that balance of powers in the adversarial, multilevel government in the US was supposed to be the State governments having a voice at the federal level to say “fuck off, that is a State-level issue.” There are two side effects of not having this.

        Every issue is a federal issue because the States are unable to effectively defend their prerogative. Why campaign for a law in your State alone, when the same number of contributions at the federal level will buy the legislation for the whole country? People that are active in trying to solve problems fundamentally assume their answer is the right one. Never mind if applying the policy in question meets the needs of other States, or is an experiment we should try at such a large scale, or if it precludes other States from trying other options. Their solution is the right one, so why would I give a damn about any of that? Think prohibition. Of course the devil’s brew is a societal problem that must be stamped out! Why be satisfied with dry counties or State control of the liquor industry when you can get the Fed to ban it completely?

        However, just promoting issues to the federal level doesn’t actually work. Major legislation (like the ACA) is impossible to implement directly at the federal level because of the constitutional limits of federal power. The federal government relies on coercing the States to submit to federal programs. But without a State voice in the legislative process, there is real risk of major legislation becoming an utter train wreck: the legislation ends up being maddeningly complex in order to forcibly nail State governments down on implementation details, and still run the risk of becoming an utter train wreck when States try to opt out entirely (like marijuana prohibition, and the utter laughingstock States flouting it makes of the Rule of Law).

        The solutions to this are to convert completely to a centralized government, or revert to a proper multilevel government. However, complete centralization is a fools errand because the US is too (geographically and demographically) large and diverse. The current and increasing deadlock in Congress is a largely side effect of this, and increasing centralization will only make it worse. As more edge cases come under consideration at the federal level, issues become more divisive and prone to deadlock. Those that do make it through the deadlock are either impossibly complex to account for divergent circumstance (and don’t actually work), or are simple, ham-handed “common sense” nonsense (and don’t actually work).

        A proper multilevel government is (more) able to craft simple and effective legislation at the proper level of granularity. States having a say at the federal level is a key component to enforce the proper granularity. If Congress deadlocks on an issue (because it is insoluble at that level), the States share the blame because an entire house of Congress is devoted to their appointees and are motivated to address the issue at their level. Counteracting the downward pull of State appointees are the direct representatives. Voters want the maximum bang per vote, so very much want to federal government to solve their problems. These countervailing forces tend to ensure that issues are solved at the appropriate level.

        The current system is a fundamentally flawed half solution, and of the two nearest whole solutions a properly functioning multilevel system is preferable. And State appointed Senators are a key component of achieving that system. As a bonus, it would require relatively minor structural change–after all, we’re just reverting a relatively minor structural change already made–compared to the other nearest whole solution; when compared with something radical like listening to [taboo] and converting to a Monarchy or a Parliamentary system (I’ll make no claim about the optimality of those, either), forget about it.

        • BBA says:

          The problem is that it didn’t work. As early as the 1850s the election of Senators was considered a more important role for state legislators than running the state government. Witness the Lincoln-Douglas debates – they were running for Senate and trying to influence Illinoisans to elect their respective parties to the statehouse. The tail wagging the dog, as it were.

          Now if you replaced the Senate with a “council of governors”, like the Bundesrat in Germany, that would guarantee state governments a voice in the federal system. But that has its own issues.

          • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

            That’s a fair point. But determining how practical or not the system was is seriously confounded throughout that entire era by the existence of a single issue that both sides were prepared to start a shooting war over if the other side got control of the Senate. Under the circumstances, any elective system would have broken down.

            Consider that we don’t have an issue even remotely like that now, and Congress has become just as dysfunctional. Probably more so: they can’t even pass a freaking budget anymore.

            Until we come up with an issue that is important enough that it is really worth destroying half the country again to solve, having the release valve of different States doing different things is a major feature.

    • AlphaGamma says:

      On the other hand, while perhaps not “taboo”, returning to an (almost) all-hereditary House would be an extreme fringe position even though it was the situation within living memory- life peerages were effectively restricted to the Law Lords until the late 1950s, so apart from them and the bishops, everyone in the House of Lords until the mid to late 20th century either had inherited their seat or expected to pass it on to their descendants.

      Similarly fringe would be a proposal to return the Lords to the level of power they held before the Parliament Act of 1911.

    • Peter says:

      It’s conservative, not reactionary – and the Lords keeps getting reformed, so it’s not even all that conservative.

      There seems to be a British thing of paying lip service to some anti-democratic thing while quietly getting on with the opposite. See also the monarchy, and the established church. Sometimes you can (or at any rate could, things have changed a little in recent years) even get me engaging in a spot of antidisestablishmentarianism, and I’m an atheist.

  27. keranih says:

    FWIW – I view the increasing number of banned things with moderate dismay. I think that temporary bans on different topics, or post-specific bans intending to channel conversations away from topics the host finds momentarily tedious are quite acceptable, but I am not crazy at all about blanket permanent bans.

    • Echo says:

      It’s a clever trick to get us all taking intelligence-enhancing drugs in an attempt to understand the Volcano God’s complicated and bizarre commandments.

  28. Asher says:

    I prefer Dark Enlightenment, a reproach to the original notion of Enlightenment which posited that as man’s incorrect notions about things fell away it would usher him into a future free of fear, want and disappointment. Basically, the original Enlightenment twisted the Biblical notion that the truth shall make men free and decided that truth eliminates suffering.

    Dark Enlightenment posits that most of the truth out there that can eliminate suffering has been revealed and that what hidden truth remains is that which acknowledges the limitation of truth to reduce suffering. A good example of such truth would be innate differences between population clusters, race in vulgar terms, and the inability to do anything about those differences.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Who came up with “Dark Enlightenment”? It’s a brilliant term, because it packs a very complex argument into two words.

      The consensus historiography of the 18th century is that it was the Enlightenment, when freethinkers braved being fired, exiled, jailed or worse to subject religious and political beliefs to reason. You’ll find this in pretty much any school textbook.
      What goes unmentioned is how the intelligenstia later abandoned the liberalism of Voltaire for Marxism and then Social Justice. So you get Socratic gadflies asking “If the Enlightenment was so good, why can’t I subject today’s political beliefs to reason?”

      • Asher says:

        British philosopher Nick Land wrote a book by that title. His blog, Outside In, links here frequently.

        I support scotts decision to ban the label, simply on grounds of vagueness

      • The original Mr. X says:

        What goes unmentioned is how the intelligenstia later abandoned the liberalism of Voltaire for Marxism and then Social Justice. So you get Socratic gadflies asking “If the Enlightenment was so good, why can’t I subject today’s political beliefs to reason?”

        Yes, it strikes me as odd, if the Enlightenment were as great as people say, that post-Enlightenment philosophy has so often been so much more illiberal and irrational than pre-.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          The uncharitable answer is that liberalism is a tactic, not a principle. It’s not that it’s unjust for the state to kill, censor, or take property, it’s an enormous injustice that the Outgroup controls the state. This was Samuel Johnson’s argument against those who supported the American Revolution (“We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”)

          A more charitable answer is that intellectuals collectively tried the political program of the 18th century empiricists, found it emotionally unsatisfying that liberalism left injustices in the world and/or created new ones, and went looking for a warmer fuzzier alternative, because empiricism itself had kicked out the rational foundations of ethics in favor of sentiment. Rationalists like Leibniz were actually viciously attacked by Voltaire because their logical claims about justice didn’t line up with his moral sentiments.

  29. onyomi says:

    This is sort of a strange problem I have–one which seems like it would be incredibly common and/or not a problem at all, but which is seemingly less common and less desirable than one might think: indecisiveness born of ability to see pros and cons of everything.

    On factual and philosophical issues I usually don’t have a problem picking a side (as anyone reading my posts can attest), though I do try to be open to new evidence. On matters of personal taste, however, I actually do have trouble deciding my own strongest preference (sort of the opposite of what one might expect: questions of fact should be mutable depending on evidence, questions of personal preference seemingly should feel subjectively very solid to oneself).

    Specifically, do I like living in the country or in the city? Eh, I’ve done both and both have advantages and disadvantages. Do I want to live in the US or Asia? Done both; both have advantages and disadvantages. Do I want to pursue hobby a, b, or c more seriously? Eh, there are things about all of them I enjoy and things I don’t enjoy. In my own research (which focuses on East Asian civilization), do I want to focus on subspecialty x, y, or z? Eh, there are things I like about each and things I don’t like about each.

    I guess this is a longwinded way of saying I’m indecisive or that my interests are overly broad. But society rewards specialization. And on certain questions, such as “do I live in the city or do I live in the country,” there must be only one answer, at least for a period of time (what strikes me as one of the great advantages of being wealthy, which I am not, is the ability to, say, have a house in the country and a house in the city; a house in the US and a house in Asia, and to switch at whim).

    What’s more, though I’m sure everyone experiences indecision, I feel like most people I know have very clear opinions on such questions as “do you like living in a big city or a rural setting?” Does this seem familiar to others and are there any good ways of resolvin git?

    • Urstoff says:

      Sounds like what happens to people with damage to their limbic system. The lack of emotional feedback means they can’t make a decision as they are endlessly weighing pros and cons. I doubt you have limbic system damage, so just go with your gut, and your psychology with self-justify the decision after awhile. Being self-deceptive is an advantage sometimes.

      • onyomi says:

        I mean, I don’t lack emotional reactions to things, it’s just that I can always see pros and cons of most things. It’s like I have a strong opinion on the right ethical philosophy but no strong opinion on whether I prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream, which seems sort of backwards but maybe it’s just normal. Sometimes I want chocolate, sometimes I want vanilla. I guess it’s really just an aspect of the human condition that not everything works like ice cream: you can’t change your career every few months at a whim–at least, most people certainly can’t.

    • Bassicallyboss says:

      I have this problem, though it’s less severe than it’s been for me in the past. I recommend flipping a coin, and just doing whatever it says to. It is not an algorithm for making the optimal decision. However, if you really can’t decide, that suggests you care little about the outcome, in which case any decision-making algorithm is an improvement over time wasted pondering pros and cons.

      Coin flips have the benefit of suspense and revelation. Sometimes you will find yourself hoping for a certain outcome, or regretting that the coin came up showing the face that it did. In these cases, thus enlightened to your preference, you may ignore the coin and do what you now realize you want to. If this doesn’t happen, no problem! That’s why you’re flipping the coin in the first place.

      Got a decision that’s more important, or over which you agonize over much more than most? Get a bigger coin. Coins are heavy, and worth real money. I find the weight of the coin helps bind me to the course of action. If you have a decision that could change major circumstances in your life, you aren’t going to take a dinky little quarter seriously. Get an old silver dollar, or a collectible gold coin, big and heavy. Consider solemnly the choices and resolve to abide by the outcome. (You’re always free to change your mind should new evidence about the decision or your preferences come to light.)

      One thing you must never do with this method is to decide that you must toss the coin again, just to be sure of your feelings. (Assuming the toss resolved unambigously the first time. If you dropped it on the floor, that’s enough for disqualification). Further tosses just tend to muddle the issue, since if you get a different result, then you have to choose which one to listen to, and you wouldn’t be tossing a coin in the first place if you had a better algorithm for making that choice.

      I will say that I had particular trouble with this sort of thing when I was depressed and somewhat anhedonic. However, I had to learn to recognize my preferences, and it was not trivial. I would recommend paying close attention to your body’s needs: Sleeping when you’re tired, eating when you’re hungry and of the foods you have a taste for, stopping when full, going outside if you image the sunlight would feel nice, etc. It helped me to pay attention to small, gut wantings I didn’t realize I had, and I am much less indecisive now that I can sometimes abstract those into preferences.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        However, if you really can’t decide, that suggests you care little about the outcome,

        Not exactly. It means that the expected utility of your possible choices is roughly equal. That can mean that the outcomes are roughly equal, or it can mean that you need more information. See Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Harder Choices Matter Less”.

        I liked the rest of your comment, though. The only problem is that coins only work for decisions with two options. You could get percentile dice and divide the outcome space according to however many paths you are facing (for example, 1-33 for one option, 34-66 for another, and 67-99 for a third, with 100 requiring a reroll), but making a major life decision as if you were attacking a monster in Dungeons & Dragons somehow lacks the gravitas of flipping a big nice silver coin.

        • Bassicallyboss says:

          Thanks for the link; I hadn’t seen that one before.

          What you you say is true: Coin-flips only work on binary choices. Usually this isn’t a problem for me, since my hardest choices tend to be between widely different alternatives. And when I have three or more such alternatives, I can usually narrow it down to the two I like best. The final step is the hardest part, since when the choices are so different, the pros and cons of one are hard to compare to the other’s.

          I did try what you suggest once as an undergrad, when I was considering transferring to different universities. I found myself thinking “Do I really want to give that school an equal weight?” and so I just eliminated it down to two. This was before I knew about Bayesian evidence, though, and I think this was a case where, as Onyomi says, the utility difference between a correct and incorrect choice was quite large, but I suppose I was less confident in the third school being correct. That could be accounted for on percentile dice by assigning number ranges equal to probability weights, but if you’re able to break things down that finely, you’re probably better off just choosing the option with highest (utility x chance).

      • onyomi says:

        Funny you should mention that: my fiancee, whose favorite Batman villain is Two-Face, sometimes suggest flipping a coin or consulting a magic 8 ball (for when you need more nuance) when we are having trouble making a decision. I made fun of her for this until she pointed out it was a way of figuring out your true feelings about something.

        The sense that the coin is about to decide the outcome for you can sort of mimic actually being forced to chose on the spot, and, as you say, you may often find yourself secretly wishing for the coin toss to come out one way or the other.

        But I also agree with jaimeastorga that it isn’t that I don’t care about the choice, but that the expected utility of either decision may feel too close, even if the expect disutility of a poor choice is high.

        • Magnap says:

          That reminds me of the following grook (small aphoristic poem usually by Piet Hein):
          “Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
          and you’re hampered by not having any,
          the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
          is simply by spinning a penny.
          No – not so that chance shall decide the affair
          while you’re passively standing there moping;
          but the moment the penny is up in the air,
          you suddenly know what you’re hoping.”

  30. BBA says:

    I’ve given some thought recently to the aviation industry – specifically, how over the century and change it’s existed, as a whole it’s lost money. For decades airlines in the US were propped up by the CAB system of regulated route monopolies and outside the US were largely government-owned and subsidized. Then privatization and deregulation happened, and airlines started going bankrupt left and right. Some quotable quotes:

    “The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.” – Warren Buffett

    “I’m an airline manager. I don’t invest in airlines. And I always said to the employees of American, ‘This is not an appropriate investment. It’s a great place to work and it’s a great company that does important work. But airlines are not an investment.’ … A lot of people came into the airline business. Most of them promptly exited, minus their money.” – Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines

    Some of the “low-cost” airlines have bucked the trend and made money – Southwest in particular even manages to do it without the sadism of the Ryanair/Spirit model. But none of them have transoceanic flights, which are just too logistically complex to fit into the low-cost model.

    Note also that the major airplane manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing, receive indirect subsidies in various forms from their governments, mainly in the form of defense contracts and tax exemptions.

    Now I’m not categorically opposed to subsidies but I think they ought to be as transparent as possible, so we don’t pretend that Pan Am was some kind of capitalist icon when they only made money because they were the only US airline allowed to fly to London. But direct subsidies aren’t politically feasible, and if we take away the indirect subsidies pretty soon the only way to get across the Atlantic will be the Queen Mary 2.

    • Mark says:

      “More strikingly, it was shown that the more capital intensive an industry was, the lower was its rate of profit. This is exactly what one would expect if labour rather than capital was the sole source of value. This explains why railway projects like the Channel Tunnel are almost always unprofitable. They involve a lot of capital but employ little labour on which to make a profit.

      Marx had said that : “Very large undertakings, such as railways, on the other hand, which have an unusually high proportion of constant capital, do not yield the average rate of profit, but only a portion of it,” Those in favour of rail privatisation in other countries take note, they will never be profitable.

      Capital itself creates no value.”

      http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/19/is-the-marxian-labour-theory-of-value-correct/

      • Urstoff says:

        The conclusion does not follow from the premises. Capital is clearly a necessary condition for profit in most industries. You can’t have Wal-Mart without buildings, Google without computers, etc.

        Plus, the “labor theory of value” is just inventing a new concept of “value” that arbitrarily ties it to labor. We don’t need this third concept over and above the use and exchange sense of value, and the concept of a “real price” that’s somehow tied to this value is just bad metaphysics. We’ve got the prices set by the market and then the individual utility a person derives from the use of that good, and from those we get the concepts of producer and consumer surplus, which are far more illuminating than a “real price” or a concept of value derived from labor.

        • Mark says:

          “the concept of a “real price” that is somehow tied to this value is just bad metaphysics”
          I don’t know about real price, but I think the idea of a “real cost” is entirely meaningful – what are the inputs you have used to create something. And it isn’t entirely mad to reduce the real costs to the conscious activity expended in production – surely this *is* the *real* cost, the negative experiences we must have in order to get something we want (more real than the concept of opportunity cost of inputs, which is both “metaphysical” and has a higher level of abstraction…)
          I work for eight hours on the replicator you own, but I only take four hour’s worth of the goods produced by the machine, you get the rest. I’ve had a negative experience, you’ve given up the opportunity of receiving slightly less things. Who is bearing the real cost?

          I suppose the other bone of contention is that right wingers believe that these real costs are expressed through the price mechanism, or at least expressed as far as possible, whereas lefties believe that, due to social conditions (rather than physical limitations), many people are not in a position to do this.

          • David N says:

            “Giving up the opportunity to receive less” is an interesting rhetorical twist, but every one involved in your story is bearing costs and having negative experiences, and it’s possible that every one involved is coming out ahead.

            Thinking about economic problems should be done at the margin. Why did you work eight hours and not seven or nine? Why did you work on my replicator when there are other ways to earn 4 units?

            I don’t know what “right wingers” believe, but capitalists believe that prices convey information about the marginal utility of the thing being priced, which is not necessarily related to the cost of producing that thing.

          • Mark says:

            “every one involved in your story is bearing costs and having negative experiences, and it’s possible that every one involved is coming out ahead.”

            What is the cost for the capitalist?

            There is a fundamental difference between a capitalist putting his machines or social power to work, and a worker putting himself to work.

            “Thinking about economic problems should be done at the margin. ”
            How do you consider the system itself, the range of choices that people have, marginally?

          • David N says:

            “What is the cost for the capitalist?”

            The capitalist had to pay for the replicator. The capitalist pays the wages. The capitalist will have to replace the replicator when it fails. The capitalist labors and has “negative experiences” overseeing the operation.

            Asserting that there’s a “fundamental difference” between two things, without explaining why the differences matter, is another way of saying “yeah, but still.”

            Once you are able to think about economic choices in terms of marginal utility, it will be readily apparent how to apply that thinking to questions about people’s range of choices.

          • Urstoff says:

            I’m not really sure at all what’s going on here, but I’ll ask one clarifying question: why is that a negative experience?

            After all, had you not worked those eight hours, you would have no goods. Working for eight hours and taking half of what you made in exchange for the opportunity to use the machine seems like a positive-sum exchange, assuming you value those good more than you value the time lost (and if you don’t, why are you doing it?).

          • Mark says:

            @David N

            I thought I did say why the differences matter – if the *real* cost (the real, real cost) of production is work, then at any particular moment, the cost of production is being borne by the worker.

            You can construct a story whereby the capitalist was previously a worker, or in actual fact is a worker… but it is by no means clear that this is actually true.

            Don’t you have to assume that people are free to make choices for marginal utility to tell us anything? We certainly aren’t free as individuals to choose the system in which we live.

            @Urstoff
            Yes, certainly, I’d prefer to work than to not work, but couldn’t you say the same thing about pretty much anything? Man with gun tells me to do something, can that rightly be called a positive experience?
            It could be worse doesn’t mean that it is good.

          • Urstoff says:

            Given that it’s voluntary (unlike the man with the gun), then it is a net positive. After all, you admit that you’d rather have the goods from the work than have those eight hours back. Work may suck, but the money sure is nice. You can’t just consider one side of the equation.

          • David N says:

            @Mark,

            Work is just part of the real, real, cost of production. In some industries it’s most of the cost, in others it’s a small fraction of the cost.

            Costs can be spread out over time, so it’s disingenuous to gauge fairness, or whatever it is you are attempting to measure, by what is happening at “any particular moment.”

            The concept of marginal utility doesn’t depend on what “system” you live under. It depends on their being more than one use for a particular thing. The marginal utility is the value of the “next best use.”

          • Dirdle says:

            @Urstoff: What’s not voluntary about the man with the gun? He points a gun at you and tells you to give him your wallet. You then give him your wallet voluntarily, because you want to have your wallet less than you want not to get shot.

            All gunpoint duress does is change your preferences in favour of a particular set of actions like “doing what the gun-holder says.” All systemic financial duress does is change your preferences in favour of a set like “doing whatever my boss says.” Can you unambiguously draw a line between the two kinds of choice? Can you imagine no reason to argue for drawing the line elsewhere?

          • John Schilling says:

            The armed robber threatens to make my life worse than it would have been if the robber had never entered my life, even if I chose not to deal with the robber at all.

            My dealings with the boss are mutually consensual, and the worst outcome on the table leaves me no worse off than if the boss had never been born.

            “First do no harm” is a relatively unambiguous line, and one that many people like to use for just this reason.

      • BBA says:

        That’s, ah, not really what I was going for. The only Marxist ideas I endorse are of the Groucho variety.

      • Nornagest says:

        An alternate explanation, one that might be borne out better by the data, would be “megaprojects usually suck”.

    • Zippy says:

      Is there some reason that, in this particular case, the free market shouldn’t be left to its own devices?

      (It also seems to me like airlines should pay a carbon tax– in a way that I am not qualified to specify– for the reasons considered in A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto. But this makes the situation even worse for airlines.)

      • BBA says:

        Leave the free market to its own devices – which if you’re really serious means ending the cross-subsidy of commercial aircraft by military purchases – and the entire industry collapses.

        • John Schilling says:

          Source?

          I won’t speak for Airbus, but the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company is a separate top-level division of Boeing, with Boeing Defense, Space, and Security on the other side of the wall. From the company’s 2014 form 10K (one of the forms where fakery gets the CEO sent to federal prison) the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company is independently profitable, generates more than 65% of Boeing’s gross revenue and 85% of its operating income. Income from BCAC exceeds Boeing’s corporate-wide administrative overhead and R&D expenditures.

          This does not seem to be a company that will collapse if the alleged “subsidy” from military aircraft purchases goes away.

        • Zippy says:

          John Schilling’s comment notwithstanding (for the sake of argument), if the industry isn’t useful enough that people want to pay for its continued existence, then is there any particular reason I should want to keep it around?

          (I imagine naively that the industry would remain the form of fewer, more expensive flights. But this would probably qualify as the “collapse” you’ve mentioned)

        • Anonymous says:

          If that were true, it would suggest that air travel really is not a good idea, that it would be a better use of our money to transport goods and people in a different way (probably numerous different ways).

          The fact that neither one of us seems to believe that conclusion is correct suggests that your claim, that the airline industry would collapse if not for subsidy, is false.

    • ReluctantEngineer says:

      The Department of Transportation issued a report a few years ago on the subsidies received by different modes of transportation. Over the period studied (1990-2002), commercial aviation received net federal subsidies of less than $15/thousand passenger miles (compared to, for example, over $150/thousand passenger miles for passenger rail). Completely removing the subsidy would not seriously alter the economics of passenger air travel, as it would hit all the carriers equally (the ruthless price competition is mostly between carriers, rather than between air travel and other modes of transit).

      It can also be helpful to know a little bit about where airlines spend their money (this article by the WSJ has a nice infographic). Historically, labor has been by far the biggest cost for airlines, although in recent years fuel costs have overtaken it. As this IATA report notes, air transportation is the most unionized private industry in the U.S., and the unions are able to extract significant wage premiums for their workers relative to workers in other industries with similar skill levels. So there is room to cut costs if need be (indeed, several unions have had no choice but to make concessions in recent years in the wake of various airline bankruptcies).

      Speaking of those airline bankruptcies, they were the unsurprising result of corporations that had been set up to operate in the heavily regulated, pre-1978, CAB-controlled industry suddenly being set loose in an actual free market and being unable to adapt quickly enough. Southwest, the only major airline that was around at the time that has not since filed for bankruptcy, only operated intra-state flights prior to 1978, and had thus avoided having to deal with federal regulations and was therefore more sensibly structured.

      tl;dr The aviation industry is in fact capable of standing on its own.

  31. Deiseach says:

    I don’t know if I’m lowering the tone of debate on here, but I saw this and I have to leave it up here for comment.

    So – all that stuff from certain online sites about how you, too, can become (or at least do a good enough imitation of) Alpha Males and keeping your women (plural, because you’re not tying yourself down to just the one) in line and chasing off Beta Cuckold Orbiters – I’m not going to say it.

    I’m going to think it, but I’m not going to say it 🙂

    • nyccine says:

      I think you’re getting tripped up over the term “harem.” And also a complete misunderstanding of pick-up artists.

      They dynamic laid out in the article is “modestly endowed monkey has to fight off other, presumably better-endowed monkeys to keep his mates from cheating on him.”

      In this scenario, the PUAs are the ones trying to screw the females behind the loudmouth’s back – your joke scenario actually says the opposite of what you were going for. You’re also mixing up terms really badly (a PUA would never worry about a “beta cuckold orbiter” scoring with his women; in the PUA view, betas don’t get laid, they get to be the shoulder to cry on before she goes out to sleep with the jerk again.)

      Also, PUA is about getting laid; if that meant having the smallest junk while being the loudest jerk, that’s what PUA would recommend. Nobody would be shamed by being accused of being under-endowed if that’s what women wanted.

  32. TheFrannest says:

    Here’s an question I’ve been pondering: are plot twists a recent invention?

    From what I see, being concerned with spoilers is not something people were very familiar with. “Tragedy” and “comedy” in Shakespearean times flat out referred to how the play is going to end, so you start watching a comedy and you already know that it will end well, usually with a marriage. Victorian era novels have these chapter titles “Chapter XVII, in which the hero does this and that and then the following happens”.

    The Twilight Zone has excellently written episodes but many of them are just relying entirely on an obvious or pointless twist, like “the humans were the alien invaders the whole time”. And it was a popular show! People liked it a lot. The earliest mention of the word “spoiler” in sources that I know of is National Lampoon in the 70s just straight up publishing a list of spoilers for a bunch of things, which is something that, in my opinion, indicates unfamiliarity with a concept. The earliest official concern with spoilers that I know of is Agatha Christie – Mousetrap in particular. Murder mystery novels are really the type of media that spoilers completely break.

    Literary criticism and old-timey book reviews didn’t seem to care about spoilers in the slightest, with contemporary Hemingway book reviews I’ve seen describing plot-central details out in the open.

    In these days, spoiler concerns are the accepted norm, and so are twists, with much of genre fiction and genre fiction-like media (like videogames, TV shows and such) being criticized if it lacks twists.

    • Deiseach says:

      In its defence, back when first shown, the “obvious” plot twists were not so obvious, or so well known, to the original audience.

      After seeing how-knows-how-many slasher movies, you can pick out “She’s next for the maniac murderer. He’s dead. She’s going to be the Final Girl.” That, after all, was the point of the “Scream” franchise initially. But that only happens when you have the genre established long enough to have developed tropes, and an audience which has grown up watching that genre and savvy enough to recognise the tropes.

      Back in the Dim’n’Distant past “Ahhhhhh – it’s a cookbook!” was an unexpected twist!

      Some of the episodes, of course, were in-jokes that winked at the audience precisely because they were old chestnuts that everyone knew and groaned at. The novelty was not “Will the hero and heroine end up together?”, it’s “How will the writer pull it off this time?”

      Rom-coms are the example of this; we know Jack and Jill who start off hating each other are going to be standing under a floral archway exchanging gooey looks and reciting self-written vows at the end, it’s in the journey there that the novelty resides.

      I think concern with spoilers is a modern idea because audiences are so jaded; if you’ve got Action Movie #99 out of 200 coming out this weekend in a cinema near you, you need to keep plot details secret enough that you can entice people to see your movie and not go next door to Action Movie #150 or even Rom-Com #56

      And there is so much pre-marketing done, with trailers and stills and interviews and the cast sent out to publicise it on every chat show and convention panel, that you nearly don’t need to go see the actual movie in order to be familiar with it; for example, I haven’t seen “Mad Max: Fury Road” but having seen so much discussion, fanart, links to interviews, etc. on my Tumblr about it from the Americans who saw it before it came out over here, I feel as if I have seen it. For del Toro’s new movie, “Crimson Peak”, I already know – because of a review – whodunnit as regards any murders (if murders do happen, I’m not saying they do, I’m not saying they don’t, murders what murders?). If I’m going to watch it – and I very well may do – it’ll be because it’s Guillermo del Toro and he makes damn-fine arthouse movies on a popular cinema scale.

      • TheFrannest says:

        The clumsy inability to apply twists in a coherent, logical manner or to not rely on them so incredibly much kind of indicates the as-of-yet unfamiliarity with the concept.

        The best bar none TZ episode I’ve seen is about the god-kid, and it’s the best because it doesn’t rely on pointless plot twists. Some of the episodes are about excessive karmic punishments that happen to people – guy’s a dick, hates people, wants to read, world annihilated, glasses get broken. But many are just, “Wax statues start moving? What could that mean? What mystery lies in store? For, I see, we are all from the planet zibble-zobble where everyone is actually made out of wax and the story you’ve just seen has absolutely NO POINT.”

        It’s a difference between an idea and a conceit. “What if humans had three arms” is a conceit, “what if aliens had three arms, two on one side and one on the other, and were asymmetric, what would that imply about their psychology?” is an idea.

    • keranih says:

      We’ve(*) had trickster tales for forever and always – telling stories with a surprise ending have been a stock part of our libraries, even back when all our stories were spoken/sung. We’ve also had contempt for badly done plot twists for a very long time – deus ex machina is not a complement.

      One might also recall that storytellers didn’t so much *invent* stories, as they did perform the retelling of stories that everyone knew in an enjoyable fashion. In much the same way, as Deiseach says below, it wasnt so much *what* happened as it was *how* it happened.

      It’s also important to remember that “spoilers” were not so much an issue when it would take forever to get something in print. Spoilers and fannish despair was an issue as far back as Charles Dickens and “Little Nell”, when sailors would shout the updates over the railing in Boston even as the ships from London were docking.

      Finally, before widespread literacy and cheap penny dreadfuls, the lack of tons of printed material meant a lot of re-reading, which meant that works which improved upon rereading were valued over those whose best effect was had through shock value/first exposure. Now we have TONS of new stuff. all the time, so that we can have first times over and over again.

      (*) I use “we” to mean humans and western lit, both at the same time. Sorry. My exposure to Asian lit is nonexistant outside of some poetry and less detective fiction, and my knowledge of African literature even less.

      • TheFrannest says:

        > deus ex machina is not a complement.

        First, Deus ex Machina isn’t about twists, but about writing oneself into a corner, second, it was completely expected that a god is going to save the day because the plays themselves were written to praise whatever god.

        • keranih says:

          No, it was not expected that a god was going to save the day, at least not in a way completely tangential to the plot so far. (That gods would be involved, duh, of course, are you wanting a play set in some crazy world where there are no gods? Wow, that’s some weird wine you’re drinking there, friend…)

          The gods could make the hero’s situation worse or better, but it had to be in a way that the audience would accept. “Rocks fall, everyone dies” was unsatisfactory then, much as it is now.

          And still dem counts as a ‘plot twist’ – it’s just a badly done plot twist.

    • Mark says:

      What about:
      “Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane”; and now a wood
      Comes toward Dunsinane”
      “MacDuff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”?

      For that matter I seem to remember seeing a version of 1001 nights with a self-fufilling prophecy that was kind of plot-twisty.

      • TheFrannest says:

        Self-fulfilling prophecies are an applied belief in inescapability of fate. You can’t fight fate, character is told that X will happen, does Y to actively prevent this, Y inevitably leads to X.

      • Nornagest says:

        Oh, that sort of thing’s all over oral traditions. The usual word for it is “quibble“.

    • onyomi says:

      One thing that is noticeable to me looking at the history of media: every time a new medium is introduced, it takes artists a while to fully realize its potential. Artists do not start working in a new medium with a full grasp of all its possibilities and pitfalls; instead, they usually attempt to do whatever they were previously doing, but in a new medium, often resulting in works which may have been kind of revolutionary at the time, but which look weird and awkward in retrospect.

      Consider early film: the makeup, staging, and even acting technique are much closer to stage acting and makeup and costume. As late as the 60s I see films with makeup and acting styles which say to me, “this is a holdover from stage acting.”

      The same thing happened with “novels” separately in Europe and Asia, and probably elsewhere. In Asia, which is the tradition I’m more familiar with, novels grew out of a combination of oral storyteller performance, quasi-fictional-but-not-quite-comfortable-presenting-itself-as-fiction prose anecdotes, and elite poetic culture. The result is, in something like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you find things which make perfect sense for a storyteller, like periodic recap, ending of “last time’s” episode in the first half of each chapter while introducing a new episode to be left on a cliffhanger for the second half of chapter, and so on.

      In the prose stories you find people justifying the writing of fiction in weird ways by making it sound like they just heard this from a reliable source. I think the Western epistolary novel is also a gesture toward this kind of reality.

      Anyway, when early novels, plays, or whatever feel awkward to you, or seem not to have “invented” a technique which is now the bread and butter of what you consume, consider what the media you now consume enables and/or makes desirable which may not have been true of earlier media, as well as the possibility that people just hadn’t figured out the full potential of a given media at a certain time.

      And, like Deiseach says, we are very jaded now; it takes more to surprise us.

    • Anatoly says:

      It’s hard to shake off the feeling that you’ve noticed something real there, despite some good objections in comments. When the story of the Trojan Horse is told in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, we’re told up front about the plan, and then the bewilderment of the Trojans is described when attackers come from inside the horse. It seems certain that if the story was invented and written up today, the reader/watcher/listener would not be told of the plan first.

      Perhaps it’s not so much the plot twist on its own, but the feelings of surprise and shock that modern audiences seem to require (or appreciate) more. There’s so much emphasis on not knowing what the hell is going on, and then learning what the hell is going on.

      Another perhaps related thing I’ve noticed is how everything nowadays seems to start in medias res.

      • NN says:

        Ancient epics have a very different context to most modern fiction. Virtually everyone attending a bard’s performance of an epic would have already heard the story many times since their childhood, so they already knew what was going to happen. The thrill was in hearing this particular bard’s spin on the story. The closest thing we have nowadays are remakes and “reimaginings.”

      • LHN says:

        When the story of the Trojan Horse is told in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, we’re told up front about the plan, and then the bewilderment of the Trojans is described when attackers come from inside the horse. It seems certain that if the story was invented and written up today, the reader/watcher/listener would not be told of the plan first.

        Even more: the only circumstance in which we’d be told the plan up front in a modern story is if it’s going to fail, or at least go interestingly wrong in a way that will require the heroes to go to extraordinary lengths to salvage.

      • Aegeus says:

        In medias res is definitely not a modern thing – both the Illiad and the Odyssey start out that way, and the term itself dates back to Horace. Wikipedia can cite examples of it throughout history.

        Maybe it’s more common nowadays; you’re not the first person I’ve seen complaining that everyone has to start off with a bang and nobody ever paces themselves properly, but I would attribute that to the fact that there’s a lot more modern fiction in general, so you’re going to see more of pretty much any trope.

      • Deiseach says:

        But shows like “Columbo” turned that on its head (and so went back to the Iliad model): we knew from the start whodunnit and how they did it; the appeal of the episode was how Columbo was going to trip them up and tie them up in knots in self-contradictions and get them to do stupid self-incriminating things like revisit the scene of the crime or try to make sure they really had destroyed the murder weapon.

    • NN says:

      From what I see, being concerned with spoilers is not something people were very familiar with. “Tragedy” and “comedy” in Shakespearean times flat out referred to how the play is going to end, so you start watching a comedy and you already know that it will end well, usually with a marriage.

      Most of Shakespeare’s non-historical works were based on existing stories, so a large chunk of his audience was already going to be familiar with the story and know how it was going to end. As such, he didn’t bother trying to surprise the audience with trick endings and instead he tried to entertain people with new twists on stories that they already knew.

      Romeo and Juliet, for example, is based on an Italian folktale that had been written and published in England for more than 30 years before Shakespeare got around to writing it. Hence why he didn’t see any problem with spoiling the play’s ending in the very first scene.

  33. sweeneyrod says:

    There is a first-world country that has a certain group of people who mostly live in ghettos, have lower levels of education, and are highly overrepresented in low-status jobs and organized crime. Sound familiar?

    I’m talking about Japan and the Burakumin.

    • onyomi says:

      Historically, Japan had a stronger sense of taboo regarding various sorts of defilement (kegare) than probably even most traditional societies. This is perhaps the flipside of having a native folk religion (Shinto) which emphasizes cleanliness, purity, birth, renewal, etc.

      It clearly lingers in the treatment of the burakumin; what’s interesting about them is how you can’t tell them apart from other Japanese by their physical appearance or accent or anything else. Though maybe that just makes them scary: don’t become a butcher! Do you want people to think you are a burakumin?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Actually just talking about that earlier today!

      The question I find most interesting: how did this group form? Were normal people working as butchers, and then somebody said “Nope, from now on you’re ostracized!” ? Or was butcher always the lowest status occupation, and only the most desperate and hopeless were willing to take it up and end up in the untouchable caste?

      The different stories would have very different morals in terms of transmission of human capital stuff

      • Deiseach says:

        Untouchable castes form around the disgust reaction; the people who deal with the messy stuff that is necessary for society to function, but which people don’t want to touch themselves.

        Butchers, people who bury/cremate corpses, the ones who do the dirty work (literally): they become tabu because they’re dealing with liminal states (disposal of the dead involves the possibility of ghosts and spirits; butchers are killers who are not governed by the same codes as warriors and have a lower place). And of course, poverty and desperation and coercion have their place there; if the dirty, hard, manual work is done by the poor and the criminal and the slaves, then by association people who might become poor or criminals or slaves are only fit for that kind of work and are not fit to mingle with ordinary decent people. The Ganguli translation of the “Mahabharata” has quite a lot about the different castes as part of the text, and it’s eye-opening stuff to read the virulent insistence that the very lowest caste not only cannot, but should not, be taught or shown anything that might lift them out of that state – e.g. they should be punished if they attempt specific religious ceremonies, people who teach them or perform them for them must be punished, because they are destined to be the degraded and despised classes and are more or less damned (though such a term is never used of course) to remain in that state, and any attempt to let them acquire the kind of virtue or merit from religious devotion the higher castes can acquire is directly against the will of the gods.

        It’s the same thing that happened with public executioners in Europe. And indeed, we see the same split between doctors, who are educated men with university educations, and surgeons, who had their origin in barber-surgeons, who are blood-letters and limb-hackers but are much lowlier in status and not at all regarded. Before modern medicine, surgery was butchery, and surgeons were as highly (or not) regarded as butchers. That’s the root of the usage that medical doctors are “Dr” but surgeons are “Mr”!

        The best quality a surgeon possessed was speed, because the faster you could cut someone open (or cut off a diseased limb), the better chance they wouldn’t bleed out or go into fatal shock.

        It’s been done in a SF setting with Asimov’s story Strikebreaker; because it’s set on an asteroid colony which is enclosed, everything needs to be recycled (including urine for drinking water). The family which operate the recycling have, over the generations, been made untouchables who cannot mingle in ordinary society.

        You can see how the repressed disgust at the necessity of living in a completely closed system (drinking urine triggering the disgust reflex) has been displaced onto the people most closely associated with it; the colonists can and do, on the surface, appear completely unconcerned about where their water comes from and completely rational about it and the filtration etc. it undergoes, but the underlying impulse breaks out there.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          “It’s the same thing that happened with public executioners in Europe.”

          As Joseph de Maistre had a space alien say in the Seventh St. Petersburg Dialogue, this is how you would rationally treat indiscriminate killers, not the poor guy who kills someone found guilty of a capital crime after a fair trial. Yet the lumieres shared the general disgust reaction to the executioner and positive attitude to military glory.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        It’s almost certain that there were Japanese butchers before Buddhist missionaries arrived in Japan (552 AD or earlier) and Empress Suiko made it high-status (~600). I think the Buddhists went “Nope, from now on you’re ostracized!” I can’t prove that they didn’t arrive to find that butchers were already the lowest status occupation, but it’s hard to prove a negative when this is just about the time literacy first appears in Japan.

        Wikipedia: “At the start of the Edo period (1603–1867), the social class system (more properly, a caste system, since it was based upon birth and not upon economics) was officially established as a means of designating hierarchy, and eta were placed at the lowest level, outside of the four main divisions of society.”

        Related, when Fa Xian made a pilgrimage to India shortly after 400 AD, his memoirs mention that the four main divisions of society are “all prosperous” and “kill no living thing nor drink wine, with the exception of Chandalas only. The Chandalas are named ‘evil men’ and dwell apart from others… The Chandalas only hunt and sell flesh.”

        • onyomi says:

          I think it predates and is largely unrelated to the Buddhist injunction against taking life. It has more to do with native Shinto notions of purity. Buddhists, for example, have nothing against undertakers, and even reject, to some extent, dichotomous thinking like “pure” and “impure.”

          Personally, I wonder if there isn’t also some faroff historical connection to non-Japanese ethnic groups. The Ainu are still looked down upon, but 1000 years ago, Southern Kyushu, Northern Honshu and all of Hokkaido were basically the territory of non-Japanese peoples, like the Emishi, whose name sounds suspiciously similar to Eta to me (the practice of writing Eta using characters meaning “filth in abundance” is not part of the original etymology).

          I wonder if, in attempting to integrate into Japanese society, these people weren’t at first shunted into undesirable occupations. I think such a pattern has happened with immigrants elsewhere (Irish police work in the US and European Jews and usury come to mind, though obviously, in many cases they had been there as long as the majority population, who nonetheless continued to view them as outsiders in most of European history).

          Originally they may have looked and sounded different, but over time those differences would have been erased in all but memory (this is totally just a random theory; discrimination against Eta and discrimination against non-Japanese ethnic groups may be historically unrelated).

          • Deiseach says:

            Looking and sounding different can be very fine distinctions; an Irish and an English person would broadly look the same, but at the time of anti-Irish discrimination there would have been a lot of “No, they look like monkeys! Look at their noses and jaws and the shape of their skulls and listen to their accent and they are very plainly not English!” while to a non-European the two would have been indistinguishable.

            Even to a European, probably, though perhaps not Americans 🙂

          • onyomi says:

            I don’t think most Japanese can tell either, though there are apparently some surnames with the association. Yakuza do have a distinctive mode of dress and speech, and a lot of Burakumin become Yakuza, but not all Yakuza are Burakumin.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        There was a similar group in France, the Cagots. Nobody is entirely sure how the group formed, or what distinguished them from non-Cagots. There were all sorts of strange beliefs about them, including that they were cannibals and that they had webbed feet. And while one of the trades they were restricted to was a reasonably unpleasant one (butcher), they were not allowed to engage in others (such as gravedigger or tanner) but were allowed to be rope-makers and carpenters.

        The one living person who admits to Cagot ancestry thinks that they are descended from converted Muslims, but others believe either that their ancestors had leprosy or some other unpleasant disease or that they were the remnants of a fallen guild of carpenters.

      • vV_Vv says:

        If I understand correctly, in many pre-modern societies there were professions with similar untouchable caste status. Typically they were all jobs, such as butcher, undertaker, various types of cleaner, even barber, etc. which involved handling dead, sick, or otherwise “unclean” stuff.

        This social insulation can be probably explained as a culturally evolved (perhaps on a biological basis) pathogen avoidance strategy.

        Japan is unusual in this regard just because it’s perhaps the only first-world society where such taboos still exist.

  34. Linch says:

    So I asked several groups on social media about the DRACOs question. This is one of the responses I’ve gotten (also the only one by a science PhD so far):

    “I’m going to try and be as diplomatic as I possibly can, but I can’t make any promises since you, this research, and this approach to funding have tripped multiple triggers of mine all at once.

    DRACOs are fusion proteins where one half binds to double-stranded RNA (which, despite this author’s wishful thinking, IS NOT specific to viruses) and one half carries a trigger for a cell-death program that is latent in almost all cells. The trigger only functions when multiple copies are near one another in the cell. The purported idea behind DRACOs is that they’ll bind to “virus-specific” dsRNAs in sufficient quantities to bring the triggers close enough to one another to specifically kill cells harboring viruses.

    There are a number of flaws with this approach, including but not limited to: 1) dsRNA isn’t specific to viruses (so DRACOs may kill healthy cells, too), 2) not all cells harboring viruses are actively making dsRNAs (so DRACO treatment might not even kill all of the cells it needs to), 3) even virally-infected cells can still be performing important functions for an organism (so you may not want to kill them), 4) the dsRNA-binding domains are non-specific by design, which means that they can easily target things like harmless endogenous retroviral transcripts, 5) this is a protein-based therapy, which will either require delivery via virus (oops) or massive, expensive direct injections of protein that will trigger an immune response.

    There are a ton of ways in which this therapy can fail, none of which have been adequately addressed in the TWO papers that have been published about DRACOs since 2011, only one of which originates from the “lab” that performed the initial study. Between the two papers, there’s a grand total of ONE experiment that puts DRACOs into living organisms, and it only reports on what happens to the virus, without looking at any potential side-effects to the mice that were treated.

    There are an enormous number of “promising” therapies for a variety of diseases that work beyond everyone’s wildest imagination in cultured cells, but ultimately fail (and fail hard) when used as an attempted therapy in real organisms. Most pharmaceutical development isn’t finding the drug that “treats” a disease, but instead, figuring out how to get that drug into cells in a living person. Without solid evidence that a treatment will actually work in something alive, it’s hard to justify continued funding to optimize that drug, let alone get it through the ten to twenty years of testing required for FDA approval. The one paper that he’s published represents perhaps 2% of all of the work required to make this a viable therapy (if it even can BECOME a viable therapy.)

    I think a Gofundme campaign for something like this is beyond inappropriate — it’s essentially preying on the ignorance of the laity to generate donations that might buy one year of research out of the 20+ required to bring this to market. In this particular case, the researcher soliciting funding has a MASSIVE financial conflict of interest, as he’s spent 10+ years of his career filing patents for this technology and will reap all of the financial benefits in the unlikely event that DRACOs make it to market.

    While the NIH has a $30 billion+ annual budget, that money is most definitely not just lying around. Any investigator at a 501(c)(3) organization can enter the competitive process for getting funding for their project; the vast majority of the NIH’s budget is already being spent on research that has gotten through this process. What this researcher is doing, in essence, is putting together a semi-slick marketing campaign to fleece donors AND try to generate public pressure on the NIH to fund him.”

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Thank you.

    • Jacob says:

      Much of that comment seems to be arguing against their marketing. The question shouldn’t be “will this therapy definitely work” as much as “is the probability of it working high enough to justify funding it some more” which is a highly subjective question.

      >generate donations that might buy one year of research out of the 20+ required to bring this to market.

      As the commenter so eloquently pointed out, there isn’t enough research to justify investment by drug companies. If there were he wouldn’t be on GoFundMe. If more studies are done and the technique continues to show promise, it will be much easier to get a pharma-company or other big funder interested.

      On a more technical note:

      1) From their PLoS paper: “Most viruses have double- or single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) genomes and produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication; the remainder of viruses have DNA genomes and typically produce long dsRNA via symmetrical transcription [4]–[5]. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally do not produce long dsRNA (greater than ∼21–23 base pairs)”. So it seems to me like dsRNA is a viable way to target virus.

      I’m not exactly wowed by the initial study but the initial results look good, it works both in cell culture and in live mice. So of course be skeptical, it will probably amount to nothing, but the same could’ve been said for everything that ever did amount to something beforehand.

      • Alexander Stanislaw says:

        A drug working in mice means very little. Only about 10% of drugs make it from Phase I trial to approval despite all of them having a plausible mechanism and promising preliminary results.

      • Deiseach says:

        As others have pointed out, working in a culture is one thing; working in humans is another.

        How many mice does it kill or do nothing for? Have we figures on that as well as “it works (sometimes for some things) in mice”?

    • weareastrangemonkey says:

      Don’t try to pick stocks unless you have inside information or good reason to think you have identified something that others, for some reason, cannot identify.

      So what have the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies both missed that we have not?

      Without a strong candidate answer to this question I don’t think donating is wise.

      • Mark says:

        Hmmmm… isn’t the better analogy – “put all your money into managed funds because those guys are the professionals”?
        Surely introducing an alternative funding mechanism can only help make the market for funding more efficient in the long term – if crowdfunding doesn’t achieve anything in comparison to traditional avenues then people will stop doing it.

        • weareastrangemonkey says:

          Not really. That wouldn’t make my point at all. People are trying to pick a winner here when there are lots of experts trying to pick winners too. The question is, “What have we seen that experts have missed?”

          Assuming Indiegogo improves the allocation of funds then it is going to be because it utilises different knowledge and preferences to that possessed by standard large scale investors. In two senses, the first sense is that people happen to know they would like something so they secure demand ahead of production. The second case, is that people have preferences not related to economic returns.

          This does not look like one of these cases, the guy is at MIT and has all the opportunities to get funding from large pharma companies and the government. They all want to fund effective medicines either for profit or by government mandate. They have experts who can evaluate the probability of success. These experts are better qualified than us in this case. I see no good reason why we think we should be able to outperform these guys.

          • Mark says:

            Well, that’s certainly a reasonable hypothesis. How should we test it?

            (You are most likely right, but whatever the individual expertise of the people involved in judging these things, I have less faith in the institutional arrangements being effective/rationally designed. )

          • weareastrangemonkey says:

            Your answer to the question “What have we seen that experts have missed?” is not that the experts have missed it but that there is something screwy about the institutional arrangements of big pharma and NIH that stop them seeing the value of the research. Okay, I don’t really see that as an actual answer to the question. What is it about the institutional details that stops them from realising and acting on this potentially very valuable research? I am sure the institutional arrangements are imperfect. None the less, I think it more likely that a group of people who know little about the process of developing medicine have missed something that is fairly obvious to people whose job it is to find promising medical research to fund and develop.

          • Mark says:

            “What is it about the institutional details that stops them from realising and acting on this potentially very valuable research?”

            Well, for one, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. I think its entirely plausible that people working for large institutions might be more risk averse than is desirable… and that is pretty much what the “valley of death” guys are saying.
            Perhaps traditional charities would be a better way of solving the problem (if in fact the problem exists), but, to be honest, if this campaign is directing funds from other indiegogo projects ($155,000 for a temperature adjustable mug!) it’s actually pretty much zero cost even if it ends up doing nothing.

    • Slander says:

      Molecular genetics PhD student here.

      Confirming that #5 was the most glaring problem that stood out to me about the concept and very possibly what sank a grant proposal, especially given how ambitious his language is. As an earlier poster noted, a more efficient way of applying protein-based therapies would be a much bigger discovery.

      Antigenicity of the DRACOs is of particular concern since he seems to envision these being taken every time someone gets the sniffles. If they are antigenic, they would quickly become at best ineffective in repeated doses and at worst, dangerous.

      #1-4 are plausibly problematic, but less so. I would guess that he has all of these in mind and it’s very reasonable that he hasn’t yet tested them:

      1. Fair, although he does explicitly note this and explains (thinks at least) that naturally-occurring dsRNA is too small to set off DRACOs.

      2. This one is weak. The risk with acute viral infections is typically that they will kill/damage the host before an effective immune response can be mounted (one that doesn’t kill/damage the host itself ideally). Existing antivirals don’t stop 100% of circulating virus or infected cells either, but they buy time for the immune system to get its shit together. Often this will actually be better than clearing the virus outright since it can lead to lasting immunity.

      3. This is true, but it’s worth noting that SCORCHED EARTH is already kind of the immune system’s go-to for handling virally-infected cells. I think this would only be problematic if the DRACOs could enter immune-privileged areas (brain, eyes, etc.) that circulating immune cells cannot. Which is quite possible.

      4. Also true, however dsRNA is already a primary target of the innate immune system. This doesn’t seem risky unless the DRACOs are exquisitely more sensitive to it and his mice not dropping dead suggests (obviously doesn’t yet prove) otherwise.

      Also concerning is that he indicates clearance/survival of the mice when he treated immediately before or after infection. With most viruses, there’s a huge gap between when you are infected and when you get sick.

      It would be much more helpful (and almost conspicuously absent) to show clearance/survival when treating after symptoms appear.

      I agree with everything else said. Even a wildly successful GoFundMe campaign would not get this project anywhere near clinical trials. My suspicion was the same- I think he’s looking for hype and publicity more than money to get the NIH or a private investor on board.

      Edit – These kinds of major concerns and minor nitpicks plague any project at this stage. It’s a reasonable idea and the VERY preliminary data he has doesn’t look sketchy, I think he’s just misrepresenting how long and how risky the road to clinical usage is.

  35. HeelBearCub says:

    I mentioned affirmative consent in a recent thread, and my belief that a post discussing affirmative consent would not be likely to generate much in the way of positive dialogue. Some posters seemed to think that we actually could have some sort of positive dialogue. So this post is intended to make the case that affirmative consent is the standard that we should all desire.

    If this topic is too close to other forbidden topics, please accept my apologies and delete the post.

    The points are relatively simple. The first is that affirmative consent is how we determine the presence or absence of assault in general already. If I am fond of bare knuckles boxing and walk up to you and raise my fists in the the style of 19th century boxers, even if you were to raise your fists and smile, if I simply commenced to punch you this would be assault on my part. Yet, if you clearly communicate consent, and there is no coercion, then my striking you is not assault. If I were to walk up to random stranger, declare “punch-buggy” and strike them on the arm, this would also be assault. Yet an ongoing game of punch-buggy would not be assault. Consent could be withdrawn for the game of punch-buggy at any time, and escalating the arm punching to face punching would not be allowed without consent. Thus, the concept that affirmative consent is some arcane, legalistic fun-destroying standard seems to fall. We apply the concept of affirmative consent all the time. I think the the punch-buggy concept can easily be expanded to understand that even non-verbal consent can still be affirmative consent.

    The second is more basic. Do you really want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you? Do you want to find out later that they actually did not want to (regardless of any legal or disciplinary peril)? If someone can actually answer this question with a “yes” and defend it, I will be interested but surprised.

    It is my contention that any issue people have with affirmative consent have very little to do with the actual standard itself, and more to do with how they perceive it might be applied, and especially in how it may be applied in an American society that is extraordinarily conflicted about how good and/or desirable sex is.

    • DrBeat says:

      How the standard might be (and will be and provably is) applied is inseparable from our assessment of the standard.

      I do not want to have sex with someone and later find out they did not want to. I do not think that all things I do not want to happen are things I should be punished for, and even if it is punishable, life-annihilation is not a fair punishment for that. I should not be punished for other people’s poor communication or other people’s sense of social obligation.

      And I should never be punished for something that only became a crime after the fact, in retrospect, after someone changed their mind after their past actions. ESPECIALLY if there is an incredibly powerful social movement that is putting in a lot of effort to change people’s minds about their past actions in order to reclassify them as crimes they were victims of.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @DrBeat – the specific argument is that positive consent is the standard we should all want in our intimate interactions, not that it should be legally enforced. All of your arguments apply to the later, not the former.

        • Anonymous says:

          I vehemently disagree that it ought to be something everyone is required, or even expected, to follow. However, with regards to use of affirmative consent as a standard, a possible solution that strikes me is having each nightclub or similar inform patrons of expected conduct within. If a university club wants to enforce affirmative consent then, fine.

          It’s the claim that everyone ought to follow these rules in their own lives everywhere, with everyone, in spite of any existing level of intimacy, in spite of any precedents, even in spite of both parties wanting to opt out, that I not only disagree with but find very disturbing.

        • DrBeat says:

          How the standard might be (or will be or provably is) applied is inseparable from my assessment of the standard.

    • Anonymous says:

      I’m not sure the analogy of intimacy to violence is useful. Most people want to engage in intimacy with some people. Very few people want to engage in violence for fun. It makes sense to get more assurance that someone really wants to do something that few people want to do than it does for something many people want to do.

      One of the problems I have with the affirmative consent idea is that you can’t opt out: that, as far as I’m aware, it is not intended to be an initial framework that couples can mutually agree to disregard, but something that people are required to follow even if both partners don’t want to.

      Another problem is that it treats all couples as equal, with precedent counting for nothing: you require affirmative consent from your wife of fifty years just as much as you do from a one-time partner. I can’t help but read political motivation into this.

      When applied to strangers the affirmative consent idea seems flimsy, but when applied to long-term couples it seems quite obviously wrong. Squeezing your wife’s bum without asking first is plainly not the same thing as squeezing a stranger’s bum without asking first. Part of this is that she is much less likely to seriously object than a stranger is. But even if she does, the assumption that she would be okay with it seems entirely defensible. If you disagree, why follow precedent in any situation? Do you talk to your friends the same way you talk to strangers? If not, why not?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Tens of millions of people engage in various martial arts on a weekly basis. Pickup basketball, many of whose activities would be assault if done to random people on a city street, is done daily without incident.

        Affirmative consent does absolutely allow for the random squeeze of your spouse, if they affirmatively consent to random squeezing in the future. In the context of a 20 year marriage, you will absolutely know whether your spouse likes getting a random squeeze. The confusion about whether this OK or not I think mostly comes from uncharitable reasoning about what affirmative consent means.

        • Jiro says:

          If I were go to the authorities and claim that someone used a single karate chop on me while I was in a martial arts studio, but that it was assault because I didn’t consent to it, they would laugh at me and tell me to go away, even though they would, in fact, be committing the crime of assault against me if my description was accurate. The authorities would *not* do anything that seriously inconveniences the alleged assaulter on the basis of my accusation, unless I reported a continuing pattern of harassment.

          No-affirmative-consent type rape accusations don’t work that way.

          The confusion about whether this OK or not I think mostly comes from uncharitable reasoning about what affirmative consent means.

          No, the “confusion” is about what you have to do to prove the existence of affirmative consent to the tribunal that punishes you. What is necessary for there to actually be affirmative consent is not the same thing as what is necessary to prove it.

          It’s only safe to give a random squeeze to your 20 year spouse because your spouse won’t be taking you to the tribunal in the first place, not because you actually would be able to defend yourself by saying “they like getting a random squeeze”.

          • alexp says:

            If I were in a boxing gym and somebody punched me while I wasn’t wearing gloves, wearing a helmet or mouthpiece, or carrying pads, then it could very well be adjudicated as assault.

            Though in practice, such a situation would most likely be dealt with internally.

          • John Schilling says:

            But that would mean that the outcome of a criminal trial might hinge on what sort of clothing the alleged victim was wearing. This, I am repeatedly assured, is intolerable.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling:
            Is that really in the spirit of honest debate? Or is that just an attempt to signal your disdain?

        • Anonymous says:

          If you were playing basketball with some people, and someone approached and appeared to be wanting to join in, I think it would be justifiable if you were to throw the ball to them. Certainly more justifiable than throwing a ball at some stranger in the street.

          I would defend my reading of the meaning of affirmative consent as charitable because when I’ve heard it described in the past it was along the lines of what I argued against in my post. I checked Wikipedia before submitting too and that seemed to back up my impression. If affirmative consent, to you, can involve non verbal consent (which presumably can’t be that explicit, I imagine you’re talking about flirty eyes and smiles, not vigorous head nodding and hand signals), and can be discarded at the behest of a couple for an unlimited amount of time into the future until one party wants to reinstate it, and precedent can allow for assumption that the rules are more lax with someone you’re already intimate with, and can vary depending on the environment you’re in… Well, then I’m not sure what distinguishes affirmative consent from the kind of implicit consent we rely on now.

          • Jiro says:

            The fact that you can’t find any differences between affirmative consent and what we already had should be a sign that you probably didn’t understand affirmative consent very well. People don’t go around making up random new terms for things we already have.

            The difference, as far as I can tell, seems to be burden of proof. Nonverbal consent still counts as affirmative consent … as long as you’re not on trial, but if you’re on trial, nonverbal consent is no more helpful to your case than no consent.

          • John Schilling says:

            The fact that you can’t just give us a simple explanation of how affirmative consent differs from what we have now, but insist that it is obvious to all right-thinking people, should be a sign that you are in no way ready to be proposing laws or formal policies based on an affirmative-consent standard.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Jiro

            Or that HBC’s definition differs from every other definition of affirmative consent I’ve heard. One specific example I’ve seen floated is that explicit consent must be reacquired every ten minutes, which clearly violates HBC’s specification that consent for unlimited amounts of time into the future can be given.

            Perhaps you’re right that I’m wrongly conflating societal standards and legal standards, but I’m not sure how comforting it is to be told that it’s totally okay to do something, but that also I should be able to be imprisoned for doing it.

          • DrBeat says:

            People go around making up new terms for things we already have all the time, especially when it allows them to (try to) change the emotional connotation of something, or to backdoor in their crazy ideas by placing them in a made-up category that otherwise covers “stuff we already had”.

            The latter appears to be what “affirmative consent standard” is about. There’s two ways to interpret “affirmative consent standard”: the way that is “pretty much what we have now”, and the way that is “ridiculously destructive and untenable because it prioritizes the ability to hurt men over every other concern.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Consent is how you defend against assault charges in the context of games and other organized activities. It is the standard that prevents each individual karate chop from being assault.

            If the opponent were to sink to the ground and stop moving and you continued to punch, kick and hit them, that would still be assault, regardless of the consent for participating in karate sparring.

        • I don’t know if you followed the recent case where someone was arrested and charged with rape for having sex with his wife. They had been married for a long time, it was apparently an affectionate marriage. The wife had (I think) Altzheimers, was in some sort of old age home. The husband visited, had sex with her, was arrested on the theory that she was unable to give assent. Not, however, convicted.

          But what really bothers me about the affirmative assent standard is that it feels like the law telling people how they are permitted to make love—a different version of the same pattern as laws against homosexuality. I don’t think religion has much to do with opposition to homosexuality, given that the pattern exists across a wide range of different societies with different religions. The underlying motive is that homosexual sex feels icky to most people—dirty, unclean.

          A common element in sexual activity for some, probably many, people is seduction. One party, usually the woman, is supposed to be reluctant but not entirely unwilling, gradually yielding, in theory due to increasing sexual arousal. I see it mostly in my response to porn. A story where two people jump into bed and run through the standard series of sex acts is a lot less arousing than a story in which one or both of them gradually yields to temptation.

          Affirmative assent means people who disapprove of that particular pattern of sex play threatening to punish other people who engage in it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            This seems very far afield from the kind of consent conversation that is happening around affirmative consent.

            End of life issues are very tricky and complicated. This particular case would also seem to be complicated by our general unwillingness to consider it tasteful for the elderly to be sexual.

            But, even past those points, what if the patient was in a vegetative state brought on by a stroke? Would you have the same reaction?

            There seems to be an endless supply of prosecutors making bad decisions about cases that involve sex, though. At that goes to my point about the general duality of the US mind when it comes to sex.

          • Tibor says:

            The following is a very wild speculation, but it seems like that to me (possible because I only see the data points that fit into my model):

            It may have actually something to do with religion, or rather the form of religion. This sort of thing seems to be more pervasive in protestant rather than catholic countries.

            Protestantism seems to me to be closer to actually taking itself earnestly and living according to some rules and in a sense, purity seems to be an important part of it. Hence you have windows with no curtains in many houses in protestant countries, whereas this happens pretty much never in catholic ones (in Germany, one can tell the religion of the part of the country by looking at the architecture, it is interesting to see how the protestant Niedersachsen differs from the catholic Bavaria).

            To me, catholicism seems to be more about the ritual than actually living according to some rules. That is not entirely true, but when you can always just come to the priest for confession and be forgiven breaking the rules is not that big a deal. This is why I also like it better (despite all its flaws, corrupt Church etc.) than protestantism*. This comparison probably works worse with non-christian religions. Hindu is obsessed with purity but it is a different kind of purity than that of the protestant christians. I also don’t know how orthodox christianity fits here as I know very little about it except that they do not acknowledge the Bishop of Rome as the Pontifex Maximus and use a wrong calendar. It could obviously be all just finding patterns where there are none. Still, maybe it is something someone else noticed as well and has something interesting to say about.

            *I myself am agnostic and come from probably the most atheist country in the world where 75% people state they are not religious in the census, so I at least like to think that I can look at it as an uninvolved observer. Then again the country was historically (and I would say still is culturally to a degree) catholic (or rather re-catholized during the counter-reformation), so that may be a source of bias.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Tibor:
            Well, my common wrapper word for the kind of mind set I am talking about is “Puritanism”. I believe this is a rather common formulation of the problem. If you have read Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” you can see that this formulation goes back to 1850 and before.

          • Tibor says:

            HeelBearCub: Exactly. And puritanism seems to me to be a predominantly protestant trait. “Catholic puritan” almost seems like an oxymoron to me. Which again seems to me to have a lot to do with the confession. For a catholic a sin is something to be forgiven or at worst accruing a few years in purgatory (not that big a deal if followed by eternity in heaven). For a protestant a sin is something to burn in hell for forever if it is too abundant, hence the need to keep the soul pure. But I am no theologian and maybe my understanding of this is wrong.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Tibor: “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. … No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day. Do you think such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins?” — Luther to Melanchthon, Letter 99 (1 August 1521)

            The Puritans were specifically Calvinists,

          • hlynkacg says:

            HeelBearCub says: This seems very far afield from the kind of consent conversation that is happening around affirmative consent.

            In that case, can you be more specific about the kind and context of the conversation you are referring to? From where I’m standing David seems to have summarized the issue it up rather well.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @hlynkacg:
            Someone who is far enough into Alzheimer’s that they are vegetative (I don’t know if this is the case here) is a really different kind of “we have been consenting sex for 40 years” than someone who has all of their cognitive functions.

            I doubt that a rape prosecution is warranted, but I would want to know the details. I’m also doubtful that a rape prosecution actually happened. This seems like it could be the kind of story that is reported breathlessly by the news and then looks completely different when you examine the details.

          • Tibor says:

            Le Maistre Chat: Apparently, I don’t know enough about religion 🙂 Thanks!

          • HBC doubts that a rape prosecution actually happened.

            “An Iowa jury found 78-year-old Henry V. Rayhons not guilty of raping his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. ”

            http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-22/iowa-man-accused-of-raping-wife-with-alzheimer-s-is-acquitted

            Details available to be inspected.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            Thanks for the article, mostly it just left me wanting to what the actual details of the case were. He is charged after her death for something that occurred months before.

            Was she almost catatonic, or functional? Did the kids (they marry in their 70s) agitate for this?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            This article answers some of the questions I had.

            “The family conflict that erupted between Henry Rayhons and his wife’s daughters from her previous marriage over how to care for her culminated in a meeting in which the nursing home staff briefly told Henry Rayhons that his wife was no longer mentally capable of legally consenting to sex. In his testimony, Rayhons said he thought this was a doctor’s advice, not an order.”

            Basically, this seems complicated by some serious questions about autonomy in what appears to be late stage Alzheimer’s and the very real specter of elder abuse.

    • onyomi says:

      What about a standard of affirmative consent to be governed?

    • Montfort says:

      HBC, do you think rape fetishes apply to only one side of the equation? I imagine such people have a complicated relationship with whether they actually “want” to ever fulfill this, but something along the lines of “my partner didn’t want to have sex, but was not harmed significantly by the experience and/or later remembers it fondly” may be acceptable to them.

      More generally, I think people opposed to positive consent would agree that it is good to have sex only with willing people. But are we discussing the best algorithm to personally determine willingness? A legal or social standard to apply after the fact to determine fault/blame? Either way, I’m not sure the question can really be divorced from local culture.

      (Further, I have seen some inconsistency in what counts as positive consent and would like clarification, especially if there is a real consensus and I have been deceived.)

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Montfort:
        If a large amount of the vocal opposition to affirmative consent is that some people want to take others without their consent, then it would say a lot in favor of feminist arguments about culture and who needs to be taught what.

        I don’t think this actually plays very much into it, though.

        • Montfort says:

          Consider yourself “interested but surprised.” I assumed you desired counterexamples.

          I have no issue with affirmative consent as a personally-adopted guideline. It seems pretty okay, and is certainly not more rapey than the usual standard.

          If you mean “everyone should use something this strict or stricter personally,” I don’t think that solves the problem: if you agree that most people actually only want willing partners, people are already carrying out SUNY’s version of affirmative consent to the extent that they do what they want! Barring some sort of metaphysical phenomenon or extreme misapplication of a priori reasoning, either some words or some actions of the partner have led the person in question to believe the partner is willing. The only difference here is that you’re reminding them that people enjoying themselves normally do not act like dead fish. (Though not always! Some people I know have been taught that’s the “proper” way to behave during sex, though in that case it’s still important to check.) If that’s really what the affirmative consent movement/campaign is about, can it be replaced with a large number of posters and pamphlets?

          As an official policy to be used in the legal system or other formal disciplinary systems, the policy becomes inseparable from the precise implementation details.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Montfort:
            Do fantasies of committing rape exist within the spectrum of human sexuality? Yes. Do people who actually want to commit rape exist? Certainly.

            People who actually want to commit rape and act on those desires are rapists subject to criminal prosecution. I don’t think anyone, on either side of the argument is arguing against this stance.

            It seems to me that you arguing that those who have a fantasy of committing rape would like to be able to engage in a plausible facsimile, but without the other person actually not wanting to engage in sex.

            If you are arguing that it should be OK to take someone forcibly without their consent and that it should be considered to be non-criminal as long as they weren’t “harmed” then I think you are in a very small minority in the western world.

            So, I guess I am basically unsure what it is you are actually arguing for.

          • Montfort says:

            Allow me to quote from the OP: ” Do you really want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you? Do you want to find out later that they actually did not want to (regardless of any legal or disciplinary peril)? If someone can actually answer this question with a “yes” and defend it, I will be interested but surprised.”

            You expressed a desire for a counterexample, if one exists. I have given you the rough outline of one. It is provided not as a form of argument but as a response to your implied request. This may have been a mistake, as I did not (and do not) see the relevance of your second point to the discussion.

            In fact, because it is so irrelevant to the broader question at hand, I included several paragraphs of text that have nothing to do with the counterexample and concern only my response to your initial claim. Of course you are not obliged to respond to them, but perhaps you did not see them, considering your latest response ignores them entirely in favor of arguments I did not even begin to make and are far afield of the core subject.

            Perhaps, in hindsight, when you asked for “someone who can answer “yes”,” you really meant “can someone argue why we all should desire to have sex with nonconsenting partners.” If this is the case, I can provide no such argument. Also conditional on that misunderstanding, I am sorry to have inserted such a potentially derailing element into this thread, but my response was in good faith to the words you wrote.

            Edit:
            I also apologize if my tone seems abrasive. I am only frustrated that our attempts to communicate have apparently not been very successful.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Montfort:
            If someone says “I want actually have sex with someone who actually does not consent to it” it’s different than a fantasy about that scenario.

            Do we agree on that?

            Defending carrying out the actual thing, where they are not OK with it, as an acceptable standard seems very hard to do.

          • Montfort says:

            Yes, of course, though both groups of people exist.

            I continue to fail to see what this has to do with affirmative consent. At no time have I said “some people want to do X, therefore X is okay.” I have said “HBC seems to imagine no one wants to do X, which is odd because I suspect he knows people do. I will remind HBC of this fact.”

            If you could take the time to explain why this is actually important to your argument, I would much appreciate it.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Montfort:
            Well, what is affirmative consent in this context? It is simply a positive affirmation that the party involved actually consents (wants) to engage in the particular sexual activity.

            So, unless you want to have sex with people who don’t want to, then you want some unambiguous signal that they do, in fact, want to. Absent some unambiguous signal, you can’t know that the other party is in fact consenting to the activity.

            Does that make clear why I think it is relevant?

          • Montfort says:

            Yes, I think I understand. For clarity, I’m reading your argument as “the large majority of people wish to have sex with only consenting partners, therefore they should look for some unambiguous confirmation of consent.”

            In other words, people want to have consensual sex only but they keep making these mistakes where they assume $behavior means their partner wants sex, when they do not. Then we have affirmative consent to… change disciplinary policies so that people who have bad information about the meaning of $behavior can be punished?
            Or is affirmative consent the education campaign explaining what $behavior means?

            As near as I can tell, this version of affirmative consent is essentially a relationship counselor saying “if your partner doesn’t seem to be enjoying themselves, stop and figure out what’s wrong.” If this is accurate, it seems like a much better way to communicate the message.

          • John Schilling says:

            In other words, people want to have consensual sex only but they keep making these mistakes where they assume $behavior means their partner wants sex, when they do not.

            You’re making another mistake here when you shift from “consensual sex” to “wants sex” is the middle of a sentence. Consent and desire are two different things.

            And the legal standard is consent, not desire. Pretty much has to be, because we can enforce a rule against sex in cases where consent is explicitly denied, and we can maybe imagine enforcing a rule against sex where consent has not been explicitly granted, but enforcing desire is out of the question. People lie about desire, all the time. Concealing one’s true desire, lying about it outright if need be, is crucial to too many effective negotiating strategies to be done away with.

            Particularly when it comes to sex. Extra particularly when it comes to sex aimed at anything beyond transient physical pleasure.

          • Montfort says:

            Ah, good catch, John, thanks.

            So we establish people (basically) want to have sex only with willing partners. This is largely immaterial, because we (reasonably) insist instead they may only have sex with partners who agree to do so. Affirmative consent is an attempt to change what constitutes a valid agreement to (if I parse HBC correctly) make it less likely for people to inadvertently agree to sex or mistakenly believe an agreement has been reached.

            The implication is that there is a sufficiently large group of people that are believed to want sex (we’re restricting ourselves to this category, I believe) who neither explicitly agree nor explicitly disagree to sexual contact nor are incapacitated, but who are nevertheless subject to harmful sexual advances.
            And this group is actually helped by affirmative consent, if and only if we say that apparent desire cannot count as consent.
            Now, I have read some examples where affirmative consent advocates seem to imply that apparent/implied desire can count as consent – e.g. your partner neither hinders nor aids your advances, but merely acts excited. Is this the conduct affirmative consent is meant to eliminate?

            I have a feeling I am still somehow off-base.

          • John Schilling says:

            At this point, I don’t think the proponents of affirmative consent can clearly articulate the objective behaviors they mean to eliminate. But, other than that, I think you’re on the right track.

            The other side of the equation is people who neither explicitly agree nor explicitly disagree to sexual contact nor are incapacitated, but are subject to beneficial sexual advances. These people are harmed by affirmative consent, if apparent desire doesn’t count.

        • Asher says:

          Probably not.

          The opposition to affirmative consent is that it is hideously complex when it comes to implementation. Good law is clear, concise, readily understandable and intuitively easy to obey. Affirmative consent fails on every count.

          That is, unless, one is willing to take it to logically absurd conclusions. Under the strictest understanding of “yes means yes” 99.99 percent of all sexual encounters between long-term, monogamous married partners has been rape throughout all of human history.

          Affirmative consent is either going to be incoherent or reach utterly absurd conclusions.

          Once you open the door to a hideously complex mechanism of consent/nonconsent the argument will simply relocate to when is/is not nonconsent punishable by law. Under that regime I am simply going to shrug and reply that its bad law for all nonconsent scenarios to be illegal.

          Changing words does change things – the map is not the territory.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Under the strictest understanding of “yes means yes” 99.99 percent of all sexual encounters between long-term, monogamous married partners has been rape throughout all of human history.”

            I think this a straw man of the flimsiest straw. This is like saying all rugby matches are actually an unending series of assaults.

          • Asher says:

            @ HBC

            “I think this a straw man of the flimsiest straw. This is like saying all rugby matches are actually an unending series of assaults.”

            Apparently, you’re a bit fuzzy on what the concept of “straw man” means. If I were actually attributing that position to advocates of affirmative consent, then, yes it would be a straw man, but I’m not. You seem to have completely ignored that I pointed out that affirmative consent leads either to absurd or incoherent application of law.

            Of course, no affirmative consent standard is going to lead to prosecution of long-term, monogamous married partners for each instance of sex without an explicit “yes”. What is it going to do is produce an arbitrary application of law due to hideous complex standards that can’t be understood without a law degree.

            The problem is that advocates of affirmative consent flippantly use “yes means yes” as if it were a simple and unambiguous standard. Pointing out that almost all sex between long-term, monogamous partners would be rape under this standard highlights that “yes means yes” is inapplicable as an actual standard and that affirmative consent laws are going to have to use a different standard.

            It highlights the absurdity and intellectual dishonesty of advocates of affirmative consent.

          • Asher says:

            @ HBC

            In other words, the criterion for affirmative consent logically can’t be “yes means yes”, therefore, you need another criterion for it.

            Now, what’s your criterion? How, under an affirmative consent standard, would one know consent has been given? Remember, you can’t say “yes means yes” because that standard leads to obviously absurd conclusions, per my previous explanation.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Asher:
            As I have linked numerous times and mentioned in the OP, the concept of consent is already well understood in law as relates to assault in general. The mere absence of “no” is never enough to indicate consent, there has to be some sort of affirmation of consent.

            If someone walked into a public park where a game of tackle football was being played, there mere presence standing there would not indicate that they were available to be tackled. The fact that they were playing in a game of touch football a few minutes earlier would not indicate consent to play tackle football.

            What objection do you to this comparison?

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            HeelBearCub –

            The issue is with the combination of “This is how society should be” and “This is how society already is.” If society is already structured this way, and Affirmative Consent is already how we do things, then what, exactly, are you proposing changing?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Orphan Wilde:
            Well, some of it is simply a question of the math of it. I will be making up some numbers below, so don’t take this as stating facts, but rather illustrating the concept.

            If 99% of encounters currently operate using affirmative consent, that 1% of encounters adds up to some pretty bad lifetime numbers for things that were not affirmatively consented to. Even if it is only 90% of encounters (or even people) who practice affirmative consent, one would still say that the vast majority of people engage in affirmative consent. Yet obviously that would be many, many, many encounters that weren’t within affirmative consent. It wouldn’t take a very big proportion of those encounters to be actually non consensual to have a really big number of actual, real violations of consent.

            When asking for a change to a standard of affirmative consent, 90% of people then may assume that they are being asked to be do something different, when this is not the case.

            Small example: I was recently at a Drive By Truckers concert at a fairly small venue. (They were awesome, by the way.) At some point I noticed a guy in front of me encouraging a girl to dance with him. I wasn’t sure if they were already a couple or not. As they are dancing his hands start to “wander” as it were. She moves his hand away from where it is going, says something to him, and starts to look uncomfortable. Wait a few minutes and more wandering and a second rebuff and she seems really uncomfortable. The third time she fully disengages shaking her head no and walks away, back several rows. She is now hanging out with a different group of people.

            At some point he is turned around and looking back through the crowd, apparently at her or just over her head. I turn around and ask her friends if she knows the guy and they say “No! Never seen him before.” I turn back around and “politely” invite the guy to watch the show instead of whatever bullshit he is currently engaging in

            This is the kind of behavior that is, not exactly encouraged, but accepted as “on the line” under a “no means no” standard. The guy tries to get away with things and forces the girl to say no (sometimes over and over). We *all* know some guys like that. That isn’t affirmative consent, even if the literal difference between affirmative consent and that seems small when described in minute detail.

            *all here meaning not literally all, but something close to it.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            HeelBearCub –

            If society actually held to a “No means no” standard, then your example wouldn’t prove anything, because my socially inculcated response would be “Well, she should have told him no.” You know this isn’t the real standard, which is why you bring that example up, in order to invoke a particular response on my part, roughly put as “That was shitty behavior on his part and he shouldn’t have done that.”

            But the issue is, your example only works in relation to society because his actions are already acknowledged as bad behavior, so your proposed change doesn’t change anything, in particular the bad actor who is already ignoring social standards of behavior.

          • DrBeat says:

            Do you believe that the 1% of bad encounters are driven by people who are stringently applying Society’s Standard in edge cases that lead to bad outcomes, and not people who do not care what Society’s Standard is?

            Do you believe that the fact rape exists proves people have not been sufficiently taught not to rape, and that teaching them not to rape some more will cause rape to not happen?

            Because this seems like the outcome of what you’re saying here, and if so, what you’re saying is obviously false.

          • Cauê says:

            HBC:

            This is the kind of behavior that is, not exactly encouraged, but accepted as “on the line” under a “no means no” standard. The guy tries to get away with things and forces the girl to say no (sometimes over and over).

            The current standard isn’t “rejection requires a verbal no” – if it were, Orphan Wilde is probably right that society would work differently.

            In the current standard most people already agree that the guy in the example is wrong. Do you have an example of something that most people think is an acceptable way to do it, but shouldn’t be by the new standard?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Orphan Wilde:
            Permit what I admit is a slight digression, or perhaps a re-framing.

            Do you think, broadly, that women are taught to say “yes” when they want sex? Do men, broadly, expect women to say “yes” when they want sex? Especially young women.

            Does there exist a significant percentage of men who do not expect to hear yes and expect to press forward until they hear “no”. Does there exist a significant percentage of women that believe that this is how they should behave?

          • Cauê says:

            You should probably clarify whether you’re talking about a verbal “yes” and “no” here, or otherwise how explicit a sign you’re thinking of.

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            I will respond with a limited yes.

            It is limited because there is a massive component of nonverbal communication; the “No” of somebody who is not interested is not the “No” of somebody who wants you to press further. Insomuch as non-verbal communication (“action”) is considered a valid indicator of consent for Affirmative Consent, it doesn’t actually resolve these ambiguities in any meaningful way, and you’re left with the “No means no” standard you already reject, or a strictly verbal consent system, such as some Affirmative Consent proponents propose.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cauê/@Orphan Wilde:

            Under that standard, the no means no standard that you are saying is equivalent to the consent I am describing, what do you do if you are unsure whether you have gotten a “yes” and you also don’t feel like you have gotten a “no”? Who is the burden on?

          • Cauê says:

            Under that standard, the no means no standard that you are saying is equivalent to the consent I am describing, what do you do if you are unsure whether you have gotten a “yes” and you also don’t feel like you have gotten a “no”? Who is the burden on?

            That’s kind of a wrong question. There’s no manual for what to do, and there shouldn’t be. What’s there is a rule on what one can’t do. And what burden do you mean here?

            Anyway, what do you do? If you don’t know whether the person is interested or not you’re in a very similar position you were before the initial approach (would you dispute this?), and would probably do something to “probe” interest, or to create/enhance interest, preferably in a way that won’t in effect decrease it (such as straight up asking, quite likely). But this is almost outside the bounds of the question. If you have reason to think they want you to stop, you have to stop. Other than that, there’s what people usually do, there’s what usually works or not, but not what they must or should do.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Cauê:
            Well, there is your difference. Simply, the difference between stopping when you believe you do not have consent, and stopping when you are not sure you have consent.

            I mean, it’s a subtle one, sure. But u think we are comfortable with the idea that subtle differences can be powerful.

          • Cauê says:

            Hey, progress! Now I know what you mean, but I still don’t know how exactly you expect the new laws and policies to be different from the current ones.

            On the object level, people never start “sure they have consent”, and still need a way to find out. Is our disagreement about which methods are to be allowed for this?

            And outright asking is aesthetically displeasing or even off-putting to a large number of people. But even this is simplistic, as interest develops in the course of the encounter, and there’s a process of seeking to get there parallel to the one about gauging if we’re there already. Maybe asking short-circuits this process, which is part of the problem.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cauê:
            I have some issues with your statements about verbal consent, but I’m going to leave those aside for the moment.

            Let’s take my concert example again. I would contend that what that guy did was inside the letter of the “no means no” standard. Every time she said no he stopped what he was doing. He respected her no each time he heard it. There were also less ambiguous “no” signals that he may or not have picked up, but each time she clearly indicated no, he stopped his behavior, backed up, and waited before going forward again.

            Whereas, in an affirmative consent framework, this is clearly not correct in letter or in spirit. Having received a clear no, it means you were incorrect about your assessment of their consent. You need to update your priors, in a Bayesian framing. You need a much clearer affirmative signal than whatever you think you had.

            There are numerous posts within this thread that imply or outright state that a female’s resistance/reticence frequently “needs” to be overcome. Even accepting that this framing is true (which I don’t), the question is “how does one do that in an acceptable manner?”

            Like it or not, that behavior I observed is largely expected behavior. We expect to see this type of behavior occur. Women expect that they will encounter this behavior. We don’t expect that this person is going to suffer much in the way of negative consequence for this behavior. I think some very large portion of this push is normative. It’s attempting to push the window to make that behavior so clearly out of bounds that it stops being expected.

          • Cauê says:

            I would contend that what that guy did was inside the letter of the “no means no” standard. Every time she said no he stopped what he was doing. He respected her no each time he heard it. There were also less ambiguous “no” signals that he may or not have picked up, but each time she clearly indicated no, he stopped his behavior, backed up, and waited before going forward again.

            Whereas, in an affirmative consent framework, this is clearly not correct in letter or in spirit. Having received a clear no, it means you were incorrect about your assessment of their consent. You need to update your priors, in a Bayesian framing. You need a much clearer affirmative signal than whatever you think you had.

            Wait, no, now we’re talking about different things again. If he had a clear no, then he had a clear no. Several, actually! How is that “inside the letter” of “no means no”?

            There are numerous posts within this thread that imply or outright state that a female’s resistance/reticence frequently “needs” to be overcome.

            Are there? I’ve been mostly talking about situations where one initially doesn’t know if there is resistance, and how to go about finding out. This is the step where your proposal would most change things, in my opinion for no gain.

            Nobody has spoken about overcoming clearly expressed resistance, much less of a “need” for it. What comes closest (and yet so far!) is people talking about the occasional feigned “resistance” that is supposed to be “overcome” as part of the game of seduction – this is a complicated topic that involves different preferences and uninteded game-theoretic consequences, that hasn’t been approached in depth here, and it’s quite disappointing of you to frame it like this.

            Like it or not, that behavior I observed is largely expected behavior. We expect to see this type of behavior occur. Women expect that they will encounter this behavior. We don’t expect that this person is going to suffer much in the way of negative consequence for this behavior. I think some very large portion of this push is normative. It’s attempting to push the window to make that behavior so clearly out of bounds that it stops being expected.

            There’s a large distance from “this is wrong” to “this deserves jail” – an argument can be made that your example should be treated as further along on the scale, but it’s not true that the behavior is considered ok.

            And the problem with this push is that, under the terms being defended, it would push with it most of human romantic and sexual behavior as actually practiced by people. You may notice a theme among people resisting the push of “this isn’t how people have sex!” and “this would mean basically everyone is a rapist”.

          • Anonymous says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I think your concert example could easily be described as wrong under either no-means-no or yes-means-yes – if, as you have suggested, we are to allow for implicit non-verbal signals as counting.

            The situation you describe could be seen as the man having failed to acquire a (implicit, non-verbal) yes. Or it could be seen as him having failed to acknowledge a (implicit, non-verbal) no.

            I don’t think you can reasonably say that one can miss implicit nos and still be correctly following the no-means-no standard, without also saying that one can mistakenly read implicit yeses and still be correctly following the yes-means-yes standard.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Wait, no, now we’re talking about different things again. If he had a clear no, then he had a clear no. Several, actually! How is that “inside the letter” of “no means no”?

            Because he stopped. He started again later, but he stoped when she indicated “no”. It’s not in the spirit of the rule, but how is it not in the letter? Is it “One no means stop that and never do it again”? Is that how people actually act? You don’t seem to be challenging my contention that we see this behavior frequently.

            As an addition to the story, you could tell she was uncomfortable from the get go. There really was never anything that should have been telling him to go for what he was doing in the first place. Affirmative consent puts the emphasis on the initiator to read and respect the other party, which he never did. No means no puts the emphasis on the non-initiator to clearly express “no”.

            The emphasis on requiring a clear yes vs requiring a clear no makes a big difference, even if it requires no change on the part of the vast majority of actors.

            What comes closest (and yet so far!) is people talking about feigned “resistance” that is supposed to be “overcome” as part of the game of seduction

            What form does that feigned resistance take? I think someone edited it out, but there was a comment where someone talked about dating someone who kept saying “no” but then became angry (after the fact) that this was respected. Does “no means no” put that behavior out of bounds? I don’t think it does.

            There’s a large distance from “this is wrong” to “this deserves jail” – an argument can be made that your example should be treated as further along on the scale, but it’s not true that the behavior is considered ok.

            What kind of sanction does it deserve? Note, I’m not saying that deserves jail either. I did say that I thought a significant part of the push is normative.

            I think we have established that coming up and punching a stranger in the arm falls under assault, or at least no one is challenging that. But would we expect anyone to go to jail for it? Even be arrested for it? Naming something as technical assault is different than establishing the punishment for it.

          • Anonymous says:

            The emphasis on requiring a clear yes vs requiring a clear no makes a big difference, even if it requires no change on the part of the vast majority of actors.

            But you’ve already said that it doesn’t have to be clear – that a reasonable belief that she is comfortable and willing, based on facial expression or something similarly non-explicit, is acceptable.

            The only difference seems to be whether a mistake is classified as a false negative i.e. “I didn’t realize she was saying no” or as a false positive i.e. “I thought she was saying yes” – where ‘saying’ is taken to mean ‘giving some kind of indication’.

            Perhaps you would respond to this with, “under yes-means-yes, if there’s any doubt whether she’s saying yes, you should stop and ask. That’s the difference”. Alright. But no-means-no could just as well include the rule, “if there’s any possibility she might be saying no, stop and ask”. In other words the level of certainty required seems to me to be a separate consideration than whether you escalate until you receive a no, or only escalate when you receive a yes – provided that we are allowing for the kind of subtle indicators you have suggested are acceptable, rather than requiring explicit statements of yes or no.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @anonymous:.
            At what point did I say it didn’t have to be clear?

            I said it could be non-verbal. That is different.

          • Anonymous says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I said:

            That you’re dancing with the person in question, that you have reached level n of sexual escalation and she is still giving you flirty eyes and smiles and other body language indicating she is happy for you to escalate to level n+1.

            You replied:

            Nevertheless, the scenario you outlined is affirmative consent!

            Perhaps we have different ideas of clarity. I would call flirty eyes and smiles unclear, or at least implicit.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            And yes, level of certainty is different than the standard, but “might be a no” is still less sure of consent than “I think she is saying yes”. And there is an even bigger space between “clear no” and “clear yes”.

          • Anonymous says:

            “might be a no” is still less sure of consent than “I think she is saying yes”.

            That’s because ‘might be’ is neutral and ‘I think’ isn’t.

            The better comparison would be “don’t think she is saying no” and “think she is saying yes”. Assuming that either she does want the escalation or she doesn’t, being 80% sure she does is the same thing as being 20% sure she doesn’t, no?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            I think the n+1 is doing some lifting there that you may not be taking into account. She is reciprocating the current actions and clearly consenting to what is happening.

            Let’s suppose you are dancing but aren’t touching, you move closer and almost touch her, clearly wanting to touch her. She moves closer to you and now you ARE touching. This is different than going from simply not touching to touching where you are doing all the initiation, (which still could be clearly consented to, in a different manner)

            Does that make it clearer?

          • Anonymous says:

            @HeelBearCub

            I don’t think we have any disagreements over what is and is not appropriate conduct. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone disagree with any of those examples you’ve posed so far, actually.

            My point here is only that it seems to me the exact same standard of conduct can be described as no-means-no as well as yes-means-yes. If we were really talking about the word no and the word yes, it would be different. But since you’ve said that a yes can be non-verbal and implicit, I can’t think of any kind of conduct that could be described as acceptable under no-means-no but wrong under yes-means-yes. The absence of an implicit no is an implicit yes. The absence of an implicit yes is an implicit no.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            You seem to be modeling this as a binary consenting/rejecting where the opposite party is in one of the two states and you are attempting to determine the state.

            I am modeling this is a continuum, where “neutral” is in the middle and “hell no” is on one end and “hell yes” is on the other. The middle ground is neutral ground and might be talk up something like 20% of the continuum.

            No means no puts you at least (say) 10% below the midpoint, affirmative consent above the midpoint.

            Does that make my stance clearer?

          • Anonymous says:

            That sounds to me like it is conflating two factors: how much she wants the escalation, and how much she is indicating she wants the escalation. I think these are separate and should be treated as separate.

            Two examples. One – a woman who is ambivalent about the escalation but has given you clear explicit verbal consent. Is it okay to escalate? I would say yes. Two – a woman who really, really wants you to escalate, but has given you no indication that this is the case. Is it okay to escalate? I would say no.

            How much she wants the escalation isn’t binary, but it’s also not something you can tell from outside her brain. All you have to go on are the signals she is giving.

            There is definitely a confusing neutral middle ground, but what you should do in response to it is an issue of certainty levels. Yes-means-yes could mean “escalate if you are at least 70% sure she is saying yes”, but this could also be described as no-means-no: “escalate unless you are at least 30% sure she is saying no”.

            I’m quibbling only over terminology, basically. It doesn’t seem to me that there is any reason, once you accept the idea that consent under ‘yes means yes’ can be non-verbal and implicit, that these two terms should be expected to mean different things. In fact I think to the extent that anyone does think they mean different things, it is based on exactly the misunderstanding that lots of us made, thinking ‘yes means yes’ actually means what it sounds like.

            So maybe you could consider which term has the best effects. The argument for using the term yes-means-yes, I think, is that it’s so absurd that people will question it, at which point you can explain to them that no, it doesn’t literally mean you have to get a verbal yes, but that you shouldn’t escalate if you don’t think she will appreciate it. The argument against using yes-means-yes is that some people think it means what it sounds like it means, meaning at worst a push toward guilty-until-proven-innocent, at best frustration for both men and women as sexual interaction is made more difficult.

            The argument for using the term no-means-no, I think, is that it makes sure women know how they can stop a sexual situation they are uncomfortable with, which is surely more important to emphasize than the word ‘yes’. The argument against the term no-means-no would be that men might read it as “it’s okay to just push until you get an explicit verbal no”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            This is slightly infuriating, because I know you are smart enough to have arrived at what I am about to say, and probably have already done so: The hypothetical that you are 100% sure she is signaling neutrality. Clearly that situation is different under yes mean yes vs. no means no. Once you admit that, you know that there are actually a whole range of possible situations that are different under the two rubrics.

            And the issue of “its ok to keep pushing until you get a clear no” is exactly the problem.

          • Anonymous says:

            The hypothetical that you are 100% sure she is signaling neutrality.

            This seems like an odd scenario to imagine. Who is really neutral about this kind of thing?

            But, I suppose I had been treating perceived preference and confidence of perception accuracy as interchangeable. So, being 100% certain she is totally neutral would be counted as the same thing as being 0% certain of her preference.

            I don’t think this is unreasonable. If we are talking an escalation she might object to significantly, you would want to be reasonably certain she wanted it, and would probably not do it if either you had no idea if she wanted it or not, or if you knew for certain that she was neutral to you doing it. If it is an escalation that she would barely object to at all if she didn’t want it, then I think you might do it in both cases. The latter case (a very minor and inoffensive action to a woman who you are certain is neutral about it) sounds less disturbing when you consider that she is likely to form a more concrete opinion once you actually take the action.

            [EDIT: considering this further, I think the problem of defining what ‘neutral’ means is harder than I initially appreciated. I think for it to be equivalent to total uncertainty in the way I am describing, it would have to be the mean of all possible preference levels the woman might have, each level weighted based on its likelihood.]

            And the issue of “its ok to keep pushing until you get a clear no” is exactly the problem.

            Okay. Have you considered the other points I raised, in favor of and against both terms? From the lengthy discussion here my impression is that the main disagreement between you and those who oppose yes-means-yes is over these points, or perhaps similar ones. They think the disadvantages of yes-means-yes and the advantages of no-means-no outweigh the reverse. I don’t think there is much dispute at all over the details of what sexual conduct is okay and what isn’t.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            “This seems like an odd scenario to imagine. Who is really neutral about this kind of thing?”

            Now who is conflating the difference between what signal and actual preference?

            “I am not getting a clear signal” seems like the kind of thing that is likely to happen frequently, especially among couples who are unfamiliar with each other and are relatively new to sexual activity.

            As to your contention that no means no makes it more likely that a no will be respected? I find this objection makes no sense.

          • Anonymous says:

            Now who is conflating the difference between what signal and actual preference?

            Still you, I think…

            If you are certain that you are not getting a clear signal, that is not the same thing as being certain that you are getting a clear signal of absolute neutrality.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:

            You seem to be saying that it is both a) impossible to be ambivalent, b) impossible to signal ambivalence, and c)impossible not to be providing a clear signal.

            I think all of those things are possible.

      • Asher says:

        It’s important to separate two distinct issues:

        A) It is bad to have sex with someone under a situation of nonconsent
        B) It is illegal to have sex with someone under a situation of nonconsent

        Intuitively, I’m pretty sure 99 percent of us would agree with A. The problem comes in with B. The purpose of law is to have a peaceful, well-ordered society and I dispute that punishing all instances of nonconsent advances that purpose. I’m pretty sure that it’s just as taboo to cheat on a spouse but it’s probably a small minority of people who would advocate making infidelity punishable by law.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          How is this different from “It is illegal to punch someone in a situation of non-consent”?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “How is this different from “It is illegal to punch someone in a situation of non-consent”?”

            how is it similar?

            punching particularly and violence generally are assumed to be hostile and have no positive function in society. The person who initiates them is in the wrong both socially and legally, and is subject to swift punishment. Nor is actual violence particularly subtle, and the offense it generates scales neatly with the overtness of the act. We don’t call intentionally shoulder-checking someone “violence”, we call it being rude.

            The only exceptions to this general rule involve going to a specific, predesignated place, usually donning a specific, predesignated uniform and special equipment, stepping into an even more unambiguous “violence allowed zone”, and then conducting the violence according to specific, unambiguous, universal rules.

            Physical intimacy is not assumed to be hostile in all cases; we smile at the person walking around a mall with a “free hugs” sign; if the sign read “free punches to the face”, we would not smile and very well might call security. Less harmful forms of intimacy may be more overt and less deserving of punishment, ie an inappropriate hug or kiss; more harmful forms of intimacy may be exceedingly subtle and more deserving of punishment, ie inappropriate touching. Society has no analogue to the boxing gym or the rugby field for physical intimacy. Attempting to convert the nearest-comparable structure, the nightclub, seems like a very, very bad idea.

            I think the core problem with your analogy is that violence is not intimate, and intimacy is not violent. The drives may be linked, the acts may share similarities, and under sufficient derangement they can be made to bleed over into each other, but there is a great deal of each that is fundamentally unlike the other.

          • Asher says:

            If two people agree to assault each other they will both get charged with a public disturbance order. Outside of organized contact sports with ancient basis on common law you can’t agree to punch each other.

            The analogy is a non-starter.

            Look, analogies need to conform to how they actually function. Yes, if we could readily give consent to be punched then it might be a relevant analogy. Since we can’t, it’s not. Otherwise, lots of bar fights would never be prosecuted as both parties would simply claim to have given each other consent to the punches.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Asher – If two people start copulating in public they likewise get a public indecency charge. If two people punch each other in private, I’m pretty sure no legal ramifications result. Therefore, I’m pretty sure you can agree to mutual violence in private, even outside specifically designated sports.

            I agree that there’s something seriously awry in the violence/intimacy comparison, though. I think it has to do with the level of ambiguity available in intimacy. Violence is fundamentally about doing physical damage, which scales neatly with effort. Intimacy does not scale anywhere near the same way, so effort and benefit/harm come dangerously unconnected from each other.

          • Asher says:

            @ FacelessCraven

            Do we have a significant body of case law and evidence for how a “yes means yes” standard applies in a non-public context? I doubt it. If we don’t the entire analogy is worthless because we don’t have any guidance for how to functionally apply it.

            While I don’t have a problem with hypotheticals and analogies I do have a problem with them when they are entirely removed from experience.

            The differences between violence and intimacy are above and beyond the issue of or baseless hypotheticals.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelessCraven:
            Pickup sports are played all the time, all over the world, and those actions would frequently constitute assault outside the context of the game. This are universally considered pleasant and desirable. Martial arts are similarly practiced in many contexts. Even activities involved in ballroom dance could constitute assault absent consent.

            What most of these activities have are very clear rules which make the consent structure much clearer and easier to navigate and adjudicate. There are things which are perfectly fine in one activity that are completely not OK in another activity. If you are playing basketball and attempt a soccer slide tackle, this is clearly not allowed.

            But, much as you would not change the rules of a game, say, from touch football to tackle football without everyone participating being clear on it, so communication of consent becomes more important in any sexual activity where there aren’t any agreed upon rules to begin with other than “agree what the rules are”.

    • brad says:

      I think it makes sense to separate out the question into the appropriate standard: 1) to hold and teach as a norm, 2) to use in civil or private disciplinary contexts, 3) to use in criminal contexts.

      I don’t think they need necessarily be identical.

      • Jason K. says:

        One will inevitably become the others.

        Here is the progression:

        Starting from 1 will change 2 and 3 because everyone is already doing it and it doesn’t make sense for the legal standard to be different.

        2 will change 1 out of habit and simplicity, then 1 will change 3.

        3 cannot stay discordant with 1 & 2 for long as the law is considered the floor on behavior. Either the floor is disagreed with and the law will be changed, or it isn’t and everything else will change.

        • Brad says:

          Do you think that when the crime of rape was defined such that it excluded the possibility that a husband could rape his wife (until 1993 in some states) it was a widespread norm that it was perfectly okay to have sex with an unwilling spouse?

          • Jason K. says:

            For a long time the answer to your question would be if not “Yes”, then “not significantly looked down upon on average”. This is with the caveat that other crimes were not committed in the process (like violence). That restriction puts limits on just how unwilling she was, which means that any such occurrence was probably more along the lines of coercive behavior. If a law was viewed rather negatively, the law would either have been changed within a few years, stopped being enforced, or something would be reinterpreted in a manner more congruent with prevailing norms. It isn’t the letter of the law, but its execution that counts.

          • I don’t think it was a norm that it was acceptable to have sex with an unwilling spouse. I think it was a norm that it was wrong for the spouse to be unwilling, short of some special reason such as illness. The marriage contract was interpreted as including both agreement not to have sex with anyone other than the spouse and, as a corollary, agreement to have sex with the spouse–who, after all, couldn’t have it with anyone else.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            What David Friedman said.

            “For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” — I Corinthians 7.4-5 (ESV)

            Presumably the reason you don’t see American conservatives defending this, letting the feminists dictate what married couples can legally do in their own homes, is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court could have changed the law to conform with a secular ideology such as feminism at any time, since there’s no Separation of Ideology and State.

          • Under Jewish law, sex is owed from husbands to wives, but not from wives to husbands. Does anyone have any idea how this works out in practice?

          • I don’t know about the case in Jewish law. Under Muslim law, a wife is obliged to sleep with her husband whenever he wants her to unless there is some reason such as illness or her period not to. The husband is obliged to sleep with the wife a certain number of times a month–I no longer remember precisely how many.

            My guess is that the underlying assumption is that the wife owes the husband the pleasure of intercourse, the husband owes the wife the opportunity to get pregnant.

          • Jason K. says:

            “unwilling” covers a large amount of difference in preferences, from merely uninterested to despising, thus this isn’t a very precise term and open to a lot of interpretation.

            As there have been plenty of laws on the books supporting either there had to be an accepted norm or some purpose was being served. Laws generally do not get put on the books nor stay enforced for long when there is widespread antipathy towards them.

    • Jason K. says:

      It doesn’t matter if the problem is with the standard or the application of the standard. From a practical point of view, the two are interchangeable for what is a standard when it isn’t applied? I am going to crib heavily from something I’ve written elsewhere:

      Starting with your example:

      Getting randomly punched in the outside world isn’t the same as getting punched in a boxing ring after a referee has said ‘Fight!’. People aren’t going up to others and randomly trying to yank their pants down (at least not without charges being filed) and anybody with the pants-yanking mindset isn’t going to give two shits about the standard anyway. In reality, there is almost always some mutually recognized lead-up that gives either party some back out time. This standard would be effectively like getting into the ring and having to ask your sparring partner each time if it is okay to hit them.

      The problem with ‘Enthusiasm”:

      What is the threshold? ‘No’ is an easy threshold to understand. Enthusiastic? Not so much. How enthusiastic is enthusiastic enough? Do you really want to be held to determining whether or not the other person is appropriately enthused? Do you want to be 100% liable for misreading the situation? If we both agree to trade in a ‘scratch my itch, and I’ll scratch yours’ sort of way, have we just violated each other since we might not be enthusiastic about the part we are each giving? What if no one says anything prior to the act? Have we then violated each other? Now how complicated does this get when it is you, me, and Dupree?

      The problem with affirmation:

      Affirmation is good only for the instant it is given because that is the only time you know you have consent. If consent can be silently withdrawn at anytime and you can’t count on a ‘no’ from the other person, how do you know when to stop? Remember that the rules are that proceeding one instant past the withdrawal of consent is a crime. Furthermore, what keeps the other person from saying later “I was just saying yes, but I didn’t really mean it” or “I was just saying yes/acting enthused because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t”? You might notice that the latter is merely a rephrasing of the ‘I was afraid to say no’ rationale into “I was afraid not to say yes”.

      In addition, keep in mind that confidence and power is a major factor in attraction for most women. The more you have to ask permission the more you indicate that you lack both.

      So it doesn’t address the original problem with the “no means no” standard (I was too afraid to say no) and it adds a new one. An affirmative consent standard is inherently unworkable in a just manner as a person’s consent cannot be objectively ascertained using it. Not a move for the better in my book. That is without considering the contextual issues.

      Context issue #1:

      We are likely in the beginning stages of a moral panic around rape. As moral panics thrive on ambiguity, the best move to take to defuse such a panic is to establish and reinforce clear explicit guidelines in order to minimize the number of people that will get swept up in the panic. ‘No means no’ is clear and explicit. ‘Enthusiastic, affirmative consent’ is not clear nor explicit as ‘enthusiasm’ is not an objective standard and ‘affirmation’ is only good for the instant that the affirmation is being expressed (because that affirmation can be voided at any other instant by silently withdrawing consent). It is likely not a coincidence that the people who stand to benefit from a moral panic also are the strongest proponents of affirmative consent.

      Context issue #2:

      Victim culture. We have been steadily moving towards a culture that increasingly rewards and encourages people to be victims. Victims get to call on the muscle of the state and their communities to right whatever they feel was wrong. Victims get celebrated as ‘brave’, ‘survivor’, and ‘noble’ along with being granted the moral authority that comes with those attributions. Affirmative consent will help feed victim culture by making it easier for people to claim they were victims, due to the aforementioned issues with the standard.

      Context issue #3:

      The infantilization of women. This is where women are routinely held to a lower standard because lady parts. (Not that there aren’t some areas that men are held to a lower standard) This flies in the face of equality and will eventually undo a lot of progress on equality if it isn’t resisted. The general dynamic for sex (for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time) is male initiation and female acceptance/rejection. As a man’s consent to sexual activity is generally assumed even without his initiation (not saying this is how it should be, just that it is), this new standard is going to be almost exclusively enforced against men. Taking this into account the enforcement, the implicit conceit of affirmative consent is that women are too weak/timid/shy/whatever to be considered responsible enough to say no. You generally wouldn’t think a man would have an issue saying no, would you? So if men should be responsible but women should not, that is holding women to a lower standard.

      The whole thing assumes that people are just too incompetent to navigate their relationships and restricts the ability of the parties involved to decide how their relationships should operate. You cannot keep control over that you are not responsible for, so be extremely leery of ceding responsibility to anyone over anything.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        In a boxing ring, there are very, very, very clear rules about acceptable conduct.

        If you want to turn a boxing match into MMA or Judo or Taekwondo or any other form of martial art, you will need consent. If a random person were to walk into a gym off the street and want to fight, there will be a long conversation about the rules of the gym and the match. This would include rules about when someone needed to stop, even though they couldn’t explicitly say “stop”.

        If you are kissing someone, it is not consent to “yank their pants down”. The consent is for kissing.

        • Jason K. says:

          Which is totally missing the point. The point is that in normal encounters the presence of the ring is already established prior to the swing. Stopping to ask is kind of silly.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            So, in what way does this apply to the concept of affirmative concept when there is no ring? No pre-agreed upon set of rules that are assumed by stepping into a boxing ring at a club of which you are a member of long standing?

            I think you are the one who is missing the point.

          • Anonymous says:

            It applies because there is a ring. The ring is the fact that you’re in a nightclub rather than the street. That you’re dancing with the person in question, that you have reached level n of sexual escalation and she is still giving you flirty eyes and smiles and other body language indicating she is happy for you to escalate to level n+1. Or, that she is your wife and you have sex several times a week and the likelihood of her being upset at you squeezing her bum is astronomically low.

            As Drew explained better than I did, the standard we follow in the rest of society is “is this person likely to respond well to this?” rather than “has this person given me explicit permission to do this?”. All the examples you give, regarding street fights and punch buggy and hitting someone in a martial arts club who is slumped on the floor, fail both #1 and #2. But there are a bunch of other examples, such as (to borrow from Drew) a mother picking up a child, or a football player hugging a teammate who has just scored a goal, which pass #1 but fail #2, and which I think almost no reasonable person would object to.

            I think you’ve yet to give a convincing reason as to why sexual interaction, and sexual interaction only, ought to follow the latter standard I mentioned above. Or, alternatively, to explain in what sense I have described standard #2 wrong, such that the sexual interactions that would fail my version of it but which you have defended as being okay, such as squeezing your wife’s bum or escalating sexual interaction without explicit verbal permission, are permissible according to some standard that is not just identical to #1.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            The nightclub is not a “sex ring”. The only explicit rule about sex one would expect to encounter in a nightclub is “no sex in the nightclub” (unless it is a very explicit kind of nightclub, and those tend to be actually quite good about consent, at least according to my understanding, which is not personal).

            Nevertheless, the scenario you outlined is affirmative consent! Of course, having reached that stage on the dance floor is not affirmative consent to engage in intercourse an hour later, but it is affirmative consent. When you escalate to n+1, make sure it is a de minimis escalation and see whether they consent to that.

          • HBC writes:

            “When you escalate to n+1, make sure it is a de minimis escalation and see whether they consent to that.”

            That looks like the standard that affirmative consent is supposed to replace. Everyone agrees that if you do something and your partner tells you to stop, you should stop. Affirmative consent, at least as I understand it, is the rule that you have to get her consent before you escalate, not after.

          • Tibor says:

            (posting here, since I probably first posted it in a dead subthread)

            What about safewords? They are a necessity in BDSM but there is no reason not to use them otherwise as well. In long-term relationships at least, they can erase all the ambiguity while allowing for spontaneity (actually even to a point of pretending rejection by saying no a few times first).

            For those who do not know what a safeword is, look up my previous comment in another subthread about affirmative consent (or UTFG 😛 )

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            Look at that video anonymous posted below and see my comments. Note that the modeled behavior is actually escalation with coincident checking of consent.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “What is the threshold? ‘No’ is an easy threshold to understand. Enthusiastic? Not so much. How enthusiastic is enthusiastic enough? Do you really want to be held to determining whether or not the other person is appropriately enthused? Do you want to be 100% liable for misreading the situation?”

        This seriously sounds like demanding that all sexually active Aspie/typically nerdy/etc. men be arrested, and in a culture where celibacy is low status.

        “If we both agree to trade in a ‘scratch my itch, and I’ll scratch yours’ sort of way, have we just violated each other since we might not be enthusiastic about the part we are each giving?”

        Yeah, why aren’t they fighting to make economic transactions with enthusiiastic consent illegal?

        “In addition, keep in mind that confidence and power is a major factor in attraction for most women. The more you have to ask permission the more you indicate that you lack both.”

        This too.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        > We are likely in the beginning stages of a moral panic around rape.

        This is only the beginning stages? Jesus, how much worse is it going to get?

        • science says:

          There’s no emerging moral panic over rape. Rape is fairly common (no less than around 1 per 2500 and probably quite a bit higher) so concern about it is natural.

          On the other hand there is a currently moral panic among certain subcultures over false accusations of rape. The same tiny handful of anecdotes get recycled over and over and over and over again and assume cosmic proportions in minds of those convinced there is a crisis. This sheer and utter disproportionality is the hallmark of a moral panic.

          • Urstoff says:

            It seems like there’s a moral panic among certain subcultures about “sexual assault”, which tends to be defined in an absurdly broad manner.

          • John Schilling says:

            @science:

            A. Sheer and utter disproportionality is the hallmark of a moral panic

            B. Rape is known to be a 1/2500 incidence thing (source?). Or maybe higher.

            C. It is commonly asserted from on high that the incidence of rape is 20%. Or maybe higher

            D: There is no moral panic over rape?

            I must have missed something there. Possibly a serving of Kool-Aid.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            how many examples of authority figures flat-out stating that they see false rape accusations as a net social good would it take for you to change your mind?

          • science says:

            @Urstoff
            Just as there are more aggravated assaults than murders and more ordinary assaults than aggravated ones, we’d expect there to be more sexual assaults (defined strictly) than rapes.

            Since rape is fairly common that leaves only fairly common and common for sexual assaults.

            Perhaps you think sexual assault is a peccadillo that doesn’t warrant concern, but that’s different from taking a few (or no) actual examples and building it up into something that’s happening all the time.

            @John
            The number is from the NCVS and is an annualized victimization rate. Your 1 in 5, however accurate or inaccurate, refers to something else.

          • science says:

            @FacelessCraven
            For evidence of an epidemic of false accusations I expect to see lots of false accusations, not some comments you don’t like from people you don’t like in professions you don’t like.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Science – indeed. How many would you like me to list?

          • Urstoff says:

            It seems like rape is the motte and sexual assault the bailey. Cite some numbers that refer to a very broad definition of sexual assault (all self-reported survey results, of course) and then claim that rape is an epidemic. Also, take advantage of the fact that when most people hear “sexual assault”, they think rape, so you can say that 1 in 4 women on campus are victims of sexual assault and know that your audience will hear that 1 in 4 women on campus are raped.

          • science says:

            @FacelessCraven
            In the US
            1 / Dunbar’s number ^ 2
            would be over 14,000. That’s seems like a good place to start.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Science – That’s an interesting number. Would you care to explain the logic behind it?

            I’m pretty sure I can’t list 14k victims of the satanic ritual abuse panic. I doubt I could list 14k victims of hypnosis-induced false memories of abuse. I suppose those weren’t real moral panics either?

          • science says:

            It’s a (very loose) ceiling on the size of a second degree network.

            And you have exactly backwards. Those were moral panics precisely because the hysteria over them was completely out of proportion to their actual occurrence. Just like shark attacks, west nile virus, and false rape accusations.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Disclaimer: IANAA (I am not an American)

            @science: Is this a flat rate? When people call “rape” a moral panic, what they usually mean is “violent rape of middle/upper-middle class young women”. The idea is that the media is super focused on these campus rape situations, when most rape occurs in lower income families (and prision, but I’m not sure prison rape is being taken into account here).

            So there can both be a very legitimate concern over rape incidence, and a moral panic regarding specific (and less likely) set of them.

          • science says:

            WHtA:

            I don’t think either “side” is panicking about violent rape. The contested ground is acquittance or date rape. One side believes this type of rape is fairly common and is a serious concern. The other side thinks it is rare and is kind of a bullshit offense anyway — let’s talk about false accusations, now there’s a real problem!

          • Nornagest says:

            The other side thinks it is rare and is kind of a bullshit offense anyway — let’s talk about false accusations, now there’s a real problem!

            I think you’re failing an ideological Turing test here.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            Is anyone actually having a moral panic about false accusations per se? (Maybe a few of the more out-there MRAs? I couldn’t say.) Most of the concerns I’ve seen being raised have come from those of us who regard the existing level of false accusations as tolerable– and a necessary evil unless we’re going to give up on the idea of punishing actual rapists– so long as those subjected to such false accusations are allowed due-process protections; the alarm is being raised over what we see as a concerted effort to weaken those protections, not over false accusations as such. Most of the critical commentary on the Duke lacrosse case seemed to take it for granted that there are always going to be a certain number of Crystal Mangums out there, but that it’s still reasonable to demand fewer Mike Nifongs, and hope for fewer Duke 88s.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Science – “And you have exactly backwards. Those were moral panics precisely because the hysteria over them was completely out of proportion to their actual occurrence.”

            So you’re saying child abuse doesn’t exist? How dare you sir. Physical and sexual abuse of children happens every day, and often scars the victims for life. If a few false accusations happen, that’s an acceptable price to pay to keep our children safe from Satanic Ritual Abuse. If you want to claim otherwise, you should be able to show that false accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse are a serious problem. Let’s see your 14,000 examples.

            Or hell, let’s talk about sodomy laws. Do you have 14,000 examples of sodomy laws actually being used to harm people? Why should we have changed them then?

            The SRA panic was harmful because fear of a bad thing drove people to abandon the protections against false positives. We have people from the united states senate on down publicly stating that they’d rather have four men be falsely accused than one rapist escape justice. We don’t accept that principle for actual murder. And no, handling these incidents via an academic tribunal without a shred isn’t okay because the accused is “only” losing their education and all the time and money spent on it to date.

          • Jason K. says:

            I don’t think many people would call a 0.04% chance “fairly common”.

          • science says:

            So you’re saying child abuse doesn’t exist? How dare you sir. Physical and sexual abuse of children happens every day, and often scars the victims for life. If a few false accusations happen, that’s an acceptable price to pay to keep our children safe from Satanic Ritual Abuse. If you want to claim otherwise, you should be able to show that false accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse are a serious problem. Let’s see your 14,000 examples.

            Satanic Ritual Abuse was moral panic because there were few or no cases of it actually occurring but many people acted like as it was happening all the time. Rape doesn’t fit that mold, because it is happening all the time. False accusations do fit that pattern because they aren’t happening all the time.

            This really isn’t that hard.

            Or hell, let’s talk about sodomy laws. Do you have 14,000 examples of sodomy laws actually being used to harm people? Why should we have changed them then?

            No one was panicking about being arrested for sodomy. You can want to change things without thinking there’s a crisis.

            All this hyperventilating over a tiny handful of examples repeated ad nauseum is something else entirely. That’s not ideological disagreement that’s panic. Completely unwarranted panic. And this is the only issue the paranoid red/grey internet alliance is blowing out of proportion. In another thread we have people claiming their are cabals hunting around the internet looking for people to target for “unpersoning” and trading tips to avoid this horrible and common fate. Give me a break.

            The SRA panic was harmful because fear of a bad thing drove people to abandon the protections against false positives. We have people from the united states senate on down publicly stating that they’d rather have four men be falsely accused than one rapist escape justice. We don’t accept that principle for actual murder.

            You already said that people are saying things you don’t like. But you have yet to actually produce even a scintilla of evidence as to the scope of false positive problem or even the direction of change.

            And no, handling these incidents via an academic tribunal without a shred isn’t okay because the accused is “only” losing their education and all the time and money spent on it to date.

            You can get a transcript even if you’ve been thrown out of school. You still have those credits, you can take them elsewhere. And no one can take your education, they don’t give you a lobotomy after they kick you out.

          • Cauê says:

            @science

            Just so we’re on the same page, did you read this post? Some great comments there as well.

            Also, an accusation of rape follows you for your whole life, getting in the way of starting social, professional and romantic relationships.

          • science says:

            Where can I find a list of people kicked out of college for sexual assault in the last year? Given that the information is so readily available, surely someone has made a sex offender style google map overlay?

            That post was before I started reading here, I’ll take a look.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Science – “False accusations do fit that pattern because they aren’t happening all the time.”

            …because 95% of rape allegations turn out to be true, right? Or wait, no, it’s one in ten. Or wait, no, that’s only of the ones that were provably false, and actually only 35% or so result in formal charges or discipline, even under the exceedingly lax standards currently being applied. So two in three accusations are at a minimum questionable, which is of course why it’s so important that we never actually question them, right? Much safer to punish merely based on the accusation. Due Process just makes things complicated.

            “You can want to change things without thinking there’s a crisis.”

            I see, so when you want something its “changing things”, where when we want something it’s a “panic”. Or perhaps we don’t let you define what is and isn’t an issue worth addressing! Yes, I like that solution much better.

            “All this hyperventilating over a tiny handful of examples repeated ad nauseum is something else entirely.”

            …Like Matthew Shephard’s murder proved we needed hate crime legislation, and isolated shooting sprees prove we need gun control legislation. I feel you.

            And of course I could cite examples. A quick google search finds 95 lawsuits against educational institutions over false rape charges. Hideous allegations of sexual abuse make the headlines over and over again, only to turn out to be completely fabricated. We have the actual statistics that show that the majority of rape charges are at least questionable. But you’ve already decided that whatever I cite is part of the “tiny handful”. I have better things to do than google facts for you to ignore.

            “You can get a transcript even if you’ve been thrown out of school.”

            Which is worthless to you, since as an adjudicated sex criminal other schools aren’t going to want to admit you.
            http://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/this-woman-gets-students-accused-of-rape-back-into-school-fo#.jrynGo4RL
            False rape allegations: so rare people can build careers around helping the victims.

            “In another thread we have people claiming their are cabals hunting around the internet looking for people to target for “unpersoning” and trading tips to avoid this horrible and common fate. Give me a break.”

            Frannest – I am also an outspoken critic of radical feminism on the internet. The existence of BDSM is inherently horrifying and vile to any radical feminist that does not lie to herself. Some approve of femdom, but I’m male. The subjugation of a female by a male, physical abuse, elements of coercion and so on leads them to claim that BDSM is patriarchal and rape culture (not in a meme way, like literal terms). And what is to be done when a woman is in an abusive relationship? Some sort of a rescue. So they “rescued” her from my “abusive relationship” by spreading vile lies about me including all the contacts they could possibly find and by spreading the photos of her to any contact of her they could possibly find – that included her workplace, her family and her friends.

            So yeah, she got fired immediately and her ties with her family were severely strained because her family is quite Muslim, no clue as to her friends but it probably doesn’t help ther mental image to know that a polite soft-spoken headscarf-wearing muslim girl gets off on being tied up, flogged and seeing her pictures on the internet.

            Stargirl – “I was doxxed for arguing against the feminist position on rape laws. I argued the rape studies did not prove what they claimed to and that the rate of false accusations was not well understood and might be high. I also argued a number of proposed laws and policies were easy to abuse.

            In addition to being doxxed I was publicly shamed by a large list of my former friends. I also have no data set. But I certainly would not discuss certain ideas under your real name in public.”

            Cord Shirt – “After I was unpersoned, I discovered a couple hate sites targeting me and a couple others. These were public, and didn’t include any planning of “snares.” But they mentioned the existence of private sites as well.”

            And of course everyone in that thread has directly observed unpersoning and swarming of multiple innocent targets over the last year or two, and heard of many more via the media. Plebcomics, Eron Gjoni, Wolf Wozniak, Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik, and Max Temkin are just a few of the ones I’ve observed in my actual home community, with direct application to my actual career.

            Of course, none of those count. It doesn’t matter how many examples we have, how many of us can speak of the harm we’ve personally observed or experienced, how many of us live in daily fear of our careers and social lives being destroyed by gangs of unaccountable sadists like this one: https://imgur.com/a/USROb

            None of that matters to you, and I find that I have better uses of my time than trying to fix that. We’re done here.

          • Anonymous says:

            @science

            Regarding false rape accusations, my view is that their incidence rate is almost irrelevant as evidence of what would happen if you were to change the law in this area from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent. The reason seems obvious. Under the latter rule, making false rape accusations is made enormously easier. The fact that rape accusations are hard to prove also means they are hard to disprove. When you’re suggesting changing the law such that a hard-to-disprove crime is presumed to have been committed when claimed unless proven otherwise, making successful false accusations becomes much easier, so their incidence will almost certainly rise.

            You’re changing the rules of the game in a way that has a very strong effect on the incentives involved; evidence collected in an environment with different incentives counts for nothing.

          • science says:

            Affirmative consent does not mean guilty until proven innocent. The burden of persuasion has nothing to do with the elements of the underlying offense.

          • John Schilling says:

            Affirmative consent, by any definition similar to those offered here, can produce no legal or regulatory outcome significantly different from the status quo unless the burden of proof is shifted to the defense. Anything less, and the only change is that rapists have to learn a slightly different set of lies.

            Affirmative consent is being proposed as a legal and regulatory standard, not merely a social guideline, and presumably by people who expect it to make a difference. And where we see affirmative consent actually implemented as an official regulation, it is being implemented with the burden of proof theoretically neutral and in practice imposed on the defense.

          • science says:

            There’s no such thing as a theoretically neutral burden of proof.

            If neither side presents any case, what happens? If nothing happens in that case, then the burden is on the prosecution.

            “Mike Krahulik”

            If that’s what being an unperson looks like, sign me up.

          • John Schilling says:

            If neither side presents any case whatsoever, then the “preponderance of evidence” standard means that the defense wins but by a literally infinitesimal margin.

            If the prosecution’s case is “I think they did it, they look guilty, prosecution rests”, and the defense presents no case, the prosecution wins.

            If the prosecution and defense cases are “Did So!” and “Did Not!” respectively, whichever the judge feels is giving off a More Honest Vibe wins. That’s theoretically neutral, but…

            In the standard being increasingly mandated at universities and corporate HR departments, the prosecutor is an actual professional lawyer trained in convincing people in such matters and who works regularly with the “judges”. The defense is an accused rapist who isn’t allowed to have a lawyer present.

            That the prosection’s theoretical burden is infinitesimaly greater than the defense’s, provides no real path to justice.

          • science says:

            @JS

            Let me see if I got this straight:

            On the hand the standard of persuasion can never be outcome determinative because all the actors involved in the process cynically ignore it and do whatever they want. So where the burden is “theoretically” doesn’t matter.

            On the other hand proponents of changing the consent standard must believe that it will be outcome determinative and the only way it could do so is by shifting the burden of persuasion (even though the actual burden of persuasion is never outcome determinative).

            How many more epicycles were you planning on adding?

        • NN says:

          Look up the 1980s daycare abuse scandals if you want to know how far this kind of thing can go if it is left unchecked.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      At the risk of TMI, I (instinctively) leaned heavily toward affirmative consent in my last long-term intimate relationship, and the disconnect between my needing to spell things out and my partner’s desire for spontaneity seemed to do very bad things for our relationship.

      “I think the the punch-buggy concept can easily be expanded to understand that even non-verbal consent can still be affirmative consent.”

      So refusal of consent would consist more of non-verbal resistance? Where does this leave seduction, in its various forms? Again, I hope I don’t need to be a red-piller or a pua to note that in my personal experience, some element of the chase is considered erotic by both partners under the right circumstances. On the occasions that my partner was seriously not interested, believe me, she had ways of unambiguously expressing her preferences. On the other hand, there were multiple occasions where she was frustrated that I was not more aggressive. How does affirmative consent navigate this sort of situation?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Affirmative consent does not mean there can be no spontaneity, nor does it mean that every verbal communication must start with “Can I?” nor does it mean every communication must be verbal. Seduction is not verbotten in a standard of affirmative consent. Hell, to some extent affirmative consent asks for seduction.

        As to the punch-buggy example, suppose you meet someone on a long bus ride and strike up a conversation. After a while their eyes light up and they say “punch buggy!” and tap you lightly on the shoulder. Your eyes light up and you say “Punch buggy no punchbacks” and give their arm a much more solid punch. You have never verbally consented to the game, but you have consented.

        But if you say nothing and start staring straight ahead, you have not consented and the other person should not take your silence as consent.

        • DrBeat says:

          So if it doesn’t disallow spontaneity, and it doesn’t mean every communication has to be verbal… how is it different from the societal standard we use now?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Well, that is one of my points. It largely is NOT very different from the kinds of standards that are generally used.

            However, there are some crucial differences. Mere non-resistance cannot be taken as consent, not absent some other framework. This would apply mostly to early in a relationship or any activity which is new. If they are communicating verbally, the non-verbal consent needs to be very clear. If, on a first date, someone simply gets tense and says nothing you don’t have a clear picture of what they are thinking. If they grab your hand and make it continue or something else unequivocal, you have consent.

            This is not rocket science.

            Part of the issue is simply that we have set up a societal expectation that sex is shameful to talk about, and that women (generally) are tainted by consenting to sexual activity. To make affirmative consent actually work well, that has to be solved as well.

            But in the context of a long term, successful relationship? Things likely don’t change.

          • Anonymous says:

            “Part of the issue is simply that we have set up a societal expectation that sex is shameful to talk about, and that women (generally) are tainted by consenting to sexual activity. To make affirmative consent actually work well, that has to be solved as well.”

            Alternatively, that women tend to find confidence attractive in men, so sexual interactions tend to involve the man making the approach and the escalations.

            I’m not really sure if there is any distinction between your affirmative consent model and most people’s view of what is acceptable, then. If you start to do something to your romantic interest that they might object to, and they get tense and go quiet, you should stop. I think people will almost unanimously agree on that.

            The question of how this ought to work in the eyes of the law is different, of course. Would you agree with those that have said that treating what you should do as what you should be legally required to do has some serious problems?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            The whore/Madonna dichotomy is a very real thing that is easily observable in practice and something that many will admit to basing judgments on.

            Switching the burden of proof in prosecution strikes me as unworkable and unconstitutional. I don’t believe we will see this, roughly ever.

            The issue of hidden evidence, administrator eyes only, disciplinary hearings I find very troubling. In my generation, there was a drive to purge alcohol from college campuses due to liability fears that was handled in a similar ham-handed a fashion. I don’t know exactly how it will shake out, but I don’t think it will end up where it is now.

            The issue with intoxication, especially mutual intoxication, and most especially the issue of those who are in a blackout state that is also quite functional strike me as problems that are hard to address.

            Here is what is NOT hard or difficult. That mildly buzzed guy who is always looking for the sloshed girl? His activities are wrong and should be punishable if proven. The guy who locked his bedroom door and told my (now) wife that she wasn’t leaving till they had sex? That’s wrong, and it should be punishable if proven.

            More importantly, neither of those things should be mistaken for obtaining consent. No one should talk about those things as if they are OK.

          • John Schilling says:

            But it is unrealistic to expect that either of those things ever will be proven, other than by means you yourself find “deeply troubling”. The effect of establishing a punitive process theoretically aimed at such offenses, will fall mainly on innocent bystanders.

            As with drunkenness and prohibition, there are real, serious social problems that can’t be solved by making the Bad Thing illegal and punishing the Bad People who do it anyway. This isn’t rocket science, and you should know better. And, given the failure of Prohibition, the failure of the War on Drugs, and the terrible cost of both, we’re not going to cut you any slack on this one.

          • Anonymous says:

            @HeelBearCub

            “Here is what is NOT hard or difficult. That mildly buzzed guy who is always looking for the sloshed girl? His activities are wrong and should be punishable if proven. The guy who locked his bedroom door and told my (now) wife that she wasn’t leaving till they had sex? That’s wrong, and it should be punishable if proven.

            More importantly, neither of those things should be mistaken for obtaining consent. No one should talk about those things as if they are OK.”

            I don’t think anyone would disagree. I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to your wife.

            It seems to me that there is almost never a perfect solution that will prevent all problems of all kinds. I’m concerned that while affirmative consent, as you’ve prevented it, seems utterly uncontroversial, the fact that it’s given a special name and conflated with a very different kind of standard (see the video I linked below) means that it’s not a term I would be comfortable using myself. I think we’re in agreement that guilty-until-proven-innocent is a very bad idea, so I’m not sure there’s much more to discuss.

            One more point I would make is that with regard to taking steps to prevent oneself becoming a victim of sexual misconduct, a lot of it depends on what kind of things you like to do, which determine whether a particular suggested action that would increase your safety would represent a minor inconvenience or a huge lifestyle change. A suggestion like “stop going out and getting blind drunk in nightclubs” sounds much more reasonable to someone with no interest in getting blind drunk in nightclubs than it does to someone whose weekends consist of nothing but getting blind drunk in nightclubs.

          • HBC writes:

            “Mere non-resistance cannot be taken as consent, not absent some other framework. ”

            In another post, you wrote:

            “When you escalate to n+1, make sure it is a de minimis escalation and see whether they consent to that.”

            You escalate. She doesn’t object. Is that “consent to that?” If so your first quote is wrong.

            If not, what is the difference between non-resistance and consent?

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman

            I’m going to turn around and defend HBC here, actually.

            “If not, what is the difference between non-resistance and consent?”

            You escalate. She goes tense, her eyes go wide and fearful, her lip quivers, she starts to tremble. Should you continue or should you stop and ask if she’s okay with what you’re doing?

            I’m talking only about morals or social standards here. The question of what should be illegal, what standards the law should apply, is obviously very very different.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Anonymous:

            That would be an explicit, affirmative, but nonverbal dissent, which doesn’t seem relevant here. Generally speaking, there’s a scale of “have people agreed to this?” that runs:

            Affirmative written consent
            Affirmative verbal consent
            Affirmative non-verbal consent
            Implicit consent
            Confusion and misunderstanding
            Implicit dissent
            Affirmative non-verbal dissent
            Affirmative verbal dissent
            Affirmative written dissent
            Gunfire

            Most sex involving actual human beings happens somewhere in the implicit to non-verbal consent range. It is remarkably unclear how far up the scale the Affirmative Consent people want to set the bar, but pretty much everyone agrees that anything at “confusion and misunderstanding” or below ought to mean no sex happens. Those aren’t interesting or useful examples.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            If you escalate and NOTHING happens? You are doing it wrong. 😉

            But more seriously, If they continue to display the signs that they want you to continue then that can be taken as consent. But how clear are the signals? Are they getting more excited? Or less so? Are they participating in what you arw doing? Moving that body part towards you, grabbing your hand and noving it farther? Do you feel sure they actually want you to do what you are doing? No? Then you better make sure.

            The de minimis is part is simply what you need if you are trying to go non-verbally. You don’t fo from a flirty glance to attempted clothing removal in one step.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “But more seriously, If they continue to display the signs that they want you to continue then that can be taken as consent. But how clear are the signals? Are they getting more excited? Or less so? Are they participating in what you arw doing? Moving that body part towards you, grabbing your hand and noving it farther? Do you feel sure they actually want you to do what you are doing? No? Then you better make sure.”

            Wow, this totally sounds like the sort of thing that can be adjudicated in a he said/she said context in a court of law without any injustice being committed.

        • Drew says:

          As to the punch-buggy example, suppose you meet someone on a long bus ride and strike up a conversation. After a while their eyes light up and they say “punch buggy!” and tap you lightly on the shoulder. Your eyes light up and you say “Punch buggy no punchbacks” and give their arm a much more solid punch. You have never verbally consented to the game, but you have consented.

          This person just hit FacelessCraven by surprise. They don’t have affirmative consent, let alone enthusiastic affirmative consent.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            No, that is de minimis. At some point that behavior might rise to the level of assault, but the initial tap would certainly not be assault.

          • Deiseach says:

            That’s assuming people know the game of “punch buggy”. I’ve never heard of it, and if someone sitting beside me on a bus went “punch buggy” and tapped me on the shoulder, I certainly would not reply “punch buggy no punchbacks”; I’d shift my seat if possible and maybe even make a complaint to the driver.

            It would be no good the other person saying “But it was punch buggy, not assault!” if they can’t be sure the person they were ‘playing with’ didn’t know the rules or didn’t want to join in.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @deiseach:
            Note the scenario assumes a conversation has occurred and that the “punch-buggy” is followed by a light tap which does no harm. No police force is going to take that complaint absent some seriously absent context (which we can assume is not present, because it is my scenario.)

            As to what “punch-buggy” is, it is a game common among American youth, mostly boys, wherein if a VW Beatle (i.e. VW Bug) is spotted, you are allowed to punch the other person in the arm once you have said “punch buggy”. It’s the kind of mindless aggression facsimile that is popular among boys the world over.

          • Deiseach says:

            And that’s where the trouble lies, HeelBearCub. Person X assumes Person Y will react in the appropriate manner when X initates such-and-such an action.

            Unless X can be sure Y shares all X’s cultural references and understandings of what is going on, then it won’t work.

            One-night-stands and just going out to hook up with a stranger is the kind of thing where affirmative consent is necessary, but there are so many assumptions around sex (e.g. women are supposed to be relucatant-but-persuadable so ‘no’ means ‘maybe, work at seducing me’; men are supposed to be dominant or at least the initiating party and not take ‘no’ for an answer – because ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘no’; sex is supposed to be spontaneous and sweep you off your feet with passionate desire or else it’s no fun; at the same time, you’re supposed to be sure to use barrier protection against STDs and/or pregnancy; you should be open to all kinds of things – ‘good giving and game’ – or else you may as well write yourself off as one of those religious prudes; and of course, everyone else is having amazing adventurous sex all the time).

            I’m glad I was never interested in the whole damn business, it’s too complicated! 🙂

          • Drew says:

            This person just hit FacelessCraven by surprise. They don’t have affirmative consent, let alone enthusiastic affirmative consent.

            No, that is de minimis. At some point that behavior might rise to the level of assault, but the initial tap would certainly not be assault.

            No, you don’t have an unlimited right to “punch buggy” unsuspecting strangers. The fact that the contact is small doesn’t mean that it’s not-battery if you hit an unsuspecting person.

            Instead, this initial “punch buggy” was ok because of the context of the interaction.

            In particular, it was ok because we CURRENTLY use a standard where it’s ok to touch people in ways that are (1) contextually ‘reasonable’ and (2) likely to be well received.

            The problem is that you’re calling for a change to an affirmative consent standard. And FacelessCraven — having been taken by surprise — couldn’t possibly have given affirmative consent.

            In fact, your whole game seems like the opposite of affirmative consent.

            Neither person is asking for the other’s consent. Instead, you’ve got people committing a series of minor escalations and then looking to see if their partner objects after the fact.

            Given that neither partner objects, these minor boundary violations compound until the pair is locked in vigorous, physical contact.

            That seems like a great model for consent under the status quo. But it’s not a story of prior, affirmative consent.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Drew:
            From what I have already linked in the wiki entry on consent in the context of assault.

            “Exceptions exist to cover unsolicited physical contact which amount to normal social behavior known as de minimis harm”

            You can initiate punch-buggy with a complete stranger without engaging in assault, and this is completely bound up with the idea of consent.

          • Drew says:

            You can initiate punch-buggy with a complete stranger without engaging in assault, and this is completely bound up with the idea of
            consent.

            I had a legal argument, but it’s easier to just quote you:

            If I were to walk up to random stranger, declare “punch-buggy” and strike them on the arm, this would also be assault

            Our points of agreement:
            1. Without context, “Punch Buggy” is battery
            2. Consent can make it ok

            Our central disagreement is that I’m accusing you of switching your standards for “consent” mid-argument.

            We seem to agree that FacelessCraven, being surprised by an escalation, didn’t give affirmative consent to the escalation.

            Your reply is that the escalation is ‘de minimis.’ And it was ‘de minimis’ because it was consensual.

            This is true under our current standards, but pretty fatal for your argument that we do/should use an affirmative consent standard.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Drew:
            If you simply walked up to a stranger, yelled “punch buggy” and punched their arm as hard as you could, that would be assault.

            If, in the course of a conversation with a stranger you lightly tap them on the arm after saying punch-buggy this is de minimis.

            You seem to have missed or not be engaging with the point that, in my example, the non-verbal attempt at gaining consent starts, not with a hard blow, but a light tap?

      • Tibor says:

        This is all strange to me. Why do people come up with funny concepts such as “affirmative consent” or even “yes means yes” when all that is needed is learn from the BDSM community? If you play the dominant/submissive roles, you want to be sure that whatever you are doing is done with consent and also things can happen at any moment where it is just too much for one of you (not exclusively for the submissive by the way). Something that you’ve done 50 times before can suddenly be too much for some reason, be it physical or psychological. You have to be able to tell when to stop and that in a situation where saying no can be just part of the play. You cannot keep asking “is it ok if you whip you now?” That would be ridiculous and spoil the whole thing. What you do instead is that you use a safeword, i.e. something that can be said at any moment by each of you at which point it is clear there is no consent anymore and the whole thing stops immediately. The safeword is obviously something you would not say otherwise. One can even have two safewords, sort of like “yellow” and “red” on the traffic lights, where yellow just means “no more of this, but let’s continue” and “red” is just the full stop. In BDSM it is necessary, but if you are unsure about consent even in “regular” sex, there is no reason not to have a safeword for those cases as well.

        Of course, this works only in a relationship, if you have a one-night stand, it probably would spoil the atmosphere as well (I cannot say, I never had a one-night stand), but your trouble seem to have been with a relationship where you only have to agree upon a safeword once and you can be pretty spontaneous from there on.

        • Anonymous says:

          That seems to be the “no means no” standard that “yes means yes” is intended to replace.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          The BDSM community, as I understand it, is very big on being very clear about what the boundaries are beforehand. They also have safewords, but that doesn’t negate the part where they are actually clear on what is to take place.

          Look, it has been very common practice to present the plaintiffs clothes in a rape trial as evidence for the defense. This was successful at obtaining a bot guilty verdict. The fact that victim had on a mini-skirt, or had mutiple previous sexualities partners was treated as if it had bearing on the case at hand. It’s not as if the view of consent in sexualities assault cases has been very clear.

          Affirmative consent, as opposed to “absence of clear non-consent” are different standards.

          • DrBeat says:

            Look, it has been very common practice to present the plaintiffs clothes in a rape trial as evidence for the defense. This was successful at obtaining a bot guilty verdict. The fact that victim had on a mini-skirt, or had mutiple previous sexualities partners was treated as if it had bearing on the case at hand. It’s not as if the view of consent in sexualities assault cases has been very clear.

            Every single time I have heard of such a defense being brought up to decry how our society treats rape — literally without exception — it turned out to be something entirely reasonable that the speaker was lying about, or was repeating a lie about.

            Like when people said “This RAPIST was acquitted because the victim was wearing skinny jeans, and they said that meant she was slutty!” when if you actually investigated it, the defense didn’t claim skinny jeans made her slutty, they claimed skinny jeans made the events she claimed physically impossible.

            The only crime that we revoke more due-process rights for than rape, is terrorism. The notion we are not hard enough on rape is a lie. It is a lie told by people who think that their own emotion of fear is an objective fact about the world, and the fact that they experience fear means men have not done enough to take their negative emotions away. You can’t just appeal to vague ideas of “well everyone knows we Don’t Do Enough, because feminist women still experience a negative emotion”, you’re going to have to appeal to actual facts to show that what we are doing is wrong and must change.

            And the facts that would show that objectively do not exist.

          • Tibor says:

            Depends on how hardcore you want to go and obviously, if you want to do something new, you should let the partner know (if for no other reason, then because you are likely to be stopped by the safeword in the act if you don’t). But I think that a list of “we are going to do this this and that and afterwards exactly this and that” is a standard upheld in porn only (where it makes perfect sense of course, because pleasure or passion of those involved are not the point so they can be disregarded completely).

            I’ve never tried anything that would possibly be physically dangerous (well, in case of a sudden heart attack, even tied arms and legs can be a dangerous thing, but that’s why you ought to have scissors) such as electrodes (there you have to really be careful and make sure you know what you’re doing) but a safeword has always been sufficient (and used only once ever). It gives full power to the submissive over what is happening (which is good for both, because then the dominant does not have to worry about not being gentle enough) so I don’t see why one would have to write down a list of “we are going to do exactly this” beforehand. If this can work with something as “extreme” as bdsm, I don’t see why people would need “yes means yes” or stuff like that for “vanilla” sex. Even the safeword seems kind of an overkill to me if you never do anything extraordinary and a clear “no” actually clearly and unambiguously means what it sounds like but I would be fine with it if someone promoted the used of safewords in general.

            I am also a little bit skeptical about a miniskirt being a successfully used evidence in the court, but even if it was, it is pretty orthogonal to what we are talking about. A miniskirt as a “defence” does not even fit into the “no means no” standard.

            Of course, save for signing a contract each time you want to have sex (that would fit well into the “antisex league” of 1984 :)), you will always have some ambiguity and cases where it is “his word against her word”. Then the standard should be NOT to punish. Western society has been built on the idea that it is better to sometimes let criminals go without punishment than to punish innocent people*. Save for 24/7 surveillance you cannot keep that principle without accepting that sometimes bastards get away, even with murder. Assuming “guilty until proven innocent” is a great way to increase the number of innocent people punished and on net likely to lead to more harm than letting some guilty roam free.

            This also seems to be a very US-specific topic. I have not heard of any other country in the world that would talk about “rape culture”…which strongly suggests to me that it is an inflated problem at best. Otherwise, there would have to be more tolerance for rape in Europe which I don’t think is the case. Then again, in probably no European country would a female teacher be sentenced to a few decades in prison for having sex with her teenage student, so judging by that measure, maybe Europe is more tolerant to “rape”. But that particular case is probably a weird exception rather than the rule (or a measure of how people think about these things) even in the US. It could also be that this is even a very niche topic even in the US, with some media attractive cases popping up occasionally (such as the one mentioned by David or one I read about in die Welt where a male German exchange student was accused by a quite clearly mentally unstable female student of rape and where she turned her “story” into an “art project” while carrying a mattress all over the campus ), which would not be so surprising in a country of 300 million. That is hard to judge from across the ocean.

            *of course, some optimization is necessary here, you probably want to hang one innocent in order not to let 100 000 murderers go lose if for no other reason than because those murderers are likely to kill more than 1 innocent person if you let them go, but you probably rather want to let a single murderer go unpunished than hang an innocent person instead)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DrBeat:
            Roughly 10 seconds on google, 4th listed article.

            @Tibor:
            You are still having a conversation about consent before hand, which is very different from attempting “pickup BDSM” where you attempt to engage in BDSM without even discussing the topic or safe words.

          • Tibor says:

            HeelBearCub: Yes, you do. But only once. You agree on a safeword and that’s it. Of course, it is a good idea to talk about what happened and what was wrong if the safeward had to be used but that just seems like common sense to me.

            I did acknowledge that this is not useful for one-night stands, didn’t I? I’ve always found the associated stress (although I usually am not stressed out by people, for some reason I can be very nervous with women, especially when I first meet them) and possible risks of getting an STD to be worth trying a one-night stand (a sex with a long-term friend who I fancy would be a different thing but it comes with another sort of problems), so I don’t know anything about that except for hearsay (in fact the idea of having sex with someone I met the same day for the first time just is somehow alien to me to the point that I almost doubt it happens even though I know quite a few people who have done it at least occasionally…and I am not religious, so that is not the reason nor would I condemn the people who do so…it is just something probably not for me). I would imagine you need to be a bit more careful in that situation (after all, you pretty much don’t know the person you are having sex with) which is though clashing a bit with how this usually happens (everyone having drunk a lot of alcohol).

            But I am quite strongly opposed to the idea that in a relationship, one would have to ask for affirmative consent each time. If you want to be absolutely sure everything you’re doing is consensual, have a safeword. If you do anything like bdsm definitely have a safeword, but that is a special case.

            Besides, save for really extreme cases when one partner (this would pretty much always be the man) disregards actual opposition to sex of the other and resorts to violence or other kind of enforcement (threats), I honestly don’t think it is that big a deal if it happens sometimes that you have sex when the partner is not really very enthusiastic about it and only “tolerates” it. I know I have had sex like that being both in the position of the one who really is not that interested (like when I was really tired, wanted to sleep and my ex-girlfriend would come home a bit intoxicated and, well, aroused after having been out partying with friends) and when I was the one “forcing” it a bit. It is not that big a deal and at worst an apology next morning is sufficient ( I am not talking about the case when one partner actively refuses sex which should be clear, but I want to make sure it really is), sometimes not even that is necessary. If this happens too often, there is probably something wrong with the relationship in general and it is likely to fall apart because of that, which is also a natural solution that kind of problems. I would regard anyone who would consider this a “rape” (I dunno if there are such people) as completely out of touch with reality and would suspect that they have never actually been in a (long-term) relationship.

          • DrBeat says:

            This appears to be a trial where the defendant said “This woman was a prostitute who consented to have sex with me in exchange for money and cocaine, and then claimed she was raped in order to avoid being arrested for the cocaine.”

            Her story was, in part, that she was not a prostitute, and she was wearing underpants, and the defendant, in the process of raping her, ripped them off. The fact of her not wearing underpants was relevant to the case because it showed she lied in her story to the police. She actually lied a great deal of times.

            This article, which was written around the time of the verdict, goes into detail about what actually happened. He was not acquitted because his victim was slutty and wore slutty things, he was acquitted because her story did not add up and she lied several times before and during the trial. But then everyone pretended that the only thing said during the trial was “she had no panties”, and look at how horrible it is to be a woman, look at how threatening it is to be a woman, that a man was found innocent.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DrBeat:

            You are misrepresenting that article.

            The juror says that he meant that she was aaking for sex and got it. He doesn’t even say, well, we thought she was lying about being a hooker so we couldn’t believe her about anything else.

            The jurors attitude is what speaks to my point.

            But you have a point that it is speaks to why the defense wanted that evidence in.

          • DrBeat says:

            He did say that the reason they could not believe her was that she kept lying. One of the lies she told was about not being a hooker. He pointed to the evidence they had, of which her clothing was one piece, that she was a prostitute and was behaving as a prostitute, and said that this contradicted her story.

            Her outfit “was a factor” in the verdict, he said, but
            not the determining one. It was a factor only in that it
            delivered a certain visual message in the same way that
            a police officer’s uniform or a nun’s habit does: it suggested
            this woman was a hooker. And she denied that. And in denying
            that she told a web of lies, and it was those lies, Diamond
            said, that persuaded the jury nothing she said could be trusted.
            “Every time she turns around, she can’t remember what she’s
            just said.”

            So how is that a misrepresentation?

            What is it the defense did that you think they should not be allowed to do?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DrBeat:
            I was conceding your point about the defense.

            The misrepresentation is that the story is far murkier than you were presenting it as. He did plead guilty to an earlier rape in Georgia where he said to the victim ”It’s your fault. You’re wearing a skirt.” And the article you linked shows that “In Georgia, Lord had been charged with sexual crimes remarkably similar to the one Chiapponi described, including two cases of abduction at knifepoint.”

            My point about the juror applied to what he said at the time, not how he explained himself after. He wasn’t saying, at the time, that her story couldn’t be trusted, but rather “We all felt she was asking for it, the way she was dressed”

            Here is how Roy Diamond explained himself in the article you linked:
            ” `It’ meant sex, not rape. People heard it and they just took it for the worst . . . if a woman goes out at 3 a.m. in that kind of a skirt, she is advertising for sex, and she got what she advertised for.”

          • DrBeat says:

            You brought up the practice of presenting plaintiff’s clothes as evidence for the defense in a rape trial as horrible, and proof we are Not Doing Enough.

            I said that every single time I have heard of such a defense being brought up to decry how our society treats rape, literally without exception, it turned out to be something entirely reasonable the speaker was lying about or was repeating a lie about.

            You brought up this 1989 case and used it to decry how our society treats rape.

            I pointed out that when I actually looked into it, it was something entirely reasonable and relevant to the case.

            What does it even mean to say “My point about the juror applied to what he said at the time, not how he explained himself after”? Why does the full explanation of what he and the jury though count LESS than the quote-mine? The segment I quoted begins with literally the very next sentence after what you quoted, explaining the meaning of the thing that he said, at the time that he said it. Why does quote with context and meaning count less than quote without context and meaning?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DrBeat:
            Sorry, going too fast. I was trying to make three distinct points.

            1) Conceded the point about the defense.
            2) Contend that, even though she lied about many things, it seems quite likely a rape and a abduction did occur.
            3) Show that issues about consent seemed to still be bound up in foreman’s statement. It’s not “she lied about being a hooker, so we can’t trust the other parts of her story” but “she was a hooker, so we think the act was most likely consensual.”

            Nonetheless, I completely concede that this wasn’t a very good example for me to use. I should have done more research than 10 seconds.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DrBeat:

            How does this strike you as an example. This is a quote from a defense lawyer in a Canadian study published in 2000 on how they defend against the charge of rape.

            “Barristers always asked complainants questions about their clothing. It was part of the same theme that they had brought what had happened upon themselves. BAR10 clearly believed that the way some women, particularly young women, dressed was the reason for what happened to them. He said:

            This girl has gone into a bikers’ pub wearing a mini-skirt and a see-through shirt. That’s part of the story. I don’t think they (young girls) realise the effect of their appearance on men. Guys get turned on if they can see through the women’s clothes. Dress is significant.

            However, questions were not confined to clothing on the occasion in question. In the case mentioned above, in which a video of the complainant dancing was shown, she was questioned about the clothing she was wearing at court. BAR7 who had prosecuted the case commented: ‘The girl was basically just cross-examined because she had a mini skirt with a zip in it.'”

    • Earthly Knight says:

      Before offering an opinion on affirmative consent, I would like to know what I am opining on. Can you give necessary and sufficient conditions for when someone has consented affirmatively?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Here is SUNY’s definition, which I believe is fairly standard:

        Affirmative consent is a knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity. Consent can be given by words or actions, as long as those words or actions create clear permission regarding willingness to engage in the sexual activity. Silence or lack of resistance, in and of itself, does not demonstrate consent. The definition of consent does not vary based upon a participant’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

        I proactively agree that the vagueness of the intoxication part of the standard creates problems for application, but, I would hope that we could agree that someone who is “sloppy drunk” is a bad choice for a random encounter (where you don’t know what their consent structure looks like).

        • Earthly Knight says:

          Here is SUNY’s definition, which I believe is fairly standard:

          Yes, it is also hopelessly vague and not what I asked for. What I want to know is how you propose to fill in the following schema:

          Person-x has affirmatively consented to having sex with person-y if and only if the following conditions obtain… [YOU FILL IN THE BLANK HERE].

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I find the method you have employed here to be ungenerous. If you already knew the standard definition of consent, why make me go through the rigmarole of finding a definition?

            In any case, consent here is not substantially different from the way consent is used in the context of non-sexual assault, and that standard works well. People don’t go around in a haze of of unclarity regarding whether a game of basketball is consensual.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            What? I asked for necessary and sufficient conditions, you responded with some words with vague positive affect loosely slung together, then I renewed my request for necessary and sufficient conditions. This is not a wild goose chase: I’d like to have a clear sense what I am agreeing to prior to agreeing to it.

            The analogy is suggestive, but we should demand a higher degree of rigor when contemplating serious ethical guidelines. It might be, for instance, that we permit a great deal of ambiguity in pick-up basketball because of the low stakes and the rarity of opportunities for confusion. My risk-tolerance for passing a basketball to an unwitting bystander is a lot higher than my risk-tolerance for raping a dude.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            To get you started, here is a first pass at what I take to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for no-means-no consent.

            ___

            No-means-no consent:
            Person X has consented to a particular sex act with Person Y if and only if both (1) and (2) and either (3) or (4) obtain:

            1. Person X is psychologically capable of consenting, in virtue of being of appropriate age, mental capacity, and sound mind, and not unconscious, asleep, or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol (except if Person X had previously, while of sound mind and not incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, explicitly agreed that the sex act take place while he was unconscious, asleep, or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, and had not subsequently revoked that agreement).

            2. Person X does not physically resist the sex act (except if Person X had previously, while of sound mind and not incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, explicitly agreed that the sex act take place despite his physical resistance, and had not subsequently revoked that agreement).

            3. Person X has had the opportunity to signal his unwillingness to participate in the sex act by word or unambiguous gesture, and has not done so.

            4. Person X and Person Y are involved in a standing relationship such that Person Y could reasonably conclude that the sex act was welcome without giving Person X a prior opportunity to signal his unwillingness to participate in the sex act, and Person X has not signaled his unwillingness to participate in the sex act by word or unambiguous gesture.

            ___

            You see that this is nowhere near as simple as “it’s just like punch-buggy or a basketball game”. But if you are serious about having a conversation about affirmative consent, this is the sort of background work that you will need to do to ensure that different parties are not just endlessly talking past one another.

        • Drew says:

          I agree with Earthly Night that the SUNY definition totally fails to answer his question.

          Without specific guidelines, you don’t even have a well-defined disagreement with the status-quo.

        • Matt C says:

          Like others, I genuinely do not understand how affirmative consent is different from regular consent. I have heard people argue that there is almost no difference, and others argue that it is almost completely different.

          This is a problem in itself, but we could at least understand what your idea of the concept means and discuss that better.

          Let’s take the bar hookups that happen every weekend, and that are mostly understood as consensual now. They all involve alcohol. Using your personal experience and/or imagination about how hookups actually play out, and your notion of affirmative consent, what fraction of them violate affirmative consent? Just a very crude estimate: almost none, a few percent, maybe half, most of them, all of them?

    • Anon. says:

      When two people get in a boxing ring, they don’t ask each other “are you sure you want to box?”

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Well, if their were “sex rings” with very clear rules about what could and could not happen and a referee, and this was the only place sex occurred, I don’t think we would be having conversations about the need for affirmative consent.

        • Sastan says:

          There is no need for affirmative consent. You’re just making it up to justify criminalizing a vast swath of normal human sexual interaction.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            On the contrary, affirmative consent is how the legal system prevents all kinds of behavior from being considered assault. This was addressed in the OP.

          • Jason K. says:

            “On the contrary, affirmative consent is how the legal system prevents all kinds of behavior from being considered assault. This was addressed in the OP.”

            The legal system doesn’t use affirmative consent for anything unless explicitly required via regulation (ex: ‘person must sign the form’). The legal system instead uses *informed consent” and assumed risk, where some risks are assumed to be acceptable simply by a person’s participation without the need for further waiver or warning.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Jason K:
            What exactly do you think affirmative consent is? Something in writing? That’s not affirmative consent. Affirmative simply means that you can’t be assumed to be consenting merely by the absence of non consent.

            Informed simply means that you must know what it is you are consenting to. It’s, I believe, part of what is required to make consent actual consent, in a legal sense.

          • Jason K. says:

            I think it is exactly what it says on the tin and have already explained why it is a bad standard.

            “It’s, I believe, part of what is required to make consent actual consent, in a legal sense.” Exactly. The legal system generally doesn’t go looking for anything beyond that (or assumed risk) unless it has explicit direction to do so. “affirmative consent is how the legal system prevents all kinds of behavior from being considered assault” is just wrong.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Affirmative consent means you have to take some action to affirm consent. Simple as that.

            In what way is this not the legal standard for anything else?

          • Anonymous says:

            @HeelBearCub
            “Affirmative consent means you have to take some action to affirm consent. Simple as that.”

            That definition says nothing, because ‘some action’ could be anything. It could mean that you have to sign a contract with three witnesses in order to consent to kissing. It could also mean that by being in the same room as someone you have consented to having sex with them.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Anonymous:
            “It could also mean that by being in the same room as someone you have consented to having sex with them.”

            No, that’s not true. Simply, merely being in the same room is not consent to having sex.

            My repeated contention is that affirmation of consent is uncontroversial and understood in plenty of other contexts. You have to take some positive action to affirm consent.

            Perhaps what I need to be more clear about is that what I mean when I say consent structure. Let’s suppose there is a boxing gym and two people are in a ring and they start to spar. In that moment, it may look like they have not engaged in anything affirmative before beginning to spar. They get in the ring, say nothing, don’t talk to each other, touch gloves and begin to box.

            But what about everything that has happened before that? They didn’t show up out of the blue. They have done many, many things before hand that affirm consent to box. They know the rules of boxing and the rules of the gym. They know that they are participating in boxing and not MMA. They know how to easily stop the competition and know that it will be respected, etc.

            These are all absent in first time intimate encounters. That means it is incumbent on all parties to ensure they are clear on what is actually being consented to. It’s the absent of that consent structure that makes determining consent more difficult. But it doesn’t mean that affirmative consent isn’t required in both situations.

          • Jason K. says:

            This is back to the same pattern. You are unable to concretely address any direct challenge to the idea and instead just evasively offer feelgood-isms or restate the definition in return. Pretty much every single ‘fact’ that you have cited has been demonstrated to be wrong.

        • Jason K. says:

          HBC, you are still missing the point. It doesn’t matter that the ring isn’t physically present. The ring is context, just like other interactions create context.

          Women are not the idiot children that progressives are predisposed to think of them as. On average, they probably know the score before men do.

          You seem to be engaging in an extremely generous interpretation of what people mean by ‘affirmative consent’. I guarantee that this is not how it is going to be implemented. The people pushing this are *not* going to be generous.

          I also note that you have not addressed any of the other problems I pointed out and instead have generally chosen to focus on nitpicking the examples. I have also noticed that you haven’t given a solid answer to anyone else that has pointed out similar problems.

          Genuine questions time:

          Have you engaged in affirmative consent as commonly defined for 100% of your sexual interactions? If not, are you comfortable with the fact that you would now be considered a rapist? Are you comfortable with ceding how things like affirmations are defined to others? Others who may then retroactively determine whether or not a given affirmation qualifies, thus allow them to make a post hoc determination as to whether or not you have committed sexual assault/rape?

    • Sastan says:

      It’s not about what people want.

      It’s about what people can reasonably be punished for not being able to prove.

      In terms of “want”, of course I don’t want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me. But, in case you haven’t noticed, human beings are not lines of Basic where you punch in the right commands and the action takes place. Some are uncomfortable verbalizing certain requests. Some don’t think it should be necessary. Some think having to stop all amorous activity every ten seconds to re-establish “consent” ruins the mood.

      If I found out that someone I had sex with hadn’t really wanted to have sex with me, I’d be embarrassed. However, I should not be imprisoned unless he or she had communicated in a manner a reasonable person would have understood to be lack of consent. Sex is weird, complicated and awkward. The solution is not to add lawyers. And this snide, sly campaign to make all men felons will not fucking stand.

      “Affirmative consent” is the death of civil rights for all men with an active sex life, nothing more. If you admit you had sex, how can you possibly prove consent? Even videotape wouldn’t cover everything. This ridiculous and barbaric idiocy will bloody well bite those pushing it in the ass one day, I guarantee. If “affirmative consent” is the standard, I have approximately ten thousand instances of rape I can charge a very long list of people with.

      The proponents of “affirmative consent” have outright stated that their goal is to have a lot of men falsely accused in order to make men afraid of interacting with women. It is legal terrorism, and those who support it are misandrists.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “The proponents of ‘affirmative consent’ have outright stated that their goal is to have a lot of men falsely accused in order to make men afraid of interacting with women. It is legal terrorism, and those who support it are misandrists.”

        Citations?

          • A proponent of, not yet “the proponents of.”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            … well that’s certainly one man of the left signalling virtue like Robespierre.

          • magicman says:

            everything that is wrong with Vox encapsulated

          • Sastan says:

            Come now, Mr. Freidman. If the bloody editor of Vox is willing to publish it to the nation, I think it’s a safe assumption he felt there was a sympathetic audience for it. The fact he still has a job seems to prove that feeling was correct.

            I’m sure I could hunt about the interwubs to find a hundred more examples, but then it would just be a No True Scotsman marathon. And I just worked sixteen hours, so I’m not feeling up to that particular game.

            I will state again. There is only one motivation to support the inversion of civil rights that is “affirmative consent”, and that is hatred of men. If I proposed “affirmative ownership of goods” for black people only, where blacks and only blacks would be required to prove they hadn’t stolen everything in their possession, otherwise it would be considered theft, I’d rightly be called a racist. There’s just no other reasonable explanation.

          • Cauê says:

            There is only one motivation to support the inversion of civil rights that is “affirmative consent”, and that is hatred of men. (…) There’s just no other reasonable explanation.

            Goddamnit.

            Now this is a failure of imagination.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Cauê:

          Yeah.

      • science says:

        I’m sure Nornagest will be along shortly to tell you that you are failing the ideological turing test.

        • Nornagest says:

          You make one post and suddenly you have a schtick.

        • Cauê says:

          I think I do it more than him, and I’ve already done it here as well…

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @science:

          I know you are on my side, so to speak, but can I gently ask you to “take it down a notch”, as it were? Good dialogue can happen in this space, but it takes work.

          I haven’t noticed you commenting here extensively before, so I’m not sure if I am interpreting your tone correctly or not.

    • Drew says:

      The first is that affirmative consent is how we determine the presence or absence of assault in general already.

      This is obviously untrue.

      Situation A: Mother picks up & hugs her child. Child giggles.
      Situation B: Homeless man picks up & hugs a random child. Child screams in terror.

      Exactly one of these scenarios is objectionable.

      The common standard is that people need to have a reasonable belief that their contact will be well-received.

      That’s why athletes can clap a goal-scoring player on the back, or even pick the person up and carry them off the field. It’s how children can start a game of punch buggy or ‘tag’ without explicit negotiation.

      Your “fighting in the street” scenario is a type of contact that’s unusual and generally unwelcome. Worse, it’s a form of contact that will be illegal in many jurisdictions, even given explicit, written consent.

      That seems like a weird edge-case that that’s almost totally inapplicable when we’re asking about scenarios like, “When is it ok for a mother to hug her child?” or “Can a married person kiss their spouse?”

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Drew:
        On the contrary consent is key notion in considering whether a behavior is assault. This is why an athlete can tackle another athlete on the field,or punch another athlete in the ring, without it being assault.

        The child example is a red-herring. Young children are considered to be unable to consent and function under different legal precedents.

        • There are lots of context where you hug another adult without first asking for or being given permission. It isn’t normally treated as assault.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I would contend that the typical adult to adult hug between people who do not know each other well usually starts with a physical invitation to hug which must be reciprocated for the behavior to be seen as not acceptable.

            Regardless, a single hug is de minimis and therefore won’t be assault anyway.

        • Drew says:

          Let’s walk through an example:

          A woman sees her spouse getting off a plane. Spouse doesn’t notice her right away. Woman surprises her spouse with a kiss. Kiss is (once surprise passes) well-received.

          —-

          My claims:
          1. This scenario is not morally objectionable.
          2. This scenario is not battery under common law.
          3. A surprise kiss by a stranger would have been battery
          4. Spouse, having been surprised, did not give affirmative consent.

          I think that points #2, #3 and #4 are sufficient to show that, in as far as our laws use a consent standard, it’s not the affirmative consent standard that you’re advocating.

          Points #1 and #4 seem like they’re sufficient to show that, while an affirmative consent model might be a good idea in some cases (particularly the one-night-stand scenarios that seem to crop up so frequently in these threads), it’s not the real moral standard that anyone is using.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            The word “spouse” is doing all of the lifting in that scenario. It implies many things about consent: that you have known each other for quite a while, are familiar with each others’ likes and dislikes, etc. You have given her surprise kisses before at home and know she consents to them, you have kissed her in public before and know she consents to this. There is already a framework of consent.

            A single attempt at a kiss is generally going to considered de minimis anyway, I believe, especially in the context of an ongoing relationship.

            Consider, If your spouse isn’t kissing you back, what do you do?

          • Drew says:

            A single attempt at a kiss is generally going to considered de minimis anyway, I believe, especially in the context of an ongoing relationship.

            Yes, the law would say that the kiss is ‘de minimis’ because of consent.

            The law would say there’s consent because it allows for both implied & explicit consent.

            Move to an “affirmative consent” standard and this changes. The kiss is no longer consensual or ‘de minimis’.

            That was the point of my example.

            You’re not consistently applying an ‘affirmative consent’ standard; it comes out only after you’ve decided that something was objectionable.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Drew:
            No. As I understand things which are de minimis are so small as to do inconsequential harm, or things for which their is broad societal understanding such that they are considered part of normal social behavior. Once again, wikipedia.

          • Drew says:

            No, the law doesn’t allow you to kiss random and likely uninterested strangers.

            The relevant tort is ‘battery’. It applies to harmful or offensive touching.

            Knock a hat off someone’s head, and it’s battery. A nonconsensual kiss would definitely quality.

            Your link to ‘Defenses: Consent’ is about ‘consent’ as a defense to assault.

            It’s true that the law allows people to argue that they thought they had implied consent for some minor forms of contact.

            However, you can only appeal to consent in my scenario if you’re saying that the woman had consent, despite not having affirmative consent.

            I think this is reasonable, but again, it is what my example is set up to show.

    • brad says:

      I mentioned affirmative consent in a recent thread, and my belief that a post discussing affirmative consent would not be likely to generate much in the way of positive dialogue. Some posters seemed to think that we actually could have some sort of positive dialogue.

      On the balance I think you were correct and your interlocutors were wrong.

      • Nornagest says:

        This scene always overestimates its ability to deal with controversy.

        But, to be fair, so does pretty much every scene. We just couch it in stuffy cog-sci verbiage.

      • Anonymous says:

        It doesn’t seem to have gone too badly to me. I’ve been exposed to an interesting set of arguments in favor of the idea, and am more sympathetic to those proposing it than I was before – mostly due to HeelBearCub’s description of it being different to the impression of it I’ve got from others.

        It currently seems to me more like one part motte and bailey, one part misguided view that law ought to perfectly mirror social standards, rather than the obviously incorrect nonsense I previously viewed it as.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @brad:
        It is going about as well as I expected.

        There is some genuine engagement and desire to consider the question in a charitable manner, but not a ton of it.

    • Anonymous says:

      HBC, further to the discussion of affirmative consent, which has been informative, I’d be interested to know your view on this video (not the most NSFW thing ever, but you probably shouldn’t watch this at work).

      This video depicts what I, and probably other people who replied to you, understood affirmative consent to mean. Is this inaccurate? Is it a particularly stringent version of affirmative consent? Is it, perhaps, a particularly stringent version of affirmative consent, presented in the hopes that people will sorta-kinda-half follow it, and end up doing just about the right amount of affirmative consenting?

      Also, why does the Wikipedia page on the subject contain the line “Ongoing consent is sought at all levels of sexual intimacy regardless of the parties’ relationship, prior sexual history or current activity” – does this not contradict what you’ve said about precedent overruling the strict standard? Would you say this is a mistake, or an alternative interpretation of affirmative consent that you disagree with?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Anonymous:
        That video does the the affirmative consent movement no great service, I will say that. #1, it does not model ANY non-verbal consent, which is very, very clearly included in the concept of affirmative consent. #2, with the the exception of one time, all of the consent seeking is in the form of “Can I”. Still, it doesn’t say that the scenario is the only way to seek consent. Frankly, with slightly better actors and slightly better lines they could have even delivered on what they were trying to convey.

        The funny thing is that the one time they do use a non “Can I” question, it is probably the most common type of consent seeking “Do you like this?” Coincidentally, this is the kind we often see modeled in popular media as being ignored (in other words, a sicko character will frequently ask “Do you like this?” neither wanting, nor expecting, an answer). Whereas in real life “do you like this?” seems a pretty common way of asking for feedback, and a non-answer is a big red flag.

        Ozzy has many good posts on consent. Here is one of them that addresses some of what you are talking about. I wish I could find the comment where she described a completely non-verbal encounter that was entirely about affirmative consent (and matched the way many encounters go).

        As to the spousal stuff. I’ve been married 20+ years. We have both had our ups and downs with libido. Recently depression, sleep apnea and low testosterone put me in a state that was almost asexual. We started out as a couple that was hornier than pretty much anyone. Yes, you need to check in with your spouse when they change how they respond!

        If you do what you have been doing for 20 years, and they continue to respond as they have, yeah that is affirmative consent. But when they stop responding as they have, you are responsible for figuring out what is going on.

        Look, if you are in a marriage for 20 years and you doubt whether you know if your spouse wants to have sex or not, you have bigger problems than the affirmative consent standard.

        • Anonymous says:

          I suspect that if they did include examples of non-verbal consent – implicit kinds, that is, not pointing and gestures – then the response would largely be “what makes this different from what everyone does already?”.

          “Yes, you need to check in with your spouse when they change how they respond!”

          I don’t disagree, my argument is only that precedent can certainly change the baseline of what you would expect the other person to be okay with.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            One thing to note, in that video the touching and the asking are coincident. So, even in that very formulaic, legalistic framing, it still doesn’t reach the straw man level that people want to tear down.

    • dndnrsn says:

      HeelBearCub: “It is my contention that any issue people have with affirmative consent have very little to do with the actual standard itself, and more to do with how they perceive it might be applied, and especially in how it may be applied in an American society that is extraordinarily conflicted about how good and/or desirable sex is.”

      I can’t speak for anyone else but I basically agree with this. On a personal level, I like affirmative consent as a standard – I think affirmative consent as you are presenting it is pretty reasonable, and pretty much how my personal practice. But there’s a lot of baggage: especially on campuses, it seems like it’s going hand in hand with a lot of other things, like a push to lower the standard of evidence, a tendency to discount exculpatory evidence, etc.

      And I think you are definitely correct in your final point. A lot of the sex people are having, anecdotally at least, strikes me as pretty grim; I’ve heard and read a lot of people describe sexual encounters that sound pretty awful, as though they’re trying to convince themselves that, no, actually, it was great. Sexual culture, at least in North America (or the Anglo countries in general?) is pretty messed up.

      • Anonymous says:

        “A lot of the sex people are having, anecdotally at least, strikes me as pretty grim; I’ve heard and read a lot of people describe sexual encounters that sound pretty awful, as though they’re trying to convince themselves that, no, actually, it was great. Sexual culture, at least in North America (or the Anglo countries in general?) is pretty messed up.”

        My impression is that anyone who is particularly enthused about anything will bemoan how badly everyone else is doing that thing, how much they’re all missing out on. Consider that for everything you partake in as an occasional amateur, the enthusiasts of that thing are sitting off somewhere shaking their heads, calling your attempts at it ‘pretty grim’ and fretting about how Thing Culture, at least in North America, is pretty messed up.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Who says I’m not an occasional amateur myself? I’m certainly not a frequent professional.

          Perhaps I came off a bit angry-old-man there. I just think that HBC was right – the culture is conflicted about how good/desirable sex is. One of the ways this manifests is in the ways that people who have absorbed the message that sex is good and fun react when they have sex that isn’t good and fun.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I think part of it is a baby-bathwater/chinese cardiologist problem. There is a lot of desire to find the problematic cases and treat them as if they are the standard thing.

        I also think that sex-positive feminists, non-sex-positive feminists and non-sex-positive, non-feminists tend to have there messages lumped together in the common mind, and what comes out tends to be typically non-sex-positive.

        • dndnrsn says:

          There’s also the sex-positive non-feminists, I would imagine.

          I would say – entirely based on personal experience – that the culture I see (and this is probably different by cohort, demographic, etc) has absorbed some of the tenets of sex-positivity, but in a way that might upset a lot of the serious sex-positive feminists.

          That is, people are definitely having sex, including casual sex, but a lot of the time they aren’t doing casual sex in the responsible, rules-ordered way a lot of sex-positive feminists see as a goal.

    • stillnotking says:

      It is my contention that any issue people have with affirmative consent have very little to do with the actual standard itself, and more to do with how they perceive it might be applied

      Well, obviously. I think it takes a degree of myopia, if not paranoia, even to suspect that opponents of affirmative consent are motivated by a desire to get away with rape.

      The basic problem is burden of proof: in the case of assault, it makes sense to presume the victim did not consent, because only in very unusual and specific circumstances would anyone agree to be assaulted. Sex is a different story; people have consensual sex all the time, and if one partner is suddenly required to produce proof of consent after the fact, it opens the door to abuse by the vindictive or the regretful. A better analogy than punch-buggy would be dinner parties. If I go to an acquaintance’s house for dinner, I can be confident they will not later be able to send me to jail by claiming I stole their food, whether I can produce a written invitation or not. Not to mention that there isn’t even a sexual analog, in our culture, to the dinner invitation — you’re requiring the accused to produce evidence they can’t reasonably be expected to have, even in ideal circumstances.

      Edit: Perhaps part of the goal of the affirmative-consent movement is to institute a “dinner invitation” standard for sexual contact. The major problem with this is that sexual activity has well-known and deliberate common-knowledge lacunae: both people may know that “Netflix and chill?” means “Come over for sex?”, yet have an interest in that not becoming common knowledge, for reasons of reputation, discretion, signaling, etc. Whether the proponents of affirmative consent think that attitude should change is beside the point, since social engineering of such scale and subtlety is almost impossible, and certainly not possible by means of the law.

    • Cauê says:

      I told you then that I’d probably get something out of it, and I did: we’re not talking about the same thing, and I had no idea of that. You apparently didn’t know either, because the question “do you really want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you?” reads like a non sequitur. Opposition to “affirmative consent” is either about express, verbal consent, repeated at regular intervals and every level of escalation (this is not a straw-man), or explicitly about the shifting of the burden of proof.

      Several people already said that what you advocate is not different from the progressive escalation and “no means no” that’s taken as the standard now, and I agree with them. I still don’t get what you mean, so I’ll try to ask for clarification in a different way: how exactly is your proposal different than the current standards?

      (as an aside, people didn’t like the analogy, but I’ll take a different tack: back when I was 8 many a playful fight did start with a probing weak punch, or just taking up a plastic sword and making a pose)

      • science says:

        It is a straw-man, or at very least an extreme weak-man. I’ve never seen a mooted standard that forbid non-verbal consent. Ditto with shifting the burden of proof. There’s some argument about what the standard of proof should be in various contexts, but the standard and the burden are orthogonal.

        • stillnotking says:

          If the burden of proof is unchanged, then a change in the standard of consent can only have a negative practical effect: anyone who knowingly commits rape will also know enough to lie about it.

        • Cauê says:

          It is a straw-man, or at very least an extreme weak-man. I’ve never seen a mooted standard that forbid non-verbal consent.

          If it’s true they are non-existent, I’ve learned something (see, HBC?). Although a lot of the problem remains after you remove the “verbal” part.

          But it’s a fact that non-verbal consent is very often discouraged in official policies, and the video Anon linked above is not unique in using constant verbal communication as the demonstration of the right way to do it. And in practice I don’t see how it could lead to anything other than an effective ban. How does one prepare a defense under yes-means-yes based on non-verbal signs? My guess is one doesn’t, and only the most honest, naive defendants will say anything other than “she said yes”. Article on this, with several examples (sorry, not motivated enough to look for more): http://time.com/3222176/campus-rape-the-problem-with-yes-means-yes/

          There’s some argument about what the standard of proof should be in various contexts, but the standard and the burden are orthogonal.

          On the one hand, I do know better and I meant standard, this was a mistake. On the other hand, the conversation about burden of proof is also ongoing, parallelly but very often entangled, and that’s also part of what people mean when they oppose “affirmative consent” – quotes below. You may say they’re confused, but I was attacking the notion that the opposition comes from people who “want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them”, which, well, come on.

          http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-regulating-sex.html

          An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead, even if, technically, it’s still up to the prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he didn’t, or that he made a unreasonable mistake about what his partner was telling him. As Judge Gertner pointed out to me, if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.

          http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/one-year-in-yes-means-yes-policies-begin-to-fall-apart/article/2570096

          To be fair, there is nothing in yes-means-yes — sometimes known as affirmative consent — policies that require schools to shift the burden of proof onto accused students. But in practice, that’s what happens, just as it did at UTC. As McCoy pointed out, accused students “must overcome the presumption inherent in the charge that the violation has been established.” Simply denying the allegation is seen as “insufficient.” The accused then becomes responsible for proving “the converse of what is taken as true and credible, i.e., the complainant’s statement that no consent was given.”

          (as an aside, I feel compelled to point out that I felt it was necessary, or at least extremely advisable, to only link articles written by women. this is not a very good sign)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cauê:
            Would you agree that, as a general rule, it’s a good idea to have talked to someone you are going to have sex with about the fact you are going to have sex?

            All the policies on affirmative consent I have seen simply says “verbal is preferred” which is completely in line with the above statement.

          • Cauê says:

            Would you agree that, as a general rule, it’s a good idea to have talked to someone you are going to have sex with about the fact you are going to have sex?

            No.

            Morally, it’s neutral. Or rather, I suppose, it’s neutral but intended to work like safety margins to make sure nothing morally bad happens. Very large, unnecessary, ineffective safety margins.

            From a personal perspective, if you care enough to make sure to talk about it with this purpose, you would have been plenty mindful and careful not to do anything wrong anyway.

            Practically… I’ve talked with multiple women who expressly declared a dislike for openly talking about it (not that I make a habit of interviewing people about romantic preferences!). I don’t know how representative they are, but from my life experience this preference is at least far from fringe. Our culture has a very elaborate set of tricks and customs designed to probe and communicate without making intentions common knowledge, and all signs point to people liking it that way.

            So, is it a good idea to go against these preferences to establish a practice that for all I can see doesn’t come with benefits? No.

            Of course, if anyone’s preference is to talk about it beforehand, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that either. I have done it and I have not done it.

        • science says:

          Thank you for including enough of the quotes to show that they of the form “well yes technically the burden of proof is still on the prosecution but …” I’m content to let those quotes speak for themselves.

          As for the defendant’s strategy that’s entirely bound up in the context: the standard and burdens of proof, admissibility rules, and so on. In a criminal case, even if a state were to move to an affirmative consent rule, negating it would still be an element of the crime that would have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. A defendant would not need to take the stand or provide any other evidence unless he wished to rebut evidence provided by the prosecution that would be sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a lack of consent.

          If the defendant (under a hypothetical affirmative defense standard) does take the stand, I don’t think he has any worse a shot before the jury if he says “she was moaning, pulling me down on top of her, and angled her hips to make it easier to enter her” than if he says “she was yelling fuck me”. Either way it mostly comes down to a credibility determination.

          • Cauê says:

            Only one of the quotes was about criminal cases. In universities the burden of proof very much is being shifted.

            Look, this one is great, I’ll quote extensively, as it’s also one more showing the push for a requirement of explicit verbal consent:
            http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/us/california-high-schools-sexual-consent-classes.html

            “What does that mean — you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?” asked Aidan Ryan, 16, who sat near the front of the room.

            “Pretty much,” Ms. Zaloom answered. “It’s not a timing thing, but whoever initiates things to another level has to ask.”

            The students did not seem convinced. They sat in groups to brainstorm ways to ask for affirmative consent. They crossed off a list of options: “Can I touch you there?” Too clinical. “Do you want to do this?” Too tentative. “Do you like that?” Not direct enough.

            “They’re all really awkward and bizarre,” one girl said.

            “Did you come up with any on your own?” Ms. Zaloom asked.

            One boy offered up two words: “You good?”

            That drew nearly unanimous nods of approval.

            Under the new law, high school students in California must be educated about the concept of affirmative consent — but they are not actually being held to that standard. So a high school student on trial on rape charges would not have to prove that he or she obtained oral assent from the accuser. That was the case with a senior at the elite St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire this year who was accused of raping a freshman. The senior was acquitted of aggravated sexual assault but found guilty of statutory rape — sex with a minor.

            Last year, Corey Mock, a student at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, was expelled after officials there found him guilty of sexual misconduct because he could not prove he had obtained verbal consent from a woman who accused him of sexual assault. But a Davidson County Chancery Court judge ruled in August that the university had “improperly shifted the burden of proof and imposed an untenable standard upon Mr. Mock to disprove the accusation.” The judge called the university’s ruling “arbitrary and capricious.”

          • science says:

            If you read the details of those two cases they both reflect mistakes made by those training on and administering the policies, not flaws in the policies themselves.

            I can agree wholeheartedly that there are procedural problems at these colleges, but that’s an entirely separate issue from what standards should be used. I also wonder where the outrage was when these deficient procedures were used to expel students for things other than sexual assault.

          • Cauê says:

            You say “mistakes”, while I see no indication that the ones making those mistakes desire the system to work in any other way.

          • Nornagest says:

            You say “mistakes”, while I see no indication that the ones making those mistakes desire the system to work in any other way.

            To be fair, a system can terrorize people in practice without being designed or intended to terrorize people. I’d wager that’s more common than malice, actually.

            It’s still a bad system.

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      Having gone through all the replies –

      You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

      That is, I think your definition of “Affirmative Consent” differs radically from what all its other supporters define it as. Your definition, insofar as you’ve given it, is how things are done now, and doesn’t require much quibbling. But given that it’s more or less how things are done now, and supporters of an Affirmative Consent standard want things to change, consider the possibility that Affirmative Consent is something other than the way things are, and is, in fact, substantively different.

      • science says:

        Based on your extensive review of proposed and enacted affirmative consent standards? Or based on third hand reports of what those evil feminists said on twitter?

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Very uncharitable. Based on my own conversations and readings. For one example drawn at random from a Google search, http://sgvnowproject.weebly.com/the-affirmative-consent-standard–rape–sexual-assault-education.html holds that Affirmative Consent requires verbal consent.

          At best its proponents cannot agree on what it means, which means it doesn’t mean anything.

          • Echo says:

            Every time I hear “but you have to agree the standards I’d set are perfectly reasonable!”:

            “these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each promises to be about a thousand policewomyn. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”
            …Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours.”

          • Orphan Wilde says:

            Echo –

            My experience with those who claim “It would never go so far as that” is that they don’t mean it. (I argued for years on a politics site, long enough that some of the people who had made exactly that statement, when confronted with the “As far as that” in more recent politics, were forced to admit they never meant it, and in fact supported the “that” in question. I had a long enough memory to call them on it.)

          • science says:

            It seems I wasn’t being uncharitable after all.

            You aren’t talking about the UC standard, the SUNY standard, those proposed by various relatively large scale trade groups, legislation introduced in various legislatures (that haven’t gone anywhere but still) or the like. You are talking about twitter, tumblr and the moral equivalent. *.weebly.com doesn’t exactly scream institutional power.

            Based on your online arguments with god only knows who is behind these accounts you are accusing HBC of misusing the term and insisting that REAL affirmative consent as propounded by REAL advocates is verbal permission renewed every two minutes.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Orphan Wilde:
        I don’t know what sgvnnowproject is, but they don’t appear to set policy anywhere?

        I believe that the SUNY policy I linked earlier is typical:

        Affirmative consent is a knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity. Consent can be given by words or actions, as long as those words or actions create clear permission regarding willingness to engage in the sexual activity. Silence or lack of resistance, in and of itself, does not demonstrate consent. The definition of consent does not vary based upon a participant’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Okay, being more explicit:

          I don’t see a difference between that and the cultural norms we already have. Given that I don’t see a difference, and you’re insisting it is different, I must conclude the difference is something you’re not telling me. Given that you’re not telling me what the real difference is (and have accused those who have been persistent in asking what the real difference is of being uncharitable), I must conclude the real difference is something you’re unwilling to admit to. Given that you don’t want to admit to it, the real difference is something I wouldn’t agree to.

          That’s why you’re getting pushback. Not because anybody thinks “No means no” is the appropriate standard. It feels like you’re trying to slip something else in.

          But, and here’s the kicker, it’s entirely possible (and, charitably, quite probable) you genuinely believe this isn’t how society operates, which leads to the conclusion that either I’m wrong about society, or you are. Given your style of argument and your examples, which are dependent upon a framework of society in which the Bad Things you give examples of are already considered Bad Things, I’m inclined to say you’re wrong about society, and are extrapolating the Bad Things you hear about (because Bad Things are amplified, and normal behavior is not) and assuming those are the societal norm.

  36. Anonymous says:

    I’ve thought of a possible insight regarding Scott’s disagreement with Bryan Caplan regarding boss-worker relations, and whether they more resemble a mutually beneficial transaction between two equally powerful negotiators, or a power imbalance wherein the boss can demand a lot from the worker who has no choice but to go along with it.

    It strikes me that much of the time, employees really aren’t that good at their jobs. My observation is that typically, when someone is applying for a job, they will go for the highest paying position that they can convince an interviewer that they are competent to do. If there’s a lower paying position which they know they can easily do, they don’t apply for that, they apply for the next one up. When someone is very good at their job, they don’t seek to stay there, they seek a promotion. At all stages, people are generally near the bottom of the possible competency range for the job they are either applying for or doing. Those that aren’t, are generally those who don’t suffer the problems Scott mentions, of feeling they have to take extra shifts when asked to, of feeling that the boss has them by the balls.

    To the extent that this isn’t a choice people can make, that the ‘overqualified’ phenomenon prevents people from applying for positions they know they will get, I think it’s simply a consequence of this effect being so widespread. Employers know that in the overwhelming majority of cases, someone overqualified for a job – that is, able to competently do it with no struggle – will soon leave for a better and higher paying job that they are less totally competent at.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      This sounds closely related to the
      Peter principle – that people rise to the level of their incompetence.

    • Deiseach says:

      It strikes me that much of the time, employees really aren’t that good at their jobs

      But this is a necessary part of the working environment. You need people who are competent but not irreplaceable (otherwise you could never fill the position when Joe, the Only Guy Who Knows How This Works, retires, quits for a better job, or drops dead).

      Some jobs or positions need geniuses or unique individuals, but the majority of work positions need “person who is best fit for our requirements”. Not even the most qualified or experienced; Sue may seem as if she’ll fit in better with the ‘work environment’ or ‘office culture’ or she shares the values and thrust of the colleagues than Jim who has more experience/better credentials.

      Interviews are hiring not Best Baker/Florist/CFO In The History Of Ever, it’s “best of these five/ten/thirty applicants” and if Number One Choice can’t or won’t take up the job, you can then go to Number Two Choice and not be at a loss.

      Even Best Salesman In The Region in Twenty Years has to be replaceable, because you’re not going to maintain continuity of service or improve if his or her replacement can’t live up to them.

      Relying on one superstar has its downside, as Apple and Steve Jobs demonstrates. Unless you can be sure you are going to have a stream of Steve Jobs (what’s the plural of Jobs?) coming online every twenty years, you are screwed, and that goes for every position from the contract cleaners who vacuum the offices up to the Chairman of the Board.

      It’s no good longterm having the Absolute Best Clerical Officer Grade IV in the Entire World because when they retire, quit or drop dead, you then have to settle for Second-, Third-, Fifth- or even Nineteenth-Best in the Entire World and this is going to mean a drop in quality and production and all the rest of it from previous levels.

      And you’ll see this in every job, where Joe or Mary retires/quits/drops dead after forty years in the place, and yet the world still keeps turning, and a fortnight later their replacement is at their desk and things march on. If the business was so reliant on Joe or Mary being the best of the best anywhere, they’d suffer real harm by their loss.

  37. Anon says:

    Can anyone recommend a good game that accurately intimates military tactics and strategy? Bonus points for being cheap or free and not too hard on the computer.

    • keranih says:

      Which military, era, and weapons system?

      • Anon says:

        I wasn’t thinking of any specific ones, but I have a mild preference toward WWII era USSR or anything since then.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Would Combat Mission be in the ballpark of what you’re looking for? I can recommend the early ones; I found the later versions a bit clumsy in their attempts to do too much.

          • Anon says:

            Combat Mission is almost exactly it, yes. Thanks, dndnrsn.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Cool. Like I said, I played the first three and liked them (although the AI is rather dim, and certainly not very good at attacking), but was quite unimpressed by the modern-era ones and the first WWII one using the newer engine: their attempts to un-abstract infantry (in the first three, infantry were on bases and teams/squads were treated as one unit, after that they were individuals) combined with bad pathfinding with the result that infantrymen were very bad at using cover, and vehicle pathfinding could be hilariously bad.

            I can’t speak for the newer WWII ones, as they are on their third engine now.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Anon – Depending on the level of simulation you’re looking for… Have you checked out the various Arma clans? Shack Tactical in particular seems amazingly impressive to me.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1dH73p3Yvc

    • Montfort says:

      Do you actually want both tactics and strategy, or will one suffice?

      ==Substantial edit (accidentally posted early)==

      This may be cheating, but VASSAL will let you play a large number of wargames on a computer, though most don’t have AI. Some well received ones for accuracy include GDW’s Assault.

      On the more tactical level, I had a friend who was big on “Project Reality” which may be what you’re looking for. It’s a mod for Battlefield 2.

      Second, smaller edit: Also they have one in the works for ARMA 3. Insurgency plays well and is relatively cheap, but is probably not quite as “real”?

      • Anon says:

        I’m looking more for strategy than tactics, and I’m afraid Battlefield 2 will be almost unplayable on the antiquated piece of machinery masquerading as a laptop that I’ve got. Assault actually looks like a lot of fun, but isn’t what I was going for.

        • Montfort says:

          If you can’t run BF2, I’m not sure HOI3, the default large-scale strategy suggestion, will fare much better. You might be able to run Blitzkrieg, which is also good (though I hear its sequels got very arcade-y).

          Panzer General Forever is free and very friendly to old computers if you’re okay with turn-based hex games.

          • dndnrsn says:

            If he’s OK with hex-based, that’s a lot of games right there.

            How about Unity of Command?

          • Anon says:

            She, not he. 🙂

            Anything with a focus on military strategy is fine. I feel like hex-based games would probably work best on my computer anyway, although they’re obviously less realistic.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Sorry! I shouldn’t go making such assumptions.

            Unity of Command is available on Steam and is pretty “light” as far as hex-based wargames go. I’m told Steam has frequent sales, so if you’re interested it’s probably worth waiting a while to see if it goes on sale.

            For something a bit heavier but still not wild (they are pretty in-depth but have been praised for being relatively accessible as far as wargames go) Decisive Battles of WWII: Korsun Pocket is quite good. It was released in 2003, and I’m surprised they are still charging full price for it (http://www.matrixgames.com/products/238/details/Korsun.Pocket). Comes with a few scenarios, and more can be downloaded. Operational level – smallest units tend to be battalion or regiment size and at most you command an army or army group. I know the same company has made several games in the same mold since then.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I’ve enjoyed Pike and Shot, although not being a 17th century general I can’t speak to how accurate a simulation it is.

    • I’ve heard generally good things about the “Close Combat” series for WWII. They’ve been made for a very long time so just go back far enough and you should be able to find something. For a FPS there’s the ARMA series. ARMA 2 is fairly cheap by now but they are sort of hard on the computer CPU-wise if not graphics-wise.

    • Ydirbut says:

      Peoples tactics is a pretty good freeware game that eventually had a (non-freeware) sequel. Download link is in the bottom right: http://www.advancedtactics.org/

  38. onyomi says:

    Sorry if this is too obvious or done to death, but having dabbled in various traditional martial arts for many years, I was thinking about a particularly weird phenomenon in that arena which might be of use in understanding irrational psychology.

    This is so-called ling kong jing: it’s basically like “using the force”:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1kTE8vUl5Y (skip to 30 to see the master)

    Now I can tell you almost certainly that these students aren’t thinking when they go into this “I’m going to throw myself all over the place like a crazy person to make my master look good.” They have genuinely learned to react this way to him because they exist in a culture which encourages it (and generally it will be the senior students who are chosen for the demonstration, for the sake of “safety,” and/or because they are more “sensitive” to the force). Of course, this all smacks of a cult, and we all know the pitfalls of a cult, but I bet most of these people lead otherwise pretty normal lives.

    Yet they have unconsciously, as a member of a particular group, learned to react in a crazy, over-the-top way to certain stimuli. If it’s not obvious where I’m going with this: I feel like this dynamic is probably way more prevalent than we realize when it comes to say, the reaction to Thomas Piketty’s book, for example (sorry for the partisan example: I’m sure there are examples of the other side acting the same way): there are certain types of evidence or argument which people in different groups are very strongly primed to be receptive to and when they find it they get “bowled over.” I’m not even sure this is entirely avoidable: who isn’t susceptible to some level of confirmation bias?

    Interestingly, in most cases, it seems even the leader is participating in the delusion, as we can see when this “kiai master” is genuinely surprised that his techniques don’t work on an MMA fighter:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I

    I don’t know if most cult leaders know they are cult leaders, but it does seem to apply to most thought leaders or political leaders who genuinely buy their viewpoint.

    • dndnrsn says:

      I imagine that the sunk-costs fallacy has a lot to do with it: by the time someone is a senior student, they can hardly say “yeah I’ve been wasting my time on this nonsense”. Same for a bogus martial art as for an ideology, a religious group, etc.

      The two questions that come to my mind are, one, why would anyone start in something bogus, two, how does something bogus get started?

      For the first question, I am guessing (to use “no touch knockout” stuff as an example) that these bogus martial arts must have some stuff that is real enough to work on an untrained person, so a new student for the first little while is shown stuff that actually does work on them, and then the stuff that isn’t real gets slowly introduced. By the time they are falling over because a guy is waving his hands at them, it’s too late to back out without feeling dumb, and they convince themselves it’s real, so as not to feel dumb.

      For the second, I imagine there must be a similar process but in reverse? I doubt anyone out of nowhere says “I’m going to make a martial art where I wave my hands at people”. I’m having a harder time coming up with how this might work. I guess that someone with enough actual skills to handle the untrained, at the very least, and somehow the hand-waving stuff gets in. I feel like it would be hard to throw examples around without potentially getting into a “mine is the TRUE art” argument.

      The martial arts that do this tend to discourage both live sparring and open competition, which tend to keep people honest, and usually have all sorts of excuses as to why. Martial arts that have lots of live sparring and lots of open competition tend not to have bogus techniques creep in: It’s not as though there are college wrestling programs teaching telekinetic takedowns or anything like that.

      To extend this to an ideology: a successful “bogus” ideology would have enough stuff that makes sense and matches up to reality, and enough stuff that accords with potential followers’ experience of the world, to attract the uninitiated, and it wouldn’t introduce the crackpot stuff super early on. It would descend from something at least partially legitimate that had crackpot ideas show up later on. And it would discourage self-critique and good-faith debate with ideological opponents, with a lot of excuses as to why those things are bad.

      • Jason K. says:

        I am going to be cynical and say that the vast majority of the time, the instigator created it as a con. There is plenty of money to be made without a lot work by selling what people want to believe and the starters frequently have track records of scammy behavior. I could see some very unusual circumstances where a bogus ideology could generate without the instigator being aware of its falsity, but these would be perfect storm sort of scenarios. Even for those that started out knowing, some do end up drinking their own kool-aid by the end.

        The adherents will be a mixed bag. There will be true believers, but I would wager that the more senior the adherent and the more testable the ideology, the more likely they know something is amiss. Those that stay even knowing that something is amiss are probably getting some other benefit, like community or power.

        Most of these bogus ideas are practiced only among other participants and not practiced competitively, in order to prevent challenges to the ideology. A veritable echo chamber if you will. In fact, that is one of the first signs of someone spreading BS, reluctance or refusal to have it tested. This casts the aggressive censorship actions from progressives in a different light.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Ha, similarly to how it’s hard to discuss bogus martial arts without talking about real ones and potentially getting into “my kung fu is the real kung fu” arguments, it’s hard to discuss “bogus ideologies” without examples … which will almost always, I would think, be one’s outgroup.

          But there are ideologies I disagree with, on different sides, where I can see what led to them coming about, and the originators, and I can’t see that the originators were intentionally going in to deceive people and so forth.

          Instead, as we humans are imperfect, the bogus stuff creeps in, self-critique is abandoned, real debate with outsiders is avoided, etc.

          Actual scuzzy types in the ideological realm seem to be opportunists who see a way they can exploit something preexisting. There are plenty of clickbait sites appealing to different ideological persuasions where the ideologies were created by people acting in good faith or in what they thought to be good faith, but the folks running the sites are unscrupulous hypocrites.

          • Jason K. says:

            It’s certainly easier to finger one’s own out group for that sort of thing. It would be really unusual for someone admit that an ideology they adhered to was bogus.

            I think disagreeing with an ideology or determining one is incorrect is significantly different than it being bogus. To me, I see a bogus ideology as one that doesn’t pass modest scrutiny (the essential pieces do not reconcile with known reality) and/or is exercised with the intent to either deceive or defraud. It is possible but unlikely to create and gains adherents to an ideology in good faith that doesn’t pass modest scrutiny. I would expect the lifespan of such to be rather short, unless it morphs into the latter.

            There was an interesting documentary “Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet” which was essentially a case study in creating a cult out of whole cloth. If I recall correctly, during the process he goes to some convention and gets a handful of spiritual leaders to admit that they know what they preach is nonsense.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I guess I meant “bogus” more generally, in the sense that you are using incorrect, probably.

            In the context of martial arts, something doesn’t have to be outright silliness to be ineffectual and a bit fraudulent. Less “ki power no-touch knockouts” and more a martial art that involves physical contact and claims to be useful in actual combat but where live sparring doesn’t happen and training is based around forms.

            There are a lot of martial arts styles that would pass modest scrutiny – they’re not painfully obviously fake – but are simply inferior to other styles with more realistic training methods.

            Likewise, some ideologies do a better job of explaining reality than others. There are plenty of popular ideologies that are full of holes, and have all sorts of relatively feeble explanations as to why those aren’t actually holes.

        • onyomi says:

          See what I think is remarkable about this is that, in many cases, I believe, no one involved actually consciously believes he is a huckster–that is, if it is a sunk cost fallacy, it is a subconscious one. As for how the master could also believe his own nonsense: many traditional arts encourage an attitude of unquestioning obedience to the master: the master is always right and always gets to save face. You don’t “beat” the master in sparring one of out five times; he is always light years beyond you. If you cultivate this attitude in those who surround you, you may start to notice that you can influence them in ways you couldn’t before. You might think you’ve brainwashed all your students, but a more flattering interpretation is that years of cultivating your psychic energies have allowed you to develop quasi-mystical powers.

          In the political realm, I think politicians (and probably celebrities in general) become so used to people kissing up to them that they develop an unrealistic appraisal of their own ability to be right.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I find it interesting to wonder how it starts, though. I mean, how does someone get to the point where they’re a master who everyone lets win, if what they are teaching is so obviously fake? I mean, if some guy says “I just invented telekinesis-do, I’ve given myself a red belt in it, come check this out” what incentive does anyone have to play along? I’ve never had an experience with a martial art involving that sort of exaggerated deference, though – the higher ranked people beat me because they are much better than I am.

            Less than politicians or celebrities are the smaller people – columnists, academics – some of whom seem to be respected or at least popular, and some of them are writing stuff that’s just … garbage. Like, glaring factual errors, massive holes in logic, etc. And I’m always kind of amazed, because I’m nothing special – how do I see it but enough people are buying it that they have professorships and book deals and newspaper/magazine columns?

            It would be like watching high-level MMA and seeing somebody fighting where I was fairly confident I could beat them, to continue the ideology-as-martial-art analogy.

          • Jason K. says:

            I think the key difference here is that I don’t give much benefit of a doubt to those in senior positions as I’ve seen a lot of dichotomous public/private behavior and the behind the scenes power games.

  39. SUT says:

    EvoPsych Pet Theory: Jungian archetypes are descended from primate social dynamics.

    Specifically, the hero, the maiden, and the trickster are three of Jung’s archetypes which all primates should instinctually cluster their experience into if they hope to pass on their genes.

    Just like cats can’t help being fascinated by prey-like movement of string or laser pointers, it seems all human cultures can’t help but get excited by myths that include these social elements. I think this important because it describes a type of rational-FAIL, where top-down processing filters your modern life into these sometimes outdated categories.

    Critiques / thoughts? I ask because connections between the mystical Jung, and the dryer, mathier world of EvoBio are very sparse in any online resources I can find.

  40. Mark says:

    If banks create money by making loans, how can they possibly become insolvent?

    I’m the bank.
    Mr.A owes me $100. I have $50 cash.
    I owe Mr.B $150.

    Mr. A disappears
    Mr. B wants his money.

    I start a new company and lend it $100.

    New company owes me $100.
    I have $50 cash
    I owe Mr. B $150
    I owe new company $100 (deposit)

    Transfer new company’s deposit and cash to Mr. B.

    New company owes me $100

    New company goes bankrupt.

    Problem solved
    ?

    • Annms says:

      How do you lend 100$ to the shell company when you only have 50$ cash? Mr. B wants his cash back.

    • bluto says:

      Two reasons:

      Because banks borrow short and lend long, so the short term borrowers can cease funding the bank’s long term loans in the mean time. Because of the impacts on the economy, banks aren’t allowed to go bankrupt like your suggestion.

      Regulators are loath to let banks operate with negative value for long, so they will shut them down relatively quickly once the balance sheet gets close to going negative.

      • Mark says:

        If you can create more money, the fact that deposits are zero notice shouldn’t really be significant.
        I wasn’t suggesting letting the bank go bankrupt – I was suggesting that they let the shell company go bankrupt and keep the bank.

    • Jason K. says:

      In your example, where did the bank get the money to lend the company? The bank only had $50. The bank can’t lend money it doesn’t have.

      When people talk about banks creating money through loans, they are referencing the money multiplier effect. The money multiplier effect is a result of banks being allowed to loan money that is on deposit. In order to ensure that depositor withdrawal demands can be met, banks are required to keep a certain portion of deposits on reserve. Having this reserve at less than 100% of deposits is what is called fractional reserve banking. As every bank gets to do this, each time the loaned money gets deposited into a new account, the bank maintaining that account gets another portion that is available for lending. The size of the reserve (the reserve requirement) determines the strength of the “money multiplier” effect. Example: bank A deposits into Bank B $100. At a 20% reserve, B now has to hold onto $20 and can do what it likes with the other $80. If B then deposits into Bank C that $80, C has to keep 20% of the $80 ($16) as a reserve and can do what it likes with the remaining $64. Bank C loans to a borrower the $64. So we are three steps in and that initial $100 deposit is now $244.

      If I remember my Econ correctly, the multiplier effect is 1/reserve ratio. This is under the assumption that all the funds loaned out end up back in a bank eventually.

      • Mark says:

        As I understand it, there isn’t any form of money in the banking system other than bank deposits (and a relatively small amount of physical cash that I’ll ignore.)

        So lets say the bank has a deposit of $100.
        The theory is that it can lend 90% of that so now it has deposits of $190
        And then 90% of the $90 for an additional $81 for every diminishing amounts.
        This works if there is some *core money* that can be differentiated from the deposits – but if “reserves” consist of deposits, then why shouldn’t they lend 90% of the $190? Ever increasing amounts.

        (From what I gather, the reserves of the bank are held within the central bank and don’t actually have very much to do with the economy – the money we use isn’t anything to do with this central bank money. From the Bank of England paper above:
        “Importantly, the reserves created in the banking sector (Figure 3, third row) do not play a central role. This is because, as explained earlier, banks cannot directly lend out reserves. Reserves are an IOU from the central bank to commercial banks. Those banks can use them to make payments to each other, but they cannot ‘lend’ them on to consumers in the economy, who do not hold reserves accounts. When banks make additional loans they
        are matched by extra deposits — the amount of reserves does not change.”)

        • Jason K. says:

          “As I understand it, there isn’t any form of money in the economy other than bank deposits (and a relatively small amount of physical cash that I’ll ignore.) ”

          That’s close enough to true for academic purposes.

          Banks can’t loan themselves an infinite amount of money because their ability to write loans is determined by the net available deposits, not the gross deposits (deposits-reserve-existing loans). Let’s say that the bank is loaning to itself and starts with deposits of $100 and a 20% reserve. First self-loaning action gives it $180 in deposits, but now it has an $80 loan on the books and a reserve requirement of $36 ($180 * 0.2). Now it only has $64 ($180-$36-$80) available to loan.

          In the U.S., the central bank sets the reserve level and acts as a lender of last resort, but I don’t think it actually holds the reserve for each bank (doesn’t matter if it does or not as it won’t change anything that we are talking about). What they are talking about in figure 3 is when the Bank of England uses a member bank to facilitate a transaction with a 3rd party and is only tangently related to what we are talking about. the short of it is that they are saying that the government buying bonds through intermediary banks does not create broad money that the intermediary bank can loan out due to generating the same amount of assets and liabilities on the intermediary’s books. In essence the intermediary is receiving a $100 deposit and writing a $100 loan at the same time.

          Edited to add:

          The level of required reserves as a huge impact on the money supply but not a significant impact on the effectiveness of the quantitative easing they are talking about, which is the buying and selling of bonds.

          • Mark says:

            I think this requires reserves to be something separate from deposits – deposits can’t be their own reserves.

            Person A comes along and wants to open an account, so we have a $100 liability to person A.
            What is the asset? You have to have something other than bank deposits to act as an asset for the bank. Let’s say it is physical cash.
            Assets: $100 cash
            Liabilities: $100 deposit

            Person B wants a loan.

            Assets: $100 cash $50 loan
            Liabilties: Person A deposit $100 Person B deposit $50

            The amount that can be loaned is calculated by deposits-reserve requirement – existing loans, but any additional deposits must always come from new loans. Deposits = Cash+loans
            Available money = Cash +loans – reserve requirement – loans
            = cash- reserve requirements.

            So the amount the bank can lend is determined by some particular asset that *isn’t* a bank deposit. (In this case cash)
            But why shouldn’t other assets be similarly privileged? In fact, in practical terms, there is no difference between physical cash and bank deposits.

          • Jason K. says:

            I think there are some terms getting confused here. I am generally referring to deposits as money that has been given to the bank for storage. You seem to be using deposits to mean the liability side of the account.

            If we are going to do double entry bookkeeping, this is how your example works with a 20% reserve:

            New Account opened with $100:
            Asset: Cash $80, Reserve Acct: $20
            Liability: Deposit $100

            Loan is given:
            Asset: Cash -$50
            Asset: Accounts Receivable $50

            Lendee makes new deposit with loan funds:
            Asset: Cash $40, Reserve Acct: $10
            Liability: Deposit $50

            End of day:
            Assets: Cash: $70, Reserve: $30, Accounts Receivable: $50
            Liabilities: Deposits: $150

            Total Assets: $150
            Total Liabilities: $150

          • Mark says:

            Fair enough. In your example the money in the reserve account consists entirely of physical money, “cash” (currency), right?
            (I’m not sure that it is useful to say that a “deposit” is money that has been given to the bank for storage, since as we see in the example, deposits may be more than the amount of “cash” stored.)

            If you had a cashless society, how would this work?

          • Jason K. says:

            It is all physical currency for conceptual simplicity, but it doesn’t have to be.

            In a literal sense, a deposit is exactly ‘money given to the bank for storage’, everything else is just bookkeeping. The reason or the physicality of the deposit doesn’t really matter. The only thing that might change is the name used for the account in the bank’s ledger.

            A truly cashless society would work close to the same way it does now. Most transactions these days are through credit/debit/checks as it is. Though if it was truly cashless, a validation method would be needed to prevent fraud.

            The major banks currently settle their books through inter bank transfers using cash stockpiles stored in a central location(s). This settling using physical currency prevents any given bank from engaging in significant fraud, else their stockpiles wouldn’t be the right size and/or their records won’t sync with other banks. Either there would be something like this persisting, or some other validation method would be needed. So there would probably still be clearing houses using something to keep everyone honest.

    • Mark says:

      Anyway, the reason I ask is that I have the feeling that government guarantees of deposits are actually almost irrelevant – if your bank deposits were to give you a claim on some fixed amount of gold, or something else, then guaranteeing that this exchange could take place would represent a real cost to the government.
      However, in our system, the only thing our bank deposits (our numbers) are transferable into is other bank deposits. In any real sense we have full reserve banking because the deposits are transferable into themselves.
      If there were some disaster, and the number of (real) assets in the economy collapsed, and the number of financial assets/liabilities (deposits) remained the same, there would be inflation, but again there wouldn’t be any real cost (beyond the collapse in real assets).
      So what would the cost be for the government to take over a bank and guarantee *all* deposits?

      I suspect that the real value of bank deposits derives from the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes, and that government guarantees of deposits are a bit of a red herring.

      • Jason K. says:

        It does represent a real cost and the banks pay insurance to the government to help cover it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance)

        “However, in our system, the only thing our bank deposits (our numbers) are transferable into is other bank deposits.”- This is incorrect. Your numbers are a claim on an equivalent amount of real, physical currency. You can go to your bank and convert everything in your account into bills. If you have a large account you might need to give them notice before doing so, but you can do it.

        The guarantee is a red herring, but not in the sense that you see it. The goal of the insurance isn’t to actually protect the depositors from failed banks, but to protect banks against mass withdrawals due to a loss of confidence on the part of depositors.

        • Mark says:

          If you were to be compensated under a deposit insurance scheme, presumably you would be paid by a deposit at another financial institution rather than with physical cash.

          Here is my point – lets say I give you an IOU for 100 apples. That is a real liability for me as the issuer because I have to give you 100 apples – if I were to die and someone else were to back my guarantee, there is a real cost for them when the apples are claimed.
          But our monetary system isn’t really like that. It’s more like I’ve just given you a piece of paper with 100 written on it. Not a hundred anything in particular, just a 100. And for whatever reason (because it can be used to extinguish tax liabilities) this has value and can be used to trade with other people, but if you come to me (as the issuer) there isn’t really anything in particular I have to give you (except perhaps another piece of paper with 100 written on it).
          If someone has to guarantee that paper, where is the real cost to them? They too will just give you something else with a number written on it.

          • Jason K. says:

            Or given a check. Which you could then cash if you so chose.

            Actually, it is like that. If they didn’t mind destroying the entire banking system (and the economy with it), they could do what you are proposing, however they don’t. While the government can print money, Everyone in the know recognizes that printing money to solve financial problems is a very bad idea. All of the banking management is under largely autonomous federal corporations, so even the government is (supposed to be) beholden to following proper accounting processes. Yes, under fiat currency money isn’t backed by anything tangible, but it doesn’t need to be.

            Money has value because we have agreed to use it as a medium of trade and it’s supply is constrained. The value of money is not derived directly from the ability to pay taxes with it (If that was truly the case, how do you explain bitcoin?), but from the value everyone else places on it. There was also a period of time in U.S. history where banks could (and did) print their own currency, hence why money is sometimes called “bank notes”. It is also why dollars are sometimes more formally referred to as “federal reserve notes”.

          • Mark says:

            Yeah, I agree that my IOUs might have value in expectation that they can be used in trade, but bank deposits actually have a real value beyond this expectation in that they are required if you want to do anything in society (because of tax obligations.)

            We know there will always be demand for bank deposits, because even if we conduct transactions in bitcoins, we can’t pay our taxes in them – even if I want to engage in barter with you, I still have to get my hands on bank deposit money before I can do so because of the tax that will be owed on the transaction.

            So lets say I can issue tickets that you need before you can do anything in society. The value doesn’t come from the fact that you are going to exchange them with me for something else (if you come to me, I’ll just give you a different ticket) it comes from the fact that you need the tickets to do anything. You might then of course trade those tickets with other people for other things.
            And if you already have a ticket, there isn’t any additional cost to an issuer in replacing it if you accidentally destroy it.

          • Jason K. says:

            “but bank deposits actually have a real value beyond this expectation in that they are required if you want to do anything in society (because of tax obligations.)”

            First half is correct, second is not. Having a bank account does make these things easier, and that convenience has value, but it is not required. There are a growing number of tools for people who do not have a bank account and the IRS does accept payment in money order and cashier’s check, neither of which require a bank account.

            Pretty much anything that might require a bank account can be handled with either pre-paid cards, cash, cashier’s checks, or money orders.

            According to CNN, roughly 10% of households do not have a bank account: http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/14/pf/bank-account-states/

          • Mark says:

            “Having a bank account does make these things easier, and that convenience has value, but it is not required. There are a growing number of tools for people who do not have a bank account and the IRS does accept payment in money order and cashier’s check, neither of which require a bank account.”

            I don’t think that is a particularly strong point, since presumably these means of payment are backed by bank deposits – the only difference is the way in which we are communicating the availability of funds – in one case by writing it on a piece of paper, on another by storing the information on a card.

          • John Schilling says:

            Making a payment by money order does not require that the person making the payment have a bank account. I’m not sure that, strictly speaking, it even requires the person/corporation handling the money order to have a bank account, though in practice I’m fairly certain they all do.

            A money order is a thing you get by walking to e.g. your local grocery store, handing them $X in cash, and saying “I want a money order for $X made out to Y”. You get a piece of paper that Y will accept as a secure payment for $X when they don’t want to deal with cash themselves (e.g. when they are taking payments by mail and fear that their minimum-wage clerks would simply pocket envelopes full of cash and deny ever having received payment from so-and-so).

          • Mark says:

            “A money order is a thing you get by walking to e.g. your local grocery store, handing them $X in cash, and saying “I want a money order for $X made out to Y”. You get a piece of paper that Y will accept as a secure payment for $X when they don’t want to deal with cash themselves”

            I’m pretty sure that the government doesn’t accept an IOU from the local grocery store as a payment for taxes though… they would only accept something that they were certain was backed 100% by either bank deposits, or cash.
            That is, something issued by a bank.

          • John Schilling says:

            The government basically does accept IOUs from the local grocery store, or more precisely from the financial-services corporations that grocery stores subcontract that sort of thing out to. And they’d accept the grocery stores’ settling the IOUs with an armored truck full of cash if it came to that – but it doesn’t because the same grocery stores are also in the rather larger business of handing out cash to people who’d rather have a wallet full of greenbacks than a welfare check. At the end of the day, the grocery stores’ agents send an empty armored truck to the Federal Reserve and order a pallet of mixed small bills to cover the difference.

            The government also accepts IOUs from other branches of the government. You can pay your taxes with a money order purchased for cash at your local post office, if that’s more convenient. You hand a stack of Jacksons to a government clerk, get a piece of paper saying you did that, mail it to another government clerk, and you’re done. And if you want to cut out every possible middleman, you can pay your taxes by hiking over to the nearest IRS office with a briefcase full of cashjust paying them directly. Really.

            The same goes for pretty much every other transaction. A private doing business with you can demand up-front payment by check, credit card, or chickens and goats if it suits their fancy. But any bill that you owe, you can pay with green presidential portraits if you want, and any payment that is due you can be collected in the same form. This requires lots of travelling about to peoples’ various business offices carrying cash, which is a nuisance, and so we’ve been inventing ways to accomplish the same result with a few strokes of a pen since before we even had paper money. But even now, at the bottom of the pyramid of financial abstraction, is a layer of real physical currency, and you don’t ever have to deal in anything else if you really don’t want to.

          • Mark says:

            “The government basically does accept IOUs from the local grocery store, or more precisely from the financial-services corporations that grocery stores subcontract that sort of thing out to.”

            I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean. Could you explain this?

            The main thrust of your comment seems to be that physical currency can be used in lieu of bank deposits when paying tax – that is true – but since bank deposits can also be used to pay tax, and can be changed at 1:1 into physical currency, aren’t they really just different forms of the same thing?

            You could construct a story where everyone suddenly decides they want physical currency and if the government refused to produce sufficient quantities, the value of physical currency would exceed that of bank deposits – but I’m not sure why 1) everyone would decide to use physical currency (since bank deposits have exactly the same function and are more convenient) 2) the government wouldn’t decide to supply a sufficient amount of physical currency to satisfy demand.
            ((3) the government wouldn’t simply regulate to limit the amount of physical currency people were allowed to use)
            Bank deposits don’t have value because we trust that they can be used to get “real money” – they are “real money”, already.

          • Jason K. says:

            “I don’t think that is a particularly strong point, since presumably these means of payment are backed by bank deposits” No. Even if so, what backs bank deposits? As you noted before, these accounts are just numbers in a ledger.

            “but since bank deposits can also be used to pay tax, and can be changed at 1:1 into physical currency, aren’t they really just different forms of the same thing”

            The whole point of your argument was that bank deposits were special as they are required to pay taxes and that is why they had value. As I said before, the value of a bank deposit stems from being a claim on a like amount of physical currency.

            Mark, you clearly have formed a hypothesis without doing basic research and are trying to stoutly defend it. You have made a correlation=causation error where you have correlated the near ubiquitousness of bank accounts with them being an easy way to pay taxes, therefore the need to pay taxes is why there are bank accounts. You could make the same argument for cars->work. Everyone has car, cars are needed to get to work, therefore the value of a car is its ability to get you to work. Seriously, this whole hypothesis would have collapsed in about 15 minutes of google and Wikipedia if you had bothered to ever directly research essentially any of the core supporting ideas.

            Easy to research fail points:

            1: Look up what forms of payment the IRS accepts and if all of those payments require the payer to have funds deposited into a bank account. Since the answer to the latter question is no, the hypothesis is invalid as taxes can be paid without a bank account.

            2: See if there are other currencies used both now and historically. Were any of those stored in bank deposits? Since the answers to both of those questions are yes, the hypothesis is invalid since some bank accounts can’t be used to pay taxes yet still had value.

            3: Does essentially everyone have a bank account? As the answer to that question is no, the hypothesis is invalid as clearly a bank account isn’t needed to function in society.

          • Mark says:

            “No. Even if so, what backs bank deposits? As you noted before, these accounts are just numbers in a ledger.”

            Sigh… if there is no unique property to physical cash, if it is interchangeable with those numbers in a ledger – in what sense could it be said to be backing them? It’s exactly the same thing in a different form.
            (Now, I think that on an organizational level, there are reserves held at the central bank – *which never enter into the economy*. If bank reserves can’t ever be claimed by money-users, again, how can it be said that the money we use is “backed” by reserves?)

            I’m not an American, but where I live, if I take an IOU issued by the local supermarket (let’s say a £10 Tesco voucher) to my local tax office they won’t accept it. If a government accepted IOU’s issued by absolutely anybody they would have completely lost control of the financial system – obviously. They are only going to accept payments where they can be certain that the numbers come from a regulated financial institution (involves bank deposits (or alternatively as you like to point out, cash.))
            Anyway, to humor you:
            “1: Look up what forms of payment the IRS accepts and if all of those payments require the payer to have funds deposited into a bank account. Since the answer to the latter question is no, the hypothesis is invalid as taxes can be paid without a bank account.”
            A cheque is a piece of paper representing a bank deposit – if you like, a cheque is a piece of paper 100% backed by bank deposits.
            If I go to an institution, pay them $100 in physical cash, and they then give me a money order… why does anywhere accept that money order? It is because they can be fairly certain that the institution issuing the money order has a bank deposit (or cash) to pay them. Again, a money order is a piece of paper 100% backed by bank deposits.
            If the money order itself were accepted as payment (without anything behind it) then it would *be* money – it would have exactly the same status as physical cash. Writing a money order would be an act of money creation.
            Let me just summarize your point 2 there for you…I sometimes play Heroes of the Storm… and I actually have quite a sizable “gold” balance on that game… I cannot pay taxes with my heroes of the strom gold balance, therefore bank deposits do not gain value because they *can* be used to settle tax obligations?
            There might be other reasons to keep a record of numbers – that doesn’t have any relevance to what I am saying which is that bank deposits within the financial system are inherently valuable because they can be used to pay tax.
            3) Does everyone have a bank account? No. Can I create my own money to pay taxes? No. Can I use bank deposits to pay tax? Yes.

            A Better analogy: (imagine) we live in a society in which automobiles are an absolute requirement to get to work, and I say “the reason why we know there will always be demand for cars is that there is an absolute requirement to use them to get to work”. Your response: “No, you fool, can’t you see that trucks exist? People also use bicycles to cycle around on their lawns! Some people take taxis to work! Ha ha ha ha…. The reason why cars have value is that they can be turned into trucks!

            None of these points address what I’m saying, unless you think the point that people could drive a truck if they so wanted rather than a car is particularly powerful. I don’t.

          • John Schilling says:

            Sigh… if there is no unique property to physical cash, if it is interchangeable with those numbers in a ledger

            The unique property of physical cash, at least in the United States, is that it is the one form of “money” that can always be used to settle debts. If for any reason you owe someone money, they can refuse to take your check, point to a sign saying “no credit cards”, whatever, but once you have offered them cash the debt is discharged whether they take it or not. Including tax debts to the government.

            And every other form of payment comes with a trail saying “…here’s where your physical cash is waiting, if you really want to collect it”.

          • Mark says:

            “The unique property of physical cash, at least in the United States, is that it is the one form of “money” that can always be used to settle debts

            Hmmmmm… I see… but I’m not sure if that is more or less significant than the fact that amazon doesn’t accept cash payments.

            [There might be different things that you can do with different representations of money, but surely if they can be exchanged for each other 1:1, these are very minor differences related to convenience of use, rather than something fundamental?]

  41. eqdw says:

    4. When I post a comment, for a while the page won’t let me scroll and instantly takes me back to the comment I just posted whenever I try. Does anyone else have this problem or know a way to solve it?

    This used to infuriate me so much that I largely stopped commenting, but I figured it out: Are any of you running adblock or ghostery?

    This blog is popular. Really popular. You get like a thousand comments on every post. The way that adblock/ghostery work, they are trying to apply a ton of styles (basically, a gigantic blacklist) to every html element on the page. Even though its not blocking anything, it still needs to load and parse this. As a result, your page (when running ghostery/adblock) can take many seconds to load fully. You are unable to scroll while the page is loading, because both rely on running javascript and so one is blocked on the other.

    Further, why does it jump back? Because you clicked on a link to a specific comment. What the browser is doing is: 1) load the page; 2) find the tag that was linked to; 3) scroll to that. The page is blocking scrolling at (1). If you try to scroll and succeed somehow, once it hits (3) it’s going to scroll you back to the tag that was linked.

    Try uninstalling adblock/ghostery, or even just browsing in a different browser that doesn’t have them. See if this fixes the issue

    • eqdw says:

      AHAHAHA. After posting this comment, I triggered the buggy behaviour. It’s different from what I’m talking about. 🙁 I’m out of ideas

  42. An essay on being very smart and figuring out how to make a living from it in a culture that isn’t exactly built for very smart people.

    ****

    I have a notion that people have three evolutionary backgrounds: paleolithic, low tech agricultural, and urban. One of the things the urban background requires is the ability to tolerate being around strangers. Nativists and racists don’t have a lot of the city genes. This might support Scott’s idea of micro-nations. Bigoted people are less of a problem when their scope is limited.

    ****

    I’ve been wondering if we’re seeing a war on empathy. Is it a coincidence that troll culture and smug terrorism and various nasty social movements which are better not named are happening at the same time? Could there be a physical explanation?

    Cruelty is nothing new, but it seems to me people used to be more hypocritical about it. They didn’t let their ids show in public nearly as much.

    I’m 62. I’m not sure exactly when it seemed to me that things were shifting against courtesy and empathy, but sometime after 2000 seems about right.

    • Technically Not Anonymous says:

      What’s smug terrorism?

    • Daniel Armak says:

      Perhaps the shared timing is simply due to the rise of Net and the Web, which have allowed and even caused many recent social changes. Also the nearly-simultaneous fall of the Iron Curtain and truly world-wide media reach.

    • Viliam says:

      When you are very smart, what makes you socially weird can also be your greatest competitive advantage on the job market. So you spend first two decades of your life being conditioned against doing the stuff that could make your life great afterwards.

      What you call “a war on empathy”, I believe it has always existed offline, among the social elite. Psychopaths rising to the top, one backstab at a time.

      What happened recently is that the different kinds of people, who previously spent their time at different places, were thrown together on the internet. In real life, rich people don’t spend their afternoons in the same places as poor people; jocks don’t play with nerds. When one group despised another, they usually avoided each other. But now they all have Facebook accounts, all use Twitter, all debate on Reddit, etc. They keep meeting each other, every single day. And there is no solution in sight, because on the web most fun is where most people are.

      Imagine that you would split the whole internet into two parts: “Internet Alpha” for the rich or socially well-connected people, and their super polite and subservient lackeys, and “Internet Omega” for the plebs. Maybe for the first few weeks the powerful people would be like: “yay! finally we are treated the way we deserve! good riddance, suckers!” But in a year or two, “Internet Alpha” would get kinda sterile, boring; while “Internet Omega” would have most of the new stuff, and the best debates (and also the worst debates, of course; there would be more of everything). And the first adventurous Alpha users would start reading the Omega; and their friends would follow them; and after some time it would be public knowledge that pretty much everyone is actually using “Internet Omega” for fun. Then at some moment the elite would start resenting that they are surrounded by plebs, and the internet would split again.

      In the technology era, the nerds are an endless source of frustration for the elite. Can’t live with them; can’t live without them. The golf clubs and pony-riding lessons didn’t have this dynamic. If was perfectly okay to play golf while knowing that the rest of the society is either working or drinking beer. No fun was lost by not being where most of the people were. On the internet, the people are the source of value, almost like in the hunter-gatherer era.

      If you can’t endure someone, but you also can’t endure the thought that they are having better fun somewhere and you are not invited… the only solution is to somehow beat them into submission.

    • zigzag says:

      I totally think the war on empathy is a thing. There’s no equivalent to words like “flame” and “troll” offline.

      • Vaniver says:

        What about something like “prank”?

        • zigzag says:

          Pranks are typically done in good fun. Trolling & flaming aren’t.

          • Cauê says:

            This looks wrong. Maybe you’re using a nonstandard definition of trolling, but I’m guessing you’re not familiar with how far pranks can go (I think YouTube should sort that out).

            I would also add “hoax” as a related phenomenon.

  43. RE: DRACOs – it seems like no one is mentioning the real problem, which is getting the DRACOs (or any large biologic) into cells.

    Exogenous proteins are almost never taken up by host cells. That’s why nearly all successful protein-based therapies have extracellular targets, while small molecules are used against intracellular targets. The tech applied in the DRACO paper (transduction tags) doesn’t actually work reliably in vivo. If we had a robust way of getting large proteins into cells, that would revolutionize much more than the treatment of viruses. For instance, we’d be able to introduce wild-type p53 protein into p53-mutant tumors, thereby treating ~40% of all cancers. So my $0.02 is that it’s a cool technology, but the project isn’t focused on the real issue that will prevent it from succeeding in clinical trials.

    • grendelkhan says:

      The described experiments include in vivo tests in mice. Does the lack of a really good large-proteins-into-cells mechanism just mean that, as Erebus pointed out, relatively large quantities (of what’s presumably a difficult-to-synthesize substance) are needed?

      • No, it unfortunately has nothing to do with the quantity. Protein delivery sometimes works in vitro, occasionally works under ideal circumstances in mice, and so far as I know have never been used in any successful therapies for human patients.

  44. I would like to donate to an effective charity that attempts to prevent extinction of species, prioritising species closely related to humans. For example I am interested in the preservation of great apes. However species preservation doesn’t seem to be a major part of the EA movement (admittedly my search hasn’t been comprehensive yet). Animal charities seem to be basically about cruelty, which is fine, but they neglect the issue of species preservation which I consider extremely important.

    As a side note, I’m aware that habitat loss is a signficant contributor, but I’m unsure if buying up rainforest and the like is really effective in an EA kind of way.

    I’m aware of the Trimates each founding a charity kinda along these lines, but don’t know of other alternatives or how to assess the effectiveness of these options.

    Does anyone have any good ideas about how to proceed in my investigation of such options, better forums to investigate (I asked on reddit without much luck, haven’t tried EA places yet because I’m not especially familiar), or any specific options they think are useful?

    • keranih says:

      Options/things to think about:

      – Great apes and other primates are not found in the wild in North America or Europe. Preserving those species in their original habitat will require engagement and priority-manipulation of other sovereign nations. Consider how you want to rank your priorities of moral principles.

      – “Habitat preservation” has long been used as a justification by groups/ethnicities with political power for dispossessing rival groups without power. Consider how you will judge if this is occurring, and what your response will be.

      – “Species preservation” could include: maintaining a freely-moving population on a preserve; maintaining a population in enclosures (ie, zoos); domestication; preserving genetic material (embryos and sperm) in a cryo bank, and possibly other methods. Do you have a preference for a particular one?

      • Species preservation is quite high on my priorities. I’m hopeful the influence required could be done in ways that don’t eat into other moral concerns too much. For example I suspect bush meat and agricultural activity on rainforest borders has very very low efficiency in terms of feeding people compared to modern farming etc. However I would be interested in quantifying this.

        Your second point is interesting, though I am not aware of any specific examples? Perhaps private aquisition of land would be a better way to go about this (though how effective is it per $?), also because it doesn’t facilitate political alterior motives very well. I’d be wanting it to be a well managed process, for example to ensure sellers are always willing and fairly compensated, which I understand is not always the historical norm. I don’t know how to qunantify the effectiveness of things like buying up rainforest though.

        I’m open to any of those options, especially in the short term, provided they are cost effective. In general I do feel preservation of habitat will ultimately be neccessary to maintain a significant number of species, so I’d like to factor that in.

  45. cthomas says:

    Hey, can anyone familiar with the climate debates help me with something? I’m trying to figure out the state of the debate over whether there has been a “pause” in climatic warming over the past 18 years or so. Here’s the very vague impression I have from reading a few quick things. My sense is that the atmospheric temperature readings show very little warming during that period, and the main thrust of the debate is over whether this is a real absence of modeled warming or whether the warming just occurred deep down in the oceans. My vague sense is that there isn’t much in the way of evidence one way or another to confirm or disconfirm the oceanic warming claims (maybe some spotty measurements that proponents of the “consensus” view take as supporting claims of oceanic warming over the period in question but that’s really extrapolating from very weak evidence).

    Is this basic story right? What about surface-level warming measurements during the 18-year period? Again, my vague sense is that they show some amount of warming (enough to satisfy the forecasts of the models?), but there is controversy here, absent from the satellite ones, over possible biases introduced at localized surface measurement stations.

    That’s my main set of questions. Do you guys know if I’m basically right about this stuff, and where I can turn to get non-propagandistic further information about them? The next set of questions, depending on how those questions come out, is what a pause would entail for the “consensus” view if it does indeed exist. I know that Friedman has suggested that it may not mean all that much because it may be the product of a fluctuating counter-trend that alternately exaggerates and offsets a steady warming trend. But first things first.

    CT

    • The following is a pro-climate-is-changing-due-to-humans (which while no expert, appears to be the correct position to me) site and its position on the pause argument you mention that you may wish to know about:
      https://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47

      I note this can sometimes be a heated debate topic. I can’t remember Scott discouraging talk on it, I apologise in advance if this topic was discouraged and I missed it.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        That’s a pretty good analysis as far as it goes. The cynical side of me wonders how many of the people who are now saying “1998 was a huge way-above-trendline outlier, don’t base anything on it” were saying the same thing in 1998.

        • Chalid says:

          Well, in 1998 you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the start of a new trend, right?

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            It all comes down to how unsettled you want your settled science to be, I guess. If it was OK for alarmists to entertain the possibility of a new, steeper trend starting in 1998 based on one year’s data, it can hardly be bad for denialists to entertain the possibility of a new, flatter trend starting in 1998 based on 17 years’ data.

    • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

      The GCMs predicted warming in the atmosphere. If it fails to materialize, that’s “a real absence of modeled warming” regardless of whether an equivalent amount of heat turns up unexpectedly in a different location. Assuming the oceanic warming claims are true, the obvious question becomes “Is there any reason to expect our anthropogenic heating to stop disappearing into the oceans? Unless it’s doing some sort of harm down there, should we quit worrying about it?”

      • A slightly different slant on the oceanic heat issue:

        There was a mid-century pause in warming for about thirty years. The IPCC models attribute it to aerosols producing a temporary cooling effect. As best I can tell, the theory wasn’t strong enough to tell whether or not that should have happened–the attribution was a way of explaining something that otherwise didn’t fit the models.

        Current warming starts in 1910. A second pause seems to have started about 2002. Eyeballing the temperature graph, it looks like the sum of a rising trend, presumably due to AGW, and a cyclic trend with a period of about sixty years due to something else, possibly atmosphere ocean interactions (where else can you hide large amounts of heat?). If that, rather than aerosols, is the explanation of the mid-century pause, then the IPCC, by special casing it, was attributing to AGW both the real contribution of AGW to warming and the rising part of the cycle. If so, the IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity and future warming are high.

        For more details, see:

        http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/09/an-explanation-for-pattern-of-warming.html

        That includes a link to a published journal article which estimates the cyclic term from a long term local temperature series and concludes that warming due to AGW has been reasonably stable for the past century at a little less than a degree/century.

    • John Schilling says:

      This is all approximately correct AFIK. The “hiatus” shows up more clearly in satellite data than in ground data, and the satellite data is more reliable within its domian, but among other things we don’t have satellite data going back beyond 1979 and we need to look at longer-term trends. And there is also a clear outlier in the anomalous 1998 El Nino, which makes people see a stronger and earlier hiatus than there really is.

      My psychometric models predict that the anomalous 2015 El Nino year will cause a different group of people to see an end to any hiatus that ever was 🙂

      But, with or without the outliers, there is a statistically significant hiatus in both satellite and surface temperatures, however you plot it. My preference is to plot surface temperature vs. ln(CO2), using Goddard for surface temperature, NOAA for atmospheric CO2 as far back as they will go, and ice core data before that. Throw out any two-sigma El Nino year on principle. Then let an optimizer find the best linear fits and break points, because it’s never wise to trust eyeballs on that sort of thing.

      Going back to 1880, I get four distinct regions.
      1880-1944, with a sensitivity of 2.8 +/- 0.5 C
      1944-1975, sensitivity 1.3 +/- 0.5 C
      1976-2004, sensitivity 2.9 +/- 0.3 C
      2005-2014, sensitivity 0.3 +/- 0.9 C

      Using “sensitivity” to mean temperature change per doubling of CO2; have to be careful because there are other definitions as well.

      Looks very much like a bimodal system, with sensitivities of ~3C and ~1C. That the system shifted modes right about the time the climatologists declared “the science is settled”, looks like Mother Nature playing a practical joke on climatologists. Talk about ocean warming that was only predicted after the fact, looks like handwaving.

      It’s going to take a lot of work to sort this out, and unfortunately I can’t recommend any place to find a summary of the good work being done in the field. There may be good work being done in the field, but almost everyone summarizing it for the lay public is a propagandist of one sort or another.

  46. Troy says:

    Am I the only one who, while lying in bed, rolls over onto my right side when my left nostril gets clogged up (and vice-versa)? My wife thinks this is very strange, but the asymmetry of having one nostril clogged and one open bothers me.

    • Liskantope says:

      Me too! In fact, I’m completely unable to get to sleep if I’m lying on the more-clogged-up side (I’ve tried, when a shoulder gets too sore to lie on the other side). You’re the first person besides myself that I’ve heard voice that preference.

      • Troy says:

        Nice to know I’m not alone! I similarly have trouble falling asleep if lying on the more clogged-up side. I wish I didn’t, because lots of other things make it hard for me to fall asleep too, so it usually takes me a couple hours as it is. (It’s especially bad when I have a nasty cold.)

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I also do this.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I have read that the “one nostril closed” thing is adaptive. (Here is the top result from google. Your nostrils are constantly “slower” on one side, and switches back and forth constantly.

      Therefore, I don’t think turning on your side actually effects the stuffiness changing. (Could certainly be wrong about this thought).

      • Liskantope says:

        Sometimes I can get it to switch sides within 10 minutes or so of turning, and can do this over and over. More often, though, it doesn’t switch sides for hours, which supports your hypothesis. That said, I can still feel comfortable enough to fall asleep with one side clogged as long as I’m lying on the opposite side of my body; actually getting it to switch is ideal but not necessary.

      • Troy says:

        Ooh, interesting! Although I think when I’m lying down I more often have the experience of it switching after 10 minutes or so. It most often takes longer the first time I roll over, after that it seems to switch much more easily, like it’s “balanced” between the two.

      • onyomi says:

        It is gratifying to know it may have some actual useful function, as I find it pretty annoying at times.

        Some yogis and meditators report that, at times, both nostrils feel equally open, and I have felt that sometimes as well; the theory would be that it would represent a state of balance between the two hemispheres of the brain and/or sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. And there are breathing exercises designed to facilitate this through alternately stopping nostrils with fingers or, if you can reach that far, tongue (some yogis can stick their tongues up into their nasal pharynx).

        No idea if this is reflected in physical reality, but I do associate it with being in a good mood of clarity; though it could also be just that when in a psychologically aroused state, both nostrils tend to open to let in more air, and therefore the differential though it may continue to exist, may feel less noticeable.

    • Oscar_Cunningham says:

      I was once read that the reason why people turn in their sleep was to alternate which nostril is clogged. I can’t remember the source though.

  47. I love breakfast says:

    Scott, others, where do I go to find out the harms associated with long term psychiatric prescribing. Seems like a very polarised debate in academia. http://cepuk.org/ trustable? Any other sources /summaries of the literature that I can be signposted to?

  48. DrBeat says:

    Seriously though, let’s all stop talking about politics and word taboos for a second and focus on the real important information, that DIAMOND IS UNBREAKABLE ANIME JUST GOT CONFIRMED!

    …I know I am not the only weeb here who cares about that.

    • Jiro says:

      This is great, but it also seemed like a fait accompli. Was anyone really doubting that there would be a part 4 series? It’s true the series didn’t come out immediately after part 3, but it seems the studio has a really low budget and can’t afford to risk another part before they get the profits from the previous part.

      (Also, how popular is part 4 in Japan? I’ve heard contradictory things about the popularity of parts greater than 3.)

      • DrBeat says:

        I have heard it was not as popular as part 3, because it was pretty far from “typical shonen”, which would be why we didn’t think it was inevitable.

    • blacktrance says:

      It was inevitable, but I’m still excited.

  49. Alsadius says:

    Re 4), I’ve been having that problem. Also, can we get a new comment system – Disqus or something? This one is seriously retro, and not in a good way. (Insert joke about newly taboo words here)

    • Daniel Armak says:

      I very very much agree. Please, Scott, can we have a better comment system? One that has “list replies to self” as a feature, and without a limit on nesting.

      I’m a programmer and so are many others here (if we’re anything like LW). If what’s stopping you is the work required, or the lack of your desired features in the comment systems available, I’d be glad to try to customize or integrate a comments system to your requirements.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I’m not sure what you mean by “list replies to self”. Nesting ends up with comments that are very thin and have like one letter per row. Also with endless back-and-forths between people that don’t go anywhere. If you can solve the first problem, I will grudgingly implement it as a test despite the second.

        Why don’t you talk to Bakkot? He’s been doing the programming for the comment system so far.

        • Daniel Armak says:

          By “list replies to self” I mean the ability to see replies to my own comments, similar to the reddit/LW inbox or the disqus profile page. I think that’s conductive to discussing and replying. Without it I have the constant feeling that no-one’s reading my replies to them because I start commenting on each thread half a day after it’s posted. As for nesting, the usual solution is not to display comments beyond a certain depth by default.

          How can I reach Bakkot?

          • Alsadius says:

            Either not displaying them(Reddit), or allowing them to be mechanically nested without being visually nested(Disqus) – you can reply as long as you want on a Disqus site, but it’ll only display as being nested four deep.

          • Montfort says:

            Bakkot shows up in the IRC fairly regularly, and often makes appearances in comment threads about comment threading.

            If you are unwilling or unable to access the IRC channel, I’m sure someone else will be good enough to summon him upon request.

          • Viliam says:

            the ability to see replies to my own comments, similar to the reddit/LW inbox

            In the top-right corner on SSC there is a box displaying new comments. I can imagine that below it there could be another box, displaying all comments made in direct reply to your comments, sorted chronologically (newest to oldest), highlighting the unread ones.

            Disadvantage: Only replies from the current article would be seen. Advantage: Similar functionality to the existing box, could be implemented rather quickly, even as a third-party script.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            A possible solution to nesting might be not to visually nest comments with only one reply, so that long conversations appear vertically.

          • I’ve lost track of the previous discussion of trn– I believe trn is the best method I’ve seen for presenting long discussions. Did people come to any conclusions about whether it’s possible and desirable to update trn for the web?

      • Collun says:

        SB Nation is probably the best commenting platform I’ve ever seen/used. Not sure if Vox uses the same system (though they should theoretically, I guess). Could that possibly be a template?

      • Vorkon says:

        There’s one thing I’ve been wishing could be implemented on this site’s commenting system lately. (Or maybe it’s something that already exists, but I just don’t know how to use properly.)

        You know how it highlights new comments in green? I like that feature, and use it regularly to quickly scan for things I haven’t seen yet. However, it also has the “X comments since [date/time]” block in the corner, and it SEEMS like the date/time block is editable, but every time I’ve tried to change it, it tells me “given date not valid.” I’d imagine I could probably change it by changing my system time, but that’s a more finicky solution than I would like. (And CERTAINLY doesn’t mean I’m checking SSC comments at work, where I can’t change the system time, or anything like that. Nosirree…)

        Anyway, I’d love it if there was some way to change that block to show new comments since whatever time I choose to enter. I often find myself in a situation where I’m reluctant to make a new comment, or refresh or close my browser for any other reason, until I’ve read through EVERY comment, even ones in threads totally unrelated to whatever I want to comment on, for fear of missing other new comments. In a comment section that always goes into the hundreds and often makes it into the thousands, that can be quite a hassle. If I could tell it to show new comments from a time I specified, I could close/refresh my browser with impunity.

        Is there already some way to do this, and I’m just messing up the format, or something like that? The fact that the date/time block is editable implies that there should be, but I haven’t had any luck making it work yet. If not, it seems like it would be a fairly simple change to make.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Are you missing the am/pm at the end? I made that mistake for a little while.

        • Nornagest says:

          It’s editable. I usually change it by copying the previous text and making point edits to it, since the formatting is complicated enough that I’m not likely to get it right from memory.

        • Cauê says:

          On my system it displays the date in the dd/mm/yyyy format, but only accepts my input in the mm/dd/yyyy format.

        • Vorkon says:

          Well, I’ve figured it out, but it’s still behaving strangely.

          What I’ve been trying to do is just taking the existing text and making point edits to it myself, since I too doubted I’d be able to remember the formatting easily. (i.e. taking the 28 in today’s date, hitting backspace, and changing the 8 to a 7.) This type of edit always resulted in a “given date is not valid” message.

          This time, I tried deleting the whole thing and typing it all from the start myself, and it worked just fine. I’m not sure what’s different. At first I thought it might have been because I didn’t include the seconds block in the time, but I tried both deleting the seconds block from the existing text (which gave me the same error) and typing from the beginning and including the seconds block (which worked just as well as when I didn’t include seconds at all) so I’ve got no clue what’s going on. Either way, I know how to make it work now!

          Thanks so much for the help, everyone, and for confirming that I’m not crazy, and it can be edited. This should come in very handy!

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          I’m consistently able to edit it by writing in the format “yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss” (which is completely different to the one displayed, but like, whatever).

          I have no idea what timezone its attuned to, either.

    • zigzag says:

      FWIW I really like the fact that SSC’s comment system doesn’t have upvotes or downvotes. I’m not exactly sure why. I think it fosters less of a mob mindset, or people fall prey to the affect heuristic less often, or it disincentivizes pandering, or something. That makes it better than Disqus IMO, despite the lack of reply notifications and nesting limitations.

      I’d guess that adding upvotes & downvotes would hurt SSC’s ideological diversity. People with unpopular opinions would get downvoted & leave. It’s basically universal on reddit. People find a sub full of people who agree with them and post on that so they don’t get downvoted. The negative implications are obvious.

      Also new comments on SSC are highlighted in green. Most systems don’t have that.

      • Daniel Armak says:

        I don’t want upvotes either. I just want a more convenient system for tracking replies, tracking my own past comments, and reading nested subthreads.

        As for tracking new comments, it’s made more complicated by the fact that posting comments requires a page refresh. I reload the page and see three new comments I want to respond to; I respond to one and lose track of the other two. Yes, I can keep track manually by asking for new comments since a particular date, but it’s annoying.

      • Alsadius says:

        TBH, I like upvotes, because I like the ability to give someone an attaboy for a good comment without having to reply to them. Right now, I see good comments and feel frustrated because I can’t realistically give props to the person who wrote it.

        • Technically Not Anonymous says:

          Same, but they also lead to a hivemind mentality and a chilling effect on unpopular opinions. The SSC comments are one of the only non-trash internet communities of substance I know of; I’d rather not ruin it.

      • JBeshir says:

        I like the lack of an upvote system; it would be nice if cogent, intelligent, useful perspectives got upvoted, but in practice stating the standard tribal response to a position and clever zingers tend to earn them better, and jokes, while good, get overvalued.

        Also, I think there are severe problems with groupthink that emerge readily when politics are discussed anywhere with voting; someone will state a piece of orthodoxy or historic narrative or similar of any prevailing tribe, everyone will upvote it, and everyone will become more confident that it’s true from seeing it upvoted. Any position that a strong majority in the community hold becomes an obvious fact, and convenient historical narrative becomes the truth.

        And then they go out into discussions elsewhere and are shocked at all the morons on the rest of the Internet who are ignorant of the obvious history and truths behind their positions, and who reject them when stated.

        SSC’s comments section is well above average but I don’t think it’s good enough to display immunity to this.

        • onyomi says:

          I agree: also against an upvote system. It psychologically makes one want to post for applause lights.

          Right now, there is already a more subtle, productive form of applause light at work on SSC: those comments which receive a lot of thoughtful comments are, in essence, being upvoted, while those which are ignored or receive only trollish and/or bickering responses are being subtly or not-so-subtly downvoted. (and, of course, you can always say “+1” or “great post!” if you see something you really, really like”).

          I think this is better than just clicking a little up arrow or down arrow, which feels more like a focus group pushing a “this made me happy/sad” button. I presume most SSC readers aren’t interested in the emotional mood of other posters regarding a point; they are interested in whether or not there is any good supporting evidence/arguments, counter evidence/arguments, etc.

    • Deiseach says:

      NOT Disqus. I hate Disqus. Any sites I’ve hung around on that went to Disqus from another system never worked properly.

      On the other hand, if switching to Disqus drives me off, you may think this a net gain 🙂

      • Daniel Armak says:

        Can you detail what you dislike about Disqus? Aside from the obvious problem that everyone must register with them and they store, mine and manipulate the comments, as opposed to the actual site doing it.

        • I agree it may be a very bad idea for the reasons you state here.

        • Anon. says:

          A big issue with disqus is that it doesn’t load all comments, if you want to read a whole thread or deep into specific conversations you’re going to be hitting “load more” (or scrolling down and waiting for it to load more) all of the time.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            disqus…doesn’t load all comments

            Yes. Yes yes yes. For a site where I’m interested only in a rough sense of the comments, that’s fine. For a site like this one where I come back to a given article again and again and again until all commenting activity has ceased, disqus is completely terrible.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            On the other hand, some of the articles here with really long comment threads take ages for my slow old computer to load. This wouldn’t be a problem if they were broken up into fifty-comment chunks.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            some of the articles here with really long comment threads take ages for my slow old computer to load

            It would take just as long to load the whole set fifty at a time, and you’d have to keep coaxing it to continue. Yes, you could start reading the first fifty, but coming back the next day to look for new comments would be untenable.

            To each their own. Maybe I already spend too much time reading the comments, in which case disqus would be a great cure for akrasia.

          • LHN says:

            Disqus Click Automate, a script for Greasemonkey in Firefox or Tampermonkey in Chrome, is a godsend. When it stops working (as it occasionally does due to changes in Disqus), Disqus sites basically become unusable for me till it’s updated.

        • Deiseach says:

          My experience has been (and I have no idea why this is so): site uses comment system, my PC has no problem with it and I can leave comments, see other comments, etc.

          Site changes to Disqus. Suddenly, when I click on “See comments”, the circly thing spins round in the middle of the page, then comes up “Cannot load comments”. Or if it does load, it’s impossible to leave a comment. Or if I can, it is down to the whims of the implacable and inscrutable Gods of the Internet who must be constantly propitiated.

          It’s happened with several different sites and through a couple of changes of PC and updating various versions of Windows, so unless I’ve been cursed by the Disqus Deity, I have no idea what’s triggering it.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            Me too. I don’t even try Disqus now.

          • Glenn Willen says:

            I have all the same problems you do with Disqus. Additionally, I used to have a problem with certain pages using huge amounts of CPU and having very laggy scrolling, making the articles unreadable; I tracked this down to “pages with Disqus”, and so now I block Disqus everywhere and the problem is gone.

            I feel like we’ve had this discussion before when Disqus has been proposed on this blog.

        • Montfort says:

          Disqus is actively hostile to my particular browser configuration, and refuses to display comments for me. For that reason as well as the problems you mention, I have an enduring hatred for it and oppose it in all forms.

          In fact, I’m not sure I even remember the actual style and function of it, and so can give you little feedback in that regard.

      • Disqus doesn’t show all the comments at once, so searching is much harder.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          That would also prevent a hack I use sometimes to search several ssc articles at one time. I download the whole articles with comments into a directory /ssc as htm, txt, etc, then use the system’s ctl-f to search that directory
          and flag the files that include the search string. This may be raw unreadable html, which comes up normally in a browser. Or if that doesn’t work, searching the file will find the search string in context, buried in the raw html.

    • NZ says:

      I just deleted my Disqus account. One thing I like in a comments section is not having to sign up for anything to participate.

    • Urstoff says:

      Disqus is terrible in so many ways. I think the current system is fine, but to me, the best threaded comments system on the web is: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty It’s got very visually clean nesting and the ability to reload threads (and collapse threads!) without reloading the page. Of course, the system has basically just been one that’s been incrementally improved for 10+ years, and I don’t think even the owners could license it if they wanted to, but that style seems optimal.

  50. I am experimentally tabooing the words “neoreaction”, “neoreactionary”, and “NRx” in this blog’s comments effective immediately. It’s emotionally charged and politicized in a way that I think potential substitutes aren’t. I got my first exposure to far-right ideas from the neoreactionaries and so historically I’ve viewed rightism through their lens and spread that to my readers, but I think that this emphasis was a mistake. Also, nobody agrees on what “neoreactionary” means, least of all self-identified neoreactionaries. If you want to talk about monarchists, call them monarchists. If you want to talk about traditionalists, call them traditionalists. If you want to talk about the far right, call it the far right. If you want to talk about HBD, call it HBD. If you want to talk about Mencius Moldbug, call him Mencius Moldbug. First infraction will be punished with a warning, second with burning eternally in the caldera of the Volcano God.

    Sometimes they are called the ‘alt right’. Maybe a new catagory, the ‘pragmatic/rationalist’ right, which is perhaps less traditionalist and more HBD

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I just realized I’ve been confusing “alt right” and “reformocon” all this time, though thankfully not anywhere where anybody could hear me.

    • dndnrsn says:

      I’ve always thought “alt-right” was a sort of umbrella term for people who are to the right of the Overton Window but don’t adopt the style of the traditional far right. Into which the folks being discussed fall, but they aren’t the only ones there.

      For instance, there are virulently racist and anti-Semitic sites where the style of discourse follows the winkingly-ultra-edgy chan-site model. They’re not neo-Nazis or Klansmen, but they use such imagery to upset people and signal how outside the respectable norm they are. They use bits and pieces of social justice language in a mocking way. They and their audience are probably fairly young. They’re kind of the stereotypical “Tumblr SJW” view of what awful white male cishets are like … and they know this. Etc.

      A lot of Red Pill/Manosphere types could be lumped under “alt right”, especially with some of them turning towards the edgy-white-nationalist stuff I just described. There’s the sense of social conservatism you get from some of them (whether it’s from the ones who are actually socially conservative in personal behaviour, like the Christian ones who really like the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline corpus when it comes to the place of women, or from the ones whose attitude is “well society is collapsing because of female hypergamy but I might as well get laid a bunch”).

      I mean, Heartiste doesn’t seem to proposing that society become some kind of corporate cyberpunk monarchy, but I would definitely define him as alt-right: you can see a trajectory from half a decade plus ago when his blog was basically about how to get laid, to now when it’s a misogynist/white nationalist blog with a side order of how to get laid.

      Likewise, I’m pretty sure Moldbug never wrote about the evils of female sexuality, and he is way less racist than a lot of people who cite him approvingly.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        “he is way less racist than a lot of people who cite him approvingly.”

        Considering he’s said something like “Everything Carlyle wrote was true, especially the Occasional Discourse where he argues that black people should be re-enslaved because they like pumpkins too much, rather than that intellectual lightweight history stuff from before he burned his bridges with John Stuart Mill”… more racist would be, er, quite a thing.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I will admit that I have not read everything he’s written, not even close, and my eyes tend to glaze over when he writes stuff like ” to make my point, here is 30 paragraphs copied from the primary sources”.

          I do not recall him ever advocating any actual concrete steps against given ethnic groups, though, which I think makes him less racist than some who cite him approvingly.

          I also do not recall him making anti-gay or anti-trans statements, which again you can’t say for many who take him as an inspiration or a source.

          Like I said, though, what I recall is hardly authoritative, given the sheer number of words he churned out.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “Like I said, though, what I recall is hardly authoritative, given the sheer number of words he churned out.”

            Fair enough. The only article of his I’m sure I read all the way through was the one about the American Revolution from Tory primary sources and how British Whig commanders may have just let Washington win out of sympathy, and how to this day Whigs won’t let the military win a war unless they agree that the enemy is evil.

            But I’m sure I saw something endorsing Carlyle’s Occasional Discourse as brave crimethink,

          • I’ve gotten one valuable idea from the little I’ve read of Moldbug– we’ve got a culture where it isn’t legitimate to say that one is seeking power, so people who seek power (for whatever reason) have to pretend they’re doing something else.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “I’ve gotten one valuable idea from the little I’ve read of Moldbug– we’ve got a culture where it isn’t legitimate to say that one is seeking power, so people who seek power (for whatever reason) have to pretend they’re doing something else.”

            “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

            That valuable idea is something modern representative governments and Communist ones have in common. We need an alternative to an incentive structure where only moral busybodies beholden to an unpredictable ideology get power.
            Say what you will about the Inquisition, you didn’t have to worry that you’d be dragged before it for having a bias some university professors had only recently coined a name for.

        • Deiseach says:

          And considering that Carlyle thought the Irish were even worse than the Negroes, because at least black people would work when they were enslaved or freed slaves but the Irish were completely useless, this is not what I’d consider “someone who I’d feel comfortable saying my politics fit with theirs” 🙂

          Actually, I’m getting that a lot: there’s a current movement or grouping (you can’t really call it a “political party”, it’s not nearly coherent enough for that) in Ireland that I would be (very) broadly inclined to on economically liberal grounds, but I’m caught on social conservatism (one of their TDs in a radio interview yesterday made sneering remarks, in the context of participating in the abortion pill bus nonsense, about “lifers or whatever they call themselves” which lets me know I’m not the kind of person they want in their group so they’ve lost my vote), and the more (allegedly) socially conservative parties bring me out in a rash with their economic and social policies, so I’m stuck with waiting for someone to come up with a replacement for the Natural Law (no, not that natural law) party for me to use as a protest vote in the forthcoming (spring sometime) election 🙂

          I was going to say, if someone founded an Irish Thomist party, I’d support them, but the nearest to that which we do have is something I don’t like or can’t fully support because of the very right-wing political angle behind some of their backing/founders (e.g. I am not one of the “Capitalism is a divinely perfect system handed down from on high by the gods and infinitely perfect in and of itself” types, as you may have noticed from previous comments).

    • Troy says:

      I’d say that about 70% of the time that I see [view which shall not be named] mentioned on this site, just plain old ‘conservative’ would do just as well. Yes, there are some topics where the [view which shall not be named] departs from mainstream conservatism, such as race (although even there mainstream conservatives are closer to them than mainstream progressives), but many “[view which shall not be named]” ideas are just conservative ideas. For example, in the Blue Eyes post people were asked whether it had a [view which shall not be named] moral, because throwing away established social norms leads to death rays. This could have just as easily, and rather less esoterically, have been described as a conservative moral.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Being a Moldbuggite may be evil, but it’s at least cool and sexy. None of us would be so unkind to our host as to suggest he might be just a straight-up conservative.

        • Troy says:

          I think part of it is tribal affiliation. As far as I can tell, most self-proclaimed [view which shall not be named] come from Blue/Grey tribe backgrounds. Just calling themselves conservatives would identify them with evangelical Christians, NASCAR fans, and other unsavory characters.

        • John Schilling says:

          It’s certainly an effective way of signaling that you came by your conservative views by way of rational thought and comparison with liberal/leftist views that you are familiar with, rather than being conservative because that’s what you were taught and have never been willing to challenge. How much of that is deliberate, I don’t know.

          For that matter, mainstream conservatism is a mix of stuff that mainstream conservatives have thought about a great deal and rationally chosen to adopt/maintain, and stuff that mainstream conservatives keep around because they haven’t gotten around to thinking about it enough. Any brand of conservatism that starts from the outside, is going to have to look different enough to get a special label.

          I won’t complain if such labels also signal “cool and sexy”.

      • Technically Not Anonymous says:

        I rarely see mainstream conservatives argue for meta-level values like Those Who Shall Not Be Named do, though. I mean, they talk about “traditional values” but 90% of the time they just mean “LGBT people are bad.” Technically the ideas you’re talking about are just conservative, but at least in my mind they’re associated with Those Who Shall Not Be Named.

        • Troy says:

          Depends on what meta-level values you’re referring to. Two-parent families? Abstinence until marriage? Traditional gender roles? These are all conservative values. More thoughtful conservatives, for the most part, see the rise of divorce and out of wedlock births as a much greater problem that the rise of same-sex marriage (although many see the two as linked).

        • dndnrsn says:

          Compared to the mainstream left, the mainstream right’s meta-level values seem to line up with their object-level values a lot less, which makes them seem incoherent and is probably behind a lot of their losses recently on the culture war front.

          If we are taking LGBT rights as an example, a mainstream Republican’s defence of “traditional marriage” is going to rest more on custom and inertia than on harsh Biblical norms. Thinking that civil unions should be the limit is now a right-wing position, which is pretty progressive by the standards of any age up to a couple decades ago.

          In contrast, a left-winger arguing for same-sex marriage has their meta-level values line up with their object-level values much more. Even if they do not discuss meta-level values – most people do not, and don’t think about them much either – this makes their position seem much stronger.

          • Deiseach says:

            You don’t think the left has shifted its position on, say, marriage equality as well?

            From “simply decriminalise consenting adult sexual relationships, that’s all, because it’s a blackmailers’ charter” to “same-sex marriage is A HUMAN RIGHT and on a par with the Civil Rights movement and we will take you to court if you don’t bake a cake for our wedding!”

          • dndnrsn says:

            Oh, they have, but their meta-level values and object-level values are more in step.

            The meta-level values the left had adopted by, say, middle 20th century seem in line with the object-level values they have now – it just took a while for the object-level values to catch up in terms of social acceptability.

            In contrast, the right is placed in the position of having to argue anti-gay points without actually being anti-gay.

        • JBeshir says:

          When I try to get my head around what, exactly, it is that mainstream American conservatives think and want, one place I tend to look is The American Conservative, which seems to talk about meta-values, cultural change, the historic context to current conflicts, etc, a fair bit. A decent example might be http://www.theamericanconservative.com/olmstead/can-we-build-identity-without-place/

          I think the actual, non-intellectual majority, as well as the angry, terrified, dubiously intellectual bulk of the volume, are usually going to be very object-level, but the “intellectual mainstream” as it were of Conservatism-the-tribe includes these things.

  51. suntzuanime says:

    No word is perfect, but utopian schemes to purify our thoughts by purifying our lexicon tend to range from “ineffective” to “laughably ineffective”. Neoreaction describes a legitimate cluster in intellectual space which is much broader than monarchism, much more specific than traditionalism, much much much more specific than the far right, and much broader than racism racialism race realism HBD. Calling them Moldbuggites wouldn’t be too far from reasonable, but then you’re just riding the dysphemism treadmill to no obvious gain. At that point we may as well call them They Who Must Not Be Named, or The Friends of The Wicked Witch, or The Semit Kroy Wen, or The Grass Mud Horses.

    • suntzuanime says:

      To elaborate: to the extent that Rationalist Taboo is useful at all, it is among people who are earnestly trying to work together to dissolve a specific confused definition. It’s not something a dictator can impose from on high with threat of punishment. Honestly I think the idea of Rationalist Taboo has done more harm than good – it’s just given a new angle for arguments to break down along, where one player will say “taboo [some term crucial to your argument]” and the other will refuse or provide some trivial circumlocution or earnestly attempt to break down the meaning of the term only to discover their opponent is not enlightened, the disagreement was not really about that term, and they have allowed themselves to cheaply have significant costs imposed on them. Possibly those arguments were not salvageable to begin with, but seriously, how much concrete good has the concept actually done in practice for actual people? It sounds good but it just doesn’t accord with how humans work.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        Those names are awesome. If my fringe ideology takes off, I’d be honored to have any of them.

        More generally, I think Scott’s argument is accurate. I’ve seen a lot of things lately ascribed to Moldbugianism that don’t sound anything like actual Moldbugian arguments. I think the term may have simply grown too diffuse as awareness of the movement grew exponentially. Something similar seemed to happen with Motte and Bailey; the term just got worn out, till it was being applied to pretty much anything. At that point, tabooing it is less about walking the treadmill, and more about keeping communication precise; you can’t rely on it any more to convey a strict meaning, so it’s better to stop using it.

        Also, googling “Grass Mud Horse” led me to amazing things. Thank you for introducing me to this glorious animal!

        • suntzuanime says:

          “NRX is not a specific enough term, let’s encourage people to use even less specific terms like ‘far right'”. It is rare, in practice, for terms to convey a strict meaning. That’s part of what makes language so exciting. Impenetrability, that’s what I say.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Well, even from my limited knowledge of the movement, why not reference the specific thinker? From what I’ve heard, Anisimov’s arguments are not identical to Moldbug’s, which are not identical to Warg Franklin’s. I think it’s pretty arguable that the third-hand caricature of the movement is a good deal more cohesive than the movement itself, and that caricature leads to premature dismissal. I see people just saying “oh right, like those people who want a king/dictator”. There’s more nuance to it than that, yes?

          • suntzuanime says:

            No reason not to reference the specific thinker, really. But I don’t expect referring to “Marxists” instead of “communists” to really raise the level of discourse or affect it at all, and so outlawing the word “communist” is just kind of dumb and ineffectual.

            I am in general opposed to top-down restrictions on discourse, but especially when they don’t serve to do anything except filter out people too ornery to use PC language or too clueless to realize they need to.

          • Saint_Fiasco says:

            It’s not that Scott wants us to do a search and replace operation with far-right and neo-reaction.

            What he wants is that, since far-right is so nonspecific, people will be forced to talk about what specific facet of the far-right is being discussed in an explicit way, instead of just relying on the word neo-reacion, which is a specific far-right thing with implicit connotations.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Could you point at examples of these problematic uses?

          I went through OT30 and I didn’t see any problems there. I found some discussion of monarchy. This is what I expected to be the problem: some NRx are in favor, but ascribing it to all them is a mistake. But I didn’t find anyone actually making that mistake.

    • Airgap says:

      Not “Grass Mud Horses,” that’s my new band.

    • Max says:

      You know that these ideas do not originally stem from moldbug? Nick Land is the originator

      • suntzuanime says:

        Sure sure, and Marx was just cribbing from Christ. gimme a break

        (Given how much of Moldbug is verbatim Carlyle et. al. I don’t see how it’s possible that Land is substantively the originator of Moldbug’s ideas)

      • Airgap says:

        Nick Land “originated” those ideas in the sense that he spent most of his time doing drugs and pretending to be a snake until he took a break and read Moldbug, and decided to become a neor*********y. As something of a neor*********y myself, I view this as a decline on his part.

  52. Murphy says:

    If your experiment with tabooing “neoreaction” works given that it can get strong reactions as well I kinda wonder whether tabooing “feminist” and “SJW” (since they’re, if anything, a far broader group) might work.

    The only problem I can see is that while the neoreactionaries will understand tabooing, uncharitable or misinformed tumblr pages are going to try to paint it as “banning talking about feminists.” even though we all know that that’s not what tabooing is.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      The term ‘SJW’ refers, not to specific subjects that could be used, but to a style of thinking and discourse. I think we need that term.

      A taboo on ‘feminist’ would be nice, or on ‘feminist’ without some qualifier to show which sub-group calling themselvses ‘feminist’ is meant.

      • DrBeat says:

        The problem with that rule is that most of the time, the people you want to talk about just call themselves “feminist” with no qualifier attached. They claim all feminists and no feminists as members, and the feminist efforts they take credit for are “everything that is not what the person I am speaking to currently objects to”.

        Adopting that specific word gives you actual power. When talking about it, we need to refer to the people who use that label for the power it gives them.

      • Liskantope says:

        The term ‘SJW’ refers, not to specific subjects that could be used, but to a style of thinking and discourse.

        Really? I thought that SJW referred to people who argued for a particular type of cause (although I know the term is most often used pejoratively by those who criticize their style of rhetoric).

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I always thought that both conditions had to be fulfilled for somebody to count as an SJW.

        • TheFrannest says:

          It’s both: you have to be a “social justice” “warrior” – a vague type of leftist belief plus the willingness to any lengths to enforce it.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          Really? I thought that SJW referred to people who argued for a particular type of cause (although I know the term is most often used pejoratively by those who criticize their style of rhetoric

          IMO at this stage we need to invent a better referential* term for ‘SJW-style rhetoric/logic/etc’. In the meantime, it’s better to use what we have, than not criticize it at all.

          * ie, a neutral, contentless term to refer to something with

    • Technically Not Anonymous says:

      I think feminist is fine. It’s usually clear that it refers to a certain kind of person whose worldview involves patriarchy, rape culture, etc., not just anyone who thinks women are as good as men. (There are certainly people who pull a motte-and-bailey with those definitions, but I haven’t seen it happen here.)

      SJW, on the other hand, should probably go. It’s purely derogatory and it has no clear meaning. People use it to mean anything from “person who doesn’t like racism” to “liberal” to “person who supports social justice” to “person who supports social justice and is an asshole about it” to “literal communist who actually hates white people and men” and like nine out of ten times you don’t know what definition they’re using. Every discussion about “SJWs” would be better if people had to clarify who they’re talking about.

      • JDG1980 says:

        It’s certainly true that “SJW” tends to get overused. Some people are already using it as a pejorative against the Left, much as “socialist” and “communist” have historically been used in the United States. But “socialist” and “communist” still have specific meanings despite their use as political slurs, and I do think the term “SJW” has a specific core meaning as well.

        When people talk about SJWs, they are usually referring to the same phenomenon that back in the 1990s used to be called Political Correctness: speech policing combined with what might be called the “Oppression Olympics”, that is, an obsessive focus on who is most “marginalized” which often dwarfs any attempt to objectively assess the issue at hand. “SJW” also implies the use of social media for shaming and/or punishment against perceived sinners.

        Of course, one issue with “SJW” is that virtually no one self-identifies as such. To the extent that Oppression Olympics has a non-pejorative term that its adherents would identify with, “intersectionalist” probably is the closest fit.

        • From what I’ve seen of SJWs, they try to avoid Oppression Olympics, and succeed to a moderate extent– this was a good strategic choice.

          What they’ve got is a dividing line for pain, where the pain from some groups counts and from other groups doesn’t. This kind of works when you’re dealing with people who agree about the dividing line, and blows up hard (radical feminists who don’t count MtF transexuals as women) when they don’t.

          Intersectionality (pain from some parts of your identity counts, but not from other parts) is another SJW strategy which helps keep the movement from completely disintegrating.

  53. Steve Sailer says:

    Back to prestige … I suspect in human societies there have always been multiple kinds of leadership: e.g., the war chief and the shaman were often different people with different personalities. To use you David Bowie example, Bowie would have made a fine shaman.

    • NZ says:

      Reminds me of the Greek letter classification system I’ve seen for social hierarchy, where you have Alphas (war chiefs) and Zetas (shamans).

  54. Any other dating sites to try other than okCupid? Or tips on using it? Had zero no luck there.

    • Liskantope says:

      Also, which dating sites are most popular / most likely to be helpful in western Europe, where I live now? There don’t seem to be as many people on Okcupid here (not that I had much success with it when I tried it briefly in America).

      • Anonymous says:

        Aren’t there like a bajillion dating sites, and plenty of regional/national ones for wherever you’re at?

    • Daniel Armak says:

      I tried using OKCupid. Many of their innumerable, user-submitted/site-curated personality match questions obviously have a red/blue US-centered tribe alignment and a “correct” answer for each side. Many other questions really beg the question and don’t allow correct answers at all.

      Do people here think one should just not answer these questions, or perhaps build a fake-ish but politically correct persona? Or maybe that it’s extremely stupid to detail a true persona of oneself that could be linked to your real identity, even if the site allowed it?

      • Matt says:

        Just skip the question about things you wouldn’t use to select a partner, as to not affect your score. Use match percentages as a broad indicator only.

        Online dating requires you to use a profile picture, so is inherently risky, privacy-wise. This risk might be worth it for many people. Keep in mind that you can temporarily hide/close your profile when not actively using it.

        You don’t have to answer questions you’re not comfortable with to build an attractive profile. Less is more.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        I wouldn’t advise trying to build up a fake persona. Aside from anything else, it makes it less likely that you’ll actually get on with people who are attracted to your profile.

      • That is an issue. There are clusters of people and I probably am not in any of them. For instance this guy was able to get very high matches for a large number of people by carefully creating a profile in the middle of these clusters.
        http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/

    • NZ says:

      Dog parks.

      Seriously, take your dog to a dog park for a while, same time every week. See if you notice any girls there consistently who don’t seem to be attached. (I’m assuming you’re male/straight. If not, adjust my advice accordingly.) You can tell that by their body language, whether they’re always there alone, if they have engagement/wedding rings on, etc. And if you’re wrong you’ll find out so don’t worry about it. As long as you’re polite and not aggressive they won’t be offended.

      Being at the dog park every week with your dog shows you a) have a stable life, b) care for other living things and have a soft side but without being a weird “cat person”.

      Same for her–way better than meeting girls at bars or some crap like that.

      Your dogs’ interaction can be a conversation starter, and as dog owners you both already have something in common to talk about.

      If I was single and looking to meet girls, the first thing I’d do is go out and get a dog.

      • 1. I don’t have a dog nor do i have any desire to get one.
        2. I don’t think that I could make any sane conversation out of the blue.
        3. The odds of them being compatible are pretty low.

        • vV_Vv says:

          2. I don’t think that I could make any sane conversation out of the blue.
          3. The odds of them being compatible are pretty low.

          I don’t want to be blunt, but in this case I suspect that your lack of success with online dating will not be solved by moving to another site.

          • I suspect that is true as well. Idk what I’m doing wrong though. Online dating gives a bit more context than meeting people at random.

          • keranih says:

            Idk what I’m doing wrong though.

            “Doing things wrong” is a rather loaded phrase. Things might be quite natural and easy for you to do, yet very much not helpful to getting to your end goal.

            If you phrased it as “I don’t know which of the actions I am taking (or not taking) that most significantly interfere with getting a date, can someone help me identify the most crucial ones?”

            – then you might get some help here. It might not be help that would be easy for you to hear, and might be harder to implement. But you’d get it.

          • Creutzer says:

            vV_Vv, I think you’re being unnecessarily uncharitable here. Being able to have a conversation with, and being potentially compatible with, random people is not in any way a prerequisite for dating. If OKC has the wrong demographic for a person, then moving to another site might very well lead to an improvement, unlike all online dating sites have similar demographics (which I wouldn’t expect – without participating in any, I’ve gained the impression that OKC has a pretty particular demographic).

          • vV_Vv says:

            @Creutzer

            If OKC has the wrong demographic for a person, then moving to another site might very well lead to an improvement,

            If I understand correctly, OKCupid is generic, therefore if you are interested in some peculiar demographic there may be a site which caters to your needs, and this demographic might be large enough that there are enough people near you to try to date. But “Halting Thoughts” didn’t say he is interested in some special demographic.

          • Creutzer says:

            I was somehow under the impression that it skews young, technophilic, and blue tribe with a bit of grey mixed in.

          • Ydirbut says:

            Creutzer: I used OKcupid around 2012-2013 and have recently started to use it again. I’ve noticed that it seems like the women I get matched with are much more blue/feminist than they were two years ago. However, I did move to a new town, but if anything I think the opposite would be true (my old town was a college town, my new town is not)

          • I mean OkCupid seems like reasonably in my demographic. Technophilic but maybe a bit too blue/feminist.

          • vV_Vv says:

            I was somehow under the impression that it skews young, technophilic, and blue tribe with a bit of grey mixed in.

            That is, the default demographics of the Internet.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          “1. I don’t have a dog nor do i have any desire to get one.”

          Why can’t you change that desire?

        • eh says:

          Point two reminded me of our host’s radicalising the romanceless and calibrate your self-assessments.

          Your conversation might be boring, insane, meandering, or even a little scary if you really screw up. However, most people would prefer you asking the age of their Labrador to Henry breaking their nose. You have a hypothesis – “my conversations are insane enough that I predict at least 50% of women will either ignore me or run away screaming within 10 seconds” – but some ad hoc experiments in the dog park are necessary to test it, in case your predictions are biased.

        • NZ says:

          1. Is your lack of desire to get a dog stronger than your desire to get a serious girlfriend? Also, dogs are awesome and do provide some base level of companionship that could help stave off the loneliness you must be feeling if you’ve resorted to online dating. Caring for a dog is potentially a way to become more mature and disciplined. Dogs will also naturally get you into conversations with strangers, giving you practice for point #2.

          2. If you literally cannot make sane conversation out of the blue with a stranger, I find it implausible that you’re a functioning independent adult who is ready for a serious relationship in the first place. Or did you just mean you find sane conversation with strangers uncomfortable or difficult? Because that’s a) normal and b) not insurmountable, especially with practice. Besides this isn’t “out of the blue”, it would be after your dogs have interacted and sort of broken the ice for you.

          3. I think people fret too much about “compatibility”. My wife and I are perfectly compatible in some ways, but very incompatible in other ways. Both our compatibility and incompatibility are sometimes cause for smoothness and sometimes for friction. As you get to really know someone, there will always be innate qualities about her that annoy or disappoint you, and they may often disguise themselves as “compatible traits” at first.

          Instead you should just worry about 1) whether you find the person physically attractive enough to maintain a romantic interest and 2) whether you find the person’s view of existence interesting enough to fuel good conversation.

          • Creutzer says:

            If you literally cannot make sane conversation out of the blue with a stranger, I find it implausible that you’re a functioning independent adult who is ready for a serious relationship in the first place.

            Why on Earth would you think that? Making conversation with strangers out of the blue is bloody difficult and essentially beyond the social skills of the entirety of England, which still somehow manages to function and populate itself. Why would that impair your functioning as an adult or as a romantic partner? How often does a normal person talk to people out of the blue, really? Also, depending on your definition of “insane”, how often does a normal person do that sanely? I’m not sure that talking about the weather for 30 seconds followed by awkward silence counts as a sane conversation, or any sort of conversation at all really.

          • NZ says:

            @Creutzer:

            Did you read my whole comment? Here, I’ll quote myself, with emphasis added in bold:

            2. If you literally cannot make sane conversation out of the blue with a stranger, I find it implausible that you’re a functioning independent adult who is ready for a serious relationship in the first place. Or did you just mean you find sane conversation with strangers uncomfortable or difficult? Because that’s a) normal and b) not insurmountable, especially with practice. Besides this isn’t “out of the blue”, it would be after your dogs have interacted and sort of broken the ice for you.

          • 1. I suspect that caring for a dog solely to get a date is likely to run into motivation issues. Is suspect that the gain is less than the effort.

            2. Keeping two conversations afloat is hard and not really enjoyable unless the topic is interesting, which is highly unlikely to be the case here.

            3. I agree and think my and most people’s model of compatibility is pretty questionable. That said, my issue is that most people fail my aspie personhood test or I fail theirs, see

            http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-players/
            Most people’s ability to pass ideological turing tests is really bad.

          • Creutzer says:

            @NZ:

            I did, but I maintain that even “literal impossibility” – as in, the conversation will devolve into awkward silence and not be any sort of conversation at all really -, as opposed to finding it merely difficult, is not as big a deal as you make it out to be.

          • Creutzer says:

            @NZ:

            I did, but I maintain that even “literal impossibility” – as in, the conversation will devolve into awkward silence and not be any sort of conversation at all really, right up to complete inability to initiate anything because you have no clue what you could possibly say to a person -, as opposed to finding it merely difficult, is not as big a deal as you make it out to be.

          • NZ says:

            @Halting Thoughts:

            1. Then don’t get a dog solely to get dates. Get a dog because it will help make you into a more dateable person and to keep you from getting extremely lonely. It will also get you out of your house and force you to talk to strangers–including ones who aren’t pretty girls. See #2 below.

            2. Please don’t take this as an insult, but that is some bitch-ass whiny shit. You need to PRACTICE things that are hard to get better at them. Very few people are naturally good at talking to strangers, but it’s an important social skill and placing screens between you and the rest of the world is not a solution.

            3. That’s a very long article and I’m not going to read it. Based on “most people fail my Aspie personhood test” though, it seems like your ratio of online interaction to meatspace interaction is way too high. You’ve relied on the ability to fine-tune every little detail for too long and now your regular social muscles–the ones that normally would handle ambiguity and surprises and moderate any dissonance–have atrophied. This is a serious problem, but not intractable! You just need to get off your computer and go out into the bright light of reality. Practice practice practice. Online interaction is not “this one weird trick” to solve your social deficiencies, it takes hard work. See #2.

            For a healthier outlook on online interactions, think of them as a nice occasional alternative to reality, not a replacement for it. It’s like bacon: nice on the weekends, but you shouldn’t JUST eat bacon. You need to also eat your vegetables.

          • NZ says:

            @Creutzer:

            When Halting Thoughts said he couldn’t make sane conversation out of the blue with a stranger, I wasn’t thinking of it as a complete in-depth conversation, but even just small verbal interactions that happen every day at grocery stores, outside building entrances, while waiting for conference rooms to become available, in elevators, and so on–not to mention around job interviews and client meetings.

            Those little verbal interactions provide a platform that can be easily extended into a further conversation in certain situations–like for example at the dog park after the pretty female has smiled and commented on how cute your dog is.

            An actual inability to make that kind of small talk–despite practice–would prevent you from being a functioning independent adult capable of a serious romantic relationship.

          • John Schilling says:

            @NZ: OK, we get it. Everybody should own a dog, because dogs are the key to all things wonderful. No person who doesn’t own a dog is ever allowed to complain about any of the things that owning a dog might help with. Which is pretty much everything, because dog ownership cures immaturity and there’s no problem that can’t be in part traced to immaturity. If somebody doesn’t own a dog, it’s because they haven’t been lectured to enough about the joys of dog ownership. And if they don’t wise up and get a dog, they deserve a lonely life with a lonely death at the end.

            Would you care to guess how charitable I am feeling towards dogs and dog owners right now?

          • NZ says:

            @John Schilling:

            I recommended dog ownership as an elegant way for Halting Thoughts to reach his romantic goals and develop the social skills needed to attain/sustain them–much healthier than living a life online. Also, a dog can provide a basic level of companionship, which is useful when you’re single and lonely.

            Somehow you took this to mean I was evangelizing dog ownership as some kind of religion or snake-oil panacea. It’s weird that you went there, and it wasn’t at all what I’ve been saying.

            In fact, I even called out online interaction for not being “this one weird trick” to solve one’s problems, so why would I just substitute dog ownership? There is no one weird trick, it takes hard work. Dog ownership is merely a very good avenue down which that work can be started.

          • vV_Vv says:

            out of the blue is bloody difficult and essentially beyond the social skills of the entirety of England, which still somehow manages to function and populate itself.

            So the entirety of England is unable to pick up romantic partners at dog parks or other unstructured social environments? Does the entirety of England rely on some unusual dating site for mating?

          • NZ says:

            At least one notable British couple of lore met at a dog park…

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_and_One_Dalmatians

          • Creutzer says:

            @NZ: At this point I cannot say more than that I simply dispute your empirical claim, at least when interpreted as fully general. However, I say this coming from a culture where small verbal interactions simply do not happen “every day at grocery stores, outside building entrances, while waiting for conference rooms to become available, in elevators”, etc. So I must concede the possibility that in other cultures the ability you describe is, indeed, essential to the functioning of an adult, and its lack indicative of such extreme incompetence at life in general that the subject in question is to be regarded as “not ready for a serious romantic relationship”.

            @vV_Vv: mumble mumble … obvious hyperbole … mumble mumble 🙂

          • Hyzenthlay says:

            I love dogs but I think getting a dog in order to get dates is an absolutely terrible idea. It’s like telling someone, “If you want to meet more women you should adopt a kid. Women love kids!”

        • NZ says:

          BTW I recommended dog parks as a “site” because as a human factors engineer I am very skeptical of online dating, and of computerized replacements for social activities in general. And if my relative expertise is to be trusted, you should be skeptical too.

      • A dog is a substantial responsibility. Perhaps getting one shouldn’t be recommended strongly to someone who isn’t interested in having a dog.

        Since this is an open thread, perhaps we could have a discussion about ethical obligations (if any) to pets. I’ve seen quite a lot of talk among rationalists about vegetarianism, but nothing about specific animals in one’s life.

        Also, if you’re getting a dog as an experiment in improving your life, you might want to get a dog from a breed that has an association which will find a home for it if you find you don’t want to keep the dog.

        • Peter says:

          In particular, a dog is a bigger responsibility than a cat – it seems not to be advised for single people who work full time. Also, many people including myself live in rented accommodation where the contract doesn’t allow pets. A pain but there you go. When I was young, my family had a dog, I’d love a dog, and if it helped me get a relationship so much the better – but I’m not getting one, for both of the reasons above.

        • NZ says:

          1. Most people have what it takes to be decent dog owners, and resources to learn how to be a good dog owner are abundant for free.

          2. I presume that getting a serious girlfriend/eventually getting a wife is worth more to Halting Thoughts than the cost in time and energy of caring for a dog. Getting a dog seems like a great way to meet people that doesn’t involve a dating website.

          • CatCube says:

            Speaking as someone who is single and has inconsistent hours at work: I don’t want to have to make sure I get home at a specific time to make sure the dog doesn’t shit on the floor. I honestly have an inconsistent enough schedule that it wouldn’t be fair to a cat.

          • I’m not sure the tactic requires a dog. What if you go to the park where people take their dogs to run before or after work, interact in a polite and friendly way with any dogs that want attention, making sure their owners don’t mind, and build up from there?

            When our daughter was little, we used to take her out to the park across the street from our house in the early morning. The park was used then by local dog owners. I had a wife so wasn’t looking for one, but I expect if I had been interacting with some of the women out running their dogs would have been reasonably simple.

          • NZ says:

            Good point, David Friedman. Though, it depends on the dog park. Some have a culture of there also being joggers, and some don’t. Also, it might be harder to plausibly stop to pet a dog–and then start talking to the dog’s owner–without making it look too obvious.

            In general though, it should be possible to come up with other strategies that don’t involve buying a dog.

            Just realized another great selling point for the dog park is that while you’re petting a dog you’re likely to be less nervous and, if you have a stammer, less likely to stammer. And petting a dog gives you an activity to do with your hands which is also good for clearing and focusing the mind. All this is useful when talking to girls.

          • Cadie says:

            I’m not sure that “most” single people – I know you only said people, but single people are the important demographic in this discussion – would be good dog owners, due to the need to be home and interact with the dog on a consistent and regular basis in fairly time-consuming ways. A single person with a full-time job outside his/her home is going to be gone for long periods of time most days, and dog ownership would limit his/her ability to work overtime, accept last-minute social invitations, and go on short trips. To take good care of a dog would require a LOT of investment in schedule structuring and possibly enlisting the help of a pet-sitter. It can be done, many do it, but I’d expect that only dog lovers would find the extra troubles worthwhile.

            If someone isn’t very much into the idea of having a dog, then finding a different hobby, or even a different kind of pet, could fill similar social functions and be more rewarding. Maybe cat parks and bird parks aren’t things; there are still social opportunities if you look a bit harder for them (and there are some women who don’t even like dogs… using dogs to meet women means you won’t be meeting that subset.)

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        “Besides this isn’t “out of the blue”, it would be after your dogs have interacted and sort of broken the ice for you.”

        Very much so. Peoples’ talk and behavior with their dogs shows what’s important to them.

        It’s not necessary to have a dog of one’s own, because there are plenty of people who have dogs but don’t have time to take them to to dog park. Kids even get paid for “walking dogs”.

      • Kiya says:

        I think “Get a dog and go to dog parks” can be generalized to “Do some activity you are interested in that facilitates meeting people of the appropriate gender.” If dogs aren’t your thing, take an art class, or join a book club, or go to a human park and ask some people playing sports if you can join their sports. Make sure you will enjoy the activity for its own sake; this is a long-term plan. Make friends. Once you have some new friends, if you are attracted to one of your friends and they don’t seem otherwise attached, ask them out.

        Admittedly all of the romantic partners I’ve had were friends I met by doing activities of mutual interest… I’m sure there are other paths to go down.

        • NZ says:

          Good point.

          I like dog parks in particular because a) dogs are a wonderful medium, providing amusement and a perennially light mood; b) girls at dog parks seem consistently prettier than average; c) girls at dog parks are probably better for dating than girls at, say, bars–responsible dog stewardship is a reasonably good proxy for adult functioning.

          Another thing to keep in mind is that making male friends is helpful too, because a lot of them have female friends or even relatives they can introduce you to.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I don’t know what others there are, but Meetup.com is basically a gigantic online warehouse of interest groups, no matter the interest. Sometimes dating is explicitly a component; sometimes the core is an actual interest (hiking, dancing, Bible study, Degas fandom, etc.). I even know of one group that’s effectively one guy’s business; he uses the Meetup machinery to schedule tours, classes, and so on.

          Which is to say: be careful not to assume such groups are intended for hooking up. They are, however, excellent for meeting new people, and are probably good practice for socializing and even dating.

    • James says:

      There is a Freakonomics podcast episode about online dating. Check it out!

    • dndnrsn says:

      What do you mean by zero luck?

      Generally, read the OKCupid blog. It’s defunct, but it includes some interesting stuff, like what kind of profile picture you want (if you’re a guy, don’t look at the camera and don’t smile, if you’re a girl, look at the camera and smile, it’s good if you’re doing something interesting, holding a cat is statistically a good thing, shirtless photos are bad unless you are someone who looks good shirtless in which case they are good). What the best way to start a message is (the more generic a greeting phrase, the worse – “hey” or “hi” generally are unsuccessful). Etc.

  55. zslastman says:

    I got noticed as an example yaaaaay.
    I’m really interested to hear those non verbalised thoughts once they’re properly cooked. I think it’s an important and under discussed topic. “Status”, like you say, doesn’t seem seem to just be a biological primitive like ‘hunger’, it seems like the behaviors have a lot of moving parts. I once asked Hanson why he doesn’t bother with that kind of dissection and he said he doesn’t think it’s usually productive, but I have to disagree. For instance, we don’t have ‘avoid sick people’ as a behavioral primitive. We have specific visual and olfactory triggers that hook up to the emotion of ‘disgust’. Knowing that tells you all sorts of things about how to test the theory, how mutable it is, how it might be affected by the new environment, etc etc.

  56. Jiro says:

    The fact that someone cannot get funding for a disease treatment from conventional sources is Bayseian evidence that the treatment is ineffective. So crowdfunding it isn’t going to work unless you can get your funding from gullible people.

  57. Nornagest says:

    Does anyone else have this problem or know a way to solve it?

    Have the problem (on Chrome 34), haven’t found a way to fix it.

    • RCF says:

      The issue seems to be that it takes a while for the browser to reload the page. It displays the new post, but it hasn’t really loaded the page, so it won’t let you view the rest of the page. I also have the issue that nothing happens for a while, so I click “Post Comment” again, and then I get a duplicate post error. It seems a bit inefficient, reloading an entire page just to display the new comments.

  58. birdboy2000 says:

    I want to no longer browse websites run by large corporations or people seeking to sell out to large corporations, or at least significantly cut down my time there. I also want to not browse websites run by power-mad tyrants who ban everyone they disagree with.

    My interests are anime, politics, and history, and the only sites I browse these days that do not frustrate the heck out of me are this place and 4chan. (Usenet if you’re willing to be more loose with your definition of “site” but that’s a ghost town too.)

    Where should I hang out?

    • As someone who’s recently left the giant gaming forum/extremely targeted hatchet job site mentioned in the comments a few posts ago, I’ve found solace in a distributed solution; rather than find a single place with a lot of people, I have a dozen or so blogs and mini-forums I check instead. This also makes me a lot more tolerant of tyranny; it’s great to see someone banned on one forum, and keep up conversation with them on another three without any interruption in flow.

    • Arbitrary Greay says:

      On the anime side, the blogging circuit is pretty much your only choice. Fantastic Memes and Chromatic Aberration Everywhere are good places to start, and then wiki-walk through the blogroll and “liked” post links.

  59. Nick T says:

    Re DRACO: the immune system already has dsRNA detectors (which DRACO is based on) that have effects including apoptosis, that obviously don’t defeat all viruses, so I’d like to know how this is different from those / why it didn’t evolve already (as a protein made from two already-existing domains, it seems way easier to evolve than most therapies) / how it would defeat existing viral resistance mechanisms / why viruses wouldn’t evolve resistance.

    The paper seems to be saying that the difference is that DRACO bypasses most of the apoptosis signaling pathway and so defeats resistance mechanisms that block those signals, which is a partial answer (but the paper also mentions the existence of other resistance mechanisms, like hiding dsRNA, without saying how DRACO gets around them).

    A comment here says “From what I’ve seen and what Dr. Rider told me the amount of dsRNA necessary for the natural Interferon Response is much higher than that necessary for DRACO”, but no further detail.

  60. Papers Please says:

    Competence and the Evolutionary Origins of Status and Power in Humans
    https://infotomb.com/ucj65.pdf

    In this paper I propose an evolutionary model of human status that expands upon an earlier model proposed by Henrich and Gil-White Evolution and Human Behavior,

    • NZ says:

      What do you think of the theory that humans became bipedal because we were able to throw hard and with accuracy? (Think groups of baseball-like throwers, shooing a cheetah off its kill so they could take the meat.) What else would make the treacherous move to bipedalism worth it?

  61. Gadim says:

    Any right of center publications worth reading?

    • Yakimi says:

      City Journal and the New Criterion are probably the two centers of intellectual American conservatism.

    • hlynkacg says:

      In what context?

      If you’re trying to get a gauge on what the what the “red-tribe” is thinking (in the US / Canada) to I’d point you towards Reason or Instapundit. Whether they are worth reading is a matter of taste.

      • _Reason_ may be closer to grey tribe.

        • Hemid says:

          Its history is definitely grey, and the Reason of today is still rhetorically greyish, but its tribal blueness—simple partisanship—is so strong now, when the rhetoric goes grey it feels dishonest and off, like a politician putting on a local-rubes accent.

        • My impression is that _Reason_ used to be gray with a surprisingly red commentariat, but has moved towards blue.

          • Urstoff says:

            Still seems solidly libertarian to me (is that what grey is?). Look at the Hit and Run blog: a pro-Snowden post, a pro-Ryan and anti-Sanders post, a pro-Uber/anti-Taxi monopoly post, a pro-School voucher post, etc. Reason commentators go on shows on both Foxnews and RT.

          • Urstoff: Grey tribe as used here isn’t exactly libertarian, but reasonably hard core libertarians are more nearly part of the grey tribe than the red or blue.

            Grey tribe people, for instance, are quite likely to be in favor of a guaranteed minimum income (our host is reasonably positive about the idea). That’s more attractive to libertarians than standard paternalist welfare, but I expect most libertarians would still be against it.

          • Urstoff says:

            So grey tribe = Bleeding Heart Libertarians?

          • I think BHL’s are mostly bluegrey.

            I think of grey tribe as Silicon Valley types, quite likely to have libertarian views on many issues but to identify culturally with the left. Scott is an example.

            Grey tribe people are less likely to think positively of Rawls than the BHL’s mostly do, if only because Rawls doesn’t really make a lot of sense–why should one make a decision under uncertainty on the assumption that you are certain to end up with the worst possible outcome, which is what his argument requires? They are more likely to be sympathetic to utilitarianism, which at least feels as though it logically holds together.

            But others here, especially people who don’t self-identify as libertarians, might be able to give you usefully different answers.

          • RCF says:

            @David Friedman

            How does Rawls require that? My understanding is that Rawls argues for maximizing total utility, not maximizing minimum utility.

          • RCF:

            I believe you are mistaken. Rawls argues that society should be structured to maximize the welfare of the worst off member. The argument is that, behind the veil of ignorance, you not only do not know who you will be, you do not have any probability distribution over who you will be.

            Hence, he argues, you will prefer the society for which the worse outcome you could end up with is as good as possible–infinite risk aversion. I have never been able to make any sense of it.

            Harsanyi, writing well before Rawls, followed the obvious line of argument–equal probability of being anyone–and reached the obvious conclusion, which is to prefer the society that maximizes average utility.

        • Simon says:

          I’d call Reason by far the “greyest” out of the mainstream right-of-centre news publications. Certainly closer to that than The Economist or WSJ, though Economist being a British publication probably makes it harder to fit into those factions.

    • Troy says:

      Unz.com, The American Conservative, The Federalist.

      • onyomi says:

        Second The American Conservative. I used to sort of be friends with the editor, and he’s an incredibly thoughtful and well-informed guy.

    • Anon. says:

      Depends on how you define right of center, but The Economist? Obviously grey, not red.

      • anon says:

        The Economist are neoliberals, not genuine libertarians. Their support of Blair and Bush Jr’s foreign military adventures should automatically revoke their grey tribe credentials

        • onyomi says:

          See this is why I like The American Conservative for a genuinely conservative, in a Burkean sense, take on US politics. Most other publications are either libertarian (Reason) or neoconservative/neoliberal. A Burkean conservative in the 21st c. often sounds a lot like a libertarian, and indeed, this editor was an active participant in my university’s college libertarians club, but it is still a distinct viewpoint worth considering.

      • cassander says:

        the economist is way too mainstream to be grey tribe. In fact, it’s almost anti-grey, in that it’s by some odd historical coincidence, it’s managed to perfectly mirror american conventional wisdom. If it has a tribe, it’s the establishment, of “serious people”.

    • Social Matter
      First Things
      The American Conservative. Though really, of all the writers at AmCon I only really read Dreher and Alan Jacobs.

      (I offered links to these in a previous version of the comment, but too many links = spam, evidently.)

    • multiheaded says:

      Like others say, Reason, American Conservative, The Economist.

      The Federalist is a horrible rag that’s seriously worse than Breitbart.

      (http://thefederalist.com/tag/lgbt/ oh wow lol; one would have to be an utterly shameless bottom feeder to exploit such a massively sensitive issue as *detransitioning* and imply that somehow queer activists HATE it. Literally no standards.)

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      I think The American Interest is fairly good. It’s in the style of The American Conservative, and is the main stomping ground of Walter Russell Mead, who first piqued my interest with his book, Special Providence.

      http://www.the-american-interest.com/

      If you’re after more zeitgeist-y faire, there’s always Ann Althouse’s blog. She herself is liberal, but goes out of her way to post things that tend to gore liberal oxen, or construct alternative interpretations to “received liberal wisdom”. (Do be careful in the comments, however. Longstanding tradition of sarcasm; if you read something outlandish, there’s a high chance you’re reading a deliberate test of Poe’s Law.)

  62. TheFrannest says:

    Interesting fun fact: no argument that mentions [defended group] “daring” to do [something that shouldn’t logically cause controversy] is ever remotely worthwhile. Just discard the whole line of discussion and pray for the sweet release of blissful insanity.

    • Adam Casey says:

      I think the term you’re looking for is Against Bravery Debates.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      The most ridiculous example of this sort of thing I’ve come across was when a Facebook friend of mine posted a status saying “I don’t care how many friends I lose, I support gay marriage!” — even though he was a left-wing arts student, and even though this was in the aftermath of the DOMA case and everybody’s feed was being inundated with rainbows.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        This seems uncharitable.

        I think everyone agrees that the gay marriage debate has undergone a sea change with amazing rapidity. In 2004, gay marriage was seen as a drop dead winning argument for conservatives. Evangelicals have been outspoken about how horrible it is.

        I certainly hold back on posting various things on my Facebook feed because I do not want to antogonize my various religiously inclined relatives.

  63. Luke Muehlhauser says:

    Did Rider apply for NIH funding and fail to get it? If so, I’d really want to learn why the review committee didn’t fund it.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      Yeah, I’m sorta struggling with this concept myself. This is penicillin for viruses, right? How is this man not dead beneath an endless cascade of money-bales?

      • grendelkhan says:

        I had pretty much this exact same discussion almost three years ago. (You can also see me futilely attempting to court a supposed billionaire’s kid.)

        This seems to fall under ‘civilizational incompetence’, but I agree, it’s a lot to swallow. One expects “We can cure the common cold in mice!” to be met with more than just “oh, cool”.

        • Murphy says:

          It’s close-ish to my own area of expertise and I had the same opinion, it sounded good but which you’d want to safety-test the hell out of first.

          I said this in the other thread that Scott linked but I’ll say it again. This seems weird.

          My only hypothesis that this researcher doesn’t want to give up as big a cut of the rights as many funding sources would want and so it taking the crowd funding approach. (after all it’s basically free money with no strings attached.)

          I see nothing on the indiegogo page about who has/would own the rights so i’m guessing it would be almost entirely this Dr Rider and if it panned out that would leave him slightly richer than God.

          Again, I can’t stress enough, 2 million is small money in this kind of context. People around me are getting more for far less interesting work and for far more speculative work.

          Combined with the blackout on information about this something is up. Either results didn’t turn out as hoped and Rider is trying to keep things going or there’s some kind of fight over money and/or patent rights.

          This is exactly the kind of tech that’s getting lots of funding right now so even your argument that this isn’t the sexy area at the moment doesn’t hold water. Organisations are throwing cash at personalised medicine, smart molecules and interventions like this.

          Also I don’t like that he’s selling it as a cure for all viruses, it’s a potential cure for a significant and very important subset of viruses but not all.

          • grendelkhan says:

            According to the AMA thread, MIT owns the patent, though that’s not directly cited.

            Here’s an interview from four years ago; the comments detail a rather sadly glacial attempt to set up actual crowdfunding.

            In any case, if you’re concerned, Andrew Clough has already donated enough to get a Hangout with Dr. Rider, so you could probably have him ask. Or send an email, or comment on the IndieGoGo page.

            It seems unlikely that someone would hold out for four years like this; also, note that they had an NIH grant and then didn’t. It reads like that economics joke, “there can’t be a twenty on the ground; someone would have picked it up by now”.

          • Deiseach says:

            What seems odd is that he apparently (if you read the announcement that way) went to Draper Labs last year precisely to work on this, and now he’s trying to crowdfund it?

            That to me sounds more like it wasn’t working as well as initial results suggested, rather than a fight over “I want a bigger cut of the pie”. If there are potential millions in profit involved, as surely there would be for a viable cure that can go into production, there’s more than enough “you can roll around on a bed covered three inches-deep in hundred dollar bills” for everyone.

          • Murphy says:

            @grendelkhan

            Some random commenter asserted that the patent was owned by MIT so I’m not sure that’s proof so I’m not abandoning my conjecture that there’s some disputes over the rights.

            it could also be a market failure where the guy in charge simply isn’t very good at getting academic funding since you’d expect MIT to be throwing some additional money at this.

            It could be a “twenty on the ground” deal but this isn’t just a 20 on the ground, this is a 20 that’s been paraded past dozens of currency recognition experts.

            I can’t find any replications outside the original lab either.

            Something is definitely weird.

          • Erebus says:

            This is, presumably, the patent:
            https://www.google.com/patents/US7566694

            There are a few other closely-related ones. (7125839, 8598324) They are all very similar, and they have one important thing in common: MIT is the assignee. This means that MIT, not Dr. Rider, owns the invention. I don’t know what this means for the future of DRACO as a therapeutic, but it bears keeping in mind. (MIT’s role in this is puzzling.)

            It is also worth mentioning that the patent expires on or around Feb 2022.
            …But I don’t know if this is a huge concern. If Dr. Rider manages to optimize a few lead compounds, I reckon that he should be able to find a way to patent them. The new patent(s) would be narrower than the one set to expire in 2022, but would probably be enough for further development and investment.

            Speaking of optimization, the PLoS study was interesting, but seemed extremely preliminary to me. DRACO is a technique — not a particular lead compound — and whatever they tested in that PLoS study seemed like a bit of a blunt tool. The concentrations they used were quite high. (100-200nm in vitro, 2.5mg to mice in vivo — where 2.5mg translates to a roughly 500mg dose in a 75kg human.) This indicates a lack of potency, and definitely indicates a need for further optimization.

            …Anyway, I also think that crowdfunding this thing is very, very odd. Even the full $2M Rider is asking for is just a drop in the bucket — not enough to make the slightest dent in Phase I clinical trials. At $15k raised thus far, this is crashing and burning badly.

          • Matt says:

            He is not trying to do a clinical trial. He is trying to get to the point where companies would fund him. He plainly states he would be doing in vitro experiments with the 2 millions.

          • Mark says:

            Below is the explanation they give for the lack of funding. Does anyone have any reason to think that this isn’t true?
            The only thing I don’t understand is why the NIH stopped funding. Do they only fund proof of concept work?

            http://www.killingsickness.com/
            “However, before committing any of their own money, those companies want to see that DRACOs have already been shown to be effective against major clinically relevant viruses (such as members of the herpes virus family), not just the proof-of-concept viruses (such as rhinovirus) that were previously funded by NIH. Thus the Valley of Death is the financial and experimental gap between the previously funded NIH proof-of-concept experiments and the threshold for convincing major pharmaceutical companies to advance DRACOs toward human trials.”

          • Murphy says:

            @Erebus

            Thanks for that, so it seems all that’s left is my hypothesis that he just kind of sucks at getting in funding, even for interesting work, which isn’t that uncommon in academia.

            Sometimes talented people waste time spinning their wheels because they don’t chase the funding effectively.

            A bunch of my old workmates used to work in pharma research. Pharma companies absolutely do sink a *lot* of money in right from the earliest stages, toxicity could sink something fast but if something worked well in animals then it was already one of the 1/10,000.

            I don’t fully believe in this ” Valley of Death” though I’m willing to believe he believes in it.

          • Linch says:

            I signal-boosted to my social network in as many areas as I could.

            Hopefully we could get a couple more scientists looking at the research more carefully and come up with a consensus on whether this is worth funding.

        • vV_Vv says:

          So the original publication is from 2003, and in these 18 years this thing hasn’t gone anywhere, and the guy is now resorting to e-begging on IndieGoGo, next to thousands pretentious failed artists?

          From the outside view, it doesn’t look good, to use an euphemism.

          • grendelkhan says:

            The first publication was in summer of 2011, in a not-maximally-prestigious journal. Was there a publication before that? I was under the impression that he’d been working on this project since circa 2003, not that it had been published then.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Ok. Still, I’m not positively impressed.

          • Erebus says:

            PLoS is extremely prestigious. It’s the top-tier open-access publisher, and in many respects is a heck of a lot better than Science and Cell. It’s more than a few notches above the vast majority of Springer and Elsevier journals.

            The MIT DRACO patents have a priority date of 2002 — and they’re very complex patents, even by modern biotech/pharma standards, so DRACO probably dates back to 1999-2000 or thereabouts. Stealth mode research, by the looks of it.

            grendelkhan: Thanks for those comments from your friend above. I agree fully with the conclusions he reached. One thing: There’s no EC50 in mice — it would be ED50, and those typically require a lot of experimentation to obtain, which I don’t think would have been warranted, under the circumstances. (It was just a proof of concept, and the version of DRACO they’re testing might not be the same version they want to bring to clinical trials. Presumably, it would be further modified/optimized. Also, mouse experiments are expensive.)

            DRACO is interesting, and it seems credible to me. But it’s also extremely preliminary, and I don’t think that we should fund a Kickstarter campaign for it. That just makes zero sense. I’m also really confused about a couple of things: Where’s MIT in all this, and why aren’t other labs working on DRACO? (The patents aren’t the reason. Those expire in a few years, and, besides, any novel modification to DRACO would potentially be eligible for a new patent.)

          • RCF says:

            2015-2003 = 18?

          • vV_Vv says:

            2015-2003 = 18?

            Mistakes were made.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Have you ever looked at an NIH rejection letter?

    • grendelkhan says:

      Hey, this is something I can actually help with! My friend in the field pointed me to this; it’s the NIH grant which extended from 2013 into early 2015. project 5U54AI057159-10, subproject 5714. It was funded for $172,903 for that period, as part of a larger $9.7 million grant to NIAID for “biodefense and emerging infectious diseases”.

      I’m not sure where to go with these things, but the project was definitely approved at one point, and according to the SENS6 presentation, used the funding to show results against additional viruses. Anyone with more information, please do chime in.

  64. grendelkhan says:

    More resources on DRACO: Todd Rider’s AMA on Reddit a week and a half ago. Presentation at SENS6. Original PLoS One paper.

    In early 2014, I asked a friend of mine who works as a researcher in a nearby field to evaluate the SENS6 presentation and PLoS One paper. I’m waiting to get his okay (it was semi-private correspondence; I’m being polite), but I’ll post it as a follow-up here if he says yes.

    • grendelkhan says:

      I’ve gotten the okay; this is from the discussion about a year and a half ago:

      Okay, this is a clever application of established biological systems. At its core, this is novel and I have no problem with what they have done. The controls are all present and most of the questions I have about it are answered.

      Both the paper and the presentation are a bit too vague to really appreciate the effectiveness of this antiviral since they do give a EC50 for cells, but there is no evidence of an EC50 for mice. It shows that it is present for up to 11 days, but there is nothing that says that the levels present are high enough to be effective for that time.

      In fact, the author says that it is only effective when injected within 36 hours of infection. This is way too narrow of a time table for most viruses, especially influenza (the flu) and rhinoviruses (the common cold). These have incubation times nearing a week before you see symptoms. The best thing the author can do right now is show that with the onset of symptoms in mice, or whatever model they use, that DRACO can effectively block or significantly reduce the duration of the infection. This is data is a great start to what could be an excellent antiviral. I would hate to see what kind of resistance viruses would create, if they could, against it.

      Overall, I think the science is sound and the data is a great start. The authors need to establish whether they can stop infections post-symptoms, or increase the window of effectiveness as a prophylactic. Additionally, they need to demonstrate that prolonged, low-dose applications of DRACO on serial passaged viruses does not create resistance to the antiviral. In other words, when patients don’t use it properly or correctly, are they just selecting for resistance viruses in their body and making this system less effective? Lastly, they need to find a better way of administering it for whole-organism effectiveness. intra-nasal is great for the flu and viruses that grow in the lungs and throat, but it does nothing for other viruses. Plus, I don’t want to be stabbed in the gut with a needle just because I *might* be exposed to a virus.

      I’ll be glad to talk specifics with you if you have any questions on their work. While I’m not the author, they did a good job laying out their experiments.

    • grendelkhan says:

      And here are some answers to questions I’d had then:

      Let me see if I can answer all of the questions. I’ll let you know if I venture into a very hypothetical or abstract world where hand-waving and “what-if”s rule.

      1) Is it particularly difficult to find viruses that have a long incubation period in mice? Maybe the idea was to show efficacy in preventing infection in the first place?

      Influenza in mice has an onset of symptoms around day 3, so they could easily wait for the symptoms to appear, or day 4 post-infection, to administer the DRACO. This would be more in line with what a clinical setting would do, since we, as humans, don’t tend to know when we are infected with a virus until the symptoms appear. With regards to showing efficacy, they did just that and it was perhaps the point of the mouse trials. Suffice it to say, they would probably have to move to a model such as the rhesus macaque to get a better idea of what would happen in a larger animal.

      One of the problems I have with mouse trials, is that while it will give you a fair idea of how an immune system would react, and if there is potential for a drug to work, there is a compressed time frame since the mice tend to die or get too old for research. One thing the researchers could do is use something such as Hepatitis B/C or even Hauntavirus in mice to establish an infection. If used early enough, I would hypothesize that killing the infected cells would not cause a severe problem for the mice. I’ll wave my hands here and say that a well-established infection of some viruses might not be curable with something like this, however it could help with even infections of HIV if you could get the latently infected cells activated to produce virus.

      2) Are there viruses that don’t use dsRNA for replication? Or am I thinking of this too much like an engineer and not enough like a biologist, where you can’t predict what mechanisms will emerge under selective pressure and history has taught you to be pessimistic?

      As the author stated, almost all viruses produce a dsRNA intermediate, though this is especially true for RNA viruses. DNA viruses only get dsRNA from what’s called convergent transcription. This generally means that in the DNA, there is code for proteins in both the sense (5’-3’) and anti-sense (3’-5’) direction. This is a crafty way of packing more information into a smaller space; by reusing code in reverse the virus can build more functional proteins to help propagate. Under selective pressure, I’m not entirely convinced that they could escape a dsRNA intermediate; however I’m not going to say that they couldn’t. Biology has a strange way of making something out of nothing.

      3) In general, this sounds like a potentially high-impact kind of research, and it doesn’t seem particularly well funded…. Is [mailing the charitable-giving arm of the company to try to drum up support] an obviously stupid idea, a potentially stupid idea, a reasonably good idea, a great idea, or something somewhere in between?

      I wouldn’t call it underfunded. From the paper this is where they get funding:

      National Institutes of Health -New England Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases (AI057159)
      Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency
      Director of Defense Research & Engineering

      I’d say that was fairly well funded. With the premise they can sell an antivirual that is easily administered to soldiers, they will likely be set for money. I’m not sure, since I haven’t seen their webpage or anything, that they are no longer funded. The paper came out in 2011, which isn’t *that* long ago, so it is likely there is still work being done. This kind of stuff, especially after proving it works, can take time. Alternatively, it could have been spun into a spin-off company that will make it using private funding. Just because you haven’t heard from them in a while doesn’t mean it’s not going strong.

      Giving them donations through work, unless it’s reasonably large and can give them a few $100k to $1,000k it is likely best to put the money elsewhere. I’ll look up the actual grant they got when I get home, but I bet it isn’t small.

      (I linked the grant they were working under elsewhere in the thread.)

  65. Pku says:

    I’m curious (as a guy in his twenties with thinning hair) if anyone here has an opinion about hair transplants. Googling just gives either the neutral-to the-point-of-uselessness Official Doctor Positions or the (clearly biased) sites of various transplant clinics who talk about how great it is.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Hair transplants are terrible. Stick with drugs.

      • One drug commonly used for the purpose (I forget its name) is also used to shrink an enlarged prostate. One possible side effect is “reduced libido,” euphemism for impotence.

        • Erebus says:

          Finasteride (sold as “Propecia” and under other names). It inhibits the enzyme which converts testosterone to DHT — but it doesn’t work locally, so, in effect, it’s a universal anti-androgen. Very nasty stuff. I know guys who have never fully recovered from the sexual side effects.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        Hair transplants are terrible. Stick with drugs

        I used to worry about going bald, until I discovered heroin
        😛

    • Megaburst says:

      A single study found that massaging your scalp really hard for a period of months can reverse hair loss.

      • Outis says:

        That blog post triggers some snake oil alarms. And the pictures are all from different angles and with different hair lengths or styles. It’s impossible for me to tell if there was any improvement at all.

    • Saul Degraw says:

      Embrace the thinning or shave it.

    • hlynkacg says:

      As a guy in his early thirties with thinning hair I agree with Saul and Mark on this one.

      Keep it short and once it recedes past the mid-line go the full Bruce.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      If our host is more reticent these days about having his photo bandied about the internet, please delete this, but you might enjoy Scott’s Biblical rationale for embracing the shaven-headed look.

      (Though in real life I have not visited a hairdresser in well over a decade, and from an early age sort of always knew that I was deep down a long-haired guy in what I imagine is a similar way to some people realising they are gay long before they get the chance to act on that knowledge – so if I did start to lose it, I’m pretty sure I’d jump on any promising treatment, and therefore cannot fault you for feeling the same)

      • Tibor says:

        I had had long hair for some 10 years before finally deciding to cut it last year also because of hair loss…First I was no longer getting compliments from women (“I envy your hair! Oh, those are wonderful curls!”), then I started disliking the look myself as I was losing hair, I decided to cut it relatively short (not bald…not yet anyway 🙂 ) and I was myself surprised about how good it looked. I also though I was a “long-haired guy”. It is also much more practical to have shorter hair but vain and narcissistic as I am, that was never a sufficient reason to go short 🙂

  66. I self-censor a lot on the Internet, as I’m sure we all do. There are many reasons for this, but significant among those reasons are the horror stories we’ve all heard about people being publicly shamed and/or having their careers destroyed for holding the wrong opinions or making bad jokes. But is this a rational fear? How frequent are these events, really? Are we in “struck by lightning” territory, or “car crash” territory? I’m not even sure how one would quantify this, since it obviously depends on how controversial the topic is, but it’s something that I spend far too much time thinking about.

    • My wife expressed concerns, years ago, that my online arguing might eventually lead to a brick through our window or something worse. So far it hasn’t happened. I am a little restrained with regard to statements criticizing very widely shared and strong norms, but not at all with regard to people I am arguing with.

      Some of whom do express considerable hostility.

    • John Schilling says:

      It also depends very much on what environment you live and work in. To what extent does your online presence stray into Social Justice territory? Do you extensively use the sorts of social media that readily support outrage-tornadoes, e.g. twitter, tumbler, facebook? Does your real-life social circle include SJWs, or to a lesser extent twenty-something blue tribe members generally? Perhaps most importantly, do you work in academia, or in the “tech” or entertainment industry? If your employer is vulnerable to blue-tribe boycotts, you are even more vulnerable. If you work on an oil rig, probably not so much.

      • Almost all of these things apply to me 😐

      • FacelessCraven says:

        That does explain rather a lot about your seeming belligerence toward the Social Justice set.

        [Edit] – I would be interested in hearing as much of the story as you feel comfortable providing. Perhaps most materially, was being set up within the last year or two, or further back?

      • Yakimi says:

        >Yes, there are in fact SJW hives in the tech space that preemptively plot, plan, and pick targets.

        Does anyone doubt this after what happened to Brendan Eich?

        Recently, a Google employee who blogged under the handle “wasenlightened” (would it be taboo to say that he was a self-described neoreactionary?) shut down his WordPress after his social justice coworkers caught wind of its existence. (He also described how they controlled Google’s internal forums to monitor dissent.) Check out what his peers had to say.

        https://twitter.com/jhamby/status/640651687359705088

        https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/639318057630887936

        • FacelessCraven says:

          …and there’s the RationalWiki link, and the derogatory reference to free speech.

          Bingo, I guess?

        • Viliam says:

          So the Google HR is like the Gestapo… because they allow people with different opinions to work at Google!

          Interesting.

          Seems like these people have no idea what Gestapo was, or have absolutely no shame comparing their hurt ideological feelings with literal genocide. It is only the rest of the world that have to monitor their words for any signs of microaggressions and other sins.

        • @Viliam: I don’t think that’s quite what he’s saying, although the way I read it doesn’t make much more sense. I believe he’s saying that HR at these companies is like the Gestapo because they know everything about every employee, which he feels is bad. However, given that knowledge, he seems to think that “wasenlightended” should have been fired for his political beliefs, because HR must have known. I don’t really know how you can square those two opinions, but that’s how I read it.

          Disclaimer: I had not heard anything about this whole situation until I read this comment thread.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          This is… kind of scary. I hadn’t heard of this before either, but by now it looks like “wasenlightened” has been almost entirely scrubbed from the Internet and all we have left are a couple of dead links and triumphant social justice warriors teabagging the corpse.

      • zigzag says:

        Mark you’re a very brave man. Here’s what you gotta do. You gotta watch the internal disputes in the SJ hivemind circles. Figure out which the big powerful factions are and what their big disagreements are. (My impression is they’re often nearly as nasty to each other as they are to outsiders.) Then when they finally come for you, defend yourself using something that one of the big powerful faction leaders said. Take something they said out of context and explain how you’re a big fan of theirs and how it provides support for your position.

        Result? Best case you trigger a bunch of infighting as the person you tried to pin furiously tries to wash their hands of you and everyone starts accusing them of being racist/misogynist/etc. because the things they say are being quoted by the likes of you and providing support for your terrible horrible no good racism/misogyny/etc.

        Hopefully you are getting the general idea here… basically as soon as you get punching bag status, try and see if you can transfer that punching status to a target that really needs it. We know that they’re impenetrable to reason but that doesn’t mean we can’t do other things that are interesting. Think like an aikido practitioner and use their force against them. If necessary you may even need to apologize: “I’m sorry, I now see the error of my ways, I was led astray by the writings of [insert target] who said _”.

        • vV_Vv says:

          I don’t recommend doing this. Some analogies about wrestling with a pig or playing chess with a pigeon come to mind…

        • zigzag says:

          Yeah on reflection I’m less sure. Probably the best strategy is to keep your nose as clean as possible while offering calm, friendly, factual info that counters SJ points. Scott could have done so much more for the cause if it weren’t for a couple of throwaway comments about feminists being worse than voldemort etc.

        • Anonymous says:

          I’m wary about giving advice on the chance that you take it and it turns out to be bad, but I think the people who say apologizing is a bad idea because it only encourages them probably have a point. My plan for if I’m ever outed for not toeing the PC line (not that my views go particularly more extreme than ‘libertarian leaning’) is to defend myself. It would probably require a change in lifestyle, almost akin to coming out of the closet. I imagine opinion on someone who does this gets polarized: some people will hate you, some people will love you. You probably don’t become a villain so much as you become Marmite. One advantage is that you get to argue your views in public, giving you a chance to persuade people in real life, as well as online. One disadvantage is you would have to spend more time defending yourself. Overall I would expect more of your life to involve arguing your views, which I imagine could be a good thing if you like arguing, not if you don’t.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          +1 for the “never apologize” advice. Look at the ongoing affair over Tim Hunt’s shaming. It is exceedingly obvious that his attackers were utterly in the wrong and that they lied to the public to destroy an innocent man. Nevertheless, his apology is being used to defuse criticism of his attackers. The claim is that he admitted his misdeeds, so how bad could their actions really be?

          Don’t apologize. Don’t resign. Fight them on every point and every issue, concede nothing. Any concession works to their script, not yours. Standard self-defense advice replies: hard targets get left alone, food gets eaten. Don’t be food.

          If it comes down to it, make them fire you, and make the rubble bounce on the way out.

        • zigzag says:

          Yes I’m inclined to think “don’t apologize” is generally a good approach. That’s why I think it’s super important to keep your nose clean, so you don’t have anything that you *would* want to apologize for even on deep reflection. Make every statement so thoughtful, true, kind, and necessary that you would stand by it even when you are mobbed. Think Gandhi style civil disobedience.

        • suntzuanime says:

          That doesn’t actually work unless you’re willing to act like a politician and talk only in soundbites that are fractally unobjectionable. Look at what happened to Tim Hunt; he didn’t say anything worth apologizing for, he only said something that could be twisted out of context. If it were only statements that were actually improper on deep reflection that got the superlaser pointed at you, the situation would be a lot less worrisome.

          (Not none worrisome, since mercy is a virtue I’d hate to see perish from the earth, but if you’re going to be merciless I’d at least prefer it to be restricted to evil.)

        • I think it is possible to apologize successfully to SJWs, but it has to be a really abject apology. You probably won’t get it right unless you know the subculture.

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          Nancy –

          …I mean, maybe?

          I’ve never seen it work. It could. You might write a perfectly-worded apology letter that doesn’t accidentally offend anybody who is actively looking for a reason to be offended.

          But if you could, theoretically, apologize in a way that got you out of it, you probably wouldn’t have gotten into it in the first place.

          In practice, you’re probably going to be attacked again because your tear-stained apology accidentally implied that they -took- offense rather than that you -gave- offense.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          (This is a new fake name for Reasons. I don’t mind people who know me from before recognizing my old pseud, just don’t want new people searching my new one to connect me with the old one.)

          I’ve seen it work.

          :googles:

          Here.

          It’s so abject it’s something I could never post. Ever. About anything. My culture is just not that emotive.

          PS: To lose one parent, Orphan Wilde, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Really, now. 😉

        • Orphan Wilde says:

          I’ll dryly observe that the two people involved in that made up, and then both authors told their commenters (without a lot of success) to quit making things worse. The commenters at bossymarmalade continued attacking the author of the linked apology.

          So, in the “This worked out decently between two people” view of things, yes, the apology worked.

          On the “Did this stop the flood of anger and indignation” side of the question? No. Not at all. Instead the author started getting attacked for their commenters’ reactions.

        • Vorkon says:

          @Mark Atwood

          Point of order for clarity’s sake: The person I assume you’re referring to is not called the International Lord of Hate. That’s Larry Correia. The tongue-in-cheek name that Puppy-style folks use for Vox Day is The Supreme Dark Overlord, or something along those lines. (Though he seems to take the title a bit more disturbingly seriously than Larry… >_> )

      • J. McDaniel says:

        I think I may be able to provide some further context, although I’m not sure how much is useful to you.

        I too am concerned about blow-back from expressing controversial opinions. These days I take some care not to attach my real name to statements I make online. The type of comment I might make here, for example, would make me concerned about blow-back from social justice advocates.

        What is strange for me right now is that last week a good friend of mine faced exactly the same type of blow-back, but from the anti-SJ crowd. He is still getting streams of nline abuse and letters demanding he be removed from his job for expressing comments in public that align him with “social justice warriors”.

        Part of that campaign against him was prompted by someone I defended when she was attacked by SJ types earlier this year. She quoted a small part of my friend’s conversation to her fans, and her followers went on the warpath. I know them both.

        I know that does not sound reassuring (double the jeopardy!), but my point here is that I believe the community of people battling each other is often very small on each side. I know or have met some of the most infamous characters on each side. Their rhetoric is primarily aimed at each other and non-combatants have to work much harder than you would otherwise believe to insert themselves into that conversation.

        Random figures are sometimes drawn in, but unless you are connected socially in some way the anger is unlikely to stick. Jon Ronson’s book is in that sense a catalog of those cases.

        My conclusion from what I’ve seen close up is that many political debates online are actually internal battles between motivated individuals within relatively small social circles for the ideological high ground in those circles. If you don’t think it’s true in the social circle you work in, you may be perceiving an exaggerated risk from watching others in this fight. If you do not engage directly with those caught up in these war zones you will be unlikely to be at risk.

        It is extremely exhausting for those of us who are in the middle of this battle. I am probably two hops maximum from Mark, for example, and perhaps count as friends several people who he would see as in “the inside” of the other camp. They are as fearful and/or cautious as him, and assume that his group is working to destroy them. Apart from United States-centered political affiliations, they are almost identical in career path, income level, and a big chunk of other characteristics. I do not know how to deescalate these confrontations. I can only presume along with Mark that it is self-limiting. I believe there is much back-channel conversation between the groups and I hope more self-doubt within them than either can publicly admit.

        • J. McDaniel says:

          I don’t have “a group”. I have no inside view or voice of any of the various anti-SJW groups

          My perception is that you do. For instance, you work with esr and post on his blog. I know most of the people who work with Eric won’t recognize that as a political discriminator, but as Eric’s opinions have become more eccentric over time (or maybe more well known as eccentric over time), it ends up being an affiliation marker, and I don’t think only as an external one. So many communities that are based around someone who regularly makes strange political pronouncements have undergone evaporative cooling to the extent that people contributing to those communities don’t really realize that they’ve ended in a group with a particular political viewpoint.

          The end result is that most of the social justice advocates I know don’t act like they’re a minority opinion, and people who spend a lot of time opposing them don’t realize they’re also in the tiny bubble that takes politics of this kind seriously. Both sides thinks they’re apolitical or middle-of-the-road, and that there’s this other extremist group that is targeting all right-thinking folk.

          The truth is, I think, both sides have ended up being extremely weird to anyone else. You’re right to think it’s strange to meet secretly to discuss what has happened on a mailing list! But the strangeness might not only be on the side of the social justice warriors.

          That weirdness of all parties is also part of what I think drives the outrage engine of this whole internecine battle. To the vast majority of the United States public, if you quoted a selection of what Shanley, or esr, or Moldbug says, they’d quickly decide they were terrible people, even if they agreed with much of what else they said. That’s because everyone involved has sorted themselves into increasingly odd seeming non-mainstream groups.

        • OK, I’m really curious; how was it that it was safer to trade details on how to arrange the meet-up in a crowded cafe than it was to just trade the information directly?

          I mean, I can imagine scenarios, but all of them require that someone’s computer and phone use be regularly monitored. Or was it that the person in question preferred an in-person meetup with no records whatsoever tying them to what was said to any form of electronic communication, no matter how anonymized?

        • Eli says:

          @Mark Atwood, I don’t know about the horology, but I’m pretty sure my team leader at work has all those other skills, as do most of the other higher-ups on our project. The systems programming world isn’t so small as to have only one person with a deep and wide skillset.

        • Cord Shirt says:

          My conclusion from what I’ve seen close up is that many political debates online are actually internal battles between motivated individuals within relatively small social circles for the ideological high ground in those circles…. If you do not engage directly with those caught up in these war zones you will be unlikely to be at risk.

          Right now, on a doll collecting discussion board I’m on, people are arguing about a recent article in American Girl Magazine (run by the doll company, marketed to 9-12-year-old girls). The article is by a girl who was adopted from foster care, and one of her fathers was also in foster care as a kid, so they’ve started a charity to help foster kids. That’s the focus of the article, but it also includes a photo of her family that takes up half a page of the magazine and of course reveals that her adoptive parents are a gay couple.

          The argument began with a self-described Christian saying that she had canceled her subscription to the magazine over this.

          Then came the social pressure on her to change her opinion or at least shut up about it. People who advocated tolerance toward her views as well were told, “This isn’t just an opinion, it’s justifying delegitimizing people for something they didn’t choose!!111!!!” One person announced that the term “practicing homosexual” is “extremely hurtful” and she would accept an apology if the person who’d used it (not the Christian, one of the tolerance advocates) wanted to offer one. This was pretty representative–the social pressure was typically justified though “sensitivity”/ “hurtfulness” concerns.

          I initially wrote something, but decided to wait and contemplate whether to post it, and given the way the discussion proceeded, now I don’t dare to. Here’s part of it:

          I was surprised to learn from the poll on the other thread that I’m older than the plurality of posters here. My guy and I were one of those old-school straight couples who waited for same-sex marriage to be legal before we were willing to get married ourselves. I’ve encountered younger people who don’t understand that either. 😉

          But because I’ve supported same-sex marriage for so long, I can understand how reasonable people could and can have objections to it–because over the years I’ve known many of them.

          I’ll just leave aside the radicals who wanted to smash marriage rather than join it, since they obviously aren’t the ones being discussed here….

          Some people believe or assume that a marriage doesn’t work without two sharply defined, socially supported, complementary roles. These are the people who used to ask of a same-sex couple, “Which is the man and which is the woman?” […] We used to think same-sex marriage would solve that. When people accepted same-sex marriage, we thought, they would have to accept that marriage doesn’t require these two very specific, socially enforced roles. When people stopped wanting to ask, “Which is the man and which is the woman?”, we thought, that would be a sign that they’d stopped thinking “Role Man” and “Role Woman” were necessary…or important…or, even, existed.

          That doesn’t seem to be how it’s turned out, and that makes me sad.

          Today, even a lot of people who do support same-sex marriage will (almost always unthinkingly, not consciously and deliberately) take the attitude that, “Well gay people can work out their own marriages their own way, BUT STRAIGHT PEOPLE ALL HAVE TO FIT INTO THESE SPECIFIC ROLES.” I mean the kids have “improved” the roles…I guess…but dernit, THEY’RE STILL ROLES!!! That’s not what was supposed to happen! 🙁

          I seem to fit your description, J. McDaniel, don’t I? Maybe that’s why a few years ago, before I even realized SJWs had shown up to a fandom of mine (or, FTM, what they even were), I was suddenly attacked and unpersoned by them.

          I have a pretty typical degree of *variety* in my views. That’s enough to make me seem “in the middle” on some of today’s issues…which is enough to get me attacked.

          Frankly…I just want to be able to live normally. Which includes chatting about my ordinary variety of opinions with my friends. And…I can’t. And *in the past, I could*.

          As you can see from the above story, yeah, “both sides do it.” I’d call it “increasing polarization.”

          I keep wanting to quote this at them.

          Sullivan quotes a reader:

          Morality has always been about keeping society on the same page. If you violate the the norms, then you are shamed and ridiculed. The ultimate “victory” of the gay rights movement will be that those discriminating against homosexuals will be ridiculed and isolated as bigots. Ultimately we can only hope that the best values win out, and that we will always find outcasts in society that share our values, should our values violate the norm.

          And replies:

          There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.

          Orwell wept.

        • RCF says:

          What does being older than the plurality mean?

      • Doubtful says:

        “Yes, there are in fact SJW hives in the tech space that preemptively plot, plan, and pick targets.”

        Please support this assertion of a mustache-twirling level of villainy for its own sake with evidence.

        Additionally, maybe this story of being “set up to fail” and having a “snare” personally laid for you is impossible to support because you avoided it, but I hope you could also support that, or point to other examples where such snares have been set.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Doubtful – “Please support this assertion of a mustache-twirling level of villainy for its own sake with evidence.”

          There was a link to a Tumblr discussion of the “mail order brides” conversation from a few weeks back. It didn’t rise to picking targets and punishments, but the trajectory that leads there seemed pretty clear. More generally, ShitRedditSays was such a place until fairly recently, I hear. Others exist, and are not difficult to locate.

          [EDIT] – Via another discussion in this very comment section: https://imgur.com/a/USROb
          …multiple websites dedicated to coordinating harassment of a children’s cartoon fan artist for socially unacceptable art crimes. The artist attempted suicide. This is not an isolated incident; the artist of Gunnerkrig Court went through something similar, I believe. Ditto Scott’s acount of the MsScribe story. Care to retract your skeptical tone?

          “Additionally, maybe this story of being “set up to fail” and having a “snare” personally laid for you is impossible to support because you avoided it, but I hope you could also support that, or point to other examples where such snares have been set.”

          I’ve personally participated in this sort of behavior in multiple contexts before I finally learned that it was always, always a bad idea. If you have questions, ask away.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          >Demanding a call for references for a personal experience is both rude and pointless.

          Indeed, we should never question a victim’s lived experiences. Listen and Believe and all that.

          Seriously, though, while I understand that getting too in detail does carry risks, you might understand why people are skeptical.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          “Indeed, we should never question a victim’s lived experiences. Listen and Believe and all that.”

          I raise a glass to you, sir(?).

        • Cord Shirt says:

          @FacelessCraven, I would really benefit from an example. Made up is fine, just…a description of what exactly happens with one of these.

          After I was unpersoned, I discovered a couple hate sites targeting me and a couple others. These were public, and didn’t include any planning of “snares.” But they mentioned the existence of private sites as well. Makes me wonder if there were or had been snares…but I can’t imagine what that would look like on the ground, so I’d like to see an example of such a thing.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Cord Shirt – “I would really benefit from an example. Made up is fine, just…a description of what exactly happens with one of these.”

          Sure. I mean, there’s not really anything dramatic about it, it’s just normal human tribal politics.

          You’re part of an organization with a bunch of other people. You get to know the other people within the group. Some of them you get along well with, some you don’t. At some point, some sort of conflict happens within the org that pits you and the people you like against the person you don’t like. People don’t like the person already, and have probably been talking to each other about how much they don’t like him, and now that dislike is framed as the person being actually bad for the organization. Pretty quickly, the consensus forms within the group that the org as a whole would be better off without the person who no one in your group likes, and people start looking for ways to make that happen.

          A starting point is that the person becomes the default scapegoat for anything that goes wrong. Grouching about how awful they are and how everything you’re doing would be better off without them serves as a group bonding mechanism. The group starts coordinating behind the scenes to “defend” against the bad person’s ideas in meetings, planning sessions, etc. Essentially, you route actual communication around them, and what they think are the actual meetings become a more or less pre-scripted performance designed to minimize their input and influence. This works even more effectively if you have a spy pretending to be sympathetic to the person and doing similar “pre-planning” with them, and then feeding that information to the group, so you know what they’re planning on proposing and can brainstorm and coordinate objections as a group. The people most opposed to the person can then pretend to be extra-reasonable, and the people who appear the most sympathetic to the person can raise the strongest objections and “persuade” everyone else.

          At some point, everyone wants this other person gone. A simple way to do that is to give them hard tasks and judge everything they do as harshly as possible. Set them up to fail, as it were. This seems analogous to the “snares” mentioned above. How overt it gets depends a lot on how much control you have over the actual projects. The underlying point is that you coordinate as a group to make their experience as bad as possible, hope they leave on their own, and failing that try to assemble a record of poor performance to demonstrate to the wider organization that they should be removed from their position. I was operating in a volunteer context, so we leaned on the former. In a corporate context it should be a lot easier to lean on the latter.

          For obvious reasons, I don’t do stuff like this any more, and am ashamed that I ever did.

        • CatCube says:

          @FacelessCraven

          Tom Sidell ended up in the SJW crosshairs? When the fuck did this happen?

          (Obviously, as a right-winger, I don’t keep up on the nonsense on that side of the divide. I might have to up my Patreon contribution)

    • Scott Alexander says:

      So far it’s never happened to me beyond one guy posting weird racist comments under my real name which he somehow found. But I think it depends on how careful you are and what kinds of places you hang out in.

      • It might help that you don’t actually use your real name. I respect that decision, but for various reasons that I haven’t fully crystallized in my head, I don’t want to post pseduonymously. Perhaps that, too, is irrational.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I’m uncomfortable with pseudonyms too, so I use my first plus middle name. Can you just do that?

        • James Vonder Haar says:

          Well, there’s something to be said for having a large online presence, so people can get a holistic idea of who you are. Imagine if someone doxxed you and the only thing on your google search is your most controversial opinion and argument. If you’ve been posting under your real name for a long time, at least there’s a bunch of other things out there where you presumably look relatively intelligent.

          Personally I post most of my stuff under my real name, using a pseudonym when I venture into other territory. If that pseudonym does get doxxed, at least I’ve got some online presence to cover it.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            I’d usually rather post under my real name as well. But when it’s a site where most of the others are using pseudonyms I start to feel like a guy wearing a suit to a beach party.

          • DrBeat says:

            Large online presence doesn’t help at all. People doxxing you want to believe bad things about you in order to justify the pain they want to cause you. Any information, any context, anything outside of the desired “this person believes bad things and thus it is morally good to cause them harm” is discarded.

        • JBeshir says:

          I post under a name derived from my real name, because I feel that I can safely, and doing so does a very tiny amount to maintain some breadth to the kind of things one can talk about attached to a public identity, in a kind of cooperator way.

          Things are different for different people and it’s a small enough thing that I don’t think it matters, though.

    • Megaburst says:

      The question to ask yourself is if someone tried to publicly same you, would it make for a good story? Would it have a high virality coefficient? If you’re a redneck in Alabama and you say something very racist, that doesn’t make for a good story because everyone knows that Alabama rednecks are very racist. On the other hand imagine a famous person who says something kinda racist. Famous people are interesting, so things they say make for good stories. And if it’s not quite clear how racist the thing is, then you get a controversy where people are for and against.

      • Saul Degraw says:

        Someone tried to same me but I was able to prove they were a doppleganger pretty quickly.

      • Deiseach says:

        everyone knows that Alabama rednecks are very racist

        Yeah, but the problem with that is say you are from small town or rural Alabama (or what equivalent you like). An enemy (and this could simply be someone who you disagreed with over who should be the Party All Night Party candidate) can then blacken your name simply because “Everyone knows crackers are racist and this guy/gal is a cracker so obviously they’re racist/sexist/homophobic”.

        It’s the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” approach; you don’t have black/gay friends? that’s because you’re a racist/homophobe! You do have black/gay friends? You’re still a racist/homophobe because only racists/homophobes say they have black/gay friends!

        • hlynkacg says:

          It’s a classic “Kafka Trap”, protestations of innocence are evidence of guilt because someone who was truly innocent would need no defense.

    • Saul Degraw says:

      The internet is vast and big so for every story about the pillory, I am sure there are many people getting away with just as bad or worse stuff. Both real and imagined and exaggerated.

      FWIW Justine Sacco (of AIDS tweet infamy) seems to have landed in PR at DraftKings.

      Note: I am still convinced that the whole debate and war between tribes Scott said can’t be named and their opponents is largely confined to people who spend too much time on the Internet. I’d bet good money that maybe people vaguely know about Gamergate but most people could not tell you about Redpill, MRAs, PUAs, MM, etc.

      Here is my frequent reminder that people who pay a lot of attention to politics (left, right, and libertarian) are in an extreme minority. People who try and develop their political beliefs into a completely coherent system without any contradiction are even are in an even smaller minority.

      • Seth says:

        A huge issue now is that many potential employers or romantic partners or others will check your social media profiles as part of evaluating you. It’s a big business and a big problem, with wrong or distorted data coming up in such searches. There’s an enormous controversy developing about addressing such search results, under the inaccurate term of “Right to be forgotten”, as it’s really more like “Right to have accurate reputation reporting”. A bunch of ranters describing you as a notorious racist, misogynist, anti-Semite, homophobe, tribal traitor, etc. etc. might be a very small minority – but those are the few things which may be prominent when one is being considered for a job or a date or membership in some organization, etc. And if you get turned down because of haters being believed, you may never know.

        • Dan T. says:

          The rub there is “Just what is accurate reputation reporting about you?” Is it what you believe about yourself, what your critics believe about you, or what you wish people believed about you? I’m reminded of a radio ad I keep hearing locally for some Internet reputation cleansing service that claims to be able to remove negative stuff people are saying about you or your business, so that people instead hear “the truth”… but what if the negative stuff is the truth?

          • The flip side of this is that you might be better off not getting a job or a date with the sort of person who would take hostile accusations as serious evidence against you.

            When I first set up my web page, one question was whether it was risky to include multiple parts of my life in one place. Did I want a potential academic employer to know about my somewhat unusual political position (anarcho-capitalist)? To know that I put substantial effort into researching medieval cooking, not a subject having any obvious connection to my professional work? That my chief athletic activity was medieval combat as a sport?

            My conclusion was that, on the whole, I was better off not being hired by a university that would be reluctant to hire someone with those characteristics. Of course, I might have felt differently if I had been more desperate for employment.

          • DrBeat says:

            The problem is, the group of people that WON’T take hostile accusations as serious evidence against someone is vanishingly small.

            Bullying works. If it didn’t, bullies wouldn’t do it.

          • Seth says:

            Dan T. – The model of truth that’s used is judicial. As in, for example, if someone is sued for libel, and they reply that what they wrote is true, a the court system makes a decision as to whether that is in fact accurate. This model of truth of takes into account implication, insinuation, lying by omission, and so on. It’s entirely possible to sue for libel, and lose the case, by a finding that the supposed libel was actually true. Or inversely, to win the case if the defendant presented accurate facts but in a way to give a dishonest impression. This is a legal meaning, not an oracle. But similarly, though at much lower level, the idea is to have some sort of redress against an inaccurate reputation report.

            David Friedman – “anarcho-capitalist” and “medieval cooking” are orders of magnitude different in potential social impact than say “misogynist” or “racist”. I’ve also found that the theory of cognitive reasoning errors does seem to apply in practice. As in, more people think they are above-average than is mathematically possible. And people think they are better than discounting hostile accusations than they really are.

          • Jiro says:

            The flip side of this is that you might be better off not getting a job or a date with the sort of person who would take hostile accusations as serious evidence against you.

            Unfortunately, hostile accusations *are* serious evidence against you–that is, the fact that you have hostile accusations means, on a Bayseian level, that it is more likely that there is something bad about you than if you didn’t have any hostile accusations. If you avoid people who listen to hostile accusations, you’re basically avoiding all rational people.

            Yes, the hostile accusations against you are false–but someone reading the hostile accusation can’t tell the difference between a false one and a true one and will use a probability that takes into account the number of true ones, which will lead to them shunning you for purely rational reasons.

          • @Jiro:

            I specified “serious evidence.” The fact that someone says bad things about you is evidence, but in itself not much evidence if the someone doesn’t produce evidence in support of his charges. It’s even weaker evidence if you obviously have views that some people object to, the person evaluating you does not object to them, and the bad things said contain signals that those saying them do.

          • DrBeat says:

            …Have you ever met a person?

            Seriousness of accusation is equal to seriousness of evidence in the eyes of a LOT of people. Far more than you can ever avoid. Far more than you can say you would gain nothing by associating with.

          • Jiro says:

            The fact that someone says bad things about you is evidence, but in itself not much evidence

            It only has to be enough evidence that someone can reasonably act based on it. And for many serious charges, a 5% or even 1% chance of the charge being true is plenty. Would you hire someone who only has a 5% chance of being an embezzler, when you have 50 other candidates whose probability of being embezzlers is just the base rate, not 5%? Would you trust your children with someone who has a 5% chance of being a child molester?

          • RCF says:

            @David Friedman

            I take it you have tenure? This seems a bit like saying “If a company isn’t willing to hire black people, it’s probably not the sort of place a black person would want to work at anyway.” I’m also reminded of a reply to “Do you really want to date someone who’s only interested in you for your money?”:

            “I like to have the option.”

            Another issue is the liability of there being accusations against you. If someone is accused of sexual harassment at one job, is hired at another, and is accused of sexual harassment at that job, then the plaintiff can claim that the fact that the company ignored the accusation, even if unfounded, shows negligence.

          • @RCF:

            I have tenure now. But the issue of people responding to my political views and my hobbies was one I considered well before I got it.

    • TheFrannest says:

      For the love of whatever eldritch powers may exist, hide your personal details, even lie about them and keep the lies consistent.

      I thought they’d target me.

      They didn’t. They hunted down people I love. They threatened my mother and they had my then-girlfriend fired and forcibly out-of-closeted to the family and/or friends.

      • Wow, that’s shocking. I’d be interested to hear the story, though I assume you can’t share it without revealing yourself, which I totally understand.

        • TheFrannest says:

          I wasn’t interested in receiving any coverage of the debacle on the internet, I was more interested in frantically going through my emails, looking for account registration confirmation and deleting them or purging them of all the info. I quit being a cracked contributor because i used my real name there. And so on.

          What happened: I am a BDSM enthusiast and I kind of like taking pictures. I made a NSFW tumblr with my then-girflriend where I shared pictures of her in bondage and so on. Face was always obscured, EXIFs were cleared, no real names were used.

          I am also an outspoken critic of radical feminism on the internet. The existence of BDSM is inherently horrifying and vile to any radical feminist that does not lie to herself. Some approve of femdom, but I’m male. The subjugation of a female by a male, physical abuse, elements of coercion and so on leads them to claim that BDSM is patriarchal and rape culture (not in a meme way, like literal terms). And what is to be done when a woman is in an abusive relationship? Some sort of a rescue. So they “rescued” her from my “abusive relationship” by spreading vile lies about me including all the contacts they could possibly find and by spreading the photos of her to any contact of her they could possibly find – that included her workplace, her family and her friends.

          So yeah, she got fired immediately and her ties with her family were severely strained because her family is quite Muslim, no clue as to her friends but it probably doesn’t help ther mental image to know that a polite soft-spoken headscarf-wearing muslim girl gets off on being tied up, flogged and seeing her pictures on the internet.

          I also had razors mailed to me because I was vaguely in support of a certain ant hill, but I was like, hey, free razors.

    • Seth says:

      To determine frequency, maybe we need some sort of collection organization for these events, as is done by everything from car crashes to food poisoning. You can get a rough estimate of “What’s the chance of dying in a crash crash?”, but not “What’s the chance of having your career destroyed by a social media hatestorm?”. Even though the collection data is not perfect, and of course individual chances vary with specific risk-factors, there’s still decent measuring data available for car crashes, but not Internet-wrecks.

      Note that while airplane crashes often make the news, many many people are killed or severely injured every day in car accidents with no notice outside their local community.

      I’ve cut down on my own writing very much due to the problem. My estimation is that the risk is high enough that it’s just not worth it. It’s akin to taking walks through gang-infested neighborhoods. Are you going to get mugged, or murdered, any time you enter such a place? Probably not. But the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the risks.

      • I’ve cut down on my own writing very much due to the problem. My estimation is that the risk is high enough that it’s just not worth it. It’s akin to taking walks through gang-infested neighborhoods. Are you going to get mugged, or murdered, any time you enter such a place? Probably not. But the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the risks.

        I kind of feel this way too, but I’ve sort of got a compulsion to write publicly, albeit not super often. I can’t really explain this.

      • Anonymous says:

        One point that has always bugged me regarding the car crash versus plane crash thing: you have zero influence on your chance of dying in a plane crash beyond frequency of flying. You have some influence on your chance of dying in a car crash: driving sensibly, wearing a seatbelt, avoiding using a phone or other distractions, etc. Even if you’re not the one driving the car, you are in a much better position to evaluate the safety of the driver of a car than the pilot of a plane. I suspect there is also more variance in the safety of drivers than the safety of pilots.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Some airlines are probably safer than others, some times to travel are probably safer than others, etc. But your general point is definitely correct.

        • Jiro says:

          Having influence over the probability isn’t an end in itself; it’s only useful to the extent that it can reduce the value. If the difference in death rates is enough, having influence may just let you change it from “a lot higher chance of death than going the same distance in a plane” to “somewhat higher chance of death than going the same distance in a plane”. This influence is not as useful as just having the lower chance in the plane.

          • Anonymous says:

            Absolutely. But other factors exist beyond likelihood of death. Knowing that you are a safer than average driver might well tip the scales to make driving a better option when you take into account e.g. lower cost, ability to take more luggage, ability to stop off at places on the way, or whatever else you consider an advantage of driving.

          • Knowing that you are a safer than average driver

            How can you know this? I have never been in an accident, but maybe I’ve just been lucky. Furthermore, how much of a difference does it really make? You don’t have control over all of the other people on the road.

            I have an irrational fear of flying myself, but I know that it’s irrational; the odds are so much worse when driving that it can pretty much only win on convenience.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Mitch Lindgren

            Perhaps you would have trouble judging your own ability, but I can certainly tell the difference between a good driver and a bad driver when I’m a passenger in someone’s car.

          • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

            @Anonymous

            That is an entirely subjective measure. The question is “to what degree do driving habits that make me look/feel safer actually influence my control of the risk?”

            Answering that question requires access to some pretty heavy duty actuarial tables that I am pretty sure the insurance companies keep as trade secrets. But, anecdotally, my insurance company is way more interested in the safety features of my car than my driving record. My impression is that, aside from driving while drunk, the portion of the risk you can control by driving habits is marginal compared to the uncontrollable risk from everyone else on the road.

    • I think about this a lot, because my Real Name is associated with an industry in which the thought police are pretty powerful (though there has been some pushback lately—not that I expect it to last long or accomplish much). My strategy is: never say anything the least bit controversial on social media or other accounts which are associated with your Real Name. That’s what pseudonyms are for. The Real Name is for tweeting cheerful life updates, blandly-acceptable bromides, and signal-boosting those kinds of things where my interests and values overlap with those of the broader community. Fortunately, this last category is still pretty big, which is why I’m still a part of the community.

      A quick note about Twitter sanity, assuming that Twitter is your thing: use Tweetdeck or some other tool, and set it to filter out retweets. This one weird trick eliminates 75% of the mind-killing SJ garbage that would otherwise clog up my food. Then use the “mute” functionality to get rid of any other topics that become too obnoxious. The fact that I don’t see 90% of the mind-killing posts keeps down the urges to go on rants about it.

      I’ve heard that there is a similar tool called Tumblr Savior which will accomplish the same thing for Tumblr. If you’re using Facebook…. good God, man, why are you using Facebook?

      • suntzuanime says:

        I feel like a better twitter strategy is just to not follow someone if you don’t want to see 90% of what they post.

        • But I do want to see most of what they post. I follow several people who post 90% nice stuff that I want to read, and 10% mind-killed SJ bullshit. It’s the latter subset which I’m trying to reduce the visibility of, not the entire feed. And I am quick with the Unfollow button if it gets to be too much from any one person.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Somehow I confused “90% of the mind-killed stuff in my feed” with “the mind-killed stuff, which makes up 90% of my feed”. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          The best twitter strategy is to not be on Twitter. That analogy of going for a stroll through a gang-infested neighborhood — yeah, why exactly would you do that in the first place? For what, cat pictures? You can get cat pictures anywhere.

      • Peter says:

        FBPurity is the Facebook equivalent. But yes, you can set up twitter to block retweets (you can do this account by account, or there are scripts which can just nuke it for everyone), when I tried it Twitter looked almost usable… but then I decided that I didn’t like twitter anyway, quite apart from the vexatious nonsense I didn’t feel like following it.

        One of these days someone with need to work on GetStungByMerelyThousandsOfWasps.

      • Deiseach says:

        The Real Name is for tweeting cheerful life updates, blandly-acceptable bromides, and signal-boosting those kinds of things where my interests and values overlap with those of the broader community

        Exactly. I have Real Name email account for work-related matters and other official purposes (as an aside, you wouldn’t believe the amount of applications we get at my place of work where people supply email addresses along the lines of “bouncy_gal69@yahmail” and you go “Did nobody ever teach you to have a “jsmith@gooloo” address for job applications and the like?”) and two others for hobby/fun/friend interaction purposes.

        I have three different online personae depending who, what, where and why; on here for instance, and elsewhere in certain places I’m Deiseach; other places I use one of my middle names for more serious content; the third is for more hobby/fan stuff.

        I don’t even use my Real Name on my Facebook account! My family know that I’m Fake Name and interact with me accordingly and it saves me the bother of all the friending, likes etc. requests I get.

        I keep my Real Life as far away and unconnected to my Online Life as possible. And I cannot understand why, in the days now where all the Big Beasts are data mining and using analytics and more or less bullying people into linking separate accounts (feck off Google, I am not interested in Circles) that people are not more careful, especially you young’uns who grew up in the PC and Internet age!

        At work we routinely use Facebook for checking up on applicants whose stories are fishy (e.g. “Me and partner suddenly broke up two days after we sent in our application so I’m applying as a single parent in urgent need of housing”, while meanwhile on Facebook it’s “Check out my engagement ring in this photo and we’re booking the honeymoon for the Algarve!”).

        Do you really think both present and prospective employers and others aren’t checking you out online as well?

        • dndnrsn says:

          Your stuff here isn’t serious content?

          • Deiseach says:

            It’s medium-serious. I do give real opinions, but other times I do try (and mostly fail) at being funny or injecting some levity into a discussion.

            The middle name person is mostly discussions about religion, if that’s any help. I did a lot of “Crash Course in Why The Heck Do Catholics Believe That???? For Bewildered But Friendly Post-Evangelical Protestants” posting under that name 🙂

        • I do essentially everything under my real name, and if it has caused problems I haven’t noticed. I did see one Amazon review of a book of mine along the lines of “I had heard that Friedman was some kind of a nutty libertarian, but this is just solid economic analysis of law.”

          There is one downside to Deiseach’s approach. It makes it harder for her to use her online status for real world purposes. People here know her as an intelligent, articulate, interesting poster. It’s not impossible that someone here might have a job that such a person was suited to. While making an offer via the pseudonym wouldn’t be impossible, it would be less convenient. And the hypothetical employer might, not unreasonably, want access to additional information linked to the real name.

          Of course, all of that could be worked out between the parties, but having to do it that way is a cost.

          • Deiseach says:

            People here know her as an intelligent, articulate, interesting poster.

            You see how successfully I have constructed a persona by pruning out the awkward bits of my real-life personality! 🙂

            Thank you very much for your kind words, but Real Life me is very little like the person on here. I can’t interact with people in the flesh. It’s a lot easier to type words on a screen and have a Fake Self that is a kind of Imaginary Friend; I do try to be honest and not completely obscure my opinions, but as recently as yesterday I shot my mouth off about something at work which did trigger a definite “Ooookay – that’s weird, back away slowly” response in the person I was speaking to, so I do a heck of a lot more self-censorship and berating myself about “Why were you so dumb, you stupid bitch?” after the fact in the real world than I do online.

            So – basically, I fail at life! 🙂

        • Viliam says:

          I have Real Name email account for work-related matters and other official purposes … three different online personae depending who, what, where and why

          If I could send a message to myself in the past, it would be to use a system like this. To keep my real name for work, and for blogging about technologies (so that anyone who googles my name sees that I am serious about programming, and that I have absolutely no opinions on politics or religion or anything possibly controversial); some throwaway nicknames for stuff I am not serious about; and to create a new nickname for every area I become sufficiently serious about (e.g. one for the rationalist community). I already use a password manager to remember different passwords for different websites; I could be using it to remember the usernames too, with almost no additional inconvenience.

          Problem is, when I started blogging 15 years ago, I had no idea of how I will feel about it later. There is already 15 years’ worth of potentially controversial comments using my real name all over the internet. Yeah, that’s no excuse to keep adding more! As a temporary solution I am using my first name, until I find a good alias.

          The inconvenient part is that I would have to remember which traits I have assigned to which identities. Because for a sufficiently non-mainstream person, a short list of their hobbies may be enough to identify them uniquely on the whole planet; so they shouldn’t be mentioned in the same account. Sometimes it’s not a problem; but if I would keep commenting on SSC for a sufficiently long time, any of those topics may become relevant in some Open Thread. Or am I now becoming too paranoid about this? The problem is, I have no idea what I will think about this 5 or 10 years later.

          My children will all have mandatory alternative identities, and they will not be allowed to use their own names online until they are 18. Problem is, the internet itself may change. Maybe 15 years later everyone will have one official electronic identity and it will be mandatory to use it on every website. (As a part of the fight against terrorism, or more likely against online harrassment and microaggressions.)

          So, the repeated problem here is: internet changes. I may have a good idea about what is the best system now, but in the future it may be otherwise.

      • Matt says:

        I’m careful to not even link different pseudonymous accounts together.

    • Chalid says:

      I was wondering this too. I have no idea where to get a good unbiased data set, but do keep in mind that this blog’s commentariat is emphatically not such a data set.

    • stargirl says:

      I was doxxed for arguing against the feminist position on rape laws. I argued the rape studies did not prove what they claimed to and that the rate of false accusations was not well understood and might be high. I also argued a number of proposed laws and policies were easy to abuse.

      In addition to being doxxed I was publicly shamed by a large list of my former friends. I also have no data set. But I certainly would not discuss certain ideas under your real name in public.

    • I bet lots of people don’t get promotions or job offers because they have offended a SJW. To the SJW, political incorrectness translates into disgust, which triggers the disease-avoidance response.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      A counterpoint to the people suggesting you use a pseudonym: the benefit of “my real identity will only be known to those that I reveal it to” that you get from being pseudonymous can also be a disadvantage, since you lose the possibility for serendipity. E.g. both my current relationship, and the one before that, got started because I’ve been open about my real-life identity online.

      E.g. the my last ex was somebody who I met when she walked up to me in a convention, asked whether I was who she thought I was, and upon having that confirmed, said that I was a great person. Then she got shy and fled, but we ended up in a relationship a couple of years later. And my current girlfriend probably wouldn’t have sent me the private message that started things between us, hadn’t she been able to link my online handle to some previous things I’d done in real life.

      There have also been several other incidents where someone ran into me in real life, recognized me from my online presence, and reacted favorably as a result. These were people I’d never met before, so I couldn’t have selectively “lowered” my pseudonymity for them, since I didn’t even know they existed. Of course it’s also possible for you to suffer from such chance encounters, if you have particularly controversial opinions. But if I’ve ever ran into someone in real life who reacted negatively to me because of my online presence, they’ve kept it hidden.

      In general I feel like the benefits I’ve gotten from predominantly using my real name online have been considerable, while I can’t recall a single negative incident that would have followed from that.

      • Jiro says:

        Kaj: What type of things did you do under that real-life online identity, though? You mentioned a convention. In context here this usually means a science fiction convention, which suggests you were talking about science fiction related topics. Like talking about sports but for a different crowd, these are safe topics because they are something that people disagree about, but don’t actually think are important in a real-world sense, so nobody’s going to be shunning or firing you for such talk (except for the occasional employer who just doesn’t trust fans).

        It’s different if you start posting about things that the average person would consider evil or is told are evil, or even things that can be mistaken for them.

        • Kaj Sotala says:

          I discuss a rather wide range of things online, and have e.g. done political blogging back when I was still active at the Finnish Pirate Party, itself a rather controversial movement. (I believe that both my ex and my current gf first became aware of me because of the political stuff.)

          A large fraction of my online activity consists of resharing and commenting on various articles that I find interesting. I’m generally sympathetic to the (sane parts of the) SJW movement and frequently post stuff that they like, but I do also post stuff that tends to go against prevailing dogmas if I think it interesting, and can’t always be bothered to be careful about my wording. I’ve had at least one SJW-ish person block me on social media after I made a comment pointing out that they seemed to be hypocritically condemning “tone arguments” when they were used against feminists but had, in the past, used a similar argument against pick-up artist writing.

          I agree that if you’re talking about sufficiently controversial things, it might be safer to use a pseudonym for those, and I even suspect that I’m personally slightly too incautious about the discussions in which I use my real life identity. But I seemed to be reading into these comments a tone of “you should use a pseudonym for talking about ANYTHING AT ALL online”, which I found weird, especially since nobody seemed to be weighing it against the benefits of not using a pseudonym.

    • vV_Vv says:

      How frequent are these events, really? Are we in “struck by lightning” territory, or “car crash” territory?

      You are asking the wrong question. These examples are not adversarial events. You can control their risk to some extent, but they aren’t caused by somebody trying to punish you for a perceived defection.

      The proper analogy is running a business in a mafia-controlled neighborhood. How frequently does the mafia burn down a somebody’s shop? Probably it doesn’t happen very often. However, if you don’t pay them the protection money, or antagonize them in some other way, it will happen to you.

      Some industries, like academia, IT, journalism, etc., at least in some countries, are SJW-controlled neighborhoods, complete with a protection racket (why do you think companies hire “diversity officers” and bend over backwards to show off how “progressive” they are?) Therefore play it smart and hide behind the cloak of anonymity.

      • Cet3 says:

        That doesn’t work either, though. SJWs (or whoever) aren’t as centralized or coordinated as the mafia is in your analogy. It is a mistake to imagine a controlling intelligence behind the internet mobs.

        • vV_Vv says:

          Criminal gangs aren’t necessarily that much coordinated or centralized, either.

          And the Internet certainly helps coordination without a central authority or a formal organization. Non-SJW example: Gamergate.

          • Cet3 says:

            A protection racket requires at least some centralization. SJWs have even less than that. Less a mafia, more a bunch of guys getting drunk and roaming the street looking for easy targets to beat up.

          • vV_Vv says:

            They do have some centralization. SJWs aren’t just a bunch of anon kids on Tumblr, they have prominent figures (e.g. Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, Anita Sarkeesian), and lobbies (e.g. Ada Initiative, Geek Feminism, Association for Progressive Communications) plus feminists in key positions in the academia (all gender studies professors), major news outlets and even the UN.

            SJWs don’t have a strictly hierarchical organization. There is no Pope (Mome?) of the SJWs. But there is clearly a loose collection of individuals and organizations which is evidently able to coordinate in order to further their shared interests.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I was very surprised to see how many people commenting here had been doxxed etc. I understand if people don’t want to share there own story, but I’d be very interested to read any similar stories (i.e. of non-celebrities being doxxed due to expressing certain opinions). I’d be especially interested in links to people discussing planning these kinds of things.

      • Toggle says:

        Be aware that the sample isn’t representative; the nature of the question is such that the people answering it are much more likely to have gotten hit by a two-minutes-hate (and Scott’s known sometimes-kinda-antifeminism will attract such readers to start with), and the people that are simply afraid of being hit are more likely to read it as interested observers. It may help you understand the dynamics of the event, but not its frequency.

      • Luke Somers says:

        I haven’t been, nor do I expect to be, and if I am I don’t expect it to accomplish much.

      • Tibor says:

        Sorry for a stupid question, but what does “to doxx” mean?

        • Nornagest says:

          To recover and publicly post personal information about someone on the Internet — typically stuff like real name, workplace, place of residence, maybe phone number. The etymology goes through “document”.

          It’s considered harmful because it can (and often does) lead to people being harassed, attempts to get them fired or SWAT sent to their doorstep, etc. It also facilitates credible death and rape threats, although I haven’t heard of many cases where that’s lead to an actual crime.

          • RCF says:

            Death and rape threats are real crimes.

          • Nornagest says:

            Yes, and telling someone you’ll punch them in the nose is, legally speaking, a real assault — but I think what I meant should have been clear from context.

            You can read “physical” for that if you want, though.

  67. Saal says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt1opkV9FkY

    I just wanted to share this for those who like some snark with their meditation. I’ve actually found it quite helpful.

  68. Jamie_NYC says:

    5. DRACO: I asked the question on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Why-havent-we-heard-anything-recently-about-DRACO-antiviral-drug-and-other-wide-spectrum-anti-viral-medications) back in March 2014 about DRACO, didn’t get any concrete information. Sad to hear that Dr. Rider has to rely on handouts to be able to continue research… Just made a moderate donation. Anyone has an opinion on the prospects of this approach to fighting viral diseases?

    • A friend of mine who is a molecular biology student, whom I consider extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, said it was scientifically sound as far as he knew. He’s not an expert, of course, but for whatever that’s worth, there it is.

      Edit: also, useful information I got from them via Facebook:

      Mitch Lindgren
      Hi, is there a 501c3 associated with DRACOs? I’d like to donate but I can do so much more effectively via a 501c3, because then the donation will be matched by my employer.

      Killing Sickness
      There is. The SENS research foundation has that status and will process the funds. Your donation will be tax deductible.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Are you talking about this SENS? If so, I can’t find any way to direct donations to DRACO; could you be more specific?

        • Jamie_NYC says:

          When you donate through IndieGoGo, the donation actually goes to SENS (there is apparently collaboration between Dr. Rider and Aubrey).

        • I believe that’s the one. They didn’t give me an EIN, but it’s the only one that came up when I searched. When I donate through my employer, there’s an option to add a note where you can specify how the donation should be used. Other channels may have similar options.

    • Hmm, I’ve been thinking that I ought to find a way to fund blue sky medical research and I remember being impressed with DRACO when it came up on Hacker News a while ago. I’m probably going to throw a couple of thousand dollars his way.

      Ok, did it. But since I’m shy I only grabbed the $500 dollar class reward.

      • grendelkhan says:

        Ah, I see you on the donations page. Damn, that’s impressive! One suggestion–if you’re in the United States, see if your employer matches charitable donations, since it’s going through SENS, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Any chance you could spring for the $2000, then ask him to come here and answer some questions instead of talking to you on the phone? I was going to do that myself, but given the concerns some people have raised maybe I should wait until after he answers questions to commit to donating that amount. Email me if you want to make this work. scott [at] shireroth [dot] org.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          What concerns? The concern that he hasn’t managed to raise much NIH money? That’s a pretty circular concern, isn’t it?

        • Mark says:

          I emailed the campaign and they said they would be happy to pass any questions on to Dr. Rider.
          Address is info at killingsickness dot com

        • OldCrow says:

          I would be willing to donate a couple hundred dollars to a collective donation to get Dr. Rider to do a public conversation with Scott/AMA with the commentariat, and up to several thousand dollars depending on how that goes.

  69. J says:

    Interesting that you called him “Dr. Todd Rider”. Since going to grad school in STEM I’ve tended not to use “Dr.” as a title when talking about researchers, and I generally associate its use with Facebook posts about people trying to make dubious medical claims sound more legit. So now I actually have a slightly negative connotation with that honorific.

    Am I just weird that way, or do others also use that as a sort of countersignaling?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      *furtively reprints business cards*

      I just thought in this context people might not realize he was a legit guy with experience in the field. I guess it was redundant with “MIT researcher”, though.

      • J says:

        Lol, I think it’s okay for actual doctors in the context of doctoring.

        One of my professors was at Bell Labs in its heyday, and said that the culture varied internally. Sometimes the Ph.D title was useful, other times it was better not to mention it.

        • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

          Lol, I think it’s okay for actual doctors in the context of doctoring.

          Is this an inappropriate time to mention that “doctor” comes to us via Latin, and means “teacher?”

    • I didn’t title myself with a “Dr.” on my last book (I have a PhD) for fear of triggering this.

      • US says:

        For what it’s worth, I generally consider a ‘written by Dr… X’ or ‘…written by X, PhD’ note/comment on the front page of a book to be the author’s way of telling me (…yelling loudly at me?) that I shouldn’t read the book. This is sort of funny in a way, as I almost exclusively read non-fiction books written by people with advanced degrees..

        I’d imagine not mentioning your degree on the front page of a book might hurt sales a bit (if a ‘written by X, PhD’ note on the front page does not improve sales, why is that front page format so common?), but that there is an associated benefit in the sense that the author does not incur a status loss among people whose opinions s/he actually cares about. Maybe on a related note targeting also improves by leaving out those words (only ‘the people you want to read your book’ will read it).

      • Earthly Knight says:

        This is the right instinct. Whatever you try to put after Dr., the words on the page will always read “Flopsweat McCrank.”

        Scholars work in communities. If you have anything worth saying, the other members of the community who should be your audience will already know your credentials.

    • Adam Casey says:

      When I see an academic referred to as doctor I tend to think “post doc, so probably capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but not a professor”. But then I’m a snob so….

    • Deiseach says:

      If it’s an honestly earned title (i.e. you went to university and slogged your way all the way through up to gaining a doctorate) I have no problem with it.

      What drives me nuts is the rich/famous former alumni (or never even went to university) who get honorary awards from toadying institutions hoping for a generous donation in return and then insist their staff and others refer to them as Dr Anthony Moneybags, even though they’re no more entitled to do so than I am.

      Then again, I suppose it’s no worse than the usual trade in buying your way into the Honours List; slip enough donations to party X and you too can be made a knight in the Birthday List! Wikipedia may claim it’s a scandal from the Noughties, but it goes back much earlier than that. Lord Northcliffe (as he became) is supposed to have said when he was plain Alfred Harmsworth “When I want a peerage I shall buy it, like an honest man” (after being offered a title more minor than he considered his due).

      • Tibor says:

        Whenever I go to the graveyard (November 1st mostly – All Saints’ day), I notice the way things have changed in the last 100 years in terms of letting everyone know your titles all the time. Pretty much all the pre-WW2 graves have an academic title there if the deceased had a title and those who do not list their occupation, so you have “Mr. First Last, accountant” and often you even see “Mrs. First Last, wife of an accountant”. This is also more common the further back you go with the Austrian Empire graves being more specific about the station of the deceased than the later ones.

        From today’s perspective it is very weird to mention on the gravestone that your late grandfather was an accountant. I wonder if you have the same in the US (and other countries), I think that central Europe is a bit obsessed with titles even today, even though much much less so than even 30 years go. Still, a neighbour of mine has a “Bc.” before his name on the doorbell, letting everyone know that he has a Bachelor title*. This is actually not common anymore and I have to smile every time I see it. Also, I heard from fellow PhD. students from Ulm that their (rather old though, I think he is 70ish) one professor there wants to be addressed as “Herr Doktor Professor” by undergraduate students in emails, which is just utterly ridiculous.

        I recognize the use of a title if you are a lawyer or a medical doctor and have it on your business card or the doorbell. Here the title means “I am actually a lawyer”. But in pretty much all other cases, it seems like compensating for something to me. It is like if a woman tries to make herself look like the “high society ladies” by putting on a lot of jewelry. The resulting impression is quite opposite.

        *Bachelor means even less here than in the US (or Hong Kong for that matter), since normally, people study 5 years to get a Ms. degree and 3 years to get a Bc. which is not usually considered a “full” degree.

        • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

          Here was buried
          Thomas Jefferson
          Author of the Declaration of American Independence
          of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
          & Father of the University of Virginia

          I’m not a Jefferson fan, so grains of salt may apply: It conspicuously fails to mention being President. I have always thought it was obviously because he knew he was a terrible one, not for some sense of modesty.

          Also, in the US, lawyers and titles are an unusual mix. “Esquire” has been traditionally popular but has no meaning. “Doctor,” while technically accurate for the last 50-ish years that the basic law degrees have been a doctorate, is pretty uncommon. Using the actual degree (JD, LLM, JSD, LLD) seems to only happen if it is a double-doctor degree.

          None of which tells you if the person in question has actually passed the bar exam or is licensed to practice in a particular jurisdiction.

    • JuanPeron says:

      Weirdly, I find “Dr. First Last” to be suspicious, but “Dr. Last” to be fine. When using only last names, titles are expected, so we ought to give the right title. When using first and last, titles aren’t required, so it comes off as an attempt to add weight to a claim.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        Yes, this is exactly right in my experience.

        The one counterexample is that when I got a job at a university, my new colleagues extolled the benefits of having your checks printed with the “Dr”, which apparently greased all kinds of paths with the local populace. It was a university town, so I don’t know how typical that is.

    • Urstoff says:

      I use the title of “Master” given that I have a Master’s degree. Is this not the norm?

  70. DrBeat says:

    So, wait, I’m confused… are we not supposed to talk about neo-Volcano-God-ism? What about Reform Volcanogodism?

    • James Picone says:

      If you’re asking the question I think you’re asking, doesn’t this section:

      If you want to talk about monarchists, call them monarchists. If you want to talk about traditionalists, call them traditionalists. If you want to talk about the far right, call it the far right. If you want to talk about HBD, call it HBD. If you want to talk about Mencius Moldbug, call him Mencius Moldbug.

      answer it? Scott just wants people to be more precise so we don’t have interminable discussions about what the actual position is, I think.

      • Peter says:

        Note: you may want to distinguish between “constitutional monarchist” and “absolute monarchist”. Opinion polls in the UK tend so show majorities in favour of the monarchy; it doesn’t mean they’d want to do away with democracy.

      • DrBeat says:

        I was making a joke wherein I acted as if our comment sections were being consumed by debates about the actual Volcano God.

  71. The_Dancing_Judge says:

    Please tell me you guys have read this article. Its pure all-the-hot-button-topics-in-western-thought-distilled-into-one-anecdote-nip. I actually can’t believe this was written in the NYT with how many of the left’s sacred cows were gored. I am updating my priors towards the quality of the NYT after this one.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html

    “she takes issue with the other half of D.J.’s diagnosis: that he’s not just spastic but has a very low I.Q. In 2004, five years before Anna met him, a clinical psychologist named Wayne Tillman, who consults for New Jersey’s Bureau of Guardianship Services, assessed D.J. and found that his impairments precluded any formal testing of intelligence, but that certain facts could be inferred: ‘‘His comprehension seemed to be quite limited,’’ ‘‘his attention span was very short’’ and he ‘‘lacks the cognitive capacity to understand and participate in decisions.’’ D.J. could not even carry out basic, preschool-­level tasks. A few months later, a court made P. and Wesley his legal guardians.

    From the time she met D.J., Anna thought Tillman had it wrong. D.J. might be unable to speak or hold a pencil, but those are motor skills, not mental ones, and their absence didn’t mean his mind was blank. What if D.J. had a private chamber in his head, a place where grown-up thoughts were trapped behind his palsy? Then, of course, he would fail the standard tests of his I.Q. — tests made for people who can answer questions verbally or read and write. What D.J. needed was another way to share his deep intelligence.

    At the request of D.J.’s family, Anna began to work with him, using a controversial method known as ‘‘facilitated communication.’’ Starting with her hand beneath his elbow, she helped him point at pictures, and then at letters, and eventually at the buttons of a Neo, a hand-held keyboard with a built-in screen. With his hand in hers, she helped him type out words after 30 years of silence.

    Wesley and his mother had been thrilled with D.J.’s progress, but now, suddenly, they recoiled. (Neither D.J.’s family nor Anna agreed to be interviewed for this article; all their quotes and recollections are drawn from court records and testimony. P. and Wesley are referred to by a middle initial and a middle name to shield D.J.’s identity, which has not been publicly revealed.) When Wesley told Anna he thought she had taken advantage of his brother, she could not muster a response. At last, with her help, D.J. began typing: ‘‘No one’s been taken advantage of. I’ve been trying to seduce Anna for years, and she resisted valiantly.’’ Then he typed another message, meant for Anna: ‘‘Kiss me.’’ Wesley walked out.”

    • FacelessCraven says:

      Just… trying to read this is physically painful.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I saw it a while back and decided not to link it. It seems to me like an academic who honestly believed in her (terrible) facilitated communication method and made a horrible but honest mistake.

      This also reminds me of one of my least favorite facts about severely disabled people, which is that by law they can’t legally consent. That situation either ends with them being taken advantage of with no way to know whether they consent or not, like here, or them literally never being able to have sex in their entire lives.

      I think there’s way too much genuine pain here for it to be worth politicizing and it probably doesn’t prove anything that anyone wants it to prove.

      • The_Dancing_Judge says:

        “I think there’s way too much genuine pain here for it to be worth politicizing and it probably doesn’t prove anything that anyone wants it to prove.”

        It proves our media can put out good writing that is both poignant and not mind killed (as in, really, truly ambiguous in ways uncomfortable for the morally dominant narrative).

        If you want me to get rid of the link that’s fine.

        • Ydirbut says:

          Forgive me for being dense, but I don’t really see the connection to politics? The only connections I can see are her field of studies and some of the rhetoric that she uses.

        • Cauê says:

          It proves our media can put out good writing that is both poignant and not mind killed (as in, really, truly ambiguous in ways uncomfortable for the morally dominant narrative).

          Daniel Engber is my model of what a journalist should be. Your thoughts are very near exactly what I thought when I read his coverage on the (imaginary) “Cannibal Cop” a few years ago.

          The unfortunate part is that I was impressed enough back then to remember his name afterwards, and was impressed again now before scrolling up and seeing the same name (rather than a new great one), which doesn’t speak so well of the general state of journalism.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Yeah, okay, maybe this is just me projecting my own ignoble motives for why I would have linked it.

    • Tatu Ahponen says:

      Okay, I am genuinely at loss here which are sacred cows being gored, here.

      • Zorgon says:

        There’s quite a lot of cases of shibboleths being used in non-sympathetic contexts. In particular the numerous references to Stubblefield’s somewhat radical antiracist opinions and to the “lived experiences” language in conjunction with the context… this is not an article that cares much for whether it upsets delicate flowers on Twitter, let’s put it that way.

        I agree with the comments above about it being excellent writing, too. There’s a palpable anger and sadness to it while it remains even-handed. There were a few weasel words here and there but overall it’s probably the best NYT article I’ve read in years.

        • Tatu Ahponen says:

          I went on Twitter and did a search on the article. Among hundreds of retweets, I spotted perhaps one that might be a delicate flower being upset, though maybe not. (Of course, Twitter being Twitter, there might be someone else commenting as well by the time someone reads this.)

          • The_Dancing_Judge says:

            i think the author has helped himself by producing dense longform that doesnt get into…slightly un-pc topics… until the half-way mark. A sort of barrier of entry that selects against the slate-style gotchya article readers.

          • Zorgon says:

            Well, of course not. They’ve not been told they need to be outraged about it yet.

            (I will acknowledge that I’m being spectacularly uncharitable here. My point was more that the article does not perform the usual dances around the maypole where everything bad is carefully allotted to places where it can only be associated with the outgroup.)

    • Jeremy says:

      As a leftist, I I thought this article was enjoyable to read and an important/significant cautionary tale. I don’t really see how “many of the left’s sacred cows were gored”. The things which were “gored” were no more sacred to the left than, say, homeopathy and dowsing.

      I think framing the article in political terms only detracts from the reference.

      I could say a lot more about how the article could easily be seen as aligning “for” or “against” the left, depending on which agenda you were pushing, but my whole point is that there’s no need to make it a political discussion.

      I am surprised at Scott’s saying “I think there’s way too much genuine pain here for it to be worth politicizing and it probably doesn’t prove anything that anyone wants it to prove.”, because it seems like the article does prove something pretty straightforward (which isn’t even political): anti-scientism will make you have wrong beliefs, and that it’s not just an academic issue whether you have wrong beliefs, but they can actually cause a lot of harm.

      And it seems to me that when a horrible accident occurs, the first thing people do is rush to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it. Nobody suggests that there was too much pain in a plane crash to investigate the cause.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Yeah.

        This section, although basically an aside, was heartbreaking to read:

        ‘ Later that afternoon, I met a 20-year-old man named John who had a prominent underbite. John had been assessed as having the mental capacity of a 3-year-old, but using F.C. he could write poetry. His father handed me some printouts of John’s writing (‘‘The place to discover the ember of love is worlds away but so close/in the land of the nonverbal autistic’’), then grabbed John’s finger so we could have a direct exchange. ‘‘Know that we are intelligent,’’ John’s finger typed into the keyboard.

        ‘‘We figured out that he taught himself to read at age 3 by reading a dictionary,’’ his mother said. ‘‘Now he’s a senior in high school.’’

        Wasn’t she worried by the studies showing that F.C. doesn’t work — that the messages aren’t always real?

        ‘‘From a parent’s perspective, who cares about the research?’’ she replied. ‘‘The research will work itself out. In the meantime, I want to talk to my son.’’ ‘

        Beyond anti-scientism, what I took from the article is that wishful thinking can easily be destructive (that is, “what harm could it do” gets bandied around – this is what it can do), and that care, respect, and love are not sanctifying forces.

        I was impressed by how evenhanded the article was. There are many different ways the article could have presented someone within it as the bad guy, someone else as the good guy. That it’s neutral means anyone could potentially see it as taking their side or being against their side.

        Instead, it’s just really, really tragic, in the actual sense of the word.

    • Qetchlijn says:

      This is like a Greek tragedy. It seems pretty clear that Anna Stubblefield believes facilitated communication works. Given that all the evidence indicates that it doesn’t, the consequences seem inevitable. Anna was having an ongoing covert communication with her own subconscious mind; it’s hardly surprising that she felt she had found a person who shared her deepest thoughts. She’s naive, deluded and reckless, but I have no doubt she thought that she had found her soul mate in D.J.

      I find it awful that she could be facing 40 years in prison for this. She certainly doesn’t pass the mens rea test for culpability. I also find it hard to believe that D.J. suffered very much, if at all, from her actions, which we have no reason to think were anything other than considerate and even respectful.

      How do you folks in the US sleep at nights knowing that you’re at the mercy of such a capricious and vindictive justice system?

      • FacelessCraven says:

        “How do you folks in the US sleep at nights knowing that you’re at the mercy of such a capricious and vindictive justice system?”

        If you think this is capricious and vindictive justice… Probably you shouldn’t look too closely at the rest of the US justice system.

        Can we just leave it there? I think I can, at least.

      • brad says:

        I find it awful that she could be facing 40 years in prison for this. She certainly doesn’t pass the mens rea test for culpability.

        She almost certainty did possess the requisite mens rea. The test is ‘knew or should have known’. The ‘should have known’ is a slam dunk, but even under ‘knew’ I think it’s relatively easy. She knew that the law considered D.J. incapable of consenting she just though the law was wrong. That doesn’t negate knowingly.

        I’m not sure that a long sentence is ultimately fair, but it looks to meet all the requirements of due process to me.

      • Kevin C. says:

        “She certainly doesn’t pass the mens rea test for culpability.”

        But mens rea is irrelevant here, much as “I thought she was eighteen, Your Honor,” is not a defense against statutory rape charges. What matters is his consent and ability to consent. If he did not or could not consent, then she is guilty, period, no matter what she thougt or believed.

        Further, I note that this only becomes “capricious and vindictive” when the accused is a woman. And I must ask, would you describe the actions of a man taking advantage of a severely disabled woman as “considerate and even respectful”, and argue that the victim didn’t “suffered very much, if at all” as a mitigating factor?

      • Earthly Knight says:

        I find it awful that she could be facing 40 years in prison for this.

        Quoting only the maximum sentence is a hoary yellow-journalism ploy to sell newspapers. Don’t be fooled, though, there’s basically zero chance that Stubblefield will wind up serving anywhere near 40 years.

  72. Nombre says:

    A question for those who tend to oppose the minimum wage or tend to oppose increasing the minimum wage to $15:

    Some people at a university near me are pushing for a $15 minimum wage on campus. The university has built many new buildings over the past number of years, many of which are completely unnecessary, and the administrative ranks have proliferated, and these administrators are paid huge amounts. It would seem that the university could easily afford the extra wages without making any cutbacks, and if cutbacks had to be made they would be made in useless areas.

    Would you disagree with these activists, provided you accept my premise that the university could readily afford the costs of the higher wage?

    • J says:

      At my university a lot of the student jobs were at least somewhat intended to be a sort of student aid. So I think your argument that the university is not a normal market has merit.

    • onyomi says:

      Being against the minimum wage myself, I will say that there is a big difference between agitating in favor of saying “this particular [university, company…] ought to change its payscale and/or spending priorities for reasons x, y, and z (be it fairness, morale, effciency, or whatever),” and saying “this is the minimum anyone can contract to work for, by law, in this whole county/state/country.”

      • Scott Alexander says:

        [i] and [/i], but with triangle brackets instead of square ones.

      • I agree with Onyomi. The university is, presumably, a private organization, entitled to spend its money as its decision making mechanisms decide. On the whole, I would prefer it to stop wasting money (if, as implied, it is doing so) and reduce tuition, thus improving its core activity, rather than giving out random welfare by paying more than the market price for labor. But I see nothing wrong with people who believe helping local poor workers is more important than building new and unnecessary buildings trying to persuade the university to do so.

    • Jason K. says:

      No. The excess buildings are a symptom of another issue. Universities tend to over build because they get funds from donors that are earmarked for new construction. The donors do this so they can put their name on the building. So all the under utilized buildings are actually a tax the university pays to keep the donors happy.

      • My father used to say that universities produce two products–education and monuments.

      • brad says:

        If the donors only want to donate money to do things that aren’t useful then why appease the donors?

        I think your account is missing the utility function of the senior administrators. That’s the group that is actually in control of most universities (after hand picking boards that are supposed to be supervising them).

        • onyomi says:

          What I find especially weird is this: what increases the value of your own degree more: adding a new stadium to the university, or adding 50 new tenured professors? I mean, I understand sometimes the alumnus is just a big sports fan or whatever, and that most of the biggest donors are already wealthy enough that maybe they don’t care about the value of the degree, but it seems like, if the goal is to increase the prestige of one’s own alma mater, hiring 50 new professors–maybe turning a weak program into a top program or even creating a program of study which previously did not exist–is the vastly superior choice to building the stadium.

          Of course, being a university professor myself I am probably biased, but I think alumni (and, frankly, many students) underestimate the degree to which a university is an institution made up of people, and overestimate the degree to which it is a set of buildings in a particular location (related to this is the notion that your money to build a new stadium will “last,” while the money to fund professors gets “used up,” but honestly, don’t most universities rebuild or renovate their libraries and such every 50 years or so anyway?) but what about making the reputation of the university “last”?

          • brad says:

            The problem from that end is that the reputation of a program the way professors think of it is irrelevant to all but a tiny subset of those with undergraduate degrees from that institution, basically those that want to get Phds.

            The type of reputation that undergraduate degree holders care about — more “uncontacted tribes have heard of Harvard” than “the University of Iowa has a fantastic creative writing program” — is extremely sticky and slow to build up. Even a huge donation might not shift the needle much in the donor’s lifetime.

          • onyomi says:

            That makes sense, though one would imagine some donors would care about the school actually being a good school, as opposed to others simply thinking it is a good school… and really I think there are maybe 20 or 30 schools like Harvard with a very well-establish, sticky positive reputation in the public consciousness… even fewer if you go abroad (where they mostly know Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford). All the rest are competing for the middle territory: the general public does not know, offhand, whether St. Olaf is better than Macalester, so if St. Olaf wants to attract better students, it seems like it would be better served to build up existing programs and create new programs rather than build a new stadium.

          • @Onyomi:

            Funny you should mention St. Olaf. It was the one school that accepted one of our home unschooled children without our having any special connection to it (as in parents and/or grandparents having gone to or taught at the school).

            St Olaf is a not quite top level liberal arts school with a top level music program. Oberlin is a top level but arguably declining liberal arts school with a top level music program. My theory is that it occurred to someone at St Olaf that if they wanted to replace Oberlin they needed good students, and the way to get them was to mine a source of good students that other schools were missing–home schooled students. That’s consistent with our interaction with them–they were the one school that treated being home schooled as a positive rather than a problem.

        • onyomi says:

          Re “administrative bloat,” I have worked at a couple top Ivy League universities and I honestly don’t know what half of all those deans and secretaries do all day, many of them making much, much more than the top professors who make the universities places want to be at in the first place. Bigger universities seem much like a collection of fiefdoms, and you gain points by increasing the size of one’s fiefdom, even if it means adding unnecessary people.

          That said, I am not bothered at all by the guy whom they pay 5 million dollars to because he increases the endowment by 1 billion dollars through smart investing. Give that guy a raise.

          Currently work at a small liberal arts college which practices what I consider to be a good solution: a kind of shared faculty governance wherein faculty themselves vote on major decisions and also themselves shoulder, in turns, many of the burdens that would be shouldered by administrators at other schools. Seems to work pretty well and not be unduely burdensome to the faculty (though it seems like if a faculty would balk at shouldering some administrative burdens then they can’t also balk about ceding control of the university to administrators), though not sure how well it would scale up to a larger university.

          • Jiro says:

            I am not bothered at all by the guy whom they pay 5 million dollars to because he increases the endowment by 1 billion dollars through smart investing. Give that guy a raise.

            That presumably beats the market by a lot. You can’t beat the market by smart investing, except maybe in marginal cases, which that wouldn’t be one of. So there is no such guy, but a lot of people who seem to be that guy because of luck.

          • Chalid says:

            Large university endowments routinely beat the market. Even if you don’t believe in investing skill (I do believe in it), endowments they have several edges that aren’t available to ordinary investor which presumably take skill to take advantage of. For example, they have a much longer time horizon than most investors and they have access to alumni networks for private investments and the like. Also the non-profit tax exemption.

          • Anon. says:

            Jiro: if you examine the performance of the investments of top university endowments you will find that it is totally possible to beat the market by smart investing.

        • Jason K. says:

          They don’t only donate for new buildings. Donors willing to throw that kind of cash simply for something to put their name on are likely to already be providing significant other support. Might help to think of it like a high end Kickstarter backer award.

          • My law school is going to build a new building. It struck me as conspicuous consumption, so I asked someone I know who is an expert in academic fundraising about how practical it was to get people to give money for scholarships instead. His response included:

            “Gifts for brick and mortar are rarely fungible.”

    • James says:

      Look at it from the other direction as well since trades are a two-way street. Think of minimum wage as a minimum skill set. Anyone without $15/hour worth of skills will be unemployed.

      Are the activists worth $15 an hour? If they refused to work for anything less, would some others be willing to exchange their skills/time/services for less?

      The university’s buildings being unnecessary doesn’t really matter, does it?

      • multiheaded says:

        If they refused to work for anything less, would some others be willing to exchange their skills/time/services for less?

        “After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a SCAB. A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumor of rotten principles. A strikebreaker is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.”

        – Jack London

        (i.e. the argument that some people would be willing to work for less is nothing new, and the historical response to them has been understandably violent)

        • Peter says:

          Indeed, there was a famous incident involving a concrete block being dropped onto a taxi driver carrying a strikebreaker to work a few decades ago. This doesn’t seem to have done the reputation of the strikers any good.

        • multiheaded says:

          (This might be of interest to Scott et al. btw, concluding the same essay:)

          …All the world is a scab, and, with rare exceptions, all the people in it are scabs. The strong, capable workman gets a job and holds it because of his strength and capacity. And he holds it because out of his strength and capacity he gives a better value for his wage than does the weaker and less capable workman. Therefore he is scabbing upon his weaker and less capable brother workman. This is incontrovertible. He is giving more value for the price paid by the employer.

          The superior workman scabs upon the inferior workman because he is so constituted and cannot help it. The one, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is strong and capable; the other, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is not so strong or capable. It is for the same reason that one country scabs upon another. That country which has the good fortune to possess great natural resources, a finer sun and soil, unhampering institutions, and a deft and intelligent labor class and capitalist class, is bound to scab upon a country less fortunately situated. It is the good fortune of the United States that is making her the colossal scab, just as it is the good fortune of one man to be born with a straight back while his brother is born with a hump.

          It is not good to give most for least, not good to be a scab. The word has gained universal opprobrium. On the other hand, to be a non-scab, to give least for most, is universally branded as stingy, selfish, and unchristian-like. So all the world, like the British workman, is ‘twixt the devil and the deep sea. It is treason to one’s fellows to scab, it is treason to God and unchristian-like not to scab.

          Since to give least for most and to give most for least are universally bad, what remains? Equity remains, which is to give like for like, the same for the same, neither more nor less. But this equity, society, as at present constituted, cannot give. It is not in the nature of present-day society for men to give like for like, the same for the same. And as long as men continue to live in this competitive society, struggling tooth and nail with one another for food and shelter (which is to struggle tooth and nail with one another for life), that long will the scab continue to exist. His will to live will force him to exist. He may be flouted and jeered by his brothers, he may be beaten with bricks and clubs by the men who by superior strength and capacity scab upon him as he scabs upon them by longer hours and smaller wages, but through it all he will persist, going them one better, and giving a bit more of most for least than they are giving.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            The options of giving most for most and least for least appear to have gotten lost in the shuffle.

            Just as well, though, that London lacked inclination to tease out the implications of giving the same: it might have brought the Handicapper General onstage before her time.

    • John Schilling says:

      I don’t think the money can be shuffled around as freely as you think it can. University construction, in particular, tends to be funded by endowments or donations that are earmarked specifically for construction. Administration is more fungible in theory, but not necessarily in practice. If, for example, the University has just been told it needs three more Title IX specialists to keep its campus sexual assault policies in conformance, then that’s really not negotiable.

      More generally, whenever you see an argument of the form, “Money is being squandered on [wasteful or harmful thing X]; it should instead be spent on [socially redeeming thing Y]”, understand that the actual result of cutting spending on X is that the money goes to completely different thing Z. There’s lots of people who want that pot of money you’re planning to free up. Some of them socially redeeming, some not, but if you note who had the money in the first place you can expect that the not-socially-redeeming folks are pretty good at getting their hands on free money.

      If you somehow do manage to get control over a chunk of recently-freed-up university funding, increasing the salary of the adjuncts until they are at least earning as much as the janitors might be a fine thing to do with it. Or possibly you could find something better – on the subject of economic flexibility, “give people a raise” offers more freedom of action than “implement a minimum wage”.

    • Chalid says:

      I oppose a $15 minimum wage, and I don’t think your argument works. There’s no reason to think that cutbacks will affect “useless” things first; the “useless” things benefit *somebody* and they exist for a reason.

      Think about government – when there was pressure to cut the budget, was there a rational process to figure out the least necessary programs and eliminate or reform them? Of course not, we got sequestration.

    • James D. Miller says:

      This proves too much. Providing free clowns to rich children would undoubtedly be a better use of money than some of the things that this university near you funds.

    • Cauê says:

      I think the activists are trying to do charity with somebody else’s money, which I don’t find particularly endearing, but I agree with onyomi that there’s a vast difference between this campaign and minimum wage laws.

      • Ricardo Cruz says:

        Yep. The problem with overarching minimum wages is that they do not take into account labor elasticizes through all industries. If they did so in this Uni case, then it may not cause unemployment.

        By the way, here in Portugal, I never saw students being hired to do chores from the staff. The only exception was a couple of student in the IT department. Never in the cafeteria or cleaning or library or administration. I would expect that with higher wages, the administration would be more pressured to hire specialized hired.

    • I’ve swung back and forth a little on this issue. A friend of mine actually made a fairly good argument why minimum wage in certain circumstances isn’t harmful to employment in the way basic supply-demand economics might suggest. Basically, minimum wage jobs, in places like univerisities, exist as a static number of jobs on the periphery of bigger projects. So basically you need X number of cleaners to clean all your buildings, and you’re going to hire the same number even if the cost doubled, because ultimately its not the core of your project but its still kinda neccessary. Conversely, if the cost went to $1/hr, you’re probably not going to hire 10 times as many cleaners. So long as minimum wage jobs are a peripheral part of an economic activity, its safe to boost it without causing job losses. Where its core, such as in a human-labour manufacturing industry, it might reasonably considered to be more harmful to the number of people employed. I don’t know where I stand exacty but I think the issue has more complexity than the main factions credit it with.

      • Ricardo Cruz says:

        “isn’t harmful to employment in the way basic supply-demand economics might suggest”

        What you are saying does not invalidate basic supply-demand. What you are saying is that the demand for labor is inelastic for some cases (in other words, it would be an horizontal line if you draw the curves).

        • Yeah I totally agree. I dont mean it violates the rules, I just mean the common/default assumption that most things are not perfectly inelastic (even over a specific range of prices) might be incorrect in some cases of labour demand.

      • David N says:

        You’re saying the demand for “cleaners” is inelastic relative to some other jobs, and that may be true, but it’s pretty clear that demand for cleaners is not absolutely inelastic when you consider options like: clean less often, invest in cleaning technology, stop using certain buildings, etc. Each option, sorted by drasticity (which should be a word if it isn’t one), becomes more and more viable as the marginal cost of a cleaner’s labor increases.

        • The reason I think perfect inelasticity over a certain range is possible is that, imho, real on-the-ground decisions about cleaners etc. don’t actually work that way. Peripheral activities like cleaners in medium and large businesses aren’t a central part of the budget, and when financial planning goes on people rarely if ever calculate the return per dollar they’ll get from different options for cleaning. It’s more like a director telling HR to hire someone to clean the rooms once a week. So the idea would be that minimum wage enables you to get the cleaners etc. payed more without their work disappearing as a result. Obviously where it is a core business activity this won’t work, but you could selectively look at sectors (we could say univerisities, though I am uncertain) where minimum wage jobs are almost exclusively on the periphery.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        That sounds plausible, although I doubt you’d be able to word minimum wage laws such that they only cover situations where this is the case.

        • Well if the question is whether to apply it in a specific case, like the example of the university, it might be an appropriate response if the evidence was there. But I’d agree as a untargeted legislative response things are different.

    • keranih says:

      Some people at a university near me are pushing for a $15 minimum wage on campus. The university has built many new buildings over the past number of years, many of which are completely unnecessary, and the administrative ranks have proliferated, and these administrators are paid huge amounts. It would seem that the university could easily afford the extra wages without making any cutbacks, and if cutbacks had to be made they would be made in useless areas.

      1) What is your metric for labeling the new buildings as “completely unnecessary”?

      2) Construction of new buildings allows for vacating, remodeling, and upgrading older buildings, many of which are decades behind the times in safety and energy efficency. What is your assessment of the trade-off between higher wages and decreasing pollution?

      3) Needed or not, those buildings are now *built*. That’s a sunk cost. You can’t take that money back and put it into the wage pile.

      4) A not-insignificant amount of university cost comes from taxpayer dollars. Another major source is student tuition. Do you belong to either of those groups? If so, what fraction of an increase in your payment will you be willing to make?

      5) Raising minimum wages above the true market value includes increasing the wages just above the new minimum as well. This ripples into administration wages as well.

      6) Which administration positions of this specific school do you think should have a wage reduction?

  73. MasteringTheClassics says:

    I’m working on establishing a sort of calibration baseline, and my google-fu has failed me – what is the approximate probability that a random 23 year-old male suffers from insanity to the point of not being able to trust his perception of the world?

    I’m not sure the language above gets the question across (LW is practically dedicated to the idea that we can’t trust our perceptions, but we’re not using quite the same definitions) so illustration time: I see a tree out my window, I’ve seen it every time I’ve looked there since I moved here ~18 years ago. I have interacted with the tree, talked with others about the tree, played with others around the tree, etc. The only conceivable way that tree doesn’t exist is that I’ve hallucinated the whole kit-and-caboodle. What is the probability that the tree exists?

    • J says:

      Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population, and tends to emerge around age 20. So I’d use that as my baseline. If you’re asking because you’re 23 and starting to experience hallucinations, be aware that it’s treatable and much better understood than it used to be, so you’ll probably end up just fine with treatment.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Almost no schizophrenics would be so bad that they start hallucinating random trees and don’t register even the tiniest amount of evidence that they have schizophrenia.

        • TheFrannest says:

          For years, I thought that the voices I hear are what is colloquially referred to as conscience, inner self, etc. On the other hand, intrusive thoughts turned out to be normal.

        • MasteringTheClassics says:

          Do you have an estimate on what portion of schizophrenics are that bad?

      • MasteringTheClassics says:

        I have no evidence that the tree is anything other than totally real, that’s why I’m using it as a baseline. I am as certain as is practicably possible that the tree exists – what does psychology say the the probability is that I’m still wrong? 1% seems untenably high – it would suggest that I can never be more than 99% certain of anything…

        • MF says:

          Have you ever looked into Bayes’ rule? 1% is your prior for schizophrenia – evidence that you’re not insane should shift your probability that you’re insane below 1%.

          If you’re making an argument that you might be so delusional that you can’t trust your evidence, and so can’t update your probability and need to use a prior (for some reason can trust your prior?), there’s no way 1% of people are so delusional that they form fantasy lands where the evidence they get is completely uncorrelated with reality.

          Either way, you should be capable of being more than 99% certain of some things.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I am indeed making the argument that I might be that delusional. Under those circumstances, what would a reasonable, wholly external prior be? 1% is certainly far too high, but I’m looking for an actual value (to within maybe an order of magnitude).

            I’m working under the assumption that some percentage of what I experience is real, but my delusions are such that any given thing could be wholly fabricated (think Charles in A Beautiful Mind). An external prior wouldn’t be completely ideal (because I could be hallucinating that too) but it would seem to be the best of a bad set of options.

          • Ricardo Cruz says:

            “1% is certainly far too high”

            I know a little of Bayesian inference from my work in machine learning. I don’t think you guys are using it correctly.

            The prior probability you are schizophrenic is without any evidence. If 1% of the population is schizophrenic, then that is your prior, P(S)=1%. If you are male and 50% of the population is male (P(M)), but you are told that 80% of schizophrenics are male (P(M|S)), then your posterior is P(S|M)=P(M|S)*P(S)/P(M)=0.8*0.01/0.5=1.6%.

            I never worked much in Bayesian statistics, but I think this is how you do it.

            Anyhow, MasteringTheClassics, if you actually think you might be suffering from schizophrenia (I remember when I was in my early twenties also thinking the same because I read at the time that’s when it develops :)), you should visit a specialist.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Your math is sound, but unless I’m mistaken a perfect delusion of a tree (including outside confirmation and a long history of physical interaction) is well beyond the bounds of garden-variety schizophrenia (especially given that no one in my immediate family thinks I’m imagining it). I’d have to perfectly hallucinate the following facts:

            I can see the tree
            I can interact with the tree
            I have a long history of seeing and interacting with the tree
            friends and family have interacted with the tree
            No one I’ve asked has suggested the tree isn’t there
            I have no warning signs for Schizophrenia

            I could be wrong, but isn’t that well beyond typical schizophrenia? What’s a good prior probability for that level of delusion?

          • Ricardo Cruz says:

            As I said, I think what you are talking about is the *posterior* probability of being schizophrenic, not the prior. (I am only making a technical point here, mind you…)

            The prior (before) probability is before you know anything about the person. You have no evidence to go with. You only have population data to go by.

            The posterior (after) probability is after you know the person, you have some evidence: he is male, he has delusions, etc, etc.

            I think you guys are using these words wrongly. But I don’t know. I do have a degree in math, but I never studied probability in much detail.

            What I understood to be remarkable about Bayes’ rule is how people often forget to account for the prior probability. Let’s say I tell you that 80% of schizophrenics are male. You know that you are male, so you think it’s very likely you are schizophrenic. Bayes’ rule says hold your horses, do not forget your priors: only 1% of the population is schizophrenic. After you do the calculations, you find that knowing you are male only increases your chances by 0.4 percentage points.

            Likewise, just because you know that P(delusional | schizophrenic)=100% does not mean that the posterior P(schizophrenic | delusional) is 100%. (P(A|B) means probability of A being true, knowing B is true.) That would only be true if only schizophrenics were delusional. Delusion can have many sources, I would think.

            ps: I still do not understand if you are joking or being philosophical here. If you truly feel you suffer from delusion, you should consult a doctor.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I am not joking and I have no information that would lead me to suspect that I have Schizophrenia or any other mental disorder. I am seeking the probability that even in my condition (apparently that of a perfectly neurotypical 23-year-old male) I could still be suffering from major sensory delusions without any evidence of that fact.

            Practically, I’m trying to set something of a calibration baseline (or maybe ceiling is a better term). If, say, 1/10,000,000 people in my demographic experience perfectly, undetectably realistic delusions, then there is a 1/10,000,000 chance that I experience major delusions to the point that I cannot trust any given experience I might have. This would then imply that I can never be more than 99.99999% certain of anything, and there’s my baseline.

            I hear your point on prior vs posterior probabilities, but I’m not sure I understand the details of applying Bayes theorem to life well enough to argue the point. In probabilistic terms I’m seeking P(delusional | apparently neurotypical).

          • Anonymous says:

            If, say, 1/10,000,000 people in my demographic experience perfectly, undetectably realistic delusions, then there is a 1/10,000,000 chance that I experience major delusions to the point that I cannot trust any given experience I might have. This would then imply that I can never be more than 99.99999% certain of anything

            I don’t think this is right. Even if there are people who have undetectable delusions, presumably most of their experiences are veridical. You want the probability that any given experience is a delusion, not the probability that any given person has undetectable delusions.

          • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

            I don’t think this is right. Even if there are people who have undetectable delusions, presumably most of their experiences are veridical. You want the probability that any given experience is a delusion, not the probability that any given person has undetectable delusions.

            Yes. I was (poorly) arguing exactly this in a recent SSC thread (though I can’t find the post). Unfortunately, we can’t use Bayes Rule for this since I can’t even imagine what “measuring the prior” would involve. In the most inconvenient world, I think the problem is insoluble. We don’t have access to noumena, only phenomena.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Solid points, both of you, and the link was excellent. I’ll adjust to taking the figure (which I still don’t have) as a prior, then I can modulate it according to the belief in question.

            The question still stands (though it will be tougher to apply) – What’s the general probability that someone of my demographic is delusional at the necessary level?

        • Daniel Speyer says:

          There’s a term missing there: how likely a schizophrenic is to hallucinate that tree.

          p(tree|seen) = p(tree)p(seen|tree)/p(seen)
          p(seen)=p(seen|tree)p(tree)+p(seen|!tree)
          p(seen|!tree)=p(seen|hallucinating)p(hallucinating)

          Making up numbers:

          p(tree)=.1 (nothing weird about a tree)
          p(seen|tree)=1 (close enough)
          p(hallucinating)=0.01 (said earlier)
          p(seen|hallucinating)=0.001 (this is a highly atypical thing to hallucinate)

          Calculating:
          p(seen|!tree)=.00001
          p(seen)=.10001
          p(tree|seen)=.9999

          Note that if the exact same sort of evidence showed the devil in your back yard, the result would be much lower.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            The tree is just there as an example – it could be anything. The question is about the probability that I am delusional, not the probability that I hallucinated any given tree.

          • Daniel Speyer says:

            It’s hard to think of what would be strong evidence against being delusional in general. But any given belief can have a credence much higher than your general credence of not being delusional.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I’m not seeking strong evidence against my being delusional in general, I’m seeking the probability (given demographics) that I’m delusional. I may have to break this down by belief after that point, but I’d like the number as a prior I can adjust.

    • 27chaos says:

      Maybe take a picture for us. Make sure there’s only one tree in frame.

      • MasteringTheClassics says:

        That wouldn’t establish anything, it would just add one more point in favor of “this tree exists” and by now the marginal value of another point is negligible. I’m looking for the probability that the whole thing has been in my head.

        (I realize that would include this conversation, but trying to think my way out of that recursion makes my head hurt, so I’m working under the assumption that I live in a real world with real people and asking what the probability is that I’m adding the tree and all the experiences surrounding it.)

        • David N says:

          Paging Dr. Samuel Johnson…

        • Anon. says:

          You could ask us to factor a large number into primes à la “Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person”.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Very well, factor away: 412,023,436,986,659,543,855,531,365,332,575,948,179,811,
            699,844,327,982,845,455,626,433,876,445,565,248,426,198,
            098,870,423,161,841,879,261,420,247,188,869,492,560,931,
            776,375,033,421,130,982,397,485,150,944,909,106,910,269,
            861,031,862,704,114,880,866,970,564,902,903,653,658,867,
            433,731,720,813,104,105,190,864,254,793,282,601,391,257,
            624,033,946,373,269,391

            Though I’m not at all certain what it would prove if you succeeded (except that you’re holding out on the mathematical community).

          • Daniel Speyer says:

            Pick a *much smaller* number. One that we can realistic factor, and you can hand-check, but you don’t think you could factor in your head. Maybe 8 digits or so.

          • Magnap says:

            What factoring an 8-digit number would prove is that either you are way better at mental math than you think you are, you are delusional to the point of hallucinating the result of certain multiplications, or we really exist outside of your head.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I’m assuming you exist outside my head, no proof necessary. This whole question is more or less invalidated if you’re hallucinations, so there’s no point in preparing for that contingency.

    • Pku says:

      Another question on the subject: Do the sort of methods used to tell if you’re dreaming (e.g. looking at a digital clock) work for schizophreniacs trying to tell if something is a hallucination?

      • Ydirbut says:

        Wait, how does that tell if you are dreaming?

        • FacelessCraven says:

          The part of your brain that does the dreaming sucks at certain abstractions. clock faces, especially digital ones, are one of them. the usual signal for me is that I hear my alarm clock, shut it off, and the alarm doesn’t stop. last night, it was my mouse not working while I played World of Tanks, to the point that I had to hold it in one hand and slam the left button with the other to fire. A simple one I tried to practice for a while is shoving one finger through the palm of the opposite hand. On the few occasions I thought to try it, it worked.

    • Deiseach says:

      You say you’ve played with others around the tree. Have any of the others walked through the place where the tree appears to be, or otherwise behaved as if a tree wasn’t there?

      If not, then the tree is real.

      If you’re talking about “I’m pretty sure I remember X happening but other people tell me I’m wrong”, then that depends. For years, until I had independent corroboration, a family member was very strongly persuading me that something I remembered had never happened because it couldn’t happen, it wouldn’t have happened like that, etc.

      To the point where I was really doubting “Do I remember this or did I only imagine it?” Until, as I say, I got independent corroboration and then it was “Yes, I’m not crazy after all!”

      If that’s what you mean, I don’t know what can help except for trustworthy outside corroboration or denial, one way or the other.

      • MasteringTheClassics says:

        Assume there I have no evidence that the tree is anything but real, and that this has been corroborated by everyone I’ve asked. I’m approaching this from a least convenient possible world – what’s the probability that the tree doesn’t exist even if every conceivable metric I have access to tells me it does?

        • The problem with your question is that once you drop the assumption that your senses give a reasonably reliable picture of the real world, you no longer have a basis for establishing prior probabilities. You are told that 1% is the schizophrenia rate–but maybe being told that is an illusion too.

          Consider solipsism as the extreme form of the problem. How could you establish any probability for the claim that you are the only consciousness in the world and everything else is an illusion you dreamed up?

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I can see this as a problem, but I don’t think it’s fatal. I’m part of a subset of humanity that is apparently neurotypical. The vast majority of this subset is in fact neurotypical, but some small percentage experiences delusions realistic enough that they cannot be disproved from within. Since it is highly probable that I do not experience such delusions it is also highly probable that I can trust the discovered probability figure.

            To illustrate, suppose we lived in a world where the moment someone won the lottery they immediately lost both all memory of having won the lottery and all ability trust their senses. It would still be legitimate in such a society to ask what the probability is that you have won the lottery. The fact that the vast majority of people have not won the lottery leads to the conclusion that it is highly probable you can trust the figure you’re given.

            Or am I making a mistake somewhere?

          • Sebastian says:

            I wonder if the question should be “what probability do you assign to me being delusional, conditional on the hypothesis that I think I’m being truthful about my observations?”

          • “I’m part of a subset of humanity that is apparently neurotypical. The vast majority of this subset is in fact neurotypical, but some small percentage experiences delusions realistic enough that they cannot be disproved from within.”

            How do you know these things?

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Sebastian: Close. I’m looking for something more along the lines of “what probability does psychology assign me…” but the gist is correct.

            David: “I’m part of a subset of humanity that is apparently neurotypical.” All evidence available to me points to this being true.

            “The vast majority of this subset is in fact neurotypical” This seemed a reasonable assumption, though I can’t prove it.

            “but some small percentage experiences delusions realistic enough that they cannot be disproved from within.” Again, reasonable assumption.

            Do you actually take issue with any of these, or are you driving at something larger?

            I understand that the truth of all these facts is contingent on my being able to trust my senses (which I’m guessing is your point), but if I can trust my senses then they are entirely reasonable, so the system is internally consistent if nothing else. The recursion gets deceptive quickly, which is why I gave the lottery example.

            More succinctly, I’m assuming that the world as I experience it is the real world, noting that within the real world there are people who assume this and are mistaken (because they have delusions), and asking what percentage of the total population these people represent (so that I can apply this percentage to myself). This is slightly self-contradicting, I realize, but I’m guessing the effect is small enough to be ignored – if everyone asked this question then the vast majority of people would receive the correct answer, so I’ll probably get the correct answer.

            Clear?

          • J says:

            It feels partly like you’re operating in an abstract philosophical space, in which case you have to nail down a lot of assumptions (such as, “am I a brain in a jar?”) before you can start doing math.

            You also seem to be asking about traditional psychotic delusion, but that doesn’t jibe with your example scenario.

            My uneducated intuition of hallucination is that it’s not otherwise perfectly rational people who have an incorrect persistent belief about a thing like a tree, with lots of verifiably consistent but also completely fake evidence. Hallucination is more like a single wrong data point, eg. “I could have sworn a guy with a red shirt was walking past right before we got into that car accident, but nobody else saw it, must have made it up” (which apparently happens pretty often to normal people around sudden events like car crashes, and is one reason eyewitness testimony is considered flaky). Or for a schizophrenic, voices criticizing you, but you’ve checked that nobody else can hear them. Or you might believe the freemasons are out to get you, but you also use a lot of run-on sentences and nobody else can follow your reasoning.

            The other thing your descriptions remind me of is people claiming they’ve had spiritual experiences that prove their religions are true, and that’s in a whole other category of motivated reasoning.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Are sustained delusions really not a thing? That would certainly clear up the question, but I’d like to see a source before I completely buy in. Assuming for the moment that the question isn’t completely invalidated by that…

            This is kind of abstract philosophy space, but I buy Chalmers’ The Matrix as Metaphysics argument that were I a brain in a vat my environment is still real, so I don’t have to derail the hard-skeptic line before continuing.

            Also, keen eye on the religious experience call. Without getting into it too deeply I’ll say this question started out as an attempt to rate my probability that God (Judeo-Christian flavor) exists. It’s about equal to my probability the tree in my front yard exists – hence why I’m trying to pin down the number.

          • From memory: This is reminding me of something Suzette Hadin Elgin wrote about hallucinating when she went off steroids. She saw a government agency set up a command center in her hospital room, and she mentioned that she’d always assumed she would realize that a hallucination was implausible, but when she was hallucinating, the question of plausibility didn’t occur to her.

          • Jiro says:

            I don’t think this is very relevant to religious experience because when people claim to sense God, they don’t normally claim to do so in ways that are as concrete as how we sense trees. You’re not going to say “I sense God, and God is 40 feet tall, has branches that begin 10 feet up from the root, is colored brown and green, and has this little hole where there was a woodpecker eating at him yesterday”. The brain is wired to easily have religious experiences in a way that it’s not wired to experience a random physical object with a set of physical traits.

            Also, you can find plenty of people from religious other than your own and notice that they also claim to “see” or “sense” religious figures in ways that match their religion. You know that they’re seeing things that aren’t there. On the other hand, you can’t find such people who hallucinate trees.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Nancy: That’s exactly why I’m seeking a reasonable probability for this tip of thing occurring to me, though I’m starting to despair of actually getting a concrete answer…

            Jiro: Sensing my deity would be one thing, but my evidence consists of concrete medical miracles produced by the laying on of hands (all medically verified – lupus disappearing (established by blood tests), before-and-after x-rays of a leg growing out, a torn rotator cuff healing perfectly within a week (seen before by MRI, seen after when the surgeon opened up her shoulder for surgery), etc.) My degree is in chemistry – I like evidence for my beliefs, and I have sufficient of it to be as confident of God’s existence as I am about the tree in my yard.

          • Anonymous says:

            If what you are really trying to do is estimate the probability of God’s existence, the probability that you are delusional isn’t the main thing to worry about. Surely persistent long-term undetectable delusions are sufficiently rare that that the more important probabilities are things like
            – the probability that God exists, given that an injury healed rapidly
            – the probability that the initial medical tests were in error, or overestimated the significance of the injury

          • Jiro says:

            Mastering: You specified that other people can see the tree. If your “miracle” was actually similar to the tree, other people would be able to see the miracle.

            Given that you did not say “every doctor and scientist I told about this agrees that it’s a miracle”, other people are *not* able to see the miracle.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Anon: This question was sparked by my efforts to estimate the probability of God’s existence, but it’s become more general. A probability baseline would be useful in contexts other than the existence of God.

            That said, let me note that the probability of all the relevant tests being wrong is low enough that the probability of my experiencing long-term undetectable delusions is a relevant number. I can’t think of any alternative causes of rapid healing that would be sufficiently probable to matter to the calculus, but if you have suggestions please enlighten me.

            Jiro: You’re generalizing a bit too much from my brevity; other people can indeed see these miracles. The only first-hand witness doctor I know the reaction of was the surgeon for the rotator cuff, and he was astounded by the transformation (I can’t speak to the reactions of the other doctors involved)

            That said, I’m not out to convince you of the truth of any of this. I need a baseline probability of long-term undetectable hallucinations in order to calculate my probability for the existence of God, which is based on different observations than your number and will thus be different.

          • Jiro says:

            1) What you described is not the equivalent of seeing a tree outside your window. You can show someone the tree outside your window. You can at best show someone a healing if they were there at the time; you can’t show it to someone later.
            2) As Anonymous pointed out, there are possible sources of bias and error that don’t amount to hallucination, so asking for the probability of hallucination is the wrong question anyway.

          • Mastering:

            Your story is an intriguing one–can you fill it out a little more?

            One question is why you interpret a miraculous cure as evidence for God rather than (say) some magical power of the curer.

            Another is how solid the evidence of the miraculous cure was. Is it possible, for instance, that the doctor dealing with the shoulder had misdiagnosed the initial problem, which was why he was astonished that what he thought was there wasn’t?

            How many such miraculous cures were there and were they all by the same healer?

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            [note that I’d still like the number]

            Jiro: I’ll grant you that as events rather than things these healings aren’t exactly equivalent to a tree. A better comparison might be my belief I went to church this past Sunday. There are of course other sources of possible error involved, but I don’t think they’re significant enough to lose the hallucination probability in the rounding. Also, it’s not the “wrong question” in any meaningful sense because I’d still want the probability of hallucination even if God is removed from the equation. The train of thought leading to the question started with God, but it applies to other things as well.

            David: Rotator cuff story:

            Subject: A middle-aged to elderly (mid-60s) woman in my church. Regularly sits one row ahead of me.

            The narration of the event is from her. She had torn her rotator cuff (I don’t remember how), confirmed the tear with an MRI, scheduled surgery on the shoulder, and gone in for the surgery. The doctor opened up her shoulder, encountered a pristine rotator cuff (no tear, no scar tissue – perfect), and closed up her shoulder without further operation. She came to church a couple days later with her arm in a sling and reported the matter. She had been praying for healing regularly since the tear.

            I can personally affirm the following facts:

            1) She had contacted church leaders prior to this requesting prayer for a torn rotator cuff.
            2) She entered church that morning with her shoulder in a sling, telling her story to all who would listen.

            The following facts I did not personally confirm, but would be risky to fabricate given hospital records:

            3) She had an MRI, which showed evidence of a rotator cuff tear.
            4) She went to the hospital to have surgery on her rotator cuff.
            5) The surgeon opened her shoulder up but did not perform the surgery.

            For all other facts I have only her word.

            The Lupus Lady:

            Subject: a woman, approximately 30 years of age, at the church I attend while at college.

            The story, told by her to several congregants (with me evesdropping), then later reported by the pastor to the whole church, is as follows: This woman had lupus, had suffered 12 miscarriages over the past several years, was again pregnant, and had requested prayer from the congregation. During the prayer her belly had become hot to the touch and despite the chill in the room she had sweated enough to wring the sweat from her shirt. Following that session no traces of lupus had been found in her system, and her baby was born alive and healthy some weeks later.

            I can personally affirm the following facts:

            1) The woman in question was pregnant and gave birth to a living child.

            The following facts would be difficult to fabricate:

            2) She had had 12 miscarriages
            3) She reported being diagnosed with lupus to the church more than a year prior

            The following facts rely on multiple witnesses:

            4) Her belly became hot to the touch while multiple congregants prayed for her

            For the rest I have only her word

            (relevant fact: diagnosing lupus is difficult and less than certain)

            Many other stories exist, but these should indicate to you the quality of the data I’m dealing with.

            I recognize that this data would not be sufficient to prove anything to a hard-core skeptic, but I personally knows the people involved in these and numerous other miracles (some of which I have been a part of), and I put high credence in their word of mouth. Other, more subjective phenomena also contribute to my belief in the Christian God.

            I interpret these and other cures as evidence for God because my theology preceded the cures – prayers were offered specifically to the Christian God specifically for the cures that occurred. This seems reasonable since any alternative explanation would have to explain both the cures and their coincidence with the prayers.

            Miraculous cures that I have first-hand knowledge of, or second-hand knowledge through someone I personally trust: 8

            The healer has not remained constant.

          • Jiro says:

            A better comparison might be my belief I went to church this past Sunday.

            The chance that you are hallucinating X doesn’t just depend on your chance of having hallucinations, it depends on the base rate of X. If there are a lot of real X’s, the chance that any given instance of X is a hallucination goes down. There are, of course, a lot of known real instances of people going to church.

            (The same is true if you replace “hallucinate” with “misremember” or other reasons why it might not be real.)

            The following facts I did not personally confirm, but would be risky to fabricate given hospital records:

            What is relevant is less the chance of fabrication, and more the chance that you or someone else down the line misunderstood or misremembered something.

            I put high credence in their word of mouth

            Don’t do this.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            “The chance that you are hallucinating X doesn’t just depend on your chance of having hallucinations, it depends on the base rate of X. If there are a lot of real X’s, the chance that any given instance of X is a hallucination goes down.”

            Okay, lets make it something less frequent – the probability I went to a Promise Keepers convention 3 summers ago (2012). The number of first- and trusted second-hand references I have to the existence of Promise Keepers conventions is lower than the list of miracles that meet the same standard.

            “What is relevant is less the chance of fabrication, and more the chance that you or someone else down the line misunderstood or misremembered something.”

            The chance of either is low in these instances – not irrelevantly low, but these are significant events for the people involved, and I’m getting it directly from them.

            “‘I put high credence in their word of mouth’

            Don’t do this.”

            These aren’t crackpots, nor are they online, nor are most of them in a position to gain anything. The people I’m trusting the reports of are family members and close friends, any of whom I would trust with my life.

            (P.S. can you point me to a list of the formatting symbols this blog uses?)

          • Jiro says:

            Just because there are as many reports of miracles as there of Promise Keeper meetings doesn’t make them comparable–you don’t compare *number of reports*, you compare *statistical expectation*–that is you have to weigh the number of reports by how trustworthy they are. I don’t for a single moment think that just because you have equal numbers of references to each one they are equally trustworthy.

            These aren’t crackpots, nor are they online, nor are most of them in a position to gain anything.

            That’s the second time you said they’re not in a position to gain anything. It doesn’t matter. People don’t misunderstand and misremember on purpose–it’s not done for gain, or deliberately done at all. You can’t say “I would trust them with my life” and act as though because they’re honest, they also can’t misunderstand or misremember.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            “you have to weigh the number of reports by how trustworthy they are.”

            And trustworthiness is determined how?

            As to misunderstanding or misremembering, while I can’t categorically rule out the possibility that everyone involved misunderstood/misremembered every instance in which this occurred, I can say that given my priors that idea is laughable.

            Let’s take a story which I didn’t share before as a case in point: my sister finds a kid with back pain, discovers that one of his legs is about a half-inch shorter than the other, lays her hands on the leg, commands it to grow, and it grows. Kid stands up and, laughing, says he feels lopsided now.

            One possibility is that God is real, Christianity is true, and she just healed his leg.

            The other is that she and the kid somehow misinterpreted the situation and nothing really happened to the kid’s leg.

            I ask you, which of those options would you pick if your prior for miracles being real was already north of 99%?

          • Jiro says:

            And trustworthiness is determined how?

            It’s hard to determine in many cases. But the fact that it’s hard doesn’t help your argument; if you need to do something hard before you can think about hallucination, then you shouldn’t be thinking about hallucination very much.

            I ask you, which of those options would you pick if your prior for miracles being real was already north of 99%?

            Is that a per-case probability (each case claimed to be a miracle has a 99% probability of being a miracle) or is it the probability that miracles exist at all? Under the former definition, I’d think it was a miracle. Under the latter definition it would still depend on base rates; Nigerian princes are real, but there are many fake ones around so if someone sent me an email telling me he is a Nigerian prince I wouldn’t believe it.

            At any rate, my prior for miracles being real is not >99%, and is on a scale with my priors for some other things. If I actually saw such a medical event and could confirm it’s not a hallucination, I still wouldn’t have a reason to prefer “divine miracle” over “trickster demon-created miracle” or “disguised space alien who can regenerate limbs”.

        • Jason K. says:

          It seems like you are trying to prove a negative: How can I prove that the tree isn’t fake? Which can replaced with: How can I prove I am not just a brain in a jar?

          The problem with that kind of question is that the goalposts can be moved indefinitely and therefore can never be conclusively answered. Your best bet is probably to apply Occam’s razor towards the tree and accept the result.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            Chalmers suggests in The Matrix as Metaphysics that if i were a brain in a vat the reality I experience could legitimately be thought of a the “real world” so even were I in such as state my question would still stand.

            In point of fact, however, your missing what I’m driving for. I don’t want to be able to prove that the tree isn’t fake, I just want to know what the probability is that it’s fake. It is enormously more probable that the tree exists than that I’m hallucinating it, but what is the probability that I’m hallucinating it?

          • Aegeus says:

            What’s the probability that you’re a brain in a vat?

            If your hallucination to be so durable that it can stand up to any form of inspection you have to hand, it’s not just inserting a couple of trees, it’s inventing an entirely new reality for you. If you cut down the tree and make a bedframe out of it, your hallucination has to filter out whatever your bed is actually made of and invent new sensations for what it feels like to sleep in. If you have a conversation with your neighbors about the tree, it has to fabricate my behavior completely, because I’m not going to hold a conversation about a tree that doesn’t exist. If you get put in a mental hospital for talking about imaginary trees, how does your hallucination explain that? After all, you were just having a normal conversation in your front yard. It’d have to create basically a whole fictional world where that didn’t happen!

            Basically, to meet the demands of your hypothesis, your hallucination has to be as detailed as The Matrix. If you’re willing to consider your brain-in-a-vat simulation as “the real world,” then you should also consider your hallucination to be “the real world.”

        • Deiseach says:

          What are you measuring the existence of the tree against, if it’s “does it Really Exist”?

          Are you proposing the world of perfect forms, where the tree undisputably 100% exists in a higher-level reality? Because if your senses tell you the tree exists, other people tell you the tree exists, you take photos of the tree and the photos come out showing the tree exists – I don’t really know how much further you can take it.

          Sure, you could be a brain in a jar having hallucinations or an emulation being run on a computer and the programmer wrote into your code “see tree outside window”.

          But even so, the fact remains that – for instance – for Hamlet in the reality of the play, his uncle really poisoned his father, Ophelia really drowned, he really dies in the last act. Outside that reality, in Shakespeare’s reality, Hamlet is not ‘real’ and Shakespeare could have had Ophelia live and marry him if he’d wanted that ending.

          So even if you’re stuck in or on a level of reality that is at Hamlet’s level not Shakespeare’s, the tree is as real as you are going to get, whether or not it exists in Shakespeare’s front garden.

          If you’re at the stage of “But how do I trust my senses to be 100% accurate? How can I be absolutely absolutely sure, because I’m discounting what I see and what others see and what mechanical reproduction shows as invalid to what I’m asking?”, then you’re going to have to admit some level of doubt even if it’s only on the 0.000001% scale, because you are not going to get 100% absolute surety with that questioning.

          If you have no reason to question the evidence of your senses (not seriously thinking you might be schizophrenic/delusional, but simply entertaining the possibility that if X can be so deceived they believe what is indisputably false, how can I be sure I’m not also believing false evidence presented by deceived senses) then I’m sorry but the corroboration of other people and inanimate objects not tampered with (a camera that takes a picture of the tree, a chainsaw that cuts it into logs, a hammer that will drive nails into the wood) is about as good certainty as you can get.

          • MasteringTheClassics says:

            I broadly agree – I’m not trying to gain 100% certainty, argue for a brain-in-a-vat scenario, or rework metaphysics. I’m looking at the following chain of reasoning:

            I feel as if I am not delusional
            In this world there are people who are delusional and unaware of it
            ∴I may be delusional and unaware of it

            Then I’m asking what the probability is that I’m part of the group of people who feel normal but are actually delusional, given my demographics. This should have a fairly concrete answer, but I can’t seem to find any research on the average rate of this level of delusion.

  74. Siah Sargus says:

    On the topic of tabooing words…

    You what we should really taboo?

    “Entitlement”.

    Seriously, I haven’t seen this suggested anywhere else. I don’t see this word used properly anymore, it’s more of a rhetorical bludgeon that you can drag out pretty much whenever someone is complaining, and it works for pretty much everything, unfortunately. As long as it’s about something someone lacks, you can “call them out” on entitlement, because people are only supposed to be entitled to their rights and the air they breathe, apparently. Imagine if you actually used this entitlement argument in daily life – you’d be an asshole!

    “The food at the cafeteria wasn’t as good today, it was just sandwiches, and there was no hot food.”
    “Stop acting so entitled, you aren’t entitled to hot food, if you wanted hot food you could buy it at a restaurant or make it at home, I hate how entitled you act.”

    “It’s pretty cold out here, do you have a spare coat? I forgot mine.”
    “What, are you entitled to my property now? You should have brought your own!”

    “The Director was rather abrasive and short with me, it’s frustrating to be brushed aside like that.”
    “You aren’t entitled to anyone’s conversation.”

    I know that these two examples seem outlandish, but I’m applying the logic of the word as I see it used online to actual conversations.

    Well, that’s not the only reason I dislike it, or the biggest one. The most important reason I don’t like this word, is because it seems to be used as a rationalization to avoid outgroup empathy.

    So in summary:

    No, poor people/black people aren’t “acting entitled” when they seek charity. No, men don’t believe that they are “entitled to women’s bodies” when they pursue romance. No, Millennials (Eww, so arbitrary. It’s like: You know what people don’t hate each other about yet? Age! Yuck.) are not “entitled and want to have the entire society cater to them” because college debt is hard to deal with and impossible to get rid of.

    • Saul Degraw says:

      Anyword can be abused. I dislike it when the GOP talks about freedom and liberty because I disagree with their narrow definition of both words. The House
      “Freedom” Caucus seems excessively focused on business and property rights instead of wondering about what freedom might mean to someone in a minority. IMO freedom and liberty also include “I am a minority and can fully participate in the civil and economic life of my country without fear of discrimination.” Yet these thoughts don’t seem to enter the heads of the House “Freedom” Caucus.

      But the words should not be banned.

      Yes I also get annoyed at void for over broad or vagueness issues.

      • “IMO freedom and liberty also include “I am a minority and can fully participate in the civil and economic life of my country without fear of discrimination.”

        Your definition isn’t broader, it’s different, since it means I do not have the freedom to decide for myself who I will buy from, sell to, hire, agree to be hired by. You are eliminating what some of us consider freedom in order to get what you consider freedom.

        • Adam Casey says:

          Seconded. Freedom is very broad and very multifaceded. People who oppose you in respecting the key vital things that have underpinned it (free contract, free association) are not “narrow”.

        • JBeshir says:

          My first thought on seeing the grandparent was that freedom, like “fairness”, has many different definitions and many people it can apply to, and not all of those definitions can be satisfied for all of those people at once.

          And thus it was not reasonable to pick the definition of either freedom or fairness that matters most to you personally, and then treat its provision as a bare minimum expectation when discussing policy.

          Which is not to say that you can’t propose universalising one particular definition of either, it just won’t be the one some people want.

          And it’s not to say that you can’t keep a thumb on the scale for a whole bunch of forms of either, even if they conflict on occasion.

          • Cauê says:

            The problem to me comes when a word has earned prestige under one definition (or rather, that concept has earned prestige), and there’s a push to shift the word to a different definition, thereby stealthly assigning the new concept unearned prestige.

            “Freedom” and “democracy” are the ones I see the most. I seem to remember rants by Orwell in this sense, and certainly by Hayek.

            It works in the opposite way, too, in attempts to expand the definitions of [examples that would push against Scott’s policies], thus implying that the things newly referred to by those words deserve similar demonization and punishment as the things those words referred to back when we decided they deserved that level of demonization and punishment.

            Not quite identical, but very related: Scott’s Worst Argument in the World.

          • Cet3 says:

            “Freedom” only became so prestigious by being all things to all people. Pretending it earned its prestige in some golden age when it had a more specific and broadly accepted definition is wishful thinking.

          • Cauê says:

            Many things, sure. All things, no, and not some of the things being pushed.

      • Jeffrey Soreff says:

        If it were named the House Owning Class’s Freedom Caucus would that label it more accurately?

      • Yakimi says:

        Does the House Freedom Caucus support rolling back legal penalties for private acts of discrimination? Do they want to repeal Civil Rights legislation? Or is your point that they don’t support the further erosion of the so-called “freedom” of association, like creating diversity quotas in affluent neighborhoods?

        • nobody says:

          “creating diversity quotas in affluent neighborhoods”

          Is this a thing people advocate? (As opposed to complaining about the lack of diversity in affluent neighborhoods.)

    • Zorgon says:

      The reason why “I lack X and would like to have access to it” is reconstructed as “You feel entitled to X!” is because people who perceive themselves as having control over X do not want to potentially lose that control over X.

      “Entitlement” in its most common usage is pretty much always another way of saying “I/We do not intend to relinquish even an ounce of my/our control over that phenomenon.”

      It’s not even particularly complicated and I’m always a little annoyed when I see otherwise intelligent people fall for it.

      • suntzuanime says:

        I disagree – very frequently “entitled” is a way of saying “I put in my effort and took my lumps to get X, and just handing it to you cheapens my own achievement”. It’s people policing cheating in status games.

        • Zorgon says:

          Our definitions are not particularly incompatible, but I’d suggest that “I put in my lumps to get X” is a post-hoc rationalisation of “I have control of X and I will not relinquish control of it to you.”

          • suntzuanime says:

            In the extremely tortured sense that “I have this status and I don’t want to relinquish the status to you”, sure. In the sense that someone who objects to being robbed has control of their money and does not want to relinquish it to the robber. I’m not sure you can blame them.

          • Loquat says:

            I have to disagree – most of the time I see people calling opponents “entitled”, they do not themselves have the slightest bit of control over X. (I mainly see it in internet comment sections, fwiw – you may be referring more to its usage by politicians and billionaires.)

            When I see it, almost always X falls into 1 of 2 categories:
            1) Reward in a status game, where the speaker may or may not be a participant but either way has no power to affect who gets X or remove X from the category of “reward”. (I play MMOs, and this is EXTREMELY common whenever some player complains that something in the game is too hard or too time-consuming.)
            2) Something that will/would be paid for by someone else, often by some fraction of the speaker’s tax dollars, particularly in cases where the speaker has already paid or is currently paying for their own X and perceives the “entitled” person as being perfectly able to earn their own X if they’d stop being lazy. Example: Hipsters on Food Stamps. Pretty much nobody who gets mad about that thinks they have any control over what food items a stranger buys – they’re mad that strangers who seem perfectly well able to support themselves are instead being supported by tax dollars, AND that a media outlet held this up as acceptable behavior.

        • JBeshir says:

          This is what I’d think of as the central meaning of “entitled”, but the debates involving it extrapolate the idea of earning so far, in such a self-serving fashion, and with such little mention of the basis, that I think tabooing it and requiring a full description of what exactly is wrong is sensible.

  75. Gauge says:

    “I am experimentally tabooing the words “neoreaction”, “neoreactionary”, ”

    Well, that’s really a very neo-neoreactionary positon to take.

  76. J says:

    I get the weird scrolling behavior too.

    • onyomi says:

      Me too.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Ditto. I believe it came in with the new theme. Looks like it kind of tries to scroll down to the comment and then bounce around a bit. I bet there’s some javascript you can remove (I’ll check once I post this).

      • Jaskologist says:

        Pretty sure this is the guilty party:

        function SCE_comment_scroll from
        https://slatestarcodex.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-comment-editing/js/simple-comment-editing.min.js?ver=20151012

        (unminified here).

        Basically, you need to remove the $( ‘.sce-edit-button’ ).on( ‘sce.timer.loaded’, SCE_comment_scroll ); line from that file. I don’t know the details of your deployment; the .min.js file is what actually gets served, but that’s compiled down from the plain .js file, so if you don’t get it out of the original source it may end up reappearing later when you change something else.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          It is a necessary part of the new theme. Since it uses javascript to resize, it messes up the vertical position, requiring the movement to get to the correct place. Solution: go back to the old theme.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Changing the animate call to a once-and-done call might do the trick, then.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Scott is complaining about scrolling at the very beginning. In fact, it is once-and-done.

          • Anon. says:

            It’d be much easier if the commenting worked without the need to reload…wouldn’t lose the new comment styling either.

          • 75th says:

            Scott is complaining about scrolling at the very beginning. In fact, it is once-and-done.

            Could be misinterpreting you here, but if I’m not, then no. The actual SCE_comment_scroll() function animates the scroll action, which is never a good idea and only ever leads to suffering.

  77. Rock Lobster says:

    I’ve almost never commented here before so please forgive me if I break any rules. Also please be aware that what I’m about to say is not meant in any kind of judgmental or emotionally/morally charged way. It’s more just an observation of something that the modern world does that I think is odd. I’m bringing it up because nobody I’ve talked to about it seems to think it’s an interesting observation but maybe people here will. So here goes:

    So in most developed countries we’ve developed a strong anti-racist ethic in the public consciousness. Obviously there continues to be racism, but to be publicly and vocally racist, or even to just be racist in private and “get caught,” is NOT COOL anymore. I live in the U.S. but you have similar things happening in Western Europe.

    And yet…isn’t the whole concept of the nation-state ultimately a racist construction? Nationalism (not militant nationalism, just the regular kind) is the belief that every “nation,” i.e. ethnic and/or linguistic group, ought to have its own self-governing state, and different nations are unfit to share governing institutions. Multi-national conglomerates like Yugoslavia are not acceptable, and multi-ethnic empires like Austria-Hungary are bad bad bad.

    I realize that as a practical matter this works, and you don’t want to start taking non-dysfunctional countries and start smooshing them together into dysfunctional ones. But at the same time, I don’t see how nationalism is anything but an “acceptable” form of racism, which in all other contexts is considered bad. What’s up with that?

    P.S. I agree that “racist” is often just a word that’s attached to “things I don’t like.” But I’m using it literally and straightforwardly.

    • Pku says:

      I pretty much agree with you, but here’s my steelmanning of the opposition:
      – Having a strong in-group identity is useful for all kind of things (e.g. mormons give more to charity and trust each other more), and nationalism helps with that. There’s relatively little cost (in theory*), since the people you’re discriminating against are generally far away and don’t encounter your nationalism, and have their own, equally-powerful ingroup.
      – You generally want government to be somewhat local (except for issues like global warming), so combining this with nations is somewhat effective.

      * (See Israel/Palestine, ISIS, illegal migrants drowning, etc.)

      • Rock Lobster says:

        All of your points are good ones, and I think that intuitively that’s what’s going on in most people’s heads, but I think those are all “merely” practical considerations rather than principled ones about racism being morally acceptable or not. Most people don’t want to think of themselves as being “racist under the right circumstances.”

        • Megaburst says:

          See: What You Can’t Say. Don’t confuse the mores of the humans who exist in your era and your region with accurate, useful beliefs about the world. Yes, rhetorically speaking accusing people of being “racist” is a powerful cudgel. So?

      • Nombringer says:

        I don’t think that argument is particularly strong; it falls into the same trap I have seen so many discussions on this fall into.

        Essentially all you can argue is:

        “Yes, but it’s net good”

        And yes you can debate if it’s net good or not, but into order to do so you have to have conceded that yes, it is racisim.

        • Airgap says:

          If racism is a net good, why aren’t you racist? Aren’t you a effective altruist?

          Scott, do you think talk therapy will work, or is this likely a case of a formal thought disorder?

          • Nombringer says:

            I’m going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume you misunderstood me.

            1. I’m not an effective altruist.

            Two, I’m talking about an argument that COULD be made. Read the post again.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Look up the open borders movement; some of them take this idea pretty seriously.

      I would argue that nation-states are a crappy way to draw boundaries, but that boundaries ought to exist and nations contain more than zero information. Basically, you want to group people with similar values together so that they can construct communities suitable to pursuing those values. I think it’s meaningful to say Israelis in general have different values than Egyptians, so it’s good that they have two different countries where each can pursue their own thing. I’d prefer countries built around values directly without reference to ethnicity, but while we have to work around the two-dimensional surface of the Earth, I think ethnicity is the closest approximation we’re going to get. One alternative might be start with nation-states, but promote immigration by people who share the state’s guiding values and characteristics in order to help people get sorted into the communities that are right for them.

      If you haven’t already, see my post on Archipelago.

      • Consider seasteading as one approach to Scott’s ideal. Online communities as a replacement for states another.

        • Bugmaster says:

          Online communities are kind of tricky, because, as we have seen time and time again, they are highly vulnerable to two types of attack:

          1). An influx of highly motivated activists who are hell-bent on destroying the community — be it for the Greater Good, or just because they are the kind of people who like to watch the world burn, or whatever.

          2). An attack on the network infrastructure powering the community (perpetrated by the aforementioned activists, governments, or other malicious agents). This includes things like DMCA requests, petitioning ISPs to shut down websites, automated scripts flagging everything pointed by community members as “abuse”, the Great Firewall of $countryName, police raids on data centers, etc.

          Both of these problems can be somewhat mitigated by technology (P2P protocols, zero-knowledge encryption, trust networks, etc.); but unfortunately, any technology that is simple enough for the average user is also not powerful enough to withstand any kind of a serious attack. So, I’m not sure what the solution here is, or even if there is one…

          • John Schilling says:

            3). A meatspace attack, or just a meatspace constraint. An online gay-rights community is not terribly useful in a land without Lawrence v. Texas, nor an online gun-rights community without a Second Amendment.

      • Rock Lobster says:

        On open borders: True, but open borders proponents are very small in number. Your typical Westerner (especially people on the left, ironically,) thinks Scotland should be free to secede from the UK if a majority wants it, that Kurdistan ought to be a de jure country, etc.

        To your second point, I agree that for most people, shared identity boils down to ethnic or national tribalism, rather than shared values or ideology. After all, how many soldiers in a war ever defect to the other side? Very few. “Actually I’ve decided American-style democracy is great and we should work with the Americans” and “Actually I’ve decided communism is great so I’m going to go fight for the Soviets on the Eastern Front” are sentences that were pretty much never said, for example.

        • T. Greer says:

          This is a very modern thing. Mass defections were incredibly common in the pre-modern world–which is why pre-modern military forces were abnormally obsessed with loyalty. See these posts for more on this:

          “ISIS, the Mongols, and the Return of Ancient Challenges”

          and

          Introducing: Asabiyah

          • Echo says:

            “we are not departing into uncharted territory so much as we are returning to lands but recently abandoned.”
            Lovely line.

        • Tibor says:

          How are open borders at odds with the right to secede? One thing is “eveyone can freely live and work in our country without having to obtain a government permit”, another is “we don’t want strangers having a say in what laws we should have”.

          Also, in my experience, the only people who support secession rights universally are libertarians. Everyone else seems to like it in some cases, dislike it in others. People on the left pretty much universally support independence of Palestine or Tibet while being against that of Catalonia.

          • JBeshir says:

            I find this surprising.

            I’ve not talked with many people around it much, but my general attitude has always been that the cost we should assign to interfering with regional self-determination is sufficiently high that unless the secession is going to lead to rampant human rights abuses it should be allowed to go ahead, and I’ve never got the impression that set me apart from the people around me, none of whom are especially libertarian.

            Might be a regional thing.

          • Jiro says:

            If everyone can live and work in your country, how do you keep them from also making laws? Or consuming resources paid for from taxes?

          • Tibor says:

            Jiro: Well, the Czech immigration law says, that within the first 5 years of your stay in the country with a valid working visa you are not eligible for any kind of welfare (as a non-EU national). After that, you can get a permanent stay which entitles you to both welfare benefits and a vote in the local elections and by naturalization you can also become a citizen with full voting rights but that takes longer (I think it is either 10 or 15 years, but I’m not sure). However, you only can get the permanent stay if you have a stable income (and have had one during those 5 years) and a residency*. This makes immigration very undesirable for anyone who would like to immigrate for welfare (and those people can get better welfare payments in Sweden, Norway or Germany anyway with a comparable or even easier immigration process) while it does not limit immigration of those who come for opportunities and work. People who have had a stable job are not ones who are likely to vote for more welfare to be paid from their pockets (perhaps they are even less likely to do so than native born citizens).

            Of course, those people, coming from a different culture, might want to institute some laws that have no costs to them and that have nothing to do with welfare payments once there are sufficiently many of them and you might not like those proposed changes. I think this is much more serious a danger if uneducated people with low chances of assimilation (but eventually with voting rights nevertheless) come to you than if the immigration is mostly of skilled and on average more educated people. As someone pointed out, the “elites” of Brazil and the US are much closer to each other than the average and I would suspect the biggest differences to be at the bottom. Still, if you have a high immigration rate from a particular culture, that culture is likely to influence the country in some ways. For a libertarian, the answer is “and that is another reason to make the state as small as possible, so that people do not get the chance to impose their cultural values on those who do not share them”. For those who believe that the state should have a say in things of culture, this might be more problematic and if you want to preserve a “pure” culture without foreign influence, closed borders might be your best choice.

            * I find the Czech law (suprisingly) good, I would call it perfect after just two “minor” modifications – no visa requirements for anyone and a proportional tax deduction for those who are not yet eligible for welfare. Of course, both of those would be politically dynamite, especially the second one. It would also probably lead to people revoking their citizenship and “immigrating” to the country to avoid welfare payments thus rendering the welfare state impossible…a feature to me, a bug to most. But one which could be easily fixed by making those who used to hold the citizenship be excluded from this tax exempt.

          • Tibor says:

            JBeshir: It might have to do something with the fact that the European left is more sympathetic (in some cases enthusiastic) towards the idea of a unified federal European Union (a horrible idea to me and one that is fortunately less likely than the EU falling apart). If your aim is to put together which is separated, yo do not want even more division as it is easier to unite fewer countries than more.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            Huh? Most lefties I know are supportive of Catalonian independence.

          • Tibor says:

            Tatu Ahnponen: Hmm, maybe I have a too small a sample. Or maybe I am only considering a particular part of the left (mostly eurofederalist “moderate” left).

      • blacktrance says:

        I’d prefer countries built around values directly without reference to ethnicity, but while we have to work around the two-dimensional surface of the Earth, I think ethnicity is the closest approximation we’re going to get.

        Ethnicity isn’t much of an approximation for values. Look at the American cultural tribes, for instance – does a white Grey Triber really have that much in common with a white Red Triber? If I had to think of approximations for values, ethnicity would be really low on the list – even splitting people into something like golfers and non-golfers would do better.

        • T. Greer says:

          I assume you have never left America?

          A white red triber and a white blue triber have far more in common than with each other than either does with someone living in Brazil, or Belgium, or Japan. People who have lived in these places recognize this pretty much instantly.

          In any case, the way you are dividing up “ethnicity” may be flawed. Americans are used to describing “white” as an ethnicity, but this seems silly in an international context. What makes a Scottsman and an Englishman a different ethnicity? They are of the same race, live in the same country, and speak the same language. America is divided up into several fairly cohesive cultural regions whose origins lies with the ethnic backgrounds of the original immigrants. Values may vary greatly between whites as such–they vary far less between whites descendants of Scott Irish in Appalachia or white Yankees descended from Puritan stock. Call it cultural, call it genetic, or what have you, but the unusual distribution of values among American whites is what is.

          • blacktrance says:

            I was born outside the US and am of an ethnicity that’s not extremely common here. Nevertheless, I have more in common with the median American than with the median person of my birth ethnicity. But I have even more in common with different foreigners who share my interests and who move in the same circles as me than with the same median American.

            I also remember Haidt writing about how elites in America and Brazil are more similar to each other than to the masses of either country.

          • Linch says:

            My experiences are similar to that of blacktrance, if you want another data point.

      • John Sidles says:

        Scott Alexander says: “Look up the open borders movement; some of them take this idea pretty seriously. … Basically, you want to group people with similar values together.”

        History provides ample reasons to appreciate that “grouping people with similar values together” can be a mighty bad idea.

        A holocaust survivor of my acquaintance, Dr. “S” of “P”, advocated precisely the opposite approach — humorously, and yet personally he did practice it — universal compulsory intermarriage … across all cultures, all races, and all religions.

        It worked well for him … his kids were beautiful.

        But hey, rather than compulsory intermarriage, howzabout a whopping housing / education / healthcare economic credit for intermarriage?

        So much cheaper than bombs, guns, and missiles! So much more humane too. And in the long run, so much more effective.

        Hmmm … open borders universally for intermarried couples and their children … now, *that* would be globally transformative within very few generations!

        • The_Dancing_Judge says:

          its funny how much this story would not surprise anti-semites.

          Jokes aside, preventing the grouping of people with similar values seems to have its biggest cost in reducing trust. (cite to bowling alone guy’s paper). I am pretty certain that trust is extremely important for collective action problems and good governance. The alternative is giant bureaucracies. Late Roman empire/ post WWII US both seem to have a correlation between multi-ethnic populations, and bureaucratic systems to patch declining trust societies.

          (ok idk if this is an appropriate topic, but it does seem to be a good strategy to prevent the formation of large majorities of homogeneous high trust groups if you are a small minority living amongst that group)

        • John Sidles says:

          The_Dancing_Judge says [utterly wrongly] “Preventing the grouping of people with similar values seems to have its biggest cost in reducing trust.”

          What, you ain’t never witnessed the transformational augmentation of trust that comes of having a mixed-religion mixed-nationality mixed-race grandchild?

          Well, just wait awhile … there’s no stronger solvent for even the toughest cases of long-standing racist cognition.

        • Jeffrey Soreff says:

          But hey, rather than compulsory intermarriage, howzabout a whopping housing / education / healthcare economic credit for intermarriage?

          So much cheaper than bombs, guns, and missiles! So much more humane too. And in the long run, so much more effective.

          Oddly, I just saw

          The aristocracy vastly preferred intermarriage to violence as a way of dynastic expansion and consolidation — it didn’t expend the commodity you were trying to gather

          on another blog I read, in

          http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/10/it-could-be-worse.html#comment-1983075

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Scott, the boundaries ought to be drawn by LANGUAGE. This is especially true if we need government schools to be an advanced culture (or to not violate human rights, if you take the UN as gospel). So you draw a boundary around the English-speakers and the state has them learn Shakespeare, one around the French-speakers and they have to learn Racine and Moliere, one around the German-speakers and they have to learn Goethe… unless the world’s teachers are only going to teach English, the way grammar schools and up once taught only Latin.

        • Tibor says:

          I do not think language is as big an issue as people think today. First, common language as a justification of a common state is a very modern idea and prior to nationalist movements of the 19th century (IMO on net a very bad thing) it never occurred to anyone that it makes sense to divide countries based on language or even nationality.

          At the same time, there are examples of successful multilingual countries. I think there are two (at least most obvious) ways one can go about that. One is the “Swiss” way, another is the “Singaporean” way. Switzerland is a country of 4 languages (even if Romansch is not all that widespread) and even culturally it is not homogeneous (and even the Swiss German dialects are so different from each other that the speakers of one do not understand the speakers of another one well if it is not too close). It is also a country with very strong federalism and independence of cantons. So while everyone is Swiss, a guy from St. Gallen does not have to care much about what a guy from Ticino thinks and vice versa. Even better – if you like the way people in Ticino think (or the climate there), you can always move there and the cantons are small enough (the largest is slightly bigger than Delaware) to keep the costs of moving quite low. And you do have a choice. The French speaking Cantons have by and large higher taxes and more state involvement than the German speaking for example. I do not see why this should not work with other countries and in fact this is what Austrian Empire might have looked like today had the history turned out slightly different ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria ).

          The Singaporean way is a bit different. In Singapore, there are quotas in housing blocks for people of different ethnicities so that say the Malay do not live in isolation from the Chinese. You have a lot of cultural and other stuff organized by the state that emphasises the “Singaporeanness” and unity is the word of the day. At the same time, Singapore is also a 4 language country* but instead of sort of letting each group of people living their own way do diffuse tension like in Switzerland, they try (and are actually quite successful) to come up with a Singaporean identity that covers all the different ethnicities and languages and works as a bound between them. Of course, Singapore, being a tiny city state, cannot really be easily divided the way Switzerland can.

          …and then there is anarcho-capitalism. I like to describe as taking the Swiss system as a function of canton size and looking at the limit in zero. The cantons get progressively smaller until they are infinitesimal in geographical size. Of course, as it is often the case with limits, the result has some new surprising properties as well as possible problems you have to deal with.

          Lastly, there is Estonia (I think) which allows for “electronic citizenship”. I have not read too much about it, so I do not know what it entails exactly, but I think it is worth mentioning it for anyone interested who can then look it up.

          *Which is funny when you are in the SMRT – Singaporean Mass Transit System (but I like the acronym because “smrt” is a word in Czech which literally means death) and before the next station gets announced in all the languages, you are already there.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “I do not think language is as big an issue as people think today. First, common language as a justification of a common state is a very modern idea and prior to nationalist movements of the 19th century (IMO on net a very bad thing) it never occurred to anyone that it makes sense to divide countries based on language or even nationality.”

            I know that very well. However, pre-modern states (counting the 15-1700s as pre-modern) did not have universal and compulsory education. Now all developed states do and underdeveloped ones are imitating in hopes of achieving economic equality. That’s a serious Chesterton fence. It’s going to take a lot of research to either prove that the older model of education would be at least as good, or to prove some new progressive idea.

            Given the modern model, it just seems fair that Latvian 6-year-olds are taught to read and write Latvian instead of Russian, Tamils Tamil instead of Hindi, and so on. As the latter example hints, this doesn’t preclude the sovereign ruling a multiethnic population, so long as internal boundaries represent autonomous units rather than powerless provinces.

          • Tibor says:

            I think that as far as schooling goes, you can do with powerless provinces. Just modify the system slightly as to allow people to choose the language their children will be taught in (if there are enough kids around to fill a classroom) among the main languages of the country.

            A bigger problem is that in the era of nationalism (we are not as nationalistic today in most places as people were in the 19th century, but we are still quite nationalistic) those provinces will not fancy someone of a different nationality ruling over them and you end up with a lot of tension or outright rebellion. In fact, even a model where it is not “nation A > nation B” but where everything is decided together in a central level is not all that stable.

            Czechoslovakia separated even though the languages of the former country are so close that most of the time one who speaks one can understand the other (save for some regional dialects or people who speak too fast) and still it was not enough.

            Then you have Belgium or UK which have been threatened by separation for some time. But while language plays a role, it is not the most decisive factor. Someone who speaks Schwäbisch is not going to understand someone who speaks Plattdeutsch (true, everyone also speaks Hochdeutsch and most young people don’t even speak the dialects well) and while Germany is a federation, it is nowhere near the level of the US or Switzerland in terms of self rule of the states. Still, you do not get separatism, because everyone considers themselves German first. In Bavaria, you have a slight* amount of separatism, because many Bavarians consider themselves Bavarian first and German second (or even not at all in some cases).

            There is some tension in Italy as well between the north and the south, although this probably has to do more with huge economic differences between north and south rather than nationalism.

            Generally, I think that it is not the language per se, but the national and cultural identity that causes problems in centrally ruled multinational/multicultural states.

            *This would be perhaps stronger if it were not for the CSU, which is also dubbed “the Bavarian party” (although there is an actual party of Bavaria which wants to reinstate independent Bavaria and has a support of about 1-2% of the votes) because it only operates in Bavaria. CSU has won all Bavarian elections save for one since its conception after WW2, often with more than 50% of the votes and is an important player in Bundestag (the federal parliament), being a part of the Union fraction (CDU+CSU) which sort of makes Bavaria more important and gives it more power than other Bundesländer (even if legally, all are the same).

        • DavidS says:

          Do you mean that all the English-speakers in the world should be one nation? Or just that you shouldn’t have countries like India, Canada, Belgium, etc. with multiple languages.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I would say the English-speakers are one nation, not living in a nation-state. Being on separate land masses make multiple English states fairly reasonable, though I honestly find the United States/Canada split incomprehensible (yes, yes, the Revolutionary War, but it’s not like Canada is a royalist utopia).

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Anglo-Pan-nationalists?

            We have 4 defacto and a raft of official (ex colonies mostly). Perhaps we should get China to declare war on US and defend Australia and have Hillary declare the new empire in the Forbidden City.

          • I’m not even sure democrats and republicans are one nation.

          • Deiseach says:

            The notion that all Anglophone nations would be one entity is not a new one; back when the British Empire was probably at its zenith, there were certainly those who thought that the USA and Britain were a natural fit as representing the “Anglo-Saxon peoples” and would come together in one union. Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes, in one of his stories, say this to an American client:

            “I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes”

            I think Kipling, too, had the same notions. Empire Day was observed in Canada first, and the ‘cult of Empire’, you could say, got most of its support from the likes of Bonar Law, Canadian by birth who became Prime Minister of the U.K. in 1922.

            The idea was that Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and other regions under the parental rule of Britain would, as the Empire/Commonwealth, amalgamate with the U.S. as a sort of junior partner or elder son who would be guided in its youthful exuberance and fledgling power by the older, wiser, more experienced Mother Country.

            With the collapse of Empire, naturally this kind of pretension to global importance fell out of memory.

          • Where does Kipling suggest that the U.S. will be incorporated in the Empire? My impression was that, despite having an American wife, his experiences in Vermont had left him with a somewhat negative view of the country.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “The notion that all Anglophone nations would be one entity is not a new one … With the collapse of Empire, naturally this kind of pretension to global importance fell out of memory.”

            For no rational cause, but because of an emotional reaction to the British Empire.

        • Daniel Armak says:

          Can I get citizenship in the English country by knowing English really really well, even though I’m an Israeli Jew? Would multilingual people have lots of citizenship offers?

          • With all the talk about linguistic nationalism, I cannot resist the temptation to point people at my first published econ journal article, a theory of the size and shape of nations, which offers an explanation of why linguistic nationalism arose when it did, along with some evidence.

            http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Size_of_Nations/Size_of_Nations.html

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            “Can I get citizenship in the English country by knowing English really really well, even though I’m an Israeli Jew? Would multilingual people have lots of citizenship offers?”

            Sure, why not?

          • Airgap says:

            Ooh, ooh! Is it transaction costs?

          • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

            What do the terms A and B stand for in the equation V = A - BT?

            Also, why does “rent (as a major potential revenue source) imply small nations”? Because I can’t seem to think of any reason rents should encourage this. Except for maybe administrative overhead. But this is negligible (as your article points out).

          • FullMeta:

            A and B are constants–I’m assuming that volume of trade declines linearly with tax rate.

            The reason rent leads to small nations is that there is no coordination economy of scale effect, as with trade, and I am assuming net diseconomies of administration. I have to assume that to keep my model from collapsing into a single state.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            So Mr. Friedman, do you think there’s enough data regarding Assyria and Kanesh:
            http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-vcs-of-bc.html?_r=0
            (As Scott linked awhile back) to make a model?

          • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

            Oh. I was thinking maybe they were abbreviations for jargon that economists implicitly understood. Like maybe A was the “Potential Aggregate Trade Volume” and maybe B was the “Trade Elasticity Coefficient”. I secretly want to name them because I want everything to have names.

            Thanks for clarifying.

        • But I like Goethe better than Shakespeare 🙁

          • Daniel Armak says:

            There’s a well-known effect where people hate the literature that was mandatory in the school they went to 🙂

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Ideally all schoolchildren would get to learn multiple literary languages, but the school system is abysmally inefficient and there’s plausibly an IQ cutoff for that anyway. Sadly.

          • Jon Gunnarsson says:

            Hmm, I’m German and I like Shakespeare better than Goethe.

          • Deiseach says:

            I’m Irish, I had my first exposure to the following between the ages of 12-15 as I ransacked the (literally) dusty bookshelves of the classroom and while Shakespeare was mandatory I love him (probably helps that I read the play first before we had to do it as part of English Curriculum and the dissecting it to its bones for essay topics took place); Dante was never mentioned at all and I love him; Goethe bores me (as I stumbled my unguided way through Sartor Resartus I couldn’t understand Carlyle’s mad, passionate crush on German philosophy and philosophers), and poor harmless Schubert and his lied “The Trout” (which I was exposed to in Music class) can still, to this day, drive me into a frothing homicidal fury when I hear the first trilling bars on the piano.

            All Music class did was turn me completely off German lieder and make me go for the French, which may be linguistic prejudice as well, since I gave up German after the first year as a language I could not get on with and which sounded horrible to me, and stuck to French which to my taste is beautiful 🙂

        • It’s interesting to look at a map of an average African country such as Liberia when considering this sort of proposal.

    • John Schilling says:

      I think you’re confusing race, ethnicity, and culture.

      Race is innate and unchangeable, and even the strongest reasonable HBD advocate would agree that it maps very weakly to anything that affects human performance or ought to affect human interactions. Racism is dumb. It’s factually wrong before it even has a chance to be morally wrong.

      Culture is much more flexible. You can usually change if you don’t like the one you’ve got. And it does strongly affect human performance and human interaction. It’s not dumb to treat cultures differently, or to treat people differently based on their cultural identity; rather, it would be dumb not to.

      Ethnicity is muddled somewhere in the middle.

      And nationalism is much more of an ethnic and cultural thing than it is a race thing. It make sense for a culture of e.g. cosmopolitan WEIRD urbanites to live by different rules than a culture of fundamentalist agrarian Moslems. It makes sense for them to follow different leaders. It makes sense for them to embark on different collective enterprises. To the extent that it makes sense for people to wage wars, it makes sense for them to wage different wars.

      Take racism entirely out of the equation, and it still makes sense for them to live in different nations. Take racism entirely out of the equation, and if you’re a cosmopolitan WEIRD urbanite who happened to be raised in Pakistan it makes sense for you to move to Europe rather than try to make Pakistan a fruitful place for cosmopolitan WIERDos to do their thing.

      Take racism entirely out of the equation, and if you’re signaling Cosmopolitan WIERD you’ll be welcome somewhere in Western Europe. And when you get there, with racism taken entirely out of the equation, it will make sense to have at least a fence between the people you live with now and the people you grew up among.

      • Rock Lobster says:

        I don’t think I agree with that. “Culture” is one of those things that maps onto ethnicity very closely, mostly for path dependency reasons, in my opinion, rather than genetic ones. But try hanging out in respectable circles and saying “I don’t have a problem with _____ PEOPLE, just the bad culture in the ______ community!” If you fill in the blank with, say, “black,” you run a very high risk of being accused of racism. You get much more leeway if you make the exact same comment about countries in the Middle East, say, or countries where FGM is practiced, and so on.

        In practice people use things like religion and culture as identity markers around which they “form sides,” in addition to ethnicity. It’s not like the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland were literally arguing over religious doctrine during The Troubles. But Protestant tended to come packaged with English/Scottish tribalistic loyalties.

        • John Schilling says:

          If you fill in the blank with, say, “black,” you run a very high risk of being accused of racism

          It is true that you will be accused of racism if you do this. That does not mean that the accusation is correct, or that the original statement is false.

          Much of the confusion comes from the fact that race, culture, ethnicity, and nationality are usually things people inherit from their parents, and so tend to be locally correlated.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          It’s not like the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland were literally arguing over religious doctrine during The Troubles. But Protestant tended to come packaged with English/Scottish tribalistic loyalties.

          Hence the old joke:

          “Hey you, are you a Protestant or a Catholic?”
          “Neither, actually, I’m an atheist.”
          “OK, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?”

      • Pku says:

        But that raises the question of why not have, say, a fence between rural Wales and London – the difference there seems to be much greater than the difference between, say, Toronto and Minneapolis.
        There’s this question of what lines to split society along – you want each society to have diverse skills (planets of hats are a bad idea, and it seems like however you divide up countries most of them will need both farmers and architects). What characteristics would you want society to be uniform along? (Ironically, skin colour might be a decent candidate, since need for melanin corresponds pretty well with geography).
        (Also, why do you keep capitalizing (and misspelling?) WIERD? It’s driving me crazy.)

        • John Schilling says:

          Wales and London (well, England) were in fact historically separate nations, for good reason as you note. And the decision to unite them was not uncontroversial. Fortunately for the Welsh, the British Empire eventually mastered the art of incorporating multiple nationalities into a single overarching political sovereignty without destroying their individual distinctions.

          And I capitalize WEIRD because I am using it as an acronym for a cultural cluster, Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic, which is a very strong dividing line you’ll want to be keeping in mind if you are making nations. If you include WEIRDs and non-WIERDs in the same nation, you’ll want to use something like federalism to let them sort out into mostly-self-governing provinces.

          I’ve seen the spelling done both ways, but if it’s bothersome there’s no problem sticking with the homonym for just plain weird. Which, globally, WEIRDs are – and will suffer for it if you insist on tearing down the national boundaries that let us do things our way in our nations.

        • Berna says:

          WEIRD (with EI) is an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

      • John Sidles says:

        John Schilling says [wrongly] “Race is innate and unchangeable.”

        Well, there’s your problem right there!

        With intermarriage and “passing” both becoming ever-more-common, it’s plain that race is biologically plastic and culturally mutable.

        At least, this is true for the increasingly many folks who are creatively enterprising in their courtship, their social relations, their work, and their art.

        A sense of humor helps, definitely!

        • Comment Reader But Not Usually a Poster says:

          I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but what is your evidence that “passing” is becoming more common?

          My impression is that in North America, as the stigma of being non-white (non-english if you go back far enough) weakened, less people bothered to “pass.”

          • John Sidles says:

            Comment Reader But Not Usually a Poster asks [very politely and reasonably]: “What is your evidence that “passing” is becoming more common?”

            One primary reason why passing is more common nowdays is common-sense simple: racial passing is no longer a felony that can send you to prison.

            Got a citation?  Sure! Chapter X “Marriage and other domestic problems” of Charles S. Magnam’s indispensable review The Legal Status of the Negro (1940) describes at-length the immense legal risks that were entailed — until relatively recently — to the practice of “passing”.

            Are these questions easy or settled?  Not in Israel!

          • Comment Reader But Not Usually a Poster says:

            John Sidles states [clearly and succinctly]: “…racial passing is no longer a felony that can send you to prison.”

            We obviously disagree what evidence is. You gave me a reason that it could be happening. Are you suggesting that it stopped being a felony because there was such a demand to pass that they had to change the law? I will do a bit more of my own research when I am at home. I am uncomfortable putting racial questions into a work computer’s google.
            The reason I asked the question in the first place is that saying passing is more common, runs contrary to all reading and experience I have had on the subject. My experience with the issue is that people do not publicly deny a vital part of their self identification unless the upside is disproportionally larger than the downside. To pass racially very often requires a sacrifice of the family and friends that are not willing or able to pass with you. Basically telling them you are ashamed of them. This is not something you do just because you are now allowed to.

          • John Sidles says:

            Comment Reader opines  “I will do a bit more of my own research [on racial identity in-the-law] when I am at home.”

            A once-controversial yet still-readable analysis of racial and class identity — that sharply contrasts legalistic cognition against empathetic cognition — is Mark Twain’s relentlessly transgressive novel The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894).

            Those who finish Huck Finn still doubting Twain’s own racial attitudes should read Following the Equator or Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which Twain excoriates the “one-drop rule” (the American law decreeing that “one drop of negro blood” made a person black):

            “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a ‘negro’.”

            When writing in an educated voice, rather than Huck Finn’s, Twain puts the then-respectful term “negro” in scare quotes, questioning the category itself.

            He also paid for the tuition of a young African American who wanted to attend Yale, saying that “he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white man to every black man”.

            Pretty much matter what the subject, Mark Twain is a good starting-point for both rational and empathetic cognition, eh Comment Reader?

            Nowadays people laugh, joke, and fib fearlessly about their racial heritage. GOOD! And that’s why it takes artistic works like Twain’s and legal works like Magnam’s to remind us — until very recent decades — the exercise of social choice in regard to racial identity was so hazardous as to be unthinkable.

          • Mary says:

            “One primary reason why passing is more common nowdays is common-sense simple: racial passing is no longer a felony that can send you to prison.”

            Given that we have had demonstrated cases of whites passing as blacks, I think that first of all you need to prove that it is indeed more common.

            And if so, is it under the “one-drop” rule? Because there were long periods in the South where the child of an octaroon and a white was white. (Something drawn upon for the arguments about the Nuremberg Laws of Racial Purity, though in the end they went a little looser.)

          • John Sidles says:

            The remarkably high level of quibbling here on SSC in regard to the evolution of social practices associated to “passing” (in regard to race, gender, class, and nationality) calls to mind Robert Heinlein’s utter rejection of quibbling with respect to the practice of slavery.

            For example, we read in Heinlein’s Kim-remake juvenile novel of class-passing and race-passing Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

            Wing Marshall Smith  “Some smarmy well-dressed character will venture the opinion that slavery — when it existed — was not so bad, because a huge part of the population is really happier if they don’t have the responsibilities of a free man [sic].”

            Thorby  “One stroke of the lash would change his slimy mind!”

            Is anyone here on SSC assimilating the plain message of Mangum’s “Legal Status of the Negro” (1940) or the highly favorable (yet gently ironical) reviews that Mangum’s work received in prestigious law journals?

            Columbia Law Review

            The customs and mores of a people often find expression in law, and the fact that this book [Mangum’s Legal Status of the Negro, 1940] is primary a legal text should not deter the sociologist from resorting to it frequently as a rich storehouse of material on the day-to-day intercourse in the South, and also as a handbook on the sanctions of subjugation.

            Emphasis by me.

            What can we conclude? … We can conclude even the most vigorous practice of rationality serves SSC readers ill, when serves chiefly to rationalize the quibbling, cherry-picking and willful ignorance of social justice concerns, that Heinlein’s juvenile novels (and Twain’s darkly humorous novels too) so clairvoyantly satirized.

          • Mary says:

            Well, that’s an interesting tangent to go off on.

            May I point out that leading with a work of fiction is not the way to convince people that they are wrong about reality?

          • John Sidles says:

            Mary says: “May I point out that leading with a work of fiction is not the way to convince people that they are wrong about reality?”

            That’s why my comments led-off with plain-as-day non-fiction primary-document works of legal reality

            The Georgia race registration action [of 1940] provides that anyone who makes an intentionally false statement as to his or her race or color in applying for a marriage license is guilty of a felony … In no less than seven states language is employed which may be construed as prohibiting marriages of whites with persons who have a Negro blood, however remote the strain may be. … No action is needed to invalidate the marriage of a white person and a Negro, the union being null and void ab initio.

            Great humanists like Twain, Kipling, Faulkner, and Heinlein (and many more) vividly portray the human passions, tragedies, and deeds of heroism and violence that are associated to these dry, rational, legal sanctions of subordination … as the above-quoted legal scholar Jerome H. Spingarn called them.

            “If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead.

            We are coming.

             —  Justice advocate Diane Nash

            It’s not easy to stop social justice advocates, is it? Equally in fiction and in reality?

            So shall we say anything other than “Good for the inspiring fiction-writers”?  As Abraham Lincoln is said to have said to Harriet Beecher Stowe “So this is the little lady who started this great war!”

        • Jason K. says:

          Depending on the font that you are using, upper case ‘i’ can be practically indistinguishable from a lower case ‘L’. Does that make the letters mutable? Just because two things are close enough that they can be confused doesn’t make the definition ‘plastic’. Go slap down some pyrite on the counter of your local gold dealer and try the argument that the definition of gold is mutable because sometimes pyrite is mistaken for gold. I can mix yellow and red and get orange. Does that mean the colors are plastic? Just because how the categories are defined can be changed and there are edge cases does not mean the underlying bits being categorized don’t exist.

      • >Race is innate and unchangeable,

        A person’s genes are innate, though even they can change a little.

        Race has changed over time and varies from one place to another, as people change their definitions. Is a person who shows some black ancestry black? Or is a person who shows some white ancestry white? Are Jews white?

        Which version of race are you saying is innate and unchangable?

        • John Schilling says:

          The version that an individual person is born with and will have to live with for the rest of their life. If you are born e.g. black, in the usual sense of the word, you are basically never going to be anything but black no matter how much you feel you don’t fit in with and don’t want to be associated with other black people. The name might change if your society does the euphemism treadmill thing. The way your society treats black people might change. The recognition of “black people” as a racial category is exceedingly unlikely to go away over the course of a single lifetime, so you’re going to be stuck with it.

          A small minority will be able to “pass”, if they so wish, but that’s not generally a viable strategy for dealing with racism.

          • John Sidles says:

            John Schilling opines: “If you are born e.g. black, in the usual sense of the word, you are basically never going to be anything but black no matter how much you feel you don’t fit in with and don’t want to be associated with other black people. […] The recognition of “black people” as a racial category is exceedingly unlikely to go away over the course of a single lifetime, so you’re going to be stuck with it.”

            That view is pretty much the same as Charles S. Magnam’s legal survey The Legal Status of the Negro confidently asserted as recently as 1940:

            The proponents of this [social justice activist] view fail to realize that the present temper of the southern white man would not tolerate a policy permitting mixed marriages.

            Any attempt to so change the law would be doomed to failure. In fact such an effort could only have the result of stirring up the racial prejudice of the white man to such fever heat that it would act as a boomerang against the Negros.

            The white man in the south has made up his mind that he wants no intermarriage against the Negro, and nothing is going to change this attitude as yet, if ever. In fact, the state of Mississippi has enacted a criminal stature punishing anyone for publishing, printing, or circulating any literature in favor of or urging interracial marriage or social equality.

            But Charles S. Magnam’s 1940 legal review, despite being solidly grounded in law and reason, turned out to be dead-wrong in the end … didn’t it? Good!

            Mainly because a critical mass of citizens rejected Magnam’s passive path of legalisms and rationality and inaction, and embraced King’s performative path of humanism, empathy, and engagement.

            Do folks nowadays exploit these hard-won gains of social activism for purposes so inconsequentially irrational as comedy and romance?

            Thankfully, yes.

            And are further social justice gains in-progress, around the world, even today? Social justice gains that presently are foci of anger, demagoguery, and even violence? To eventually become wellsprings even of comedy and romance?

            Also, thankfully yes!

    • J says:

      I’ve been arguing lately that the Left is doing a sort of awkward shift from opposing teams to supporting them. Most of my left-leaning friends are uncomfortable with the notion of nationalism, partly I think because it signals “Red Team”, but partly because they associate teams with oppression.

      Some of them even organized a parlor discussion among friends to try to decide if there was any merit to the idea of nationalism, and couldn’t come up with much, so I tried to help steelman it.

      My argument was: imagine you’re the football team that always easily wins the state championship. We expect you to be gracious in victory, especially around the weaker teams, but team spirit is okay at the appropriate times.

      Now imagine you’re the podunk high school that rarely wins. You have a lot more reason to band together and work hard to perform well against your many neighboring competitors.

      So for nationalism, if you’re from a traditionally powerful country, it makes more sense to be gracious and sensitive to how you treat weaker countries. But if you’re a small landlocked nation surrounded by hostile forces, nationalism may well be necessary for survival.

      • Pku says:

        Anecdotally, I’ve been doing something of an awkward shift from opposing teams to supporting them over the last few years, but this has corresponded pretty well with getting somewhat anti-leftist.

      • “But if you’re a small landlocked nation surrounded by hostile forces, nationalism may well be necessary for survival.” Assuming an absence of co-operative solutions, like banding together ina n EU or African Union arrangment.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Yes, modern leftism is turning against nationalism. Congratulations for noticing that you hold beliefs that contradict each other. That’s because some of them are wrong.

      Nation-states were a Schelling point for international borders for ~200 years. But the races involved were generally social constructed by nationalism for sake of nationalism. They would declare a national language, force everyone to speak it, and declare the speakers of that language to be a race. It’s a lot easier to force the capital language on the provinces if they already speak related languages, ideally dialects. That’s why Basques and Bretons were big hold-outs. The Basques still are, but a whole generation of male Bretons were killed in WWI, solving that problem. But even closely related languages can survive, like Catalan.

    • Saul Degraw says:

      That depends. I suppose it could be but I am a pragmatist and also convinced that most people will never accept a government entity larger than the nation-state. I am sympathetic to the open borders argument. I think the U.S. should let in many more refugees. I have yet to see open boarders advocates craft an argument that non-sympathetically inclined people and/or non-woks can get behind.

    • Adam Casey says:

      You can steelman (and I think quite reasonably) Nationhood as a cultural and linguistic grouping not as an ethnic one. “The Jews” come in lots of different ethnic flavours depending on where there were disaporaed to, but we call all the people who do the passover feast part of the Jewish nation regardless of this.

      That being granted it’s utterly reasonable to want only people of your nation to be part of your state. I’d trust someone born and brought up in the culture of Hong Kong to participate in the UK far more effectively than I’d trust a Frenchman, even if the latter are more genetically similar.

      Being ruled by foreigners is bad in a way that isn’t to do with ethnicity. It’s about being ruled by people who don’t share a culture with you. A yankee might think a bible-belter is pretty damn weird, but they trust eachother to both respect key institutions like free commerce and private property. I don’t think there’s the same cultural bedrock of shared assumptions and norms in somewhere more heterogeneous like Europe. And this analysis holds even if the US is a more genetically diverse place than Europe is.

      • unsafeideas says:

        The problem is not just that foreigners who rule over you do not share your culture. Even if they would share the culture, ruling foreigners have different interests then you. It makes perfect sense for them to design rules that benefit them and they have little reason to care whether they harm you.

        If you are ruled by foreigners, they themselves are not subject to rules they are creating for you if they do not want it. That situation is bound to harm you no matter how compatible or same your cultures are.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Since when is the bible-belter going to trust the yankee to respect free commerce and private property? The yankee is in the habit of forcing the bible-belter to bake gay cakes and pay ruinous Obamacare taxes.

    • Yakimi says:

      You are correct to note that there is a contradiction between the fundamentally exclusionary nature of nation-states in which the nation is largely defined by common descent (a race, if you will), and the moral universalism which these states espouse. Mencius Moldbug noted that the open borders people are essentially right to call national borders a case of Apartheid on an international scale, and that it is inconsistent to oppose Apartheid in one country (like South Africa) but not between countries. To believe in the maintenance of national borders, then, is to be believe in the necessity of Apartheid. This contradiction has been resolving in favor of universalist tendencies as of late, resulting in mass immigration and the worship of diversity as states try to erase nations defined by descent.

      The evolution of fascism from progressivism becomes more obvious if you consider it a case of the contradiction resolving entirely in favor of exclusionary nationalism.

      • Matt says:

        Apartheid was about people being subjugated socially and legally *in the same country*. They weren’t living in a neighboring country, under their own culture and with self determination.

        Radically different situations.

        • Apartheid South Africa set up mini-countries (Bantustans) within the bigger country as part of implementing apartheid.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            South African blacks were officially guest workers with voting rights in a Bantustan that they didn’t live in. I don’t think Matt would count that as “self-determination.”

            It is, however, exactly like the generations of Turkish guest workers in Germany. While the same people eventually condemned this and forced Germany to grant them citizenship, they weren’t complaining in the 80s.

        • Anon. says:

          >Radically different situations.

          Why?

          • Matt says:

            I acknowledge that borders segregate people. I realize this is unfair to individuals born outside of the first world.

            However, there is an inherent social benefit of letting different peoples do their own thing on their own territory. It minimizes conflicts. If it wasn’t for the principle of basically letting other peoples alone, we would be morally obligated to conquer islamic countries and free their women, in the same way they would be obligated to conquer us to stop us from living our immoral lives.

            Suppose a western european country opened it’s borders and was practically overrun by syrian refugees. One of two things would happen: refugees would be forced to live according to western values with are immoral to them or there are enough of them to impose their own values on their host country. How would that not lead to violent conflict?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Matt

            While I agree entirely that there are benefits to allowing people to do their own thing on their own territory, a nation strikes me as much too large a group of people to be able to agree on doing pretty much anything.

            I think an approach that gets much closer to achieving this goal would be strong property rights, freedom of association, freedom of contract, as minimal government as is feasible, and open borders. Refugees can do what they like, on their own property. They can have their Islamic culture, you can have your preferred culture. If anyone’s culture requires demanding everyone else adopts the same culture, then those people are by far the most deserving target of any demands along the lines of “please change your preferences, I find them offensive”.

        • Yakimi says:

          >Apartheid was about people being subjugated socially and legally *in the same country*.

          Pretty moot distinction from a universalist, Rawlsian perspective, and from that of an individual. Speaking as my former progressive self, why should the arbitrary national borders you were randomly born into be the limit of the opportunities you deserve? Why is discrimination and segregation justified when done to “foreigners”? Why should the distinction of being a “foreigner” serve deny any human being the benefits of a First World existence? Why do people have to be segregated into their own countries to enjoy their own cultures? What consolation is “national self-determination” in a time when so many people are eager to flee their own nations for the safety and prosperity of First World countries?

          • John Schilling says:

            A black person living in a nation of just black people, is highly unlikely to live under laws saying that black people can’t go to the best schools, live in the best neighborhoods, hold the best jobs. A black person living in a nation with an apartheid regime very likely will, because that’s the whole point.

            It seems like an individual black person might find this to be a significant difference.

          • Anon. says:

            Except the best schools are in the USA, and US law says they can’t go to the best schools. Even worse, it’s far less likely that they’ll be able to change US law than their own local apartheid laws.

          • John Schilling says:

            The folks at Cambridge and Oxford would like to have a word with you about which nation the best schools are in. And in any event, the best students usually don’t have much trouble crossing the borders to get to the best schools.

            “Nationalism” != “Berlin Wall”. It can, however, mean getting clear of people who would prevent you from building good-enough local schools for students who aren’t going to be traveling halfway around the world for an education.

    • Daniel Armak says:

      The argument for nationalism: different people have different life goals, prefer living in differently organized countries with different culture and religion, and yet that doesn’t mean some of them are objectively wrong and require reeducation. Therefore it’s best for everyone to voluntarily segregate into separate nations, and the ones we’ve got today are mostly homogenous, which is good. When they’re not homogenous enough, if everyone is willing to relocate so that Greens live in one end of the country and Blues in the other, then secession might be to their mutual benefit.

      Inasfar as you’re already heterogenous and integrated, of course you mustn’t discriminate; but integration isn’t necessarily a good thing.

      Saying racism is wrong, in this sense, is the same as saying having political disagreements is wrong, at least when they correlate with race. Suppose there’s a political debate: Christians want the weekly day off to be Sunday, Jews want it to be Saturday, Muslims want Friday, and Discordians want every worker to choose for themselves. No-one is “objectively” right, but everyone wants their religious group to be the political majority and enforce its will on the others. One possible resolution is to voluntarily segregate by religion and make the choice on a state or municipal level.

      Now suppose the Christians are European, the Muslims are Middle Easterners, the Jews are Jews, and the Discordians are recent Mexican immigrants. Suddenly the debate becomes racist. Is it now wrong to segregate? Is it wrong to politically force your preference on the minority? Is there a third way?

      ETA: I’m not arguing for segregation; I’m trying to steelman the argument.

      My example is, of course, a real-world problem; we have it here in Israel. The current solution is that everyone is registered with the state as having a certain ethnicity and religion (which they can’t change at will). Jews have a day off on Saturday, Muslims on Friday, and there aren’t enough Christians to matter, but I think other minorities can choose their own day. The main benefit is that Muslim-run shops get a lot of business from secular Jews on Saturdays.

    • There’s some evidence of the arrow goign in the other direction..groups thinking they are ethnically homegenous (and distinct) because they are politically united.

      And, as a former inhabitant of Belgium..don’t underestimate the importance of language!

    • This is why anti-racists are trying to destroy the concept of the nation-state.

    • Sastan says:

      It’s simpler than all that.

      “Anti-racism” is just code for anti-lower-class-own-racism. Anti-racist sentiments are how middle class people signal to upper class people that they aren’t like those terrible lower class people, who have tribal affilitations and practical problems that won’t let them be quite that stupid. If you’re poor, and the neighborhood is infested with racially segregated violent gangs, you don’t have the luxury of being “anti-racist”. That just signals defection from the only group that will protect you. Hence the success of groups like Nation of Islam and Aryan Nations in the prison system.

      Or, put another way, at some point after a tribe starts the hopscotch on top of Maslows Hierarchy of Needs, the internal factions become more important distinctions than the external ones. There are no threats to Americans, so our internal battles become much more important. Anti-racism is how the wealthy whites can ethnically cleanse the valuable real estate and push the minority problems onto the poorer whites, and gain status while they do it.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        There’s certainly something to the thesis that SJ is a form of classism that Americans have the luxury to indulge in because of a lack of real threats.
        But Switzerland has been safe and rich since before America had a Constitution. Shouldn’t the Swiss have, like, the worst case of Social Justice War?

        • Chalid says:

          They didn’t get universal female suffrage until 1991, so Swiss feminism certainly was not a major force.

      • Berna says:

        >Anti-racism is how the wealthy whites can ethnically cleanse the valuable real estate […]

        I don’t understand this part. How does that work?

        • JDG1980 says:

          He’s probably alluding to Steve Sailer’s argument that a lot of the modern “anti-racist” movement is really about pushing underclass African-Americans out of large cities (where they drive down property values) and into suburbs. This is accomplished by replacing old-style public housing with Section 8 vouchers, and encouraging the recipients of those vouchers to settle in suburban regions. The efforts of the existing suburban residents to enforce middle-class norms of living is a threat to this project, hence the massive demonization of cops in small and mid-size towns like Ferguson for doing police work “too aggressively”.

          • LeeEsq says:

            This seems like just pure projecting. It seems to be just as uncharitable as the opinions many liberals have about libertarianism.

          • LeeEsq says:

            Adding to my original comment, this doesn’t even make sense in regards to St. Louis because St. Louis is not one of the cities that are gentrifying in the United States. There might be some hipster areas but it isn’t New York, Portland, or even Philadelphia by a long stretch.

          • Berna says:

            Thanks for the explanation!

    • eh says:

      May the hammer of Scott fall upon me if my transgressions against the “no race” taboo are unjustified. That said…

      Culture seems to be the basis for modern nationalism. The concept of “race” as ethnoreligiocultural grouping was all the rage early 20th century and before, since the three things were pretty similar. Now, we split the historical concept of “race”[0] into its ethnic, religious, and cultural parts. In other words, there’s a meaningful difference between a cultural nationalist, which is what we usually mean when we say a nationalist and who you might see cheering on a sports team or voting; a religious nationalist, who might be found supporting Israel or Iran, opposing Muslim immigration into Europe, or traveling to fight with ISIS; and an ethnonationalist, who might be found in the identarian movement in Europe, dressed in jackboots with a shaved head at your local neo-Nazi rally, or holding any given position within the ANC in South Africa[1]. The three can be and usually are combined.

      Racism as an -ism would refer to ethnonationalism. Racism as a belief about the state of the world wouldn’t fall into any category. Racism as an act of aggression made on the basis of ethnicity might fit into ethnonationalism, but doesn’t rely on the existence of a nation, and fitting it into that category implies that all ethnonationalists support political violence.

      Counter-examples not only welcome but explicitly begged for.

      [0] Evola’s race of the soul is a good example of an idea that makes no sense if race means the same thing as ethnicity or genetics. The unmentionables talk about thedes a lot, and what someone like Evola or Kipling meant when they talked about race is probably a lot closer to a thede than an ethnic group. Proud lads from Derbyshire stop being proud lads from Derbyshire when they spend three generations in rural New Zealand.

      [1] I’ve tried to list varied examples, not equivalent ones: neo-Nazis are not the same as the ANC in ends or means, Israel and Iran are notable for being quite different, and voting != sportsball.

      • Where does Kipling talk about race?

        In “The White Man’s Burden,” it’s pretty clear that “White Man” is a reference to civilization, not race–consider that in the stories set in Roman Britain the Romans are playing the white man role. You get a similar effect with “An’ for all ‘is dirty ‘ide,/’E was white, clear white, inside/When ‘e went to tend the wounded under fire!”

        • eh says:

          In “The White Man’s Burden,” it’s pretty clear that “White Man” is a reference to civilization, not race

          Which is, in a way, what I mean. Civilisation to Kipling looked European, white, and Christian. I don’t think he drew as great a distinction between Britain the empire, Britain the race, and Britain the culture. For example, “Lesser breeds without the Law” is a fuck-you to Germany, but also links German lineage and German militarism in a way few modern writers would. Race for Kipling and for many others of his era reads as more than genetic.

          • As I pointed out, in the two Roman stories the “white man” civilization is Roman. Judging by the hymn to Mithra, not Christian. I don’t think Kipling was particularly Christian himself–the impression I get is a somewhat vague theism, with more use of Old Testament than new as references in the poetry.

            Technological civilization was European at the time he was writing, although Japan was beginning to come online. But it’s pretty clear from works such as _Kim_ that he didn’t think of all non-Europeans as the sort of people it was the burden of Europeans to bring towards the light.

            Where does Kipling use the term “race?” No examples come immediately to mind. He writes about the English, positively or negatively depending on context, but I can’t think of references that lump together all white European Christians.

          • eh says:

            I may have hallucinated a Kipling poem, since I remember some lines about Sheffield and Derbyshire, the Panama Canal, and “the English race” that don’t appear anywhere, in Kipling’s work or otherwise.

            As such, ignore what I said, and sorry for this whole thing.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            Race for Kipling and for many others of his era reads as more than genetic.

            I think a key here may be what people of that era meant by ‘blood’. It meant what we call ‘DNA’, but its facets included psychological and spiritual qualities, and perhaps some of what Chesterton called ‘instincts’.

            Kipling’s _His Chance in Life_ is … another country.
            www gutenberg org /files/1858/1858-h/1858-h.htm#link2H_4_0010

            Notes, and links to other sources.
            www kiplingsociety.co.uk / rg_hischance1.htm

    • PGD says:

      Favoring your own children over the children of other families is also quite racist but people seem to think there is value in it.

      • John Schilling says:

        If the other families in question are of the same race as your own, how is this racist?

        • Anonymous says:

          Surely all families in the world are in question, since you could in principle choose to help out pretty much any child anywhere if you really wanted to?

          In which case, unless there is only one race in the world, which there isn’t, by helping out your family you’re favoring people of your own race over the other possible families you could have favored, most of them of a different race to yours.

          • John Schilling says:

            And if I start a business, then I become a racist on the day I hire my first employee because I have favored a person of one race over all the other people I could have favored, most of them of different races?

            Or am I only a racist if the person I hire is of my own race?

            You seem to be using the word “racist”, and for that matter “favor”, in a very different manner than I would, and I’m not sure what your version is intended to communicate.

          • Anonymous says:

            “I’m not sure what your version is intended to communicate.”

            To be honest… pedantry.

          • Linch says:

            You could, of course, just bite the consistency bullet and not have children until the cost of saving another’s child comes within an order of magnitude as having your own.

            (Not sure how generalizable this advice is though…)

          • Anonymous says:

            @Linch

            That depends on you caring about other people’s children as much as your own, which I expect almost nobody does, nor can I see any reason to think that anyone should.

          • Deiseach says:

            That only works even theoretically if I am childless and favour children of my siblings/neighbours over children in Africa that I could be helping.

            If I have children of my own, I am obligated to look after them. Unless you recommend I give up my newborn baby

          • Linch says:

            I totally get the argument for why special relationships take priority over global suffering. Totally! Whether it is correct or not is another matter, but I think most people can agree that we do not have a moral obligation to *create* a special relationship.

            So I’m agnostic about whether you should value your child over the lives of 100+ other children, but pretty strongly in the camp of “you should not value an existent child over 100 actual children actually dying.”

        • PGD says:

          By favoring your children you favor those of your genetic lineage over those of another genetic lineage. The biological element of race is all about genetic lineage. By definition your children are the closest people to you racially who exist on earth, except for your parents or siblings. (Not sure if you really can’t see this or are ignoring it for some reason).

      • Zippy says:

        Those who favor family over nonfamily are just a kind of racist with an extremely picky standard of what constitutes the “master race”.

        Steven Kaas

        • Publius Varinius says:

          Everyone is just a kind of racist.

          Those who favor humans over nonhumans are just a kind of racist with a somewhat lax standard of what constitutes the “master race”.

          Those who favor mammals over nonmammals are just a kind of racist with a lax standard of what constitutes the “master race”.

          Those who favor living beings over inorganic matter are just a kind of racist with an extremely lax standard of what constitutes the “master race”.

  78. Chalid says:

    Any rationalist/scientific thoughts on parenting? My goal would be to be happy and to have a happy family, and for the child to be able to be at least middle-class; I don’t highly prioritize instilling a particular set of values except as necessary for happiness.

    Things I see are

    a) genetics and chance largely determine outcomes, parenting doesn’t matter much for outcomes as long as it’s not extremely bad.
    b) avoid lead and cigarettes, and other environmental poisons.
    c) quality of the peer group matters
    d) people stress way too much about rare dangers like kidnapping

    a) implies don’t worry too much. b) and c) support living in an expensive neighborhood and/or sending them to a private school – the more expensive the better – and d) doesn’t really suggest any course of action beyond making sure your friends have some grounding in statistics.

    What am I missing?

    • Since the child will socialize to the peer group, even a relatively good school may be a mistake if you don’t regard current teen culture highly. You might want to consider home schooling or, in my view better, home unschooling. For my thoughts on the subject see:

      http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=unschooling

      • Chalid says:

        That was very interesting. Thank you!

        I did not see any mention of how you thought about promoting their social lives without school. Was this an issue?

        I don’t really have an opinion on current teen culture – my child is 9 months old – but I think that even if I did have a low opinion of it I would want her to be familiar enough with it to be able to navigate it; those teens would ultimately turn into her coworkers a decade later.

        • Teen culture has virtually nothing to do with adult culture in the workplace… or anyplace else, for that matter. In my experience, it didn’t even have any bearing on what I encountered in college.

          • Chalid says:

            Hmm yes that came out wrong. I’d think it would be important for her to have developed social skills; being able to navigate teen culture would indicate success in that.

            But even then I think there’s a body of common cultural knowledge that is helpful – not “teen” culture specifically, but stuff that people generally acquire as teens. To take a trivial example, being able to talk fluently about football is very useful both socially and professionally.

          • I have not found the inability to talk fluently about football (or basketball or baseball) a serious handicap.

          • Basiles says:

            I can talk about football all day and I learned it on my own, being from a country that calls a different sport football (funnily enough, I much prefer American).

        • My daughter’s social life has been almost entirely online, which has both advantages and disadvantages–a couple of her friends, for instance, are Chilean. She went to college, got along well with adults but made almost no friends her own age, possibly due to not being socialized to their culture. Her brother at college got along with fellow gamers, some of whom he still interacts with online.

          I wouldn’t say either had a very active social life–but neither did their parents, and we were not home schooled.

          People who home school often arrange social interaction, either with other home schooled kids or through boy scouts and the like. We occasionally attended a gathering at a local park of home schooling families, but the only benefit was that my son acquired some people to come over once a week for a role playing game that he DM’d. Our daughter attended (with her mother) a weekly early music get together and a weekly renaissance dance get together (we’re in the SCA), which gave her social interaction, but mostly with adults.

          • PSJ says:

            I personally appreciate the ability to have non-traditional social lives, but from an optimization standpoint it seems like it would de facto bar your children from a lot of high-paying careers (finance, consulting, makes getting tenure harder, any board or management positions, anything highly based on interviewing). Traditional social skills still have a lot of economic value if nothing else.

            Although these are also a lot of careers generally dismissed by the rationalist community, so maybe that’s not a problem at all 🙂

          • Linch says:

            Really? Finance and consulting are among the top suggested careers by 80K hours, along with CS and Econ PhDs.

          • LTP says:

            “My daughter’s social life has been almost entirely online, which has both advantages and disadvantages”

            Would do think these are?

            A pro is that she can self-select people like her, and also avoid bullies and incompatible people. Also this would benefit her writing skills.

            Cons would be that she misses out on the suggested psychological benefits of face-to-face community, she doesn’t learn to read body language, probably she gets out of the house less in general, and doesn’t have as much or any opportunity for physical affection, platonic or otherwise. Also, internet friendships tend to be less intimate.

            To be honest, I see this as a net negative of homeschooling (if you attribute it to that), but I’m probably projecting myself onto the situation.

          • PSJ:

            1. I have tenure. In a field in which I have never taken a course for credit in my life. And I have taught (but not gotten tenure) at good schools in another field in which the same is true. Conventional paths may be easier, but one publication in a top journal is a pretty good substitute for the more usual credentials.

            2. I don’t think either of my children wants the sort of career in which you work nine to five in an office as an employee. My daughter is developing a career as an online free lance editor, my son is trying to get his first novel published. While I realize both of those paths have some uncertainty, they strike me as a sensible gamble.

            3. I first encountered a home schooling family back in the sixties. Two boys. One of them currently runs the Federalist Society.

            I suspect that the sort of kid likely to be into social skills can develop them even while home schooled, since there are lots of other contexts to interact with people in. And he may end up with a more functional set of skills as a result of not developing them in the rather odd context of an age segregated population. My daughter, in college, interacted well with adults, including both her professors and her advisor, who happened to be the dean of students. And it’s pretty easy to avoid developing those skills even in a conventional school, as I gather some here can testify.

          • Airgap says:

            I suspect that David’s children were genetically predisposed to being huge nerds like their father, and that homeschooling did not affect this. I’ve met members of the homeschooled who were normal. They were probably born that way.

          • Matt C says:

            Along these lines, we homeschool, and my kids are kind of weird. I’m sure some people who meet my daughter think we warped her with homeschooling, and she would be less odd and less shy if she hadn’t been shut away from the real world.

            However, I have a bit of extra insight, having been weird in ways fairly similar to my daughter. Probably weirder. Sending me to public school didn’t change that, and I don’t think it would for my daughter either.

            Chalid, we have put considerable amount of effort (for a couple of introverts) into getting our kids interacting with other kids. Most of our socialization is with other homeschoolers (a fairly weird group of them). We did 4-H for a few years and our kids interacted with more normal kids there, but never really connected too well.

            I have some real concerns about the lack of street smarts my kids have. We’ve discussed sending them to school for a year to get them some experience with deceptive/charming/malicious people, but we haven’t actually done it and probably won’t do it. They’ll probably take a lump or two as they get out further into the wide world, I just hope not too serious.

          • Cliff says:

            David:

            “While I realize both of those paths have some uncertainty, they strike me as a sensible gamble.”

            Really?? This causes me to question your judgment overall

          • Cliff:

            I’ve managed to succeed with a non-conventional career path. I think it likely my children can do the same. So far my daughter has had at least as much work as she wanted. To be fair, she’s been charging a relatively low price for her editing, but that is because she is just starting and needs to get established.

            If my son is unable to get published, he can always go back for a final year at Chicago. But my guess is that it will not prove necessary.

            I am, of course, biased, but I also have more data than you do.

          • I had a friend in grad school at Caltech who was homeschooled… then started college at age 10, and graduate studies in physics at Caltech at age 15. He didn’t seem to have any social problems. He had a few rough edges, but no more than the typical 15 year old.

          • To provide a little anecdotal evidence, in case anyone is curious – hi, test subject here…

            Re – PSJ

            Actually, by what I can tell, I tend to do very well in interviews (at least, the only ones I’ve had, which were college, not professional). If I’m being sensible and rational, I theorize that it’s because I’m socialized to deal with adults much like those interviewing me, rather than to deal with teens, and hence am signaling being a part of their culture as opposed to the teenage one, which tends to make them like me; if I’m a bit more biased, I theorize that it’s because I avoided getting burned out/burned in general by high school, and could therefore talk cheerfully about interesting things without being scared of offending people/having already had my enthusiasm for academics worn away – that I could say with complete honesty that I was disappointed when a class was canceled. (I didn’t; I’m not stupid, and no interviewer would believe that. But I in fact thought so when one of my classes was canceled in my second year of college, and I suspect the same attitude that caused that was visible in the interviews.)

            … certainly people commenting on how I interview usually comment on that specific thing. Apparently most people’s eyes don’t light up when talking about renaissance dancing. I can see that would be a major disadvantage in some social settings, but I’ve never yet found it to be one.

            Re – LTP

            Avoiding bullies is absolutely positively a huge advantage. (See above comments on not getting burned.) Being fluent in written English is also a significant advantage. As a teenager, I felt that being able to interact with people of my maturity, without anyone being able to tell what age I was, was also an advantage – while I was part of realworld adult social communities as a teenager, I was quite clearly junior (not just in how people treated me, a lot of it was how I reacted to them as well) and online communities, where there was no mandatory (or semi-mandatory) age ordering, got around that nicely (and tended to shove me into leadership or leadership-adjacent positions as a result, which I think was very good for me).

            … then again, while the friends I made in my mid-teens varied, most of the friends I made around my very late teens/early twenties turned out to be within a few years of me. They were a set friendgroup I joined, so that may confound it, but since nobody knew anyone else’s age – and most of us were non-conformists who all felt more comfortable with adults than “kids our own ages” – I still find that result very weird.

            I doubt I missed out on much in the way of psychological benefits of face-to-face community while I was living at home, because I had face-to-face community – the SCA contacts my father mentioned. When I lost those I had trouble finding replacements, but that was partially because I was stuck on a college campus and could not drive (I knew there were good communities available and where they were, I just couldn’t get to them). I read body language reasonably as an adult; I don’t remember how I was as a kid. I do get out of the house less in general*, and crushing on online friends does not work very well for obtaining a boyfriend. Especially when the one who reciprocates turns out to live in Chile. So both of those criticisms are spot-on.

            *Though I had harp lessons and volunteering at the local library and riding lessons and stuff, and activities at least half the nights of the week, so I wasn’t entirely stuck at home either.

            And… internet friendships are not less intimate. At least in my experience. Really really are not. They can be less effective – you can’t make someone cookies or go over to help them out when they’re sick – but you absolutely can stay up to three AM sharing secrets and talk about the things you worry about most and be a supportive friend when they need a shoulder to cry on (or the other way around) and and and. Lack of intimate friendships was not an issue. Getting too involved in friendships, such that my homework got done at the last minute because I was spending all my time talking to my friends, was sometimes an issue. >.> (This was in college; homeschooling did not involve homework. College was probably a useful experience – as a job would have been – just to get used to really working.)

            I don’t seem to have trouble connecting to other adults as an adult, besides a certain degree of shyness which, judging from my mother, would probably not be any better and might be significantly worse if I had gone to public school.

            I do lack a good deal of common culture – it mostly shows up in the context of movies/TV shows and music, also occasionally books, rather than football, since none of the social groups I’m part of place a high value on sports, but some of them do expect everyone to have seen Buffy – but it usually hasn’t been an issue; most of my friends seem to classify it under “charming eccentricity” rather than “not-our-tribe marker.” This may be related to online friendships – most groups I’ve been part of are non-homogeneous enough that nobody shared everything, what with members not even necessarily all being from the same country, so it isn’t a major problem. Except, it seems to be true of my real-world groups too, so…?

            On the whole I’m in favor of homeschooling, as is probably clear from my comments. I think there are things I’d do differently with my own kids, but “not homeschool” is probably not one of them.

          • LTP says:

            Interesting response Rebecca (I didn’t even know you posted here!). It sounds like I was projecting my experiences a bit.

            I wonder how much of this has to do with one’s opinion’s on their parents? My parents had good hearts, but I feel like if I had spent most of my waking hours around them most of my psychological issues around socializing would have been even worse given their personalities. Also, I very much fear that if I was homeschooled I would have had no reason to fight my social anxiety and I would have become an agoraphobic shut-in.

            My intuition is that homeschooling only works if you have parents who are educated, financially well-off, and relatively emotionally healthy. Most people don’t have parents who hit all three of those criteria.

            My ideal is very different than current public education, but it would still involve being out of the house 6-8 hours a day, and being around professional educators rather than your parents.

            I’m glad it worked out of you though! I think there are a variety of educational methods that are effective depending on the child and parents and life situation.

          • Well, usually I don’t – see “a certain degree of shyness”. ^^ But I am definitely a lurker, and this seemed worth chiming in for.

            I think a huge amount of it depends on how you get on with your parents. I both liked them and found them very good people to be around – dad you’ve met, and my mom had a tendency to have these surprising insights on moral problems that none of my friends did, for some odd reason that couldn’t be connected to decades of life experience plus actually thinking about these things. (She also had about infinite patience, and the ability to take an interest in a huge variety of subjects, which was incredibly useful.) And both of them thought the way I did. For kids who don’t get on with their parents, homeschooling would probably be a disaster – no argument there.

            As far as psychological stuff… mmm. The thing is, there’s a lot of stuff I think I would have done worse with in an environment where I couldn’t leave. I spent a lot of time as a child avoiding things that scared me (for example, bugs) – but I don’t think that made it worse; as I grew up, I started learning to deal with stuff that scared me, and deciding on my own to do so. Shyness slowly evaporating was part of that, and I think a lot of how it was able to do so was that it never got reinforced. This is purely my own case, mind, and I don’t have any really serious issues, and they would probably be harder to deal with if I did – but at least in my case, mostly being allowed to avoid stuff that scared me left me perfectly capable of growing out of it.

            (That said, I can’t actually know what would have happened if I’d been educated more traditionally. Just that at least for me, my method of education does not seem to have been drastically harmful. ^^)

            And completely agreed on the last paragraph! People are different. That’s one of the nice things about having a diversity of educational methods – people can find one that specifically works for them (or their child).

        • bluto says:

          When I home schooled more than a few years ago, there was an active home school group that would set up field trips, once a week bowling (it was during the day so very inexpensive), and various other social activities. Also, check your state’s rules, the state allowed home schooled students to take any classes they wish wished, and participate in after school sports so long as my family covered all the transportation. So I could play in the jazz band and play sports as desired.

        • T. Greer says:

          I strongly recommend you read Paul Graham’s article “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

          It shows quite well, I think, that teen high school culture is about as far away from normal social relations in adult society as can be imagined. He proposes that the closest analogue to high school social hierarchies is found in prison. And when you read his explanation you will agree with him.

          P.S. If you are worried about them not understanding football, watch football with them.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            That essay is amazing. Thank you for it.

          • Murphy says:

            Luther: A high school…
            …its a lot like prison.
            Bad food, high fences.
            The sex you want, you ain’t getting.
            The sex you getting…
            …you don’t want.
            I seen terrible things.

            Dizzy: Yesterday, an eighty-year-old librarian broke my penis.

            Luther: You win.

          • Chalid says:

            That is interesting and very foreign to my experience. I guess I’ve always been pretty nerdy but all the schools I went to were pretty academically focused and urban – lots of children of immigrants in elementary and middle school, and high school was a magnet school.

            Was I just oblivious? Or do the above (and other traits? which ones?) reduce nerd-hate?

          • I think his essay probes too much..it implies that non US high schools should be much more like US high schools than they are. Brought up multiple times int he comments.

          • onyomi says:

            Great essay. I have long thought that it was very unnatural the way schools put groups of children all roughly the same age together to essentially create their own, cruel, mini society. It is interesting, though, how the author points out it’s not so much their age that is the problem, but the lack of purpose or connection to a bigger world (with the example of adults in prison being at least as cruel and petty and popularity-focused).

            Instead of spending 10,000+ per student, maybe we should go back to the old schoolhouse days with the older students teaching the younger students all in one big room?

          • disciplinaryarbitrage says:

            This was a very good essay, thanks for posting it.

            The funny thing is, though, my middle and high school experiences diverged really strongly from what was described here, and the horror stories so many people relate on the web. I say this having been a stick-thin, pimply-faced kid with questionable hygiene and a paid membership to my high school’s Dungeon’s and Dragons club–I’d have been eminently castable as someone’s nerdy younger brother in a teen movie at the time. And yet I can recall zero incidents of anything that might be called ‘bullying’ happening to me, let alone ongoing campaigns of terror.

            Further yet, the hardened status hierarchies suggested here and everywhere else in American media were much fuzzier than commonly portrayed. My social circles including a patchwork of music and drama kids, smart jocks, slackers, and true nerds, all spanning a pretty big range of apparent status and without the sort of cruel displays of dominance described here and elsewhere. (What isolated bits of horribleness I was privy to mostly seemed focused on intra-group behavior policing among girls.) In and out groups were definitely present, but there seemed to be a generally peaceful coexistence between somewhat-porous groups. Maybe I’m just oblivious, but old friends have affirmed similar experiences and perceptions.

            Murphy mentions a similar experience above but mentions a few mitigating factors (immigrant culture, magnet schools) that might drive better behavior. I went to a big and good-but-not-amazing school in a fairly diverse first-ring suburb, which hardly had the sense of shared purpose or ambition of a more expensive community. So similarly, I’m curious–all the tendencies noted in the article above notwithstanding, what accounts for school cultures that avoid the Lord of the Flies trap?

          • Like Chalid and disciplinaryarbitrage, I find Paul Graham’s essay interesting, but it doesn’t really describe the culture at the secondary school I attended here in England. My school was a comprehensive in a not particularly well-off (though also not particularly deprived) area, not the kind of school whose pupils you’d expect to be particularly focused on academic achievement. But I don’t think a division between nerds and non-nerds existed. Certainly there were people with more nerdy personalities and interests, and to the extent that nerdiness is correlated with low social skills, the nerds were less popular; but it was the social skills that mattered, not the nerdiness. And nerds would associate just as much with non-nerds as other nerds; they didn’t think of themselves as a separate social group, and they didn’t use the term “nerd” (or any equivalent) to describe themselves, nor did other people use it to describe them.

            But there was, I think, a way in which the pupils at my school were divided into two relatively discrete groups, and these two groups did to some extent recognize themselves as separate entities. The division wasn’t absolute, of course, but it was there in a way that the nerd / non-nerd distinction wasn’t. It’s hard to tell exactly what it was based on, because you can’t tell everything about a person’s background by sight, but I suspect it was mostly based on class. Children in the more working-class group tended to have more markedly non-standard accents, sometimes smoked cigarettes or (more rarely) weed, sometimes got pregnant during their school years (if they were girls) and were often “rebels” in class (that was the term people used–they made a show of not taking academic work seriously and were engaged in a constant low-level revolt against the school uniform requirements). Children in the more middle-class group had more standard accents, rarely smoked, never got pregnant, and tended to only get in trouble inadvertently and to regret it when they did rather than considering it as enhancing their covert prestige.

            Both groups thought they were better than the other group, but they didn’t try to enforce their norms on each other. You couldn’t say one group was more “popular” than the other. A nerd who tried to get in with the working-class group might have some problems with people mocking them, but there was no reason why they should do that: they could just hang around with people from the middle-class group, and people from the other group wouldn’t bother them then.

            Most of the pupils in the working-class group didn’t stay on to do further education, so the sixth form had a more uniformly middle-class culture.

            (Appendix for confused Americans: In England, pupils leave secondary school at age 16 or 17, i.e. between the sophomore and junior year of high school in the USA. They can then choose to do what’s called further education, which takes up what Americans would call the junior and senior years of high school and is a requirement for higher education. It is either done at a separate institution called a college, or at a sub-institution within a secondary school called a sixth form. After leaving secondary school, many people stay on at the school’s sixth form, if it has one.)

            (Also, I know I shouldn’t be because people have different experiences, but I’m surprised that there are still people on the Internet who haven’t read that Paul Graham essay.)

          • stillnotking says:

            I think Graham’s experience was an outlier. I went to high school in the late ’80s, not so long after him that it should be vastly different, yet it was. (I only attended public school through the 9th grade, then went to a private boarding school — which was, as one would expect, much better in every way. I’m talking about my public-school experience here.)

            There were social strata, and kids were concerned with popularity. However, the divisions were not as stark as Graham describes. I was definitely a nerd, but I had friends — in some cases, very good friends — who were jocks and cheerleaders. Physical bullying was quite rare, and was considered boorish. (Since this was the American South, being a bully made you a “grit” — a previous generation would’ve called them “white trash”.) The biggest divisions, in fact, were class-related: the smart kids and the popular kids versus the ignorant rednecks. The gap was bridged by the “rebels” or “freaks”, who tended to draw about evenly from both strata… although even among them, there was a noticeable difference between “kids going through a rebellious phase” and “kids who get the shit kicked out of them at home”.

            The quality of the education on offer wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t as dreadful as Graham’s school. Teachers were familiar with the material — the odd football coach excepted — and our school’s Academic Challenge team was pretty good. If it wasn’t the most glamorous of extracurricular activities, it wasn’t a social kiss of death either. Bus trips to academic competitions were notorious for their make-out sessions (I rarely participated, but I did get offers which I was too shy to accept).

          • Ydirbut says:

            stillnotking: That is extremely similar to my experiences at fairly normal highschool in a small city in the South.

          • Bruce Beegle says:

            T. Greer:
            Very nice essay. For several reasons, my time in school wasn’t as bad as Paul Graham’s, but every part of the essay rang true.

          • onyomi says:

            I kind of wish my high school had had more physical bullying. It would have been nicer.

          • Walter says:

            This article strikes me as right on the money. I was a nerd, suffered through high school, things more or less as he describes.

      • nope says:

        Which of you stays home with the kids? And is it possible to home-unschool and still have a career?

        • nope:

          Assuming your question was to me (hard to follow the threading):

          My wife retired early (as an oil geologist) a year or so before we had our first child. I was an academic with a flexible schedule, so could be home quite a lot of the time.

          When the children were little, there had to be an adult around most of the time. When they got to school age, they went for a while to a small and unconventional private school run on unschooling lines. When problems developed with that, we switched to home unschooling.

          I think any career that can be done from home would be consistent with home unschooling–it doesn’t take up a lot of the adult’s time, although it takes some. We could probably have managed if my wife had also been an academic, scheduling so one of us was usually home and, if not, hired a babysitter. But if both of us had nine to five jobs, we would have had to have some sort of regular child care to cover for us.

    • A further implication of (a) is that you shouldn’t take an extended leave from the workforce to raise your child. Hire a nanny, even if it costs most of your paycheck, so you can stay in the workforce. Kids don’t get a huge benefit from a stay-at-home parent, but they do get a large benefit from a big college fund, which you can afford more easily if you don’t have a big gap in your work experience.

      • Chalid says:

        We did this and are very happy with the decision. Aside from the logic you gave, I’d add that you can take so much more joy in a child if you can get breaks from them. At least in the infant stage; can’t speak for anything older.

      • I liked my nannies better than my parents.

        I don’t think my parents appreciated that outcome, but I don’t know what other result they were expecting.

    • Hari Seldon says:

      I think you are pretty spot on. I have several children and I will agree wholeheartedly with a).

      I feel like I was unfairly misled by our culture’s love affair with blank-slatism. You have to accept that your children will very likely share your most and least flattering traits. My kids are very smart, easily do well in school, and seem to have a natural distaste for violence. They are not good at creating close relationships but can be very skilled at manipulating others and putting on a false front. They are prone to compulsive behaviors and anxiety. The teenagers suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts.

      Somehow, I believed that my kids wouldn’t have any of my flaws. However, my two teenagers are practically clones of me. My wife pretty much has no flaws and I have hidden mine from her pretty well. She sees these negative traits in our children and thinks she is doing something wrong. I love my kids and can’t imagine my life without any of them. However, I am not sure I would have had so many if I’d had a realistic conception of how much exactly they would be inheriting from me.

      Not all of them are clones of me and their individual personalities are pretty apparent even before they can talk. Short of extreme measures, I don’t believe you can change that basic algorithm. But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        My wife pretty much has no flaws and I have hidden mine from her pretty well.

        I hope that somewhere on someone else’s blog, she’s saying the converse 🙂

        • Linch says:

          Yes, that would be explain the apparent contradiction between a mother that has no flaws and the child inheriting *all* of the father’s. 😛

      • Linch says:

        “You have to accept that your children will very likely share your most and least flattering traits.”

        That has not been my experience. My parents are pretty smart (PhDs and Master’s), but I think it’s reasonable to say that I’m significantly more intelligent than my parents (hurray having enough calories and iodine growing up!). My father is probably somewhere above the 95th percentile for conscientiousness, I’m almost unbelievably lazy/a procrastinator, despite 14+ years of life being shamed by my parents for not working hard enough. (Today, I still consider my lack of conscientiousness my ONE greatest flaw). My parents care immensely about how tasty food is; switching to Soylent was easy for me (except for the cost that I do agonize about). My father has trouble paying more than 10% in tips to waitresses (despite having a wife who worked as one for years); I’m pretty much dead set on improving the world as much as I possibly can. I am also half a foot taller than my father.

        So I think environmental factors play a huge role.

        • Cliff says:

          “So I think environmental factors play a huge role.”

          Not a good conclusion to draw from the proceeding story. Data point of 1 and all.

          • Linch says:

            Well, everybody generalizes from a single data point. I mean, I do it…:P

            But in this case the Foundation guy (from parent comment) didn’t exactly have that many more data points either, and I think your demand for rigor is a tad isolated.

            (Also, in a pedantic sense my claim is literally true. I mentioned IQ and height, and I don’t think anybody could seriously argue that eg. most of the height differential between North and South Koreans can be explained by genetics. So I contend that at least in my case vis a vis. my parents environment is likely to have played a significant role.

            I would also argue that intelligence and height are seen as fairly significant traits by the culture at large. (Though maybe not as important as personality?)

            Of course, the low-hanging fruits are probably already taken by most readers of this blog)

    • Wouter says:

      I assume you’re American or British. Consider teaching your child another language from a young age, preferably a language spoken in a country that has cheap subsidized higher education of decent quality. That way, there are education options other than “pay enormous amounts of money for college”.

      • Chalid says:

        Oh that’s a good one that I was wondering about.

        Seems like there’s some research suggesting knowing multiple languages has cognitive benefits. Unfortunately I’m essentially monolingual so having my kids learn another language would require specialized schooling, and I’m not sure it’s worth the opportunity cost – if I could choose between my kids knowing French vs knowing C and Java (for example) then probably the computer languages are better?

        • Devilbunny says:

          Duolingo will teach you another language for free. I can’t speak with any authority about how good it can actually make you, but it certainly feels like I’m picking up on Spanish. Whereas, unless you’re fairly certain they want to be programmers, there’s little reason I can see to teach both C and Java (says the nonprogrammer who took CS 101-102 in college, taught in C++, it was enough for a basic introduction to CS concepts). Pick one and go with it.

          The bigger problem is finding people to practice with.

          • Daniel Armak says:

            Correction: unless you’re fairly certain you want *to program*, which a lot of non-programmers do, and a lot more would arguably benefit from doing.

            Not that C, C++ or Java are the best / most useful languages to teach non-professionals, OR the best first languages to teach programmers in CS101, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion…

          • bartlebyshop says:

            Re Duolingo:

            When I was young, I lived in a German speaking country for four years, and got good enough at German I would have been in the native speakers’ literature class if I hadn’t moved back to North America.

            Over the 12 years since, I’ve lost almost all of my ability to speak German spontaneously, but I can still read and write without much trouble. This is where Duolingo struggles, I think. It will enable you to read the newspaper, or a novel that’s been translated from another language. You would probably also be able to do basic things like order in restaurants or tell the doctor in the ER which part of your body hurts and how much! But a casual back and forth, using grammar beyond the stuff that marks you as an obvious learner, isn’t tested much AFAICT. You can tell in English when people are new – they always use simple constructions like “I sing on Wednesday” or “The package will arrive at 5pm” but if they have to produce something with a few tenses – “I’m going to soccer on the weekend, and I would have signed up for Sunday, except then I couldn’t see Game of Thrones” – it’s a struggle.

            It also doesn’t incorporate a lot of material from previous lessons. I find when speaking to someone I suddenly want to use a preterite while I’m talking about science and I panic trying to think of how to make it (or vice-versa I remember the verb but can’t remember if it’s “physiciste” or “physicienne” in French). But on Duolingo, it tends to be the case that the later vocabulary lessons don’t use a lot of the material from the verb conjugation lessons. In the “matching” tasks you sometimes have to remember animal names/”what is the verb for kissing” but it’s rare that they ask you to say something like “The bee would have been eaten by the birds.”

            You also don’t have to write prose. When I was taking German classes we pretty commonly had to read a novel or long article and summarize it in our own words or have a discussion about it. I found this very helpful, but of course it’s quite difficult to replicate with a free app. I also used to (and still do sometimes) watch the news or listen to podcasts because comprehending people who are speaking quickly, the first time, (Duolingo lets you repeat the phrase as often as you need), is an important skill for conversation. It also tends to expose you to a variety of accents, which Duolingo also doesn’t have a lot of for the languages I’ve tried.

            tl;dr I like Duolingo and I’d recommend it to get to the reading/listening to the news level and then you can branch out from there.

          • Devilbunny says:

            @Daniel Armak: I have encountered quite a lot of people who say “learning to code is good”, and yet I have encountered almost zero places where one can learn how to code something practical. I took an entire year of college-level computer science. I am aware that CS is not simply “how to code”, and I did learn a lot of other things, but the fact is that I spent a year learning about it and still couldn’t write anything but a text-based program for Unix.

            Reddit’s dailyprogrammer is similar – lots of algorithms. Algorithms, algorithms everywhere (even though, for the vast majority of situations, you can look up the best algorithm to use and choose from any of a dozen reference implementations), but not even a little bit about how to write a simple calculator app.

          • Who wouldn't want to be Anonymous says:

            @Devilbunny

            You’re complaining about learning arithmetic because you can just use a calculator; after twelve years of math in school you can’t even do a simple conic section!

            Jumping straight into high level programming (which is usually coded as “practical”) without spending significant time on the order of years building fundamentals is like trying to teach calculus in kindergarten. Sure, after a little while you could get the kids to push symbols around and come up with the right answer, but there is basically zero chance they actually understand what they are doing.

            If you are married to “practicality,” you can certainly use a calculator or look up the “right” method to use. But if you do then you will be wondering why so many professional scientists fundamentally misunderstand the statistics they are trying to apply.

            More to the point: programming is algorithms.

            Edit:
            If you want a real life example where programming fundamentals matter consider Elite: Dangerous. It is a spaceflight sim (they sold me at “simulation of the entire galaxy”) where you “jump” between adjacent systems but fly around inside the system. Pretty standard space game stuff. But since the galaxy is freaking huge, getting anywhere requires making insane amounts of jumps, which requires a sophisticated route planner. Traveling and looking at the pretty stars is about 75% of the game, so getting the route planner right is a big deal. (Blowing people up in pseudo-aerodynamic flight model is the other 25%.)

            At launch, they were basically using a reference implementation of a graph search algorithm to plot routes. It was utter, laughably, completely broken. To the point that trying to use it in certain locations (e.g., near the galactic core where there are an insane number of neighbors) would hang the game.

            After getting screamed at for a couple months by paying customers, a programmer sat down after dinner and rewrote the algorithm between episodes on netflix. An order of magnitude improvement of a core function of your £1.5m program in a couple hours is a pretty huge deal.

          • Saint_Fiasco says:

            I spent a year learning about it and still couldn’t write anything but a text-based program for Unix.

            Text-based programs are some of the most useful programs a non-programmer can learn to write.

            You could make a program that checks eBay every day and mails you a list of links to interesting products, where “interesting” is defined by an algorithm that has no user interface at all.

            You can make a program that checks your email and when it sees one with a certain subject line, it opens it and starts downloading the link in the message body. Put that program in your home PC and you can download things from the office without actually using your office’s Internet bandwidth for personal stuff, which is admittedly more of a third-world problem because bandwidth is expensive here.

            Is there anything computer-related you do that can be automated?

          • Chalid says:

            It was just an example, and while it’s easy to think of life paths where knowing a computer language won’t be useful, it’s even easier to think of life paths where knowing Spanish won’t be useful.

            I took Spanish to the AP level and got a 5 on the exam, which probably puts me in the 99.9th percentile of Spanish skill for people who purely learned the language in a “normal” school (and I’d guess way better than Duolingo can do for you), and the only thing it ever did for me was let me watch some terrible TV and eavesdrop on strangers on the bus. And after a few years I couldn’t even do that. I went to Spain a decade after that and couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, and vice versa.

        • brad says:

          Even though they are both called languages I don’t think learning french and a programming language have much in common in terms of indirect cognitive benefits.

          I also agree with devilbunny, that I can’t see much reason for a child born since the millennium to ever learn c and java. Actually that statement works almost as well for c or java. They’ll still be people writing in them circa 2030 but they’ll both be niche languages. If I had a bright child 13-14 years old or older right now that wanted to learn to program I’d probably start with python. Younger than that maybe MIT’s SCRATCH.

          • magicman says:

            Scratch is terrific. I strongly encourage everyone who wants to learn programming (Children and Adults) to begin with it. It depends on the child but i think Scratch to Python is a big leap. I have had success with Processing as an intermediate step. It is very visual which I think is good for keeping children interested and it combines well with simple CS-Real World projects. i made a Arduino/Processing drawing robot with my ten year nephew recently.

    • Deiseach says:

      Even a “good” private school won’t let you avoid “bad” peer-group pressure; look at David Cameron and his pals in the Bullingdon Club: the cream of society (rich and thick), many of them titled, at a prestigious and ancient seat of learning, and half of them turned out to be drug addicts, fraudsters. and *gasp!* Tory politicians 🙂

      How big a family do you intend to have and how much child-rearing will you do? That is, will you be the one taking time off work to take Junior to the doctor, or will it be “Me and the partner/spouse both work full-time, so the kid will be dropped off at childcare between the ages of three months and thirteen”?

      I could be pessimistic and quote the Larkin poem at you, but instead I’ll go for something from the “Alien Nation” TV series (based on the movie of the same name):

      “All you can do is love them, teach them right from wrong, and hope they don’t grow up to be axe-murderers”.

      🙂

      • Airgap says:

        Yeah, but those blue jackets look sharp. Admit it.

      • Chalid says:

        Two working parents, flexible jobs. Wife is in tech and currently works almost exclusively from home; I have to go to an office, but no particular hours are required and I can work from home on occasion. So there will be a lot of daycare/schooling in the future. Of course, this may change!

        I take your point about the most elite private schools – at the really expensive ones, you’re going to get spoiled rich kids. My own school environment was public schools, which weren’t particularly wealthy, but were full of the children of striving immigrants with a heavy “Tiger Mother” influence; that seems like a good peer group in retrospect.

    • I attended public school, a ghetto public school, a medium-cost private school, and an expensive private school as a kid. I now have kids in public school.

      The ghetto school was obviously bad.

      Expensive private schools are most likely a waste of money. I did not like mine; the kids there were honestly fucked up and degenerate in a lot of ways.

      A decent public school in a decent neighborhood can be very nice; they have access to a lot of resources and programs that many private schools don’t have the scale to match. If you’re stuck in a situation where the local schools suck or your kid isn’t suited to them, then I’d look into a mid-range private school.

      Be wary of 1. Wasting your money and 2. Wasting your kids’ time. For example, if you have several children, it’d probably be cheaper to live in Vail and hobnob with rich kids there than to pay the tuition for all of your kids at a fancy private school. Similarly, if you send your kids to a school with a lot of exceptionally high-scoring kids, then your kids will have to work much harder to stand out than at a school with a more average population.

      Ultimately, relax and try to enjoy the ride.

    • LTP says:

      What evidence is there of ‘a’? I could buy that nurture is overrated, but I can’t imagine there is enough evidence to suggest it doesn’t matter much at all except at the extremely bad side. I can think of a lot of things that, if my parents had done differently, would have significantly improved my life outcomes, and my parents weren’t abusive or neglectful or anything.

    • Tracy W says:

      My advice is:
      1. Never make a threat you are not willing to carry out.
      2. A more general case of (1), be careful to promise only what you know you can deliver.
      3. If you are going to give in, give in quickly so at least you’re not reinforcing persistent whining.

    • phil says:

      I’d like to throw out a book recommendation I really like

      http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/1451663889/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445754692&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen+%26+listen+so+kids+will+talk

      and just say, things that seem obvious to you, aren’t to them

      also the world/circumstances you grew up in is different than the one they’re growing up in (ie their going to have a different perspective than you do)

      good luck

    • pneumatik says:

      Go read the Last Psychiatrist (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/) in reverse order. Scott used to link to the blog but it hasn’t updated in over a year. The good stuff is a little older; first you’ll have to get through some interesting if maybe questionable ideas about the media and advertising, but the material a little before that can be really good. It discuses family and other interpersonal relationships and realistic personal improvement. You can stop reading when the posts are all about psychiatric drugs.

      I’ve found his relevant advice to be enormously helpful, which is that over time you become what you do and that the best thing you can give your kids is your time. His argument is that you should decide that you want to spend more time with your kids, even if you often feel like you want to spend less time with them. Eventually you will begin enjoying time with them more. An n of 1 is of limited value, but I’ve found success in doing this.

      He also suggests that while you should make an effort to be involved in your kids lives, there’s nothing wrong with backing off when they ask you to. What’s important is for them to realize you support them, not that you are actually around them.

      Unrelated to Last Psychiatrist, praising your kids doesn’t have to cost you anything. I think sometimes parents don’t want to praise their kids because of social dynamics, like if they praise their kids too much they’ll lose too much of their alpha status. But parents can’t lose their alpha status over their kids, so give out lots of praise. It makes the kids happier and better behaved.

      Related, I’ve found I can avoid getting angry at them by remembering that as their parent I will always win all arguments. I don’t have to debate or argue with them any longer than I want to, and shouting to win the argument is completely unnecessary.

      • “Related, I’ve found I can avoid getting angry at them by remembering that as their parent I will always win all arguments. ”

        Only if “win an argument” is defined by who has more power rather than by who is right.

        Why should one get angry at losing an argument?

        • pneumatik says:

          I mean arguments over when they’re going to bed, or if they can have second desserts. Kids (at least my kids) will keep asking for something they can’t have as long as I engage with them on it. I’ve found it’s important to remember that I always win those arguments by virtue of being their parent.

          Factual arguments are very uncommon, but when they happen we just look up the answer.

          • There are arguments that don’t fit either pattern. The kid wants to do something (himself or wants the whole family to do something). The parent’s initial response is negative. The kid offers arguments, reasons why he should be allowed to do it or you should all do it. “I want to do it” isn’t much of an argument, “you said last week we would do it this week” if true is a strong argument, and there are lots of other possible legitimate arguments for his position.

            Also, there are factual arguments for which you can’t just look up the answer.

    • PGD says:

      I think (a) is wrong, and the crude statistical methods used to show it are a massive overreach. That doesn’t mean you should spend all your time worrying, or that you have the power to somehow ‘determine’ them through your behavior. Genetics is obviously critical. But it does mean that you are really important figures in your children’s lives and how you treat them matters. So do the (numerous!) choices you will make that affect what kinds of environments and peers they are exposed to.

      • I expect how you treat your children has a large effect on what relationship they end up having with you. I don’t know how large an effect it has on what sort of people they become.

        • PGD says:

          It seems highly implausible to me that the way children are treated by the central and most important figures early in their lives won’t affect how they treat others as well. There is a mountain of evidence showing that this is true in extreme cases; i.e. parental abuse is correlated with all kinds of personal outcomes. I see no reason to think that this wouldn’t be true for less extreme cases in less extreme ways. But people are complicated and I’m sure it’s not a deterministic relationship — the size, variability, and nature of the effects are certainly open to plenty of question.

          • Tracy W says:

            It seems highly implausible to me that most kids will find treating others like their parents treated them a good idea in later life. The number of adults I can pick up and tuck under my arm is rather limited, and this is true of most people.
            What’s more, a parent typically doesn’t want to treat their kids the way they treat other adults, one has to be a pretty liberal parent to let one’s pre-schoolers drive a car.

          • Tracy:

            I think your picture of how people are treated is too narrow. I can’t pick up most other adults and tuck them under my arm. I can try to be honest with them, take their welfare into account in my decisions, listen seriously to their views and arguments arguments. I can do the same things with my children. Or not.

            There are two fundamental views of children. One is that they are pet animals that can talk. The other is that they are small people who do not yet know very much. I suggest that interacting with them on the latter assumption may produce a different long term outcome than interacting on the former.

          • If moms talked to each other the way they talked to kids— content warning: I cringed watching the video. LJ link because there’s some interesting discussion of children and toy weapons in the comments.

          • Walter says:

            About treating kids like little people who are ignorant vs. pets that talk:

            That’s definitely true, but it isn’t automatically better to do one vs. the other. We were on a hike with some nephews/nieces, and one threw himself down a hill and broke bones because he couldn’t drink his sister’s soda. We thought we were dealing with tiny ignorant person, but there was nothing behind those eyes. Should have used a leash.

          • Pets vs small people:

            Is it possible, in the case you describe, that the problem was a child who had been treated as a pet instead of a person too much?

      • Chalid says:

        Any specifics on what to do that is supported by evidence? From a practical standpoint, “parenting doesn’t matter” and “parenting matters but we have no idea which aspects of parenting are good” lead to the same place.

        To be clear, when I say “don’t worry too much” I’m saying something like “helicopter parenting is unhelpful, and free-range parents aren’t hurting their kids,” and emphatically not saying “ignore them until they turn 18.” A great deal of the point of having kids for us is to have a relationship with them!

    • Elephant says:

      I really don’t understand the appeal of homeschooling / unschooling. I have two very bright kids who go to the local, not particularly affluent or academic but not bad, public school. They’re probably not getting all the stimulation they could use, but they enjoy it, they’re learning things, and they’re definitely learning to interact with a wide spectrum of other people. We spend a lot of time on our own going to the library, playing games, doing things related to math, and so on. It’s rewarding and enjoyable, and isn’t a full time job for my spouse or for me. Is it “optimal” in some obsessive “rationalist” way? Probably not, but I don’t really view having kids as some sort of optimization problem. Do your best, spend some unstructured time with your kids, be open to new experiences, don’t obsess about the “quality of the peer group,” and everyone will be fine.

      • On unschooling (not home schooling, which is often done on the conventional model) …

        To what extent are your kids learning that learning is something you do because people make you do it–good for you but tastes bad, like cod liver oil? That’s part of my reservation about the conventional model.

        One of the things that struck my daughter attending Oberlin was that, when a class was canceled, the other students were happy. Attending class wasn’t the benefit they were there for, it was the price charged them to be there.

        • Luke Somers says:

          Weird. By the time I was in college, a cancelled class (in most classes, anyway) was cause for consternation – ‘how are we going to fit all this material into fewer sessions?’ and we would try to make it up later.

          The exceptions were telling.

          • It was a history class; maybe it would have been different in a more mathematical subject? In practice she removed some of the assigned readings and we went over things more quickly. Unfortunately. I remember the other students’ reactions distinctly, because it bugged me; it’s possible they just liked other classes better, but it was a really good class, so…

            (This was also the college where by the end of the quarter, only about half my music history class was showing up. In their defense it was basically music history for non-music majors and I think it was scheduled at 9 AM. In their not-defense, it was both a serious (actually hard) and a very fun class, and they knew it was going to be at 9 AM when they signed up for it. I don’t know how they did on the test, or whether they managed to get away with it. But the class was definitely smaller by the end, and given the timing I don’t think it was people dropping it.)

            I could tell you other horror stories, but probably shouldn’t. But my general impression of college was that the other students were generally not very enthusiastic about the actual learning.

          • CatCube says:

            @Rebecca Friedman

            Most people are in college to get the diploma, not necessarily to actually learn. If they can get the piece of paper with less effort, they’re cool with that.

            I’m a big believer that our current model of forcing college as the norm is destructive to both the people who like school (book-learning, more generally) and those who don’t. The classes get clogged with people who don’t really want to be there, dragging them down for the people who *do* want to be there. The people who would do much better in a hands-on career spend time screwing around in college rather than learning their career, and are miserable while doing it.

        • Elephant says:

          I agree with most of these comments, especially about most people not having good motivations for going to college. However: I experienced similar things (being dismayed by the attitudes of fellow students), and I was a product of “normal” US public schools. Admittedly N=1 anecdotes abound, but I would guess that one’s interest in learning isn’t particularly aided or dulled by homeschooling vs. regular schooling; this is, as it’s always been, a consequence of general attitudes one picks up.

          • @Elephant:

            You are putting it in terms of home schooling vs regular schooling. Rebecca was home unschooled, which isn’t at all the same thing.

            Being made to study something you have no interest in by your parents might have the same effect—convincing you that learning is something unpleasant that you do because people make you do it—as being made to study it by your teacher. But studying something because you want to learn it or think studying it is fun, which is what happens in unschooling, is unlikely to have that effect.

    • Zippy says:

      Well, you would be remiss if you hadn’t read The Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting (purely for entertainment, of course).

    • I would recommend digging into how they measure parenting. My parents bought me the first serious (David Attenborough) books before I went to school. Those books definitely steered me towards an intellectual direction, after that they did not have to do much, I simply demanded books, and they simply bought them. That act of parenting, buying the first books, and then the rest when demanded, may be unmeasurably small, it is not big time investment, and not so much in money either, yet it may be highly important.

      I would rely on common sense. Put good books into arms reach. Perhaps not push reading so much, maybe pushing does not work.

  79. Asterix says:

    Good call on NRx. I never could figure out what that means.

      • Diadem says:

        You link to a post that is literally (in the figurative sense, of course) infinitely long, and does not, as far as I can tell, contain the term. Nor does the FAQ that your link links to.

        I’m guessing the terms means something like “typical talking points”, but that is just a guess and I’ve never been able to find a definition.

    • Does Scott’s ban countenance the use-mention distinction? Does the Volcano God? Shall Asterix get a warning?

    • Montfort says:

      Did you know they have a wiki page now?

      Granted, they don’t seem to have a very good definition, either, but give it time.

      • Echo says:

        Yeah, Vice will quote twitter and the wiki about how evil they are, then wikipedia will cite Vice in return. Credible sourcing and reliable information out of thin air–isn’t the internet amazing?

        • Montfort says:

          Did you read the article? I thought this one was surprisingly positive.

          But yes, the wiki-press-wiki cycle can get distressingly amusing at times.

    • I did, but found the abbreviation counter-intuitive. Native English speakers have weird ways of using the X letter e.g. in BMX bikes the X stands for “cross”. And in Xmas it stands for “Christ”. And there was a whisky brand called Rx because during the Prohibition it was camouflaged as medicine – somehow “Rx” is associated with medicine.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Using Rx for medicine isn’t any weirder than using Pb for lead or Au for gold or etc for and so on.

        • CatCube says:

          IIRC, the “Rx” was actually its own character–kind of like an “R”, but with a cross on the leg. It’s just that “Rx” is the closest you can get with the standard English character set.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        Rx- or, as CatCube says, the Rx character- doesn’t mean “medicine”, it’s an abbreviation of the Latin word “recipe”, meaning “take”. And yes, this is also where we get the word recipe as in instructions for how to prepare food. Both early prescriptions and early recipes always began with an instruction to “take” certain ingredients.

        My favourite x-based abbreviation is xtal…

  80. TK-421 says:

    Last open thread a commenter brought up the link to MIT researcher Dr. Todd Rider’s crowdfunding campaign for DRACOs, a promising new therapy that could treat many or all viruses.

    Wait, the same Todd Rider that did his thesis in plasma physics? That’s… quite a jump.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      The fact that he switched from the nuclear engineering department for his masters to the electrical engineering department for his PhD on nuclear fusion is probably a good measure of his political skills and the likely outcome of this crowdfunding project. But, really, that last phrase speaks for itself.

      • DensityDuck says:

        It’s no more suspicious than a rocket scientist deciding to switch from Mechanical Engineering to Chemical Engineering for his PhD on rocket fuel. Nuclear Engineering is probably more closely aligned with running a steam locomotive than anything involving fusion. In particular, if you want experts in magnetics then you’ll find them in the Electrical Engineering department.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          His advisor was in the nuclear engineering department.

          • Luke Somers says:

            Okay, and…?

            I did my PhD work in a lab where some of the candidates were also in the Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering departments.

            This doesn’t sound suspicious.

            Nooow, switching from plasma physics to killing all viruses? THAT sounds suspicious, at first glance. The first ping on the crackpot-o-meter, not the degree history.

      • Nuclear fusion is, in a practical sense, halfway between electrical engineering and and conventional nuclear power. At least if you’re not doing purely inertial containment but most fusion researchers aren’t doing that. I’m not sure why you seem to think that nuclear fusion is evidence of kookhood. Fusion power isn’t energy positive right now but it does work and the scientific consensus is that energy positive reactors are possible in theory.

        • Decius says:

          ‘Conventional fission’ involves roughly zero of the concepts that are held by fusion power generation that are not also involved in steam railroad locomotion.

          • That’s really not true since fission chain reactions involve a heavy nucleus fusing with a neutron and then splitting. And most fusion involves nuclei joinging and then breaking apart as well. The math involved in the decays and energy balances in both cases are fundamentally the same and I believe the math involved in reaction rates has the same basis as well. Engineering-wise they are totally different I’ll grant you but people working on fusion engineering have to come from somewhere and there really isn’t any undergrad major which will prepare you for those engineering challenges.

          • Luke Somers says:

            Okay, so, it’s mid-way between electrical engineering, plasma physics, and designing a steam engine. Point stands?

          • John Schilling says:

            Nobody doing fusion research is working on the “steam engine” part, which leaves precious little in common with the fission guys. Fusion is mostly EE and plasma physics, fission is neutronics and mechanical engineering.

            Though there are “nuclear engineering” departments that cover all of the above; it’s no crazier than “aerospace engineering”.

    • Physicist -> Medical researcher is a more common career path than you might think

      edit: He’s got a bio on the bottom, shows plenty of experience in medical research.

  81. E. Harding says:

    I shall hereby call it “Yarvin-Land-ism”.

  82. John Schilling says:

    For anyone still interested in the overpriced generic medications problem, the free market seems to have found an answer. A somewhat cumbersome one, but it works.

    Short version, you don’t have to buy pills from a giant pharmaceutical corporation. It’s still technically legal for a properly-licensed pharmacist to make them the old fashioned way, with mortar and pestle and a bottle of high-purity ingredients. There are still a few pharmacists who do that, for patients with idiosyncratic needs. It doesn’t require a $10 million FDA license, so long as you are doing it for one patient at a time using proper ingredients and methods.

    And so a company that manufactures the key ingredient for Daraprim has made it available to such “compounding pharmacists”, for the equivalent of $1/pill.

    So, yeah, if you need the stuff you’ve got to tell your doctor what a “compounding pharmacist” is, and then go find one, and pay a markup over the $1/pill ingredient price to cover the inefficient hand-crafted manufacturing work, but Shkreli doesn’t get his $750/pill and you don’t have to visit bankruptcy court. If it turns out Shkreli does, so much the better.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      So that’s how they did it! I read about that and I was confused about how they’d managed to get licensed to make the drug so quickly!

      • Deiseach says:

        And that is going back to the past for a solution. My little mediaevalist heart is gladdened 🙂

        I mean, that is what pharmacists were in the Old Days; there weren’t giant firms (or indeed any firms at all) making batches of pills and tonics (except for the patent medicine market).

        So a doctor wrote the prescription, the patient brought it to the chemist, and the chemist made it up for them. If they want to close that loophole, they’re going to have to demonstrate that modern pharmacists aren’t trained or qualified to do this, and universities that run four-year degree courses training pharmacists aren’t likely to take that lying down, never mind the professional organisations.

        RE: the comments – it does that to you, too? I thought I was the only one!

        RE: Todd Draper and his crowdfunding – that does look very peculiar, given that in January 2014 it was announced he’d be joining Draper Labs to pursue this. Wild and uninformed speculation as to a possible hypothesis that might account for this off the top of my head: the avenue he was pursuing wasn’t working, the lab asked him to drop it or try something else, he didn’t want to, so he decided to go the crowdfunding route and people what know about this stuff are saying “yeah, that’s a dead end” so it’s not taking off that way either.

        Or I could and probably am completely and totally wrong there.

    • Echo says:

      The raw milk solution, huh? Something tells me we’ll be seeing DEA raids to shut down that “loophole”.

      • John Schilling says:

        I’ll take that bet. The “loophole” has been a deliberate, known, legal, and accepted feature of the American pharmaceutical trade from day one. This is almost the sort of situation it was designed for, except that the expectation was there would be zero big pharmaceutical companies targeting a tiny niche market rather than one. The only thing that has changed is that a very unpopular pharmaceutical company loses that pseudo-monopoly.

        The only person or institution that would benefit from closing that “loophole” now, would be Shkreli and his company. Everybody else, including the feds, would gain nothing but a metric buttload of negative publicity from their aiding and abetting Mr. Burns, er, Shkreli. And no, there’s no way he can sneak them enough money to be worth that and get away with it.

        Also, I’m pretty sure the DEA doesn’t have jurisdiction. This is an FDA thing.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          What are the regulations on the raw ingredients? Can I just buy (or even sell) raw pyrimethamine? If people don’t mind taking it as a powder, is there any reason to go beyond that?

          • John Schilling says:

            For anything that isn’t a Schedule I controlled substance, I think it’s perfectly legal for a private citizen to buy the raw chemical compound and consume it themselves. IANAL, YMMV, obviously.

            If you advertise or offer it to others as a medicine, regulations start to apply. A licensed compounding pharmacist is probably the easiest path from raw chemicals to legal sale-as-a-medicine.

            And if the compound is obviously going to be used as a medication, the manufacturer may decline to sell any of it to J. Random Private Citizen. That’s pretty common even for compounds that aren’t intended for medicines, for lawsuit-avoidance reasons.

          • Erebus says:

            @John Schilling

            I believe that it’s illegal to buy & sell chemicals that are on schedules II – V, as well. It is also illegal to trade in analogs of the chemicals on schedules I-II, but not in analogs of the chemicals in other schedules, which is why adrafinil is de facto legal. Furthermore, it is illegal to trade in certain “restricted” chemicals, which are typically precursors towards the production of scheduled drugs. This poor Scottish bloke was extradited to the USA and sentenced to a few years in prison for selling red phosphorous, which is restricted but not scheduled at all. (!!)

            …All that said, pyrimethamine is neither scheduled nor listed as a restricted chemical, to the best of my knowledge. It should be perfectly legal to sell in raw powder form. “For research purposes”, say.

          • Jiro says:

            Erebus: Reading your own link, the law requires reasonable cause to believe your chemicals will be used to manufacture amphetamines. Considering they found his products in an amphetamine lab, told him about it and that it was illegal, and he continued to sell it anyway, such reasonable cause to believe did exist. Furthermore, he sold the chemicals to the US. Selling something to people in a country, that you know is illegal under that country’s laws, and then expecting to be exempt from those laws is stupid.

          • Erebus says:

            The law only states that it is illegal to manufacture/distribute chemicals which are listed as controlled without first obtaining regulatory approval. Every listed chemical can be used in the manufacture of scheduled drugs, but this is not limited to amphetamines. (Safrole is listed as a precursor to MDMA, for instance.)

            …And the guy was an idiot. But you missed my point entirely: It goes to show that you can get arrested, and be quite severely punished, for selling chemicals that are not scheduled & have zero recreational use in themselves.

            Fortunately, pyrimethamine appears to be completely legal to sell in raw powder form, so have at it.

          • John Schilling says:

            Pragmatically, what matters is whether the company will sell it to you. Aside from a few specifically-listed Compounds of Pure Evil (and yeah, it’s more complicated than just “Schedule I”, my bad), they can if they want to. And even if it isn’t strictly legal, the Feds will probably never know if they do. But they are the ones with the deep pockets, and thus liable to be sued if something really bad happens.

            For chemicals with the mediciney or explodey nature, odds are pretty good that there are very few manufacturers and that they mostly have a policy of not filling POs from random laymen who want small batches. Or small businesses that don’t jump through the right hoops. And if it is controversially mediciney, they may not even want to sell to compounding pharmacists, because who gets sued when Kindly Granny Mistletoe’s Down-Home Country Pharmacy mixes up a batch of Thalidomide for a woman who swore she wasn’t pregnant?

            In this case, the company lawyers presumably did a quick check to verify that there is no IP encumbrance to pyrimethamine, no side effects or off-label uses that are likely to lead to big lawsuits, and obviously no possibility of bad PR for being the company that helps Granny Mistletoe sell affordable pyrimethamine to toxoplasma sufferers.

          • Erebus says:

            What’s to stop somebody from importing it? They make pyrimethamine by the ton in China, and there are thousands of manufacturers and brokers. (That’s no exaggeration.) It’s not illegal to import the raw powder into the USA, either. If it’s shipped properly, with an MSDS, an invoice, and a COA, there’s less than a 1% chance that Customs will intercept the shipment or ask any questions at all. Then all you’d need to do is have the powder analyzed, and that doesn’t cost very much these days.

            In all honesty, I think that selling pyrimethamine would be less risky than selling adrafinil. And just as easy.

          • John Schilling says:

            Thousands of manufacturers is absolutely an exaggeration.

            When you see a web site in China offering to sell Exotic Compound X at a low, low price, there’s a very good chance that the company has never made any X in its existence – but if they get a big enough offer, they’ll look into making some, or maybe see if they can buy it cheap somewhere else and repackage it. Or maybe they’ll just ignore your order because it turns out that stuff is too hard to make. It costs them nothing to put the offer on their web site.

            People have tested this by asking for chemicals that don’t exist, that cannot exist, and getting offers from Chinese companies to sell it to them because, sure, that’s in our catalog, what do you think we are, some sort of inept losers who can’t make exotic chemicals?

            There might be a few places in China that actually do make and sell pyrimethamine of acceptable purity for medical use, but until you’ve got some in hand and tested it in an American lab, it’s far from a sure thing.

          • Erebus says:

            Your mistake lies in assuming that pyrimethamine is exotic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

            For a chemical like pyrimethamine, there are dozens of manufacturers, and thousands of brokers and agents who re-sell it. (There are lots of chemical brokers in China who deal in this sort of thing. China has become the world’s chemical supermarket.)

            I am aware of the fact that some companies — mostly brokers, actually — list chemicals like FOOF online & cannot hope to provide it. But this is a non sequitur — it has absolutely nothing to do with pyrimethamine, which is made in very large quantities, and which is too common and cheap to even bother faking.

          • John Schilling says:

            So now we’re down from claiming thousands of manufacturers to maybe dozens?

          • Erebus says:

            I believe I said “thousands of manufacturers and brokers”. Perhaps I was unclear, but what I meant was that there are thousands of outlets for pyrimethamine in China, when one considers the dozens of manufacturers and the army of brokers and independent middlemen who sell such things for a living. It is by no means a rare or exotic chemical — in fact, it is considerably less rare than adrafinil, which people import themselves from China all the time.

    • James says:

      Wow, that’s awesome!

      I am so excited for all the private solutions to superfluous, authoritarian states. Uber, carseats, EPA MPG requirements, security, Silk Road, etc.

      If anyone is excited like me, I’d recommend Against Security by Molotch and Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine.

      “Compounding pharmacist” – makes me wanna muddle a beverage!

      • J says:

        A family member recently bought a minivan for their three kids, despite having a perfectly functional 5-seat sedan, because three car seats won’t fit in the back seat, and it’s forbidden to put car seats in the front seat. Also, kids are apparently supposed to use a car seat or booster up until something like age 11. Vans are expensive, and this one has lots of maintenance issues.

        Makes me wonder how much poverty and pollution are caused by this expectation: people buying big cars they can’t afford and wouldn’t otherwise need.

        Apparently the market is responding and there are narrower child seats that pack side-by-side better, but I hear they’re expensive.

        • Tom Davies says:

          There is a good reason for not having child seats in the front, by the way — the child is likely to be injured by an airbag.

          • Glen Raphael says:

            …itself an unintended consequence of hamfisted regulation. There’s a deadly airbag in the front passenger seat because the law requires it and the government decided the right metric to judge the suitability of an airbag was whether it could stop an average adult male.

            Upon noticing that an explosion that strong can decapitate a little kid the regulators could have chosen to make passenger-side airbags optional and left it up to the manufacturer to decide just how strong they need to be if present, thereby leaving it legal to sell cars whose front seat isn’t a deathtrap for little kids.

            But I suppose that’s just crazy talk.

          • Jules.LT says:

            In France, passenger aibags are mandatory as well as *TA-DAAA* having to have an off switch so that you can put a baby seat in the front…
            That it is not so in the US is rather surprising to me.

          • JDG1980 says:

            My car (a 2010 Honda Fit) has some sort of weight sensor in the passenger seat. If you stick something less than the weight of a full-grown adult (say, a large backpack) in the passenger seat, it will detect it and turn on a light saying the passenger airbag is disabled. I assumed this was a required safety feature.

        • Airbags are (were?) also dangerous for short adults, who are mostly women.

        • Mike in Boston says:

          I needed to fit three car seats into a 1995 Toyota Corolla, which is teeny by today’s standards. What worked for me was one Combi Coccoro in the middle with a Diono Radian on either side. These are not cheap car seats, but buying a new vehicle would have been much more money.

          Best post I have seen on the subject is from the wonderfully named Punk Rock Operations Research.

      • Alejandro says:

        Read the first title as “Against Security by Moloch” and was confused for a moment at how much SSC memes had spread.

    • Eric Rall says:

      A decent way to find a local compounding pharmacy is to ask a veterinarian. Most veterinary prescriptions are just human medicines with the dosages adjusted, which you can get filled at any normal pharmacy, but it’s not uncommon to need a dosage or preparation that isn’t mass-produced and can’t reasonably be faked by cutting pills in half, so vets often have a relationship with a compounding pharmacy to fill those prescriptions.

      • Lambert says:

        I hear that pet shops are the easiest place to buy iodine for medical use.

      • Anthony says:

        A veterinarian once told me she bought cancer meds for about 10% what the local hospital was paying. She was using a human-sized dose for a 120-pound dog, so she was buying the *exact same pills* that the local hospital bought. But because she was a veterinarian, and the pills were for a dog instead of a human, she didn’t have to pay the liability markup.

    • keranih says:

      A backgrounder on compounding pharmacies.

      It’s not clear to me that this is an optimal solution. “Mortar and pestle” pharmacies (they don’t really use those anymore) make their drugs in smaller lots (you can see from the link that they are pretty much limited to actual demand, and can not warehouse). (They also can’t sell to other pharmacies, nor to docs to dispense to their patients.)

      This allows for many many more “accidents” involving toxic or non-effective drugs, when X Y and Z are supposed to be combined, but some how B gets swapped with Y. Granted, each accident will have a much smaller scope, as the affected lot will be much smaller, and it’s not like massive manufacturers don’t have screw ups, either. However, in nearly all other industries, the effects of scaling up have been to decrease the impact of accidents on the population as a whole, in part by adding indepth quality control & testing that is cost-prohibitive on the smaller scale operations.

      (Think about the difference between airplane accidents and car accidents.)

      Having said all that – I don’t take those drugs, so I wasn’t directly involved, but I did have faith in our greedy capitalist system for someone to figure out a way to make money off someone else’s over reach. Glad to see I was right.

  83. James says:

    “Well, dat de end of April”, Tom said in dismay.